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The 1968 Hangover
Like Nixon before him, Trump could use campus protests to further stoke an already polarized electorate.
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America Canât Stop Watching Creepy Robot Videos
The robot is shaped like a human, but it sure doesnât move like one. It starts supine on the floor, pancake-flat. Then, in a display of superhuman joint mobility, its legs curl upward from the knees, sort of like a scorpion tail, until its feet settle firmly on the floor beside its hips. From there, it stands up, a swiveling mass of silver limbs. The robotâs ring-light heads turns a full 180 degrees to face the camera, as though possessed. Then it lurches forward at you.The scene plays out like one of those moments in a sci-fi movie when the heroes think for sure the all-powerful villain must be done for, but somehow he comes back stronger than ever. Except itâs a real-life video released last month by the robotics company Boston Dynamics to introduce its new Atlas robot. The humanoid machine, according to the videoâs caption, is intended to further the companyâs âcommitment to delivering the most capable, useful mobile robots solving the toughest challenges in industry today.â It has also freaked out many people, and the video has garnered millions of views. âImpressive? Yes. Terrifying? Absolutely,â wrote a reporter for The Verge. Terminator and I, Robot memes abounded. Elon Musk suggested that it looked like it was in the throes of an exorcism.You might think that such reactions would concern Boston Dynamics, that it would seem bad for the public to associate your product with dystopian sci-fi. But the company is used to this. Over the past decade-plus, Boston Dynamics has become arguably Americaâs most famous robotics company by posting unnerving viral videos that elicit a predictable cascade of reactions: things like âCould you imagine this thing chasing you?â and âWeâre doomed.â When the company posts a video like the one of the new Atlas, and viewers get worked up, it all appears to be part of the plan.Even if you donât know Boston Dynamics by name, there is a good chance you have seen one of its videos before. Clips of robots running faster than Usain Bolt and dancing in sync, among many others, have helped the company reach true influencer status. Its videos have now been viewed more than 800 million times, far more than those of much bigger tech companies, such as Tesla and OpenAI. The creator of Black Mirror even admitted that an episode in which killer robot dogs chase a band of survivors across an apocalyptic wasteland was directly inspired by Boston Dynamicsâ videos.The company got into the viral-video game by accident. Now owned by Hyundai, Boston Dynamics was founded in 1992 as a spin-off of an MIT robotics lab, and for years had operated in relative obscurity. In the 2000s, someone grabbed a video off the companyâs website and uploaded it to YouTube. Before long, it had 3.5 million views. That first YouTube hit is when âthe light went onâthis matters,â Marc Raibert, the founder, has said. (Boston Dynamics did not provide an interview or comment for this story.) In July 2008, the company created a YouTube channel and began uploading its own videos. Almost every one topped 1 million views. Within a few years, they were regularly collecting tens of millions.Many of Boston Dynamicsâ videos seem engineered to fuel peopleâs most dystopian fantasies, such as the one in which it dressed its humanoid robot in camo and a gas mask. But the company is careful not to lean too far in this direction. Alongside videos of the robots looking creepy or performing incredible feats, it has offered ones in which the robots failed spectacularly, were bullied by their human makers, or did silly dances; in response, people professed to feeling âsorry forâ or âemotionally attached toâ these robots. The companyâs recent farewell video for its old Atlas model, retired days before the new one was released, included clips of the robot toppling off a balance beam and tumbling down a hill. âWhat weâve tried to do is make videos that you can just look at and understand what youâre seeing,â Raibert told Wired in 2018. âYou donât need words, you donât need an explanation. Weâre neither hiding anything nor faking anything.âBoston Dynamics has not said much publicly about how it trains its robots. But when viewers watch videos of the recently retired hydraulic Atlas doing parkour, they might well assume that if it can execute such complex maneuvers, then it can do pretty much anything. In fact, it has likely been programmed to perform a handful of specific tricks, Chelsa Finn, an AI researcher at Stanford University, told me last year. As I wrote then, robots have lagged behind chatbots and other kinds of generative AI because âthe physical world is extremely complicated, far more so than language.â The company posted its first video of Atlas doing a backflip in 2017; more than six years later, the robot still is not commercially available. âThe athletic part of robotics is really doing well,â Raibert told Wired in January, âbut we need the cognitive part.âThe actual business of Boston Dynamics is comparatively mundane. Currently, its humanoid robots are purely for research and development. Its commercial productsâa large robotic arm and a small robotic dogâare used mainly for moving boxes and workplace safety and inspections. âThe perception of how far along the field is that we get from these highly curated, essentially PR-campaign videos ⊠from different companies is a bit distorted,â RaphaĂ«l MilliĂšre, a philosopher at Macquarie University, in Sydney, whose work focuses on artificial intelligence and cognitive science, told me. âYou should always take these with a grain of salt, because theyâre likely to be carefully choreographed routines.âThe company, for its part, has gestured at the limits of its robots in press releases and YouTube descriptions. But it still keeps posting dystopian videos that keep freaking people out. âThey probably made a calculated decision that actually this is not bad press,â MilliĂšre said, âbut rather, it makes the videos more viral.â The company recognizes that we love fantasizing about our own demiseâto a pointâand it supplies regular fodder. The strategy has paid off. Now pretty much all the top robotics companies post video demonstrations on YouTube, some of which are more advanced than Boston Dynamicsâ. Its video introducing the new Atlas robot garnered more than twice as many views as this frankly far more impressive video from the lesser-known robotics company Figure.In recent years, AI companies seem to have taken a page out of the Boston Dynamics playbook. When OpenAI CEO Sam Altman talks about the existential threat of superhuman AI, he is in effect deploying the same strategy. So, too, are the other executives who have invoked the ârisk of extinctionâ that AI poses to humanity. As my colleague Matteo Wong has written, AI doomerism functions as a fantastic PR strategy, in that it makes the product seem far more advanced than it actually is.Boston Dynamics is poised to benefit from the revolution those companies have delivered. Hardly a week after the launch of ChatGPT in late November 2022, the company announced the creation of a new AI Institute. Last month, it posted a video about using simulations and machine learning to teach its robot dogs how to move through a range of real-world environments. And the press release for the new Atlas robot explicitly talked up the companyâs progress in AI and machine learning over the past couple of years: âWe have equipped our robots with new AI and machine learning tools, like reinforcement learning and computer vision, to ensure they can operate and adapt efficiently to complex real-world situations.â In normal English, Atlas might soon not just look but actually be, in a certain sense, possessed. Now that would really be scary.
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Bidenâs Electoral College Challenge
President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.Even a modest recovery in Bidenâs current support could put him in position to win states worth 255 Electoral College votes, strategists in both parties agree. His problem is that every option for capturing the final 15 Electoral College votes he would need to reach a winning majority of 270 looks significantly more difficult.At this point, former President Donald Trumpâs gains have provided him with more plausible alternatives to cross the last mile to 270. Trumpâs personal vulnerabilities, Bidenâs edge in building a campaign organization, and abortion rightsâ prominence in several key swing states could erase that advantage. But for now, Biden looks to have less margin for error than the former president.[Read: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in Novemberâs poll?]Bidenâs odds may particularly diminish if he cannot hold all three of the former âblue wallâ states across the Rust Belt that he recaptured in 2020 after Trump had taken them four years earlier: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is running more competitively in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any other swing states. But in Michigan, Biden has struggled in most polls, whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans.As James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist told me, if Biden can recover to win Michigan along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, âyou are not going to lose.â But, Carville added, if Biden canât hold all three, âyou are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.âFor both campaigns, the math of the next Electoral College map starts with the results from the last campaign. In 2020, Biden won 25 states, the District of Columbia and a congressional district centered on Omaha, in Nebraskaâone of the two states that awards some of its Electoral College votes by district. Last time, Trump won 25 states and a rural congressional district in Maine, the other state that awards some of its electors by district.The places Biden won are worth 303 Electoral College votes in 2024; Trumpâs places are worth 235. Bidenâs advantage disappears, though, when looking at the states that appear to be securely in each sideâs grip.Of the 25 states Trump won, North Carolina was the only one he carried by less than three percentage points; Florida was the only other state Trump won by less than four points.Itâs not clear that Biden can truly threaten Trump in either state. Bidenâs campaign, stressing criticism of Floridaâs six-week abortion ban that went into effect today, has signaled some interest in contesting the state. But amid all the signs of Floridaâs rightward drift in recent years, few operatives in either party believe the Biden campaign will undertake the enormous investment required to fully compete there.Bidenâs team has committed to a serious push in North Carolina. There, he could be helped by a gubernatorial race that pits Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein against Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a social conservative who has described LGBTQ people as âfilthâ and spoken favorably about the era when women could not vote. Democrats also believe that Biden can harvest discontent over the 12-week abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed last yearBut Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Despite Democratic gains in white-collar suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, Trumpâs campaign believes that a steady flow of conservative-leaning white retirees from elsewhere is tilting the state to the right; polls to this point consistently show Trump leading, often by comfortable margins.Biden has a much greater area of vulnerable terrain to defend. In 2020, he carried three of his 25 states by less than a single percentage pointâGeorgia, Arizona, and Wisconsinâand won Pennsylvania by a little more than one point. He also won Michigan and Nevada by about 2.5 percentage points each; in all, Biden carried six states by less than three points, compared with just one for Trump. Even Minnesota and New Hampshire, both of which Biden won by about seven points, donât look entirely safe for him in 2024, though he remains favored in each.Many operatives in both parties separate the six states Biden carried most narrowly into three distinct tiers. Biden has looked best in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Bidenâs position has been weakest in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Michigan falls into its own tier in between.This ranking and Trumpâs consistent lead in North Carolina reflect the upside-down racial dynamics of the 2024 race to this point. As Democrats always do, Biden still runs better among voters of color than among white voters. But the trend in support since 2020 has defied the usual pattern. Both state and national polls, as Iâve written, regularly show Biden closely matching the share of the vote he won in 2020 among white voters. But these same polls routinely show Trump significantly improving on his 2020 performance among Black and Latino voters, especially men. Biden is also holding much more of his 2020 support among seniors than he is among young people.These demographic patterns are shaping the geography of the 2024 race. They explain why Biden has lost more ground since 2020 in the racially diverse and generally younger Sun Belt states than he has in the older and more preponderantly white Rust Belt states. Slipping support among voters of color (primarily Black voters) threatens Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin too, but the danger for him isnât as great as in the Sun Belt states, where minorities are a much larger share of the total electorate. Biden running better in the swing states that are less, rather than more, diverse âis an irony that weâre not used to,â says Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of the liberal advocacy group American Bridge 21st Century, which is running a massive campaign to reach mostly white swing voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.Given these unexpected patterns, Democratic strategists Iâve spoken with this year almost uniformly agree with Carville that the most promising route for Biden to reach 270 Electoral College votes goes through the traditional industrial battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. âIf you look at all the battleground-state polling, and donât get too fixated on this poll or that, the polling consistently shows you that Biden runs better in the three industrial Midwest states than he does in the four swing Sun Belt states,â Doug Sosnik, who served as the chief White House political strategist for Bill Clinton, told me.Democratic hopes for a Biden reelection almost all start with him holding Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where polls now generally show a dead heat. If Biden wins both and holds all the states that he won in 2020 by at least three pointsâas well as Washington, D.C., and the Omaha congressional districtâthat would bring the president to 255 Electoral College votes. At that point, even if Biden loses all of the Sun Belt battlegrounds, he could reach the 270-vote threshold just by taking Michigan, with its 15 votes, as well.But Michigan has been a persistent weak spot for Biden. Although a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed Biden narrowly leading Trump in Michigan, most polls for months have shown the former president, who campaigned there today, reliably ahead. âIn all the internal polling Iâm seeing and doing in Michigan, Iâve never had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump,â Richard Czuba, an independent Michigan pollster who conducts surveys for business and civic groups, told me.[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]Czuba doesnât consider Michigan out of reach for Biden. He believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has qualified for the ballot, will ultimately draw more votes from Trump. Democrats have also rebuilt a formidable political organization, he noted, while the state Republican Party is in disarray, which will help Biden in a close race. And defending abortion rights remains a powerful advantage for Democrats, Czuba said, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer an effective and popular messenger for that cause.But Czuba said Biden is facing obstacles in Michigan that extend beyond his often-discussed problems with Arab American voters over the war in Gaza, discontent on college campuses around the same issue, and Trumpâs claim that the transition to electric vehicles will produce a âbloodbathâ for the auto industry. Biden is also deeply unpopular among independents in the state, Czuba said concerns about his age are a principal concern. âThatâs the overriding issue weâre hearing,â he told me. âI donât think any of those independents voted for Joe Biden thinking he was going to run for reelection.â On top of all that, Sundayâs CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump winning about one in six Black voters in Michigan, roughly double his share in 2020.If Biden canât win Michigan, his remaining options for reaching 270 Electoral College votes are all difficult at best. Many Democrats believe that if Biden loses Michigan, the most plausible alternative for him is to win both Arizona and Nevada, which have a combined 17 votes. Georgia or North Carolina, each with 16 votes, could also substitute for Michigan, but both now lean solidly toward Trump. After Michigan, or the combination of Arizona and Nevada, âthereâs a fault line where the math works but the probabilities are pretty significantly lower,â Sosnik said.Public polls this spring arenât much better for Biden in Arizona and Nevada than in Georgia and North Carolina. And just as Biden faces erosion with Black voters in the Southeast, heâs underperforming among Latinos in the Southwest. Yet most Democrats are more optimistic about their chances in the Southwest than the Southeast.In Nevada, thatâs partly because the Democratsâ turnout machinery, which includes the powerful Culinary Union Local 226, has established a formidable record of winning close races. Both states have also been big winners in the private-investment boom flowing from the three big bills Biden passed in his first two years in office: Nevada received $9 billion in clean-energy investments, and Arizona got a whopping $64 billion from semiconductor manufacturers. The sweep of Trumpâs plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could undo some of his gains with Latinos.But mostly, Democratic hopes in both states center on abortion. Ballot initiatives inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution seem on track to qualify for the ballot in both, and polls show most voters in each state believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases. In Arizona, the issue has been inflamed by the recent decision from the Republican-controlled state supreme court to reinstate a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864.Beychok says a message of defending democracy and personal freedoms, including access to abortion and other reproductive care, remains Bidenâs best asset across the Sun Belt and Rust Belt swing states. âAbortion, democracy, and freedom have been greater than whatever Republicans have decided to throw against the wall,â he told me. âThey can go and scream about Bidenâs age, or âthe squad,â or inflation and the cost of things. The problem is they have been singing that song for years and they have continued to lose elections.âIf Biden has a path to a second term, those issues will likely need to clear the way againâin the Rust Belt and Sun Belt alike.
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The Atlantic Hires Ali Breland as Staff Writer Covering Extremism; Julie Beck, Ellen Cushing, and Matteo Wong Move to Staff Writers
The Atlantic is sharing news about four new staff writers: the hire of Ali Breland, most recently at Mother Jones, to report on disinformation and extremism; the promotion of Matteo Wong, previously an associate editor, covering artificial intelligence; and the moves of longtime Atlantic editors Julie Beck and Ellen Cushing to staff-writer positions, covering culture and family. More details on the new roles for all three are below, as announced by deputy editors Paul Bisceglio and Jane Yong Kim.From Paul Bisceglio, announcing Aliâs hire and Matteoâs promotion: Ali arrives from Mother Jones, where he has distinguished himself with his reporting and writing about the intersection of technology, extremism, and politics. In a cover story last year, he profiled the white nationalist Nick Fuentes and explored a hideous culture of neofascist influencers ⊠His feature for The New Republic about Germanyâs neo-Nazi resurgence is a finalist in this yearâs Livingston Awards; he has covered effective accelerationism, and broken news about racism on the worldâs largest NFT platform. Matteoâs promotion will come as no surprise to his colleagues, nor to the many fans of The Atlanticâs conversation-setting AI coverage. Since joining us as an assistant editor in 2022, Matteo has rapidly established himself as a leading voice on AI, guiding us through the fieldâs promise, dangers, and uncertainty while also delighting us with big ideas about the future of electric vehicles, robot chicken sandwiches, rice cookers, and smelling ⊠Matteo is the full package: a skilled writer, prodigiously talented, and a kind, generous colleague. Itâs a gift for us all to have even more of his writing.â From Jane Yong Kim, announcing new roles for Julie, an editor at The Atlantic since 2013 and host of the recent podcast How to Talk to People, and Ellen, who joined The Atlantic in 2018: Iâm thrilled to report that Julie Beck will be shifting into a staff-writer role. Julie has steered the Family desk with verve and creativity, shaping an expansive slate of storiesâabout relationships, parenting, adolescence, how we live, and moreâthat have resonated deeply with readers. Her work on friendship, in particular, from âThe Friendship Filesâ to ambitious stories that challenge us to rethink the status quo, has been first in class. Julie has always found the time to write original, memorable stories: about why our childhoods were all the same, the dangerous myths pop culture sells about romance, how hobbies infiltrated American life, and her quest to talk with other people named Julie Beck, among many others. Second, Iâm very happy to say that Ellen Cushing, who has deftly led the Projects team over the past several years, is also shifting into a staff-writer role. Ellen has brought some of our most ambitious editorial projects to life with ingenuity and vision. She is an elegant, assured reporter who has helped readers understand many of the tangled, confusing parts of our lives: the dystopia that is Amazon Prime Day, the huge impact of Slack on the workplace, the brain fog of the late-stage pandemic, and what it was like growing up as a teenage conspiracist. As a writer, Ellen will focus on the culture, business, science, and politics of foodâa subject area that The Atlantic has long wanted to tackle even more robustly. Sheâll also contribute to our coverage of internet culture, American childhood, and more.â Please reach out with any questions or requests: press@theatlantic.com.
