Vereinte Nationen: UN-Vollversammlung stimmt über höheren Status für Palästina ab

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A House Oversight Committee hearing Thursday night on whether to move forward with a contempt resolution against Attorney General Merrick Garland devolved into chaos as lawmakers took turns body-shaming each other, starting with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene telling Rep. Jasmine Crockett “I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading.”  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stepped in to...

The United States Congress took six months to approve a supplemental spending bill that includes aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The drama, legislative maneuvering, and threats to remove a second speaker of the House of Representatives have left reasonable people asking what, exactly, is going on with Republican legislators: Have they recognized the perilous state of the world and the importance of U.S. leadership? Or was the difficulty in securing the aid the real signal worth paying attention to—making Republican support for the assistance just a last gasp of a conservative internationalism that is no longer a going concern?In the breach between these two narratives lies the future of the Republican Party—whether it has become wholly beholden to the America First proclivities of Donald Trump or can be wrenched back to the reliably internationalist foreign policy of Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.Former President Trump has long questioned the value to the U.S. of international alliances, trade, and treaties, and involvement in global institutions. Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, who propounds the Trumpian view, recently said of the fight over the supplemental spending bill: “Notwithstanding some lingering Cold Warriors, we’re winning the debate because reality is on our side.” And Vance may be right about who’s winning: 22 of the 49 Republicans in the Senate voted for the supplemental when it was presented in February, at a time when Trump was agitating against it; Speaker of the House Mike Johnson persuaded Trump to stay on the sidelines for the April vote, and five more Republican senators opposed the legislation anyway. That suggests a rising, not ebbing, tide.If Vance is correct, this could be the last aid package for Ukraine—meaning that Ukraine will ultimately lose its war with Russia. Republicans will have the U.S. pull away from alliance commitments in Asia and Europe and withdraw from participating in trade agreements and international institutions.[Anne Applebaum: The GOP’s Pro-Russia caucus lost. Now Ukraine has to win.]But Republican lawmakers and voters are far from united around this worldview. Despite the onslaught against internationalism, Republican voter support for NATO has decreased only marginally, from 44 percent in 2015 to 43 percent currently. And despite some radical party members’ fulminating that Republicans who’d voted for the supplemental would be hounded by voters, no backlash actually took place.Some Republican legislators who supported the supplemental spoke of it in terms redolent of the internationalist Republican tradition. House Appropriations Chair Tom Cole, of Oklahoma, said: “This House just showed tyrants and despots who wish harm upon us and our allies that we will not waver as the beacon of leadership and liberty.” Johnson, who’d formerly voted against aid to Ukraine, put his job on the line to get the bill passed, in the name of doing what he said was “the right thing.” Representative Mike McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, described the speaker’s reversal as “transformational … he’s realizing that the world depends on this.” And if that is indeed where Johnson stands, he does so in the company of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has indicated that he will commit his final two years in the Senate to restoring Republican internationalism.Ultimately, the Republican Party’s direction will become clear based on the policies it chooses to oppose or support. The supplemental was one test; some of the others are less high-profile but at least as consequential, if not more so, because they concern the very building blocks of a conservative international order. Given that the leader of the Republican Party does not favor these ideas, creating policies to advance them will be difficult. But difficult is not impossible, as the success of the supplemental shows.For example: Will Republicans fight to increase defense spending? The past four presidential administrations have failed to spend even what was needed to carry out their own national-security strategies—and this at a time when the world has been growing more dangerous, as U.S. adversaries have coalesced into an axis of authoritarian powers. Defense spending is popular with the public: In a Reagan Institute poll, 77 percent of Americans said that they favored bumping it up. But doing so will require a reordering of priorities, whether through reforming entitlements, raising taxes, shifting money from domestic to defense budgets, adopting policies that speed economic growth, or allowing deficits to continue to balloon. Republican willingness to make these hard choices in order to spend more on defense—particularly on ship building and munitions stocks—will be a leading indicator as to whether the internationalists among them are gaining ground.So, too, will the Republican stance toward the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which establishes rules for navigation and boundaries for the exploitation of maritime resources. The convention commits countries to recognizing that territorial waters become international 12 nautical miles from shorelines, and it delineates countries’ exclusive national zones for mining and fishing. In 1994, the United States signed the convention, which has also been signed by 168 other nations and the European Union. But the U.S. Senate has so far refused to ratify it. Conservatives are concerned that the convention impinges on U.S. sovereignty; even the urging of former President George W. Bush, when he was in office, failed to convince them otherwise.The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea sets terms that the United States already abides by and enforces on other countries. Without it, America may be forced to comply with the rules its adversaries—chiefly Russia and China—prefer to establish, or else to spend time and money protecting itself and its allies against those countries’ maritime activities. Every living chief of naval operations advocates the convention’s passage. And countries contending with Chinese claims in the South China Sea view U.S. ratification as an indicator of American commitment to the rules-based order on which they rely. Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski and Democrats Mazie Hirono and Tim Kaine have introduced a resolution to ratify the convention. Republicans will have to decide whether they will provide the votes to pass it or make hostility to treaties a hallmark of their party.[George Packer: ‘We only need some metal things’]Similarly, the GOP will need to decide exactly what its posture will be on international free trade. Efforts to integrate China into the global economic order on equal terms failed; as a result, both American parties lost their appetite for international trade agreements and turned instead to imposing punitive tariffs on China and restricting its market access. This approach has not been successful either. In fact, the bipartisan retreat from global trade agreements as a lever of international power comes at a time when more Americans—eight in 10—view international trade as beneficial to consumers such as themselves than at any other time in the past 50 years. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Dan Blumenthal and Derek Scissors have argued for updating trade agreements in the Western Hemisphere—as the Trump administration did with the North American Free Trade Agreement—while prioritizing new agreements with Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia. A truly internationalist Republican Party will pursue such a policy, which would strengthen the trade links among Western nations.In recent years, the United States has withdrawn from dominant roles in numerous international institutions. Neither the Trump administration nor the Biden administration bothered to nominate judges for the World Trade Organization, greatly weakening that body. Meanwhile, China secured leadership roles in Interpol and in the UN agencies that regulate international telecommunications, air routes, and agricultural and industrial assistance. China nearly assumed leadership of the UN’s international maritime organization, which would have allowed it to rewrite the rules for freedom of navigation. Perhaps Republicans can be persuaded that ceding such positions to China is damaging. Much as with the Convention on the Law of the Sea, Washington and its allies can either lead the institutions that set and enforce rules or work to shield their interests from the reach of them. Setting the rules is more cost-effective.How the Republican Party addresses these nuts-and-bolts national-security policies will reveal its true direction—whether it will continue to lurch toward Senator Vance’s America First policies or return to the values it came to embody after World War II. Even if Donald Trump—the avatar and motive force behind America First—returns to the presidency, Speaker Johnson’s adroit management of the supplemental bill shows that Congress is not powerless. By reasserting its constitutional prerogatives, the legislature can constrain the executive. But for that to happen on national security, Republicans have to believe that American security and prosperity require active engagement in the world.

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Each week, Alexa is rounding up the buzziest fashion drops, hotel openings, restaurant debuts and celeb-studded cultural happenings in NYC. It’s our curated guide to the very best things to see, shop, taste and experience around the city.  What’s making our luxury list this week? The St. Regis’ delivers its famous Champagne sabering service to...

Volkswagen workers and labor organizers at a United Auto Workers vote watch party on April 19, 2024, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. | Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images Workers at a Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama are on their last day of voting for a UAW union. Here’s why it matters. It’s been another big week for the UAW. Over 5,000 auto workers at the Mercedes-Benz assembly plant in Vance, Alabama, have been holding their union election vote with the United Auto Workers (UAW); ballots will be counted when voting closes today. It’s the UAW’s second election in their campaign to organize non-union auto workers, with a particular focus on the South — a notoriously difficult region for union drives. They won their first election with Volkswagen workers last month in Tennessee with 73 percent of workers voting to form a union. What makes the UAW’s recent success compelling is that they’re finding big wins at a time when union membership rates in America are at an all-time low. But each union drive is a battle: With our current labor laws, unionizing is not an easy process — particularly when workers are up against anti-union political figures and employers, as is the case at the Alabama Mercedes plant. So if the UAW can win another union election in a region that’s struggled to realize worker power, it could mean more than just another notch in their belt. It could offer lessons on how to reinvigorate the American labor movement. What’s at stake in Vance, Alabama? Unionizing nearly anywhere in the US will require some sort of uphill battle, but this is especially true for the South. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, most of the South had unionization rates below the national average in 2023. Alabama resides within one of those regions, at a union membership rate of 7.5 percent compared to a national rate of 10 percent. This is the result of historical realities (see: slavery and racist Jim Crow laws) that have shaped today’s legislation: Alabama is one of 26 states that have enacted a “right-to-work” law, which allows workers represented by a union to not pay union fees, thus weakening the financial stability and resources of a union to bargain on behalf of their members. Prominent political figures in Alabama have been vocal about their opposition to the UAW, too. Gov. Kay Ivey has called the UAW a “looming threat” and signed a bill that would economically disincentivize companies from voluntarily recognizing a union. Workers say Mercedes hasn’t been welcoming to the union, either. In February, the CEO of Mercedes-Benz US International held a mandatory anti-union meeting (he’s changed roles since then). Back in March, the UAW filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against Mercedes for “aggressive and illegal union-busting.” And according to a recent report from Bloomberg, the US government voiced concerns to Germany, home of Mercedes-Benz’s headquarters, about the alleged union-busting happening at the Alabama plant. The combination of weak federal labor laws, a strong anti-union political presence, and a well-resourced employer can be a lethal combination for union drives and labor activity — and have been in Alabama. Recent examples include the narrow loss to unionize Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse, the nearly two-year long Warrior Met Coal strike that ended with no improved contract, and even past failed unionization drives at this Mercedes plant. Mercedes is also not the only auto plant in the state. Other foreign car manufacturers like Toyota, Honda, Mazda, and Hyundai also have factories in Alabama, and the UAW plans to unionize them too. What happens at the Mercedes plant in Vance will likely influence what happens at the other auto plants — win or lose. Where’s this momentum coming from — and where is it going? The UAW is in a strong position after a series of wins. First they won their contract battle with Detroit’s Big Three automakers last year. Then they successfully unionized the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in mid-April (the first time a non-union auto plant in the South was unionized in around 80 years). Later that month, they ratified a contract with Daimler Trucks after threatening to strike, securing a wage raise and annual cost-of-living increases among other benefits. Where are these wins coming from? A big part of the momentum comes from Shawn Fain, the president of the UAW. He’s ambitious and a hard-nosed negotiator, isn’t afraid to break from the traditions of UAW’s past, and perhaps most importantly, is also the first leader of the UAW directly elected by members. The direct election came after several high-ranking members of UAW leadership were investigated for corruption in 2017 and were later convicted. Fain was a part of a slate called “Members United” that ran on a “no corruption, no concessions, no tiers” platform, supported by the reform caucus within the UAW. By a slim margin of 483 votes, Fain ousted the incumbent in a run-off election. This new prioritization of democracy in the UAW can even be seen in its campaign to unionize Southern auto workers. In an article from Labor Notes, Mercedes workers at the Vance, Alabama, plant said that past unionization drives with the UAW failed partly because union organizers interfered too much with worker-to-worker organizing. This time, the workers say they are leading the union campaign, while the UAW supports as needed. Today’s election may seem difficult to win, considering the South’s past and present. But the UAW’s recent success shows that difficult is not impossible. Fain and his reform slate taking over the UAW, the historic contracts from striking at the Big Three, and the win in Chattanooga — all of those things seemed impossible a little over a year ago. This week, they might defy the odds again. Even if they don’t, there’s a lesson here for reviving unions in the US: be bold, and let workers lead the way. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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Illustrations by Max GutherOn a bright, chilly Thursday in February, most of the people inside the Chase Sapphire Lounge at LaGuardia Airport appeared to be doing something largely absent from modern air travel: They were having fun. I arrived at Terminal B before 9:30 a.m., but the lounge had already been in full swing for hours. Most of the velvet-upholstered stools surrounding the circular, marble-topped bar were filled. Travelers who looked like they were heading to couples’ getaways or girls’ weekends clustered in twos or threes, waiting for their mimosas or Bloody Marys or the bar’s signature cocktail—a gin concoction turned a vibrant shade of violet by macerated blueberries, served in a champagne coupe.Other loungers in the golden-lit, plant-lined, 21,800-square-foot space chatted over their breakfast, boozy or otherwise. At the elaborate main drink station that formed one wall of the lounge’s dining room, I chose the tap that promised cold brew, though spa water and a mysterious third spigot labeled only as “seasonal” beckoned. When I reached for what I thought was a straw, I pulled back a glistening tube of individually portioned honey, ready to be snapped into a hot cup of tea.While I ate my breakfast—a brussels-sprout-and-potato hash with bacon and a poached egg ordered using a QR code, which also offered me the opportunity to book a gratis half-hour mini-facial in the lounge’s wellness area—I listened to the 30-somethings at the next table marveling about how nice this whole thing was. That’s not a sentiment you’d necessarily expect to hear about the contrived luxury of an airport lounge. In the context of air travel, nice has usually meant nice relative to the experience outside the lounge’s confines, where most of your choices for a meal are marked-up fast food eaten at a crowded gate, or the undignified menu truncation of a Chili’s Too.American Airlines opened the world’s first airport lounge, then an invite-only affair for VIPs, in 1939. By the end of the 20th century, lounges had cemented their reputation as the domain of road warriors—mostly solo travelers headed to, say, medical-device sales conventions or engineering-job-site visits. The experience was less brussels-sprout hash and champagne and more “cheese and crackers and $5 beers,” Brian Kelly, the titular guy behind the Points Guy website (and arguably the most influential person in the travel-status game), told me. But behind those generously staffed check-in desks, things have been changing. Private-lounge networks have rapidly expanded over the past decade, as scores of new travelers have begun demanding entry. What awaits inside is changing, too.Perhaps the most salient characteristic of the modern airport lounge is that it is busy. According to one estimate, the number of fliers visiting lounges hit an all-time high in the summer of 2023, and this year’s vacation season appears likely to top it. As Americans have rushed back into travel after a pandemic lull, they’ve also rushed to apply for new credit cards, the fanciest of which promise bounties of travel-related perks, including lounge access. Now a broader cohort of fliers is squeezing in alongside the usual business travelers. This new group might be described as work-from-home travelers: people tapping