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A Grand Experiment in Human Reproduction

theatlantic.com

For a long time, having children has been a young person’s game. Although ancient records are sparse, researchers estimate that, for most of human history, women most typically conceived their first child in their late teens or early 20s and stopped having kids shortly thereafter.But in recent decades, people around the world, especially in wealthy, developed countries, have been starting their families later and later. Since the 1970s, American women have on average delayed the beginning of parenthood from age 21 to 27; Korean women have nudged the number past 32. As more women have kids in their 40s, the average age at which women give birth to any of their kids is now above 30, or fast approaching it, in most high-income nations.Rama Singh, an evolutionary biologist at McMaster University, in Canada, thinks that if women keep having babies later in life, another fundamental reproductive stage could change: Women might start to enter menopause later too. That age currently sits around 50, a figure that some researchers believe has held since the genesis of our species. But to Singh’s mind, no ironclad biological law is stopping women’s reproductive years from stretching far past that threshold. If women decide to keep having kids at older ages, he told me, one day, hundreds of thousands of years from now, menopause could—theoretically—entirely disappear.Singh’s viewpoint is not mainstream in his field. But shifts in human childbearing behavior aren’t the only reason that menopause may be on the move. Humans are, on the whole, living longer now, and are in several ways healthier than our ancient ancestors. And in the past few decades, especially, researchers have made technological leaps that enable them to tinker like never before with how people’s bodies function and age. All of these factors might well combine to alter menopause’s timeline. It’s a grand experiment in human reproduction, and scientists don’t yet know what the result might be.So far, scientists have only scant evidence that the age of onset for menopause has begun to drift. Just a few studies, mostly tracking trends from recent decades, have noted a shift on the order of a year or two among women in certain Western countries, including the U.S. and Finland. Singh, though, thinks that could be just the start. Menopause can come on anywhere from a person’s 30s to their 60s, and the timing appears to be heavily influenced by genetics. That variation suggests some evolutionary wiggle room. If healthy kids keep being born to older and older parents, “I could see the age of menopause getting later,” Megan Arnot, an anthropologist at University College London, told me.Singh’s idea assumes that menopause is not necessary for humans—or any animal, for that matter—to survive. And if a species’ primary directive is to perpetuate itself, a lifespan that substantially exceeds fertility does seem paradoxical. Researchers have found lengthy post-reproductive lifespans in only a handful of other creatures—among them, five species of toothed whales, plus a single population of wild chimpanzees. But women consistently spend a third to half of their life in menopause, the most documented in any mammal.In humans, menopause occurs around the time when ovaries contain fewer than about 1,000 eggs, at which point ovulation halts and bodywide levels of hormones such as estrogen plummet. But there’s no biological imperative for female reproductive capacity to flame out after five decades of life. Each human woman is born with some 1 to 2 million eggs—comparable to what researchers have estimated in elephants, which remain fertile well into their 60s and 70s. Nor do animal eggs appear to have a built-in expiration date: Certain whales, for instance, have been documented bearing offspring past the age of 100.[Read: Why killer whales (and humans) go through menopause]This disconnect has led some researchers to conclude that menopause is an unfortunate evolutionary accident. Maybe, as some have argued, menopause is a by-product of long lifespans evolving so quickly that the ovaries didn’t catch up. But many women have survived well past menopause for the bulk of human history. Singh contends that menopause is a side effect of men preferring to mate with younger women, allowing fertility-compromising mutations to accumulate in aged females. (Had women been the ones to seek out only younger men, he told me, men would have evolved their own version of menopause.) Others disagree: Arnot told me that, if anything, many of today’s men may prefer younger women because fertility declines with age, rather than the other way around.But the preponderance of evidence supports menopause being beneficial to the species it’s evolved in, including us, Francisco Úbeda de Torres, a mathematical biologist at Royal Holloway, University of London, told me. Certainly, menopause was important enough that it appears to have arisen multiple times—at least four separate times among whales alone, Samuel Ellis, a biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.One of the most prominent and well-backed ideas about why revolves around grandmothering. Maybe menopause evolved to rid older women of the burden of fertility, freeing up their time and energy to allow them to help their offspring raise their own needy kids. In human populations around the world, grandmother input has clearly boosted the survival of younger generations; the same appears to be true among orcas and other toothed whales. Kristen Hawkes, an anthropologist at the University of Utah, argues that the influence of menopausal grandmothering was so immense that it helped us grow bigger brains and shaped the family structures that still govern modern societies; it is, she told me, sufficient to explain menopause in humans, and what has made us the people we are today.[From the October 2019 issue: The secret power of menopause]Some researchers suspect that menopause may have other perks. Kevin Langergraber, an ecologist at Arizona State University, points out that certain populations of chimpanzees can also live well past menopause, even though their species doesn’t really grandmother at all. In chimpanzees and some other animals, he told me, menopause might help reduce the competition for resources between mothers and their children as they simultaneously try to raise young offspring.Regardless of the precise reasons, menopause may be deeply ingrained in our lineage—so much so that it could be difficult to adjust or undo. After all this time of living with an early end to ovulation, there is probably “no single master time-giver” switch that could be flipped to simply extend human female fertility, Michael Cant, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Exeter, told me.Perhaps, though, menopause’s timeline could still change—not on scales of hundreds of thousands of years, but within generations. Malnutrition and smoking, for instance, are linked to an early sunsetting of menses, while contraceptive use may push the age of menopause onset back—potentially because of the ways in which these factors can affect hormones. Menopause also tends to occur earlier among women of lower socioeconomic status and with less education. Accordingly, interventions as simple as improving childhood nutrition might be enough to raise the average start of menopause in certain parts of the world, Lynnette Sievert, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me.[Read: Why so many accidental pregnancies happen in your 40s]Changes such as those would likely operate mostly on the margins—perhaps closing some of the gaps between poorer and richer nations, which can span about five years. Bigger shifts, experts told me, would probably require medical innovation that can slow, halt, or even reverse the premature aging of the ovaries, and maintain a person’s prior levels of estrogen and other reproductive hormones. Kara Goldman, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at Northwestern University, told me that one key to the ovarian fountain of youth might be finding drugs to preserve the structures that house immature eggs in a kind of dormant early state. Other researchers see promise in rejuvenating the tissues that maintain eggs in a healthy state. Still others are generating cells and hormones in the lab in an attempt to supplement what the aging female body naturally loses. Deena Emera, an evolutionary geneticist at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, in California, thinks some of the best inspiration could come from species that stay fertile very late into life. Bowhead whales, for instance, can reproduce past the age of 100—and don’t seem to succumb to cancer. Maybe, Emera told me, they’re especially good at repairing DNA damage in reproductive and nonreproductive cells alike.Some women may welcome an extended interval in which to consider having kids, but Goldman and Emera are most focused on minimizing menopause’s health costs. Studies have repeatedly linked the menopause-related drop in hormones to declines in bone health; some research has pointed to cardiovascular and cognitive issues as well. Entering menopause can entail years of symptoms such as hot flashes, urinary incontinence, vaginal dryness, insomnia, and low libido. Putting all of that off, perhaps indefinitely, could extend the period in which women live healthfully, buoyed by their reproductive hormones.[Read: Women in menopause are getting short shrift]Extending the ovaries’ shelf life won’t necessarily reverse or even mitigate menopause’s unwanted effects, Stephanie Faubion, the director of Mayo Clinic’s Center for Women’s Health, told me. Plus, it may come with additional risks related to later-in-life pregnancies. It could also raise a woman’s chances of breast or uterine cancer, blood clots, and stroke, Jerilynn Prior, an endocrinologist at the University of British Columbia, told me. And putting off menopause may also mean more years of menstruation and contraception, a prospect that will likely give many women pause, says Nanette Santoro, an obstetrician-gynecologist and a reproductive scientist at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.But several researchers think some tweaking is worth a shot. Even if menopause once helped our species survive, Goldman said, “it’s hard to imagine” that’s still the case. Evolution may have saddled us with an odd misalignment in the lifespans of the ovaries and the other organs they live alongside. But it has also equipped us with the smarts to potentially break free of those limits.

Say Plainly What the Protesters Want

2 h

theatlantic.com

Despite all the coverage of the protests over Israel’s war in Gaza, it can be remarkably difficult to understand what the players are actually saying. On social media, partisans on both sides cherry-pick extreme comments or incidents, as a way to suggest that their opponents are comprehensively rotten. Others invoke broadly held values—free speech, peaceful protest, human rights—without explaining how they apply in specific circumstances. And many of the media stories have only worsened the confusion, by employing imprecise and euphemistic language that obscures more than it illuminates.As a result, the American public remains badly informed about both the war itself and the movement against it, a dynamic that has steadily grown worse as campus protests—and the rate of (sometimes violent) arrests—has intensified. This lack of clarity may be especially damaging to people who both oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza and who want to see long-term peace—a group long marginalized by Israel hawks and expansionists—but who may also find themselves surprised and troubled by the stated objectives of many of the groups leading the protests. And there is a growing risk, as the backlash to the protests grows both more violent and more litigious, that the extreme claims, demands for ideological purity, and rejection of nonviolence advanced by some of the protest leaders will undermine a movement that many liberals agree is morally urgent.Here is a sadly typical example of the phenomenon I’m seeing: The Washington Post recently published an article headlined, “They Criticized Israel. This Twitter Account Upended Their Lives.” The story, by reporter Pranshu Verma, looked at the organization StopAntisemitism, which, according to the Post’s summary, “has flagged hundreds of people who have criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza. Many were swiftly fired.”But that’s not actually an accurate description of the reality The Post is reporting. The people featured in this article did not simply criticize Israel or its actions in Gaza. One woman was fired from her job at a branding firm for a video in which she declared that “radical solidarity with Palestine means … not apologizing for Hamas.” (Refusing to say a bad word about a U.S.-designated foreign-terrorist group is undoubtedly not the way her firm wanted to be branded.) Another person, a therapist, was caught on video ripping down a poster of Israeli hostages. She subsequently promoted the conspiracy theory that the Israelis taken by Hamas on October 7 were actually kidnapped by their own country. (She said later that she hadn’t meant what she’d said, but that she’d torn down the poster because it used the term “Hamas terrorists,” which undermined the Palestinian cause. Her clinic, the Post reported, fired her.)[Iddo Gefen: What ‘Intifada Revolution’ looks like]The story mentions just two other people whose lives were “upended” because they “criticized Israel.” StopAntisemitism “has flagged people for a variety of statements the organization considers antisemitic,” the Post reported, “including a college instructor who called Israelis ‘pigs’ and a high school basketball coach who wore a shirt with a watermelon, a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian cause, to a game.” The coach is the most sympathetic person in the story, although the Post fails to mention that he wore the shirt to a game in which his team was playing a Jewish school. Those who were—in my opinion, unjustifiably—angry about the shirt seem to feel that the symbol wasn’t a general expression of support for Palestinians, but targeted at a group of Jewish high schoolers. Either way, the coach was suspended, and apologized. The college instructor, who is no longer employed by her school, did not, but “called Israelis ‘pigs’” does not quite capture her comments, which included, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” and, “May they rot in hell.”The Post story raises important questions: Should these people, or others whose views are unpopular in a particular community or workplace, have been fired from their job? What are the ethics of reposting their social-media comments or footage of their public acts on an account devoted to making private citizens face personal or professional consequences? How much do we want to rely on viral social-media posts to police ugly behaviors and comments? But these questions are much more difficult to answer when the situations that gave rise to them are fundamentally mischaracterized.News outlets have a duty to both accurately report the news and include the context necessary for readers to understand it. The Post article not only casts the whitewashing of Hamas and the murders it committed as “criticism” of Israel, it also fails to explain Hamas’s aims—which include the complete destruction of Israel by any means, including the mass murder of innocent civilians. What happens to public discourse around the most controversial issues when media outlets don’t talk about what we’re actually talking about?Campuses across the country are seething over Gaza. On social media, in Congress, and in the media, debates rage over whether these protests are admirable, gatherings of idealistic young people voicing their dissent over a war that has reportedly killed more than 30,000 Palestinians, many of them innocent children and women, or whether the protesters are entitled, terrorism-excusing rule-breakers who should face consequences when they intentionally flout the law.Much of this conversation has been carried out in bad faith, such as when grandstanding Republicans decided to haul university presidents before Congress for a public dressing-down. And the decision of administrators at several schools—including Columbia University, NYU, UCLA, and the University of Texas at Austin—to ask aw enforcement to break up student encampments and demonstrations represented a dramatic, and inflammatory, escalation.Part of the debate turns on whether the protests are anti-Semitic. And it has been easy to find examples of blatant anti-Semitism, some of it from standard-fare lunatics and much of it from actual pro-Palestinian protesters; some of it on college campuses, and much of it part of other protests held off-campus and comprising many people who are not students. One problem, though, is that campus higher-ups and the broader public can’t agree on what anti-Semitism is. There are obvious examples: Yelling at Jews to “go back to Poland,” for instance. But the waters get murkier when it comes to anti-Zionism: Are chants calling for the destruction of Israel anti-Semitic, or merely anti-Zionist? What about chants cheering on Hamas? Who gets to draw the line: Jewish students who say they feel threatened, observers who are upset and offended, protesters (some of them Jewish), or critics who say feelings aren’t facts and even stringent anti-Zionism isn’t anti-Semitism?The question of anti-Semitism is an important one, especially because colleges and universities have long made it their business to police on-campus bias and discrimination (and are obligated under federal law to ensure that all of their students can access an education). But it is not the only relevant question. More salient, and less explored even by major media outlets, is this: What do the protesters actually stand for?According to some news outlets, the protests are best characterized as “anti-war.” And that’s true insofar as the groups leading e the protests do oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, and no doubt many of the demonstrators show up because they’ve watched horror after horror unfold, sympathize with a long-oppressed population that is now being killed by the thousands, and want to voice their desire for the violence to cease. But the protests—both on college campuses and those led by broader, noncampus groups—have articulated demands and ideologies. News outlets have a responsibility to report what those are, and are largely failing.Many of the protest groups agree with that critique of the coverage. National Students for Justice in Palestine posted on Instagram, “Do not cover our protests if you will not cover what we are fighting for.” On-campus demands vary from college to college, but generally include that the university divest from companies doing business with Israel, cut ties with Israeli universities and academics, offer amnesty to all student and faculty protesters who have broken laws or campus rules, and implement total transparency for all university investments and holdings.[Michael Powell: ‘We want all of it’]But those demands are not the sum total of the protest groups’ aims. Two of the student groups coordinating the encampments at Columbia, for example, published a guide answering the question “What principles must one align with in order to sign onto our coalition?” and clarifying “the cause we are fighting for.” The core principles include the Thawabit, originally published in 1977 and characterized as nonnegotiable Palestinian “red lines” (albeit ones from which many advocates for peace and statehood who actually live in Palestine have since deviated). Those include a right to Palestinian statehood, making Jerusalem the capital of Palestine, the right of return, and the right to resistance, even armed resistance, or “struggle by all available means.”These groups have also routinely refused to condemn the Hamas attacks of October 7 that led to the Israeli incursion, even while they have found time to condemn far less egregious acts. (An October 12 statement from Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine and Columbia Jewish Voices for Peace lambasted those calling for peace and issued five separation condemnations of Columbia, including two for emails that voiced sympathy for Israelis without sufficient recognition of Palestinian suffering.) Some protest leaders and professors have explicitly said that they will not condemn Hamas, or that requests to do so are a distraction; others have overtly embraced the organization.Similar ideologies and goals have taken center stage at off-campus protests as well, with banners pledging to secure Palestinian freedom By Any Means Necessary and chants cheering on Hamas and rejecting a two-state solution in favor of the end of Israel (“We want all of ’48”). Protesters should be free to gather and make their demands of course, but these particular demands are not, by any reasonable definition, “anti-war.” Protesters who endorse these ideas are against Israel’s war in Gaza, but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state. (What else does “by any means necessary” connote if not an embrace of any means necessary, no matter how vicious?) These groups are not calling for all combat to end. Too many support any self-styled “resistance” group that, like Hamas, uses violence against civilians to achieve its ideological and theological aims.This does not make every protester a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer, as some have claimed. Contrary to what National Students for Justice in Palestine itself argues, showing up at a protest does not and should not require pledging allegiance to the maximal demands of its organizers. Nor do those demands, in my view, negate the moral urgency of the protests, which in the aggregate—if not at their organizational core—are about ending a bloody war. And although there are no polls or data on what the many protesters who are not aligned with the major pro-Palestinian groups think, my personal sense is that the majority are horrified by the brutality they see Palestinians enduring and believe this war is a moral atrocity. They protest because they want to see it end—not because they have any sophisticated understanding of the “intifada revolution” the organizers often champion, or because they are “pro-Hamas,” as so many conservative outlets claim.If the public is to understand the protests, then journalists need to give a sense of proportion, and at least attempt to cover what average demonstrators think and why they show up. But they also need to do exactly what protest organizers ask, which is to clearly articulate those organizers’ demands and positions. And for people who are horrified by the war but do not support Hamas or like-minded groups and who do not champion the destruction of Israel (or the mass expulsion and murder of millions of Jews that they fear would come with the end of the state), it’s especially important to understand and take seriously what protest leaders are saying.If you disagree with the organizers—and I imagine a lot of people who oppose this war, including many who are protesting, do—then the decision becomes whether to participate anyway because the stakes are so high, sit it out because the disagreements run so deep, attempt to wrest control and put forward goals that are much more popular with the American public, or attempt to make the existing movement a big-enough tent to allow in “Zionists” who oppose violence of all kinds and support an independent Palestinian state alongside an Israeli one.None of that is possible when conservative news outlets tar all of the protesters as pro-Hamas, while more liberal ones suggest they are merely anti-war.This same failure has emerged in the coverage of the counterprotests. Just outside the Columbia gates, well-known Trump-affiliated Christian nationalists were among the organizers of a pro-Israel rally—if you can call a group whose apocalyptic religious aims require the return of Jews to Israel so that they might all convert or die when Christ returns “pro-Israel.” And there has been remarkably little reporting on the ideologies, affiliations, and goals of the counterprotesters, despite reports that they have also been making threats and shouting bigoted comments, including “go back to Gaza.” At UCLA, counterprotesters are widely reported to have fomented serious violence against the pro-Palestinian activists in an encampment and to have brutalized student journalists. Are these demonstrators, who seem to have grown more aggressive in recent days, really merely “pro-Israel”? Or are their more expansive ideologies, and perhaps other connections, at play?[Conor Friedersdorf: Columbia University’s impossible position]Although many observers and commentators invoke the right to protest or the right to free speech, the student protesters seem disinclined to make free-speech or assembly claims to justify their actions, perhaps realizing that many of the tactics they are using are outside the First Amendment’s protections. And even as student protesters stand accused of making their fellow students feel unsafe with their anti-Zionism and with their allegedly anti-Semitic behaviors, those same protesters do not shy away from claims that their safety is being threatened by people whose ideas they oppose, or from demands that those people be removed from campus. To try to parse the protests using generally applicable standards of free speech or content-neutral campus rules is to misunderstand what many of the protesters are asserting, which is less about any particular norm and more about moral clarity. Israel, many protesters argue, is conducting a genocide, and they need to stand in opposition. It could not be clearer.The protesters’ simple argument is that their cause is righteous and should therefore be supported, and that their schools should enable their protests. These schools are communities, as administrators continuously remind them. Non-righteous causes and individuals, the protesters believe, should not be allowed. A community’s norms are set not only by the law, but by what that community deems acceptable, moral, and desirable. But, from the other perspective, college campuses that receive federal dollars are required to ensure that all students can access an education safely and without discrimination—an obligation that some Jewish students and political leaders say is being compromised by anti-Israel protesters.And so the protests also raise a question of content, not just one of content-neutral norms. Or at least, this has been the position of the protesters, who do not believe that content-neutral time-place-manner restrictions on protest should apply to them. If these protests were about a less popular campus cause—say, in opposition to Donald Trump’s criminal trials, or to petition their schools to end affirmative action, or to demand that their school do more to support Israel’s war in Gaza—it is hard to imagine such a full-throated demand that students be permitted to violate generally applicable protest rules. But the rules seem to be considered broadly irrelevant here, in light of the stark moral claims.In the protesters’ defense, they do have a stark moral claim in their generalized opposition to a grotesque ongoing war. And their actions echo those of Vietnam War protesters, who also took up a righteous cause, shook the nation, used unpopular and disruptive tactics, and were widely criticized, before being ultimately vindicated in their belief that the deployment of U.S. troops to Vietnam was tragic, immoral and unnecessary. One has to wonder if that movement, and the leftist movements that developed in its aftermath, would have been more successful in achieving a variety of goals had it not devolved into the maximalism of chanting “One side’s right, one side’s wrong, victory to the Vietcong,” engaging in bombings, and offering support for the murderous Khmer Rouge.Of course, one does not have to wonder if college administrators feel proud of their decision to call in law enforcement. In the Vietnam era, when they did so, some students were killed, many were arrested, and schools, including Columbia, have for decades considered their response a badge of shame.Today, a clear line of argument has emerged from many progressive commentators: First, the overwhelming majority of the protesters are peaceful and not anti-Semitic. Second, it undermines and mischaracterizes a vital movement to focus on a few bad actors who spout anti-Semitic vitriol, or to emphasize a few chants that glorify Hamas or call for the destruction of Israel. Third, the obsessive coverage of these protests is coming at the expense of the much more important story, which is the war itself. And in many respects, this is a sensible position. A war costing tens of thousands of lives, conducted by a key U.S. ally following a horrific terrorist attack, is a much more important story than whatever college students are doing in the United States. The violent crackdowns on these protests strike many, myself included, as far more troubling than the protests themselves. And it isn’t fair to conflate what a handful of protesters do or say with a much broader movement.But again, many news outlets, journalists, and commentators are sidestepping the content of the protests and the demands of the protesters, both on and off college campuses. The content and demands shouldn’t have any bearing on whether the police are called in (or on whether the National Guard should be called in—an appalling and deeply illiberal and authoritarian suggestion). But progressives who oppose violence on all sides should have a clear sense of what those who claim to speak for this movement are advocating, so they can decide where to participate and where to push back—protest movements are dynamic things, and can be reshaped by those invested in their outcome. And the public should understand protesters’ demands and aims, as well as those of the counterprotesters. The only way that happens is if media outlets forgo euphemism and are clear on what individuals and leaders actually say. And on that much, at least, even the protest organizers seem to agree.

