He says he wants to give power back to the states, but has also signaled his intention to align American schools with his own cultural agenda.

The unglamorous food has the potential to remake American diets, but it has an image problem.

Well, that was fast.Last Wednesday, President-Elect Donald Trump shocked even his allies by nominating Representative Matt Gaetz as attorney general. Today, Gaetz has pulled out of consideration, one day after meeting with senators on Capitol Hill.“It is clear that my confirmation was unfairly becoming a distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition,” the Florida man wrote on X. “There is no time to waste on a needlessly protracted Washington scuffle, thus I'll be withdrawing my name from consideration to serve as Attorney General. Trump’s DOJ must be in place and ready on Day 1.”For at least one presidential nominee to withdraw at some point in the process is very common. What is unusual is how quickly Gaetz’s nomination fell apart. Eight days is not the record, but it’s close. (Recall that White House Physician Ronny Jackson’s nomination to lead the Department of Veterans Affairs took nearly a month to collapse.) Just two days ago, Trump was insisting he had no second thoughts about picking Gaetz.[Listen: What Pete Hegseth’s nomination is all about]The reason why Gaetz withdrew is no secret and no surprise. He’s been shadowed for years by allegations of sex trafficking, paying for sex, drug use, and sex with an underage girl. Trump doesn’t appear to have bothered to vet Gaetz in any serious way before nominating him, but all of this was known. The Justice Department investigated Gaetz for years but in 2023 decided against bringing charges; the House Ethics Committee was still probing him. Gaetz himself denies any wrongdoing. The fact that Gaetz, like Trump, has a personal vendetta against the Justice Department seemed to be his main credential for the job.When Gaetz was nominated, he also resigned from Congress. That froze the House Ethics Committee investigation, since he was no longer a member. Speaker Mike Johnson, a Gaetz ally though he is primly conservative where Gaetz is a libertine, opposed releasing the committee’s work, and the committee deadlocked in a vote. But Gaetz’s victory was hardly complete. His nomination dislodged lots of damaging new information, including testimony about him twice having sex with a 17-year-old, though witnesses believed Gaetz did not know she was underage. A lawyer for two women said they testified to the House that Gaetz paid them for sex. The New York Times published an impossibly elaborate diagram outlining payment schemes. Gaetz fooled around, and the public found out; by accepting the scrutiny that comes with a nomination, he also fooled around and found out.But don’t cry too much for Gaetz, and not only because of his record as a scoundrel. (He’s detested by House colleagues, and many reports indicate he shared naked videos of paramours on the House floor.) His infamy hasn’t prevented his rise so far, and he is believed to have designs on running for governor of Florida when Ron DeSantis’s term ends.The question now is what this defeat portends for the rest of Trump’s slate of outrageous nominees. The president-elect likes to take a gamble, even if he sometimes loses, but as I argued last week, the presence of so many unqualified picks might perversely make it easier for some of them to get through—after all, the Senate couldn’t reject them all, right?[Read: The perverse logic of Trump’s nomination circus]Gaetz’s quick exit shows that Senate Republicans aren’t willing to accept literally anyone who Trump throws their way, and the fact that they were able to send that message so quickly suggests just how deep their reservations were. If the rejection is a sign of weakness for Trump, it is also one for his vice president-elect, Senator J. D. Vance. Vance was given the tough job of squiring Gaetz around Senate offices yesterday to drum up support, which obviously did not go well.The Gaetz failure doesn’t mean that senators will reject any other picks, but with Gaetz out of the way, the troubled nomination of Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon will be able to get more attention. A police report about a sexual-assault allegation against Hegseth from 2017 was released today, and it’s a stomach-churning read. Alternatively, Gaetz could end up looking like a sacrificial pick to save the others, or like a stalking horse for Trump to appoint someone else at DOJ. It seems unlikely that Trump intended either of these—he doesn’t usually play to lose—but that could be the effect.Before Trump chose Gaetz, he reportedly concluded that other contenders simply didn’t have what he wanted in an attorney general, according to The New York Times. Now he’ll have to go back his lists to choose someone who has one thing that Gaetz conspicuously lacked: the ability to get confirmed.

He considers himself to be at war with basically everybody to Trump’s left, and it is by no means clear that he means war metaphorically.

Suddenly, these events are everywhere. What’s going on?