away on laptops, trying to wedge in a few more emails or Zoom meetings around pleasure travel.In the past year, for reasons both journalistic and personal, I’ve visited seven lounges across five cities. These rooms held the expected corporate types in company-issued quarter-zips, but also 20-something women in Taylor Swift tour merch, bros with tennis rackets protruding from their carry-on, and lots of young people with one AirPod in and their Zoom camera turned off.The lounge’s booming popularity complicates its premise. This expanding group of high-spending customers is valuable to airlines, which operate most lounges, and to credit-card issuers, who have joined the lounge market with their own club networks. (High-fee credit cards, Kelly told me, have become the most common way for airline-perk neophytes to access lounges, no matter whether they’re run by airlines or banks.) But to attract these customers, lounge operators need to uphold the impression that lounges are exclusive—a special place far from the airport cattle call, not one crammed with too many other valued customers. The operators’ solution to this dilemma has been to build fast and build big, putting up huge, extravagant new clubs as quickly as the vagaries of airport construction will allow. Globally, more than 3,000 airport lounges are now open, with most major operators promising to add at least a few new locations this year.Most of the existing lounges max out somewhere around the ambience of a Panera, with booze instead of lemonade. The food and drinks are free, and that’s usually their main selling point. With the new mega-lounges, though, airlines and credit cards alike talk a big game about their culinary acumen, cocktail programs, and spa amenities, which include massages, private showers, and manicures. In United Airlines’ new 35,000-square-foot, three-story lounge in Denver, one of its two bars evokes a brewery, complete with tasting flights from Colorado brewers. Delta is opening the first in a series of ultra-premium clubs in June: a 38,000-square-foot mega-lounge at New York’s JFK airport containing, among other things, a full-service French bistro. American Express’s largest-ever lounge, which opened recently in Atlanta, has a backroom whiskey bar, a menu designed by a celebrated local chef, and 4,000 square feet of outdoor space from which loungers can watch planes roll by.You could dismiss the amenities arms race as an absurd exercise in flattering wealth’s vanity—it is. But that flattery is so effective because lounges offer a solution to a real set of problems. In the past few decades, air travel in the United States has become notably worse. Airlines have shrunk seats, increased fees, and pushed a larger proportion of passengers toward expensive tickets that offer more room and better service. At the same time, tickets at the back of the plane have become much less expensive, which has increased overall demand. Americans took 665 million flights in 2000, and by 2019, that number had increased to more than 925 million. On top of this, American airports are pretty old, and many need serious upgrades to handle the passenger volume more comfortably.Airlines profit from these conditions, but they still have to keep their most profitable customers happy. Lounges go a long way toward placating frequent fliers. They are, on some level, a decent deal for all involved: Private companies shoulder the cost of building them. They cater to people who endure the indignities of air travel most often. For many of those people, the pricey fees probably do save money over time, relative to how often they’d otherwise buy astronomically marked-up food from airport vendors. And the clubs tend to get put in inconvenient spots, which should theoretically help ease overcrowding at the gate, or at least move some of the fussiest passengers to their own containment area.[Read: Flying is weird right now]More curious is the fact that credit-card companies are making the effort to launch entire lounges themselves, competing against airlines when they already partner with airlines to get cardholders into existing lounges. A lounge is, by all accounts, a huge money sink—even besides the cost and red tape of building within an airport, making people feel special requires an army of workers available 18 to 20 hours a day, seven days a week. Everyone I spoke with at companies that run lounge networks said some version of We do not view the lounges as revenue opportunities. Illustration by Max Guther Lounges are, however, a great incentive to sign up for credit cards. As people’s day-to-day financial lives become more cashless, credit-card issuers are battling one another to win over customers and encourage them to swipe as much as possible, Joseph Nunes, a marketing professor at the University of Southern California, told me. One big reason: interchange fees. Card issuers take a cut of the purchase price from sellers every time a card is used, and that cut tends to be larger for more premium cards. Frequent pleasure travelers are a creditor’s dream: They are wealthier than the average American, they do a lot of discretionary spending, and they pay their bills on time. Lounges have already succeeded at enticing this group to sign up for airline-specific credit cards, so card issuers have taken the next logical step: lounges for people who aren’t quite road warriors and who may not be devoted to any particular airline, but who want perks all the same.Controlling an entire lounge, stamped with an enormous company logo, is a play for what marketers call brand affinity. “It solidifies our relationship with our customers,” Audrey Hendley, the president of American Express Travel, told me. Those customers might visit a lounge only a few times a year. But if everything goes according to plan, those visits are one of the reasons they love their Amex Platinum or Chase Sapphire card and use it for everything, even though they’ve got three or four others they could pull out of their wallet.Of course, the genuinely wealthy still need to be convinced that they’re more special than the rest of us. Credit-card companies have been ready to oblige with even more layers of exclusivity. Chase’s LaGuardia lounge is open to anyone who pays a $550 annual fee for the right credit card, but the private suites inside, which include a palatial bathroom and all the seafood towers you can eat, cost up to $3,000 for a three-hour visit. This is part of what Nunes called the further tiering of society, fueled by the incredibly granular financial-data profiles that companies can now make of their customers. “We really say, ‘Where are consumers spending, who are the consumers that are the most profitable for me, and how should I treat them?’” Nunes told me. “We’re going to see further and further discrimination by firms, I think, in treating their most profitable customers the best.”Credit-card perks have proved such an effective way to lure high-income customers that the airport lounge has begun to make its way outside the airport. Card issuers now commonly sponsor VIP areas at concerts and sporting events, especially those that appeal to high spenders. American Express and Chase offer members-only lounges at the U.S. Open tennis tournament in New York. The Sundance Film Festival has had a Chase Sapphire lounge for years. And although it can seem silly to get excited about entry to a VIP area, few people are immune to the charms of more places to sit down, shorter lines for cleaner bathrooms, and a couple of free drinks.