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The trees have a job: to blush their leaves orange or red and then drop them to the lawns and pavements below. If you are one of the many millions of Americans who own their homes, you may soon be faced with the question of what to do with all that foliage. Maybe you will rake your leaves into piles. Maybe you will let them decay into the ground. And maybe—just maybe—you will risk your hard-earned reputation by gusting them away with a leaf blower.For decades now, the dust and din of blowing leaves has infuriated Americans, sometimes to the point of violence. “The gas leaf blower is by all measures, and without dispute, harmful,” a New York Times op-ed announced in 2022, summing up the new consensus. Although the blower’s squall rages and enrages year-round, pushing snow, grass, and dirt alike, autumn gives it special purpose. The very first commercial blower, from the 1970s, was touted on these grounds: “In fall, it rounds up a yardful of leaves in no time.” That makes now a perfect time for me to say what nobody else would dare to: The leaf blower—that is, the machine itself, as it’s used for blowing leaves—is a force for good.But Americans are also right: In many ways, leaf blowers are truly terrible. They are loud, which is irritating to those far away and can damage the hearing of anyone nearby. And they’re inhospitable: Blowers hurtle dirt and debris, along with other particles, through public space; they create a gale unnecessary for sidewalks.This is why America has witnessed a fearsome blower blowback for about as long as we’ve had blowers. In the 1980s, some homeowners’ associations and municipalities started trying to curb the things. Cities moved to ban them entirely. In 1997, Los Angeles passed an ordinance to limit their use within the city. The entire state of California now prohibits the sale of new gas-powered blowers, which is the type that The Atlantic’s James Fallows helped banish from Washington, D.C.The more recent efforts to get rid of blowers have focused on the combustion engines used in many models. These pollute the air as much as an automobile. In recent years, an alternative has emerged in the form of cleaner, electric blowers, with lithium-ion batteries for power, that are strong enough to push a mound of dried-out vegetation to the street. But even if these new devices can solve the blower’s air-pollution problem, they do not address its many other irritations. Battery blowers can be just as loud as those that run on gas, according to Kris Kiser, the president and CEO of the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute. Testing finds that some may hit 90 decibels—that’s louder than city traffic—when they’re producing enough air pressure to, well, blow stuff. And just like the old-fashioned blowers, their blasts end up spreading dirt and dust and leaves well beyond their users’ targets.Yet the blower’s many faults must be weighed against the elemental fact that evicting fallen leaves from your property in late October is a heinous chore, and one that cannot be accomplished easily via mulcher, mower, rake, or bonfire. A leaf blower, though, is as suited to this purpose as a toaster is to browning bread: It is a magnificent, purpose-built device for sending yard detritus from one place to another. I’ll grant that there would be certain benefits, to the Earth and to our own well-being if we could move all of our leaves by hand. The same is true of travel: Walking to another state would do far less damage to the world than flying in an airplane. But the convenience of a blower, like the convenience of jet-propelled flight, is sometimes worth the cost.But leaf blowers, like airplanes, can be grossly overused. The problem that a blower solves so beautifully—the need for clearing leaves—is, or should be, limited in time: Several blowing sessions should suffice, sprinkled in from October to December. I submit that the case against the blower has less to do with leaves than with all the other things that people like to push around with air, at all the other times of year.[Read: Your TV is too good for you]In particular, it has to do with grass. Consider the “mow and blow,” a standard offering for yard work, in which a crew will trim a lawn, then blast it clear of clumps of trimmings with artificial wind. A crew that did a “mow” but not the “blow” would have to spend a lot of time collecting clippings, as well as dust and dirt, in bags and then disposing of them. That’s why gardeners in Los Angeles, who made their living from this work, were among the most vocal opponents of that city’s blower ban during the ’90s. (The city and its landscapers skirmished for years.) Even to this day, the loudest, most annoying blowing comes from this commercial work, Kiser told me. Yard-service companies may end up using four to eight blowers at a time, as early as 5 o’clock in the morning. “That’s where you get in trouble,” he said.Demand for this noisy work is high: Some 40 percent of U.S. households with lawns hired out yard services in 2017. During the pandemic, American homeowners started doing more of their own yard maintenance, Kiser told me, and some bought leaf blowers of their own. That trend may now be over, but blower sales are still increasing worldwide, especially as new battery-equipped models become more powerful. In other words, the blowing bubble may still be growing.[Read: How Starbucks perfected autumn]Excessive use of blowers, not the tools themselves, should be taken as the villain here. The “mow and blow” could be extinguished, or at least scaled back. Homeowners and the people they hire ought to blow much less often, and for shorter durations. They could bag their grass, or cut it frequently enough that the clippings remain modest and would not have to be dispersed by air. This would allow everyone to save their clamor for the autumn, when the blower’s power and fitness for purpose could be fully, gloriously, and temporarily unleashed.Some will ask why this temperance with blowing should be limited. Why not have a full-year ban instead? Why not keep our fallen leaves in place, as a habitat for bees, butterflies, and moths? For that matter, why not abandon our water-hungry yards entirely? These fights seek moral victories. But a practical solution will yield better results, because yards and landscaping are still entrenched in American life. We just need ways to tend to them that are environmentally and socially aware.My premise is simple: Leaf blowers are for blowing leaves, and little else.

