The Atlantic
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Lighthouse Parents Have More Confident Kids When my son was a toddler, he liked to run in our driveway until he fell. He would then turn to me to see if he was hurt. If my face betrayed worry or if I audibly gasped, he would wail. If I maintained equanimity, he would brush himself off and get back to running. Learning that I could so powerfully influence his mental state was a revelation. Here was this human being who was counting on me to make sense of the world—not just how to tie his shoes or recite the ABCs, but how to feel.Years later, when he was in middle school, this lesson came back to me. One night while doing homework, my son told me about a classmate who had been unkind to him. My first instinct was to rush to fix it—email the parents, call the school, demand action. (Calling his teachers would have been complicated, given my role as the head of the school.) But instead of reacting, I paused. “That sounds hard. What did you do?”“I decided not to hang out with him for a while,” my son replied. “I’m going to try playing soccer at lunch instead.”“That’s a great solution,” I said, and he went back to his homework.These otherwise ordinary parenting moments crystallized for me an important truth: Sometimes, the best thing a parent can do is nothing at all.Parents of any age can conjure up the feeling they had when they first held their child and thought, Oh. Here you are, this person whom I’m in charge of. And they can tell you that no single piece of parenting wisdom can prepare you for this new, magical, terrifying endeavor. Parenting is joyous and challenging and sometimes stressful. In fact, a recent advisory from the surgeon general argues that parenting is hazardous to people’s mental health. The report cites a range of factors that are contributing to a perilous parental landscape—from the complexities of social media to worries about children’s safety. It goes on to propose an array of solutions, including investments in child care and federal paid family leave.There’s no question that many American parents desperately need more support. Yet the surgeon general is missing one important strategy that is within the control of every parent: a look in the mirror. What if the ways in which we are parenting are making life harder on our kids and harder on us? What if by doing less, parents would foster better outcomes for children and parents alike?I’ve spent the past 30 years working in schools, and I’ve watched thousands of parents engage with educators and with their children. Too often, I watch parents overfunctioning—depriving their kids of the confidence that comes from struggling and persevering, and exhausting themselves in the process. Although this has been true throughout my career, it’s growing more acute. Most Americans now believe that young people will not be better off than their parents. They see greater competition for fewer resources—be it college admissions, jobs, or housing. Parents are scrambling to ensure that their kids are the ones who will be able to get ahead.We’re biologically wired to prevent our children’s suffering, and it can be excruciating to watch them struggle. A parent’s first instinct is often to remove obstacles from their child’s path, obstacles that feel overwhelming to them but are easily navigable by us. This urge has led to pop-culture mythology around pushy parenting styles, including the “Helicopter Parent,” who flies in to rescue a child in crisis, and the “Snowplow Parent,” who flattens any obstacle in their child’s way. A young person who grows accustomed to having a parent intervene on his behalf begins to believe that he’s not capable of acting on his own, feeding both anxiety and dependence.I want to make a case for the Lighthouse Parent. A Lighthouse Parent stands as a steady, reliable guide, providing safety and clarity without controlling every aspect of their child’s journey. Here’s an example: A child comes home feeling overwhelmed by school and frustrated that she is doing “all of the work” for a big group project that is due next week. The overfunctioning parent is ready with an array of next steps: “Why don’t you assign the other group members what they each have to do?” “You should put your name next to all of the parts that you did so the teacher gives you credit.” “I’m going to email the teacher so she knows that you’re doing all of the work.” These tactics may address symptoms, but they fail to get at the underlying issue. They also inadvertently communicate to a child that what’s needed is parental involvement. Sometimes what a child needs is simply to be acknowledged: “Wow, that sounds like a lot.” “I can tell you are working really hard.” “Do you have ideas about what you want to do?”Like a lighthouse that helps sailors avoid crashing into rocks, Lighthouse Parents provide firm boundaries and emotional support while allowing their children the freedom to navigate their own challenges. They demonstrate that they trust their kids to handle difficult situations independently. The key is learning when to step back and let them find their own way.One of the most important shifts that parents can make is learning to substitute our impulse to fix problems with the patience to listen. A fix-it mindset is focused on quick solutions, at quelling or containing emotions or discomfort; listening is about allowing emotions to exist without rushing to solve a problem. Listening teaches resilience; it communicates confidence in your child’s ability to cope with challenges, however messy they might be.As children grow, parents must move from the role of boss to that of consultant. When our children are young, we make nearly every decision for them, from what they eat to when (in theory) they sleep. Little by little, we remove the scaffolding, creating freestanding adults who have internalized our values and have the capacity to embody them in the world. At least, that’s the idea.If children never have the opportunity to stand on their own, we risk setting them up for a collapse later on. They must experience struggle, make mistakes, and learn from them in order to grow. In fact, learning any skill—whether it’s coding, painting, playing a sport—requires repeated missteps before mastery. And yet, in an educational landscape fueled by perceptions of scarcity, students can absorb an unconscious and unintended message that mistakes are permanent and have no value. Too many kids think that their parents want unblemished transcripts, and in pursuit of that unattainable goal, they sacrifice opportunities for growth.An aversion to owning mistakes can be most visible when it comes to student discipline. Adolescents cross boundaries—this is part of growing up. When they do, they receive feedback on their transgression and ideally internalize that feedback, ultimately making the desired values their own. When a teenager plagiarizes a paper or arrives at a school dance under the influence, one part of a school’s response is disciplinary—it’s a way of providing feedback. In the moment, students don’t thank us for administering a consequence. I have yet to hear a student who has been suspended say “Thank you for helping me learn a lesson that will serve me well in college and beyond.” Instead they say “This is unfair” or “Other kids were doing it too.” This is when parents need to stand shoulder to shoulder with the school, communicating a clear and aligned message to support their child’s growth. But parents are often more worried about their child’s future college applications than they are about having their child internalize valuable lessons. When parents seek to control outcomes for their kids, they are trading short-term wins for long-term thriving—they’re trading the promise of a college bumper sticker for a happy, well-adjusted 35-year-old.In the 1960s, the psychologist Diana Baumrind described three parenting styles, which researchers building on her work eventually expanded to four: authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, and authoritative. Authoritarian parents make all decisions for their children with little room for negotiation. Permissive parents avoid conflict by setting few boundaries, often leading their children to struggle with discipline and focus. Uninvolved parents are disconnected, providing minimal support or structure. Authoritative parents allow for some flexibility, combining clear expectations with the willingness to listen. Authoritative parents are Lighthouse Parents. They are clear on values, but open to a range of ways in which those values can be put into practice; they balance structure and autonomy. The research shows that authoritative parenting yields the best outcomes for kids, and tends to produce happy and competent adults. Although this framework may seem simple or even intuitive, too many parents struggle to adopt it.All parents show up as authoritarian, permissive, uninvolved, or authoritative at different times, depending on the situation and on what’s unfolding in their own lives. But remembering to put parenting in perspective, focusing on long-term outcomes over short-term saves, can reduce some of the stress of parenting while also yielding better outcomes for children.Yes, parenting can be stressful. But when we trust our children to navigate their own course—with us as steady and supportive guides—we lighten our own load and empower them to thrive.theatlantic.com