[From the April 2020 issue: It’s all so … premiocre]Even if you never have entered or never will enter an airport lounge, the perks arms race affects your daily life. More premium-card use means higher fees for retailers, and those fees then get baked into the prices everyone pays—an easier task for large sellers, who usually pay less for their goods than mom-and-pop stores. (A recent settlement in a class-action suit against Visa and Mastercard could lower and cap these fees while allowing retailers to charge customers with premium cards extra.) Meanwhile, many card issuers have also begun to experiment with opening places that target other tiers of customers too. Capital One now operates more than 50 cafés that are open to the public, which seem aimed at the kind of young, laptop-lugging workers who might someday be high earners but for now just need a coffee shop with free Wi-Fi. In addition to baristas, these spaces have “ambassadors” and “mentors” available to guide patrons through the bank’s range of services while they sip their lattes. These cafés, like the airport lounges, are money sinks. But Kelly told me that it’s a mistake to think about banks the way we think about other consumer-facing businesses. “Look at the earnings reports of any of the credit-card companies,” he said. “This is a drop in the bucket.”In February, I visited American Express’s Centurion New York club in Midtown Manhattan. The space, which uses the entire 55th floor (and one dedicated express elevator) of the new One Vanderbilt skyscraper on 42nd Street, is the first of its kind for the company. It is, in some sense, a Capital One café for people already very comfortable with the services offered by their preferred financial institutions. A few tables in some of its spaces can be reserved by the general public, but no one there will sell you a new credit card or recommend a loan for your small business. The club’s best nooks and crannies, including a large corner table with clear views of much of the city’s skyline, are reserved for those who carry the company’s invite-only Centurion Card, which is rumored to require at least $500,000 in annual charges for membership. One Centurion-exclusive bar gives you a view from heaven down onto the Art Deco curves of the Chrysler Building below, as though you are a god yourself.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Airport-Lounge Arms Race.”

In a drawer in the living room of my childhood home, you can find the drumsticks I got in elementary school, the calculator I used in middle school, and a to-do list I wrote in high school. (“Shoes—tell mom,” it reads, and, in all caps: “CUT NAILS.”) In my bedroom are prom pictures, concert posters, a photo of my round-faced teen self printed for a fake ID I never got. In the bathroom: expired acne medication; crunchy, dried-up mascara; an old retainer. My mother, who still lives in the house, would like me to clear out my stuff. I keep stalling.The funny thing is, I’m not all that attached to these objects. I could throw most of them away after a few moments of bemused recollection; the pictures, I could take back with me to Brooklyn. But that would make it possible for my mom to sell the house, which she’s been trying to do for years. I can’t seem to stop standing in the way.Why? If home is “where the heart is” or “wherever I’m with you,” I should be fine with my mom moving anywhere—especially to a nearby apartment, as she plans to, where she’ll doubtless have a place for me to sleep whenever I want. Instead, any mention of a future sale prompts an ache akin to the homesickness I felt as a kid at summer camp—except that now I ache for my future self. I imagine her standing outside that suburban New Jersey house, pacing back and forth, insisting that some piece of her remains in this one edifice on a certain corner of a specific street, even though she hasn’t lived there for decades.[Read: What the suburb haters don’t understand]It’s a weird, anticipatory grief—but it’s not unfounded. For his 2011 book, Returning Home: Reconnecting With Our Childhoods, Jerry M. Burger, a Santa Clara University psychologist, interviewed hundreds of people and found that about a third had traveled as adults to visit a childhood home; another third hoped to. The subjects who’d made the trip largely no longer had parents in the house; in many cases, they arrived unannounced, ready to knock and ask the residing strangers to let them in. Others discovered that their old home physically no longer existed. Giving up such a formative space, Burger told me, is “like a dancer losing a leg. It’s a really important part of you. And now it’s gone.” So many people cried during interviews that Burger started arriving with tissues.You might think that only people with rosy childhood memories would feel compelled home, perhaps to relive their golden days or try to regain some of the comfort of being young. But that’s not true—some of Burger’s subjects had experienced such trauma at home that going back was probably a terrible idea; one person turned and ran out of the space immediately after setting foot inside it. Rather, Burger found, people with all kinds of relationships to where they grew up shared another motivation: They felt like a stranger to their old selves. And they wanted to reconnect.Attempting to pull a thread between past and present is a common human impulse, what the Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams calls a search for “narrative identity”—this life story we draft as we go, trying to make sense of who we are and why. Marya Schechtman, a philosopher