Contained in this riddle is the key to an enriching contemplation of life’s underlying meaning.

Donald Trump has vowed to “defeat anti-Semitism.” His Cabinet picks tell a very different story.

Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah suggests that some people must look outside the traditional bounds of Christianity to find true spiritual freedom.

The singer has long stood for a brassy, strutting kind of survival. Her new account of her early life explains how that came to be.

Some say that no book deal is complete without it.

Revenge is just the start of it.

Nothing about Trump 2.0 is mere bluster.

Jake Paul is an emblem of a generation starving for purpose while gorging on spectacle.

Perhaps there’s no better guide for understanding America’s MAGA moment than the founder of modern psychology himself.

A poem for Wednesday

A close friend—someone whom I’ve always thought of as an optimist—recently shared his theory that, no matter what time you’re living in, it’s generally a bad one. In each era, he posited, quality of life improves in some ways and depreciates in others; the overall quotient of suffering in the world stays the same.Whether this is nihilistic or comforting depends on your worldview. For instance, plenty of Americans are currently celebrating the outcome of the recent presidential election; many are indifferent to national politics; many others are overwhelmed with anger and despair over it. Looking at the bigger picture, I think the upsides of contemporary life—antibiotics, LGBTQ acceptance, transcontinental FaceTime—outweigh the horrors more often than not. I’ll also concede that this decade comes with a continuous drip of bad news about ghastly acts of violence, erosion of human rights, and climate disaster. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a 2023 Gallup poll found that rates of depression in the United States have hit a record high.What can people turn to when the itch to burn everything down, or to surrender to hopelessness, feels barely suppressible? I agree with the novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge that there is power in “naming reality”—in telling, and writing, the truth about what’s happening around us. For those who are despondent about Donald Trump’s victory and feel unable to make a difference, reading might be a place to start. This doesn’t necessitate cracking open textbooks or dense political tracts: All kinds of books can provide solace, and the past few decades have given us no shortage of clear-eyed works of fiction, memoir, history, and poetry about how to survive and organize in—and ultimately improve—a broken world.Reading isn’t a panacea. It’s a place to begin and return to: a road map for where to go from here, regardless of where “here” is. Granted, I am perhaps more comfortable than the average person with imperfect solutions. As a clinical pharmacist, I can’t cure diabetes, for example, but I can help control it, make the medications more affordable sometimes, and agitate for a better health-care system. Similarly, these seven books aren’t a cure for rage and despair. Think of them instead as a prescription.Which Side Are You On, by Ryan Lee WongWong’s novel opens with a mother picking up her son from the airport in a Toyota Prius, her hands clutching the wheel in a death grip. Wry, funny moments like this one animate Wong’s book about the dilemma of trying to correct systemic problems with individual solutions. It’s 2016, and spurred by the real-life police shooting of Akai Gurley, 21-year-old Reed is considering dropping out of Columbia University to dedicate himself to the Black Lives Matter movement. Reed wants nothing more than to usher in a revolution, but unfortunately, he’s a lot better at spouting leftist talking points than at connecting with other people. Like many children, Reed believes that his family is problematic and out of touch. His parents, one a co-leader in the 1980s of South Central’s Black-Korean Coalition, the other a union organizer, push back on his self-righteous idealism. During a brief trip home to see his dying grandmother, Reed wrestles with thorny questions about what makes a good activist and person. Later, in the Prius, Reed’s mother teaches him about the Korean concept of hwabyung, or “burning sickness”—an intense, suppressed rage that will destroy him if he’s not careful—and Reed learns what he really needs: not sound bites but true connection. Wong’s enthralling novel is a reminder that every fight for justice is, at heart, a fight for one another.Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, by Rebecca SolnitSolnit’s short manifesto about the revolutionary power of hope is a rallying cry against defeatism. She begins by critiquing the progressive tendency to harp on the bleakness of societal conditions, insisting that despair keeps oppressive systems afloat. Hope and joy, by contrast, are essential elements of political change, and celebrating wins is a worthy act of defiance against those who would prefer that the average person feel powerless. Originally published in 2004 after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, and updated in 2005 and 2016, Hope in the Dark provides modern examples of gains on race, class, environment, and queer rights. That said, this is not a feel-good book. It does not sugarcoat, for instance, the fact that we are headed toward ecological disaster. And if you look up the latest figures on the gender wage gap, you’ll find that they’ve hardly budged from those cited by Solnit years ago. Still, her deft logic and kooky aphorisms (“Don’t mistake a lightbulb for the moon, and don’t believe that the moon is useless unless we land on it”) have convinced me that to give up hope is to surrender the future. Fighting for progress can be exhausting and revelatory, full of both pain and pleasure. Solnit insists that doing so is never a waste.