Six Books That Explore What’s Out There

3 h

theatlantic.com

Humans have always been explorers. For better or worse, something in our collective makeup seems to push us to discover new things, understand the enigmatic, or reach past the limits of what we imagine is possible. Some people dream about what the cosmos could contain; scientists launch probes into space, and astronauts travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Others go on life-threatening quests, such as climbing the planet’s tallest peaks and diving into the sea’s deepest trenches, to tap into the wonder, fear, and awe that come from experiencing—and surviving—the places on Earth most hostile to human life.The six books below reflect on what drives our species to seek out the uncharted and unknown. In each, what propels an individual’s desire to expand their experiences differs; some stories follow people yearning for adventure or to set a record, while other protagonists turn to exploration when they want to run away from something. No matter where these books take us, whether they cover searching for life beyond our planet or diving miles deep into the ocean to discover ecosystems heretofore unknown, their pages bring readers along for the ride. Gallery Books Contact, by Carl SaganIn Sagan’s 1985 novel, the astronomer Ellie Arroway is the leader of a scientific endeavor called Project Argus, a network of radio telescopes that picks up a message from an extraterrestrial source. The missive includes blueprints to build a machine that can take a group of humans … somewhere. Sagan’s story weaves Ellie’s personal life, particularly her relationship with her parents, together with Earth’s many competing efforts to build (or destroy) a working version of this machine. Though the novel doesn’t shy away from humanity’s propensity to sow discord and violence, Sagan’s story has a through line of hope—Contact is ultimately about how people’s tendency to seek the unknowable can lead them to better understand themselves and others. By the end of the novel, Ellie—who has traveled to the stars and back—realizes that “for small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” This message resonates nearly four decades later, as humans wade farther and farther into the galaxy. Doubleday The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan CaseyFor all of humanity’s stargazing, the deepest trenches of Earth’s oceans remain relatively unexplored. Many people consider the sea “the earth’s haunted basement—sinister, shrouded in blackness, spewing molten rock and poisonous gases, a den of freaky beings and hoary specters—and they would rather stay upstairs,” Casey writes in her book about those who do seek to journey to the bottom of the sea, where “intraterrestrial” life thrives. Casey herself is one of those people, and in The Underworld, she showcases others whose vocations send them into the ocean’s depths. But the book isn’t only about humans: Equal time is given to the creatures that live down there—including animals that aquanauts have given flippant monikers to, such as assfish, snailfish, weirdfish, and rattails—and underwater natural phenomena, such as black smoker hydrothermal vents, chimneylike structures that spew a sulfide-rich “smoke” into the water. Through Casey’s research, interviews, and firsthand experience, readers journey to the abyssal and hadal zones of the ocean, which run 10,000 to 36,000 feet deep, and get to share the “alchemical mix of wonder and fear” the author finds there.Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism One World Lone Women, by Victor LaValleExploration isn’t always about running toward something—at times, it’s about running away from something else. Lone Women uses the trappings of the American West, a complicated, enduring cultural symbol of a supposedly untouched frontier, to delve into the human tendency to try to escape the past. It follows Adelaide Henry, a Black woman who leaves her family's California farm in 1915 under violent circumstances and lugs a mysterious trunk to Montana, where the U.S. government is offering free land to those who homestead there. The trunk’s undisclosed, possibly supernatural contents disturb Adelaide, and seem directly related to what she’s trying to leave behind. Over the course of the book, we see her failed attempt to shut that part of her past away as she tries to build a life in the brutal landscape of the Great Plains, a place that can destroy anyone who’s unprepared or without friends—or be a refuge for those looking to build a new home with space for the love, and suffering, that comes with living. Read: The ‘curious’ robots searching for the ocean’s secrets Vintage The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice MillardTeddy Roosevelt lived his life by fighting his way through it, pummeling any hardships or setbacks with relentless action and an indomitable force of will. In 1912, he lost a presidential election that would have given him a third term. The defeat devastated him, and—as he was wont to do—he sought an endeavor that would put his mental and physical limits to the test. He decided on an expedition to an unmapped expanse of land in South America, which to North Americans represented an alluring, seemingly impenetrable wilderness. Once he landed in Brazil, he was persuaded to explore an Amazonian tributary ominously and aptly called the River of Doubt. “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so,” he wrote. Roosevelt did, in fact, almost die on that trek. He and the men who accompanied him were, “for all their own experience and knowledge, vulnerable outsiders,” Millard writes. She goes on to describe how their hubris on that journey made them “clumsy, conspicuous prey” at the mercy of not only the Cinta Larga tribe, whose members shadowed them throughout and could have killed them easily if they’d decided to, but also the flora and fauna they knew little about. The River of Doubt is a riveting look at how exploration can be laden with arrogance and ignorance. Millard vividly recounts how Roosevelt brought both with him into the Amazon, and how much both cost him.Read: The difference between exploring and tourism Vintage Into the Wild, by Jon KrakauerIn April 1992, a 24-year-old man named Chris McCandless walked into the wilds three hours outside Fairbanks, Alaska, intent to live off the land without any modern conveniences. “I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters,” he told the man who dropped him off at the edge of the bush. McCandless never made it out—he died in the home he’d made in an abandoned bus sometime that August. His journey was reckless—he was unprepared in terms of both supplies and the knowledge of how to survive. His story, which Krakauer first recounted in an article for Outside magazine, angered many: How could McCandless have been so foolhardy? (Krakauer’s account also doesn’t capture all of his subject’s life: Chris’s sister Carine alleged years later that their parents had physically and mentally abused both children; they called her memoir “fictionalized.”) McCandless, however, was confounded by people passively staying within the confines of a civilization that he found crushing. Krakauer’s recounting of his final months is captivating, giving readers a window into McCandless’s mentality; it is a tragic portrait of a man whose urge to escape into nature was so strong and alluring that, decades later, the circumstances of his death have morphed into legend. William Morrow Seveneves, by Neal StephensonAt certain moments, the impetus to go somewhere new isn’t about gaining knowledge or traveling simply for the novelty: Sometimes, it’s the only way to survive. In Seveneves, the moon explodes, making Earth uninhabitable for humans. The bulk of the story centers on the 1,500 or so people who struggle in the aftermath of the disaster, living initially in ad hoc habitats built around the International Space Station. Most of them die in these first years, destroyed by mounting internal discord and by the struggle to gain the basic resources—water, air, food—required for life. Stephenson goes deep into the science of their attempts to make it, and the book will fire up anyone who, for example, wants to know in detail how humans might be able to capture water from a passing ice comet. Ultimately, only seven women able to bear children remain, and they later set up base in a cleft of the broken moon. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, the action leaps 5,000 years into the future, where a civilization with billions of genetically altered humans seeks to reclaim Earth. Stephenson’s considerable extrapolations about what humans—or their genetically altered future descendants—will do to survive make the novel a fun, philosophical, and surprisingly hopeful read.

The Atlantic’s June Cover Story: Anne Applebaum on How “Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War”

Applebaum reports that autocratic regimes are making common cause with MAGA Republicans to undermine liberalism and freedom around the world.

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Hypochondria Never Dies

The diagnosis is officially gone, but health anxiety is everywhere.

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Is It Wrong to Tell Kids to Apologize?

Some parents argue that forcing children to say they’re sorry is useless or even harmful. The reality is more nuanced.

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Universities Could Divest If They Wanted To

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theatlantic.com

Students at dozens of colleges and universities across the country are occupying quads, lawns, and buildings in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, demanding that their universities divest from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies. But is cutting such financial ties even possible? And even if it were, would the loss of colleges’ investments actually change the bottom line for businesses operating in the region or providing arms for the conflict?Institutions of higher education hold close to $1 trillion in their endowments, much of it parked in index funds, hedge funds, and private-equity funds that invest in equities, bonds, derivatives, real estate, start-ups, and so on. They do not generally make individual investments themselves, meaning that divestment would not be as simple as executing a few stock orders.That does not mean they have no say over where their money is going, however. Many universities already can claim that they avoid pouring money into industries that damage the planet or hurt people. In one survey of 688 schools with endowments, 187 said they had a “responsible investment strategy.” Many put their cash in “ESG” funds that invest only in firms committed to meeting environmental and social standards (such as measuring their carbon output and reporting on the gender and racial balance of their workforce). Other endowments engage in “impact investing,” pushing cash to for-profit enterprises working for the common good (such as ones building homes, grocery stores, and schools in low-income neighborhoods). Still others bar investment in gambling and tobacco.Plus, universities have divested before. In the 1980s, protesters at schools around the country formed encampments and demanded divestment from businesses operating in apartheid South Africa. Many schools agreed. (Endowments were smaller and simpler then.) In the past decade, scores of colleges and universities—including Columbia, Brown, and Harvard—have divested from fossil-fuel firms after being petitioned by campus activists; others pulled money out of Russia after its incursion into Ukraine; others divested from private prisons and the retailers of assault weapons.Divestment from Israel would not be straightforward. It might not be immediate. (And at least one state, Ohio, has a law barring its public universities from divesting from Israel.) But it is certainly possible, Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at UC Merced who studies university endowments, told me. “If you’re a Columbia or a Brown or a Princeton or a Harvard, you have a lot of leverage as a very large investor. If you’ve got an endowment that’s valued in the tens of billions of dollars, you can find somebody who will manage the funds according to your preferences.”If schools chose to do this, they would face little financial risk. Their investments are so big that pulling back from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies, a tiny share of the global economy, would do essentially nothing to their bottom line.[Annie Lowrey: If you’re worried about the climate, move your money]The specific decisions a college would have to make are more complicated. Schools could divest from Israeli firms and military contractors around the world if they actually wanted to. But what about firms with major operations in Israel? Firms whose wares or services are purchased by the Israel Defense Forces? Some students at Columbia argue that the school should drop its investments in all companies “profiting from Israeli apartheid,” including Amazon, Airbnb, Hyundai, and Google, among others.A yet-bigger question is whether divestment would do anything. In terms of changing the financial outlook for the firms being called out, the clear answer is no, not much. The old investing chestnut applies: For every seller, there is a buyer. If University A sells its shares in military contractor B and Israeli technology firm C, pension fund D is going to pick them up. Unless a huge share of the world’s investors refuses to put money into the companies in question, share prices and financing costs won’t be impacted much. Indeed, studies of ESG investing show no effect on a company’s expected returns. The South Africa divestment campaign did not seem to do much either.That said, some studies of fossil-fuel divestment show a small, but measurable, effect. Divestment has reduced the share price of American coal companies, for instance. The world’s financiers came to see investing in coal as riskier, in essence, and lower returns as likelier.Still, this kind of analysis misses the point. Most students understand that divestment would not bring down the Israeli economy or end the war. Their goal is not really a financial one but a political one: They don’t want their universities supporting Israel or associated with the human tragedy in Gaza. They oppose the war.Likewise, the real opposition to divestment is political, not technical. Most Americans believe that Israel has a valid reason to be targeting Hamas; the country is split on whether the campaign of bombardment itself is justified. Many donors to colleges and universities find the protests anti-Semitic, and support Israel, and don’t want to see administrators give in. Some are even promising to quit giving money to their alma maters if the schools divest.University administrators, for their part, seem to be searching for ways to make everyone happy, by promising to study the issue or hold votes on their investment strategies. Brown committed to meet with a divestment coalition. The University of Minnesota agreed to share more information about its holdings. It seems unlikely that much will come from these initiatives. But if colleges felt compelled to divest, they could certainly do so.