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The End of Cultural Arbitrage
In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a future classmate named Tim that the numbers 007 373 5963 would take him straight to the final fight of the very popular Nintendo boxing game Mike Tysonâs Punch Out. My buddies and I in Oxford, Mississippi, all knew this code by heart, but it turned out to be rare and valuable information in Pensacola. Years later, Tim revealed to me that it was my knowledge of the Punch Out cheat code that made him want to be friends.I wouldnât have understood this at age 9, but I had just engaged in a successful act of cultural arbitrage. If financial arbitrage involves the acquisition of commodities in a market where they are inexpensive and selling them for profit in a market where they are expensive, cultural arbitrage is the acquisition of information, goods, or styles in one location where they are common and dispersing them in places where they are rare. The âprofitâ is paid out not in money but in esteem and social clout. Individuals gain respect when others find their information useful or entertainingâand repeated deployments may help them build entire personas based on being smart, worldly, and connected.In the past, tastemakers in the worlds of fashion, art, and music established careers through this sort of arbitrageâplucking interesting developments from subcultures to dangle as novelties in the mass market. The legendary writer Glenn OâBrien, for example, made his name by introducing the edgiest downtown New York bands to suits at record labels uptown and, later, by incorporating elements from punk rock, contemporary art, and underground S&M clubs in the creation of Madonnaâs scandalous 1992 book, Sex.But the internetâs sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasableâcurbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary profits going to those responsible for relaying the information. Moreover, the sheer speed of modern communication reduces how long any one piece of knowledge is valuable. This, in turn, devalues the acquisition and hoarding of knowledge as a whole, and fewer individuals can easily construct entire identities built on doing so.There are obvious, concrete advantages to a world with information equality, such as expanding global access to health and educational materialsâwith a stable internet connection, anyone can learn basic computer programming from online tutorials and lectures on YouTube. Finding the optimal place to eat at any moment is certainly easier than it used to be. And, in the case of Google, to âorganize the worldâs information and make it universally accessible and usefulâ even serves as the companyâs mission. The most commonly cited disadvantage to this extraordinary societal change, and for good reason, is that disinformation and misinformation can use the same easy pathways to spread unchecked. But after three decades of living with the internet, itâs clear that there are other, more subtle losses that come with instant access to knowledge, and weâve yet to wrestleâinterpersonally and culturallyâwith the implications.To draw from my own example, there was much respect to be gained in the 1980s from telling friends about video-game cheat codes, because this rare knowledge could be obtained only through deep gameplay, friendships with experienced gamers, or access to niche gaming publications. As economists say, this information was costly. Today, the entire body of Punch Out codesâand their contemporary equivalentsâcan be unearthed within seconds. Knowledge of a cheat code no longer represents entrĂ©e to an exclusive worldâitâs simply the fruit of a basic web search.Admittedly, an increased difficulty in impressing friends with neat tips and trivia hardly constitutes a social crisis. And perhaps benefitting from closely kept secrets was too easy in the past, anyway: In my Punch-Out example, I gained a disproportionately large amount of esteem for something that required very little effort or skill. But when these exchanges were rarerâand therefore more meaningfulâthey could lead to positive effects on the overall culture. In a time of scarcity, information had more value, which provided a natural motivation for curious individuals to learn more about what was happening at the margins of society.[Read: Why kids online are chasing âcloutâ]Arbitrageurs would then âcash inâ by introducing these artifacts to mainstream audiences, which triggered broader imitation of things once considered niche. This helped accelerate the diffusion of information from the underground into the mainstream, not only providing sophisticated consumers with an exciting stream of unfamiliar ideas but also breathing new life into mass culture. The end result of this collision was cultural hybridizationâthe creation of new styles and forms.This process helps explain the most significant stylistic shifts in 20th-century pop music. Living in the port city of Liverpool, where sailors imported American rock-and-roll records, the Beatles leveraged this early access to the latest stateside recordings to give themselves a head start over other British bands. A decade later, the music producer Chris Blackwell, who co-founded Island Records using his upbringing in Jamaica and knowledge of its music, signed Bob Marley and turned reggae into a globally recognized genre. Over the past 15 years, Drake has picked up this mantle as musicâs great arbitrageur, using his singular celebrity to produce collaborations with then-emerging talent such as Migos and the Weeknd that cemented his own reputation as a tastemaker. Creative ideas appear to be impressive innovations to average consumers only once they get a foothold in wider society, which requires a difficult jump from so-called early adopters (who are curious to find new products and art forms) to the more conservative mainstream (who tend to like what they already know). And in the cultural marketplace, arbitrage succeeds more than pure invention because it introduces works that feel novel yet have proven track records of impressing others somewhere else. Before importing reggae to the United States and the United Kingdom, Blackwell knew that this music delighted Jamaicansâand that its popularity within a community that was fighting oppression would appeal to countercultural sympathizers as well.That global platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and Wikipedia reduce the glory of acquiring deep information has not stopped the hunt. Instead, itâs pushed everyone to solve a much more narrow set of information inequalities in their own, smaller communities. Big-league influencers may have trouble looking for the big score, but âday tradersâ in niche fan groups can achieve minor status boosts by being the first to deliver news about their favorite idols to fellow fans. Arguably, individual fandoms have never been strongerâyet because information moves so quickly, these communities exert less influence on larger audiences that have less time or inclination to keep up with every micro-development. And though such superfans may claim to reject public opinion, they secretly need their insights to be respected outside the group in order to feel like something other than just dedicated hobbyists.At the same time, the hyper-politicization of culture on the internet has constrained arbitrage from a different angle: The previously common practice of being influenced by minority communities now elicits charges of appropriation. Such moral judgments are not new: The Nigerian musician Fela Kuti initially accused Paul McCartney of intending to steal âBlack manâs musicâ after the former Beatle went to Lagos to record the Wings album Band on the Run. A greater awareness of the issue in recent years, however, means that third parties now actively police the exact moments when inspiration becomes theft. When the white influencer Charli DâAmelio boosted her own fame by popularizing the âRenegadeâ dance on TiKTok, the journalist Taylor Lorenz traced its origin back to its Black creator, Jalaiah Harmon. In this case, the heightened sensitivity toward appropriation had arguably positive effects: Harmonâs dance became world-renowned, and she eventually received proper credit for it. But these new standards make arbitrage a much weightier undertaking than it used to be, potentially requiring groundwork in coordinating permission and approval from originators.[Read: How Ariana Grande fell off the cultural-appropriation tightrope]In the past decade, some observers have wondered whether cultural innovation is slowing down. Theyâve pointed to the stultifying effects of legacy IP at the box office, the way fast fashion has flattened any genuine sense of clothing trends, the indefatigability of Taylor Swiftâs ongoing pop-chart dominance. The devaluing of cultural arbitrageâand the decrease in instances of hybridizationâis certainly an additional factor to be considered. This is not just a problem for hipsters, however; it ends up affecting everyone who enjoys participating in popular art with other people. The wider entertainment industry always needs new ideas, and with reduced instances of cultural arbitrage, few that come to mainstream consumers now feel particularly valuable.Some countervailing trends might organically reenergize cultural arbitrage over time. The move from billion-user platforms back to balkanized networks on clubbier apps such as Discord could allow savvy individuals to step in and bridge distinct worlds. We also may seek to reduce the amount of information shared onlineâkeeping information exchange personal and limited to real life may restore some value to what tastemakers know. Restaurant reservations have become valuable for this very reason: There are limited seats in a real place. The Canadian indie-music project Cindy Lee recently released a double album, available for download only on GeoCities and as a YouTube stream rather than on streaming sites such as Spotify. The self-created scarcity gave the album palpable buzz, and the lack of easy access didnât get in the way of critical reviews or online discussion.The internet arrived at a time when we gained social clout from arbitraging information, so our first instinct was to share information online. Perhaps we are now entering an era of information hoarding. This may mean that, for a while, the most interesting developments will happen somewhere off the grid. But over time, this practice will restore some value to art and cultural exploration, and bring back opportunities for tastemaking. Whatever the case, we first must recognize the role that arbitrage played in preventing our culture from growing stale while literally making us friends along the way. Winning respect by sharing video-game cheat codes may be a thing of the past, but we need to promote new methods for innovators and mediators to move the cultureâotherwise it may not move much at all.
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When Poetry Could Define a Life
From the 1970s through the 2000s, Marjorie Perloff and Helen Vendler were regularly mentioned together as Americaâs leading interpreters of poetry. When a 2000 article in Poets & Writers referred jokingly to a âVendler-Perloff standoff,â Perloff objected to the habitual comparison. âHelen Vendler and I have extraordinarily different views on contemporary poetry and different critical methodologies, but we are assumed to be affiliated because we are both women critics of a certain age in a male-dominated field,â she wrote in 1999.Now fate has paired them again: Perloffâs death in late March, at age 92, was followed last week by Vendlerâs at age 90. Both remained active to the very end: Perloff wrote the introduction to a new edition of Ludwig Wittgensteinâs Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published this year, and the current issue of the journal Liberties includes an essay by Vendler on war and PTSD in poetry. But for many poets and readers of poetry, the loss of these towering scholars and critics feels like the definitive end of an era that has been slowly passing for years. In our more populist time, when poetry has won big new audiences by becoming more accessible and more engaged with issues of identity, Vendler and Perloff look like either remote elitists or the last champions of aesthetic complexity, depending on your point of view.Age and gender may have played a role in their frequent pairing, as Perloff suspected, but it was their different outlooks as critics that made them such perfect foils. They stood for opposite ways of thinking about the art of poetryâhow to write it, how to read it, what kind of meaning and pleasure to expect from it.Vendler was a traditionalist, championing poets who communicated intimate thoughts and emotions in beautiful, complex language. As a scholar, she focused on clarifying the mechanics of that artistry. Her magnum opus, The Art of Shakespeareâs Sonnets, is a feat of âclose reading,â examining the 154 poems word by word to wring every drop of meaning from them. In analyzing âSonnet 23,â for instance, she highlights the 11 appearances of the letter l in the last six lines, arguing that these âliquid repeatedâ letters are âsigns of passion.âFor Vendler, poetic form was not just a display of virtuosity, but a way of making language more meaningful. As she wrote in the introduction to her anthology Poems, Poets, Poetry (named for the popular introductory class she taught for many years at Harvard), the lyric poem is âthe most intimate of genres,â whose purpose is to let us âinto the innermost chamber of another personâs mind.â To achieve that kind of intimacy, the best poets use all the resources of languageânot just the meaning of words, but their sounds, rhythms, patterns, and etymological connections.Perloff, by contrast, championed poetry that defied the very notion of communication. She was drawn to the avant-garde tradition in modernist literature, which she described in her book Radical Artifice as âeccentric in its syntax, obscure in its language, and mathematical rather than musical in its form.â She found this kind of spiky intelligence in John Ashbery, John Cage, and the late-20th-century school known as Language poetry, which drew attention to the artificiality of language by using it in strange and nonsensical ways. One of her favorite poets was Charles Bernstein, whose poem âA Test of Poetryâ begins: What do you mean by rashes of ash? Is industry systematic work, assiduous activity, or ownershipof factories? Is ripple agitate lightly? Arewe tossed in tune when we write poems? For Perloff, the difficulty of this kind of poem had a political edge. At a time when television and advertising were making words smooth and empty, she argued that poets had a moral duty to resist by using language disruptively, forcing readers to sit up and pay attention. âPoetic discourse,â she wrote, âdefines itself as that which can violate the system.âFor Vendlerites, Perloffâs approach to poetry could seem excessively theoretical and intellectual; for Perloffians, Vendlerâs taste could seem too conventional. (Perloff wrote that when her âpoet friends ⊠really want to put me down, they say that Iâm not so different from Helen Vendler!â) Vendlerâs scholarly books explored canonical poets such as Wallace Stevens, W. B. Yeats, and Robert Lowell; Perloffâs focused on edgier figures such as Gertrude Stein and the French Oulipo group, which experimented with artificial constraints on writing, such as avoiding the letter e. When it came to living poets, Vendlerâs favorites tended to win literary prizesâPulitzers, National Book Awards, and in the case of her friend and colleague Seamus Heaney, the Nobel. Perloffâs seldom did, finding admiration inside the academy instead.These differences in taste can be seen as a reflection of the criticsâ very different backgrounds. Vendler was born in Boston and attended Catholic schools and a Catholic college before earning a doctorate from Harvard. She went on to teach for 20 years at Boston University and then returned to Harvard as a star faculty member. She spoke about the open sexism she initially encountered in the Ivy League, but she was a product of that milieu and eventually triumphed in it.Perloff was born to a Jewish family in Vienna and came to New York in 1938 as a 6-year-old refugee from Nazism. (In her memoir, The Vienna Paradox, she wrote that she exchanged her original name, Gabrielle, for Marjorie because she thought it sounded more American.) She earned her Ph.D. from Catholic University, in Washington, D.C., and spent most of her academic career in California, at the opposite corner of the country from the Ivy League and its traditions. Perloffâs understanding of high art as a tool for disrupting mass culture unites her with thinkers of the Frankfurt School such as Theodor AdornoâGerman Jewish Ă©migrĂ©s of an older generation, many of whom also ended up in California.In his poem âLittle Gidding,â written during World War II, T. S. Eliot wrote that the Cavaliers and Puritans who fought in Englandâs Civil War, in the 17th century, now âare folded in a single party.â The same already seems true of Vendler and Perloff. Today college students are fleeing humanities majors, and English departments are desperately trying to lure them back by promoting the ephemera of pop culture as worthy subjects of study. (Vendlerâs own Harvard English department has been getting a great deal of attention for offering a class on Taylor Swift.) Both Vendler and Perloff, by contrast, rejected the idea that poetry had to earn its place in the curriculum, or in the culture at large, by being ârelevant.â Nor did it have to be defended on the grounds that it makes us more virtuous citizens or more employable technicians of reading and writing.Rather, they believed that studying poetry was valuable in and of itself. In her 2004 Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities, Vendler argued that art, not history or theory, should be the center of a humanistic education, because âartworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history.â Perloff made a similar argument in her 1999 essay âIn Defense of Poetry,â where she criticized the dominance of cultural studies in academia and called for âmaking the arts, rather than history, the umbrella of choiceâ in studying the humanities.There are no obvious heirs to Vendler and Perloff in American poetry today. Given the trend lines for the humanities, it seems unlikely we will see a similar conjunction of scholarly authority and critical discernment anytime soon. But that is all the more reason for them to be rememberedâtogether, for all their differencesâas examples of how literary criticism, when practiced as a true vocation, can be one of the most exciting expressions of the life of the mind.
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When Voters Care About Foreign Affairs
Generally they donât. But for Biden, Gaza could make this election different.
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Democrats Defang the Houseâs Far Right
A Republican does not become speaker of the House for the job security. Each of the past four GOP speakersâJohn Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnsonâfaced the ever-present threat of defenestration at the hands of conservative hard-liners. The axe fell on McCarthy in October, and it has hovered above his successor, Johnson, from the moment he was sworn in.That is, until yesterday. In an unusual statement, the leaders of the Democratic opposition emerged from a party meeting to declare that they would rescue Johnson if the speakerâs main Republican enemy at the moment, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, forced a vote to oust him. Democrats chose not to help save McCarthyâs job last fall, and in standing with Johnson, they are rewarding him for bringing to the floor a foreign-aid package that includes $61 billion in funds for Ukraine and was opposed by a majority of his own members.[Read: A Democratâs case for saving Mike Johnson]Democrats see an opportunity to do what theyâve wanted Republican speakers to do for years: sideline the far right. The GOPâs slim majority has proved to be ungovernable on a party-line basis; far-right conservatives have routinely blocked bills from receiving votes on the House floor, forcing Johnson to work with Democrats in what has become an informal coalition government. Democrats made clear that their pledge of support applied only to Greeneâs attempt to remove Johnson, leaving themselves free to ditch him in the future. Come November, theyâll want to render him irrelevant by retaking the House majority. But by thwarting Greeneâs motion to vacate, Democrats hope they can ensure that Johnson will keep turning to them for the next seven months of his term rather than seek votes from conservative hard-liners who will push legislation ever further to the right.âWe want to turn the page,â Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the third-ranking House Democrat, told reporters. He explained that Democrats were not issuing a vote of confidence in Johnsonâan archconservative who played a leading role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential electionâso much as they were trying to head off the chaos that Greene was threatening to foist upon the House. âShe is a legislative arsonist, and she is holding the gas tank,â Aguilar said. âWe donât need to be a part of that.â Democrats wonât have to affirmatively vote for Johnson in order to save him; they plan to vote alongside most Republicans to table a motion to vacate the speakerâs chair should Greene bring one to the floor, as she has promised to do.McCarthyâs ouster by a group led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida paralyzed the House for weeks as Republicans considered and promptly rejected a series of would-be speakers, until they coalesced around Johnson, a fourth-term lawmaker little known outside the Capitol and his Louisiana district. Democrats were then in no mood to bail out McCarthy, who had turned to them for help keeping the government open but only weeks earlier had tried to hold on to his job by green-lighting an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.Now the circumstances are different. The impeachment case has fizzled, and Democrats saw in Johnsonâs move on Ukraineâdespite months of delayâan act of much greater political courage than McCarthyâs last-minute decision to avert a government shutdown. They also respect him more than they do his predecessor. âI empathize with him in a way I could not with Kevin McCarthy, who was just this classic suit calculating his next advancement as a politician,â Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-term Democrat from Washington State, told me recently, explaining why she planned to help Johnson.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]Greene took the Democratsâ move to save Johnson as a validation of her argument against himâthat he kowtows to the establishment rather than fighting for âAmerica Firstâ policies at any cost. âMike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House,â she wrote on X in response to the Democratsâ announcement.After the Ukraine aid passed, Greene had hoped that a public backlash by conservative constituents against Johnson would lead to a groundswell of Republicans turning on him. That did not materialize. Only two other GOP lawmakers have said they would back her. Nor has former President Donald Trump lent support to her effort. Though Trump has been tepid in his praise of Johnson, heâs sympathized with the speaker for leading such a slim majority.Greene first introduced her motion to vacate more than a month ago and insisted yesterday that she would still demand a vote on it. If she does, no one will be surprised when it fails, but that will demonstrate something America hasnât seen in a while: what a Republican-controlled House looks like when its hard-liners have finally been defanged.
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Is Iran a Country or a Cause?