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How Glendale, Arizona, Used the Pentagon Earlier this year, the Pentagon swooped in to give Katie Hobbs, Arizona’s Democratic governor, the perfect reason to veto a valuable bill. The proposed Arizona Starter Homes Act sought to legalize smaller dwellings to address the affordability crisis straining the fast-growing state. After the state legislature had already passed the bill, a regional Navy official wrote a letter to Hobbs opposing it. The intervention seemed bizarre, as I noted in an article at the time. But now we know what happened: The U.S. military was doing a favor for a NIMBY local government—in this case, the city of Glendale, a Phoenix suburb that is also home to Luke Air Force Base.The episode reveals something important about how the nation’s current housing crisis came about: The shortage of homes is the result of thousands of decisions that barely anyone is paying attention to—and that in many cases happen outside public view.After the Arizona bill’s demise, Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat who has pushed for federal action on housing-supply policies, reached out to the Pentagon for an explanation. In a response letter that Garcia shared with The Atlantic, William A. LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, revealed that Glendale had tipped the military off to the bill. Ryan Lee, the city’s intergovernmental-programs director, confirmed to me over the phone that he’d played that role but declined to answer further questions.[Read: Why your house was so expensive]The bare facts here are infuriating: The democratically elected representatives of the people of Arizona were able to come together with a commonsense solution to the nation’s most pressing economic problem, and a staff member at a mid-size city was able to call in the military to provide the governor cover to veto? Without so much as a public vote?Garcia surmised that what the Department of Defense did is part of a larger pattern. “My guess is, for far too long, large organizations like DOD have engaged in these types of efforts—sometimes public and other times maybe not,” he told me. “And folks never really find out about it.”One prominent supporter of the starter-homes bill, State Representative Analise Ortiz, whose district includes parts of Glendale and Phoenix, told me she hadn’t been aware of Glendale’s decision to involve the military but wasn’t surprised: “Cities across the state were doing everything in their power to try to stop the Starter Homes Act.”Ortiz was skeptical about Glendale’s motivations in enlisting the Department of Defense to gain the governor’s veto. “This is not the way we typically go about creating policy,” she said. “Typically, if a city is looking at a bill and wants to get all perspectives, they will think of that in the weeks that it takes for a bill to get through the legislature. If there was a genuine concern here, it should have been raised much earlier in the legislative process, and the fact that it was not raised until the 11th hour—it seems to me like it was solely a tactic to get the bill vetoed.”The Biden administration has been vocal about its concern for housing affordability and has specifically praised state and local actions like those in the now-dead Arizona bill. In the weeks following Hobbs’s veto of the Arizona law, at least one senior administration official contacted the Defense Department to inquire how it got involved and why it intervened against official Biden policy. The conversation, according to a source who requested anonymity to speak freely about discussions within the administration, revealed that the Defense Department had simply not even registered that local land-use fights were important to federal officials, and ended with the mutual understanding that future similar engagements would require a discussion.Housing politics is local is a familiar refrain, but one that national leaders have become less and less able to hide behind. After pandemic-induced inflation led to widespread dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign, federal policy makers realized that rising shelter costs (rents and mortgages) needed to be addressed, lest voters take their frustration out on their elected officials. After all, if voters are going to blame you for it, there’s no point complaining that it’s actually someone else’s job.[Read: The next generation of NIMBYs ]At the least, federal officials should stop enabling NIMBYism at the state or local level. “I think it’s important for them to be put on notice,” Garcia argued. “I don’t think the DOD should be engaged in stopping housing developments across the country. This is a national priority.”theatlantic.com
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How a Group of University Students Toppled a 15-Year-Old Regime Abu Sayed stood with his arms outstretched, holding nothing but a stick, when Bangladeshi police fired their shotguns. A video from July shows the 25-year-old student facing a wall of officers in riot gear. Tear gas has cleared out the other protesters, but Sayed stays, baring his chest as police shoot warning rounds at his feet. More shots ring out; he staggers, then falls to the hot cement. He died before reaching a hospital.Sayed’s killing galvanized the Bangladeshi people, marking the moment when “everything started to fall apart” for the government, Ali Riaz, a Bangladeshi political scientist at Illinois State University, told me. The protests multiplied, led by a group of students that came to be known as the Anti-Discrimination Movement. Within days, state authorities imposed a national curfew and cut off telecommunications in the country. Within two weeks, police and paramilitary forces had killed hundreds of demonstrators. Within a month, protesters marched on the capital, forcing the nation’s leader, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina, to resign and flee to India. In her stead, a makeshift government has emerged, run in part by the same students who toppled the old one.The proximate cause of the protests was the reinstatement of a government-job quota that massively favored members of the ruling party, the Awami League. Like many working-class students in Bangladesh, Sayed went to college in hopes of finding work in the civil service. His parents and siblings scrounged money for his tuition, betting that his postgraduate employment would provide for them in return. But in June, the supreme court of Bangladesh reinstalled the quota, reversing a decision from 2018, and slashing his chances. Sayed was one of 400,000 graduates in his year competing for a mere 3,000 jobs. They weren’t the only ones upset by the quota; the government’s apparent favoritism inspired Bangladeshis of all professions, classes, and ages to protest.[Read: The angst behind China’s ‘lying flat’ youth]For much of her 15-year reign, Hasina and the Awami League relied on the quota to stock the government with loyalists and shore up her rule. Bangladesh first instituted the system after its liberation from Pakistani forces in 1971, setting aside one-third of its civil-service jobs for the descendants of those who fought in the war for independence. (Hasina was the most obvious beneficiary; her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence movement. Challenging the quota meant, in one sense, challenging Hasina’s right to rule.) Because the Awami League was associated with the war effort, the quota disproportionately benefited students affiliated with the party. As protests intensified following the court’s decision in June, the government’s response grew more draconian. Hasina deployed the nation’s Border Guard—a paramilitary group that typically patrols the country’s frontiers with India and Myanmar—and implemented a shoot-on-sight order for anyone who violated the curfew. Demonstrations turned violent. Tanks roamed city streets. Authorities beat and killed scores of unarmed students. Aid groups have reported that dozens of children died, too, including a 6-year-old girl struck by a stray bullet while playing on the roof of her apartment building.The government’s brutality proved to be a strategic misstep. Instead of subduing the protesters, repression strengthened their numbers. “Ten thousand were suppressed, and 20,000 showed up,” Mahfuz Anam, the editor of the leading national newspaper, The Daily Star, told me. “Twenty thousand dispersed, and 100,000 showed up.” On August 3, student organizers demanded Hasina’s resignation. Two days later, hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis marched on her official residence as she escaped in a helicopter.The students quickly installed an interim government and named Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel laureate and critic of Hasina, as its head. Backed by an advisory board that includes student leaders, he’s indicated that he has much larger ambitions than simply stewarding Bangladesh through to a new election. Earlier this month, Yunus announced the creation of several commissions focused on reforming institutions including the judiciary, electoral system, and police.