Democracy Is Losing the Propaganda War

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Illustrations by Tyler ComrieOn June 4, 1989, the Polish Communist Party held partially free elections, setting in motion a series of events that ultimately removed the Communists from power. Not long afterward, street protests calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy brought about the end of the Communist regimes in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. Within a few years, the Soviet Union itself would no longer exist.Also on June 4, 1989, the Chinese Communist Party ordered the military to remove thousands of students from Tiananmen Square. The students were calling for free speech, due process, accountability, and democracy. Soldiers arrested and killed demonstrators in Beijing and around the country. Later, they systematically tracked down the leaders of the protest movement and forced them to confess and recant. Some spent years in jail. Others managed to elude their pursuers and flee the country forever.In the aftermath of these events, the Chinese concluded that the physical elimination of dissenters was insufficient. To prevent the democratic wave then sweeping across Central Europe from reaching East Asia, the Chinese Communist Party eventually set out to eliminate not just the people but the ideas that had motivated the protests. In the years to come, this would require policing what the Chinese people could see online.Nobody believed that this would work. In 2000, President Bill Clinton told an audience at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies that it was impossible. “In the knowledge economy,” he said, “economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.” The transcript records the audience reactions:“Now, there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet.” (Chuckles.) “Good luck!” (Laughter.) “That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” (Laughter.)While we were still rhapsodizing about the many ways in which the internet could spread democracy, the Chinese were designing what’s become known as the Great Firewall of China. That method of internet management—which is in effect conversation management—contains many different elements, beginning with an elaborate system of blocks and filters that prevent internet users from seeing particular words and phrases. Among them, famously, are Tiananmen, 1989, and June 4, but there are many more. In 2000, a directive called “Measures for Managing Internet Information Services” prohibited an extraordinarily wide range of content, including anything that “endangers national security, divulges state secrets, subverts the government, undermines national unification,” and “is detrimental to the honor and interests of the state”—anything, in other words, that the authorities didn’t like.[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]The Chinese regime also combined online tracking methods with other tools of repression, including security cameras, police inspections, and arrests. In Xinjiang province, where China’s Uyghur Muslim population is concentrated, the state has forced people to install “nanny apps” that can scan phones for forbidden phrases and pick up unusual behavior: Anyone who downloads a virtual private network, anyone who stays offline altogether, and anyone whose home uses too much electricity (which could be evidence of a secret houseguest) can arouse suspicion. Voice-recognition technology and even DNA swabs are used to monitor where Uyghurs walk, drive, and shop. With every new breakthrough, with every AI advance, China has gotten closer to its holy grail: a system that can eliminate not just the words democracy and Tiananmen from the internet, but the thinking that leads people to become democracy activists or attend public protests in real life.But along the way, the Chinese regime discovered a deeper problem: Surveillance, regardless of sophistication, provides no guarantees. During the coronavirus pandemic, the Chinese government imposed controls more severe than most of its citizens had ever experienced. Millions of people were locked into their homes. Untold numbers entered government quarantine camps. Yet the lockdown also produced the angriest and most energetic Chinese protests in many years. Young people who had never attended a demonstration and had no memory of Tiananmen gathered in the streets of Beijing and Shanghai in the autumn of 2022 to talk about freedom. In Xinjiang, where lockdowns were the longest and harshest, and where repression is most complete, people came out in public and sang the Chinese national anthem, emphasizing one line: “Rise up, those who refuse to be slaves!” Clips of their performance circulated widely, presumably because the spyware and filters didn’t identify the national anthem as dissent.Even in a state where surveillance is almost total, the experience of tyranny and injustice can radicalize people. Anger at arbitrary power will always lead someone to start thinking about another system, a better way to run society. The strength of these demonstrations, and the broader anger they reflected, was enough to spook the Chinese Communist Party into lifting the quarantine and allowing the virus to spread. The deaths that resulted were preferable to public anger and protest.Like the demonstrations against President Vladimir Putin in Russia that began in 2011, the 2014 street protests in Venezuela, and the 2019 Hong Kong protests, the 2022 protests in China help explain something else: why autocratic regimes have slowly turned their repressive mechanisms outward, into the democratic world. If people are naturally drawn to the image of human rights, to the language of democracy, to the dream of freedom, then those concepts have to be poisoned. That requires more than surveillance, more than close observation of the population, more than a political system that defends against liberal ideas. It also requires an offensive plan: a narrative that damages both the idea of democracy everywhere in the world and the tools to deliver it.On February 24, 2022, as Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, fantastical tales of biological warfare began surging across the internet. Russian officials solemnly declared that secret U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine had been conducting experiments with bat viruses and claimed that U.S. officials had confessed to manipulating “dangerous pathogens.” The story was unfounded, not to say ridiculous, and was repeatedly debunked.Nevertheless, an American Twitter account with links to the QAnon conspiracy network—@WarClandestine—began tweeting about the nonexistent biolabs, racking up thousands of retweets and views. The hashtag #biolab started trending on Twitter and reached more than 9 million views. Even after the account—later revealed to belong to a veteran of the Army National Guard—was suspended, people continued to post screenshots. A version of the story appeared on the Infowars website created by Alex Jones, best known for promoting conspiracy theories about the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School and harassing families of the victims. Tucker Carlson, then still hosting a show on Fox News, played clips of a Russian general and a Chinese spokesperson repeating the biolab fantasy and demanded that the Biden administration “stop lying and [tell] us what’s going on here.”Chinese state media also leaned hard into the story. A foreign-ministry spokesperson declared that the U.S. controlled 26 biolabs in Ukraine: “Russia has found during its military operations that the U.S. uses these facilities to conduct bio-military plans.” Xinhua, a Chinese state news agency, ran multiple headlines: “U.S.-Led Biolabs Pose Potential Threats to People of Ukraine and Beyond,” “Russia Urges U.S. to Explain Purpose of Biological Labs in Ukraine,” and so on. U.S. diplomats publicly refuted these fabrications. Nevertheless, the Chinese continued to spread them. So did the scores of Asian, African, and Latin American media outlets that have content-sharing agreements with Chinese state media. So did Telesur, the Venezuelan network; Press TV, the Iranian network; and Russia Today, in Spanish and Arabic, as well as on many Russia Today–linked websites around the world.This joint propaganda effort worked. Globally, it helped undermine the U.S.-led effort to create solidarity with Ukraine and enforce sanctions against Russia. Inside the U.S., it helped undermine the Biden administration’s effort to consolidate American public opinion in support of providing aid to Ukraine. According to one poll, a quarter of Americans believed the biolabs conspiracy theory to be true. After the invasion, Russia and China—with, again, help from Venezuela, Iran, and far-right Europeans and Americans—successfully created an international echo chamber. Anyone inside this echo chamber heard the biolab conspiracy theory many times, from different sources, each one repeating and building on the others to create the impression of veracity. They also heard false descriptions of Ukrainians as Nazis, along with claims that Ukraine is a puppet state run by the CIA, and that NATO started the war.Outside this echo chamber, few even know it exists. At a dinner in Munich in February 2023, I found myself seated across from a European diplomat who had just returned from Africa. He had met with some students there and had been shocked to discover how little they knew about the war in Ukraine, and how much of what they did know was wrong. They had repeated the Russian claims that the Ukrainians are Nazis, blamed NATO for the invasion, and generally used the same kind of language that can be heard every night on the Russian evening news. The diplomat was mystified. He grasped for explanations: Maybe the legacy of colonialism explained the spread of these conspiracy theories, or Western neglect of the global South, or the long shadow of the Cold War. Tyler Comrie But the story of how Africans—as well as Latin Americans, Asians, and indeed many Europeans and Americans—have come to spout Russian propaganda about Ukraine is not primarily a story of European colonial history, Western policy, or the Cold War. Rather, it involves China’s systematic efforts to buy or influence both popular and elite audiences around the world; carefully curated Russian propaganda campaigns, some open, some clandestine, some amplified by the American and European far right; and other autocracies using their own networks to promote the same language.To be fair to the European diplomat, the convergence of what had been disparate authoritarian influence projects is still new. Russian information-laundering and Chinese propaganda have long had different goals. Chinese propagandists mostly stayed out of the democratic world’s politics, except to promote Chinese achievements, Chinese economic success, and Chinese narratives about Tibet or Hong Kong. Their efforts in Africa and Latin America tended to feature dull, unwatchable announcements of investments and state visits. Russian efforts were more aggressive—sometimes in conjunction with the far right or the far left in the democratic world—and aimed to distort debates and elections in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and elsewhere. Still, they often seemed unfocused, as if computer hackers were throwing spaghetti at the wall, just to see which crazy story might stick. Venezuela and Iran were fringe players, not real sources of influence.Slowly, though, these autocracies have come together, not around particular stories, but around a set of ideas, or rather in opposition to a set of ideas. Transparency, for example. And rule of law. And democracy. They have heard language about those ideas—which originate in the democratic world—coming from their own dissidents, and have concluded that they are dangerous to their regimes. Their own rhetoric makes this clear. In 2013, as Chinese President Xi Jinping was beginning his rise to power, an internal Chinese memo, known enigmatically as Document No. 9—or, more formally, as the Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere—listed “seven perils” faced by the Chinese Communist Party. “Western constitutional democracy” led the list, followed by “universal human rights,” “media independence,” “judicial independence,” and “civic participation.” The document concluded that “Western forces hostile to China,” together with dissidents inside the country, “are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere,” and instructed party leaders to push back against these ideas wherever they found them, especially online, inside China and around the world.[From the December 2021 issue: The bad guys are winning]Since at least 2004, the Russians have been focused on the same convergence of internal and external ideological threats. That was the year Ukrainians staged a popular revolt, known as the Orange Revolution—the name came from the orange T-shirts and flags of the protesters—against a clumsy attempt to steal a presidential election. The angry intervention of the Ukrainian public into what was meant to have been a carefully orchestrated victory for Viktor Yanukovych, a pro-Russian candidate directly supported by Putin himself, profoundly unnerved the Russians. This was especially the case because a similarly unruly protest movement in Georgia had brought a pro-European politician, Mikheil Saakashvili, to power the year before.Shaken by those two events, Putin put the bogeyman of “color revolution” at the center of Russian propaganda. Civic protest movements are now always described as color revolutions in Russia, and as the work of outsiders. Popular opposition leaders are always said to be puppets of foreign governments. Anti-corruption and prodemocracy slogans are linked to chaos and instability wherever they are used, whether in Tunisia, Syria, or the United States. In 2011, a year of mass protest against a manipulated election in Russia itself, Putin bitterly described the Orange Revolution as a “well-tested scheme for destabilizing society,” and he accused the Russian opposition of “transferring this practice to Russian soil,” where he feared a similar popular uprising intended to remove him from power.Putin was wrong—no “scheme” had been “transferred.” Public discontent in Russia simply had no way to express itself except through street protest, and Putin’s opponents had no legal means to remove him from power. Like so many other people around the world, they talked about democracy and human rights because they recognized that these concepts represented their best hope for achieving justice, and freedom from autocratic power. The protests that led to democratic transitions in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, and Mexico; the “people’s revolutions” that washed across Central and Eastern Europe in 1989; the Arab Spring in 2011; and, yes, the color revolutions in Ukraine and Georgia—all were begun by those who had suffered injustice at the hands of the state, and who seized on the language of freedom and democracy to propose an alternative.This is the core problem for autocracies: The Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians, and others all know that the language of transparency, accountability, justice, and democracy appeals to some of their citizens, as it does to many people who live in dictatorships. Even the most sophisticated surveillance can’t wholly suppress it. The very ideas of democracy and freedom must be discredited—especially in the places where they have historically flourished.In the 20th century, Communist Party propaganda was overwhelming and inspiring, or at least it was meant to be. The future it portrayed was shiny and idealized, a vision of clean factories, abundant produce, and healthy tractor drivers with large muscles and square jaws. The architecture was designed to overpower, the music to intimidate, the public spectacles to awe. In theory, citizens were meant to feel enthusiasm, inspiration, and hope. In practice, this kind of propaganda backfired, because people could compare what they saw on posters and in movies with a far more impoverished reality.A few autocracies still portray themselves to their citizens as model states. The North Koreans continue to hold colossal military parades with elaborate gymnastics displays and huge portraits of their leader, very much in the Stalinist style. But most modern authoritarians have learned from the mistakes of the previous century. Freedom House, a nonprofit that advocates for democracy around the world, lists 56 countries as “not free.” Most don’t offer their fellow citizens a vision of utopia, and don’t inspire them to build a better world. Instead, they teach people to be cynical and passive, apathetic and afraid, because there is no better world to build. Their goal is to persuade their own people to stay out of politics, and above all to convince them that there is no democratic alternative: Our state may be corrupt, but everyone else is corrupt too. You may not like our leader, but the others are worse. You may not like our society, but at least we are strong. The democratic world is weak, degenerate, divided, dying.Instead of portraying China as the perfect society, modern Chinese propaganda seeks to inculcate nationalist pride, based on China’s real experience of economic development, and to promote a Beijing model of progress through dictatorship and “order” that’s superior to the chaos and violence of democracy. Chinese media mocked the laxity of the American response to the pandemic with an animated film that ended with the Statue of Liberty on an intravenous drip. China’s Global Times wrote that Chinese people were mocking the January 6 insurrection as “karma” and “retribution”: “Seeing such scenarios,” the publication’s then-editor wrote in an op-ed, “many Chinese will naturally recall that Nancy Pelosi once praised the violence of Hong Kong protesters as ‘a beautiful sight to behold.’ ” (Pelosi, of course, had praised peaceful demonstrators, not violence.) The Chinese are told that these forces of chaos are out to disrupt their own lives, and they are encouraged to fight against them in a “people’s war” against foreign influence.[Read: I watched Russian TV so you don’t have to]Russians, although they hear very little about what happens in their own towns and cities, receive similar messages about the decline of places they don’t know and have mostly never visited: America, France, Britain, Sweden, Poland—countries apparently filled with degeneracy, hypocrisy, and Russophobia. A study of Russian television from 2014 to 2017 found that negative news about Europe appeared on the three main Russian channels, all state-controlled, an average of 18 times a day. Some of the stories were obviously invented (European governments are stealing children from straight families and giving them to gay couples! ), but even the true ones were cherry-picked to support the idea that daily life in Europe is frightening and chaotic, that Europeans are weak and immoral, and that the European Union is aggressive and interventionist. If anything, the portrayal of America has been more dramatic. Putin himself has displayed a surprisingly intimate acquaintance with American culture wars about transgender rights, and mockingly sympathized with people who he says have been “canceled.”The goal is clear: to prevent Russians from identifying with Europe the way they once did, and to build alliances between Putin’s domestic audience and his supporters in Europe and North America, where some naive conservatives (or perhaps cynical, well-paid conservatives) seek to convince their followers that Russia is a “white Christian state.” In reality, Russia has very low church attendance, legal abortion, and a multiethnic population containing millions of Muslim citizens and migrants. The autonomous region of Chechnya, which is part of the Russian Federation, is governed, in practice, by elements of Sharia law. The Russian state harasses and represses many forms of religion outside the state-sanctioned Russian Orthodox Church, including evangelical Protestantism. Nevertheless, among the slogans shouted by white nationalists marching in the infamous Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstration in 2017 was “Russia is our friend.” Putin sends periodic messages to this constituency: “I uphold the traditional approach that a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, and a father is a father,” he told a press conference in December 2021, almost as if this “traditional approach” would be justification for invading Ukraine.[Michael Carpenter: Russia is co-opting angry young men]This manipulation of the strong emotions around gay rights and feminism has been widely copied throughout the autocratic world, often as a means of defending against criticism of the regime. Yoweri Museveni, who has been the president of Uganda for more than three decades, passed an “anti-homosexuality” bill in 2014, instituting a life sentence for gay people who have sex or marry and criminalizing the “promotion” of a homosexual lifestyle. By picking a fight over gay rights, he was able to consolidate his supporters at home while neutralizing foreign criticisms of his regime, describing them as “social imperialism”: “Outsiders cannot dictate to us; this is our country,” he declared. Viktor Orbán, the prime minister of Hungary, also ducks discussion of Hungarian corruption by hiding behind a culture war. He pretends that ongoing tension between his government and the U.S. ambassador to Hungary concerns religion and gender: During Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Hungary, Carlson declared that the Biden administration “hates” Hungary because “it’s a Christian country,” when in fact it is Orbán’s deep financial and political ties to Russia and China that have badly damaged American-Hungarian relations.The new authoritarians also have a different attitude toward reality. When Soviet leaders lied, they tried to make their falsehoods seem real. They became angry when anyone accused them of lying. But in Putin’s Russia, Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, and Nicolás Maduro’s Venezuela, politicians and television personalities play a different game. They lie constantly, blatantly, obviously. But they don’t bother to offer counterarguments when their lies are exposed. After Russian-controlled forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 over Ukraine in 2014, the Russian government reacted not only with a denial, but with multiple stories, plausible and implausible: It blamed the Ukrainian army, and the CIA, and a nefarious plot in which dead people were placed on a plane in order to fake a crash and discredit Russia. This tactic—the so-called fire hose of falsehoods—ultimately produces not outrage but nihilism. Given so many explanations, how can you know what actually happened? What if you just can’t know? If you don’t know what happened, you’re not likely to join a great movement for democracy, or to listen when anyone speaks about positive political change. Instead, you are not going to participate in any politics at all.