On April 21, a week after Iranâs first-ever direct attack on Israel, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with his military commanders to gloat. The assault had failed to cause much damage in Israel, but Khamenei claimed victory and tried to give it a patriotic color.âWhat matters most,â he said, âis the emergence of the will of the Iranian nation and Iranâs military forces in an important international arena.âSuch national chest-thumping is to be expected from any head of state. But something stood out about the Iranian attacks that made this nationalist reading suspect. Technically speaking, the strikes had been carried out not by Iranâs military but by a militia, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose name doesnât even include Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGCâs Aerospace Force, one of its six divisions, was what fired 300 drones and missiles at Israel.This is not some bureaucratic âfun fact.â Rather, it illustrates a fundamental truth about Iran: the duality of its institutions, many of which are explicitly defined to be autonomous of both the nation and the state. That duality, in turn, leads to much head-scratching and confusion about Iran. Is the Islamic Republic a rational and potentially pragmatic actor, like most other nation-states, or is it an ideologically motivated actor, bent on pursuing mayhem in support of its goals?The charged nature of Washington debate about Iran often leads partisans to give simple, binary answers to this question. But those who follow Iran more closely realize that the dilemma has produced a tough, protracted battle within the regime itself. In 2006, a journalist asked Henry Kissinger about the future of Iranian-American relations. The doyen of American strategy responded, âIran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause. If a nation, it must realize that its national interest doesnât conflict with ours. If the Iranian concern is security and development of their country, this is compatible with American interests.â[Read: Ordinary Iranians donât want war with Israel]Khamenei, the man who holds ultimate power in todayâs Iran, has himself been inconsistent on this point. He is after all not just Iranâs commander in chief but also a revolutionary in chief who heads the Axis of Resistance, an international coalition of anti-West and anti-Israel militias.Not all Iranians are happy to lend their nation-state to such a coalition. Thus a continuous battle rages, in Iranâs society and its establishment, not only over what Iranâs foreign policy should be, but over the more fundamental question of whom it should serve. Should it be the vehicle for the pursuit of Iranâs national interestsâor of an Islamist revolutionary agenda that knows no borders?The IRGC is an instrument of the latter conception. That Iran is nowhere in its title is no accident: The IRGC was formed in 1979 from a variety of Islamist militias, precisely because the revolutionaries who had just overthrown the monarchy didnât trust traditional institutions, such as Iranâs powerful military, and wanted to serve goals beyond Iranâs borders. The IRGCâs founders saw themselves as loyal first and foremost to the revolutionâs founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who couldnât have been more explicit about rejecting Iranian nationalism in favor of a transnational revolutionary Islamism.Doing so meant reorienting Iranâs foreign policy entirely. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had maintained ties with Israel as well as its Arab neighbors, even proposing to mediate between them. The monarchy had christened Iranâs position a ânational independent policyâ and positioned Iran as Western-leaning but nonaligned, touting the countryâs long and proud tradition as a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.Khomeini wanted both to do away with this tradition and to burnish his credentials as an international revolutionary leader. He began by fully embracing the anti-Israeli cause, declaring the last Friday of the month of Ramadan to be Quds (Jerusalem) Day, an occasion for global rallies in opposition to the Jewish state. In a televised message on Quds Day 1980, Khomeini stated forcefully: âNationally minded people are of no use to us. We want Muslim people. Islam opposes nationality.âAs Islamist revolutionaries took over Iran and built their Islamic Republic, some envisaged erasing Iranâs national identity altogether. A faction close to Libyaâs Muammar Qaddafi dreamed of fusing Iran and Libya into a new revolutionary state. A cleric took a group of goons to vandalize the tomb of Ferdowsi, Iranâs cherished medieval national poet, near Mashhad. Many regime leaders were openly contemptuous of pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, even the single most important one: the Iranian new year, or Nowruz. In 1981, Khomeini explicitly asked Iranians not to put much emphasis on âtheir so-called Nowruz.âBut Khomeiniâs radicalism soon collided with reality. Few people anywhere would willingly give up their national identity; Iranians are famously patriotic, and for them, the demand was a nonstarter. Nowruz would stay, as would Ferdowsiâs tomb. But the battle over whether revolutionary Iran would behave as a nation or as an Islamist cause never ceased.When Saddam Husseinâs Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, masses of Iranians mobilized to defend their country, in what was clearly a patriotic effort. Former pilots of the Shahâs imperial armies were released from prison to fly sorties. From his exile, the recently overthrown crown prince offered to come back to join the armed forces (he was denied). Iranâs war dead included many non-MuslimsâChristians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Bahaâis. And yet, Khomeini conceived of the war not as one of national defense but as a âholy warâ to spread the revolution.Iran liberated all of its territory from Iraqi forces in 1982, but Khomeini declared that the war had to go on âuntil all sedition has been eliminated from the world.â He sent Iranian forces into Iraq, where they kept pushing for six more futile years, until at last he accepted a UN-mandated cease-fire in 1988. That same year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. By the time Khomeini died, in 1989, the country appeared to be setting a more moderate course, even shedding its internationalist revolutionary pretensions.Shadi Hamid: The reason Iran turned out to be so repressiveWhether it would really do so would be up to Khomeiniâs successor. Khamenei was a hard-line revolutionary activist, known for translating into Persian the works of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious ideologue of Egyptâs Muslim Brotherhood. But he owed his ascent to the leadership in part to the new president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose pragmatism many thought would rub off on Khamenei as well. Rafsanjani came to represent something of an Iranian Deng Xiaoping, more interested in technocracy than in ideological purity.The alliance turned out to be one of convenience, and from the 1990s to 2010s, Iran became the scene of a ferocious struggle among three broad factions: conservatives led by Khamenei, reformists (led by Mohammad Khatami, who would succeed Rafsanjani as president in 1997) who wanted to democratize, and centrists (led by Rafsanjani) who wished to maintain the closed political system but make the countryâs foreign policy less ideological and more practical. As Khamenei sought to strengthen his faction against the other two, he realized that the IRGC was his best cudgel. He used it to repress and exclude from power both the reformists and the centrists. Khamenei extended the stateâs largesse to his allies in the militia as it pursued its most ambitious project: that of building up an Axis of Resistance in the region, including groups such as Lebanonâs Hezbollah and Iraqâs Shiite militias.With the help of these proxies, the IRGC conducted a campaign of terror against its ideological enemies, Israel above all. It helped bomb Israelâs embassy in 1992 and, two years later, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The latter action killed 85 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. Starting in 2003, wars and crises in the Middle East allowed the Axis to spread and strengthenâand, as it did so, to capture Iranâs regional foreign policy.Khamenei understood that the rise of the IRGCâs regional power risked dangerously isolating Tehran and putting it on a collision course with Washington. And so he attempted to balance out the IRGCâs radicalism by giving some ground to the pragmatism of the centrists who favored ties with the West. Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani acolyte, was elected president in 2013 with a popular mandate to conduct direct negotiations with the West over Iranâs nuclear program. He and his U.S.-educated foreign minister, Javad Zarif, had the support of both reformists and centrists. They bitterly opposed the IRGC, and the militia in turn opposed their talks with the United States.The Rouhani government finally inked a deal with the United States and five other powerful countries in 2015, only for it to be thrown out three years later by President Donald Trump. The anti-IRGC coalition was severely weakened, and Khamenei swung heavily in the other directionâwhich better fit with his own politics in any case.The long-lasting battle over Iranâs foreign policy has now been largely settled in favor of the octogenarian supreme leader and his allies. Since 2020, only pro-Khamenei conservatives have been permitted to run for office in major elections. The IRGC openly operates Iranian embassies in most of the Middle East, and ideological commitments, rather than national interest, drive Iranian foreign policy. This turn is most evident in Iranâs shameful support for Russiaâs invasion of Ukraine, which only makes sense as an expression of Khameneiâs anti-Western zeal. In fact, Khameneiâs men have broken with the countryâs traditional nonalignment by repeatedly favoring ties with China, Russia, and North Korea. The facade of Iranâs Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran is still emblazoned with the revolutionary slogan âNeither Western nor Easternââbut pro-Khamenei foreign-policy hands now speak of a âLook Eastâ policy to justify their new orientation.Khamenei never made the transition from Islamist activist to Iranian statesman. Having hijacked the Iranian nation for a cause, he hitched its fortunes to those of militias that wreak havoc in every country where they operate. With the IRGC's attacks on Israel, he has now put the country on the path to a war most Iranians neither want nor can afford. Having just turned 85 years old, Khamenei has lost the respect of most Iranians and even many establishment figures. Iran is worse today in every single way than it was 20 years ago: socially repressed, politically closed, diplomatically isolated, and economically destroyed.Many Iranians are now simply waiting for the leader to die. His cause-centered foreign policy has brought only disaster. Those who want Iran to once more act like a nation are politically marginalized, but in a post-Khamenei Iran, they will fight for a country that pursues its national interests, including peace with its neighbors and the world.
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Authoritarianism by a Thousand Cuts
The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in Americaâs retreat from democracyâthe failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Fordâs high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. âThe President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,â she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. âThere has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.â Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.Despite thisâand numerous death threatsâCheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasnât alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Fordâs chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.) President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona) Yet when the foundationâs executive committee received Cheneyâs nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundationâs executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundationâs executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committeeâs decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: âAt the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.âGiving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be âprudent.â Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across Americaâthe fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trumpâs team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]I see Whitneyâs legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasnât been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. Whatâs more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to thenâVice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, âWe face a very different political environment today than in 2004.â He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasnât afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwarkâs Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying âMAGA Republicans.â Daniels said he had spent 10 years âduckingâ such questions. He allowed that he would âmake no objectionâ to Bidenâs statement, but continued: âI think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.â This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundationâs executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, âOur long national nightmare is over.â It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixonâs actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheneyâsomeone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.
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The Mysteries of Plant âIntelligenceâ
On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroyâs lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.Researchers led me into a small microscope room. One of them turned off the lights, and another handed me a pair of tweezers that had been dipped in a solution of glutamateâone of the most important neurotransmitters in our brains and, research has recently found, one that boosts plantsâ signals too. âBe sure to cross the midrib,â Jessica Cisneros Fernandez, then a molecular biologist on Gilroyâs team, told me. She pointed to the thick vein running down the middle of a tiny leaf. This vein is the plantâs information superhighway. Injure the vein, and the pulse will move all over the plant in a wave. I pinched hard.On a screen attached to the microscope, I watched the plant light up, its veins blazing like a neon sign. As the green glow moved from the wound site outward in a fluorescent ripple, I was reminded of the branching pattern of human nerves. The plant was becoming aware, in its own way, of my touch.But what exactly does it mean for a plant to be awareâ? Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention. Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them.Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent. Plants have been found to show sensitivity to sound, store information to be accessed later, and communicate among their kindâand even, in a sense, with particular animals. We determine intelligence in ourselves and certain other species through inferenceâby observing how an organism behaves, not by looking for a psychological sign. If plants can do things that we consider indications of intelligence in animals, this camp of botanists argues, then why shouldnât we use the language of intelligence to describe them too?[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]Itâs a daring question, currently being debated in labs and academic journals. Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientistâs career. And plenty of botanists still think that applying concepts such as consciousness to plants does a disservice to their essential plantness. Yet even many of these scientists are awed by what we are learning about plantsâ capabilities.A single book nearly snuffed out the field of plant-behavior research for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, was as popular as it was irresponsible; though it included real science, it also featured wildly unscientific projection. One chapter suggested that plants could feel and hearâand that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. Another suggested that a plant could respond to malevolent thoughts.Many scientists tried to reproduce the most tantalizing âresearchâ presented in The Secret Life of Plants, to no avail. According to several researchers I spoke with, this caused the twin gatekeepers of science-funding boards and peer-review boards to become skittish about plant-behavior studies. Proposals with so much as a whiff of inquiry into the subject were turned down. Pioneers in the field changed course or left the sciences altogether.A decade after the bookâs publication, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, reopened questions of plant communication. Rhoades had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadnât yet reached were ready: Theyâd changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasnât unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other informationâsay, that the forest was under attackâmight also drift through the air.[Read: A glowing petunia could radicalize your view of plants]Still, the idea that a plant would defend itself in this way was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades presented his hypothesis at conferences, but mainstream scientific journals were reluctant to take the risk of publishing something so outlandish. The discovery ended up buried in an obscure volume, and Rhoades was ridiculed by peers in journals and at conferences.But Rhoadesâs communication experiments, and others that came immediately after, helped establish new lines of inquiry. We now know that plantsâ chemical signals are decipherable not just by other plants but in some cases by insects. Still, four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany.One key problem is that there is no agreed-upon definition of communication, not even in animals. Does a signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver? Much as consciousness and intelligence have no settled definition, communication slip-slides between the realms of philosophy and science, finding secure footing in neither. Intention poses the hardest of problems, because it cannot be directly determined.[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]The likely impossibility of establishing intentionality in plants, though, is no deterrent to Simon Gilroyâs sense of wonder at their liveliness. In the â80s, Gilroy, who is British, studied at Edinburgh University under Anthony Trewavas, a renowned plant physiologist. Since then, Trewavas has begun using provocative language to talk about plants, aligning himself with a group of botanists and biologists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, and publishing papers and a book laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness. Gilroy himself is more circumspect, unwilling to talk about either of those things, but he still works with Trewavas. Recently, the two have been developing a theory of agency for plants.Gilroy is quick to remind me that he is talking strictly about biological agency, not implying intention in a thoughts-and-feelings sense. But thereâs no question that plants are engaged in the active pursuit of their own goals and, in the process, shape the very environment they find themselves rooted in. That, for him, is proof of plantsâ agency. Still, the proof is found through inferring the meaning behind plantsâ actions rather than understanding their mechanics.âWhen you get down to the machinery that allows those calculations to occur, we donât have the luxury of going, Ah, itâs neurons in the brain,â Gilroy told me. His work is beginning to allow us to watch the information processing happen, âbut at the moment, we donât know how it works.âThat is the essential question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli? How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?A few years back, Gilroy and his colleague Masatsugu Toyota thought theyâd have a go at those questions, which led them to the experiment I participated in at the lab. Their work has shown that those glowing-green signals move much faster than would be expected from simple diffusion. They move at the speed of some electrical signals, which they may be. Or, as new research suggests, they may be surprisingly fast chemical signals.Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localized response. But it doesnât. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found ânervous systemâlike signalingâ in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo LlinĂĄs, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel TomĂ©, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organisms separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, LlinĂĄs and Miguel TomĂ© say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?âWhat do you mean, the flower remembers?â I ask.Itâs 2019, and Iâm walking through the Berlin Botanic Garden with Tilo Henning, a plant researcher. Henning shakes his head and laughs. He doesnât know. No one does. But yes, he says, he and his colleague Maximilian Weigend, the director of a botanical garden in Bonn, have observed the ability of Nasa poissonianaâa plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andesâto store and recall information.The pair noticed that the multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were raising their stamen, or fertilizing organs, shortly before a pollinator arrived, as if they could predict the future. The researchers set up an experiment and found that the plant in fact seemed to be learning from experience. These flowers, Henning and Weigend found, could ârememberâ the time intervals between bee visits, and anticipate the time their next pollinator was likely to arrive. If the interval between bee visits changed, the plant might actually adjust the timing of its stamen display to line up with the new schedule.In a 2019 paper, Henning and Weigend call Nasa poissonianaâs behavior âintelligent,â the word still appearing in quotation marks. I want to know what Henning really thinks. Are plants intelligent? Does he see the flowerâs apparent ability to remember as a hallmark of consciousness? Or does he think of the plant as an unconscious robot with a preprogrammed suite of responses?Henning shakes off my question the first two times I ask it. But the third time, he stops walking and turns to answer. The dissenting papers, he says, are all focused on the lack of brainsâno brains, they claim, means no intelligence.âPlants donât have these structures, obviously,â Henning says. âBut look at what they do. I mean, they take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions. And they perform. They take everything into account, and they transform it into a reaction. And this, to me, is the basic definition of intelligence. Thatâs not just automatism. There might be some automatic things, like going toward light. But this is not the case here. Itâs not automatic.âWhere Nasa poissonianaâs âmemoriesâ could possibly be stored is still a mystery. âMaybe we are just not able to see these structures,â Henning tells me. âMaybe they are so spread all over the body of the plant that there isnât a single structure. Maybe thatâs their trick. Maybe itâs the whole organism.âItâs humbling to remember that plants are a kingdom of life entirely their own, the product of riotous evolutionary innovation that took a turn away from our branch of life when we were both barely motile, single-celled creatures floating in the prehistoric ocean. We couldnât be more biologically different. And yet plantsâ patterns and rhythms have resonances with oursâjust look at the information moving through Gilroyâs glowing specimens.Mysteries abide, of course. We are far from understanding the extent of âmemoryâ in plants. We have a few clues and fewer answers, and so many more experiments still to try.This article was adapted from ZoĂ« Schlangerâs new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline âThe Mysteries of Plant âIntelligence.ââ
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The Columbia Protesters Backed Themselves Into a Corner
Yesterday afternoon, Columbia Universityâs campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their âliberated zoneââan encampment of about 80 tentsâand Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their âliberated building.â At midnight yesterday morning, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive sound.And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia University, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was âguilty of abetting genocideâ and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.[Will Creeley: Those who preach free speech need to practice it]As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On the campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.âNo peace on stolen land,â she intoned. âWe want all the land. We want all of it!âHearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protesterâs words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possibleâthat two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power, and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.The protesters confronted a university where leaders seemed alternately stern and panicked. Columbia left it to police to break a siege around 9 p.m. in a surge of force, arresting dozens of protesters and crashing their way into Hamilton Hall.The denouement was a tragedy that came accompanied by moments of low comedy, as when a student protester seemed to suggest yesterday that bloody, genocidal Columbia University must supply the students of the liberated zone and liberated building with food. âWeâre saying theyâre obligated to provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here,â she explained. But moments of true menace were evident, such as when some protesters decided to break into and occupy Hamilton Hall.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbiaâs âliberated zoneâ]Rory Wilson, a senior majoring in history, had wandered over to the site early yesterday morning when he heard of the break-in. He and two friends were not fans of this protest, he told me, but they also understood the swirl of passions that led so many Arab and Muslim students to recoil at the terrible toll that Israeli bombings have inflicted on Gaza. To watch Hamilton Hall being smashed struck him as nihilistic. He and his friends stood in front of the doors.Hundreds of protesters, masked, many dressed in black, surged around them. âTheyâre Zionists,â a protester said. âRun a circle around these three and move them out!.âDozens of masked students surrounded them and began to press and push. Were you scared?, I asked Wilson. No, he said. Then he thought about it a little more. âThere was a moment when a man in a black mask grabbed my leg and tried to flip me over,â he said. âThat scared meâOne more fact was striking: As a mob of hundreds of chanting students smashed windows and built a barricade by tossing dozens of chairs against the doors and reinforcing them with bicycle locks, as fights threatened to break out that could seriously harm students on either side, Wilson couldnât see any guards or police officers anywhere around him. Two other students told me they had a similar impression. âI donât get it,â Wilson said. âThere were some legitimately bad actors. Where was the security? Where was the university?â (Columbia officials did not respond to my requests for comment.)Less than 24 hours later university leaders would play their hand by bringing in police officers.For more than a decade now, weâve lived amid a highly specific form of activism, one that began with Occupy Wall Street, continued with the protests and riots that followed George Floydâs murder in 2020, and evolved into the âautonomous zonesâ that protesters subsequently carved out of Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Some of the protests against prejudice and civil-liberties violations have been moving, even inspired. But in this style of activism, the anger often comes with an air of presumptionâan implication that one cannot challenge, much less debate, the protestersâ writ.[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle IslandYesterday in front of Hamilton Hallâwhich protesters had renamed Hindâs Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gazaâorganizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, mindersâsome of whom were sympathetic faculty membersâkept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.All along, it has never been clear who speaks for the movement. Protesters claimed that those who took over Hamilton Hall were an âautonomous collective.â This elusiveness can all but neuter negotiations.By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the copsâat least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian-American, or Latinoâby likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. âFrom the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.â There was a pause, as if protesters were searching for something more cutting. âHey, hey, ho, ho, Zionism has got to go.âAs I left the area, I thought about how Rory Wilson responded earlier when I asked what life on campus has been like lately. The senior, who said he is Jewish on his motherâs side but not observant, had a take that was not despairing. In polarized times, he told me, having so many Jewish and Israeli students living and attending class on a campus with Arab and Muslim students was a privilege. âSome have lost families and loved ones,â he said. âI understand their anger and suffering.âAfter spending two days on the Columbia campuses during the protests, I was struck by how unusual that sentiment had becomeâhow rarely Iâd heard anyone talk of making an effort to understand the other. Maximal anger was all that lingered.