“After 15 years of autocracy, the entire body of the country is rotten,” Shafqat Munir, a Bangladeshi security expert, told me. “Limb by limb, the interim government will have to repair the country.” How much Yunus will be able to accomplish remains unclear, but he appears determined to unwind Hasina’s legacy. If he has any success, the students who ousted her will play a key part.On a humid evening in late August, I stood with Ashrefa Khatun, a student leader in the Anti-Discrimination Movement, amid towers of water bottles and donated clothes. Days earlier, flash flooding had overrun a city in southeast Bangladesh, and Khatun—the daughter of a rickshaw puller and garment worker—was suddenly coordinating national relief efforts. She is one of many students who have taken on roles such as policing traffic, protecting sites of worship, cleaning streets, and, more recently, responding to natural disasters.[Read: Bangladesh really is a climate success story]Khatun attributes the success of the Anti-Discrimination Movement to savvy organizing. Students across multiple universities used social media to recruit one another and arrange demonstrations, including highway blockades. They circulated memes—many derived from Marvel movies—tallying each day’s wins and losses. When the government shut down the internet in response to its Gen Z adversaries, the students switched to offline texting apps, such as Bridgefy, that allowed them to continue communicating during the blackout. Nazifa Hannat, an undergraduate who helped coordinate across the schools, told me that even students enrolled in private universities—like she is—felt compelled to join the movement, despite the fact that their superior job prospects insulated them from the effects of the quota. “For us, it wasn’t about the quotas,” she told me. “We started to protest injustice.” When private-university students joined the movement en masse, street protests grew too large for the government to manage. More and more, it resorted to violence. Khatun quickly discovered the importance of recruiting female students: Police, she found, were less likely to use violence when enough women attended a demonstration.In addition to social media, the movement embraced an older mode of protest—public art. Near the University of Dhaka, the largest public university in the country, I approached a group of students painting a work that read LIVE FREE in English, Bangla, and sign language. One of the artists was Quazi Islam, the president of a student club that promotes disability awareness. He told me that propaganda from the Awami League and its student wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League, once dominated campus walls, whereas “we had to get permission from proctors or the BCL students to put something up.” Now, he told me, he is “reclaiming the walls that belong to the students and the country.”The art began appearing as early as June and serves today as a record of the summer’s events. A wall in the university’s amphitheater displays a quote from a widely viewed video in which a police officer tells his commander, “When I shoot one, only one dies. The rest don’t scatter.” A spray-painted message on a pillar reads The Z in Gen Z stands for zero chance of defeat. Several murals show Abu Sayed facing a bullet.Many of the student protesters already had firsthand experience with repression. In 2018, an unlicensed bus driver ran over two high-school students on their way home from school, sparking national outrage. Students campaigned for better road safety, but members of the BCL forced them back into their homes. That wasn’t the end of the campaign, though; the students adapted, relying on digital organizing. Many of today’s student leaders are those same schoolchildren from six years ago—including Khatun. The road-safety movement is what inspired her to apply to university in the first place.Hasina and the Awami League tried every trick they could to subdue the protests. There is no easy way to explain how students persevered and overthrew a 15-year-old regime in less than 60 days. But their achievement offers a clear lesson: Despotism is often more brittle than it seems.theatlantic.com
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The Timekeeper of Ukraine Photographs by Iva SadishFor six years, Vladimir Soldatov has been the custodian of Ukraine’s time. He oversees a laboratory in the city of Kharkiv that contains about a dozen clocks and several distributive devices: gray boxes, humming in gray racks and connected via looping cables, that together create, count, and communicate his country’s seconds. The lab is located within the Institute of Metrology, a cluster of cream-colored buildings now scarred by Russian artillery.Soldatov is Ukraine’s representative in a small, international community of obsessives who keep their nation’s time and, by doing so, help construct the world’s time, to which all clocks are set. The timekeepers compare their labs’ outputs once every five days; many then tweak their systems in increments of trillionths of a second. In the digital era, no such lab has operated in a war zone until now.Kharkiv has endured waves of bombardment since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. During that first winter, an explosion about 50 meters from Soldatov’s lab shattered all of its windows and spiked its herringbone wooden floors with shards of glass. Most of the lab’s devices kept ticking. The windows are now filled with wood and insulation, and Soldatov and his colleagues have moved many of their instruments from second- and third-floor rooms to a basement space, Soldatov explained to me by email, “in case the building is directly hit again.” Windows at the Institute of Metrology have been covered with plywood. (Iva Sadish for The Atlantic) [Read: No time for funeral rites]Modern timekeeping is a science of nearly unfathomable precision, built on counting the perfectly steady, rapidly recurring undulations of energy waves. An energy wave rises, peaks, descends, bottoms out, ascends, and returns to its original altitude: tick. The wave repeats the same motion, at the same pace, taking the same interval of time to complete the cycle: tick. The trick for timekeepers is to ensure that they all use waves that oscillate at the same rate—the same frequency.Since 1967, when timekeepers officially forsook astronomy for physics as the basis of the second, the time’s definitional energy wave has been one that, when it hits a cesium-133 atom that is in one of two energy states, inspires the atom to switch to the other. This change is called a “clock transition.” To find that frequency, a cesium clock embarks on a continuous search. It uses magnets or lasers to select only the atoms that are in one of those two states, beams them through a pair of energy fields, and notes how many atoms make the leap. The clock then adjusts the frequency of the fields’ energy and sends another batch of atoms through—repeating this process over and over, nearing, then overshooting, then nearing, then overshooting the frequency. The clock determines the frequency of energy that seems to convert the most atoms, then counts its undulations.For these measurements to be as accurate as possible, timekeepers have to sustain a stable environment around the atoms, both in the lab and within the clocks, which are also known as “standards.” Some timekeeping labs keep their temperature constant within tenths of a degree Celsius. The clocks have their own internal temperature stabilizers, as well as vacuums that remove excess atoms and molecules, and shields to fend off energy waves that could distort their readings. The need to control for every variable can hardly be overstated, because the second is arguably civilization’s most precisely defined unit of measurement. Ideally, each second should contain 9,192,631,770 ticks of the definitional frequency. Instruments control the temperature in the basement, which has become part of the time lab. (Iva Sadish for The Atlantic) Not all atomic clocks use cesium. In the Kharkiv lab, three clocks do; six use hydrogen, which can be more stable in the short term, and several use rubidium, though none of the latter contribute to Ukraine’s time. Today, that is the job of two cesium and two hydrogen clocks. Another hydrogen clock operates in reserve. Soldatov previously kept four reserves running, but that would require more electricity than he can currently use. Of his work, Soldatov told me, “Mostly, I have to repair the old Soviet hydrogen standards.” Sometimes, he has to disassemble devices to adjust their inner sanctum, often using spare parts. And, he added, “the cesium standard doesn’t like it when a rocket explodes 50 meters away.”That early blast tore off the side walls of several hydrogen clocks, badly bending them, but they kept running. The cesium clock closest to the wall, though, stopped transmitting its time to the measuring system. Soldatov shut it down. When he started it back up, it lagged behind the other clocks. He restarted it again, under the manufacturer’s advice, but then it rushed. He tried again. For a while, it seemed to operate normally, but then it began performing too poorly to keep running.Under ordinary circumstances, all clocks accelerate or decelerate at their own rate. Even atomic ones made to the exact same specifications will deviate from one another. Partly for this reason, timekeeping labs generally use a weighted average of their clocks’ readings, called a “timescale,” as their time. (Another reason is that any clock can fail.)