[Anne Applebaum: The American face of authoritarian propaganda]Fear, cynicism, nihilism, and apathy, coupled with disgust and disdain for democracy: This is the formula that modern autocrats, with some variations, sell to their citizens and to foreigners, all with the aim of destroying what they call “American hegemony.” In service of this idea, Russia, a colonial power, paints itself as a leader of the non-Western civilizations in what the analyst Ivan Klyszcz calls their struggle for “messianic multipolarity,” a battle against “the West’s imposition of ‘decadent,’ ‘globalist’ values.” In September 2022, when Putin held a ceremony to mark his illegal annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine, he claimed that he was protecting Russia from the “satanic” West and “perversions that lead to degradation and extinction.” He did not speak of the people he had tortured or the Ukrainian children he had kidnapped. A year later, Putin told a gathering in Sochi: “We are now fighting not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world. We can frankly say that the dictatorship of one hegemon is becoming decrepit. We see it, and everyone sees it now. It is getting out of control and is simply dangerous for others.” The language of “hegemony” and “multipolarity” is now part of Chinese, Iranian, and Venezuelan narratives too.In truth, Russia is a genuine danger to its neighbors, which is why most of them are re-arming and preparing to fight against a new colonial occupation. The irony is even greater in African countries like Mali, where Russian mercenaries from the Wagner Group have helped keep a military dictatorship in power, reportedly by conducting summary executions, committing atrocities against civilians, and looting property. In Mali, as in Ukraine, the battle against Western decadence means that white Russian thugs brutally terrorize people with impunity.And yet Mali Actu, a pro-Russian website in Mali, solemnly explains to its readers that “in a world that is more and more multipolar, Africa will play a more and more important role.” Mali Actu is not alone; it’s just a small part of a propaganda network, created by the autocracies, that is now visible all over the world.The infrastructure of antidemocratic propaganda takes many forms, some overt and some covert, some aimed at the public and some aimed at elites. The United Front, the fulcrum of the Chinese Communist Party’s most important influence strategy, seeks to shape perceptions of China around the world by creating educational and exchange programs, controlling Chinese exile communities, building Chinese chambers of commerce, and courting anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. The Confucius Institutes are probably the best-known elite Chinese influence project. Originally perceived as benign cultural bodies not unlike the Goethe-Institut, run by the German government, and the Alliance Française, they were welcomed by many universities because they provided cheap or even free Chinese-language classes and professors. Over time, the institutes aroused suspicion, policing Chinese students at American universities by restricting open discussions of Tibet and Taiwan, and in some cases altering the teaching of Chinese history and politics to suit Chinese narratives. They have now been mostly disbanded in the United States. But they are flourishing in many other places, including Africa, where there are several dozen.These subtler operations are augmented by China’s enormous investment in international media. The Xinhua wire service, the China Global Television Network, China Radio International, and China Daily all receive significant state financing, have social-media accounts in multiple languages and regions, and sell, share, or otherwise promote their content. These Chinese outlets cover the entire world, and provide feeds of slickly produced news and video segments to their partners at low prices, sometimes for free, which makes them more than competitive with reputable Western newswires, such as Reuters and the Associated Press. Scores of news organizations in Europe and Asia use Chinese content, as do many in Africa, from Kenya and Nigeria to Egypt and Zambia. Chinese media maintain a regional hub in Nairobi, where they hire prominent local journalists and produce content in African languages. Building this media empire has been estimated to cost billions of dollars a year. Tyler Comrie For the moment, viewership of many of these Chinese-owned channels remains low; their output can be predictable, even boring. But more popular forms of Chinese television are gradually becoming available. StarTimes, a satellite-television company that is tightly linked to the Chinese government, launched in Africa in 2008 and now has 13 million television subscribers in more than 30 African countries. StarTimes is cheap for consumers, costing just a few dollars a month. It prioritizes Chinese content—not just news but kung-fu movies, soap operas, and Chinese Super League football, with the dialogue and commentary all translated into Hausa, Swahili, and other African languages. In this way, even entertainment can carry China-positive messages.This subtler shift is the real goal: to have the Chinese point of view appear in the local press, with local bylines. Chinese propagandists call this strategy “borrowing boats to reach the sea,” and it can be achieved in many ways. Unlike Western governments, China doesn’t think of propaganda, censorship, diplomacy, and media as separate activities. Legal pressure on news organizations, online trolling operations aimed at journalists, cyberattacks—all of these can be deployed as part of a single operation designed to promulgate or undermine a given narrative. China also offers training courses or stipends for local journalists across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, sometimes providing phones and laptops in exchange for what the regime hopes will be favorable coverage.The Chinese also cooperate, both openly and discreetly, with the media outlets of other autocracies. Telesur, a Hugo Chávez project launched in 2005, is headquartered in Caracas and led by Venezuela in partnership with Cuba and Nicaragua. Selectively culled bits of foreign news make it onto Telesur from its partners, including headlines that presumably have limited appeal in Latin America: “US-Armenia Joint Military Drills Undermine Regional Stability,” for example, and “Russia Has No Expansionist Plans in Europe.” Both of these stories, from 2023, were lifted directly from the Xinhua wire.Iran, for its part, offers HispanTV, the Spanish-language version of Press TV, the Iranian international service. HispanTV leans heavily into open anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial: One March 2020 headline declared that the “New Coronavirus Is the Result of a Zionist Plot.” Spain banned HispanTV and Google blocked it from its YouTube and Gmail accounts, but the service is easily available across Latin America, just as Al-Alam, the Arabic version of Press TV, is widely available in the Middle East. After the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an international group dedicated to fighting disinformation, found that Iran was creating additional hacking groups to target digital, physical, and electoral infrastructure in Israel (where it went after electoral rolls) and the United States. In the future, these hacking operations may be combined with propaganda campaigns.RT—Russia Today—has a bigger profile than either Telesur or Press TV; in Africa, it has close links to China. Following the invasion of Ukraine, some satellite networks dropped RT. But China’s StarTimes satellite picked it up, and RT immediately began building offices and relationships across Africa, especially in countries run by autocrats who echo its anti-Western, anti-LGBTQ messages, and who appreciate its lack of critical or investigative reporting.RT—like Press TV, Telesur, and even CGTN—also functions as a production facility, a source of video clips that can be spread online, repurposed and reused in targeted campaigns. Americans got a firsthand view of how the clandestine versions work in 2016, when the Internet Research Agency—now disbanded but based then in St. Petersburg and led by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, more famous as the mercenary boss of the Wagner Group who staged an aborted march on Moscow—pumped out fake material via fake Facebook and Twitter accounts, designed to confuse American voters. Examples ranged from virulently anti-immigration accounts aimed at benefiting Donald Trump to fake Black Lives Matter accounts that attacked Hillary Clinton from the left.Since 2016, these tactics have been applied across the globe. The Xinhua and RT offices in Africa and around the world—along with Telesur and HispanTV—create stories, slogans, memes, and narratives promoting the worldview of the autocracies; these, in turn, are repeated and amplified in many countries, translated into many languages, and reshaped for many local markets. The material produced is mostly unsophisticated, but it is inexpensive and can change quickly, according to the needs of the moment. After the October 7 Hamas attack, for example, official and unofficial Russian sources immediately began putting out both anti-Israel and anti-Semitic material, and messages calling American and Western support for Ukraine hypocritical in light of the Gaza conflict. The data-analytics company Alto Intelligence found posts smearing both Ukrainians and Israelis as “Nazis,” part of what appears to be a campaign to bring far-left and far-right communities closer together in opposition to U.S.-allied democracies. Anti-Semitic and pro-Hamas messages also increased inside China, as well as on Chinese-linked accounts around the world. Joshua Eisenman, a professor at Notre Dame and the author of a new book on China’s relations with Africa, told me that during a recent trip to Beijing, he was astonished by how quickly the previous Chinese line on the Middle East—“China-Israel relations are stronger than ever”—changed. “It was a complete 180 in just a few days.”Not that everyone hearing these messages will necessarily know where they come from, because they often appear in forums that conceal their origins. Most people probably did not hear the American-biolabs conspiracy theory on a television news program, for example. Instead, they heard it thanks to organizations like Pressenza and Yala News. Pressenza, a website founded in Milan and relocated to Ecuador in 2014, publishes in eight languages, describes itself as “an international news agency dedicated to news about peace and nonviolence,” and featured an article on biolabs in Ukraine. According to the U.S. State Department, Pressenza is part of a project, run by three Russian companies, that planned to create articles in Moscow and then translate them for these “native” sites, following Chinese practice, to make them seem “local.” Pressenza denied the allegations; one of its journalists, Oleg Yasinsky, who says he is of Ukrainian origin, responded by denouncing America’s “planetary propaganda machine” and quoting Che Guevara.Like Pressenza, Yala News also markets itself as independent. This U.K.-registered, Arabic-language news operation provides slickly produced videos, including celebrity interviews, to its 3 million followers every day. In March 2022, as the biolabs allegation was being promoted by other outlets, the site posted a video that echoed one of the most sensational versions: Ukraine was planning to use migratory birds as a delivery vehicle for bioweapons, infecting the birds and then sending them into Russia to spread disease.Yala did not invent this ludicrous tale: Russian state media, such as the Sputnik news agency, published it in Russian first, followed by Sputnik’s Arabic website and RT Arabic. Russia’s United Nations ambassador addressed the UN Security Council about the biobird scandal, warning of the “real biological danger to the people in European countries, which can result from an uncontrolled spread of bioagents from Ukraine.” In an April 2022 interview in Kyiv, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky told The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, and me that the biobirds story reminded him of a Monty Python sketch. If Yala were truly an “independent” publication, as it describes itself, it would have fact-checked this story, which, like the other biolab conspiracies, was widely debunked.[Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg interview Volodymyr Zelensky]But Yala News is not a news organization at all. As the BBC has reported, it’s an information laundromat, a site that exists to spread and propagate material produced by RT and other Russian facilities. Yala News has posted claims that the Russian massacre of Ukrainian civilians at Bucha was staged, that Zelensky appeared drunk on television, and that Ukrainian soldiers were running away from the front lines. Although the company is registered to an address in London—a mail drop shared by 65,000 other companies—its “news team” is based in a suburb of Damascus. The company’s CEO is a Syrian businessman based in Dubai who, when asked by the BBC, insisted on the organization’s “impartiality.”Another strange actor in this field is RRN—the company’s name is an acronym, originally for Reliable Russian News, later changed to Reliable Recent News. Created in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, RRN, part of a bigger information-laundering operation known to investigators as Doppelganger, is primarily a “typosquatter”: a company that registers domain names that look similar to real media domain names—Reuters.cfd instead of Reuters.com, for example—as well as websites with names that sound authentic (like Notre Pays, or “Our Country”) but are created to deceive. RRN is prolific. During its short existence, it has created more than 300 sites targeting Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America. Links to these sites are then used to make Facebook, Twitter, and other social-media posts appear credible. When someone is quickly scrolling, they might not notice that a headline links to a fake Spiegel.pro website, say, rather than to the authentic German-magazine website Spiegel.de.Doppelganger’s efforts, run by a clutch of companies in Russia, have varied widely, and seem to have included fake NATO press releases, with the same fonts and design as the genuine releases, “revealing” that NATO leaders were planning to deploy Ukrainian paramilitary troops to France to quell pension protests. In November, operatives who the French government believes are linked to Doppelganger spray-painted Stars of David around Paris and posted them on social media, hoping to amplify French divisions over the Gaza war. Russian operatives built a social-media network to spread the false stories and the photographs of anti-Semitic graffiti. The goal is to make sure that the people encountering this content have little clue as to who created it, or where or why.Russia and China are not the only parties in this space. Both real and automated social-media accounts geolocated to Venezuela played a small role in the 2018 Mexican presidential election, for example, boosting the campaign of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Notable were two kinds of messages: those that promoted images of Mexican violence and chaos—images that might make people feel they need an autocrat to restore order—and those that were angrily opposed to NAFTA and the U.S. more broadly. This tiny social-media investment must have been deemed successful. After he became president, López Obrador engaged in the same kinds of smear campaigns as unelected politicians in autocracies, empowered and corrupted the military, undermined the independence of the judiciary, and otherwise degraded Mexican democracy. In office, he has promoted Russian narratives about the war in Ukraine along with Chinese narratives about the repression of the Uyghurs. Mexico’s relationship with the United States has become more difficult—and that, surely, was part of the point.None of these efforts would succeed without local actors who share the autocratic world’s goals. Russia, China, and Venezuela did not invent anti-Americanism in Mexico. They did not invent Catalan separatism, to name another movement that both Russian and Venezuelan social-media accounts supported, or the German far right, or France’s Marine Le Pen. All they do is amplify existing people and movements—whether anti-LGBTQ, anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, anti-Ukrainian, or, above all, antidemocratic. Sometimes they provide a social-media echo. Sometimes they employ reporters and spokespeople. Sometimes they use the media networks they built for this purpose. And sometimes, they just rely on Americans to do it for them.Here is a difficult truth: A part of the American political spectrum is not merely a passive recipient of the combined authoritarian narratives that come from Russia, China, and their ilk, but an active participant in creating and spreading them. Like the leaders of those countries, the American MAGA right also wants Americans to believe that their democracy is degenerate, their elections illegitimate, their civilization dying. The MAGA movement’s leaders also have an interest in pumping nihilism and cynicism into the brains of their fellow citizens, and in convincing them that nothing they see is true. Their goals are so similar that it is hard to distinguish between the online American alt-right and its foreign amplifiers, who have multiplied since the days when this was solely a Russian project. Tucker Carlson has even promoted the fear of a color revolution in America, lifting the phrase directly from Russian propaganda. The Chinese have joined in too: Earlier this year, a group of Chinese accounts that had previously been posting pro-Chinese material in Mandarin began posting in English, using MAGA symbols and attacking President Joe Biden. They showed fake images of Biden in prison garb, made fun of his age, and called him a satanist pedophile. One Chinese-linked account reposted an RT video repeating the lie that Biden had sent a neo-Nazi criminal to fight in Ukraine. Alex Jones’s reposting of the lie on social media reached some 400,000 people.Given that both Russian and Chinese actors now blend in so easily with the MAGA messaging operation, it is hardly surprising that the American government has difficulty responding to the newly interlinked autocratic propaganda network. American-government-backed foreign broadcasters—Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Farda, Radio Martí—still exist, but neither their mandate nor their funding has changed much in recent years. The intelligence agencies continue to observe what happens—there is a Foreign Malign Influence Center under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—but they are by definition not part of the public debate. The only relatively new government institution fighting antidemocratic propaganda is the Global Engagement Center, but it is in the State Department, and its mandate is to focus on authoritarian propaganda outside the United States. Established in 2016, it replaced the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, which sought to foil the Islamic State and other jihadist groups that were recruiting young people online. In 2014–15, as the scale of Russian disinformation campaigns in Europe were becoming better known, Congress designated the GEC to deal with Russian as well as Chinese, Iranian, and other propaganda campaigns around the world—although not, again, inside the United States. Throughout the Trump administration, the organization languished under the direction of a president who himself repeated Russian propaganda lines during the 2016 campaign—“Obama founded ISIS,” for example, and “Hillary will start World War III.”Today the GEC is run by James Rubin, a former State Department spokesperson from the Bill Clinton era. It employs 125 people and has a budget of $61 million—hardly a match for the many billions that China and Russia spend building their media networks. But it is beginning to find its footing, handing out small grants to international groups that track and reveal foreign disinformation operations. It’s now specializing in identifying covert propaganda campaigns before they begin, with the help of U.S. intelligence agencies. Rubin calls this “prebunking” and describes it as a kind of “inoculation”: “If journalists and governments know that this is coming, then when it comes, they will recognize it.”The revelation in November of the Russian ties to seemingly native left-wing websites in Latin America, including Pressenza, was one such effort. More recently, the GEC published a report on the African Initiative, an agency that had planned a huge campaign to discredit Western health philanthropy, starting with rumors about a new virus supposedly spread by mosquitoes. The idea was to smear Western doctors, clinics, and philanthropists, and to build a climate of distrust around Western medicine, much as Russian efforts helped build a climate of distrust around Western vaccines during the pandemic. The GEC identified the Russian leader of the project, Artem Sergeyevich Kureyev; noted that several employees had come to the African Initiative from the Wagner Group; and located two of its offices, in Mali and Burkina Faso. Rubin and others subsequently spent a lot of time talking with regional reporters about the African Initiative’s plans so that “people will recognize them” when they launch. Dozens of articles in English, Spanish, and other languages have described these operations, as have thousands of social-media posts. Eventually, the goal is to create an alliance of other nations who also want to share information about planned and ongoing information operations so that everyone knows they are coming.It’s a great idea, but no equivalent agency functions inside the United States. Some social-media companies have made purely voluntary efforts to remove foreign-government propaganda, sometimes after being tipped off by the U.S. government but mostly on their own. In the U.S., Facebook created a security-policy unit that still regularly announces when it discovers “coordinated inauthentic behavior”—meaning accounts that are automated and/or evidently part of a planned operation from (usually) Russian, Iranian, or Chinese sources—and then takes down the posts. It is difficult for outsiders to monitor this activity, because the company restricts access to its data, and even controls the tools that can be used to examine the data. In March, Meta announced that by August, it would phase out CrowdTangle, a tool used to analyze Facebook data, and replace it with a tool that analysts fear will be harder to use.X (formerly Twitter) also used to look for foreign propaganda activity, but under the ownership of Elon Musk, that voluntary effort has been badly weakened. The new blue-check “verification” process allows users—including anonymous, pro-Russian users—to pay to have their posts amplified; the old “safety team” no longer exists. The result: After the collapse of the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine last summer, a major environmental and humanitarian disaster caused by Russian bombing over many weeks, the false narrative that Ukraine had destroyed it appeared hundreds of thousands of times on X. After the ISIS terrorist attack on a concert hall in Moscow in March, David Sacks, the former PayPal entrepreneur and a close associate of Musk’s, posted on X, with no evidence, that “if the Ukrainian government was behind the terrorist attack, as looks increasingly likely, the U.S. must renounce it.” His completely unfounded post was viewed 2.5 million times. This spring, some Republican congressional leaders finally began speaking about the Russian propaganda that had “infected” their base and their colleagues. Most of that “Russian propaganda” is not coming from inside Russia.Over the past several years, universities and think tanks have used their own data analytics to try to identify inauthentic networks on the largest websites—but they are also now meeting resistance from MAGA-affiliated Republican politicians. In 2020, teams at Stanford University and the University of Washington, together with the Digital Forensic Research Lab at the Atlantic Council and Graphika, a company that specializes in social-media analytics, decided to join forces to monitor false election information. Renée DiResta, one of the leaders of what became the Election Integrity Partnership, told me that an early concern was Russian and Chinese campaigns. DiResta assumed that these foreign interventions wouldn’t matter much, but she thought it would be useful and academically interesting to understand their scope. “Lo and behold,” she said, “the entity that becomes the most persistent in alleging that American elections are fraudulent, fake, rigged, and everything else turns out to be the president of the United States.” The Election Integrity Partnership tracked election rumors coming from across the political spectrum, but observed that the MAGA right was far more prolific and significant than any other source.The Election Integrity Partnership was not organized or directed by the U.S. government. It occasionally reached out to platforms, but had no power to compel them to act, DiResta told me. Nevertheless, the project became the focus of a complicated MAGA-world conspiracy theory about alleged government suppression of free speech, and it led to legal and personal attacks on many of those involved. The project has been smeared and mischaracterized by some of the journalists attached to Musk’s “Twitter Files” investigation, and by Representative Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. A series of lawsuits alleging that the U.S. government sought to suppress conservative speech, including one launched by Missouri and Louisiana that has now reached the Supreme Court, has effectively tried to silence organizations that investigate both domestic and foreign disinformation campaigns, overt and covert. To state baldly what is happening: The Republican Party’s right wing is actively harassing legitimate, good-faith efforts to track the production and dissemination of autocratic disinformation here in the United States.Over time, the attack on the Election Integrity Partnership has itself acquired some of the characteristics of a classic information-laundering operation. The most notorious example concerns a reference, on page 183 of the project’s final post-2020-election report, to the 21,897,364 tweets gathered after the election, in an effort to catalog the most viral false rumors. That simple statement of the size of the database has been twisted into another false and yet constantly repeated rumor: the spurious claim that the Department of Homeland Security somehow conspired with the Election Integrity Partnership to censor 22 million tweets. This never happened, and yet DiResta said that “this nonsense about the 22 million tweets pops up constantly as evidence of the sheer volume of our duplicity”; it has even appeared in the Congressional Record.The same tactics have been used against the Global Engagement Center. In 2021, the GEC gave a grant to another organization, the Global Disinformation Index, which helped develop a technical tool to track online campaigns in East Asia and Europe. For a completely unrelated, separately funded project, the Global Disinformation Index also conducted a study, aimed at advertisers, that identified websites at risk for publishing false stories. Two conservative organizations, finding their names on that latter list, sued the GEC, although it had nothing to do with creating the list. Musk posted, again without any evidence, “The worst offender in US government censorship & media manipulation is an obscure agency called GEC,” and that organization also became caught up in the endless whirlwind of conspiracy and congressional investigations.As it happens, I was caught up in it too, because I was listed online as an “adviser” to the Global Disinformation Index, even though I had not spoken with anyone at the organization for several years and was not aware that it even had a website. A predictable, and wearisome, pattern followed: false accusations (no, I was not advi

