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Scouted/The Daily Beast/Retailers.Scouted selects products independently. If you purchase something from our posts, we may earn a small commission.As we navigate the ever-evolving landscape of ‘anti-aging’ skincare products, searching for the right active serum to suit your specific skin goals can be challenging. Whether your aim is to soften fine lines and crow’s feet, remove UV-induced hyperpigmentation, or smooth out texture and the appearance of enlarged pores, there’s a targeted formula for everything nowadays. Of course, not all anti-aging serums are created equal.To help you narrow down the best one for you (and your skin type), we’ve rounded up some of our favorite skin-rejuvenating serums to help correct and prevent multiple signs of aging on the skin. From potent retinoid-forward serums to damage-erasing (and preventing) vitamin C formulas, these serums will help you achieve a radiant, youthful complexion.Read more at The Daily Beast.

"For this specific video, it was one marathon of a day," Tom Walsh told Newsweek. "I made a little over 100 burritos."

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Joe Camporeale/USA Today Sports via ReutersDonald Trump has called on the Supreme Court to weigh in on his hush-money case as his sentencing looms next month.The former president, who was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records, is set to be sentenced on July 11, four days before the beginning of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He has vowed to appeal his history-making conviction on charges related to his efforts to unlawfully influence the 2016 election with a scheme to cover up a hush-money payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels.“The ‘Sentencing’ for not having done anything wrong will be, conveniently for the Fascists, 4 days before the Republican National Convention,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Sunday evening.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Because of the number of weeks in the month, there are slight changes to the usual payment schedule in June.

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TK

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With smartphones in our pockets and doorbell cameras cheaply available, our relationship with video as a form of proof is evolving. We often say “pics or it didn’t happen!”—but meanwhile, there’s been a rise in problematic imaging including deepfakes and surveillance systems, which often reinforce embedded gender and racial biases. So what is really being revealed with increased documentation of our lives? And what’s lost when privacy is diminished?In this episode of How to Know What’s Real, staff writer Megan Garber speaks with Deborah Raji, a Mozilla fellow, whose work is focused on algorithmic auditing and evaluation. In the past, Raji worked closely with the Algorithmic Justice League initiative to highlight bias in deployed AI products.Listen to the episode here:Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Andrea Valdez: You know, I grew up as a Catholic, and I remember the guardian angel was a thing that I really loved that concept when I was a kid. But then when I got to be, I don’t know, maybe around seven or eight, like, your guardian angel is always watching you. At first it was a comfort, and then it turned into kind of like a: Are they watching me if I pick my nose? Do they watch me?Megan Garber: And are they watching out for me, or are they just watching me?Valdez: Exactly. Like, are they my guardian angel or my surveillance angel? Surveillance angel.Valdez: I’m Andrea Valdez. I’m an editor at The Atlantic.Garber: And I’m Megan Garber, a writer at The Atlantic. And this is How to Know What’s Real.Garber: I just got the most embarrassing little alert from my watch. And it’s telling me that it is, quote, “time to stand.”Valdez: Why does it never tell us that it’s time to lie down?Garber: Right. Or time to just, like, go to the beach or something? And it’s weird, though, because I’m realizing I’m having these intensely conflicting emotions about it. Because in one way, I appreciate the reminder. I have been sitting too long; I should probably stand up. But I don’t also love the feeling of just sort of being casually judged by a piece of technology.Valdez: No, I understand. I get those alerts, too. I know it very well. And you know, it tells you, “Stand up; move for a minute. You can do it.” Uh, you know, you can almost hear it going, like, “Bless your heart.”Garber: “Bless your lazy little heart.” The funny thing, too, about it is, like, I find myself being annoyed, but then I also fully recognize that I don’t really have a right to be annoyed, because I’ve asked them to do the judging.Valdez: Yes, definitely. I totally understand. I mean, I’m very obsessed with the data my smartwatch produces: my steps, my sleeping habits, my heart rate. You know, just everything about it. I’m just obsessed with it. And it makes me think—well, I mean, have you ever heard of the quantified-self movement?Garber: Oh, yeah.Valdez: Yeah, so quantified self. It’s a term that was coined by Wired magazine editors around 2007. And the idea was, it was this movement that aspired to be, quote, unquote, “self-knowledge through numbers.” And I