[Read: A brief history of (modern) time]The world’s central timescale, called Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), is based on the weighted average of more than 400 clocks in about 70 labs across the world. A seven-person department within the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, in the Paris suburb of Sèvres, calculates this average. (In the latest version, clocks from Russia’s metrology lab contributed the highest percentage of the time.) One country’s time is seldom in sync with another’s; even when they do coincide, they don’t remain that way for long. But the best timekeeping labs tend to steer their time to keep within a couple nanoseconds of UTC; others stay within hundreds or thousands. Soldatov has generally kept Ukraine’s time within about 20 nanoseconds.At the beginning of the war, around the time the blast shattered the institute’s windows—causing the lab’s temperature to sharply drop—Ukraine’s time rose to more than 65 billionths of a second fast and stayed there for 10 days before recovering. “I had no time to monitor the scale,” Soldatov said. In another period, when the city went without power for several days, the hydrogen standards had to be shut off to conserve energy, and so Ukraine’s time jumped again to nearly 40 nanoseconds ahead. The lab’s latest differences, for the five-day intervals between July 28 and August 27, have ranged from 3.8 billionths of a second fast to 2.1 slow, though for several stretches Soldatov was unable to submit his data in time.Soldatov is 46 years old, grew up in Kharkiv, and graduated from its Air Force University with a degree in radio engineering. “I became the custodian somewhat by chance,” he wrote to me. After serving in the army for 10 years, he worked as a programmer and built websites. “A friend invited me to set up computers and write a program for a frequency synthesizer for the system, and after some time, I became the head of the laboratory.” Lately, Soldatov comes to the lab mainly to repair devices and develop new ones. (Iva Sadish for The Atlantic) When the Russians began bombing Kharkiv, Soldatov directed most of the laboratory’s staff to stay home. One colleague remained with him to keep the time: Demian Mykolayovych Kravchenko, an engineer who moved with his family into the institute’s subterranean bomb shelter within days of the Russian incursion to escape the relentless shelling of their neighborhood.A time relies on having someone to look after it. If a lab’s clocks do not operate continuously, the time will be lost. Many timekeepers swear that the devices wait until nights or weekends to malfunction. “It may sound funny, but I treat the system as a living organism,” Soldatov joked. He thinks of his instruments as temperamental colleagues, some of whose components are not much younger than he is. They harbor a furtive mischief: “If a staff member leaves the laboratory, something breaks. I can’t explain it, but it happens.”In the early days of the war, the Russians bombed the city mainly at night. Soldatov often stayed overnight at the institute to tend to the standards, and especially to keep an eye on the generator if the power went out. Kravchenko sometimes helped with the whole building’s engineering needs; the institute’s then-director later described him as “a true guardian angel of the Institute of Metrology.”But the Russians changed their patterns, according to Soldatov, first to random times within the city’s curfew, but then to any time, including during the day and in crowded places, “due to the great efficiency and desire of the Russian Federation to kill as many people as possible.” One Sunday morning, Kravchenko was in the institute’s back area when a cluster bomb hit. “He was killed in front of his family,” Soldatov told me. Soldatov had spoken with Kravchenko at the institute just hours before.For many months afterward, Soldatov kept Ukraine’s time alone. Now he has a staff again, and he works remotely except when the devices need to be reset or repaired, or when he comes in to develop devices for the future.In recent weeks, Russia has redoubled its attacks on Kharkiv, raising a question that I put to Soldatov: What would happen if Ukraine’s primary timekeeping lab were destroyed? What if a national time suddenly disappeared?His first response was sobering. “We have not conducted experiments to determine what would happen if the single point of synchronization fails,” he wrote, “but it is highly likely that achieving high-speed internet and stable communication will be impossible. Additionally, there will be issues with electricity and frequency stability in the network.” But then he amended that, writing later: “I don’t think there will be any catastrophic consequences from the destruction of the clocks.” About a dozen clocks and several distributive devices create, count, and communicate Ukraine’s seconds. (Iva Sadish for The Atlantic) Timekeeping may be delicate, but it is also resilient, because its burden is distributed and shared. Critical infrastructure all over the world relies on numerous clocks in far-flung places to remain synchronized within millionths of a second. Power grids, for instance, use temporal alignment to pinpoint failures. But a grid’s clocks don’t need to be synchronized to UTC or even a national lab. They simply need to be synchronized to one another. Ukrenergo, the Ukrainian grid’s operator, synchronizes its substations using readings not from the lab in Kharkiv but beamed down from GPS.Many telecommunications providers around the world operate similarly: Their networks need to stay synchronized to connect calls across towers, and they often do so using GPS receivers and clocks. Exactly how, and to what time, Ukrainian telecoms companies synchronize is so essential to their functioning that three of the country’s providers declined to describe their timekeeping systems to me. A representative of Lifecell responded to my query, “The information you are requesting is quite sensitive and cannot be disclosed, especially during the war.”The Institute of Metrology is linked directly to the internet. Soldatov’s lab houses two servers that distribute Ukrainian time to anyone who wants it. Together, they receive about a quarter million requests for the time a day, “sometimes many more,” Soldatov said. Because these servers are connected to a primary time source, they are at the top of the internet’s temporal hierarchy, on stratum one. Beneath them, on stratum two, are go-between servers that pass their understanding of the time along to other servers and machines. And so the time trickles through the web, often synchronous within tens of milliseconds, down to the innumerable devices that sustain the internet and, degrading as it goes, to the corners of the screens of the public’s personal computers.[Read: A brief economic history of time]This system was designed in the earliest days of the internet, when network devices failed frequently. It’s based on principles that are fundamental to timekeeping: redundancy and diversity. If the Institute of Metrology’s servers cut out, any server looking to them should be programmed to also seek the time from at least two other sources. Whether system administrators have properly set up these processes would be revealed only if the worst happened.Coders have often been surprised by how complex the time can be. Once in a while, a leap second must be added to UTC to keep the time mostly aligned with the Earth’s erratic rotation. When this happens, websites and digital systems have been known to fail, because of a gap of a single second. Without sources of time like the lab in Ukraine, improperly programmed systems would swiftly drift at least a second out of sync. Encrypted systems would especially suffer, as they require a particularly large amount of synchronous data to operate. Websites could break, or at least slow.In Ukraine, rolling blackouts already limit the hours that people can spend online communicating, working, or reading. Losing a primary, central time source could cause an additional disturbance to internet access across the nation. The country’s handful of surviving stratum-one servers could be flooded with requests. Whether they would be overwhelmed or hold steady is not known.Ukraine does have a lesser, backup timescale in Kyiv, and the Ukrainian military has its own standards. But if the Kharkiv lab were destroyed, Ukraine would almost certainly depend more than ever on GPS for the time. The country’s stratum-one servers outside the lab use it as their time source, just as the power grid does. In a 2019 paper, Soldatov warned against Ukraine’s reliance on GPS for the time. “According to some experts, our dependence on GPS is becoming very dangerous, given the extreme unreliability of this technology,” he wrote. “The problem is that the signal from the satellite is very weak, and it is extremely easy to muffle it with generating noise at the same frequency.” The war has made GPS even harder to access in Ukraine.Soldatov does not believe that the war will destroy his lab’s timescale. But he has suffered other losses since it began. A rocket badly damaged his family’s home, and so he, his wife, and his teenage son now live with his mother in a small apartment, a few kilometers from the lab.[Watch: Where time comes from]“Recently, one of the hydrogen standards just went out,” Soldatov wrote to me. “That same day, the daughter of a colleague called me and said that her father had died.” This colleague had worked specifically on that device. He had been struggling with his health, but Soldatov believes the war accelerated his decline. “He died around the same time the hydrogen standard went out,” Soldatov told me. He has since repaired the standard.Soldatov once saw his work as being central to Ukraine’s technological ascendence and an indicator of “technical potential.” He wrote, “The better the clock in the country, the more developed it is, as a rule, the more data it can process.” But he has come to believe that Ukraine’s potential is withering. “Yes, sometimes it seems to me that all my work is meaningless and has few prospects, and I want to go somewhere far away and do my own thing, but for now I am where I am.” During an earlier stretch of the war, Soldatov sent his wife and son elsewhere, but he stayed.Soldatov learned in the military to value perseverance and responsibility over self-preservation, he told me, and he thinks that most Kharkiv residents share this mentality. “If the clocks are destroyed,” he wrote, “I will go to serve on the front lines.” Iva Sadish for The Atlantictheatlantic.com