SNL Has No Idea What to Do With the College Protests

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The Saturday Night Live cold open is usually a place for the series to do its most topical, often political, material. But an awkward sense of obligation hung over last night’s sketch, about campus protests surrounding the conflict in Gaza. The activism at colleges across the U.S. has been dominating the news, especially as the university and police responses have led to arrests. SNL seemed compelled to acknowledge this in some way, but all it gave its audience was uncomfortable, limp material that failed to make any real point about the urgent subjects animating protesters.The show opened with a fake NY1 community-affairs panel featuring parents of New York City college students. Even the cast seemed ill at ease. Heidi Gardner’s Hunter College mom spoke of the strain the protests had put on her relationship with her daughter. Mikey Day’s New School dad said, “I want to let my son make his own choices, but to be honest, it’s a little scary.” Kenan Thompson, playing a Columbia dad named Alphonse Roberts, appeared to be fully supportive of the protests—“Nothing makes me prouder than young people using their voices to fight for what they believe in”—until it was implied that his daughter might be out there. “I am supportive of y’all’s kids protesting,” he said; “not my kids.”Thompson’s delivery is routinely one of the most delightful things SNL has to offer, and that was the case here. Yet the sketch was underdeveloped, with little discussion of the reason students are demonstrating, and that tension hung in the air. There was some loose commentary on class and race in the divide between the concerned white parents and Alphonse, a Black man who works multiple jobs to pay Columbia’s exorbitant tuition. It turned out that Alphonse didn’t really care about the protests, as long as his daughter “had her butt in class,” pursuing the degree he was paying for. By the time Thompson got to the close and yelled, “Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!,” he looked both surprised and relieved the moment had come.It was as if the writers felt moved to say something but ended up reaching for the most potentially inoffensive angle. The ultimate joke was less about the protests and more about how expensive it is to attend college—a fact probably anyone in the audience would agree with. The sketch certainly didn’t have the boldness of Ramy Youssef’s opening monologue earlier this season, a deft stand-up set about how “complicated” his prayers are these days, in which he also said, “Please free the people of Palestine, please,” and “Please free the hostages, all the hostages, please.”In general lately, SNL seems to be struggling with the most newsworthy material. Regarding Israel and Gaza, that makes sense. The war is nearly impossible to joke about, especially for a program trying to be broadly appealing. But even in a sketch last night on a lower-stakes topic—the ongoing beef between Kendrick Lamar and Drake, featuring host Dua Lipa as a clueless southern morning-show reporter with limited knowledge of Black culture—the gags were labored.The sketches that hit were the most bizarre and absurdist: Sarah Sherman’s riff on The Elephant Man, titled “The Anomalous Man,” in which a 19th-century woman, played by Lipa, falls for Sherman’s monstrous playwright, who turns out to be a major player and is cheating on her; and “Sonny Angel,” in which Bowen Yang played a tiny, naked doll hooking up with Lipa’s character, a woman with a fixation on her “little boyfriend” toys.One sketch late in the night perhaps unintentionally captured SNL’s predicament. In a fake ad for the “Teeny Tiny Statement Pin,” the writers mocked celebrities who were too afraid of taking a stand to wear a normal-size pin on the red carpet. “It’s wrong to stay silent, but it’s also wrong to say too much,” Gardner said. “I just wish there was a way to split the difference.” The joke was supposed to be on wishy-washy famous people—but SNL might as well have been sending up itself.

A Terse and Gripping Weekend Read

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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites The Culture Survey: Kevin TownsendA quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”The Week Ahead Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum. I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine ExistsBy Elena Dudum My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.” His 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 … Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s 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 father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.” Read the full article.More in Culture How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life Catch Up on The Atlantic What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Photo Album Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty) Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

‘By Any Means Necessary’ at Columbia

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Last month, a pro-Palestinian activist stood in front of me on Columbia University’s campus with a sign that read By Any Means Necessary. She smiled. She seemed like a nice person. I am an Israeli graduate student at the university, and I know holding that sign is within her rights. And yet, its message was so painful and disturbing that after that moment, I left New York for a few days.If I’d had the courage, I would have asked that student, "What exactly do you mean by ‘any means necessary’?” Holding up signs? Leading demonstrations? Or do knives also fall under that category? Guns and rifles as well? Raping and taking civilians hostage? (As of this writing, 133 hostages are still being held in Gaza.) And whom would these means be employed against? Columbia? The Israeli government? Soldiers? Civilians? Children?Since my return to Columbia, tensions have escalated dramatically. After protesters broke into Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night, the administration sent in the NYPD to evacuate the building and arrest the occupiers. This is the second time such measures have been taken—and they may only intensify the frustration and hostility of all involved. More worrying, this frustration might push more students to believe that “by any means necessary” is the only way to achieve their goals.At this point, anyone reading this essay might suspect that I am not objective, and they would be absolutely right. Because if you ask me what I think about when I see the words by any means necessary, it is only one thing. I think about Sagi: my best friend, whom I knew since sixth grade, the funniest and kindest person I have ever met.On the morning of October 7, Sagi Golan woke up at home with his boyfriend, Omer Ohana, whom he was supposed to marry two weeks later. They had already bought their beautiful white suits, and I had bought a plane ticket to the wedding. As a reservist, Sagi immediately headed south, where he fought bravely for hours at Kibbutz Be’eri, saving the lives of innocent adults and children, until he was killed in combat with terrorists. One hundred civilians were killed in Be’eri, and 30 more were taken hostage.I am a writer who has published short stories and a novel, but the day Sagi was killed, I lost my words. I couldn’t get a plane ticket to Israel for the funeral, so I just showed up at the airport. I was so confused and upset that when the ticketing agent tried to understand why I was trying to get on a plane without a ticket, I said, “My best friend … a wedding … a funeral …” The agent, a complete stranger, asked if he could give me a hug. Half an hour later, he’d arranged a one-way ticket.I landed an hour before Sagi’s funeral. The flowers that were meant for my best friend's wedding were laid upon his grave.[Mark Leibovich: House Republicans at the ‘Liberation Camp’]Back in New York, I barely left my apartment. I barely ate, barely slept. By that time, protests had already become routine on campus, but I was so deep in my own grief that I didn’t even notice. This went on for months. Toward the end of the fall semester, a professor took me aside after class. He told me that in his youth, he’d had friends who spent summers at kibbutzim in Israel, describing the people there as the nicest in the world. Neither he nor his friends were Jewish, but they were captivated by the concept of a cooperative socialist society. “Hearing about the attacks on those kibbutzim on October 7 was deeply painful for me,” he said. “So I can’t even imagine how painful it is for you.”That professor is a strong critic of the Israeli government and its policies. But in that particular moment, he chose to address only my pain. Although I’m still grieving and will be for a long while, his compassion helped me start to heal, and allowed me to better perceive the suffering of many others, Israelis and Palestinians, whose lives have been shattered since October 7.As an Israeli, I despise the rhetoric emerging from certain extremist politicians, who have claimed that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza or advocated for a forced deportation of Palestinians. I also believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the Jewish people. His willingness to grant political power and public legitimacy to racist and fascist ideologues is a moral stain on the history of the nation, and I am alarmed by the possibility that Netanyahu would reject a hostage deal and a cease-fire to preserve his own power.But some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. Indeed, many of their slogans have nothing to do with peace. Almost every day, I hear protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” Growing up in Israel during the early 2000s, I lived through the Second Intifada. I witnessed buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; on campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading Al-Qassam’s next targets. In the encampment itself, signs hang with small red triangles that might seem like an innocent design choice. Whether the protesters realize it or not, Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israelis that they’ve targeted and murdered.I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Bringing the NYPD onto campus on April 18, when the encampment had just been established, likely contributed to the escalation, and I know that off-campus bad actors, including politicians, are taking advantage of the volatile situation and fueling tensions. Most of the student protesters are peaceful; Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric, and some even laugh and cheer along. I’ve heard Columbia students claim that these incidents are so petty that they are not worth discussing at all. I find myself debating intelligent people who treat reported facts like myths if they don’t align with their narrative.Universities don’t have to be battlefields. More people, including faculty and students, should speak out against hateful rhetoric that is morally wrong, even if this rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment. Fundamentally, I don’t see how the protesters’ insistence on using the language of violence will contribute to the Palestinian cause, or their own. They have to know that their actions have only strengthened the extreme-right political forces in the U.S. and Israel, who are already using these statements to consolidate more power. Their expressions and actions trample the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who advocate for complexity and compassion. And they further entrench today’s distorted public discourse, which demands complete conformity from people within the same group and zero compassion for those in another.