mean, it’s worth remembering what was going on in 2007, 2008. You know, I know it doesn’t sound that long ago, but wearable tech was really in its infancy. And in a really short amount of time, we’ve gone from, you know, Our Fitbit to, as you said, Megan, this device that not only scolds you for not standing up every hour—but it tracks your calories, the decibels of your environment. You can even take an EKG with it. And, you know, when I have my smartwatch on, I’m constantly on guard to myself. Did I walk enough? Did I stand enough? Did I sleep enough? And I suppose it’s a little bit of accountability, and that’s nice, but in the extreme, it can feel like I’ve sort of opted into self-surveillance.Garber: Yes, and I love that idea in part because we typically think about surveillance from the opposite end, right? Something that’s done to us, rather than something that we do to ourselves and for ourselves. Watches are just one example here, right? There’s also smartphones, and there’s this broader technological environment, and all of that. That whole ecosystem, it all kind of asks this question of “Who’s really being watched? And then also, who’s really doing the watching?”Valdez: Mm hmm. So I spoke with Deb Raji, who is a computer scientist and a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation. And she’s an expert on questions about the human side of surveillance, and thinks a lot about how being watched affects our reality.—Garber: I’d love to start with the broad state of surveillance in the United States. What does the infrastructure of surveillance look like right now?Deborah Raji: Yeah. I think a lot of people see surveillance as a very sort of “out there in the world,” physical-infrastructure thing—where they see themselves walking down the street, and they notice a camera, and they’re like, Yeah, I’m being surveilled. Um, which does happen if you live in New York, especially post-9/11: like, you are definitely physically surveilled. There’s a lot of physical-surveillance infrastructure, a lot of cameras out there. But there’s also a lot of other tools for surveillance that I think people are less aware of.Garber: Like Ring cameras and those types of devices?Raji: I think when people install their Ring product, they’re thinking about themselves. They’re like, Oh, I have security concerns. I want to just have something to be able to just, like, check who’s on my porch or not. And they don’t see it as surveillance apparatus, but it ends up becoming part of a broader network of surveillance. And then I think the one that people very rarely think of—and again, is another thing that I would not have thought of if I wasn’t engaged in some of this work—is online surveillance. Faces are sort of the only biometric; uh, I guess, you know, it’s not like a fingerprint. Like, we don’t upload our fingerprints to our social media. We’re very sensitive about, like, Oh, you know, this seems like important biometric data that we should keep guarded. But for faces, it can be passively collected and passively distributed without you having any awareness of it. But also, we’re very casual about our faces. So we upload it very freely onto the internet. And so, you know, immigration officers—ICE, for example—have a lot of online-surveillance tools, where they’ll monitor people’s Facebook pages, and they’ll use sort of facial recognition and other products to identify and connect online identities, you know, across various social-media platforms, for example.Garber: So you have people doing this incredibly common thing, right? Just sharing pieces of their lives on social media. And then you have immigration officials treating that as actionable data. Can you tell me more about facial recognition in particular?Raji: So one of the first models I actually built was a facial-recognition project. And so I’m a Black woman, and I noticed right away that there were not a lot of faces that look like mine. And I remember trying to have a conversation with folks at the company at the time. And it was a very strange time to be trying to have this conversation. This was like 2017. There was a little bit of that happening in the sort of natural-language processing space. Like, people were noticing, you know, stereotyped language coming out of some of these models, but no one was really talking about it in the image space as much—that, oh, some of these models don’t work as well for darker-skinned individuals or other demographics. We audited a bunch of these products that were these facial-analysis products, and we realized that these systems weren’t working very well for those minority populations. But also definitely not working for the intersection of those groups. So like: darker skin, female faces.Garber: Wow.Raji: Some of the ways in which these systems were being pitched at the time, were sort of selling these products and pitching it to immigration officers to use to identify suspects.Gaber: Wow.Raji: And, you know, imagine something that’s not 70 percent accurate, and it’s being used to decide, you know, if this person aligns with a suspect for deportation. Like, that’s so serious.Garber: Right.Raji: You know, since we’ve published that work, we had just this—it was this huge moment. In terms of: It really shifted the thinking in policy circles, advocacy circles, even