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Chatbots Are Saving America’s Nuclear Industry When the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania was decommissioned in 2019, it heralded the symbolic end of America’s nuclear industry. In 1979, the facility was the site of the worst nuclear disaster in the nation’s history: a partial reactor meltdown that didn’t release enough radiation to cause detectable harm to people nearby, but still turned Americans against nuclear power and prompted a host of regulations that functionally killed most nuclear build-out for decades. Many existing plants stayed online, but 40 years later, Three Mile Island joined a wave of facilities that shut down because of financial hurdles and competition from cheap natural gas, closures that cast doubt over the future of nuclear power in the United States.Now Three Mile Island is coming back, this time as part of efforts to meet the enormous electricity demands of generative AI. This morning, the plant’s owner, Constellation Energy, announced that it is reopening the facility. Microsoft, which is seeking clean energy to power its data centers, has agreed to buy power from the reopened plant for 20 years. “This was the site of the industry’s greatest failure, and now it can be a place of rebirth,” Joseph Dominguez, the CEO of Constellation, told The New York Times. Three Mile Island plans to officially reopen in 2028, after some $1.6 billion worth of refurbishing and under a new name, the Crane Clean Energy Center.Nuclear power and chatbots might be a perfect match. The technology underlying ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Microsoft Copilot is extraordinarily power-hungry. These programs feed on more data, are more complex, and use more electricity-intensive hardware than traditional web algorithms. An AI-powered web search, for instance, could require five to 10 times more electricity than a traditional query.The world is already struggling to generate enough electricity to meet the internet’s growing power demand, which AI is rapidly accelerating. Large grids and electric utilities across the U.S. are warning that AI is straining their capacity, and some of the world’s biggest data-center hubs—including Sweden, Singapore, Amsterdam, and exurban Washington, D.C.—are struggling to find power to run new constructions. The exact amount of power that AI will demand within a few years’ time is hard to predict, but it will likely be enormous: Estimates range from the equivalent of Argentina’s annual power usage to that of India.That’s a big problem for the tech companies building these data centers, many of which have made substantial commitments to cut their emissions. Microsoft, for instance, has pledged to be “carbon negative,” or to remove more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits, by 2030. The Three Mile Island deal is part of that accounting. Instead of directly drawing power from the reopened plant, Microsoft will buy enough carbon-free nuclear energy from the facility to match the power that several of its data centers draw from the grid, a company spokesperson told me over email.Such electricity-matching schemes, known as “power purchase agreements,” are necessary because the construction of solar, wind, and geothermal plants is not keeping pace with the demands of AI. Even if it was, these clean electricity sources might pose a more fundamental problem for tech companies: Data centers’ new, massive power demands need to be met at all hours of the day, not just when the sun shines or the wind blows.To fill the gap, many tech companies are turning to a readily available source of abundant, reliable electricity: burning fossil fuels. In the U.S., plans to wind down coal-fired power plants are being delayed in West Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, and elsewhere to power data centers. That Microsoft will use the refurbished Three Mile Island to offset, rather than supply, its data centers’ electricity consumption suggests that the facilities will likely continue to rely on fossil fuels for some time, too. Burning fossil fuels to power AI means the new tech boom might even threaten to delay the green-energy transition.Still, investing in nuclear energy to match data centers’ power usage also brings new sources of clean, reliable electricity to the power grid. Splitting apart atoms provides a carbon-free way to generate tremendous amounts of electricity day and night. Bobby Hollis, Microsoft’s vice president for energy, told Bloomberg that this is a key upside to the Three Mile Island revival: “We run around the clock. They run around the clock.” Microsoft is working to build a carbon-free grid to power all of its operations, data centers included. Nuclear plants will be an important component that provides what the company has elsewhere called “firm electricity” to fill in the gaps for less steady sources of clean energy, including solar and wind.It’s not just Microsoft that is turning to nuclear. Earlier this year, Amazon purchased a Pennsylvania data center that is entirely nuclear-powered, and the company is reportedly in talks to secure nuclear power along the East Coast from another Constellation nuclear plant. Google, Microsoft, and several other companies have invested or agreed to buy electricity in start-ups promising nuclear fusion—an even more powerful and cleaner form of nuclear power that remains highly experimental—as have billionaires including Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos.Nuclear energy might not just be a good option for powering the AI boom. It might be the only clean option able to meet demand until there is a substantial build-out of solar and wind energy. A handful of other, retired reactors could come back online, and new ones may be built as well. Just yesterday, Jennifer Granholm, the secretary of energy, told my colleague Vann R. Newkirk II that building small nuclear reactors could become an important way to supply nonstop clean energy to data centers. Whether such construction will be fast and plentiful enough to satisfy the growing power demand is unclear. But it must be, for the generative-AI revolution to really take off. Before chatbots can finish remaking the internet, they might need to first reshape America’s physical infrastructure.theatlantic.com
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Public-Health Officials Should Have Been Talking About Their Sex Parties the Whole Time In conversations caught on hidden camera, New York City’s former COVID czar said that he’d organized a pair of sex parties in the second half of 2020, as New Yorkers coped with peak pandemic social isolation. “The only way I could do this job for the city was if I had some way to blow off steam every now and then,” Jay Varma told an undercover reporter with whom he thought he was on a date. In a video compiled from several recordings taken this summer, the onetime senior public-health adviser to city hall describes the two events that took place in August and November of 2020. He also talked about his work promoting vaccination in the city by making it “very uncomfortable” for those who wanted to avoid the shots.“I stand by my efforts to get New Yorkers vaccinated against COVID-19, and I reject dangerous extremist efforts to undermine the public’s confidence in the need for and effectiveness of vaccines,” Varma said in a statement to The Atlantic. He acknowledged having participated in “two private gatherings” during his time in government, and said he takes responsibility “for not using the best judgment at the time.” The statement also notes that the taped conversations were “secretly recorded, spliced, diced, and taken out of context.”It’s not clear whether Varma personally violated any COVID rules. The sex parties involved, by the account he gave to the podcaster Steven Crowder in a companion video, “like, 10 people.” At the time, New York’s guidelines—which Varma was promoting far and wide—limited gatherings to 10 people or less in an effort to curb the spread of the virus. Separate city guidance on “Safer Sex and COVID-19” discouraged—but did not forbid—group sex. (“Limit the size of your guest list. Keep it intimate,” the guidance said.) Varma explained that he’d sex-partied responsibly, noting, “Everybody got tests and things like that.” He also said that he’d attended a dance party with hundreds of others in June 2021, after he’d left government (but while he was still consulting for the city on COVID policies).Still, you might think that a public-health official would do better to skip out on all of these events while other city