at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that humans are constantly negotiating a contradiction: On the one hand, “it’s just sort of taken as a given that you’re a single individual from roughly cradle to grave.” On the other hand, this isn’t really how we experience life. Certain parts of our history resonate more than others, and some former selves don’t feel like us at all. (“I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old,” Joan Didion wrote. “It would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford.”)Many of us actively try to “make our pasts and our futures real to us,” Shechtman said. So although we eagerly make plans and envision ourselves in new places, with new people, we also flip through photo albums and reread our old journals. (Didion on keeping a notebook: “Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.”) But sometimes, those methods aren’t enough to really take us back. Burger kept hearing a similar story: Subjects would find photos of themselves as kids, but “they’re feeling like they can’t relate to this person in the picture,” he told me. “And it’s important to kind of get that sense of wholeness, to keep that part of yourself alive.”Going home can be a much more effective way to time travel. Our past isn’t just preserved in knickknacks and memorabilia; it lingers in the spaces we once occupied. When we talk about our experiences, we often focus, understandably, on the people who’ve shaped us, and we “treat the physical environment like a backdrop,” Lynne Manzo, a landscape-architecture professor at the University of Washington, told me. But setting can be its own character; it colors our day-to-day, and we endow it with agency and meaning. If social interactions and relationships are the bricks constructing our identities, our surroundings are the scaffolding.Setting is also central to how we remember. Recalling events (as opposed to information) involves “episodic memory,” which is deeply tied to location. Many researchers, in fact, believe that episodic memory evolved to help us physically orient ourselves in the world. (One very sad study—partial title: “Implications for Strandings”—found that some sea lions with damage to the hippocampus, the hub of episodic memory, get lost and wander ashore.) When you’re in a given space, your brain tends to “pull up the relevant memories” that happened there—even ones that have long been dormant, Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and the author of Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold On to What Matters, told me. People remembering a specific moment can even demonstrate what Ranganath called a “reboot” of the brain-activity patterns they showed during the original event.But without the physical space to visit, it can be hard to mentally transport yourself back. When the 19th-century French writer Stendhal wrote his memoir The Life of Henry Brulard, detailing a difficult and lonely childhood, he drew the places of his youth again and again, in an obsessive attempt to spur his memory. “Winding staircase—Large, cheerless courtyard—Magnificent inlaid chest-of-drawers surmounted by a clock,” he scrawled under a sketch, as if the incantation might apparate him to his grandfather’s imposing Grenoble townhouse. Yet his recollection remained, as he put it, like a fresco, solid for stretches and elsewhere crumbling apart.[Read: Nostalgia is a shield against unhappiness]I can relate to the yearning for preservation: If my mom leaves my childhood home, I’ll lose the particular sweet smell—I can’t even describe it—that wafts through the living room on hot days. And the pinch of acorns under my bare feet in the yard. And the specific lilt of the birdsong in the early mornings, so different from what I hear now, just over 15 miles away. I’m scared that without those sensations, the filing cabinet deep in my mind, holding all these everyday snippets of memory, will get pushed just out of my reach.Visiting home doesn’t always clarify or heal; it won’t necessarily make the scattered fragments of your story click into place. Sometimes, it just leaves you confused. For most people, what comes up is thorny—not only because good and bad events alike occurred at home, but because as much as you might long for your old and current selves to collide, it’s strange when they do.Going back can highlight how faulty your recollections were in the first place—and how subjective your perceptions still are. Anne Wilson, a Wilfrid Laurier University psychologist who studies identity, gave me an example: You might remember your old bedroom as large, the hallway from it running on and on, not just because the memory is from a child’s perspective but also because you associate it with enchantment—or with powerlessness. If you return to the house and find a short hallway, a tiny bedroom, it can feel disturbing. That’s not to mention material changes that might have been made to the house, which Burger said his participants reliably hated. To encounter such a familiar space transformed, and without your consent—as if someone has snuck into your memories and moved things around—is an affront. Your version doesn’t exist anymore.Even if family still lives in your old home, returning can be unnerving. Several people have told me, in casual conversation, that they’ve felt themselves regressing on visits back—they let their mom do their laundry or address their parents like a bratty 15-year-old. That tendency has to do with relationships as much as with physical space; our habits of interaction can be stubborn. But the setting itself can cue you to act a certain way. Just think about it evolutionarily, Schechtman told me: “If you’re a bunny, and you’re in the location where the hawk was last time, you should start feeling scared”—and get out of there. When a place triggers a rush of episodic memories, you might feel the frustration, the helplessness, the loneliness you did when you were young, and lapse into old behaviors.