commercial spaces around how well those systems worked. Because all the information we had about how well these systems worked, so far, was on data sets that were disproportionately composed of lighter-skin men. Right. And so people had this belief that, Oh, these systems work so well, like 99 percent accuracy. Like, they’re incredible. And then our work kind of showed, well, 99 percent accuracy on lighter-skin men.Garber: And could you talk a bit about where tech companies are getting the data from to train their models?Raji: So much of the data required to build these AI systems are collected through surveillance. And this is not hyperbole, right? Like, the facial-recognition systems, you know, millions and millions of faces. And these databases of millions and millions of faces that are collected, you know, through the internet, or collected through identification databases, or through, you know, physical- or digital-surveillance apparatus. Because of the way that the models are trained and developed, it requires a lot of data to get to a meaningful model. And so a lot of these systems are just very data hungry, and it’s a really valuable asset.Garber: And how are they able to use that asset? What are the specific privacy implications about collecting all that data?Raji: Privacy is one of those things that we just don’t—we haven’t been able to get to federal-level privacy regulation in the States. There’s been a couple states that have taken initiative. So California has the California Privacy Act. Illinois has a BIPA, which is sort of a Biometric Information Privacy Act. So that’s specifically about, you know, biometric data like faces. In fact, they had a really—I think BIPA’s biggest enforcement was against Facebook and Facebook’s collection of faces, which does count as biometric data. So in Illinois, they had to pay a bunch of Facebook users a certain settlement amount. Yeah. So, you know, there are privacy laws, but it’s very state-based, and it takes a lot of initiative for the different states to enforce some of these things, versus having some kind of comprehensive national approach to privacy. That’s why enforcement or setting these rules is so difficult. I think something that’s been interesting is that some of the agencies have sort of stepped up to play a role in terms of thinking through privacy. So the Federal Trade Commission, FTC, has done these privacy audits historically on some of the big tech companies. They’ve done this for quite a few AI products as well—sort of investigating the privacy violations of some of them. So I think that that’s something that, you know, some of the agencies are excited about and interested in. And that might be a place where we see movement, but ideally we have some kind of law.Garber: And we’ve been in this moment—this, I guess, very long moment—where companies have been taking the “ask for forgiveness instead of permission” approach to all this. You know, so erring on the side of just collecting as much data about their users as they possibly can, while they can. And I wonder what the effects of that will be in terms of our broader informational environment.Raji: The way surveillance and privacy works is that it’s not just about the information that’s collected about you; it’s, like, your entire network is now, you know, caught in this web, and it’s just building pictures of entire ecosystems of information. And so, I think people don’t always get that. But yeah; it’s a huge part of what defines surveillance.__Valdez: Do you remember Surveillance Cameraman, Megan?Garber: Ooh. No. But now I’m regretting that I don’t.Valdez: Well, I mean, I’m not sure how well it was known, but it was maybe 10 or so years ago. There was this guy who had a camera, and he would take the camera and he would go and he’d stop and put the camera in people’s faces. And they would get really upset. And they would ask him, “Why are you filming me?” And, you know, they would get more and more irritated, and it would escalate. I think the meta-point that Surveillance Cameraman was trying to make was “You know, we’re surveilled all the time—so why is it any different if someone comes and puts a camera in your face when there’s cameras all around you, filming you all the time?”Garber: Right. That’s such a great question. And yeah, the sort of difference there between the active act of being filmed and then the sort of passive state of surveillance is so interesting there.Valdez: Yeah. And you know, that’s interesting that you say active versus passive. You know, it reminds me of the notion of the panopticon, which I think is a word that people hear a lot these days, but it’s worth remembering that the panopticon is an old idea. So it started around the late 1700s with the philosopher named Jeremy Bentham. And Bentham, he outlined this architectural idea, and it was originally conceptualized for prisons. You know, the idea was that you have this circular building, and the prisoners live in cells along the perimeter of the building. And then there’s this inner circle, and the guards are in that inner circle, and they can see the prisoners. But the prisoners can’t see the guards. And so the effect that Bantham was hoping this would achieve is that the prisoners would never know if they’re being watched—so they’d always behave as if they