residents were encouraged to minimize their social interactions. Even if Varma did not personally buck official guidance, others in his family may have crossed the line. He says in the videos that his family traveled to Seattle for Christmas in 2020, and that he didn’t join because the mayor was concerned about the optics: Public-health officials were actively encouraging people to avoid traveling for the holidays to avoid a winter surge. The following January, the U.S. reported a then-record number of COVID deaths.In June 2021, around the time that he attended the dance party with hundreds of others, Varma wrote an article for The Atlantic about the tricky calculus behind vaccine mandates and related COVID policies. “Many academic public-health experts favor more stringent restrictions than public-sector practitioners, including me, believe are realistic,” he wrote. He argued instead for what he called “a more targeted approach—one that neither requires universal sacrifice nor relieves everyone of all inconvenience.”Perhaps it would have helped if he’d shared his own struggles with that tension at the time. Social-science research tells us that public-health messaging wins trust most effectively when it leads with empathy—when leaders show that they understand how people feel and what they want, rather than barraging them with rules and facts. Clearly Varma struggled in the way that many others did as he tried to navigate the crushing isolation of the pandemic. In preparation for the holidays, his family was faced with tough, familiar choices, which resulted in his being separated from his loved ones.The end result may seem hypocritical, but it’s also relatable. (Well, maybe not entirely relatable, but in principle.) “We know that transparency can increase public trust in public health and medical experts,” Matt Motta, who studies vaccine hesitancy at the Boston University School of Public Health, told me. What if Varma had been forthright with the public from the start, even on the subject of his sex parties? Perhaps he could have shown that he understood the need to get together with your friends as safely as you can, in whatever ways make you happy. Even now, his description of that moment strikes a chord. “It wasn’t so much sex,” he told the woman who was trying to embarrass him. “It was just like, I need to get this energy out of me.” So did the rest of us.theatlantic.com
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Mark Robinson Is a Poster Mark Robinson is many things: the lieutenant governor of North Carolina, the Republican nominee for governor, and a bigot. But the key to understanding him is that he is a poster.The poster is an internet creature—the sort of person who just can’t resist the urge to shoot off his mouth on Facebook or Twitter or in some other online forum. (For example, the message boards on the porn site Nude Africa.) These posts tend to be unfiltered and not well thought out. Sometimes they’re trolling. Sometimes they’re a window into the soul. The imperative is just to post.Robinson is a particular flavor of poster familiar to almost anyone who is Facebook friends with an extremely online, right-wing Baby Boomer, a curmudgeon who is upset about new cultural currents and airs his conservative and sometimes conspiratorial views for anyone to hear—or, more likely, to simply scroll over and ignore. (And it’s always Facebook.) This type of Boomer poster is common. What’s unusual is for someone like this to make the jump from Facebook oddball to gubernatorial nominee.[David A. Graham: The GOP should have drawn its Mark Robinson line long ago]As I explained in a May profile of Robinson, he made that jump in what must be record time. In 2018, he gave an impromptu speech to the city council in Greensboro, North Carolina, defending gun rights. A video of the remarks went viral, and two years later he was elected lieutenant governor in his first run for office.Robinson’s hopes at becoming governor of North Carolina dimmed yesterday with a CNN report about his truly disturbing posts on Nude Africa. He called himself a “black NAZI” and said he wished for slavery to come back. He also wrote about relishing transgender porn, although he has railed against transgender people as a politician. Robinson was already trailing the Democratic nominee, Josh Stein, in polls, partly because of a long trail of offensive comments prior to this.In an interview with CNN, Robinson denied that he’d made the posts, and suggested they were an AI hoax. “This is not us. These are not our words. And this is not anything that is characteristic of me,” he said. The problem is that they sound exactly like him: Intentionally provocative remarks about race, anti-Semitism, and attacks on Martin Luther King are all in his record. (That’s not to mention characteristic phrases like “gag a maggot” and “I don’t give a frogs ass.”)[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is testing the bounds of GOP extremism]Even if Robinson genuinely made the comments, the things he says in them seem dubious. (Robinson is a huge fan of professional wrestling, which is premised on exaggerated tales and made-up backstories.) Consider some of the most lurid material. Robinson recounts finding a way to peep on women in showers when he was in high school. “I came to a spot that was a dead end but had two big vent covers over it! It just so happened it overlooked the showers!” he wrote. “I sat there for about an hour and watched as several girls came in and showered.”Perhaps this really happened, but it sounds more fantasy than reality. This is the sort of thing that happens mostly in teen-sex comedies and Gay Talese books. (I emailed Wayne Campbell, a high-school friend of Robinson’s, to ask if he knew anything about the alleged incident. “CNN is pushing garbage about my great friend, Mark Robinsonn,” he wrote. “The stories are completely false. Any intelligent person can see this is simply mudslinging and character assassination.”)Robinson also writes in several excruciating posts about supposed sexual encounters with his sister-in-law. I have no insight into Robinson’s marriage, though Politico reported yesterday that his email address was registered on Ashley Madison, a site for people seeking extramarital liaisons. But fantasies about sisters-in-law are apparently common, and the writing in the anecdotes is, well, not convincing. It reads like a randy teenager trying to replicate the tone of Penthouse “I can’t believe it happened to me” letters, but updated for the coarseness of a porn message board.[David A. Graham: Mark Robinson is already making new promises to veterans]Earlier this year, I read through Robinson’s Facebook history, going back years. (For whatever reason, Robinson never deleted his old posts and left them public, providing a jackpot for opposition researchers.) Occasionally, his Facebook friends would try to argue with him; more occasionally, they’d agree. But mostly they seemed to respond with affectionate eye-rolling: There goes Mark again. Reading the porn-forum posts reminded me of that. There goes Mark again, indulging his fantasies.Robinson’s sexual life is his own business, and he’s welcome to it. The problem is that Robinson doesn’t take the same approach to others. He is a hardliner on abortion, having long called for a complete ban. He’s also been outspokenly critical of LGBT people, deriding transgender rights and calling homosexuality “filth.”Robinson’s racism, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denialism, among other things, can’t be so easily excused as personal sexual predilections. But they would have remained hateful comments by some random guy if Robinson hadn’t decided to run for office so he could establish his own views as government policy. He’s just a poster on the internet, and he should have stayed there.theatlantic.com
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Vivek Ramaswamy’s Solution for Springfield It didn’t take long for someone to bring up the cats.Only minutes into Vivek Ramaswamy’s town hall last night in Springfield, Ohio, a man who identified himself as Kevin raised his hand. He felt awful seeing news clips of children in Haiti with “flies in their eyes,” he said. But what about the people here in Ohio? And what about “the motherless kittens in the alleys of Springfield. Where are the mothers?”Kevin was referring, of course, to the pets—the cats and dogs and birds—that some Springfield residents allege have been eaten by Haitian immigrants in town. There is zero evidence that this is occurring, as city officials have repeatedly stressed. Still, the rumor persists—as one woman told me ominously, “You don’t see as many geese and ducks” in the park these days. And Ramaswamy—the failed Republican-primary candidate turned Donald Trump surrogate, who stood in the center of it all wearing a dark suit, his hair combed into a demi-bouffant—was not exactly there to fact-check.He’d come, he said, as a unifier. “My hope is that, through open conversations, through actually speaking without fear, we actually not only solve the problems of this country but, dare I say, unite this country as well,” he told his audience. Yet Ramaswamy’s purported unity play felt more like a Festivus-style airing of grievances: a “community reconciliation” event that reconciled nothing, and from which nobody was going to benefit—other than, of course, Ramaswamy. Even as Trump and his running mate, J. D. Vance, have seized on the Springfield