[Read: Welcome to kidulthood]All of this can feel odd, maybe even a little heartbreaking. Confronting change requires confronting loss. And confronting loss, of course, means acknowledging our mortality: If our old selves have slipped beyond our grasp, our current self will too. “The moment you stop to reflect, even on the present, that moment is gone,” Ranganath told me. “Everything is in the world of memory.”But if you can let the melancholy of that truth wash over you, you might find that it’s beautiful too. So often, I feel stranded in the present or the recent past—stricken by the dumb thing I said yesterday but unable to conjure what it felt like to be 6, or 12, or 20. It’s hard to really feel that right now is one point in a larger life trajectory, even if I know it on some level. Going home is one of the rare times I can glimpse the larger perspective. One of these days—after I’ve emptied the living-room drawer of the paper scraps and almost-spent gift cards—returning will be harder for me. But I can imagine my future self joining the ranks of Burger’s pilgrims, arriving on my old street looking for meaning, some story to tell about the past. That might sound sad, but such a visit isn’t just about holding on. It’s also about letting go—that thing I’ve been struggling to do.Manzo, the landscape-architecture professor, suggested that I enact a ritual to bid farewell to my mom’s house: walk through the rooms, take pictures, pocket a stone. I could sketch like Stendahl, try to capture all the angles. I will lose some memories, but maybe I’ll come away with some sense of the wholeness that Burger said so many people seek. I keep thinking about the woman who ran out of her old home—she wanted wholeness too. Eventually, her brother bought the place and bulldozed it to the ground. She had just one more request: Where the house once stood, she asked him to plant some flowers.​​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Getty Images Records and films are longer, but songs and scenes are shorter. What happened? When Taylor Swift’s new album dropped last month, it was greeted with one almost universal complaint. With the surprise “double album” edition clocking in at 31 tracks and a cool 122 minutes, critics lamented, the whole thing was way too lengthy. “Too long,” said the New Yorker. “Sprawling and often self-indulgent,” said the New York Times. “Its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level,” said Pitchfork. Swift is not alone in being dinged for lack of brevity. Lately, it’s come to seem as though everything, all of pop culture, is too long. Albums. Movies. It all just goes on and on forever, the complaint goes, and we don’t have the time for it. These criticisms are mostly true, with some caveats. Movie lengths on average have plateaued since the introduction of the talkie 60 years ago, but the length of the average top 10 movie is up from two hours in 1993 to 2 hours and 23 minutes in 2023. Albums, meanwhile, have been trending longer for decades, ever since the CD boom of the 1990s put an end to the space constraints of vinyl. That means they’re longer now, albeit not that much longer than they were a few years ago — an average of 80 minutes in 2022 compared to 73 in 2008. It’s normal for critics to worry that formats have been corrupted and that while art was perfectly figured out a little while ago, before our time, it’s now on the verge of ruin. That’s a familiar argument. Yet there’s a particular vehemence to the concern about how long runtimes have gotten that suggests this conversation reflects our fears about all the ways the world is changing. Albums and films used to be shorter because they had to be; the technology they existed on demanded it. With those constraints gone, they exist in a free, wide-open space — and all the rest of us are there too. What, we worry, are we going to do there? How albums got long and songs got short Albums used to be confined to the length of a vinyl record: about 45 minutes, counting both sides. Likewise, songs were about three to four minutes long because that was the length that a radio station was willing to go without an ad break. For your album to go longer than that meant that you were making a statement; you were doing something that could not be contained by the physical limitations of your form. For your single to go longer meant that you were so popular and dominant and high-minded that you could simply dare the radio stations not to play your song. You were the Beatles with The White Album, making a double record. You were Don McLean with “American Pie,” making an eight-minute single and charting at No. 1. You were a very big deal. Then CDs came, and albums started to meander. There’s a limit to how much music you can cram onto a CD, but they’re a lot more expansive than vinyl is, and the new lack of restraints showed. You were free to explore, to be playful, to experiment. Going long didn’t mean you were making some kind of genre-defining statement so much as it meant you were feeling out a way forward in the new world. Pitchfork reports that by the 2000s, at the end of the CD era, the average hip-hop album was 17 tracks and 67 minutes long. As MP3s took over, the physical constraints that kept albums short vanished completely. In their place came new, less obvious constraints. The post-Napster music industry of the 2010s was a winner-take-all economy in which it was vital to chart on Billboard if you wanted a sustainable career. Starting in 2007, Billboard incorporated streams into its ratings process, and artists quickly figured out the best way to chart was to give fans as many songs as possible to stream. The thinking went that the shorter the song, the more times people would stream it. Albums kept getting longer, but songs started to contract, from four minutes and 14 seconds in 2008 to three minutes and 8 seconds in 2022. Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road,” which went to No. 1 in 2019, was just one minute and 53 seconds long. These days, platforms like Spotify and TikTok are also putting their mark on the shape of a song. The Washington Post reports that on Spotify, a stream only counts if the listener stays for at least 30 seconds. That means that there are incentives to grab your listener immediately instead of drawing things out with a long intro. Meanwhile, the possibility of your sound going viral on TikTok places more emphasis on a quick, grabby hook. “Shorter intros, sing the chorus upfront, don’t have long, boring bits when not much happens — these are now the keys for success,” concludes the Post. How blockbuster movies got long Movies, too, have been reshaped by their technology, but in different ways than music. Movie length used to be limited to the size of a film reel, which plays about 11 minutes of footage. The standard length of a film is still, to this day, nine reels, or about 90 to 110 minutes long. Even now, when we can shoot movies on digital film and not have to worry about how much it weighs, that average length tends to hold. As a 2023 Slate article by Sam Adams shows, the outliers in film are the ones that perform well at the box