If you’re interested in modern beauty standards, the social value of femininity, and the fetishization of mothers in American culture, Hulu’s recent reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a rich, chaotic product. I watched the entire series in a couple of days, gasping and Googling, shriveling inwardly every time I caught a glimpse of my haggard self in the mirror compared with these lustrous, bronzed, cosmetically enhanced women. The stars of the show are young wives and mothers in Utah who have become notable in a corner of the internet called MomTok; their online side hustles include performing 20-second group dances and lip-syncing to clips from old movies, the financial success of which has helped them eclipse their husbands as earners. As an encapsulation of 21st-century womanhood, it’s almost too on the nose: a discordant jumble of feminist ideals, branded domesticity, and lip filler.The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is a logical end point for lifestyle-focused reality television, which has never quite been able to decide whether women should be gyrating on a pole or devoutly raising a dozen towheaded children. This show bravely asks: Why not both? “We’re all moms; we’re all Mormons. I guess you could say a lot of us in MomTok look similar … We’re just going off based [on] what’s trending,” Mayci (28, two kids) explains in the first episode. The camera cuts to the women filming a video. “Mayci, I need you to twerk your ass off, as hard as you can,” Jen (24, two kids) shrieks. Jessi (31, two kids) comments on the volume of Jen’s cleavage, amplified by her breastfeeding garments. Each woman has waist-length, barrel-curled hair and teeth as white as Mentos; most wear jeans and a tight Lycra top. No children are in sight. What we’re watching isn’t the kind of dreamy domesticity that traditional momfluencers post on Instagram. It’s something more interesting: the conflation of “motherhood” as an identity with desirability, fertility, and sexual power.[Read: The redemption of the bad mother]America loves mothers more than women, an inclination the 2024 election has demonstrated in abundance. Mothers are given license to do things that other women often aren’t, like getting angry or even seeking political power, as long as it’s understood that whatever they’re doing is on someone else’s behalf. In a commencement address to a conservative Catholic college earlier this year, the Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker even advised the female graduates in his audience to forgo careers altogether and focus on supporting their husbands as homemakers. The women of MomTok, while pushing back against some of the strictures of the Mormon Church, are living out this advice to a curiously literal degree. They’re financially supporting their husbands as homemakers, thanks to social media. “Who is currently, like, the breadwinner at home?” Demi (30, one child) asks at one point. “I think all of us?” Mayci replies. This looks like progress—women making money, at home, with the flexibility to set their own schedule and pick their own projects. But underlying this portrait is a darker reality: The only women who get to succeed at this kind of “work” are the ones who look the part.The women of MomTok aren’t tradwives, the smock-wearing, Aga stove–warmed, calf-snuggling performance artists who fascinate and perplex us on social media. The Secret Lives mothers flirt and assert their independence and critique the men who try to control them. Some got married as teenagers after unplanned pregnancies; several are divorced. (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints issued a statement ahead of the show’s release noting that “a number of recent productions depict lifestyles and practices blatantly inconsistent with the teachings of the church,” seemingly in reference to a widely publicized scandal involving one cast member that’s the least interesting part of the series.) Late in the season, Demi plans a girls’ trip to Las Vegas that includes VIP tickets to Chippendales, which prompts an alarming conflict between the more traditional Jen and her husband, Zac, whom she’s supported through college and is about to fund through medical school. Zac, despite having been given $2,500 by his wife to gamble on the trip, is furious that she’d agree—even as a joke—to see a male dance show. He threatens to take their kids and divorce her. “This type of behavior is exactly what MomTok is trying to break in our LDS faith,” Demi tells the camera. “We’re not doing this anymore.”But even as they reject what they see as the suffocating confines of one institution for women, they’re bolstering another. The pursuit of a certain kind of highly maintained beauty for all eight women on the show seems to dominate everything else. In one episode, while getting Botox injections, several of the women gossip, semi-scandalized, about the fact that Jessi drank alcohol from a flask at Zac’s graduation party; the irony that they’re in that moment high on laughing gas administered to ease the pain of the injections seems lost on everyone. In a different episode, Jessi tells her friends that she’s getting a labiaplasty, which she refers to as “a mommy makeover,” because childbirth has changed the shape and appearance of her vulva. Plastic surgery, Mayci explains, is tacitly sanctioned by the LDS Church (though LDS leaders today caution against vanity); Salt Lake City has more plastic surgeons per resident than Los Angeles.