were being watched.Garber: Mm. And that makes me think of the more modern idea of the watching-eyes effect. This notion that simply the presence of eyes might affect people’s behavior. And specifically, images of eyes. Simply that awareness of being watched does seem to affect people’s behavior.Valdez: Oh, interesting.Garber: You know, beneficial behavior, like collectively good behavior. You know, sort of keeping people in line in that very Bentham-like way.Valdez: We have all of these, you know, eyes watching us now—I mean, even in our neighborhoods and, you know, at our apartment buildings. In the form of, say, Rng cameras or other, you know, cameras that are attached to our front doors. Just how we’ve really opted into being surveilled in all of the most mundane places. I think the question I have is: Where is all of that information going?Garber: And in some sense, that’s the question, right? And Deb Raji has what I found to be a really useful answer to that question of where our information is actually going, because it involves thinking of surveillance not just as an act, but also as a product.—Raji: For a long time when you—I don’t know if you remember those, you know, “complete the picture” apps, or, like, “spice up my picture.” They would use generative models. You would kind of give them a prompt, which would be, like—your face. And then it would modify the image to make it more professional, or make it better lit. Like, sometimes you’ll get content that was just, you know, sexualizing and inappropriate. And so that happens in a nonmalicious case. Like, people will try to just generate images for benign reasons. And if they choose the wrong demographic, or they frame things in the wrong way, for example, they’ll just get images that are denigrating in a way that feels inappropriate. And so I feel like there’s that way in which AI for images has sort of led to just, like, a proliferation of problematic content.Garber: So not only are those images being generated because the systems are flawed themselves, but then you also have people using those flawed systems to generate malicious content on purpose, right?Raji: One that we’ve seen a lot is sort of this deepfake porn of young people, which has been so disappointing to me. Just, you know, young boys deciding to do that to young girls in their class; it really is a horrifying form of sexual abuse. I think, like, when it happened to Taylor Swift—I don’t know if you remember; someone used the Microsoft model, and, you know, generated some nonconsensual sexual images of Taylor Swift—I think it turned that into a national conversation. But months before that, there had been a lot of reporting of this happening in high schools. Anonymous young girls dealing with that, which is just another layer of trauma, because you’re like—you’re not Taylor Swift, right? So people don’t pay attention in the same way. So I think that that problem has actually been a huge issue for a very long time.—Garber: Andrea, I’m thinking of that old line about how if you’re not paying for something in the tech world, there’s a good chance you are probably the product being sold, right? But I’m realizing how outmoded that idea probably is at this point. Because even when we pay for these things, we’re still the products. And specifically, our data are the products being sold. So even with things like deepfakes—which are typically defined as, you know, using some kind of machine learning or AI to create a piece of manipulated media—even they rely on surveillance in some sense. And so you have this irony where these recordings of reality are now also being used to distort reality.Valdez: You know, it makes me think of Don Fallis: this philosopher who talked about the epistemic threat of deepfakes and that it’s part of this pending infopocalypse. Which sounds quite grim, I know. But I think the point that Fallis was trying to make is that with the proliferation of deepfakes, we’re beginning to maybe distrust what it is that we’re seeing. And we talked about this in the last episode. You know, “seeing is believing” might not be enough. And I think we’re really worried about deepfakes, but I’m also concerned about this concept of cheap fakes, or shallow fakes. So cheap fakes or shallow fakes—it’s, you know, you can tweak or change images or videos or audio just a little bit. And it doesn’t actually require AI or advanced technology to create. So one of the more infamous instances of this was in 2019. Maybe you remember there was a video of Nancy Pelosi that came out where it sounded like she was slurring her words.Garber: Oh, yeah, right. Yeah.Valdez: Really, the video had just been slowed down using easy audio tools, and just slowed down enough to create that perception that she was slurring her words. So it’s a quote, unquote “cheap” way to create a small bit of chaos.Garber: And then you combine that small bit of chaos with the very big chaos of deepfakes.Valdez: Yeah. So one, the cheat fake is: It’s her real voice. It’s just slowed down—again, using, like, simple tools. But we’re also seeing instances of AI-generated technology that completely mimics other people’s voices, and it’s becoming really easy to use now. You know, there was this case recently that came out of Maryland where there was a high-school athletic director, and