office. Movies on average may be more or less the same length they always were, but it’s easy to see how it doesn’t feel that way when you’re trying to sit through Avengers: Endgame (182 minutes), Oppenheimer (180 minutes), or Killers of the Flower Moon (206 minutes). In 1989, The Little Mermaid was 83 minutes long; the 2023 remake was 135 minutes. Adams attributes these new lengths to a combination of digital film and the rise of the multiplex. “There’s no obvious penalty for making a movie that runs a little over,” he writes. “The physical constraints that used to make the exhibition and distribution of longer movies more expensive no longer apply: fewer showtimes on a given day mean fewer tickets, but that’s less of an issue when the movie is playing on multiple screens and you no longer have to factor in the cost of manufacturing and shipping larger and heavier film prints.” The other big factor is the rise of the streaming platforms. Big-time directors now always have the option to jump ship to Netflix and its fellows, where they are promised more creative freedom than ever before. As Vanity Fair reported last year, the time-slashing producers of old are less powerful, and the name-brand directors who can deliver hits for streamers are more so. That means they no longer have to kill their darlings if they don’t want to. More and more often, they don’t. Even as popular movies swell, though, they are being fed to audiences in increasingly bite-sized portions. On TikTok, accounts dedicated to sharing two-minute movie clips have hundreds of thousands of followers. Last fall, in a marketing push for the musical remake, Paramount put the full run of the original Mean Girls on TikTok in 23 separate clips. We worry about whether art is the right length because we’re worried that we don’t know how to pay attention anymore The paradox of it all is that as movies and albums swell, they are shared and sampled in ever smaller chunks. Songs are optimized for Spotify and scenes are optimized for TikTok. Art has somehow become too long and too short at once. The biggest artists and auteurs in this ecosystem are given free rein to be as self-indulgent as they want, the thinking goes, while audiences’ attention spans get even more fragmented. At the root of both these concerns is that technology has degraded the quality of our art and our consumption habits. The concern about what technology has done to our minds can become, in this system, an argument in favor of long albums and films rather than against them. When entertainment is increasingly sliced and diced to the length of a TikTok video, we have all the more reason to luxuriate in a long movie or album. They will focus our attention once again. “Movie theaters are one of the few remaining places where it’s possible, at least under ideal circumstances, to do one thing and one thing only for hours at a time,” wrote Adams in his Slate article. “It’s worth crossing your legs to keep it that way.” Popular art has always been shaped by the technology we use to distribute it; as the saying goes, the medium is the message. As the medium shifts and changes in our new era, we become more anxious and afraid. What if we simply don’t know how to pay attention any longer? How will we experience good art then? What if some artists desperately need editors, while others just need a little bit more of our time? In music, some artists are intentionally adopting shorter and more curated formats as they explore this brave new era, to the point that there are some plausible trend pieces complaining that albums are too short these days. In 2018, Pitchfork reported that the 15 albums that had reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Rap Albums chart by and large hovered around 30 to 40 minutes long. More recently, Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine was 13 tracks and 35 minutes long. In Cosmo UK, the writer Lydia Venn was perturbed by Eternal Sunshine’s comparative brevity, suspecting that studio interference forced Grande to drop her record too early, before she had generated enough material to fill a record. Eventually, though, Venn comes around to the side of the short album. “Eternal Sunshine was written primarily by Ariana, has no skips, and is some of her best work to date,” she concludes. “So maybe shorter albums can be the future if they’re done primarily because of the artists’ own creativity and authenticity, not to suit a label’s own agenda.” To make a short album now becomes an inverse of the Beatles making The White Album. You’re making a statement, bucking the trends. Venn’s argument in favor of Grande’s short album is similar to an argument Adams makes in favor of Scorsese’s decision to make Killers of the Flower Moon 206 minutes long without intermission. “The reason there’s no intermission in Killers of the Flower Moon isn’t because Scorsese wants to try his audience’s patience,” Adams writes. “It’s because the movie concerns a string of brutal, racist murders, and the violence needs to feel both mundane and unrelenting. An intermission is an escape valve, and you shouldn’t be able to escape.” In other words, it’s that long because that’s the length that it’s supposed to be. Or, more simply, it’s that long because that’s the length where it gets good. One of the ambivalences of our moment is that it can be hard to tell when art is long because that’s the length when it gets good, when it’s long because that’s how you make money now, and when it’s long simply because no one said no. We’re in a moment in which the rules around popular art are changing rapidly. There are very few physical constraints left, only the constraints of the marketplace, which fluctuate wildly with every new hit app. Is there a scenario in which we leave this era to enter one in which a work of art is only as long or as short as it has to be? If we ever make it there, will we recognize it when it happens?

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Gonzalo Fuentes/ReutersPolice in France shot an armed suspect dead Friday morning after he attempted to torch a synagogue, authorities said.The attack unfolded in the northwestern city of Rouen. Responding officers “neutralized” the man who was “clearly wanting to set fire to the city’s synagogue,” Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin announced in a post on X. He also congratulated officers for their “responsiveness and courage.”Rouen Mayor Nicolas Mayer-Rossignol said in his own post that there were “no victims other than the armed individual.” Read more at The Daily Beast.