China’s Plan to Turn Buddhism Into Communist Propaganda

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Shangri-la is best-known as a fictional place—an idyllic valley first imagined by a British novelist in the 1930s—but look at a map and you’ll find it. Sitting at the foot of the Himalayas in southwestern China, Shangri-la went by a more prosaic name until 2001, when the city was rebranded by Chinese officials eager to boost tourism. Their ploy worked.The star of Shangri-la is the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery. Since its destruction in 1966, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this Tibetan Buddhist monastery has been rebuilt into a sprawling complex crowned by golden rooftops and home to more than 700 monks. It was humming with construction when I visited in October—and filled with Chinese tourists.Like many monasteries, Sumtseling is thriving thanks to Tibetan Buddhism’s growing popularity in China. When the government loosened restrictions on religious worship in the 1990s, the practice took off, especially among urban elites unsatisfied with the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist worldview. It’s an open secret that even high-ranking party officials follow Tibetan lamas.Tibetan Buddhism’s recent spread presents both a threat and an opportunity for President Xi Jinping. He wants to make China politically and culturally homogenous, a goal that could be jeopardized by a tradition steeped in Tibetan language and history. But Xi is enacting a program that seeks to turn the rising popularity of Tibetan Buddhism to his advantage—to transform the tradition from a hotbed of dissent into an instrument of assimilation and party propaganda. If it works, it could smooth his path to lifelong power and help him remake China according to his nationalist vision.[Read: Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home]Tibetan Buddhism isn’t only a spiritual practice; it’s an expression of Tibet’s cultural identity and resistance to Chinese rule. The CCP annexed Tibet in 1951, claiming that the then-independent country belonged to historical China and had to be liberated from the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist theocracy. The Dalai Lama fled to India to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile, and Tibet has been a source of opposition to Beijing ever since.According to the Tibetan scholar Dhondup Rekjong, Xi’s ultimate goal is to erase Tibet’s language and cultural identity entirely. In a campaign similar to the CCP’s oppression of China’s Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan teachers and writers have been arrested as “separatists” for promoting the Tibetan language, and more than 1 million Tibetan children have been sent to boarding schools to be assimilated into Chinese culture. Xi’s effort to control Tibetan Buddhism is just one piece of this long-standing effort to suppress Tibetan identity, but it has taken on an additional valence as the practice expands in China.To co-opt Tibetan Buddhism’s popularity, the CCP recruits religious leaders willing to implement what it calls Sinicized Buddhism—a combination of state-sanctioned religious teachings and socialist propaganda taught by party-approved clergy—and rewards their monasteries with money and status. The well-funded Sumtseling monastery, for example, has been officially designated by the CCP as a “forerunner in implementing the Sinification of Buddhism.” To detach Buddhism from Tibetan culture, monks are pressured to replace traditional Tibetan-language scriptures with Chinese translations. According to Rekjong, they will soon be expected to practice in Mandarin.The approach is part of a broader campaign to influence all religions in China. As of January 1, every religious group is legally required to “carry out patriotic education and enhance the national awareness and patriotic sentiments of clergy and believers.” Failure to pledge loyalty to Xi, display the Chinese flag, and preach “patriotic sentiments” is now punishable by law. If Mao wanted to eliminate religion, Xi wants to nationalize it.Co-opting Tibetan Buddhism will bring Xi one step closer to achieving what he and the CCP call the “Chinese dream,” a vision that seeks to unite China’s ethnic groups—its Han majority, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and dozens more—in their dedication to the motherland and party. Xi has already consolidated more political power than just about any other modern leader, but realizing the Chinese dream will require something arguably more difficult: winning the hearts and minds of his subjects. As communist ideology loses its allure, Xi is enlisting religion to sell his program to the people.But it may not be that easy. Joshua Esler, a researcher who studies Tibetan culture at the Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Australia, told me that Tibetan Buddhism has grown so popular precisely because it offers the Chinese something their government can’t. Many Han Chinese, he said, “believe that Tibetan Buddhism has retained a spiritual authenticity that is lost in China.” They see Tibet as an alternative to the corruption, materialism, and environmental degradation that characterize life under the CCP. Any government interference in Tibetan Buddhism might alienate its followers, pushing them toward Buddhist leaders who secretly support the exiled Dalai Lama.[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]As for Tibetans themselves, Sinicized Buddhism is unlikely to become popular anytime soon. Many of them consider monasteries that have too eagerly embraced Xi’s program to be sellouts. But as the government ramps up its campaign—and as a new generation of assimilated Tibetans comes of age—that might begin to change.After visiting Shangri-la, I went to the remote Tibetan town of Daocheng, where a young monk named Phuntsok showed me around his monastery. “Without the Communist Party, we would not have freedom of religion,” Phuntsok told me as we walked through ornate chapels. He extolled the CCP’s support for Tibetan Buddhism, and no wonder: Locals told me that the monastery, Yangteng Gonpa, had received substantial government funding. A freshly paved road snaked up the mountainside on which the monastery was perched, ending at a parking lot built to accommodate hundreds of visitors. A new welcome gate was being erected, and the tourism office promoted Yangteng as one of the area’s main attractions.I followed Phuntsok up to the second floor of a chapel, where he showed me an exhibit celebrating the monastery’s “liberation” by the Red Army in 1950. The space doubled as a classroom; a whiteboard showed the faint outlines of a lesson on how monks can “actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society.” Though the monastery belongs to the Buddhist tradition of the Dalai Lama, Phuntsok didn’t mention the exiled spiritual leader, whose name and image are censored in Tibet. Mural at the Yangteng Gonpa monastery celebrating its “liberation” by the Red Army (Photograph by Judith Hertog) Instead, Phuntsok praised Gyaltsen Norbu, a Buddhist leader who was handpicked by the CCP as a child to be the Panchen Lama, a position second only to the Dalai Lama. (Many Tibetans don’t recognize Norbu as legitimate; in 1995, the Dalai Lama identified another child as the Panchen Lama, whom Chinese authorities promptly detained, and whose whereabouts remain unknown.) When the 88-year-old Dalai Lama dies, Norbu will likely be tasked by the CCP to select his replacement, who will be raised under CCP supervision and expected to promote Sinicized Buddhism. Westerners tend to imagine the Dalai Lama as a force for peace and human rights, but the position can just as easily be put into the service of totalitarianism.Gray Tuttle, a Tibetan-studies professor at Columbia University, told me that the CCP is wary of any religious movement that isn’t under its control. In 2017, the government issued orders to tear down Larung Gar, Tibet’s most popular Buddhist monastery. Thousands of residents, including many Han Chinese, were displaced from the remote valley where they had come to study. The official reason for the evictions was that the monastery didn’t comply with safety regulations; the likelier explanation is that, despite the government’s initial support for the monastery, the CCP felt threatened by its success and the influence of its teachers. “The CCP definitely wants to limit the charismatic power of any particular lama,” Tuttle told me.The challenge Xi has set for himself, then, is to reshape Tibetan Buddhism without undermining its allure. Judging by the large crowds at Sumtseling, he’s succeeding—at least among some Han Chinese. “Tibetan lamas possess the deepest knowledge,” a Han woman named Jin Yi, who had traveled 400 miles to the monastery to meet her guru, told me. But devotees like her were considerably outnumbered by tourists, many of them dressed up as Tibetan pilgrims and modeling for photos—striking lotus poses, spinning prayer wheels, or staring in feigned rapture at Buddhist murals. Few entered the chapels, where photography was prohibited. Government-sponsored monasteries like Sumtseling might attract tourists looking for a photo op, but lavish temples won’t win over true believers.

No Subject

Hope exhausted years agobut I still try.Heart thumps on doggedlyand wants to knowif nice surprises might in time arrive,and mind likewise. I readto keep a lookoutunbeknownst,or make a wild surmise. I dreamthe ground I plough and plantmight even nowsprout greenery I never saw beforeand not, as I expect, remainas rolling oceans do in falling snow.

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Monuments to the Unthinkable