“We wanna make sure that we’re taking care of our bodies, and we’re always told that our body is a temple,” Mayci adds during the Botox episode. “It’s actually surprising that [the Church doesn’t] really care about plastic surgery?” The moment underscores the space for interpretive tension within a faith that discourages toxins while prizing beauty in all its forms as a reflection of morality and a source of happiness. And yet it’s hard not to read this show another way: as evidence of a specific online culture that encourages women to bear children while also requiring them to erase the visible evidence of their pregnancies. The physical toll of giving birth is covered up, made as inconspicuous as the children who have left these same marks. That these mothers be beautiful and desirable in this realm is paramount.In one sense, this is what reality television has always wanted from women. Those who can exude sexuality from the safety of the domestic sphere have long been able to build lucrative businesses in the process. In 2022, a writer for Bustle counted 52 separate beauty lines launched by stars of the Real Housewives franchise, who leveraged their fame to sell perfumes, wigs, nail polish, “firming lotion,” and false eyelashes. But the Secret Lives stars are notable for how intricately their brands are enmeshed with fertility—not the mundane reality of day-to-day motherhood but the symbolic power of sexual eligibility and maternal authority. On Secret Lives, Mayci is seen launching Baby Mama, a line of “natal supplements” for women. No one on the show seems to question the primacy of beauty. After filming wrapped, Layla (22, two children) revealed in a podcast interview that she’s had six separate cosmetic procedures over four months. “I had kids young, and I love my babies to death, but they screwed up my body, and I wanted to feel hot again,” she said. Her co-star Demi added, “That’s just the Utah way!”[Read: How did healing ourselves get so exhausting?]Women who don’t accept—or can’t meet—these terms are, tellingly, less visible on the show, and thus less able to leverage their new fame. Mikayla (24, three children), a doe-eyed, strikingly beautiful woman who struggles with a chronic illness that causes skin flare-ups gets sidelined; she has no primary storylines of her own, and much less screen time than the others. This gravitation toward more visibly perfected stars stems perhaps from the aspirational ideal that momfluencers represent, as Sara Petersen writes in her 2023 book, Momfluenced. “As mothers, our everyday lives are full of gritty motherhood rawness, of children refusing to wear snow pants in blizzards, or the strain of holding back tears and curses upon stepping on another fucking Lego.” She adds, “Why would we want to spend our spare time consuming someone else’s rawness when we’re sick and tired of our own?”The women of MomTok are enthralling because they symbolize the possibility of a mother’s desirability and influence—and of a broader sisterhood. They are, with the exception of the one stock villain, Whitney (31, two children), impossibly likable, funny and scrappy and unserious. They constantly invoke their sliver of the internet as a pillar of friendship and prosperity—as in “I really want this MomTok group to survive,” and “We need to get back to what MomTok was before all this happened.” Taylor (30, three children) says that the group built its following in the hope of changing people’s attitudes about Mormon women—and making space for them to be bolder and more outspoken than the norm. But all of the women on the show seem to have wholly absorbed the idea that to be heard as mothers in America, you first have to be seen, in high-definition, expensively augmented perfection.In her 1991 book, The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf noted that the proliferation of sexualized images of women in music videos and television and magazines toward the end of the 20th century represented “a collective reactionary hallucination willed into being by both men and women stunned and disoriented by the rapidity with which gender relations have been transformed: a bulwark of reassurance against the flood of change.” The same dynamics have since been amplified a thousandfold on TikTok, where you have precisely one second to hook someone who’s idly scrolling. The politics of visibility are more loaded than ever. Beauty, as Wolf wrote decades ago, has fully taken over “the work of social coercion that myths about motherhood, domesticity, chastity, and passivity, no longer can manage.” The lifelong project of self-maintenance used to be, for women, a distraction from recognizing the things we really need. Now it’s the most valid and laudable form of labor.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Donald Trump welcomes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the stage at a Turning Point Action campaign rally at the Gas South Arena on October 23, 2024, in Duluth, Georgia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images In several swing states, the 2024 election polls are practically tied. The slightest factor could impact the results either way — including the presence of a third-party candidate on the ballot.  