he was arrested after he allegedly used an AI voice simulation of the principal at his school. And he allegedly simulated the principal’s voice saying some really horrible things, and it caused all this blowback on the principal before investigators, you know, looked into it. Then they determined that the audio was fake. But again, it was just a regular person that was able to use this really advanced-seeming technology that was cheap, easy to use, and therefore easy to abuse.Garber: Oh, yes. And I think it also goes to show how few sort of cultural safeguards we have in place right now, right? Like, the technology will let people do certain things. And we don’t always, I think, have a really well-agreed-upon sense of what constitutes abusing the technology. And you know, usually when a new technology comes along, people will sort of figure out what’s acceptable and, you know, what will bear some kind of safety net. Um, and will there be a taboo associated with it? But with all of these new technologies, we just don’t have that. And so people, I think, are pushing the bounds to see what they can get away with.Valdez: And we’re starting to have that conversation right now about what those limits should look like. I mean, lots of people are working on ways to figure out how to watermark or authenticate things like audio and video and images.Garber: Yeah. And I think that that idea of watermarking, too, can maybe also have a cultural implication. You know, like: If everyone knows that deepfakes can be tracked, and easily, that is itself a pretty good disincentive from creating them in the first place, at least with an intent to fool or do something malicious.Valdez: Yeah. But. In the meantime, there’s just going to be a lot of these deepfakes and cheap fakes and shallow fakes that we’re just going to have to be on the lookout for.—Garber: Is there new advice that you have for trying to figure out whether something is fake?Raji: If it doesn’t feel quite right, it probably isn’t. A lot of these AI images don’t have a good sense of, like, spatial awareness, because it’s just pixels in, pixels out. And so there’s some of these concepts that we as humans find really easy, but these models struggle with. I advise people to be aware of, like—sort of trust your intuition. If you’re noticing weird artifacts in the image, it probably isn’t real. I think another thing, as well, is who posts.Garber: Oh, that’s a great one; yeah.Raji: Like, I mute very liberally on Twitter; uh, any platform. I definitely mute a lot of accounts that I notice [are] caught posting something. Either like a community note or something will reveal that they’ve been posting fake images, or you just see it and you recognize the design of it. And so I just knew that kind of content. Don’t engage with those kind of content creators at all. And so I think that that’s also like another successful thing on the platform level. Deplatforming is really effective if someone has sort of three strikes in terms of producing a certain type of content. And that’s what happened with the Taylor Swift situation—where people were disseminating these, you know, Taylor Swift images and generating more images. And they just went after every single account that did that—you know, completely locked down her hashtag. Like, that kind of thing where they just really went after everything. Um, and I think that that’s something that we should just do in our personal engagement as well.—Garber: Andrea, that idea of personal engagement, I think, is such a tricky part of all of this. I’m even thinking back to what we were saying before—about Ring and the interplay we were getting at between the individual and the collective. In some ways, it’s the same tension that we’ve been thinking about with climate change and other really broad, really complicated problems. This, you know, connection between personal responsibility, but also the outsized role that corporate and government actors will have to play when it comes to finding solutions. Mm hmm. And with so many of these surveillance technologies, we’re the consumers, with all the agency that that would seem to entail. But at the same time, we’re also part of this broader ecosystem where we really don’t have as much control as I think we’d often like to believe. So our agency has this giant asterisk, and, you know, consumption itself in this networked environment is really no longer just an individual choice. It’s something that we do to each other, whether we mean to or not.Valdez: Yeah; you know, that’s true. But I do still believe in conscious consumption so much as we can do it. Like, even if I’m just one person, it’s important to me to signal with my choices what I value. And in certain cases, I value opting out of being surveilled so much as I can control for it. You know, maybe I can’t opt out of facial recognition and facial surveillance, because that would require a lot of obfuscating my face—and, I mean, there’s not even any reason to believe that it would work. But there are some smaller things that I personally find important; like, I’m very careful about which apps I allow to have location sharing on me. You know, I go into my privacy settings quite often. I make sure that location sharing is something that I’m opting into on the app while I’m using it. I never let