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Photographs by Marc WilsonUpdated at 10:38 a.m. ET on December 5, 2022.The first memorials to the Holocaust were the bodies in concentration camps.In January 1945, Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, in southern Poland. As the German forces retreated, officers at Buchenwald, a camp in central Germany, crammed 4,480 prisoners into some 40 railcars in an effort to hide them from the Allies. They sent the train south to yet another camp: Dachau. Only a fifth of the prisoners survived the three-week journey.When Dachau was liberated in April and American forces came upon the railcars near the camp, they found corpses packed on top of one another. Soldiers turned their heads and covered their noses as the sight and smell of the bodies washed over them. They vomited; they cried.Dachau was about 10 miles northwest of Munich, and was the first concentration camp built by the Nazi regime. It had operated as a training center for SS guards and served as the prototype for other camps. Its prisoners were subjected to hard labor, corporal punishment, and torturous medical experiments. They were given barely any food; they died from disease and malnutrition, or they were executed. In Dachau’s 12 years of existence, approximately 41,500 people had been killed there and in its subcamps. Many were burned in the crematorium or buried, but thousands of corpses remained aboveground.The American soldiers wondered how this could have happened. How thousands of people could have been held captive, tortured, and killed at the camp, while just outside its walls was a small town where people were going about their lives as if impervious to the depravity taking place inside. Buying groceries, playing soccer with their children, drinking coffee with their neighbors. German people, the Americans reasoned, should have to see what had been done in their name.And so the soldiers brought a group of about 30 local officials to the camp. When they arrived on that spring day, they saw piles of bodies, mountains of rotting flesh. They also saw thousands of emaciated survivors emerging from the barracks—“walking skeletons,” as many soldiers described them, barely holding on to life. Later, American soldiers ordered farmers and local residents who were members of the Nazi party to bury some 5,000 corpses. This is how they were made to bear witness. This is how they were made to remember.The mass burial was one of the first acts of constructing public memory in a country that has been navigating questions of how to properly remember the Holocaust ever since.Today, Dachau is a memorial to the evil that once transpired there. Before the pandemic, almost 900,000 people visited every year from all over the world, including many German students. Visitors see the crematorium where bodies were burned, where the smell of smoldering flesh filled the air, where smoke rose through the chimney and lost itself in the sky. They are made to confront what happened, and they realize that it happened not so long ago.Questions of public memory—specifically how people, communities, and nations should account for the crimes of their past—are deeply interesting to me. Last year I wrote a book, How the Word Is Passed, about how different historical sites across the United States reckon with or fail to reckon with their relationship to slavery. As I traveled across the country visiting these places, I found lapses and distortions that would have been shocking if they weren’t so depressingly familiar: a cemetery where the Confederate dead are revered as heroes; a maximum-security prison built on top of a former plantation, where prisoners were once tasked with building the deathbed upon which executions would take place; a former plantation where Black employees were once made to dress as enslaved people and give tours to white visitors.[From the June 2021 issue: Clint Smith on why Confederate lies live on]During my travels I often thought of Germany, which is frequently held up as an exemplar of responsible public memory. From afar, it seemed that the Germans were doing a much better job than we were at confronting the past. But the more I invoked Germany, the less comfortable I felt drawing comparisons between America and a place I barely knew. So over the past year I made two trips to Germany, traveling to Berlin and to Dachau, visiting sites that only eight decades ago were instrumental to an industrialized slaughter of human beings unlike any the world had ever seen. I learned that the way the country remembers this genocide is the subject of ongoing debate—a debate that is highly relevant to fights about public memory taking place in the U.S.In recent years, Americans have seen a shift in our understanding of the country’s history; many now acknowledge the shameful episodes of our past alongside all that there is to be proud of. But reactionary forces today are working with ever-greater fervor to prevent such an honest accounting from taking place. State legislatures across the country are attempting to prevent schools from teaching the very history that explains why our country looks the way it does. School boards are banning books that provide historical perspectives students might not otherwise encounter.Many of these efforts are carried out in the name of “protecting” children, of preventing white people from feeling a sense of guilt. But America will never be the country it wants to be until it properly remembers what it did (and does) to Black people. This is why I went looking for lessons in Germany. Sometimes, I found, these lessons are elusive. Sometimes they’re not.I saw that Germany’s effort to memorialize its past is not a project with a specific end point. Some people I spoke with believe the country has done enough; others believe it never can. Comparisons to the United States are helpful, but also limited.Soon, those who survived the Holocaust will no longer be with us. How will their stories be told once they are gone? Germans are still trying to figure out how to tell the story of what their country did, and simultaneously trying to figure out who should tell it.Listen to Clint Smith discuss this article on Radio Atlantic:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsOn a cool October morning, I walked with Frédéric Brenner to Gleis 17, or track 17, of Berlin’s Grunewald station, the primary train platform from which Jews in Berlin were sent to the camps in Eastern Europe.Brenner, a photographer known for his portraits of Jewish communities, has spent more than 40 years traveling the world to document the Jewish diaspora, and a few years ago settled in Berlin with his wife, Hetty Berg, a Dutch woman who now serves as the director of the city’s Jewish museum.Originally, Brenner told me, he had not wanted to come to Germany at all. Many of his relatives had been killed by the Nazis. Brenner grew up in France in the years after the Holocaust. “I was raised that we don’t go to Germany, we don’t buy German, and we don’t speak German,” he said. The Polish artist Karol Broniatowski’s monument to the people who were deported from the Grunewald train station (Marc Wilson for The Atlantic) Yet he was also intrigued by the idea of returning to a country his family had been forced to flee, of not allowing that trauma to exert control over him. It had not been easy. “My father will not come and see me here,” he said. His father’s father had been one of six siblings, and only three survived the Holocaust. Brenner placed his hands in his pockets and shook his head, almost in disbelief at himself. “I never thought I would come back.” In a 2021 exhibition and accompanying book called Zerheilt: Healed to Pieces, Brenner used Berlin as a setting to explore Jewish life.The houses in Grunewald, the neighborhood where we were walking, were large and elegant, with enormous windows that invited in the sun. “These are the homes the Jews were taken from,” Brenner told me. Men, women, and children had been forced to march down these streets to the train platform and sent to their death. Most of them were made to pay for their own “tickets.”As we approached the station, we saw a concrete wall etched with silhouettes—a monument to the people who had been deported, designed by the Polish artist Karol Broniatowski and unveiled in 1991.I walked past the monument and up onto the Gleis 17 platform. I looked down. Lining the tracks were steel plates. Each one had the date of a train’s departure, the number of Jewish people on board, and the camp they were sent to. I walked up to the edge of one section and read the date: 1.3.1943.Next to the date I saw 36 JUDEN, meaning that 36 Jews had been deported on that day. Next to the number, the steel plate read berlin - auschwitz. I tried to imagine those people—maybe eight or nine families—handing over their tickets, being shuffled into the cars, and listening as the heavy doors shut behind them.I looked down again and used my foot to sweep aside a leaf; I realized that I hadn’t seen the full number. It wasn’t 36 Jews. It was 1,736 Jews.I stood there and looked at the numbers carved into the plates on either side of me. 1758 JUDEN were deported the next day. 1000 JUDEN had been deported just a few days prior. Steel plates line the tracks of the Gleis 17 platform. Each plate has the date of a train’s departure, the number of Jewish people on board, and the camp they were sent to. (Marc Wilson for The Atlantic) I tried to do the math in my head as my feet followed the chronology beneath them. But there were 186 steel plates, and as the numbers reflecting each day’s human cargo rose and fell—ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred to more than 1,000—it became impossible.The platform stretched off into the distance in both directions. I craned my neck over the edge and looked down at the train tracks, their weathered steel stained with spots of brown rust. To the right, the tracks were visible until the rail line curved and disappeared into the forest. To the left, the tracks were partially buried beneath a cluster of trees whose thin trunks arched upward into an orange-and-yellow canopy. The trees’ presence was intentional. The trunks growing between the tracks were there to say: No more trains will ever pass here.This memorial, designed by the architects Nikolaus Hirsch, Wolfgang Lorch, and Andrea Wandel, opened to the public on January 27, 1998: Holocaust Remembrance Day.I asked Brenner what he felt when standing on this platform and seeing these dates, these numbers, these words. He paused and looked around at the trees above us, his eyes moving slowly back and forth, as if he were searching for the answer in the leaves. “I cannot process it. My mind cannot process it. And obviously”—he wiped at his eyes—“my body can process it.”Unfortunately, Brenner said, his experience at Holocaust-memorial sites wasn’t always like this. He asked me if I had been to Auschwitz, in Poland. I hadn’t. “Don’t go there,” he said, shaking his head. “People are all with their phones. It should be prevented. And they go”—he raised his hand a few feet from his face and looked at his palm, emulating someone taking a selfie—“ ‘Me in front of the crematorium.’ ‘Me in front of the ramp.’ I mean, it’s so obscene.”I walked to the end of the platform to read the final plate. The last train on record left Berlin on March 27, 1945. Eighteen Jewish passengers were sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp in what is now the Czech Republic. Auschwitz had already been liberated by the Soviets by then; a week later, Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, became the first camp liberated by U.S. soldiers. The Germans were in retreat. Dachau would be liberated within weeks. The war in Europe was nearly over. Those 18 people had been so close to avoiding deportation. I wondered whether they had survived.After Brenner left, I sat down on the platform and let my legs dangle over its edge. Small blue wildflowers sprouted from the cracks in the wooden railroad ties below. From 1941 to 1945, 50,000 people were sent on these tracks to death camps and ghettos farther east. I closed my eyes and pictured soldiers yelling. Children crying. Bodies tussling. Suitcases rattling. I wondered how much the deportees knew about where they were headed when they got on those trains. I wondered how many days they spent inside those railcars. I wondered if they were able to sleep. I thought of my own children. What would I have told them about where we were going? How would I have assuaged their fear? How would I have assuaged my own?The first time I saw a Stolperstein, I almost walked past without noticing. I was heading back to my hotel after getting some tea at a café, and there they were, two of them. Small, golden cubes laid into a cobblestone sidewalk. They sat adjacent to each other outside what looked like an office building, or maybe a bank. I stepped closer to read what was written on each of them:HIER WOHNTEHELMUT HIMPELJG. 1907IM WIDERSTANDVERHAFTET 17.9.42HINGERICHTET 13.5.1943BERLIN-PLÖTZENSEEHIER WOHNTEMARIA TERWIELJG. 1910IM WIDERSTANDVERHAFTET 17.9.42HINGERICHTET 5.8.1943BERLIN-PLÖTZENSEEHier wohnte … Here lived …The English translation for Stolperstein is “stumbling stone.” Each 10-by-10-centimeter concrete block is covered in a brass plate, with engravings that memorialize someone who was a victim of the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The name, birthdate, and fate of each person are inscribed, and the stones are typically placed in front of their final residence. Most of the Stolpersteine commemorate the lives of Jewish people, but some are dedicated to Sinti and Roma, disabled people, gay people, and other victims of the Holocaust.In 1996, the German artist Gunter Demnig, whose father fought for Nazi Germany in the war, began illegally placing these stones into the sidewalk of a neighborhood in Berlin. Initially, Demnig’s installations received little attention. But after a few months, when authorities discovered the small memorials, they deemed them an obstacle to construction work and attempted to get them removed. The workers tasked with pulling them out refused.In 2000, Demnig’s Stolperstein installations began to be officially sanctioned by local governments. Today, more than 90,000 stumbling stones have been set into the streets and sidewalks of 30 European countries. Together, they make up the largest decentralized memorial in the world.Demnig, now 75, spends much of his time on the road, personally installing most of the stones. Since 2005, the sculptor Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer has made the stones. Mass-manufacturing them would feel akin to the mechanized way that the Nazis killed so many millions of people, Demnig and Friedrichs-Friedländer say, so each one is engraved by hand.I felt drawn to the Stolpersteine, compelled by the work Demnig was trying to do with them, and overwhelmed by how much they captured in such a small space.The next day I met Barbara Steiner in the city’s Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district. The neighborhood’s narrow streets were lined with five- and six-story buildings whose balconies stretched out over the cobblestone sidewalks. People bundled in coats whizzed past us on bicycles.Steiner, a convert to Judaism, is a historian and therapist. She has short, jet-black hair. She wore a sky-blue coat and small gold earrings that gleamed when they caught the sun.“I have a 12-year-old daughter,” Steiner told me as we walked toward a Stolperstein a few meters away, “and whenever we walk in the streets, we stop.” She looked down at the engraved brass in front of us. “She really wants to read every stone.” Left: Barbara Steiner in Berlin. Right: The German artist Gunter Demnig’s Stolpersteine memorialize victims of the Nazis. (Marc Wilson for The Atlantic) “They mean more than those huge things,” Steiner said, stretching her arms wide above her head. “I think the huge monuments are always about performing memory, when this is really connected to a person.” Steiner likes that you see the names of specific people. She likes that the stones are installed directly in front of the place these individuals once called home. “You can start to think, How would it have looked for them to live here? ”Stolpersteine are largely local initiatives, laid because a family, or residents of an apartment complex or neighborhood, got together and decided they wanted to commemorate the people who had once lived there. Steiner said that students at her daughter’s school had begun researching the building across the street from the school, and discovered that a number of Jewish families had lived there. Then they applied to have Stolpersteine installed.Demnig has said that this is the most meaningful aspect of the project for him. He believes that for children and adults alike, 6 million is too abstract a number, and individual stories are more powerful tools than statistics for coming to terms with this history. “Sometimes you need just one fate,” he has said, to start thinking about how someone’s life relates to your own: Maybe they lived on your street, or were the same age you are now when they were murdered. “Those are the moments I know they will go home as different people.” Each stone creates its own unofficial ambassadors of memory.Steiner and I walked a bit farther down the street. She stopped in front of a beige building with a large white archway above a brown door. “I lived here,” she said. I looked at the door, then looked down. Five stumbling stones lay together among the cobblestones, their brass faces shimmering. Steiner translated them into English for me:Max Zuttermann. Born 1868.Deported October 18, 1941.Murdered January 15, 1942.Gertrud Zuttermann. Born 1876.Deported October 18, 1941.Murdered December 20, 1941.Fritz Hirschfeldt. Born 1902.Deported October 18, 1941.Murdered May 8, 1942.Else Noah. Born 1873.Deported July 17, 1942.Murdered March 14, 1944.Frieda Loewy. Born 1889.humiliated/disenfranchised.Died by suicide June 2, 1942.I did the math to estimate how old they might have been when they died: Max Zuttermann, 74. Gertrud Zuttermann, 65. Fritz Hirschfeldt, 40. Else Noah, 71. Frieda Loewy, 53.I glanced at Steiner; she was still looking down at the stones, her hands in her coat pockets, her legs crossed at her ankles.I thought about what it must be like to live in a home where you walk past these stones, and these names, every day. I imagined what it might be like if we had something commensurate in the United States. If, in front of homes, restaurants, office buildings, churches, and schools there were stones to mark where and when enslaved people had been held, sold, killed. I shared this thought with Steiner. “The streets would be packed,” she said.She was right. I imagined New Orleans, my hometown, once the busiest slave market in the country, and how entire streets would be covered in brass stones—whole neighborhoods paved with reminders of what had happened. New Orleans is, today, at a very different place in its reckoning with the past; it has only recently been focused on removing its homages to enslavers. Over the past few years, the statues of Confederate leaders I grew up seeing have been removed from their pedestals, and streets named after slaveholders have been renamed for local Black artists and intellectuals. My own middle school has a new name as well. As I looked at the stumbling stones beneath me in Berlin, I wondered if there might be a future for them on the streets I rode my bike on growing up.I asked Steiner how it felt to have these stones here, in front of what was once her home. “My daughter now reads these names and asks herself, Could this be me? ” she said. “But what I like is to stand here and think about them, how they might have lived here.”As I looked at the house, I began to imagine who these people could have been. Perhaps Max and Gertrud were married; I pictured them making Shabbat dinner for their adult children on Friday evenings. Perhaps Fritz helped them with their groceries as they made their way up the stairs. Maybe they spoke about what the Zuttermanns planned on cooking, whether they would see one another at synagogue on Saturday. Perhaps Max and Gertrud invited Fritz to join them for their meal. Perhaps they invited Else and Frieda too. Maybe they all sat around the table. Perhaps they laughed. Perhaps they sang. Perhaps they played a game of cards to end the evening. Perhaps, as wax began to collect at the bottom of the small plates that held the candles, they discussed the new laws that were restricting their lives, the rumors of war. Perhaps they asked one another whether they still had time to leave. (I later learned that Max and Gertrud were in fact married, and that Fritz was their subtenant. The Zuttermanns’ two adult daughters, I found, had been able to escape Germany.)My eyes moved from the building we stood in front of to the buildings adjacent to it. When German Jews were led to the trains for deportation, the block would have been lined with other Germans who watched from their windows, their storefronts, the sidewalk. Maybe some cheered. Most probably said nothing.Steiner saw me looking at these other buildings and must have realized what I was thinking about. “There’s the relational aspect,” she said. “It was their neighbors that had been murdered. It was their neighbors that had been deported. It was their neighbors that had been thrown out to Auschwitz. It was their neighbors who lost their lives. And we need to understand this. It was not an abstract group.”So many of Germany’s monuments, I was learning, were not built until long after the war. The first Stolperstein was laid in 1996. The Gleis 17 memorial opened in 1998. The Jewish Museum Berlin opened in 2001. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, in Berlin, opened in 2005.When Steiner was a child, the country’s major sites of memory about the Holocaust were the concentration camps. Her parents had taken her to Dachau when she was very young. She was left haunted and terrified by the experience.I asked if she had taken her daughter to any camps. She shook her head and told me she thought that, at 12, she was still too young. They had considered going to Auschwitz in the summer, but Steiner had changed her mind, ultimately deciding it wasn’t yet time. Her daughter had read about the Holocaust, and it seemed to have overwhelmed her. She struggled to sleep. “She was worried that if she fell asleep, she might not wake up,” Steiner told me.Anti-Semitism and racism have been on the rise in Germany in recent years as the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has gained political power; the German government recently reported a 29 percent increase in anti-Semitic crimes. Steiner shared a story about how, on one recent Holocaust Memorial Day, two boys at her daughter’s school had pretended to “hunt” her daughter as they chased her through the hallways.“She was … hunted by them?” I asked, wanting to make sure I had heard correctly.“Yes, she was hunted by them.” Then, in a singsongy voice meant to emulate the melody of a nursery rhyme, she said what the boys had said to her daughter: “My grandfather was Adolf Hitler and he killed your grandfather.”I put my hands in my pockets and took a deep breath.“This is everyday Jewish life for children,” she said. “If you raise a Jewish child, how can you avoid this topic?”Steiner’s question echoed the question that Black parents in the U.S. wrestle with every day. How can we protect our children from the stories of violence that they might find deeply upsetting while also giving them the history to understand who they are in relation to the world that surrounds them? My son is 5 years old; my daughter is 3. I think about what it means to strike that balance all the time.I mentioned this to Steiner and she nodded, then looked back down at the stones in front of us. “I wonder what it’s like, because when you’re Black in America, at least there are more of you who could connect and support each other. There are so few Jews.”This point—this difference—had become clear to me in my first few days in Germany. In the United States there are 41 million Black people; we make up 12.5 percent of the population. In Germany, there are approximately 120,000 Jewish people, out of a population of more than 80 million. They represent less than a quarter of 1 percent of the population. More Jewish people live in Boston than in all of Germany. (Today, many Jews in Germany are immigrants from the former Soviet Union and their descendants.) Lots of Germans do not personally know a Jewish person.This is part of the reason, Steiner believes, that Germany is able to make Holocaust remembrance a prominent part of national life; Jewish people are a historical abstraction more than they are actual people. In the United States, there are still millions of Black people. You cannot simply build some monuments, lay down some wreaths each year, and apologize for what happened without seeing the manifestation of those past actions in the inequality between Black and white people all around you.Steiner also believes that the small number of Jewish people who do reside in Germany exist in the collective imagination less as people, and more as empty canvases upon which Germans can paint their repentance. As the scholar James E. Young, the author of The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, writes, “The initial impulse to memorialize events like the Holocaust may actually spring from an opposite and equal desire to forget them.” The American Jewish writer Dara Horn puts it more bluntly in her book People Love Dead Jews, writing that in our contemporary world, most peopleonly encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.Steiner and I continued walking. Before, I had seen stumbling stones only intermittently; now I saw them in front of almost every building. Three here. Six there. Eight here. Twelve there. When we encountered a group of a dozen or more stones, we would stop, look down, and read the names as we had done in front of her old home. I saw dates of birth that read 1938, 1940, 1941. These were children—a 5-year-old, a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old.A blackbird landed near the brass plates, jabbing its beak into the spaces between the cobblestones with quick, jerking movements. A little girl walked by and pointed in its direction, turning and saying something to her mother as she held her hand.The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, recognized as the official Holocaust memorial of Germany, sits in the center of downtown Berlin, just south of the famous Brandenburg Gate and a block away from the site of the bunker where Hitler died by suicide. Designed by the American Jewish architect Peter Eisenman and spanning 200,000 square feet, it consists of rows of 2,711 concrete blocks that range in height from eight inches to more than 15 feet tall. The space resembles a graveyard, a vast cascade of stone markers with no names or engravings on their facade. The ground beneath them dips and rises like waves.The memorial is significant not only for its size and location—the equivalent, in the United States, would be the placement of thousands of stone blocks in Lower Manhattan to honor those subjected to chattel slavery, or on Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C., to remember the victims of Indigenous genocide—but also because it was constructed with the political support and full financial backing of the German government.Steiner told me that, in her opinion, the stumbling stones are a much better means of memorialization than something like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. “This has more to do with the German society and the expectation of having something big,” she said, stretching her hands out again. “We did a big Holocaust, we have a big monument.”Steiner said that whenever she went down to the memorial, she saw people smoking while standing on top of the columns, or jumping back and forth from one to another. “It’s lost its purpose and meaning,” she said. “Maybe it never got it.”When I visited the memorial, the sky was overcast, its long sweep of endless gray matching the color of the stone columns beneath it. A group of young people took selfies in front of the columns, some throwing up peace signs or puckering their lips as they sat cross-legged on top of a stone. Two women stood in between the shadows, their faces covered in tears, and held each other’s hands. A class of students looked up at their teacher as he explained what lay behind him, their eyes moving from him to the columns to one another with a silent solemnity. Three small children played hide-and-seek among the columns, shrieking in delight when they discovered one another. The memorial had become a part of the city’s landscape; different people engaged with the space in different ways. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe is in the center of Berlin, near the Reichstag. (Marc Wilson for The Atlantic) I wondered, as I toured the monument, how much of the motivation to create memorials to the Holocaust reflected a desire for Germany to—internally—reckon with its heinous state-sanctioned crimes, and how much of it stemmed from a hope that putting memorials up would demonstrate to the rest of the world that Germany had accounted for its past? Put more directly, were monuments like this one for Germans to collectively remember what had been done? Were they a performance of contrition for the rest of the world? Were they both?James E. Young writes that “memory is never shaped in a vacuum,” and that the reasons for the existence of Holocaust museums and monuments in Germany, and across the world, “are as various as the sites themselves.” Some, he argues, were built in response to efforts of Jewish communities to remember, and others were built because of “a government’s need to explain a nation’s past to itself.” The aim of some is to educate the next generation and forge a sense of collective experience, while others are born of guilt. “Still others are intended to attract tourists.” The messy truth is that all of these ostensibly disparate motives can find a home in the same project.At the edge of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, I met up with Deidre Berger, the chair of the executive board of the Jewish Digital Cultural Recovery Project Foundation and the former director of the American Jewish Committee’s Berlin office. She was bundled in an all-black ensemble—jacket, shoes, scarf, and gloves—that matched her short black hair. Berger is American, and Jewish. She has lived in Berlin since 1998.We discussed the differences in the ways the Holocaust is memorialized in the United States versus in Germany, which she called “enormous.” In the United States, she said, the push for Holocaust remembrance has come largely from Holocaust survivors themselves, as well as their descendants.In Germany, after the war hardly any Jews were left—only 37,000 in the entire country in 1950—and the push to create a national Holocaust memorial came largely from non-Jewish communities, many years later.The idea “came from within German society,” Berger said, but there had been, in previous decades, “perhaps some gentle pushing from other countries that felt that it was important for Germany to have a visible symbol of marking the Holocaust.” Notably, the German word for guilt, schuld, is the same as the word for debt.It wasn’t always obvious that Germany would build memorials to the Nazis’ victims; for decades there was mostly silence. In her book Learning From the Germans, the philosopher Susan Neiman writes that families in Germany simply did not discuss the war in the years immediately following it. “Neither side could bear to talk about it,” she writes, “one side afraid of facing its own guilt, the other afraid of succumbing to pain and rage.”When 22 of the Third Reich’s leaders stood trial in Nuremberg, from November 1945 to October 1946, the four major Allied powers vowed to publicize the proceedings. Officials in the American zone put up billboards and posters with photographs depicting Nazi crimes, had films made that documented the gruesomeness of the concentration camps, and ensured that German newspapers and radio stations reported on the trial. The Allies hoped that the public nature of the trials, and the extensive documentation presented, would help educate Germans about the true scope and horror of what the Nazis had done. According to the military historian Tyler Bamford, in the final month of the tribunal, 71 percent of Germans surveyed by American authorities said that they had learned something new from it.But awareness did not necessarily translate into reckoning. For some, even those who had supported Hitler, Nuremberg provided the opportunity to wash their hands of culpability, and pin responsibility only on the Nazi leaders on trial. When confronted with the Nazis’ atrocities, many Germans repeated the phrase “Wir konnten nichts tun”—“We could do nothing.” In the years after the trial, former Nazi officials rejoined mainstream society, and many took on positions similar to those they’d held before the war.Neiman writes that in those postwar years, many Germans saw themselves not as perpetrators, but as victims—as people who had experienced enormous suffering that wasn’t being acknowledged by the rest of the world. Husbands, sons, and brothers had died in battle; women and children had spent long, freezing nights in cellars as bombs dropped overhead; civilians survived on scraps of potato peels. Not only were they being asked to accept having lost the war, but they were being told, amid all their hardship, that they were responsible for evil. The German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich write in their book, The Inability to Mourn, that the nation experienced a sort of paralysis, in which people couldn’t countenance their soldiers moving so quickly from heroes to victims to perpetrators. If they couldn’t even mourn their sons and brothers because the world was telling them they were monsters, how could they bring themselves to mourn the people those soldiers had killed?“There wasn’t really a confrontation until the ’60s, when the young generation started asking their parents what they did during the war,” Berger told me. They wanted to know what had happened in their community—and their country—and why there was so much silence. Germans, Berger said, many of them the children of those who had witnessed or participated in the Holocaust, began tracing Jewish histories, inviting Jewish families who had fled to come back to visit their towns.As Berger and I spoke, I wondered about the people leading the various museums, memorials, and other cultural institutions that had resulted from this push in the decades since the ’60s. How many of them were Jewish? Did it matter?I had heard that Germans would sometimes create events, commissions, and institutions centered on commemorating Jewish life without meaningfully consulting any Jewish people. Berger closed her eyes and nodded when I mentioned this, and said that it had been a major issue for years. She told me about how, in 2009 and 2015, the German Parliament had created independent commissions on fighting anti-Semitism. The 2009 commission included only a single Jewish person. The 2015 commission, at first, had no Jewish members at all. Berger found this unacceptable, so she approached officials in the Interior Ministry. She was appalled by the response she got. “They said, ‘Well, Jews are not impartial enough, because they’re part of the story.’ ” (Two Jewish members were eventually added to the eight-person committee, bringing its total to 10.) She tucked her lips inside her mouth as if she was preventing herself from saying something she would regret.I was struck by how much this idea echoed what Black scholars in the United States have navigated for generations. The preeminent early-20th-century Black American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois faced questions from white scholars and funders who doubted his ability to do his work objectively and with the appropriate level of scientific rigor, because they thought he was too invested in the issues he was studying. He was often encouraged to partner with white scholars, who could balance out his ostensible biases.When I asked Berger what she thought of the Stolpersteine, she told me she feels ambivalent. On the one hand, she said, the project has brought communities together to research their history. But on the other hand, she finds the idea that people are stepping on the names of Jewish people deeply unsettling. “Every time, I cringe,” she said. “They should be plaques on the wall. And why aren’t they? Because most of the owners of buildings wouldn’t accept, even to this day, a plaque saying, ‘Here is where a Jewish family lived.’ ”Berger is not alone in this sentiment. In Munich, Charlotte Knobloch, a Holocaust survivor who is the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, persuaded the city to ban Stolpersteine in 2004. The city eventually created plaques at eye level. “It is my firm belief that we need to do everything we can in order to make sure that remembrance preserves the dignity of the victims,” Knobloch has said. “People murdered in the Holocaust deserve better than a plaque in the dust, street dirt and even worse filth.”Berger also believes that sometimes the laying of the stones can serve as a sort of penance: After a Stolperstein has been placed, people wipe their hands and believe that they have done all there is to do.Even though Berger and the American Jewish Committee had, for years, been some of the most prominent advocates for the memorial where we now stood, she also has mixed feelings about how the space turned out. “It’s overwhelming. And the symbolism isn’t entirely clear to me. I mean, we don’t need to have a cemetery,” she said, looking around at the stones. “The whole country is a cemetery.”But Berger says she is grateful—and relieved—that the space exists.Eisenman, the architect who designed the memorial, was cognizant of how difficult—perhaps impossible—it would be to create a Holocaust memorial commensurate with the history it carries. “The enormity and horror of the Holocaust are such that any attempt to represent it by traditional means is inevitably inadequate,” he wrote in 2005.Criticism of the monument has come in many forms. In 2017, a leader of the far-right AfD party said that the monument was a “symbol of national shame”; he didn’t think that shame was a good thing. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, some critics have charged that the memorial isn’t inclusive enough. Demnig, the originator of the Stolperstein project, supports the memorial as a whole, but has been critical of its exclusive focus on Jewish victims. “There were other drafts that would have included all groups of victims that, in my opinion, would have been more effective,” he said in 2013.The New Yorker writer Richard Brody visited the monument in 2012, and took issue with the very framing of the memorial: “The title doesn’t say ‘Holocaust’ or ‘Shoah’; in other words, it doesn’t say anything about who did the murdering or why—there’s nothing along the lines of ‘by Germany under Hitler’s regime,’ and the vagueness is disturbing,” he wrote. “The passive voice of the title—‘murdered Jews’—elides the question that wafts through the exhibit like an odor: murdered by whom?”I understand some of these criticisms, and still, I couldn’t help but appreciate the scale and scope of the space. I couldn’t help but admire how centrally located it was in the city. There was no missing it. There was no avoiding it. No other nation on Earth has done anything quite like it. Not the United States for its genocide of Indigenous peoples or centuries of enslavement; not France or Britain for their histories of colonial violence; not Japan for its imperial projects across eastern Asia.Walking through the monument’s columns amid the cacophony of the city all around me felt haunting, but appropriately so. It is a space meant to haunt, meant to overwhelm. But beneath the stones, in the memorial’s underground museum, there was only silence.I stepped into one of the subterranean exhibits. The room was dark but for illuminated glass panels underfoot. Other visitors moved through the space like shadows, each of us silent, looking down at the glowing glass beneath us. Below each pane were letters, diary entries, and accounts written by people who had been murdered in the Holocaust. I leaned in closer to the panel I was looking at.There was a note written by a 12-year-old girl named Judith Wishnyatskaya, included as a postscript to a letter her mother had written to her father on July 31, 1942:Dear father! I am saying goodbye to you before I die. We would so love to live, but they won’t let us and we will die. I am so scared of this death, because the small children are thrown alive into the pit. Goodbye forever. I kiss you tenderly.Yours J.Judith and her mother were killed shortly afterward. Their letter was found by a Soviet soldier near the eastern-Polish town of Baranowicze (in what is now Belarus).Each panel told the story of another victim, the floor glowing with accounts of murder and terror, a fluorescent extension of the work the stumbling stones were doing throughout the city. There was something about the physical act of looking down, of having your body pause and hover over the names, that made the experience feel somehow intimate.After reading all of the panels, I took a seat on a bench toward the back of the room. In front of me, and to my left and right, and then behind me, I saw numbers with the names of different European countries alongside them. I quickly realized that these numbers reflected estimates of how many Jews from each nation had been killed in the Holocaust.Belgium 25,000–25,700Hungary 270,000–300,000Greece 58,900–59,200Latvia 65,000–70,000Italy 7,600–8,500Lithuania 140,000–150,000Germany 160,000–165,000Poland 2,900,000–3,100,000I stopped at this last number and caught my breath. I hadn’t known that half of the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust were Polish. (Ninety percent of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland were murdered, I would later learn.) By the end of the war, only 380,000 Polish Jews survived.In school, I read more books about the Holocaust than perhaps any other atrocity in human history, including those that took place on American soil. I have watched countless films and documentaries on World War II and the Holocaust. But it wasn’t until this moment, surrounded by these numbers that stretched around the room and the stories that glowed underfoot, that I began to fully feel the scale of this atrocity.Approximately two-thirds of all the Jews in Europe were killed in the span of just a few years, a level of slaughter that is overwhelming to consider. Something about being there—in Berlin, in this museum, in this room—made it all feel so much more real.The next day I met Lea Rosh at a small café in the Güntzelkiez neighborhood of Berlin. Rosh, who is not Jewish, is a former television journalist, and was among the first women to manage a public broadcasting service in Germany. Along with the historian Eberhard Jäckel (who was not Jewish either), she spent nearly 20 years pushing for Germany to build a memorial to the Holocaust. Their unrelenting advocacy is widely understood as one of the primary reasons the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe exists at all.Rosh was 85 years old when we met. She is not quite fluent in English, and I don’t speak German, so we each spoke slowly, attempting not to miss each other’s words. She was accompanied by a man named Olaf, and we discussed her work to bring the memorial to fruition in between bites of cake and fruit.Rosh said that in the mid-1980s she and Jäckel had begun collaborating on a four-part television documentary about the Holocaust. Jäckel, one of Germany’s leading historians of Nazism, told her that Germany needed to build a monument to the Jews killed in the Holocaust. Not just the German Jews, but the Jews from all across Europe. “The German victims were 2 percent of the whole,” she told me. Her conversations with Jäckel, and the experience of working on the series, were transformative for Rosh. Lea Rosh, who helped push Germany to build a national memorial to the Holocaust. In 2021, a portrait of Rosh by Frédéric Brenner was featured in an exhibition of the photographer’s work at the Jewish Museum Berlin. (Jule Roehr) In 1989, Rosh and Jäckel published a formal call to organize German citizens to help erect a memorial. “I was sure we’d have it in three years, because it’s so clear to do it,” she said as she set her fork down. “It was not clear for this country.”So this became her mission, to make the moral imperative for building a memorial undeniably, inescapably clear. She began a public crusade to pressure the German government, she told me, speaking about the need for a memorial on her television show, and her group took out ads in newspapers and met with political and civic leaders. She said that every Saturday for about eight years, she stood on the street with other advocates, collecting signatures in support of a museum. “If it’s raining? Okay. It snowed? Okay. Sunshine? Okay. We stood there.”Rosh said that young people were the most supportive of her efforts. I asked her why that was. Then Olaf raised his eyebrows and said, “The old ones were soldiers in the war.”“People did not want to show we were guilty,” Rosh said. “But the Holocaust memorial shows …” Olaf completed her thought: “Yes, we were guilty.”Despite the resistance, Rosh and others pressed ahead. Then, in 1999, a decade after she began advocating for it and more than five decades after the event itself, the German Parliament approved the construction of a national Holocaust memorial. It would take another six years to build.Her work, however, has not been without controversy. Barbara Steiner had told me about how, when Rosh gave a speech at the memorial’s opening, she held up a tooth—“a tooth that she found on the ground of a concentration camp.” Rosh announced that she planned to have the tooth embedded in the memorial. “Everybody was shocked,” Steiner told me. “You don’t take something of a murdered person with you.” Steiner shook her head, exasperated. (The tooth was not ultimately added to the memorial.)As I walked through the streets of Berlin, past the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, past the Jewish Museum, past Gleis 17, past Hitler’s bunker, and past the Stolpersteine that are scattered across the streets of the city like stars, I had the feeling of being confronted with the past at every moment. I wondered if I would feel different if I encountered these every day. Would the gleam of the stumbling stones eventually dim and fade into the rest of the pavement? Would the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe become a silhouette in the corner of my eye as I sped by in a taxi?“I think there’s a real risk of all these manifestations becoming either senseless or unreadable, or just part of the city landscape at some point,” the German historian Daniel Schönpflug told me. “It creates the feeling that we’re doing so well at this, we’re world champion of Holocaust memory, and this gives us also legitimacy,” he said. “This memory loses its pain, once it’s put into an almost positive, proud context.”Was Rosh happy with how the memorial and the museum had turned out? I asked. Did she think that it did justice to the victims?“It’s 6 million murdered people. You cannot be happy,” she said, her voice becoming low. “You can [only] be satisfied that it was possible to build them a memorial.”I asked Rosh if she thinks that Germany has done enough to account for its past, or if she thinks there is still more to do. She paused and looked up, her eyes searching the ceiling. “Difficult to say, because our memorial is a big memorial. It’s the biggest. There’s no example in the world for such a thing,” she said. She told me that memorials and monuments had been constructed to essentially every group of victims, and that Germany had come a long way since she first began her advocacy, almost 35 years ago.“I think you cannot do more. What else?”The memory of Jewish life in Berlin is not singularly tied to the spectacle of mass death. There is a museum that attempts to ensure that German Jews are remembered as a people with a rich culture, and not only remembered for what was done to them. At a café in Berlin’s Schöneberg neighborhood, I met with Cilly Kugelmann, who was a co-founder and, until her retirement in 2020, the program director of the Jewish Museum Berlin.Kugelmann compared that institution to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in the sense that both attempt to tell the story of an oppressed group, without the entirety of their cultural identities being linked to that oppression. Jewish history, Kugelmann said, does not begin and end with the Holocaust.I was curious what she made of the other memorials and museums across Berlin. “Well, I think one has to ask yourself, what would Germany be without these memorials? You can criticize every single memorial. It’s an aesthetic expression and it never comes close to what really happened, so it’s always ambiguous. But on the other hand, what would we say if it wouldn’t be there at all? It’s a dilemma. It’s an unsolvable dilemma.”Both of Kugelmann’s parents were Jews from Poland. They were married before the war and had two children. In 1943 they were all sent to Auschwitz. Her parents survived, but their first set of children—siblings Kugelmann never knew—were killed. Cilly Kugelmann, who retired in 2020 as the program director of the Jewish Museum Berlin, in the museum’s“Memory Void,” which includes an installation called Shalekhet (Fallen Leaves), by the Israeli artist Menashe Kadishman. Visitors are allowed to walk on the more than 10,000 open-mouthed iron faces that cover the floor. (Marc Wilson for The Atlantic) Her parents didn’t talk much, or really at all, about their time in the concentration camps. But Kugelmann told me that once, she was watching a film about the liberation of the camps, and as the camera was scanning across survivors, she saw her father’s face.After the war ended and her parents were liberated, they moved to Frankfurt am Main, where they started a new family. As a child, Kugelmann was aware that she had a pair of siblings who “were no longer there,” but she did not have a full sense of what that meant. Had they died? Were they living somewhere else? Would she ever meet them? Her mother wore a silver medallion around her neck with photos of the two children, but she never spoke of them.It was only many years later that Kugelmann was able to put the pieces together. From the work of the Polish Auschwitz survivor Tadeusz Borowski and others, she learned about the ghetto from which her family had been deported. She learned that all the infants and smaller children from this ghetto, including her siblings, would have been killed immediately upon their arrival at Auschwitz. Even when she discovered this information, she never brought it up with her parents.I asked Kugelmann why not. Kugelmann placed her tea down and traced her fingers along the edge of the saucer. “You have a sense of what you can ask a parent and what you can’t ask a parent. If I try to explain it to people, I refer to rape. The most humiliating thing that can happen. And the question is: Would you be able to question your mother about details of the rape? Of course you would not.”“And for you that feels analogous?” I asked.“Yes, absolutely.”The House of the Wannsee Conference is a villa about half an hour from the center of Berlin, on a narrow, one-way street just off Wannsee Lake.Everything about the villa is idyllic. Behind the mansion, a small band of brown ducks dipped their heads into the lake and then returned to the surface, their wet feathers gleaming under the midday sun. Sailboats swept across the water while gentle waves lapped against a stone wall on the shore. Wind chimes on a nearby tree sang a chorus in the light breeze.This was where, on January 20, 1942, the leaders of the Nazi regime discussed and drafted their ideas about how to implement “the final solution of the Jewish question.”Exactly 50 years later, the villa was reopened as a museum. But unlike mo