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Why I Am Creating an Archive for Palestine
My father collects 100-year-old magazines about PalestineâLife, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the worldâs first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. âI have proof,â he would say, âthat Palestine exists.âHis father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him: âFirst there was Hassan,â he would say in his thick Arabic accent, âand then there was Simri.â Following fathers and sons down the line of paternity, in a rhythm much like that of a prayer, he told the story of 11 generations. Every generation until my fatherâs was born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine.After 1948, however, almost our entire family in Ramallah moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although my American-born father didnât inherit Siddiâs habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his fatherâs, these speeches were unprompted. âYour Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,â he would say for the hundredth time. âAnd that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because itâs convenient, but itâs not the truth.âHis lectures were tedious, repetitive, and often fueled with so much passion that they overwhelmed me into silence. And yet they took up permanent residence in my brain, and I would reach for them when pressed to give political opinions after new acquaintances found out I was Palestinian. âSo what do the Palestinians even want?â a co-workerâs husband once asked me as we waited in line for the bar at my companyâs holiday party. I said what I imagined my father would have said in the face of such dismissiveness: âThe right to live on their land in peace.âBut sometime after the luster of young adulthood wore off, I found my piecemeal understanding of Palestinian historyâwhat Iâd gleaned from passively listening to my fatherâno longer sufficient when navigating these conversations. When a man I was on a date with learned where my olive skin and dark hair came from, he told me that Palestinians âwere invented,â even though I was sitting right in front of him, sharing a bowl of guacamole. I left furious, mostly at myself. I had nothing thoughtful to say to prove otherwise.Like my father, I started collecting my own box of scraps about Palestine, although I couldnât have said why. Perhaps I wanted to slice through a conversation just as others had sliced through my existence, but not even this was clear to me yet. Magazines, books, old posters, and stickers found a home in a corner of my bedroom. My collecting was an obsession. Iâd buy books by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, not necessarily because I knew who these men were at the time, but because the word Palestine was right there, embossed on the cover.At first I didnât dare open these books. They became an homage to my identity that I both eagerly honored and wanted to ignore. My eventual engagement with the material was slow, deliberate. I wanted to preserve a semblance of ease that I feared I would lose once I learned more about my peopleâs history. I bookmarked articles on Palestine in my browser, creating a haphazard folder of links that included infographics on Palestineâs olive-oil industry, news clippings about the latest Israeli laws that discriminated against Palestinians, and articles on JSTOR with provocative titles like âMyths About Palestinians.â I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kitâlike the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Franciscoâeven though I didnât know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary. But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.Even more true: These archives validate Palestiniansâ existence. In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was âa country without people; the Jews are a people without a country.âIn 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: â[There is] no such thing as Palestinians ⊠It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.â This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israelâs Parliament, saying, âThere is no such thing as a Palestinian people.âBut this fiction of Palestiniansâ nonexistence feels tired. Itâs a distraction that not only invalidates us but also places Palestinians on the defensive while Israelâs government builds walls and expands illegal settlements that separate Israelis from their very real Palestinian neighbors.It feels especially absurd in the face of Israelâs latest military campaign in Gaza, launched in response to Hamasâs attacks on October 7. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gazaâs Ministry of Health, although that number is incomplete. It does not include all of the civilians who have died from hunger, disease, or lack of medical treatment. If Palestinians donât exist, then who is dying? I fear that Strockâs words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will become extinct. Itâs a cruel self-fulfilling prophecyâclaim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.While listening to my fatherâs monologues, I used to think about how exhausting it must be for him to keep reminding himself that the place where his father was born is real. At the time, I didnât think about my place in this heartbreak. But I canât ignore that heartbreak any longer.Since October, Iâve returned to my own little box on Palestine. I used to think that this haphazard archive lacked direction, but I see it differently now. This collection proves to me that the place where my great-grandfather owned orchards and grew oranges was real, that the land Siddi was forced to leave behind was a blooming desert before others claimed its harvest. Itâs also a catalog of my own awakening, a coming to terms with a history that I didnât want to know. My ignorance is shattered over and over again when I look through this box and think about all that we are losing today.Gaza is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world; some of its monuments date back to Byzantine, Greek, and Islamic times. Since the October 7 attacks, however, Israelâs air raids on Gaza have demolished or damaged roughly 200 historical sites, including libraries, hundreds of mosques, a harbor dating back to 800 B.C.E., and one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. In December, an Israeli strike destroyed the Omari Mosque, the oldest and largest mosque in Gaza City, which housed dozens of rare ancient manuscripts. Israeli strikes have endangered Gazaâs remaining Christian population, considered one of the oldest in the world, and have destroyed every university while killing more than 90 prominent academics.The destruction of cultural heritage is not new in the history of war. Perhaps thatâs why when my father came across a tattered hardcover titled Village Life in Palestine, a detailed account of life in the Holy Land in the late 1800s, in a used-book store in Cork, Ireland, he immediately purchased it. He knew that books like these were sacred artifacts that hold a truthâa proof of existence outside political narratives. My fatherâs copy was printed by the London publishing company Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1905. The first few pages of the book contain a library record and a stamp that reads CANCELLED. Below is another stamp with the date: March 9, 1948. Iâm not sure if that dateâmere months before the creation of Israelâsignifies when it was pulled out of circulation, or the last time it was checked out. But the word cancelled feels purposeful. It feels like another act of erasure, a link between my fatherâs collection and the growing list of historical sites in Gaza now destroyed. We are losing our history and, with that, the very record of those who came before us.After I started my own collection on Palestine, my father entrusted me with some of his scanned copies of Life that mention Palestine. He waited to show them to me, as if passing on an heirloom. Perhaps he wanted to be sure I was ready or that I could do something with them. One of the magazines dates back to May 10, 1948, four days before the creation of Israel. Thereâs a headline that reads, âThe Captured Port of Haifa Is Key to the Jewsâ Strategy.â The author goes on to write that the port âimproved Jewsâ strategic position in Palestine. It gave them complete control of a long coastal strip south to Tel Aviv ⊠They could look forward to shipments of heavy military equipment from their busy supporters abroad.â Right next to this text is a picture of Palestinian refugees with the caption âArab Refugees, crammed aboard a British lighter in the harbor at Haifa, wait to be ferried across the bay to the Arab-held city of Acre. They were permitted to take what possessions they could but were stripped of all weapons.âI canât help but feel the echo of this history today. I think about President Joe Bidenâs plans to build a temporary port in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid in, even though about 7,000 aid trucks stand ready in Egyptâs North Sinai province. Back in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to welcome the idea of letting help arrive by sea,which at first confused me because not only has he denied that Palestinians are starving, but his government has also been accused by the United Nations and other humanitarian groups of blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza (a claim that Israel denies). Nevertheless, the historical echo seems quite clear to me now as I look through my fatherâs magazine and see refugees leaving by port 75 years earlier.I believe my father didnât want to be alone in his recordkeeping. Who would? Itâs endlessly depressing to have to write yourself and your people into existence. But writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion. Itâs the same drive that I imagine led Siddi to recite his family tree over and over, a self-preservation method that reminded him, just as much as it reminded his young son, of where they came from. Itâs the same compulsion that inspires my father to collect the rubble of history and build a library from it.This impulse is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestineâs existence, but itâs also an act of faithâfaith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history. Sometimes I hear my father say that his magazines and books will one day be in a museum about Palestine.âYour brother will open one, and these will be there,â he muses to himself.Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope. Since Iâve started publishing articles and essays about Palestine, Iâve had close and distant relatives reach out to me and offer to share pieces from their own collections.They ship me large boxes of books and newspapers, packed up from the recesses of their parentsâ homes. âCan you do something with these?â they ask. My answer is always yes. Iâm realizing that this archiving is not only work I have to do, but something I get to do.In the middle of the night, my father sends me subjectless emails with links to articles or scanned copies of magazines about Palestine that heâs been waiting to show to someone, anyone, who will care. I save each email in a folder in my Gmail account labeled âPalestineââa digital version of the box in my bedroom, an archive that I return to whenever I feel despair.âItâs all here,â my father writes. âWe existed. We were there.â
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Florida Is Preparing for Midnight
A new abortion ban has providers there scramblingâand clinics in other states preparing for a crush of new patients.
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The Atlantic Announces Democracy at a Crossroads, a Multi-state College Tour on the Crucial Issues in This Election
Today The Atlantic announces Democracy at a Crossroads, a three-stop tour bringing Atlantic writers to colleges and universities across the country to discuss crucial issues shaping the 2024 election cycle. The first event is Thursday, May 2, at 5:30 p.m. PT at the University of Nevada, Reno with Atlantic staff writers Elaina Plott Calabro, Adam Harris, and Ron Brownstein and contributing writer Evan Smith. During the event, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar will also be interviewed by Jon Ralston, founder of The Nevada Independent, about the importance of free and fair elections. The event in Reno is free, and attendees can RSVP here.During Democracy at a Crossroads, Atlantic journalists will discuss topics that are central to democracy and this election, including: navigating the rise of political polarization, the future of immigration reform, the high stakes for higher education, the gun-control crisis, the social impact of this election, the next era of climate-change reform, and the role of journalism and technology. The tour will continue September 12 in Atlanta at Morehouse College, and will be open to all students in the Atlanta University Center Consortium; and at Michigan State University in October.The Atlantic has made covering persistent threats to democracy a top editorial priority, including the magazineâs recent January/February 2024 issue, If Trump Wins, with essays by 24 Atlantic writersââexperts in foreign and domestic policy, economics, and national securityââon the consequences if Donald Trump were to be elected again. Its writers have reported a number of extensive recent profiles of elected officials and party leaders such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Speaker Mike Johnson, General Mark Milley, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Senator Mitt Romney.As part of efforts to introduce The Atlantic to new audiences and grow readership among students, last summer The Atlantic launched an academic group subscription, which gives entire student bodies and faculty digital access to The Atlanticâs journalism and 167-year archive. Half a million students and educators can now access The Atlantic through this subscription offering.Press contact for inquiries: press@theatlantic.com
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Americaâs Response to Bird Flu Is âOut of Whackâ
The ongoing outbreak of H5N1 avian flu virus looks a lot like a public-health problem that the United States should be well prepared for.Although this version of flu is relatively new to the world, scientists have been tracking H5N1 for almost 30 years. Researchers know the basics of how flu spreads and who tends to be most at risk. They have experience with other flus that have jumped into us from animals. The U.S. also has antivirals and vaccines that should have at least some efficacy against this pathogen. And scientists have had the advantage of watching this particular variant of the virus spread and evolve in an assortment of animalsâincluding, most recently, dairy cattle in the United Statesâwithout it transmitting in earnest among us. âItâs almost like having the opportunity to catch COVID-19 in the fall of 2019,â Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told me.Yet the U.S. is struggling to mount an appropriate response. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the nationâs alertness to infectious disease remains high. But both federal action and public attention are focusing on the wrong aspects of avian flu and other pressing infectious dangers, including outbreaks of measles within U.S. borders and epidemics of mosquito-borne pathogens abroad. To be fair, the United States (much like the rest of the world) was not terribly good at gauging such threats before COVID, but now âwe have had our reactions thrown completely out of whack,â Bill Hanage, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvardâs School of Public Health, told me. Despite all that COVID put us throughâperhaps because of itâour infectious-disease barometer is broken.H5N1 is undoubtedly concerning: No version of this virus has ever before spread this rampantly across this many mammal species, or so thoroughly infiltrated American livestock, Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me. But she and other experts maintain that the likelihood of H5N1 becoming our next pandemic remains quite low. No evidence currently suggests that the virus can spread efficiently between people, and it would still likely have to accumulate several more mutations to do so.Thatâs been a difficult message for the public to internalizeâespecially with the continued detection of fragments of viral genetic material in milk. Every expert I asked maintained that pasteurized dairy productsâwhich undergo a heat-treatment process designed to destroy a wide range of pathogensâare very unlikely to pose imminent infectious threat. Yet the fear that dairy could sicken the nation simply wonât die. âWhen I see people talking about milk, milk, milk, I think maybe weâve lost the plot a little bit,â Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth, told me. Experts are far more worried about still-unanswered questions: âHow did it get into the milk?â Marrazzo said. âWhat does that say about the environment supporting that?âDuring this outbreak, experts have called for better testing and surveillanceâfirst of avian and mammalian wildlife, now of livestock. But federal agencies have been slow to respond. Testing of dairy cows was voluntary until last week. Now groups of lactating dairy cows must be screened for the virus before they move across state lines, but by testing just 30 animals, often out of hundreds. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he would also like to see more testing of other livestock, especially pigs, which have previously served as mixing vessels for flu viruses that eventually jumped into humans. More sampling would give researchers a stronger sense of where the virus has been and how itâs spreading within and between species. And it could help reveal the genomic changes that the virus may be accumulating. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies could also stand to shift from âalmost this paternalistic view of, âWeâll tell you if you need to know,ââ Osterholm said, to greater data transparency. (The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.)Testing and other protections for people who work with cows have been lacking, too. Many farm workers in the U.S. are mobile, uninsured, and undocumented; some of their employers may also fear the practical and financial repercussions of testing workers. All of that means a virus could sicken farm workers without being detectedâwhich is likely already the caseâthen spread to their networks. Regardless of whether this virus sparks a full-blown pandemic, âwe are completely ignoring the public-health threat that is happening right now,â Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. The fumbles of COVIDâs early days should have taught the government how valuable proactive testing, reporting, and data sharing are. Whatâs more, the pandemic could have taught us to prioritize high-risk groups, Sosin told me. Instead, the United States is repeating its mistakes. In response to a request for comment, a CDC spokesperson pointed me to the agencyâs published guidance on how farmworkers can shield themselves with masks and other personal protective equipment, and argued that the small number of people with relevant exposures who are displaying symptoms has been adequately monitored or tested.Other experts worry that the federal government hasnât focused enough on what the U.S. will do if H5N1 does begin to rapidly spread among people. The countryâs experience with major flu outbreaks is an advantage, especially over newer threats such as COVID, Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA and former member of the National Security Council, told me. But she worries that leaders are using that notion âto comfort ourselves in a way that I find to be very delusional.â The national stockpile, for instance, includes only a limited supply of vaccines developed against H5 flu viruses. And they will probably require a two-dose regimen, and may not provide as much protection as some people hope, Borio said. Experience alone cannot solve those challenges. Nor do the nationâs leaders appear to be adequately preparing for the wave of skepticism that any new shots might meet. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)In other ways, experts told me, the U.S. may have overlearned certain COVID lessons. Several researchers imagine that wastewater could again be a useful tool to track viral spread. But, Sosin pointed out, that sort of tracking wonât work as well for a virus that may currently be concentrated in rural areas, where private septic systems are common. Flu viruses, unlike SARS-CoV-2, also tend to be more severe for young children than adults. Should H5N1 start spreading in earnest among humans, closing schools âis probably one of the single most effective interventions that you could do,â Bill Hanage said. Yet many politicians and members of the public are now dead set on never barring kids from classrooms to control an outbreak again.These misalignments arenât limited to H5N1. In recent years, as measles and polio vaccination rates have fallen among children, casesâeven outbreaksâof the two dangerous illnesses have been reappearing in the United States. The measles numbers are now concerning and persistent enough that Nahid Bhadelia worries that the U.S. could lose its elimination status for the disease within the next couple of years, undoing decades of progress. And yet public concern is low, Helen Chu, an immunologist and respiratory-virus expert at the University of Washington, told me. Perhaps even less thought is going toward threats abroadâamong them, the continued surge of dengue in South America and a rash of cholera outbreaks in Africa and southern Asia. âWeâre taking our eye off the ball,â Anthony Fauci, NIAIDâs former director, told me.That lack of interest feels especially disconcerting to public-health experts as public fears ignite over H5N1. âWe donât put nearly enough emphasis on what is it that really kills us and hurts us,â Osterholm told me. If anything, our experience with COVID may have taught people to further fixate on novelty. Even then, concern over newer threats, such as mpox, quickly ebbs if outbreaks become primarily restricted to other nations. Many people brush off measles outbreaks as a problem for the unvaccinated, or dismiss spikes in mpox as an issue mainly for men who have sex with men, Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. And they shrug off just about any epidemic that happens abroad.The intensity of living through the early years of COVID split Americans into two camps: one overly sensitized to infectious threats, and the other overly, perhaps even willfully, numbed. Many people fear that H5N1 will be âthe next big one,â while others tend to roll their eyes, Hanage told me. Either way, public trust in health authorities has degraded. Now, âno matter what happens, you could be accused of not sounding the alarm, or saying, âOh my God, here we go again,ââ Jeanne Marrazzo told me. As long as infectious threats to humanity are growing, however, recalibrating our sense of infectious danger is imperative to keeping those perils in check. If a broken barometer fails to detect a storm and no one prepares for the impact, the damage might be greater, but the storm itself will still resolve as it otherwise would. But if the systems that warn us about infectious threats are on the fritz, our neglect may cause the problem to grow.