apps just follow me around all the time. You know, I think about what chat apps I’m using, if they have encryption; I do hygiene on my phone around what apps are actually on my phone, because they do collect a lot of data on you in the background. So if it’s an app that I’m not using, or I don’t feel familiar with, I delete it.Garber: Oh, that’s really smart. And it’s such a helpful reminder, I think, of the power that we do have here. And a reminder of what the surveillance state actually looks like right now. It’s not some cinematic dystopia. Um, it’s—sure, the cameras on the street. But it’s also the watch on our wrist; it’s the phones in our pockets; it’s the laptops we use for work. And even more than that, it’s a series of decisions that governments and organizations are making every day on our behalf. And we can affect those decisions if we choose to, in part just by paying attention.Valdez: Yeah, it’s that old adage: “Who watches the watcher?” And the answer is us.__Garber: That’s all for this episode of How to Know What’s Real. This episode was hosted by Andrea Valdez and me, Megan Garber. Our producer is Natalie Brennan. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.Valdez: Next time on How to Know What’s Real: Thi Nguyen: And when you play the game multiple times, you shift through the roles, so you can experience the game from different angles. You can experience a conflict from completely different political angles and re-experience how it looks from each side, which I think is something like, this is what games are made for. Garber: What we can learn about expansive thinking through play. We’ll be back with you on Monday.

For most Americans, D-Day remains the most famous battle of World War II. It was not the end of the war against Nazism. At most, it was the beginning of the end. Yet it continues to resonate 80 years later, and not just because it led to Hitler’s defeat. It also signaled the collapse of the European empires and the birth of an American superpower that promised to dedicate its foreign policy to decolonization, democracy, and human rights, rather than its own imperial prestige.It is easy to forget what a radical break this was. The term superpower was coined in 1944 to describe the anticipated world order that would emerge after the war. Only the British empire was expected to survive as the standard-bearer of imperialism, alongside two very different superpower peers: the Soviet Union and the United States. Within weeks of D-Day, however, the British found themselves suddenly and irrevocably overruled by their former colony.That result was hardly inevitable. When the British and the Americans formally allied in December 1941, the British empire was unquestionably the senior partner in the relationship. It covered a fifth of the world’s landmass and claimed a quarter of its people. It dominated the air, sea, and financial channels on which most global commerce depended. And the Royal Navy maintained its preeminence, with ports of call on every continent, including Antarctica.The United States, by contrast, was more of a common market than a nation-state. Its tendency toward isolationism has always been overstated. But its major foreign-policy initiatives had been largely confined to the Western Hemisphere and an almost random collection of colonies (carefully called “territories”), whose strategic significance was—at best—a point of national ambivalence.In the two years after Pearl Harbor, the British largely dictated the alliance’s strategic direction. In Europe, American proposals to take the fight directly to Germany by invading France were tabled in favor of British initiatives, which had the not-incidental benefit of expanding Britain’s imperial reach across the Mediterranean and containing the Soviet Union (while always ensuring that the Russians had enough support to keep three-quarters of Germany’s army engaged on the Eastern Front).Things changed, however, in November 1943, when Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt held a summit in Cairo. The British again sought to postpone the invasion of France in favor of further operations in the Mediterranean. The debate quickly grew acrimonious. At one point, Churchill refused to concede on his empire’s desire to capture the Italian island of Rhodes. George Marshall, the usually stoic U.S. Army chief of staff, shouted at the prime minister, “Not one American is going to die on that goddamned beach!” Another session was forced to end abruptly after Marshall and his British counterpart, Sir Alan Brooke, nearly came to blows.With the fate of the free world hanging in the balance, a roomful of 60-year-old men nearly broke out into a brawl because by November 1943, America had changed. It was producing more than twice as many planes and seven times as many ships as the whole British empire. British debt, meanwhile, had ballooned to nearly twice the size of its economy. Most of that debt was owed to the United States, which leveraged its position as Britain’s largest creditor to gain access to outposts across the British empire, from which it built an extraordinary global logistics network of its own.