pet rumor to attack Democrats on immigration policy, the falsehood has also become a handy vehicle for this hungry young Republican to audition for political promotion. And with Trump promising to make his own appearance in Springfield, last night’s “conversation” attained the status of a warm-up act.It takes a potent blend of chutzpah and political ambition to run toward a fire set by your own political allies, and declare yourself the hero who will put it out. Ramaswamy, a native Ohioan, had announced himself the man for the job over the weekend. “I live less than an hour from here,” he told the crowd. “I don’t actually blame any of the 70,000 people in Springfield” for the problems in town, he said. “I blame the federal policies.” Last night, he promised an “open, unfiltered conversation”—although he encouraged people to be respectful, he asked them not to censor themselves.They heard him. Some 300 people, mostly white, squeezed into a hot basement meeting hall—plus an overflow room—at the Bushnell Event Center downtown. Roughly half of the attendees wore MAGA gear. Earlier, I’d seen a man carrying an AR-15-style rifle who’d posted himself outside the venue, lending the proceedings a deeply sinister vibe.Ramaswamy had met with a few leaders in the Haitian community beforehand, he said, and he’d invited them all to his town hall. But no Haitian immigrants spoke up at the event, and I saw none. (“I think I saw one in the back,” Ramaswamy told me afterward.)That the community of Springfield faces challenges is not in dispute. According to estimates from city officials, some 15,000 Haitian immigrants have come to this once economically depressed town in recent years, welcomed by employers looking for workers. Primary-care facilities have been overloaded. Schools are struggling to handle the influx of students for whom English is a second language. Traffic has gotten worse.But these were not the problems that Trump referenced during the presidential debate when he declared, “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs!”—thus aiming a 10,000-watt spotlight on this small city west of Columbus, and causing a string of frightening threats, school closures, and canceled community events.Ramaswamy, whose Indian-born parents were the beneficiaries of U.S. immigration policy, last night refused to directly address the accounts repeated by Trump and Vance. “I’m not here to talk about the issues that the media has really loved to obsess over,” he told me and a handful of other journalists before the town hall. I could virtually hear my fellow reporters’ eyeballs rolling.Instead, as he explained, Ramaswamy was determined to engage in a more noble effort: promoting harmony in Springfield—though, if that sentiment was in good faith, he was soon disabused of the notion. “I was a little concerned about the topic of this conversation, the vow for unity,” one man told Ramaswamy. “One thing we should be united on is there simply are too many mass migrants in this town.”The town hall’s moderator was a MAGA celebrity in her own right: Tiffany Justice, a co-founder of the conservative group Moms for Liberty. But her only job during the event appeared to be passing the mic around, and reining in unruly speakers with a gentle pat on the shoulder. One after another, locals stood to share their concerns—about skyrocketing rent, bad Haitian drivers, and the new Amazon facility, which would bring only more newcomers to town. One woman said a 22-year-old Haitian man was in her daughter’s high-school class; another claimed that her daughter had been chased by a Haitian man wielding a machete.Springfieldians are tired of being called racist, speakers said. They’re not angry at the Haitians for wanting a better life, but the community doesn’t have the infrastructure to support them. Most Haitian immigrants in Springfield came legally; still, the audience cheered when Ramaswamy suggested that a second Trump administration would bring about historically large deportations of undocumented immigrants. “Git ’em gone!” a man wearing a cowboy hat said, from a row behind me. “If it was up to me,” another man said, “we’d send them away and start all over.” One of the few Black people in the audience, a woman named Chrissy, took the mic to say she understood that the Haitians were struggling in their home country, but there really were too many here: “The biggest problem is they don’t know how to drive!” she said.At one point, a man named Bruce Willmann, who is affiliated with a religious nonprofit called the Nehemiah Foundation, made a pitch to Ramaswamy: Would he donate to the group’s new program to teach English to Haitian immigrants? The crowd erupted in boos. “Those are lies!” someone shouted. An angry-looking woman grabbed the mic after Willmann. Organizations like his “have contributed” to bringing in immigrants, she said. “When does it stop?” To Ramaswamy, she pleaded, “You’re here, Vivek. What do we do when you’re not here anymore?”“When will you come back?” attendees asked Ramaswamy over and over again—during the event, and in the hallway afterward. Some of the people I spoke with had expected specifics. “It was a step in a direction. I don’t know if it was the right one,” Brock Engi, a 28-year-old biracial Springfield native, told me. “I think it may get worse in the city before it gets better.”The only solution Ramaswamy urged was Trump. Joe Biden’s administration caused the problems in Springfield, he told the crowd, which murmured its agreement. “You don’t always have a chance to change things, but this time, in about 50 days, you actually do,” he said.Ramaswamy didn’t commit to donating to Willmann’s organization, but he did pledge to donate $100,000 to a local nonprofit. After that, Ramaswamy said, “I don’t know what comes next for me.” But he seems to have a pretty good idea. Ramaswamy has been angling for a status upgrade, telling reporters that he’s interested in a “substantial” administration role if Trump wins the election in November. He’s also open to filling Vance’s seat for Ohio in the Senate. “I think there’s a role for Vivek to do anything he wants,” Justice, his Moms for Liberty co-host, told me.I found Willmann, the director of Nehemiah, outside looking frazzled. There are two “legitimate” discussions to be had about the problems in Springfield, he said. One is about immigration rules and limits. “On the flip side, there are 12,000 to 15,000 immigrants in our city, and they’re here, and they have needs,” he said. “What are we going to do about them?” Wellman’s organization has set up free English classes with child care so that Haitian parents can attend with their children. As a result, he has received threats on social media, and someone on X doxxed his wife.I asked Willmann whether the town hall would have been more productive if some members of the Haitian community had shown up. He shrugged and said, “I wouldn’t come here if I was a Haitian.”After the event, I walked with Ramaswamy through the kitchen of the event hall, surrounded by beefy security guards. How did it go? I asked. “I feel like it went well,” he said. “I thought it was productive.” When we emerged from the back entrance, a throng of attendees was waiting, snapping photos and screaming praise for Ramaswamy, who waved and smiled like a starlet on the red carpet. “We need you!” people begged. “Run for governor!” “I love you guys,” he told them, before ducking into a waiting black car.The town hall may not have been a success for Springfield, but it was certainly a win for its instigator.theatlantic.com
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I Survived Hamas Captivity, but I’m Not Yet Free The last time I saw my husband, Keith, was on November 26. He was lying on a filthy mattress on the floor of a darkened room and could barely look at me. We had spent 51 days together as Hamas’s hostages after being violently abducted from our home on October 7. I had been told earlier that day that my name was on the list; I was to be released and sent back home to Israel. Keith was to be left behind.My long journey out of Gaza was filled with fear and sadness. I was sure our son had been murdered on October 7 in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, where we lived. The Hamas terrorists had been telling us throughout our captivity that Israel had been destroyed; I didn’t know what I would find. When I finally arrived at the border, I was told that all four of my children were waiting for me in the hospital. The attack on Kfar Aza had killed 64 people, and another 19 had been taken hostage, but my son had miraculously survived. I looked up and saw the moon for the first time in 51 days and screamed with joy and relief that he was alive and I was free.I spent my first night of freedom in the hospital with my three daughters. I slept for perhaps an hour—I was in shock, and adrenaline was coursing through my body. I had lost 20 pounds and was weak and sick. I could not get my head around the fact that I had been separated from Keith, my husband of 43 years and my constant companion. Every day since—for nearly 300 days—I have been fighting for his release with every ounce of my being.