Third-party candidates don’t tend to get much traction: Without a major party behind them, every step of the electoral process is decidedly more difficult, including building name recognition, earning endorsements, getting on the ballot or a debate stage, and fundraising.  But third-party candidates don’t need much support to disrupt a race. In the last two election cycles, the average number of votes that decided the results in the seven swing states was less than 125,000 votes. In Wisconsin, for example, the election went Trump’s way by 22,748 votes in 2016 and Biden’s by 20,682 in 2020 — an average margin of victory of less than 21,715 votes. And while any one third-party candidate is unlikely to crack that threshold alone, votes for all third-party candidates combined have well surpassed that threshold in some states.  Kyle Kondik, managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, said that this year, the third-party vote share is likely to be closer to what it was in 2020 (about 2 percent) than what it was in 2016 (about 6 percent). That might be in part because 2016 saw an unusually large share of Americans dissatisfied with their options for president, and Harris’s entry into the race to replace President Joe Biden this year appears to have given most Democratic-leaning voters a candidate they can get behind.  Still, Kondik said it’s “possible, if not likely, that the total third-party share will be bigger than the margin between Trump and Harris in one or more states.”  That means that third-party voters, notoriously unpredictable and difficult to persuade, could play a decisive role in a very close election, swinging it in either Trump’s or Harris’s direction.  Who are the third-party candidates on the ballot?  There are a few key third-party candidates to know. None of them is very popular, but together, the top four are polling at about 3 percent nationally. (Notably, most polling averages and models have Harris and Trump within 2 percentage points of each other). Chief among the third-party candidates who made it on swing-state ballots this year is the Green Party’s Jill Stein, a progressive who drew Democratic-leaning voters in her previous two presidential bids. Stein is on the ballot in every swing state except Nevada, and she’s been backed by a Muslim American group called “Abandon Harris” in Michigan. The vice president is struggling among Arab-American voters there who helped power Biden’s 2020 victory in the state and who oppose the Biden administration’s approach to the war in Gaza. Both Stein and the Libertarian Party nominee Chase Oliver each claim about 1 percent support nationally, according to recent New York Times polling. That’s less than Stein’s vote share in 2016, when she last ran for president.  Still, it could be enough to upset the results in the same states where she’s previously earned significant numbers of voters: In 2016, she earned more votes in the “Blue Wall” states of Michigan and Wisconsin than Trump’s margins of victory in those states. Another potential wild card in those states is independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who suspended his campaign and endorsed former President Donald Trump in August. Given his embrace of the anti-establishment views held by certain segments of the GOP and his status as a member of the Democratic Kennedy dynasty, he was once seen as a potential spoiler for both Trump and President Joe Biden. Kennedy was polling around 10 percent nationally for the better part of 2024, and even higher in some swing-state polls. But his support cratered to less than 5 percent in August after Harris assumed the Democratic nomination, suggesting that many Democrats saw him as the only alternative to Biden and were not particularly invested in his candidacy. Now, he has more potential to be a spoiler for Trump. He’s recently polled at about half a percentage point, on par with independent Cornel West, according to the New York Times. Though he managed to take himself off the ballot in Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona, and Nevada, he’s still on the ballot in Wisconsin. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled to keep him on the ballot there, but he has appealed that decision. It’s unclear how the court could render a decision in his favor from a practical standpoint; nearly 100,000 people have already received absentee ballots printed with his name. A federal judge also ruled that Kennedy must remain on Michigan’s ballot, where the race has narrowed and Harris now holds less than a 1 percentage point lead in FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.  Other third-party candidates include the Socialism and Liberation Party’s Claudia De la Cruz, the Independent American Party’s Joel Skousen, the Constitution Party’s Randall Terry, and the Socialist Equality Party’s Joseph Kishore. None of them have the support the above four have managed to eke out, however. Together, these third-party candidates have some potential to cut into both Harris and Trump’s vote margins in states that they need to win. Still, as much as third-party candidates may often appear to siphon away votes from the two major party candidates, the results of the election might not be any different if they were not on the ballot. “Third-party voters can be quirky and may not be all that gettable by either campaign — perhaps some of them wouldn’t have voted major-party even if those were the only options,” Kondik said. 

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