theatlantic.com
How Daniel Radcliffe Outran Harry Potter
Photographs by Lila BarthOn August 23, 2000, after an extensive search and a months-long rumble of media speculation, a press conference was held in London. There, the actor whoâd been chosen to play Harry Potter in the first movie adaptation of J. K. Rowlingâs best-selling novels was unveiled, alongside the filmâs other two child leads. According to the on-screen caption in the BBCâs coverage of the event, this 11-year-oldâs name was âDaniel Radford.âUntil the previous year, Daniel Radcliffe, as he was actually known, hadnât had any acting experience whatsoever, aside from briefly playing a monkey in a school play when he was about 6. When heâd auditioned for a British TV adaptation of David Copperfield, it was less out of great hope or ambition than because heâd been having a rough time at school and his parents (his father was a literary agent; his mother, a casting agent) thought that the experience of auditioning might boost his confidence. For an hour or two, the idea went, heâd get to see a world that none of his classmates had seen. Instead, he found himself cast as the young Copperfield, acting opposite Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. And now this.At the press conference, wearing the round glasses that his character needed but he did not, Radcliffe explained with evident nerves how he had cried when heâd heard the news. (He had been in the bath at the time.) The answer that seemed to charm everyone was when he allowed, hesitantly, âI think Iâm a tiny, tiny bit like Harry because Iâd like to have an owl.â Asked how he felt about becoming famous, he replied, âItâll be cool.âIf those words channeled the innocence of youth, a boy blessedly oblivious to all that would soon be projected upon him, such obliviousness wouldnât last very long. Less than a day, in fact. The following morning, an article appeared in the Daily Mailâ: âHarry Potter Beware!â Its notional author was Jack Wild, a former child star who had played the teenage lead in the 1968 movie-musical Oliver before his life and career were derailed by alcoholism and financial mishaps. The articleâs closing lines, addressed to Radcliffe, were: âAnd, above all, enjoy fame and fortune while they last, for they can be fickle. I know, I learned the hard way.âThere would be plenty more like this. Radcliffeâs other professional role, between David Copperfield and the first Harry Potter film, had been a smallish part in a John Boorman movie, The Tailor of Panama. When Boorman was asked about what the young actor was now doing, his answer was at best unguarded. âI think itâs a terrible fate for a ten-year-old child,â he said. âHeâs a very nice kid, Iâm very fond of him ⊠I was astonished that he was going to spend the next four years or so doing Harry Potter, itâs really saying farewell to your childhood isnât it?â Boormanâs conclusion: âHeâs always going to be Harry Potter, I mean what a prospect.ââI remember being a little upset about that,â Radcliffe says now. âJust the phrase terrible fate âŠâ As his time playing Harry Potter progressedâas one film turned into two, then ultimately eight, and as four years stretched into 10âRadcliffe became accustomed to endless iterations of this narrative. âThere was a constant kind of drumbeat,â he recalls, âof âAre you all going to be screwed up by this?âââFrom early on, Radcliffe was aware of two competing drumbeatsâtwo inevitable destinies, usually somehow intertwined, that were being predicted for him: âââYouâre going to be fucked upâ and âYouâre not going to have a career.âââ He decided that he would do everything he possibly could to defy both.âLooking back,â Radcliffe saysâand he is offering these words at the age of 34, backstage at the Broadway theater where he is co-starring in the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll AlongââIâm quite impressed with 13-, 14-year-old meâs reaction to those things. To really, actually use them. To internally be going: Fuck you, Iâm going to prove that wrong.âWhen success comes so young, even the person at its center can wonder exactly what it is that they have for all this to happen. Radcliffe says heâs fascinated that, among the first four roles he played, three of them are orphans: David Copperfield, Harry Potter, and a boy called Maps, who lives in an orphanage in a 2007 Australian coming-of-age story called December Boys. Even now, Radcliffe is not sure why this might have been. âIâve had, in many ways, the most stable home life a person can imagine,â he says. His actual parents are âan incredibly loving couple.â But no matterâwhen people looked at him through a camera lens, they apparently saw something. Something he wasnât aware was there.Chris Columbus is the director who cast Radcliffe as Harry Potter. âI remember having long discussions with Jo Rowling,â Columbus told me, âand one of the words that continuously came up about who Harry should be was haunted. Harry had to have a haunted quality.â Columbus described how, quite by chance, he turned on the TV in his hotel room at the end of a long dayâs preproduction and stumbled across David Copperfield. He saw Radcliffe for the first time, and there it was: âthat haunted quality on-screen.â Columbus wanted to meet him.Radcliffe knows that this is the story. He says that he always had a good imagination, and that, as an only child, he spent plenty of time within it. âBut the idea of me having this sort of haunted quality or this darkness inside, I definitely donât think I did when I was a kid,â he says. Heâs grateful, of course, that this is what people perceived, but he hypothesizes that it might all have been an auspicious quirk of biology. âIâve always said, âIâve just got big eyes,âââ he tells me. âI think thatâs a ton of the reason for my success.âColumbus insists otherwise. He points out that he saw 800 to 1,000 boys, in person or on video. After watching Radcliffeâs screen testââThis was a complex kid, even back thenââColumbus, Rowling, and the producer David Heyman believed theyâd finally found the actor they needed. Problem was, the studio disagreed. âThey were pushing for this other kid who I felt just was a typical sort of Hollywood kid, even though he was from the U.K.,â Columbus said. âAnd his acting wasnât naturalistic or believable. We just fought and fought for Dan.â When I mentioned Radcliffeâs theory about his eyes, Columbus dismissed it out of hand. âIronically, the kid with the bigger eyes was the one the studio was fighting for at the time,â he said. âThis kid had big eyes, but he had absolutely zero complexity.â Left: Radcliffe as a child. Right: Radcliffe and the director Chris Columbus, who cast him as Harry Potter, in 2000. (Courtesy of Marcia Gresham; Hugo Philpott / AFP / Getty) Radcliffeâs original screen test is now online, and it makes for fascinating viewing. First he banters convincingly with Columbus, who is off camera, about dragon eggs, and then they transition to a much darker, heavier scene, in which Radcliffe must say things like âIf you heard your mum screaming like that, just about to be killed, you wouldnât forget in a hurry.â He manages all of it with a remarkable, unshowy, charming intensity. Radcliffe himself watched the audition for the first time a couple of years back, and even he noticed something in it. âI cringe whenever I watch any of my early acting,â he says. âBut the thing I did see when I watched that was, Oh, Iâm very good at being still.âIn the early days of his new Harry Potter life, Radcliffe was largely sequestered from the public. The films would shoot through most of the year, and even before falling in love with acting, Radcliffe fell in love with being on a film set, and with the people he was surrounded by, particularly the crew. Heâs often noted that one thing heâs grateful for, which he thinks may be specific to British film culture, is that, however central the young actorsâ roles may have been, they were treated as kids, rather than as child stars.David Holmes, who was Radcliffeâs stunt double for nine years, became one of his closest friends and the accessory to all kinds of tomfoolery. âJust two kids having fun,â Holmes, who is five years older than Radcliffe, told me. âIâd let him do all the things an insurance company wouldnât let him do: jumping on trampolines, swinging around swords, jumping off of the top of a Portakabin roof onto a crash mat.âRadcliffe lived at home with his parents and attended school as much as he could, though more and more of his education came from tutors between breaks in filming. Only intermittently would he find himself face-to-face with what all of this was coming to mean in the outside world, and how strange and uncomfortable it could be.âI remember really well the physical feeling of the first filmâs premiere,â he says. âYou can tell a kid as much as you like, âThereâs going to be tons of people there,â and they did tell us, but getting out and feeling it, and feeling that noise hit you, and the kind of knowledge of, Oh, something is expected of me now. I remember looking at my hands and they were very still, but inside my body, it was like I could feel my whole body vibrating. I donât know if youâve ever hyperventilated, but itâs a similar feeling. When youâre just about to pass out, but donât.âThe apogee of this sensation came when he flew to Japan in December 2002, to promote the second film. âI think there was something with privacy laws at that point,â he says, âwhere you could just phone up the airline and say, âIs Daniel Radcliffe on this flight?â And theyâd say yes.â Before he and his parents got off the plane, a flight attendant let them know that 100 security people were ready at the airport. That seemed a bit much. It wasnât. âIt was 100 security barely managing to hold back 5,000 people,â he says. Fans, and press too. âI remember there was a woman cleaning the floor, and she just got mowed down by this pack of photographers and journalists,â he says. Radcliffe mentions that he has long wanted to find footage of this melee. I wonder aloud how much the TV cameras would have been filming the surrounding chaos, and how much just him. âAt a certain point,â he responds, âme and the chaos became inseparable.âTwo snapshots from that day are stuck in Radcliffeâs mind. First, the moment, going through the crowd, when a toggle of his motherâs duffle coat got caught on the button loop of another womanâs jacket. âAnd they just stood there,â he says, âhaving to free themselves from one another for a second.â Next, when they finally got in the car, the way his parents reacted: how they started laughing and said, âWasnât that crazy?â Looking back, he thinks that it was how his parents, and the other adults around him, set a tone at times like thatââThat was weird; letâs go to the hotelââthat helped make what might have been overwhelming into something that, for all its otherworldly strangeness, he could deal with.It was around the third Harry Potter film when Radcliffe realized that acting was what he wanted to do as a career. With that came more self-consciousness about his performances, and even though the films became more and more successful (cumulatively they would gross close to $8 billion), his satisfaction did not always grow in proportion.One period that stands out to him in particular was around the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He had some ideas about how his character might be shut down from the trauma heâd sufferedânear the end of the fifth film, Harry witnesses the death of his godfather, Sirius Black, the closest figure in his life to a parentâbut looking back, Radcliffe finds that what he did as a result is stiff and wooden. This was compounded by standard teenage awkwardness: âI didnât want my face to do anything weird. Like, I used to hate smiling on camera, because I hated my smile.âAt the end of January 2009, just before the seventh film was to begin shooting, his real world was shaken in a most brutal way. His stunt double, Holmes, and another friend had just visited Radcliffe in New York. Upon his return to England, Holmes started prepping for the forthcoming shoot. While rehearsing what is known as a âjerk backâ stunt, in which Harry would be seen flying backwards after being attacked by a giant snake, something went wrong. Holmesâs body, propelled on pulley-rigged wires, rotated unexpectedly in midair, and when he hit a padded vertical wall as intended, he broke his neck. He was paralyzed from the waist down.To begin with, Radcliffe struggled to process what had happened. âEven when you see him in bed in the hospital with all the tubes and stuff coming out of him, looking like he looks, your brain still goes, Well, youâre going to get betterâthey can do anything nowadays.â âItâs coming to the understanding,â he adds, âthat some things cannot be helped.âHe and Holmes remain closeâat one point Radcliffe tells me, âDaveâs story is kind of the biggest thing from Potter that has gone on having an effect in my lifeââand a few years ago, Holmes finally agreed to Radcliffeâs suggestion that his story be told in a documentary. Radcliffe began shooting interviews with Holmes and others. Then he looked at what he had.âI donât know why I thought that I would be able to direct a documentary,â he says. The biggest issue, he says, âwas how shit I was at being the interviewer.â He realized that when it came to speaking with Holmes or anyone else he was close to, âI found asking the really hard questions virtually impossible.â He stepped back, and their filmmaker friend Dan Hartley, whoâd worked as a video operator for the Harry Potter movies, took over. (The powerful result, David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, came out last fall.)When I mentioned to Holmes what Radcliffe told meâabout Radcliffeâs difficulties in discussing the hardest stuffâHolmes at first seemed to agree. But then he corrected himself.âActually, no,â he said. âIn the lockdown, we had a Zoom call once or twice a week. At the time, I was losing neurological function on this armââHolmes indicated his right sideââand my pain levels were going through the roof.â Because of COVID, Holmes said, the usual hospital resources werenât available to him. He realized that Radcliffe âwas one of the only people where I was like, âHow does a quadriplegic without arms or legs kill himself without putting another person in some sort of trauma?â Thatâs a hard conversation to have. Itâs not an easy thing to hear a human being say, but itâs a reality.â Radcliffe was someone he could discuss this with: âLogical, emotionally intelligent enough, and also had enough of a sense of âI get it, Dave.âââ Radcliffe at the Hudson Theatre, in New York (Lila Barth for The Atlantic) âMe and Dave go to very heavy places,â Radcliffe says. âAlso, and thereâs no way of reading this and not some people getting the wrong impression, but also thereâs a huge amount of humor in those conversations where heâs devising essentially some kind of Rube Goldberg machine so that he can still be the person who does it.âRadcliffe offers another example. âI remember one of the funniest voice messages I ever received was from him on safari in Africa, talking about what a brilliant time he was having. And also, how wonderful would it be to die at the horn of a rhinoceros. He went into very graphic detail. So yeah, itâs dark, itâs weird, but these are the conversations you have with friends in really specific situations. Knowing Dave, it forces you to think about a lot of stuff.âWhen Radcliffe emerged from the Harry Potter chrysalis, he did not want to stop working. He knew that some things were immutableââHarry Potter is going to be the first line of my obituaryââbut if that was the context in which his life would now continue, it neednât limit it. âI wanted to try as many different things under my belt,â he says, âknowing that it was going to be the accumulation of all of those things, rather than one thing, that would actually sort of transition me in peopleâs minds.âA key moment he identifies in his evolution was Kill Your Darlings, a movie he made in 2012, the year after the final Harry Potter film was released, in which he plays a young Allen Ginsberg. It was directed by John Krokidas, who gave him an education in ways to think about a script and his performanceâone that Radcliffe, in his former life as a cog in a relentlessly focused franchise, had never had before. âIâd always just been: I learn my lines and I come to set and I follow my instincts.âWhen Krokidas asked him, âWhatâs your process?,â Radcliffe had to explain that he didnât have one. So the director taught him. âIncredibly basic stuff,â Radcliffe says. These were techniques that most actors would consider âActing 101,â but it was all new to him: âIt was just, like, breaking down a script by wants. So rather than thinking, I am going to try and effect this emotion, thinking, What am I trying to do to the other person in the scene?â In the film they made together, Radcliffe portrays the young poet in a persuasively natural way. If this was a product of what he had just learned, the lessons stuck quickly and well.There were also other, more specific ways in which Krokidasâs direction was different from what Radcliffe was used to. During a scene where Ginsberg is picked up in a bar and sleeps with a man for the first timeâjust a passing moment in the movie, although predictably it would later become a disproportionate part of the filmâs public profile in a âHarry Potter has gay sexâ kind of wayâRadcliffe has recalled that Krokidas shouted at one point: âNo! Kiss him! Fucking sex kissing!â As Radcliffe explained in an interview ahead of the filmâs release, âThe things that directors have shouted to me in the past usually involve which way I have to look to see the dragon.âThat film holds additional significance for Radcliffe. In an earlier scene, Ginsberg meets a librarian at Columbiaâthey disappear into the stacks, where she kneels down and fellates him. When Radcliffeâs infant son is older, Radcliffe acknowledges, âheâs going to find that film an awkward watchâ; this scene is from the first few days when Radcliffe was getting to know his future partner, Erin Darke. Krokidas made Radcliffe and Darke do an acting exercise in which they stood âa foot from each other, and made eye contact and said things that we found attractive about each other or said things that we liked about each other. And I was so immediately aware that I was going red because I was like, Oh God, thereâs no way for this girl not to find out that I really like her in this moment.âFor a decade, he and Darke have kept a low profile. They have appeared on red carpets together only a handful of times. âI have learned so much from her about my own boundaries,â he says. âVery occasionally, people will come up to me in the street and be very weird or rude or something like that. And she has given me a sense over the years of: You donât have to just be nice to everyone when theyâre weird with you. Sheâs given me some sense of my own autonomy, I guess.âI mention to him that I heard his and Darkeâs rare joint appearance in 2021 on Love to See It With Emma and Claire, a podcast about reality dating shows. The couple keenly engage in a 100-minute discussion of the most recent Bachelor in Paradise episodes.Radcliffe has a long-held affection for various strands of reality TV. He proceeds to explain the strange impromptu role he has occasionally played on the edges of that world. His friend Emma Gray, who co-hosts the podcast, has an annual Christmas party, where Radcliffe sometimes runs into cast members from the Bachelor universe: âI always find them fascinating to talk to. I say I always want to do fame counseling with them, because Iâm just like, âIâve had a lot of practice at this nowâyou guys have just been shot out of a fucking cannon.ââ He repeatedly finds himself wanting to ask them, âHow are you? Are you okay?âBackstage at New Yorkâs Hudson Theatre, Radcliffe leads me into his small dressing room just up a metal gangway, stage left. As he does so, he politely offers a preemptive apology. âI might conduct a little of this interview with my trousers around my ankles, Iâm afraid,â he says.For the past four months, Radcliffe has been playing one of the three leads in Merrily We Roll Along, the famous Stephen Sondheim flop that is belatedly enjoying its first successful Broadway run. (In April, the role will earn him his first Tony nomination.) As he takes a seat, he lets his trousers fall. This afternoon, when he stood up to leave the home he shares with Darke and their son, he realized that heâd somehow tweaked his knee. Thatâs why he is now in his underwear, pressing an ice pack to it. Radcliffe at New Yorkâs Hudson Theatre (Lila Barth for The Atlantic) Radcliffe has been doing theater for half his life now, and onstage was where he made his first bold break from expectations. When he was 17, between the release of the fourth and fifth Harry Potter movies, it was announced that he would be appearing in Londonâs West End as the lead in a revival of the 1970s play Equus, playing a disturbed teenager with a predilection for mutilating horses by blinding themâa role that, among its many other tests, required him to be fully naked onstage for several minutes.He wasnât trying to shock; he was just trying to stretch the boundaries of who he might become. Heâd been taking voice lessons for 18 months in preparation for the challenge of appearing onstage. When the reviews came in, their surprise showed. âDaniel Radcliffe brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected range and depth,â The Daily Telegraph assessed.Since then, other theater roles have followed, including in Martin McDonaghâs The Cripple of Inishmaan and Samuel Beckettâs Endgame, along with 10 months as the lead in a Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. And now Merrily, Sondheimâs told-backwards tale of three friends.For Radcliffe, the role seems a natural fit. Although interviews he gave in his Harry Potter years tended to be punctuated with overexuberant declarations about â70s punk albums and his latest indie-rock discoveries, another world of song has always run through him. His parents, who met doing musical theater, used to play Sondheim productions while they were driving. It took Radcliffe years to understand that not all childhoods were like his in this respect. âI thought everyone listened to show tunes in the car,â he recently said. âI thought that was road-trip music.âAs he performs, you can see two kinds of delightâin sinking into the unshowy togetherness of an ensemble, and, now and again, in stepping forward and commanding all eyes in the theater to follow his every move and breath.Two days a week, Radcliffe has both a matinee and an evening show. One afternoon, following a matinee, I find him in his dressing room chewing some beef jerky. He says that somebody asked him the other day what he does between shows: âI said, âI eat jerky and I sleep.âââEven outside the demands of a two-show day, his diet is somewhat unconventional. He mostly doesnât eat during the day and has one huge meal at night. âI find thereâs, like, a switch in my brain that if I start doing something, I canât turn it off.â If he starts eating anything, he says, heâll keep craving more. He is, he acknowledges, prone to such habitual behaviors. âIâve got a very addictive personality.âEmerging from his teens, Radcliffe did quietly skate a little too close to one part of the prophesized tragic-child-star narrative heâd been hell-bent on avoiding. He started to drink, because it was something he thought he should become good at. âI had a really romanticized idea of all these old actors who were always on the piss, and there were all these stories about them and they were really funny,â he explains. Committed intoxication was also part of the British-movie-set world he loved. âI was like, Iâve got to be able to keep up with all these hardened film crews,â he says.He took to it well enough, but thatâs not to say he was good at it. He would black out all the time. âThereâs so much dread that comes with that,â he says, âbecause life is a constant sense of What have I done? Who am I about to hear from? Iâd say itâs in the last few years that Iâve stopped getting some sense of internal panic whenever my phone rings.âI ask him about something that had belatedly struck me: The sixth Harry Potter movie, the one in which heâd said he doesnât like his acting, was filmed around this period. (It was released when he was 19.) Is that a coincidence? Not entirely, he says. âI canât watch that film without being like, to myself, I look a bit, like, dead behind the eyes,â he says. âAnd Iâm sure thatâs a consequence of drinking.âAfter a time, he realized that he needed to stop. Partly, he didnât like the sense that he was fulfilling a trope expected of himââI was like, Oh God, Iâve become a real clichĂ© of something hereââbut mostly he wanted âto stop getting in trouble and feeling fear.âHe also received some stern encouragement. âAs a friend, I realized that he wasnât really taking care of himself,â David Holmes told me. âOne day when he came and visited the hospital, he just looked tiredâbags under his eyes, skin wasnât too good. And Iâm lying there in a bed with a neck brace on with a feeding tube up my nose. Of course, Harry Potterâs on the ward, so weâve got loads of attention, but we put the bed curtain around and I just said to him, âLook, mate, youâve got to look after yourself with this. Iâm not lying here the way I am watching you piss this away. So please know, if I could get up right now and give you a hiding, I fucking would.âââ Radcliffe with Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, his co-stars in Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway, 2023 (Matthew Murphy) Somehow, Radcliffeâs drinking had slipped under the radar of the British press, but after he first cleaned upâhe later wobbled for a while, though heâs now been sober for more than a decadeâhe decided to share in an interview a little of what had been going on. Part of his rationale was inoculationââsomething might come out about it anyway, so I wanted to try and get ahead of thatââbut he also had a notion that closing the gap between reality and the perception of his life âwould make me happier or feel less ill at ease in the world.