[From the April 2023 issue: The age of American naval dominance is over]Having methodically made their country into at least an equal partner, the Americans insisted on the invasion of France, code-named “Operation Overlord.” The result was a compromise, under which the Allies divided their forces in Europe. The Americans would lead an invasion of France, and the British would take command of the Mediterranean.Six months later, on June 6, 1944, with the D-Day invasion under way, the British empire verged on collapse. Its economic woes were exacerbated by the 1.5 million Americans, and 6 million tons of American equipment, that had been imported into the British Isles to launch Operation Overlord. Its ports were jammed. Inflation was rampant. Its supply chains and its politics were in shambles. By the end of June 1944, two of Churchill’s ministers were declaring the empire “broke.”The British continued to wield considerable influence on world affairs, as they do today. But after D-Day, on the battlefields of Europe and in international conference rooms, instead of setting the agenda, the British found themselves having to go along with it.In July 1944, at the Bretton Woods Conference, the British expectation that global finance would remain headquartered in London and transacted at least partially in pounds was frustrated when the International Monetary Fund and what would become the World Bank were headquartered in Washington and the dollar became the currency of international trade. In August 1944, America succeeded in dashing British designs on the eastern Mediterranean for good in favor of a second invasion of France from the south. In September 1944, the more and more notional British command of Allied ground forces in Europe was formally abandoned. In February 1945, at a summit in Yalta, Churchill had little choice but to acquiesce as the United States and the Soviet Union dictated the core terms of Germany’s surrender, the division of postwar Europe, and the creation of a United Nations organization with a mandate for decolonization.How did this happen so quickly? Some of the great political historians of the 20th century, such as David Reynolds, Richard Overy, and Paul Kennedy, have chronicled the many political, cultural, and economic reasons World War II would always have sounded the death knell of the European imperial system. Some British historians have more pointedly blamed the Americans for destabilizing the British empire by fomenting the forces of anti-colonialism (what D. Cameron Watt called America’s “moral imperialism”).Absent from many such accounts is why Britain did not even try to counterbalance America’s rise or use the extraordinary leverage it had before D-Day to win concessions that might have better stabilized its empire. The French did precisely that with far less bargaining power at their disposal, and preserved the major constituents of their own empire for a generation longer than the British did. The warning signs were all there. In 1941, Germany’s leading economics journal predicted the rise of a “Pax Americana” at Britain’s expense. “England will lose its empire,” the article gloatingly predicted, “to its partner across the Atlantic.”[Read: How Britain falls apart]The American defense-policy scholar and Atlantic contributing writer Kori Schake recently made a persuasive case that Britain came to accept the role of junior partner in the Atlantic alliance, rather than seek to balance American power, because the two countries had become socially, politically, and economically alike in all the ways that mattered. Britain, in other words, had more to lose by confrontation. And so it chose friendship.The argument makes sense to a point, especially given how close the United Kingdom and the United States are today. But the remembered warmth of the “special relationship” in the 1940s is largely a product of nostalgia. British contempt for American racism and conformist consumerism seethed especially hot with the arrival in the U.K. of 1.5 million Americans. And American contempt for the British class system and its reputation for violent imperialism equally made any U.S. investment in the war against Germany—as opposed to Japan—a political liability for Roosevelt.The British elite had every intention of preserving the British empire and European colonialism more generally. In November 1942, as Anglo-American operations began in North Africa, Churchill assured France that its colonies would be returned and assured his countrymen, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”The British assumed that America’s rise was compatible with that goal because they grossly miscalculated American intentions. This was on stark display in March 1944, just over two months before D-Day, when Britain’s Foreign Office circulated a memorandum setting out the empire’s “American policy.” Given how naive the Americans were about the ways of the world, it said, Britain should expect them to “follow our lead rather than that we follow theirs.” It was therefore in Britain’s interest to foster America’s rise so that its power could be put to Britain’s use. “They have enormous power, but it is the power of the reservoir behind the dam,” the memo continued. “It must be our purpose not to balance our power against that of America, but to make use of American power for purposes which we regard as good” and to “use the power of the United States to preserve the Commonwealth and the Empire, and, if possible, to