[Franklin Foer: Hamas’s devastating murder of Hersh Goldberg-Polin]I think about Keith all the time, but I feel a particular pang whenever I drink water, when I take a shower, when I eat something delicious. As a hostage in Gaza, these are not things I could do. The most frustrating part is that I don’t know anything about Keith’s condition: Is he alone? (I’d love for someone to tell me that he’s not.) Is he sad, or crying? Is he in a tunnel with no oxygen? Is he sick or being tortured? Has he eaten any food at all today? Is he alive?Keith is an American citizen. He was born and raised in Chapel Hill, North Carolina—also the hometown of James Taylor, his favorite singer. In his early 20s, he moved to Israel, where we met and started a life together. I was a nursery-school teacher, working with the children of the kibbutz, and Keith was an occupational therapist who was working for a pharmaceutical company. Our entire lives centered on supporting each other and our community, nourishing the next generation with family time and instilling the values of respect, integrity, and acceptance of the other in our four children and five grandchildren.Keith is the kindest, most gentle man you could ever meet. He makes friends wherever he goes and is universally loved by people and animals. Thirty years ago, Keith learned Arabic so that he could talk with the Palestinian workers on the kibbutz, whom he swiftly befriended. A lifelong vegetarian, he held fast to his values in captivity. He wouldn’t even eat a few tiny morsels of chicken when the terrorists gave us more than our standard daily rations of half a pita or a few bites of plain rice.We are both lifelong peacemakers and activists. That’s one reason what happened to us and to our community was so shocking.On the morning of October 7, when the alarms sounded, we locked ourselves in our safe room. There were terrifying explosions and screams, and then suddenly 15 gun-wielding terrorists walked into our home, through a door we’d thought was locked. Keith put his head on his knees and covered his head with his arms; they fired a bullet through his hand and blood was everywhere. I screamed with a force I had never known before. Soon, the terrorists dragged us to Keith’s car. All around us were scenes of fire, violence, and death. I couldn’t stop thinking about my son, who lived just a few minutes away. How could he survive this?We arrived in Gaza and found people celebrating everywhere. We were bleeding and in shock. I couldn’t believe anyone could be happy to see two people in their 60s in such a state. The terrorists led us to a tunnel shaft, and we climbed down a rickety ladder into one of the scariest places I’d ever seen. It was damp and we could hardly breathe. There were electric lights on the path, which was a relief, because I’m scared of the dark. Keith’s ribs were broken and his hand was still bleeding. Within a few hours, they moved us aboveground to a room in an apartment with three yoga mats on the floor. The window was covered and we were not allowed to move. It was absolutely filthy.Keith and I were moved 13 times while I was in Gaza, from darkened rooms in private homes to terrifying tunnels without oxygen, light, or sanitation. We were treated with pure brutality, and knew we could die at any moment. We were not seen as human beings. We were starved while our captors ate. We were beaten, humiliated, and kept in disgusting conditions with no way to take care of our basic hygiene or survival needs. We depended on terrorists for every sip of water as they guarded us with their guns and threatened to kill us if we spoke or moved around. There were times I wanted to die.And there were many times I thought I would die. The buildings shook and walls crumbled with the launch of every missile. It seemed like the terrorists were firing them from our building. Many times a day, we heard the bell of a mosque and then, a moment later, the launch of a missile from the same direction. And, of course, we heard the Israel Defense Forces bombing close by. Between the missiles, the bombs, and the constant threat of being shot or beaten, it’s a miracle I survived.Keith and I were always held along with at least one other hostage, and sometimes up to three others. All of them were young women. All of the girls we were held with are still stuck in Gaza today. Each of them was sexually abused. The terrorists forced them to undress, and gave them children’s clothes to wear that were far too small. They watched them shower and touched them however and whenever they felt like it. I wanted to scream, but I had to stay quiet. I wasn’t allowed to feel or cry. I was not allowed to console the girls. They could have been my kids. And each of these girls has a family who can’t sleep at night, after almost a year, as they worry about bringing them home.For those who deny that any sexual assaults have taken place: I wish you were right. But I’ve seen it myself. I’ll never forget their faces. I will never stop fighting for these girls’ freedom.Since returning to Israel, I have worked to rebuild my physical strength. I could barely walk for the first few days. It took six weeks for me to be able to eat a normal meal. Nearly 300 days later, my body is still not the same as it was before I was kidnapped. As I’m getting stronger physically, I’m also working tirelessly to maintain some stability for my kids and grandchildren, who are exhausted and devastated from this endless struggle. We all need to keep it together as we engage in the most important fight of our lives.I’m not ready to go back to my home in Kfar Aza. Instead, I’ve moved between my children’s houses in different parts of the country. I haven’t had time to grieve the 64 people from my community who were slaughtered. I’m singularly focused on getting Keith and the rest of the hostages out of Gaza, the only way I know how. I spend hours every day speaking with the media, delegations, politicians, heads of state, religious groups, and other organizations. Keeping the hostage issue at the top of people’s minds is the only thing I can do. This week I’m in the U.S., and will speak before Congress and at the United Nations. I understand that I am one of the few people able to communicate the experience of being held hostage, and the urgency of bringing the remaining hostages home. I take this role very seriously.I’m not alone in this fight. Many of the hostages who were released during the November deal left Gaza with loved ones still in captivity. We are all unable to heal fully until everyone is home safely.The international community, with its promises of solidarity and support, does not fully grasp the personal tragedy of those who are left waiting. We are not just statistics or stories. We are real people with real families, struggling with with the most intense sadness, exhaustion, and frustration. Keith’s captivity is not just a political issue or a humanitarian tragedy. It is a deeply painful and personal wound.Today, we know more than ever about the extreme conditions and violence Keith and the other hostages are living in. A few weeks ago six hostages—Ori Danino, Carmel Gat, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, Alex Lobanov, Almog Sarusi, and Eden Yerushalmi—were executed in the tunnels after surviving 332 days in hellish conditions. Those six families could have been reunited with the people they have been fighting to free for almost a year. Instead, they buried them.We need a deal to bring Keith and the other hostages home, now. I was there. I know what they’re going through. If your family or friends were there, you would do everything in your power to get them out.Every moment since my release, I’ve been fully consumed with freeing Keith and the other hostages out of that hell. There isn’t a head of state, member of parliament, news network, tech leader, or global organization that my family and I haven’t reached out to over the past months with a simple message: Get them out now, or they’ll be murdered.But now, as I wait for news of Keith, I feel helpless. I am at the mercy of negotiations, of political strategies, and of decisions made far from the emotional core of this situation. I have learned that hope is a double-edged sword, at once a source of strength, pushing me through each day, and a terrifying reminder of what is at stake. My daughters tell me, whenever a deal is on the table, not to dare to hope, or my heart will shatter again.[David Brooks: How do the families of the Hamas hostages endure the agony?]In moments of quiet, I think of the other families that are caught in the crossfire of this awful war, at the mercy of decisions made by politicians. The price we all pay is immeasurable; the assurances of a future peace ring hollow when it is your family being torn apart.My plea is simple: I don’t want any more innocent people to die. I want this war to end so the hostages can return to their families and the good people in Gaza can rebuild their lives. I am asking the global community to help us bring the hostages home, to release them from Hamas’s torture and allow people to heal.The hostages kidnapped by Hamas on October 7 came from 24 different countries; they were Muslim, Jewish, Christian, and Buddhist. They were daughters, fathers, grandfathers, babies. I’m asking the United States government not to give up on them. I’m asking Israel’s leaders to bring our hostages home. Don’t abandon them. Don’t let them kill our loved ones.The last time I saw my husband was on November 26. I told our captors that I was not going to leave him. “Either he comes or I stay,” I said. They pointed their guns at me and forced me through the door. Keith promised that he would stay strong, for me and our family, and that he would be home soon.I cannot wait any longer.theatlantic.com