â That didnât work as heâd hoped. âI learned that the more information you give,â he says, âit just raises more questions for people.â In the celebrity universe, the truth doesnât always set you free. Sometimes it just feeds a relentless hunger for even more truth.Radcliffe moves through many of our conversations like a whirlwindââI know I talk at a million miles an hour and go off on weird tangents or whatever,â heâll note while doing exactly thatâbut on one particular subject, everything slows down. There are long pauses and pained sighs. He sees the sense in the questions, but it feels as though, deep down, he has little faith in the worth of answering them.First, some context. Radcliffe has long been a public advocate for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide-prevention hotline and crisis-intervention resource he was introduced to back in 2009, while performing in Equus. He explains that, having grown up in his parentsâ world, surrounded by their gay friends, it was baffling to discover the wider worldâs prejudice; here, he saw a specific opportunity to help. âIf there was any value in a famous straight young actor who was from this film series that could be useful in the fight against people killing themselves, then I was just very keen to be a part of that,â he says. Along the way, he became aware of a particular symbiosis that he hadnât anticipated: âI did have a realization of a connection to Harry Potter and this stuff. A lot of people found some solace in those books and films who were dealing with feeling closeted or rejected by their family or living with a secret.âThen, in June 2020, J. K. Rowling wrote a series of tweets that set off a media hullabaloo. She began by sarcastically commenting on an article that used the term people who menstruate, before doubling down in ways that many criticized as anti-trans.A few days later, Radcliffe issued a personal statement through the Trevor Project. âI realize that certain press outlets will probably want to paint this as in-fighting between J. K. Rowling and myself, but that is really not what this is about, nor is it whatâs important right now,â he began, before moving on to say: âTransgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.âHe expressed hope that readersâ experiences with the Harry Potter books neednât be tarnished by this, and argued that what people may have found within those booksâfor instance, âif they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groupsââremains between readers and the books, âand it is sacred.ââIâd worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I donât know, immense cowardice to me to not say something,â Radcliffe says when I raise this subject. âI wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments,â he tells me. âAnd to say that if those are Joâs views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the Potter franchise.âSince those June 2020 tweets, Rowling has proclaimed, again and again, her belief in the importance of biological sex, and that the trans-rights movement seeks to undermine women as a protected class. Radcliffe says he had no direct contact with Rowling throughout any of this. âIt makes me really sad, ultimately,â he says, âbecause I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.âDuring the blowback, he was often thrown in together with his Harry Potter co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, who both also expressed their support for the trans community in response to Rowlingâs comments. In the British press particularly, he says, âThereâs a version of âAre these three kids ungrateful brats?â that people have always wanted to write, and they were finally able to. So, good for them, I guess.â Never mind that he found the premise simply wrongheaded. âJo, obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesnât mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.âRadcliffe offered these carefully weighted reflections in the early months of this year, before Rowling (who declined to comment for this article) newly personalized their disagreements. In the second week of April, Rowling wrote a series of posts on X in response to the publication of a British-government-funded report that notes, as just one of a wide-ranging series of findings, that âfor the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best wayâ to help young people âpresenting with gender incongruence or distressâ; Rowling touted this as vindication of her views. When one of her supporters replied on X that they were âjust waiting for Dan and Emma to give you a very public apology,â further suggesting that Radcliffe and Watson would be safe in the knowledge that Rowling would forgive them, she leaped in: âNot safe, Iâm afraid,â she wrote, and characterized them as âcelebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding womenâs hard-won rights.â In response, Radcliffe told me: âI will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.âRadcliffe has long had a passion for word-crammed, tongue-twisting songs. Sometimes these have been rap songsâhe says that he has mastered four or five Eminem songs (âwhen âRap Godâ came out I was like, This is my Everestââ), and in 2014, he improbably appeared on Jimmy Fallonâs Tonight Show to perform Blackaliciousâs âAlphabet Aerobicsâ with the Roots. But at a young age, through his parentsâ influence, he also picked up a sustained, much less fashionable passion for the works of Tom Lehrer. In 2010, on the British talk show The Graham Norton Show, sitting on a sofa next to Colin Farrell and Rihanna, Radcliffe performed Lehrerâs âThe Elements,â in which the periodic table is rhythmically recited at great speed, for no obvious reason other than that he wanted to, and could.A while afterward, a fellow Lehrer aficionado came across the clip on YouTube. âI just thought at the time that was the nerdiest possible thing a person could do,â Al Yankovic told me. âThatâs such an alpha-nerd thing to do. I thought we would get along very well.â Later, when Yankovic was looking for someone to play him in the 2022 movie Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, his thoughts returned to Radcliffe. âWe needed to cast somebody that really understood comedy and appreciated comedy, but also who could pull off the part without winking. We wanted somebody that would treat this like it was a very serious Oscar-bait drama.â Radcliffe as âWeird Alâ Yankovic in Weird, 2022 (The Roku Channel / Everett Collection) That is one part of the backstory to Weird, Radcliffeâs most recent movie, which masquerades as a Yankovic biopic but is actually a savagely pinpoint parody of every other musical biopic, particularly in the ways it unscrupulously and ludicrously reshapes history into a series of vainglorious fables about our hero. It was also an unlikely triumph, and Radcliffe, who committed to a sincerity unruffled by all that surrounds it, was nominated for an Emmy.Although Radcliffe makes clear that, postâHarry Potter, heâs not averse to big, mass-market moviesâhe recently played the villain in the action-adventure movie The Lost City, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, which made nearly $200 millionâhis filmography is scattered with fascinatingly eclectic choices.Some of them are the kind of challenges you might expect an ambitious actor to take onâan FBI agent as an undercover white supremacist (Imperium), a South African political prisoner (Escape From Pretoria)âand some of them are ⊠stranger. In Horns, he plays a man with a murdered girlfriend who grows real horns. In Guns Akimbo, he wakes up to find that he has had guns surgically attached to both hands. By now, word has clearly spread that if you have a good role of compelling oddity, Daniel Radcliffe might consider it.The finest example of this is the 2016 movie Swiss Army Man, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, better known as the Daniels. When the Daniels approached Radcliffe, long before the success of their 2022 movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, they were two pop-music-video makers who had never done a full-length film, and the movie they proposed was a surreal, absurdist story about a suicidally lonely man who befriends a flatulent corpse. They wanted Radcliffe to play the corpse.Scheinert took me through the thought process that led to their approach: âWe wanted someone who could sing, because itâs a little bit of a musical; someone with a weird sense of humor, because itâs a weird movie; and someone who didnât feel like they needed to look beautiful all the time. Weirdly, thereâs a lot of actors who are concerned with their image.âMuch later, when Radcliffe was promoting the filmâa movie he would himself refer to, perhaps both in acknowledgment and parody of some peopleâs reactions, as âthe Daniel Radcliffe farting boner corpse movieââhe would be routinely asked how on earth the Daniels had persuaded him to get involved. But that was never an issue. From the moment he turned the scriptâs first few pagesâin which Hank, played by Paul Dano, is distracted from killing himself by the sight of a corpse washing up onto his desert island, expelling air from its rear, and soon is riding the corpse across the ocean like a Jet Ski, propelled by the corpseâs fartsâhe was in. (The âbonerâ part, by the way, comes later, when Hank learns that the corpseâs erections function as a compass.)For a movie with such a high-wire premise, Swiss Army Man does an impressive job of finding, within its absurdities and grotesqueness, something more. The film plays out in a zone somewhere between reality and the hallucinations of broken, lonely people with good hearts. âIâve realized over the years,â Radcliffe says, âthat if thereâs a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then thatâs the stuff I really love doing.â Anything, he tells me, âthat says something kind of lovely about human beings in spite of ourselves, in spite of how bad the world is.â Left: Radcliffe and Paul Dano in Swiss Army Man, 2016. Right: Radcliffe in The Lost City, 2022. (A24 / Everett Collection; Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection) Radcliffe recognizes that, in making career decisions, he now faces an unusual predicament. From the Harry Potter films, he has banked more money than most actors will ever see in their lifetime, and there are no signs that he has been frittering it away.âIâm in a weird position where I donât have to work,â he tells me. âNot to sound like an asshole about itâIâm sure people reading this will be like, âFor fuckâs sake.âââ His point is just that itâs difficult to explain how he decides what he does and doesnât do without acknowledging that one of the usual impetuses is absent. âI go to work,â he says, âbecause I love what I do.ââI think heâs one of those special cases where he started as a child and it actually is what he wanted to do and itâs how heâs wanted to spend his life,â Jonathan Groff, his Merrily co-star, told me.Merrily We Roll Along runs until July. After that, Radcliffe initially tells me, he is looking forward to appearing alongside Ethan Hawke in a film called Batso, about a true-life mountain-climbing feat in Yosemite in the 1970s: âAny acting job where thereâs some physical thing that goes alongside it, I tend to really enjoy, just because I think it takes away self-consciousness.âBut then in April, several weeks after Batso is publicly announced, the project is put on hold. Radcliffe seems to take this, too, in his stride. Heâd been planning a long break anyway, and now the chance will come sooner. âWeâre just going to be a family for a bit,â he says, âand Iâm very, very excited about that, to be honest.âWhen the Potter movies ended, Radcliffe says, âI got to feeling like people were watching to see if we just flamed out or actually managed to go on to do something. And I didnât know the answer at that moment, and not knowing the answer to that question made me feel like a bit of a fraud, I guess. I think I just carried that all around with me in a way that was just very present in my day-to-day life and thinking. In a way that itâs thankfully not as much now.âThis article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline âAfter Potter.â
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A Uniquely French Approach to Environmentalism
On a Wednesday morning last December, Bruno Landier slung his gun and handcuffs around his waist and stepped into the mouth of a cave. Inside the sprawling network of limestone cavities, which sit in a cliffside that towers above the tiny town of MarbouĂ©, in north-central France, Landier crouched under hanging vines. He stepped over rusted pipes, remnants from when the caves housed a mushroom farm. He picked his way through gravel and mud as he scanned the shadowy ecru walls with his flashlight, taking care not to miss any signs.Landier was not gathering evidence for a murder case or tailing a criminal on the run. He was searching for batsâand anything that might disturb their winter slumber. âAha,â Landier whispered as his flashlight illuminated a jumble of amber-colored beer bottles strewn across the floor. Someone had been there, threatening to awaken the hundreds of bats hibernating within.Landier is an inspector in the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), an entity that was given sweeping powers to enforce environmental laws when it was founded, in 2020. Its nationwide police force, the only one of its kind in Europe, has 3,000 agents charged with protecting French species in order to revive declining biodiversity in the country and its territories. Damaging the habitat of protected animals such as batsâmuch less killing a protected animalâis a misdemeanor that can carry a penalty of 150,000 euros and three years in prison. Itâs a uniquely draconian, uniquely French approach to environmentalism.The environmental police watch over all of Franceâs protected species, including hedgehogs, squirrels, black salamanders, lynxes, and venomous asp vipers. Bats are a frequent charge: Of the 54 protected mammal species on French soil, 34 are bats. The MarbouĂ© caves patrolled by Landier are home to approximately 12 different species.[Read: How long should a species stay on life support?]When Landier visits each morning, he sometimes must crouch to avoid walking face-first into clusters of sleeping notch-eared bats, which he can identify by their coffin-shaped back and âbadly combedâ off-white belly. They hibernate in groups of five, 10, or even 50, dangling from the ceiling like so many living umbrellas for as long as seven months each year. If roused before springâby a loud conversation or even prolonged heat from a flashlightâthe bats will flee toward almost-certain death in the cold temperatures outside the cave.Bats, of course, arenât the only nocturnal creatures attracted to caves. Landier has spent more than 20 years patrolling this site, beginning when he was a hunting warden for the French government. In that time, he has encountered ravers, drug traffickers, squatters, geocachers, looters, local teens looking for a place to party. When he comes across evidence such as the beer bottles, heâll sometimes return on the weekend to stake out the entrance. First offenders might receive a verbal warning, but Landier told me heâs ready to pursue legal action if necessary. (So far, he hasnât had to.) âIâm very nice. But I wonât be taken for a fool,â he said. In the neighboring department of Cher, several people were convicted of using bats as target practice for paintball, Landier told me. A fine of an undisclosed amount was levied against the culprits. (France prevents details of petty crimes from being released to the public.)[From the June 1958 issue: Is France being Americanized?]Across France, many of the caverns and architecture that bats call home are themselves cherished or protected. Landier told me that relics found in his caves date back to the Gallo-Roman period, nearly 2,000 years ago; on the ceiling, his flashlight caught the glitter of what he said were fossils and sea urchins from the Ice Age. The floor is crisscrossed with long wires trailed by past explorers so they could find their way back out.In nearby ChĂąteaudun castle, built in the 15th century, several dozen bats live in the basement and behind the tapestries. At Chartres Cathedral, to the north, a colony of pipistrelle bats dwells inside the rafters of a medieval wooden gate. Bats flock to the abbey on Mont Saint-Michel, in Normandy, and to historic chĂąteaus such as Chambord, in the Loire Valley, and Kerjean, in Brittany. In Parisâs PĂšre Lachaise Cemetery, they chase insects from the graves of MoliĂšre, Ădith Piaf, and Colette.France is fiercely protective of its landmarks, and that sense of patrimoine extends to less tangible treasures too. For more than a century, French law has prohibited any sparkling-wine producer worldwide to call its product âchampagneâ unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. As part of the French naturalization process, I had to learn to match cheeses to their region (Brie to Meaux, Camembert to Normandy). Their craftsmanship, too, is included in the cultural imagination: In 2019, the French government asked UNESCO to recognize the work of Parisâs zinc roofers as part of world heritage (the jury is still out).[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Acting French]In recent years, even animals have begun to be incorporated into this notion of cultural heritage. When two neighbors ended up in court in 2019 over the early-morning cries of a roosterâembraced for centuries as Franceâs national animalâthe judge ruled in favor of Maurice the rooster. Inspired by Maurice, France then passed a law protecting the âsensory heritage of the countryside.â In the immediate aftermath of the Notre-Dame fire, a beekeeper was allowed access to care for the bees that have been living on the rooftop for years. The Ministry of Culture insists on provisions for biodiversity on all work done on cultural monuments.Bats, despite receiving centuries of bad press, are a fitting mascot for biological patrimony. They are such ferocious insectivoresâa single bat can eat thousands of bugs a nightâthat farmers in bat-heavy areas can use fewer pesticides on grapes, grains, and other agricultural products. On Enclos de la Croix, a family-owned vineyard in Southern France that has partnered with the OFB, insectivorous bats are the only form of pesticide used. Agathe Frezouls, a co-owner of the vineyard, told me that biodiversity is both a form of âcultural heritageâ and a viable economic model.Not all farmers have the same high regard for biodiversityâor for the OFB. Earlier this year, 100 farmers mounted on tractors dumped manure and hay in front of an OFB office to protest the agencyâs power to inspect farms for environmental compliance. The farmers say that itâs an infringement on their private property and that complying with the strict environmental rules is too costly. Compliance is a major concern for OFB, especially when it comes to bats. If someone destroys a beaver dam, for instance, that crime would be easily visible to the OFB. But bats and their habitats tend to be hidden away, so the police must rely on citizens to report bats on their property or near businesses.Agriculture is part of the reason bats need protection at all. The MarbouĂ© cavesâ walls are dotted with inlays from the 19th century, when candles lit the passageways for the many employees of the mushroom farm. Until the farm closed, in the 1990s, the cave network was home to tractors and treated heavily with pesticides; their sickly sweet smell lingers in the deepest chambers. The pesticides are what drove off or killed most of the bats living here in the 20th century, Landier told meâwhen he first visited this site, in 1998, only about 10 bats remained. Today, itâs home to more than 450.[Read: Biodiversity is lifeâs safety net]After several hours inspecting the cave, Landier and I ambled back toward the entrance, passing under the vines into the harsh winter light. In the next few weeks, the bats will follow our path, leaving the relative safety of the cave to mate.With summer coming on, the slate roofs ubiquitous throughout rural France will soon become gentle furnaces, making attics the perfect place for bats to reproduce. Homeowners reshingling roofs sometimes discover a colony of bats, and Landier is the one to inform them that they must leave their roof unfinished until the end of the breeding season. Most people let the bats be, even when itâs a nuisance. Perhaps theyâre beginning to see them as part of the âsensory heritage of the countrysideâ too.Support for this article was provided by the International Womenâs Media Foundationâs Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism
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Trumpâs Contempt Knows No Bounds
Donald Trump has made his contempt for the court clear throughout his criminal trial in Manhattan, and now a judge has made it official. Juan Merchan ruled today that the former president had violated a gag order designed to protect the integrity of the trial and fined him $9,000.The order is a window into Merchanâs approach to controlling the unruly defendant, who is on trial in his courtroom for falsifying business records. Merchan found that nine violations alleged by prosecutors were clear violations, but deemed a tenth too ambiguous to warrant punishment. He declined to levy the most serious punishment available to himânamely, tossing Trump in jailâbut also had scathing words for Trumpâs excuses for violating the order. Merchan used his ruling to defend his gag order as narrow and careful, but also warned that potential witnesses (looking at you, Michael Cohen) should not use the order âas a sword instead of a shield.âMerchan is the third judge in recent months to reckon with the challenge of Trump, a defendant who not only is furious that heâs being called to account for his actions and is openly disdainful of the rule of law, but also sees political advantage in attempting to provoke sanctions on himself. Give Trump too much latitude and he undermines the standing of the criminal-justice system; act too forcefully and it could reward his worst behavior.[Read: Is Trump daring a judge to jail him?]Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who handled civil suits brought by E. Jean Carroll, scolded Trump for his behavior from the bench but went no further. Justice Arthur Engoron, who oversaw a civil fraud case, repeatedly fined Trump and chided him, but also allowed him to hector the court in closing arguments. Merchan, like them, seems to be trying to control Trump without being drawn into hand-to-hand combat.Trump has tested the bounds of Merchanâs gag order from the start. Ahead of the hearing last Wednesday to discuss the alleged violations, Trump sent histrionic emails to supporters. âALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE IN 24 HOURS!â he wrote. âFriend, in 24 hours, the hearing on my GAG ORDER will begin. I COULD BE THROWN IN JAIL AT THAT VERY MOMENT!â In another, he wrote, âMY FAREWELL MESSAGEâI HOPE THIS ISNâT GOODBYE!â During the hearing, prosecutors specifically said they were not seeking jail time at this point and accused Trump of âanglingâ for it.Merchan today lamented that the law permits him to fine a defendant only $1,000 per violation, which, he wrote, âunfortunately will not achieve the desired result in those instances where the contemnor can easily afford such a fine.â He also warned that if Trump continued to violate the order, the court âwill impose an incarceratory punishment.â[David A. Graham: âControl your clientâ]Perhaps more interesting than the money is Merchanâs analysis. Trumpâs lawyers raised a couple of defenses during last weekâs contempt hearing. First, they argued that several of the instances cited by prosecutors were simply reposting other content on Truth Social. Second, they argued that Trump had to be allowed some leeway to engage in political speech.Merchan made clear at the time that he had little patience for these claims. When the defense attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about âtwo systems of justice,â Merchan sharply objected: âThereâs two systems of justice in this courtroom? Thatâs what youâre saying?â At another moment, he warned Blanche, âYouâre losing all credibility with the court.âWith some room to elaborate in his ruling, Merchan found that contra the old Twitter saw, retweets do equal endorsements. âThis Court finds that a repost, whether with or without commentary by the Defendant, is in fact a statement of the Defendant,â he wrote. Although he allowed that reposts might not always be deemed a statement of the poster, Merchan added, âIt is counterintuitive and indeed absurd, to read the Expanded Order to not proscribe statements that Defendant intentionally selected and published to maximize exposure.â[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]As for the argument that Trump should be permitted political statements, Merchan wrote that âto allow such attacks upon protected witnesses with blanket assertions that they are all responses to âpolitical attacksâ would be an exception that swallowed the rule.â But he defended his gag order as carefully written to deal with competing interests and took an opportunity to rebut charges of political bias against himself. He had ânarrowly tailoredâ the order because âit is critically important that Defendantâs legitimate free speech rights not be curtailed,â he wrote, âand that he be able to respond and defend himself against political attacks.âTrump has complained that Cohen, his former fixer and the expected star witness in this trial, can attack him without consequence. Merchan appears to be sympathetic to that complaint, saying that the goal is to protect witnesses from attacks but not to enable them.Already, a second hearing on further allegations of contempt is scheduled for tomorrow in court. And as the judge noted, the paltry fines involved here are unlikely to deter Trump. Merchan clearly wants to avoid a long and intense fight with Trump, but the former president may give him no choice.