support the pacification of Europe.”It is easy to see why members of Britain’s foreign-policy elite, still warmed by a Victorian afterglow, might discount Americans’ prattling on about decolonization and democracy as empty wartime rhetoric. If anything, they thought, Americans’ pestering insistence on such ideals proved how naive they were. Churchill often grumbled with disdain about Americans’ sentimental affection for—as he put it—the “chinks” and “pigtails” fighting against Japan in China, scornful of the American belief that they could be trusted to govern themselves.And the face America presented to London might have compounded the misapprehension. Roosevelt was expected to choose George Marshall to be the American commander of Operation Overlord, a position that would create the American equivalent of a Roman proconsul in London. Instead, he picked Dwight Eisenhower.Roosevelt’s reasons for choosing Eisenhower remain difficult to pin down. The president gave different explanations to different people at different times. But Eisenhower was the ideal choice for America’s proconsul in London and Europe more generally, if the goal was to make a rising American superpower seem benign.Eisenhower had a bit of cowboy to him, just like in the movies. He was also an Anglophile and took to wearing a British officer’s coat when visiting British troops in the field. He had a natural politician’s instinct for leaving the impression that he agreed with everyone. And he offered the incongruous public image of a four-star general who smiled like he was selling Coca-Cola.He was also genuinely committed to multilateralism. Eisenhower had studied World War I closely and grew convinced that its many disasters—in both its fighting and its peace—were caused by the Allies’ inability to put aside their own imperial prestige to achieve their common goals. Eisenhower’s commitment to Allied “teamwork,” as he would say with his hokey Kansas geniality, broke radically from the past and seemed hopelessly naive, yet was essential to the success of operations as high-risk and complex as the D-Day invasion.Eisenhower, for his part, was often quite deft in handling the political nature of his position. He knew that to be effective, to foster that teamwork, he could never be seen as relishing the terrifying economic and military power at his disposal, or the United States’ willingness to use it. “Hell, I don’t have to go around jutting out my chin to show the world how tough I am,” he said privately.On D-Day, Eisenhower announced the invasion without mentioning the United States once. Instead, he said, the landings were part of the “United Nations’ plan for the liberation of Europe, made in conjunction with our great Russian allies.” While the invasion was under way, Eisenhower scolded subordinates who issued reports on the extent of French territory “captured.” The territory, he chided them, had been “liberated.”The strategy worked. That fall, with Paris liberated, only 29 percent of French citizens polled felt the United States had “contributed most in the defeat of Germany,” with 61 percent giving credit to the Soviet Union. Yet, when asked where they would like to visit after the war, only 13 percent were eager to celebrate the Soviet Union’s contributions in Russia itself. Forty-three percent said the United States, a country whose Air Force had contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of French civilians in bombing raids.In rhetoric and often in reality, the United States has continued to project its power, not as an empire, but on behalf of the “United Nations,” “NATO,” “the free world,” or “mankind.” The interests it claims to vindicate as a superpower have also generally not been its imperial ambition to make America great, but the shared ideals enshrined soon after the war in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.Had the D-Day invasion failed, those ideals would have been discredited. Unable to open the Western Front in France, the Allies would have had no choice but to commit to Britain’s strategy in the Mediterranean. The U.S. military, and by extension the United States, would have lost all credibility. The Soviets would have been the only meaningful rival to German power on the European continent. And there would have been no reason for the international politics of national prestige and imperial interest to become outmoded.Instead, on D-Day, American soldiers joined by British soldiers and allies from nearly a dozen countries embarked on a treacherous voyage from the seat of the British empire to the shores of the French empire on a crusade that succeeded in liberating the Old World from tyranny. It was a victory for an alliance built around the promise, at least, of broadly shared ideals rather than narrow national interests. That was a radical idea at the time, and it is becoming a contested one today. D-Day continues to resonate as much as it does because, like the battles of Lexington and Concord, it is an almost-too-perfect allegory for a decisive turning point in America’s national story: the moment when it came into its own as a new kind of superpower, one that was willing and able to fight for a freer world.

The rapid expansion of state voucher programs follows court decisions that have eroded the separation between church and state.