theatlantic.com
Are White Women Better Now?
We had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called âThe Toxic Trends of Whiteness,â hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity.An older white woman whom Iâll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldnât be white anymore. This provided us with a major learning moment. One participant began by amping herself up, intoning the concepts weâd been taught over the past two days: âGrounding, rooting, removing Bubble Wrap.â Then she got into it. âWhat I heard you say about wanting to come back as a dark-skinned person in your next life was racist, because as white people we donât have the luxury of trying on aspects of people of color.ââNotice how challenging that was,â our facilitator, Carlin Quinn, said. âThatâs what getting your reps in looks like.âAnother woman went next, explaining that Stacy seemed to see people of color as better or more desirable, that her statement was âan othering.â Quinn prompted her to sum it up in one sentence: âWhen you said that you wish you would come back in your next life as a dark-skinned person, I experienced that as racist because âŠââThat was racist because it exoticized Black people.ââGreat,â Quinn said. She pushed for more from everyone, and more came. Stacyâs statement was romanticizing. It was extractive. It was erasing. Stacy sat very still. Eventually we finished. Stacy thanked everyone, her voice thin.The seminar would culminate with a talk from Robin DiAngelo, the most prominent anti-racist educator working in America. I had signed up because I was curious about her teachings, which had suddenly become so popular. DiAngeloâs 2018 book, White Fragility: Why Itâs So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, had been a best seller for years by the time I joined the toxic whiteness group in May 2021. But during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, her influence boomed. She was brought in to advise Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Coca-Cola, Disney, and Lockheed Martin sent their employees through DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings; even the defense company Raytheon launched an anti-racism DEI program.In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural. To fix oneâs inherent racism requires constant work, and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. Seminars like hers exploded as anti-racism was shifted from a project of changing laws and fighting systems into a more psychological movement: something you did within yourself. It was therapeutic. It wasnât about elevating others so much as about deconstructing yourself in hopes of eventually deconstructing the systems around you.[Read: Abolish DEI statements]Anti-racism courses are less popular today. This may in part be because more people have become willing to question the efficacy of corporate DEI programs, but itâs surely also because their lessons now show up everywhere. In March at UCLA Medical School, during a required course, a guest speaker had the first-year medical students kneel and pray to âMama Earthâ before saying that medicine was âwhite science,â as first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The course I took was just a preview of whatâs come to be expected in workplaces and schools all over the country. DiAngelo and her fellow thinkers are right in many ways. The economic fallout of structural racism persists in this countryâfallout from rules, for example, about where Black people could buy property, laws that for generations have influenced who is rich and who is poor. The laws may be gone, but plenty of racists are left. And the modern anti-racist movement is right that we all probably do have some racism and xenophobia in us. The battle of modernity and liberalism is fighting against our tribal natures and animal selves.I went into the workshop skeptical that contemporary anti-racist ideology was helpful in that fight. I left exhausted and emotional and, honestly, moved. I left as the teachers would want me to leave: thinking a lot about race and my whiteness, the weight of my skin. But telling white people to think about how deeply white they are, telling them that their sense of objectivity and individualism are white, that they need to stop trying to change the world and focus more on changing themselves ⊠well, Iâm not sure that has the psychological impact the teachers are hoping it will, let alone that it will lead to any tangible improvement in the lives of people who arenât white.Much of what I learned in âThe Toxic Trends of Whitenessâ concerned language. We are âwhite bodies,â Quinn explained, but everyone else is a âbody of culture.â This is because white bodies donât know a lot about themselves, whereas âbodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.âThe course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be âas close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.â We needed to feel uncomfortable.One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now âsort of being told to step aside.â She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of âbeing a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.âA woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? âWanting to say, âProve it.â Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?â[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility]She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: âItâs really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerabilityâlike where it kind of makes you want to throw up.âOne participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. âIâm here because Iâm a racist. Iâm here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other peopleâs whiteness.â A woman who loved her cats was struggling with âhow to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.â Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. âThe darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I werenât here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.âThe next day we heard from DiAngelo herself. Quinn introduced her as âtransformative for white-bodied people across the world.â DiAngelo is quite pretty, and wore a mock turtleneck and black rectangular glasses. She started by telling us that she would use the term people of color, but also that some people of color found the term upsetting. She would therefore vary the terms she used, rotating through imperfect language. Sometimes people of color, other times racialized, to indicate that race is not innate and rather is something that has been done to someone. Sometimes she would use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), but she would then make a conscious grammatical mistake: âIf I say âBIPOC,â I find thatâs a kind of harsh acronym. I usually add people at the end to humanize it a bit, even though grammatically thatâs not correct,â she said.Language is a tricky thing for the movement. The idea is that you should be open and raw when you speak, but you can get so much wrong. Itâs no wonder that even Robin DiAngelo herself is worried. (At one point she recommended a book by Reni Eddo-Lodgeââa Black Brit,â DiAngelo said. For a moment she looked scared. âI hope thatâs not an offensive term.â Quinn chimed in to say she thought it was okay, but DiAngelo looked introspective. âIt sounds harsh. The Brit part sounded harsh.â)DiAngelo wanted to remind us that she is white. She emphasized the whâ, giving the word a lushness and intensity. âIâm very clear today that I am white, that I have a white worldview. I have a white frame of reference. I move through the world with a white experience.âShe introduced some challenges. First was white peopleâs âlack of humilityâ: âIf you are white and you have not devoted years, yearsânot that you read some books last summerâto sustained study, struggle, and work and practice and mistake making and relationship building, your opinions while you have them are necessarily uninformed and superficial.ââChallenge No. 2 is the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special.âShe prepared us for what would come next: âI will be generalizing about white people.â She was sharing her screen and showed us an image of middle-aged white women: âThis is the classic board of a nonprofit.â She threw up a picture of high-school students in a local paper with the headline âOutstanding Freshmen Join Innovative Teacher-Education Program.â Almost all the teenagers were white. âThis education program was not and could not have been innovative. Our educational system is probably one of the most efficient, effective mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality.â Lingering on the picture, she asked, âDo you feel the weight of that whiteness?â[From the September 2021 issue: Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help]Another image. It was a white man. âI donât know who that is,â she said. âI just Googled white guy, but most white people live segregated lives.âWhen someone calls a white person out as racist, she told us, the white person will typically deny it. âDenying, arguing, withdrawing, crying. âI donât understand.â Seeking forgiveness. âI feel so bad, I feel so bad. Tell me you still love me.ââ She paused. âEmotions are political. We need to build our stamina to endure some shame, some guilt,â she said. Quinn broke in to say that intentions are the province of the privileged. But consequences are the province of the subjugated.Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: âI hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private ⊠You want to go watch a movie with me? Youâre going to get my analysis of how racism played in that movie. I have personal relationships and know the private lives of a range of people of color, including Black people. And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.âI was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor meâit sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldnât mind being Venmoed afterward.When DiAngelo was done, Quinn asked if we had questions. Very few people did, and that was disappointingâthe fact that white bodies had nothing to say about a profound presentation. Silence and self-consciousness were part of the problem. âPeopleâs lives are on the line. This is life or death for bodies of culture.â We needed to work on handling criticism. If it made you shake, that was good.One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here heâd just been talking with all of his friends about not being racist. Now he was going to âsay that I might have been wrong here.â He noticed he felt âresistance to saying âIâm racist.ââQuinn understood; that was normal. He just needed to try again, say âI am a racistâ and believe it. The man said: âI am racist.â What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. âI am racist.ââDo you feel sadness or grief?ââSadness and grief feel true,â he said.âThatâs beautiful,â Quinn said.Some members of the group were having a breakthrough. Stacy said she was âseeing them finally ⊠Like, wow, are there moments when this white body chooses to see a body of culture when it isnât dangerous for them?â One woman realized she was âa walking, talking node of white supremacy.â Another finally saw how vast whiteness was: âSo vast and so, so big.âFor a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hostsâSaira Rao and Regina Jacksonâencourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist. At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: âDear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how *exactly* you cause this pain and damage.âOne could also attend a workshop called âWhatâs Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege Over Lunch,â hosted by the authors of Whatâs Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice (the authors are two white women). Or you could go to âFinding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy,â hosted by We Are Finding Freedom (a for-profit run by two white women). The National Association of Social Workersâ New York City chapter advertised a workshop called âBuilding White Womenâs Capacity to Do Anti-racism Workâ (hosted by the founder of U Power Change, who is a white woman).So many of the workshops have been run by and aimed at white women. White women specifically seem very interested in these courses, perhaps because self-flagellation is seen as a classic female virtue. The hated archetype of the anti-racist movement is the Karen. No real equivalent exists for men. Maybe the heavily armed prepper comes close, but heâs not quite the same, in that a Karen is someone youâll run into in a coffee shop, and a Karen is also someone who is disgusted with herself. Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its âwhitenessâ (and I donât mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. Weâll thank you for it.[Tyler Austin Harper: Iâm a black professor. You donât need to bring that up.]After DiAngelo, I went to another course, âFoundations in Somatic Abolitionism.â That one was more about what my white flesh itself means and how to physically manifest anti-racismââembodying anti-racism.â Those sessions were co-led by Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and the author of My Grandmotherâs Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.Menakem stressed how important it was not to do his exercises with people of color, because it would wound them: âDo not have bodies of culture in a group of white bodies. White bodies with white bodies and bodies of culture with bodies of culture.âThe harm caused by processing your whiteness with a person of color had also been stressed in the previous courseâthe book DiAngelo had recommended by Reni Eddo-Lodge was called Why Iâm No Longer Talking to White People About Race. But at the same time, Quinn had said that we should talk with people of different races about our journey and let them guide us. It all seemed a bit contradictory.One participant had a question for Menakem about community building. She was concerned because she had a mixed-race group of friends, and she wanted to be sure she wasnât harming her Black friends by talking about this work.âThereâs no way youâre going to be able to keep Black women safe,â Menakem said. âIf youâre talking about race, if race is part of the discussion, those Black women are going to get injured in the process.ââThatâs my worry,â she said. The problem was that she and her friends were actually already in âlike, an anti-racism study group.â Menakem was definitive: âDonât do that,â he said. âI donât want white folks gazing at that process.âA few years have passed since I was in these workshops, and I wonder if the other participants are âbetterâ white people now. What would that even mean, exactly? Getting outside their ethnic tribeâor the opposite?At one point Menakem intoned, âAll white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. âAll white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.ââ We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm. The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it alsoâand this seemed like a problemâfelt good.What if fighting for justice could just be a years-long confessional process and didnât require doing anything tangible at all? What if I could defeat white supremacy from my lovely living room, over tea, with other white people? Personally I donât think thatâs how it works. Iâm not sold. But maybe my whiteness has blinded me. The course wrapped up, and Menakem invited us all to an upcoming two-day workshop.This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.
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Colleges Are Failing the Free Speech Test
Too many leaders are failing to uphold the First Amendment rights they claim to champion.
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A Father Consumed by the Question of What to Teach His Children
When I got pregnant last year, I began reading online about parenting and found myself confronted with an overwhelming quantity of choices. On social media, how-to graphics and videos abound, as do doctrines about the one true way to discipline your children, or feed them, or get them to sleep through the night. Parent forums, blogs, and product-recommendation sites are full of suggestions for the only swaddle that works, the formula that tastes milkiest, the clicking animatronic crab that will get your tummy-time-averse baby to hold her head high. Scrolling through all of this advice can make it seem as though parenting is largely about informed, research-based decision-makingâthat choosing the right gadgets and the right philosophy will help parenting itself go right.This logic can feel particularly visceral for a parent considering how to be a good steward of the environment. (Do I genuinely need a special $160 blender to avoid giving my baby prepackaged food? Or can I just mash steamed veggies with a fork?) Worrying about waste can turn into a variation on the pursuit of perfect parentingâbut not worrying about it is illogical. Our children will inherit the climate crisis. Personal decisions cannot undo that fact; can, indeed, hardly mitigate it. Deciding to be a parent anyway means you had better hope that our species and societies can work out a new way to thrive on a changing, warming, conflict-riddled planetâbecause if not, what have you done?Choice, the Booker Prizeânominated writer Neel Mukherjeeâs fourth novel, addresses this question head-on. Itâs a triptych novel in the vein of Susan Choiâs Trust Exercise and Lisa Hallidayâs Asymmetry, which use their three parts to repeatedly surprise and challenge readers. Compared with these novels, Choice is both more ambitious and less successful, harmed by the fact that its second and third sections just cannot compete with its blistering first.But that first section is a barn burner. Mukherjee starts Choice with the story of Ayush, an editor at a prestigious London publishing house, whose obsession with the climate crisis lands somewhere between religious fervor and emotional disorderâespecially as far as his kids are concerned. Ayush and his economist husband, Luke, have twin children, Masha and Sasha, and his portion of Choice is a beautiful, horrifying, detailed, and messy evocation of parenthood, full of diapers and dirty dishes and âCan you help Daddy make dinner?â It also presents having children as a moral crisis, a stumbling block Ayush canât get past. He tries bitterly to lessen his familyâs consumptionâwe see him measuring the exact amount of water in which to cook the twinsâ pasta, boiling it in the electric kettle because heâs read that it uses less energy than a stovetop pot âbut he canât get away from the belief that Masha and Sasha are ânot going to have a future anyway.â His conviction that theyâre doomed weighs more and more heavily on his parenting decisions, eventually convincing him that he can no longer parent at all.Readers meet Ayush in a scene nearly too painful to read. Home alone with his kindergarten-age twins, Ayush skips their bedtime story in favor of a documentary about an abattoir. Mukherjee describes this moment in vivid visual detail, contrasting the childrenâs sweet bedroom decor (cherries on the bedding; sea creatures on the night-light) to the laptop screen, which shows slaughtered pigs on a floor âso caked with layers of old solidified blood and fresh new infusion that it looks like a large wedge of fudgy chocolate cake.â Unsurprisingly, the twins sob hysterically as the video plays; their distress upsets Ayush so acutely that he cannot talk. But rather than comfort them once he regains speech, he doubles down on the decision that he has to teach them about cruelty to animalsâand about their complicity in it. He puts his children to bed not with an apology or a lullaby, but with the stern reminder that âwhat you saw was how our meat comes to us.â[Read: The books that help me raise children in a broken world]Ayush seems like a monster in this sceneâand not an unfeeling one, which signals to the reader that he may be as much tortured as torturer. Mukherjee swiftly makes it apparent that this is the case. We see him begging Luke to help teach their too-young children to weigh the morality of âthings that donât appear to be choices,â such as eating meat; Luke, in turn, begs Ayush to examine the roots of his unhappiness and anxiety, his compulsion to conserve energy far beyond what could reasonably be useful. Ayush yearns to âshake off his human formâ and become one with natureâor, more ominously, vanish into it. At one point, Ayush takes his children to explore some woods outside London, an activity that many parents might relate to: He wants to share the wonder of the natural world with his children, both as a bonding activity and as a lesson in ecological stewardship. But he canât focus on Masha and Sasha. What he hears instead is that the âgreat trees are breathing; Ayush wants to still his heart to hear them.â Mukherjee only implies this, but it seems that all Ayushâs experiences lead to this paradox: His love for the Earth makes him want to erase himself from it.Ayushâs relationship with his children is also shaped by a desire to remove himself, as well as a significant amount of attendant guilt. He is the twinsâ primary parent, despite the fact that he never wanted childrenâa revelation that Mukherjee builds to slowly. Ayushâs anxieties about choosing parenthood are legion. Heâs upset by the ecological impact of adding to the Earthâs human population, and believes that his twins will face a future of walled cities and climate refugeeism. Having grown up South Asian in Britain, heâs frightened of exposing children to the racism heâs faced his whole life; he also has a half-buried but âfundamental discomfort about gay parenting,â of which he is ashamed. Most of all, before having children, he didnât want to have a baby who could become like himââa consumed, jittery, unsettled creature.â His own unhappiness, he feels, should have precluded him from having children. Yet he acquiesced, a choice he partly disavows by suppressing his memory of why he did. Not only does he go along with having children; he takes daily responsibility for raising them.On the surface, this is the case because Ayush earns less than Luke, a dynamic the novel explores with nuance. In straight partnerships, the question of who parents more is very often gendered, which Mukherjee acknowledges: At one point, Luke, who has a big job and generational wealth, dismisses Ayush with a sexist reference to the âpin-moneyâ he earns in publishing. But there are more layers here. Ayush, it seems, takes responsibility for his children in order to atone for not having wanted them. Luke, who pushed for fatherhood, is the more patient and affectionate parent, while Ayush is busy fretting over the environmental impact of disposable diapers. Luke is also much kinder and more open to Ayush than Ayush is to him: Although Luke is an economist, with a genuine belief in the rationality that undergirds his discipline, heâs motivated far more by his emotions than his ideas.Ayush believes himself to be the opposite. His domestic decisions are often logical (or logical-seeming) responses to climate anxieties, but this impulse becomes more disturbing as it influences his child-rearing. Sometimes, he seems to care more about raising Masha and Sasha as environmentalists than he does about any other aspect of their upbringingâalmost as though he wants to offset having had them to begin with. He doesnât necessarily want to be this way: After the somewhat-failed forest outing, Ayush takes the twins on a walk around London and teaches them to come up with similes and metaphors to describe what they see, making a game of comparing dandelions to egg yolks and lemons. Here, he successfully keeps his attention on his children, but he still spins a tender moment into one of moral exigency. âWill this remain in their memory,â he wonders, âmake them look up and out, make them notice, and, much more importantly, notice again?â For Ayush, this qualifies as optimism. Heâs trying to control his childrenâs way of seeing the world, but he is also trying to offer them the gift of coexisting, happily, with the Earth.[Read: The book that captures my life as a dad]Mukherjee does give Ayush one way of communing peacefully with nature: his relationship with his dog, Spencer. The writer Joy Williams has said that any work of fiction should have an âanimal within to give its blessing,â which Spencer certainly does in Choice. Mukherjee describes Ayushâs devotion to his dog in lush detail; the bookâs most beautiful passages have Spencer in them. Ayushâs heart breaks when he realizes that Luke does not see âyou, me, and the dogâ as family enough; it breaks far more deeply when Spencer grows too old to âbound to the door ⊠surprised by joy, impatient as the wind, when any member of his family comes in.â Among Ayushâs most treasured memories is a spring morning with Spencer: Then a puppy, he had rolled in wild flowers so that his âsilky golden throat and chest had smelled of violets for a brief second, then the scent had disappeared. Ayush had sat on the ground, sniffing Spencerâs chest for another hit of that elusive perfume, but it was gone.âAyush plainly sees Spencer as his child, and yet the dog also gives him a way to experience the âelusive perfumeâ of a pleasurable connection with the planet. As Spencer ages and that link is harder to sense, Ayushâs unhappiness grows. He understands that he is grieving preemptively for Spencer, but the approaching loss of his dogâan event he cannot control or avoidâdoes not motivate him to snuggle with Spencer or prepare his children for the loss. Instead, it makes him want to leave his family when Spencer doesâas if, without the connection to nature that the dog offers, he can no longer bear to be caged in his family home.By the end of his section of Choice, Ayush has completely lost the ability to make rational decisions. He betrays Spencer in a scene perhaps even more painful than the bookâs opening, thinking that heâs doing his beloved dog a service; he also betrays his children, his husband, his life. All of his efforts to control his familyâs ecological impact, to do the right research and calculations, to impart all the right moral lessons, lead directly, maybe inexorably, to this tragic point. At the novelâs start, he tells Luke that he wants their kids to understand âchoices and their consequences.â But it ultimately becomes clear that he canât accept the consequences of his choice to have children. He canât save the planet for his children; nor can he save it from themâand so, rather than committing to guiding them into a future he canât choose or control, he abdicates his responsibility for them.Mukherjee leaves Ayushâs family behind rather than linger on the aftermath of these betrayals. He moves on to two narratives the reader will recognize as parts of books that Ayush edited: first a story about a young English academic who begins meddling inâand writing aboutâthe life of an Eritrean rideshare driver, then an essay by a disillusioned economist who describes the misery that ensues when an aid organization gives a Bengali family a cow that is meant to lift them from poverty, but radically worsens their situation instead. Mukherjee imbues these sections with a propulsive mix of anger and grace, but neither is especially complicated. Emily, the academic, has no one who depends on her, and her odd choices concerning the rideshare driver, Salim, have no real consequences for anyone but herself. Sabita, the mother of the family that gets the cow, is so wholly at the mercy of her material conditions that choice is hardly a relevant concept to herâsomething that she understands, though the cow-providing âpeople from the cityâ do not.Emilyâs section primarily serves as a portrait of choice amid abundance. Sabitaâs, meanwhile, underscores the central idea of Ayushâs: that our efforts at control are, by and large, delusions. For parents, this can be especially painful to accept. We want our choices to guarantee our childrenâs safety, their comfort, their happiness. For Ayush, who believes fervently that his twins will grow up to inhabit a âburning world,â the fact that he canât choose something better for them drives him away from them. By not showing the consequences of Ayushâs actions, Mukherjee leaves incomplete the bookâs exploration of parenting. What his abdication means to Masha, Sasha, and Luke is hidden. What it means to the reader, though, is clear. In Choice, there is no such thing as a perfect decision or a decision guaranteed to go right. There are only misjudgments and errorsâand the worst of those are the ones that can never be undone.
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Israel Is Lonely in the Dock
Israel has been convicted of genocide by protesters at Columbia and UCLA, but its genocide case before the International Court of Justice is still pending. Israel remains officially aghast that it, and only it, is subject to judicial proceedings for the crime of genocideâand that the ICJâs rulings so far have implied that the judges think Israel might be guilty of the crime of crimes. According to reports this weekend, the International Criminal Courtâa separate body that hears cases against individualsâis preparing arrest warrants for Israeli officials and possibly Hamas leaders. In the ICJ, Israel stands alone.In January, the judges stopped short of ordering Israel to stop fighting in Gaza, but they voted 15â2 to remind Israel of its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Among the judges voting with the majority was the German jurist Georg Nolte. His written opinion was curiously apologetic. He called the whole situation, including the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7, âapocalyptic.â He noted, correctly, that the case before him was not about âpossible violations of the Genocide Convention by persons associated with Hamas.â The ICJ hears cases between and against states, and Hamas isnât one. âWhile these limitations may be unsatisfactory, the Court is bound to respect them,â he wrote. âI would like to recall, however, that persons associated with Hamas remain responsible for any acts of genocide that they may have committed.â[James Smith: The genocide double standard]Was this a coded suggestion? Without consideration of the October 7 attacks, something is missing from the ICJ proceedings, and Nolte is not the only one to sense an omission. The case is going forward almost as if the Gaza war were not preceded by, and in retaliation for, an attack that itself resembled genocide. Israelâs defenders, including its legal team at the ICJ, have complained that the proceedings tell only half the story, and that a full assessment of the facts would demand consideration of Hamasâs actions, too.There is a simple remedy for this problem: Charge Palestine with genocide, and let the ICJ hear both cases at once.The idea is not mine. I first heard it from David J. Scheffer, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in the Clinton administration as ambassador at large for war-crimes issues. At least three of the judgesâ opinions, he told me, suggested that they were âuncomfortable arriving at a determination on the merits of this case, when a large component of the entire situation is not on the table.â Nolte hinted at this view most strongly. The declarations of judges from Uganda and India also noted the absence, as did the judge designated by Israel, Aharon Barak. Scheffer said a parallel case against Palestine âwould be to the advantage of the court and, frankly, facilitate their ability to reach a decisionâ that enjoyed a broad legitimacy.Every international lawyer I spoke with about this idea called it wild and implausible. Foremost among the objections is the fact that the international representative of the state of Palestine is the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas. The PA is not just not Hamasâit is directly opposed to Hamas, which slaughtered PA members when it seized control of Gaza in 2007.Irrelevant, Scheffer says. âHamas members are nationals of the state of Palestine, which is party to the Genocide Convention.â The Genocide Convention obligates its parties (including Israel and most other countries) to prevent, investigate, and punish genocidal acts. The failure to prevent and punish was enough to convict Serbia of genocide in a case before the ICJ in 2007. If Hamas committed genocide on October 7, then Palestine was obligated to stop it and punish its culpable members. Palestine has manifestly failed to do so, with even token gestures. Palestine âis supposed to prevent you from committing genocide, even if youâre a terrorist,â Sheffer told me. âIts duty is to prevent and punish genocide. And I donât think thereâs a record of any punishment [by the PA] of any Hamas member.âOthers doubted that Palestine was even subject to the ICJâs jurisdiction, because the state of Palestine is not a member of the United Nations General Assembly. It is a ânonmember observer state.â Sheffer points out that this question comes close to being resolved by a statement, helpfully posted on the ICJâs website, from the state of Palestine itself, consenting to the ICJâs jurisdiction. In 2018, Palestine went to the court to object to the Trump administrationâs decision to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In doing so, it declared that it âaccepts all the obligations of a Member of the United Nationsâ with respect to the ICJ. Moreover, Article IX of the Genocide Conventionâwhich Palestine joined in 2014, and Israel joined in 1950âspecifies that the ICJ will hear any cases concerning genocide.Eliav Lieblich, an international-law professor at Tel Aviv University and a critic of Israelâs conduct of the Gaza war, pronounced the idea of instituting a genocide case against Palestine âtheoretically interestingâ but âa political nonstarter.â Cases have to be brought to the court by a state, as South Africa did against Israel. Lieblich noted that any state bringing a case against Palestine would, in effect, be recognizing the Palestinian state. You canât prosecute a state whose existence you deny. That catch-22 favors Palestine: Countries that recognize Palestine tend to be on Palestineâs side, and therefore disinclined to prosecute it at the ICJ.[Graeme Wood: Israelâs bitter bind]But plenty of countries could still bring the case. Of the 193 members of the UN General Assembly, 151 have joined the Genocide Convention. Of those, more than 100 recognize the state of Palestine. Remove from that list the countries that are so pro-Palestine that they would never bring such a case, and at least 30 countries remain, including Cambodia, Paraguay, and Poland.Any of these countries could start proceedings. But who would want to? (âWe have enough problems,â one official from a country on the list replied when I asked if his country would be game.) Longtime critics of Israel have treated South Africa as heroic for stepping up to prosecute Israel. Any country that prosecuted Palestine would probably risk the opposite effect on its reputation.But Scheffer urges countries to think strategically about the effect of bringing a case against Palestine. Doing so would greatly influence the proceedings against Israel, he says, and that influence âis not necessarily to the detriment of South Africaâs position.â Israelâs complaint that it is lonely in the dock vanishes instantly if it has company. Judges would be more inclined to rule against Israel, Scheffer suggests, if they did not feel that they were singling out the Jewish state. âIf they could also look at the evidence regarding Hamas and say there is also a violation by the state of Palestine, that would be a much more comfortable position for judges to take.âAnd it is far from certain that the court would convict Palestine. Palestine could defend itself by saying that it failed to prevent genocide because it was itself prevented from doing so by Israel, through its occupation of the West Bank and hamstringing of the Palestinian Authorityâs capacity to act. Eliav Lieblich noted that in other international courts, a stateâs duties are lightened or relieved when its territory is controlled by another, stronger state. Israel would not relish having to observe this defense.And, finally, the ICJ imposes very high burdens on the prosecution in genocide cases. The prosecution must demonstrate the intent to destroy a protected group, and the absence of plausible nongenocidal intents that might explain the behavior of the accused. Could a prosecutor show that the only possible rationale for Hamasâs actions on October 7 was to commit genocide against Jews? Could Palestine convince the judges that Hamas was instead attempting to resist Israelâs occupation, and that if Hamas intended genocide, it would have planned its operation differently? If so, Palestine, and by extension Hamas, would likely be acquitted.Israel has at its disposal a similar defense. Might the death and suffering of Gazans be attributable not to an intent to wipe them from the Earth, but to a desire to free hostages and defend itself against a terror group that commits flagrant war crimes, vows to keep doing so, and uses civilians as shields? If so, Israel, too, stands a good chance of acquittal.One frequently noted shortcoming of the International Court of Justice, and of international law more broadly, is that its justice is applied unevenly (and often by the strong against the weak). Israel is frustrated that, at the ICJ, it seems to be allowed only to lose, while its wartime adversary remains beyond judgment of any type. The verdicts would not depend on each otherâone party could be guilty and the other innocentâbut the ICJâs legitimacy does seem to be tied to the willingness of the court, and the states before it, to punish potential violators of all types, and not just those vilified, rightly or wrongly, in the current wave of fashionable opinion.
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What I Wish Someone Had Told Me 30 Years Ago
In 1990, I was among the most unremarkable, underachieving, unimpressive 19-year-olds you could have stumbled across. Stoned more often than studying, I drank copious amounts of beer, smoked Camels, delivered pizza. My workouts consisted of dragging my ass out of bed and sprinting to classâusually late and unprepared.My high-school guidance counselor had had good reason to tell my deflated parents that there was no way I was college-bound: I graduated in the bottom third of my 100-person class at Lourdes Academy in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. I had to attend the Menasha extension of the University of Wisconsin, a two-year school, just to smuggle myself into the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, a four-year school in my hometown. A year into that, I was staring at a 1.491 GPA and making the guidance counselorâs case daily, unambiguously, emphatically. I was one more wastedâliterally and figurativelyâsemester away from getting the boot. This article has been adapted from VandeHeiâs new book, Just the Good Stuff. Then I stumbled into a pair of passions: journalism and politics. Suddenly I had an intense interest in two new-to-me things that, for reasons I cannot fully explain, came naturally. My twin interests were animated by my innate mischievousness, contrarian impulses, long poker nights, antiestablishment snobbery, and ease with people of all stripes at dive bars. These passions launched me on a wild, wholly unforeseeable ride through presidential impeachments and congressional coups, aboard Air Force One, onstage moderating a presidential debate, inside an Oval Office lunch with Donald Trump, on TV, and at the helm of two successful media start-ups: Politico and Axios.Thirty years later, I am running Axios, and fanatical about health and self-discipline. My marriage is strong. My kids and family seem to like me. I still enjoy beer, and tequila, and gin, and bourbon. But I feel that I have my act together more often than notâat least enough to write what I wish someone had written for me 30 years ago, a straightforward guide to tackling the challenges of life.[Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz: What the longest study on human happiness found is the key to a good life]An inherent hubris comes in offering this kind of advice, as I do in my new book, Just the Good Stuff. You naturally come off as arrogant or a know-it-all. I am acutely aware of the kind people, awesome family, and twists of fate that landed me here. And I am like so many others: an imperfect, middle-of-the-pack, small-town guy who worked hard, who never lost sight of lifeâs serendipity, who feels blessed to share with others what othersâor lifeâs face slapsâshared with me.It is nonsense that to shine, you need to go to a fancy school, bootlick bosses, or pay your dues at soul-sucking jobs working for bad people. You do not need to get 1500 on your SAT or to have a sky-high IQ or family connections. You donât even need sparkling talents. You simply need to want to construct goodness with whatever life throws at you. This starts by grounding yourself with unbreakable core values and then watching, learning, and copying those who do itâand get itâright. But it also includes watching and studying those who screw it up. You need to find your own passions, not have them imposed by others. Then outwork everyone in pursuit of shaping your destinyâyour own personal greatnessâon your terms, by your measures, at your pace.My own life is littered with mistakes. But I learned something from every dumb move and used it to try to get the big things right. Five decades in, that is what matters most to me: cutting myself slack on my daily sins or stumbles so I can focus on the good stuff. [Read: How to succeed at failure]For me, that list includes pursuing deep, meaningful, unconditional relationships with my kids; a healthy, resilient marriage; strong, loving relationship with my parents and siblings; a few deep and durable friendships; faith and connection beyond myself; and doing consequential work with people I enjoy and admire.Iâve often fallen short of these goals, and so Iâve learned the value of grace. Weâre all deeply flawed, wounded, selfish, clueless, and mean at different times. It does not make us bad. It makes us normal. Thatâs why we need to extend grace to others, and to ourselves.I have blown many months beating myself up for being a selfish husband or an inattentive son or a harsh leader or an absent friend. And all of those things were often true. But life is not measured by a moment. In the end, I want to be able to say what we should all be able to say about ourselves: I learned a little every day, tried to do the next right thing, and got the big things right.This article has been adapted from Jim VandeHeiâs new book, Just the Good Stuff.
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When Patients Do Their Own Research
At its best, medicine will be a process of shared decision making, and doctors need to be prepared.
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