[Read: Trump won. Now what?]Women Talking, by Miriam ToewsThe inspired-by-true-events premise of Toews’s seventh novel is literally the stuff of nightmares. In a remote Mennonite colony, women who have suffered mysterious attacks in the night learn that they’ve been drugged and raped by several men from their community. One woman is pregnant with her rapist’s child; another’s 3-year-old has a sexually transmitted infection. The novel takes place in the aftermath of the discovery, just after the men have been temporarily jailed. They are set to be bailed out in two days, and the colony’s bishop demands that the victims forgive them—or else face excommunication and be denied a spot in heaven. The women meet in secret to decide what to do: Comply? Fight back? Leave for an outside world they’ve never experienced? Even against this harrowing backdrop, Toews’s signature humor and eye for small moments of grace make Women Talking an enjoyable and healing read. The women’s discussions are both philosophical (they cannot read, so how can they trust that the Bible requires them to forgive the men?) and practical (if they leave, do they bring their male children?). Any direction they choose will lead to a kind of wilderness: “When we have liberated ourselves,” one woman says in a particularly stirring moment, “we will have to ask ourselves who we are.”Good Talk, by Mira JacobJacob’s graphic-memoir-in-conversations took major guts to write. It begins like this: The author’s white in-laws throw their support behind Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and her otherwise loving family toes the edge of collapse. Good Talk is a funny and painful book-length answer to questions from Jacob’s 6-year-old son, who is half Jewish and half Indian, about race, family, and identity. Jacob, who was raised in the United States by parents who emigrated from India, gorgeously illustrates her formative experiences, touching on respectability politics, colorism within the Indian community, her bisexuality, and her place in America. She refuses to caricaturize the book’s less savory characters—for example, a rich white woman who hires Jacob to ghostwrite her family’s biography and ends up questioning her integrity and oversharing the grisly details of her 2-year-old’s death from cancer. Jacob’s ability to so humanely render the people who cause her grief is powerful. My daughter is too young to ask questions, but one day, when she begins inquiring about the world she’s inheriting, I can tell her, as Jacob told her son, “If you still have hope, my love, then so do I.”[Read: Hope and the historian]The Twenty-Ninth Year, by Hala AlyanStartling, sexy, and chaotic, The Twenty-Ninth Year is a collection of poems narrated by a woman on the verge—of a lot of things. She’s standing at the edge of maturity, of belonging as a Palestinian American, of recovery from anorexia and alcoholism. It’s a tender and violent place, evoked with images that catch in the throat. The first poem, “Truth,” takes the form of a litany of confessions: “I broke / into the bodies of men like a cartoon burglar”; “I’ve seen women eat cotton balls so they wouldn’t eat bread.” That Alyan is a clinical psychologist makes sense—her poems have a clarity that can’t be faked. Dark humor softens the blow of lines such as “I starved myself to starve my mother” and “Define in, I say when anyone asks if I’ve ever been in a war.” She reckons with the loneliness of living in exile and the danger of romanticizing the youthful conviction that there is something incurably wrong with you. A shallow read of the collection might be: I burned my life down so you don’t have to. But I return to the last line of the book: “Marry or burn; either way, you’re transfiguring.” There is always something to set aflame; more optimistically, there is always something left to salvage. The Twenty-Ninth Year is, in the end, a monument to endurance.Riot Baby, by Tochi OnyebuchiIf you’re sick of books described as “healing” or “hopeful,” look no further than Riot Baby. Onyebuchi’s thrilling 2020 novella asks just how far sci-fi dystopias are from real life. Kev, a Black man born during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, California, spends much of his 20s in prison after a botched armed robbery. His sister, Ella, has more supernatural problems: She sees the past and the future and, when fury takes over, can raze cities to the ground—yet she could not protect her brother from the violence of incarceration. When Kev is paroled and a new form of policing via implantable chips and pharmaceutical infusions brings “safety” to the streets of Watts, Ella understands that the subjugation of her community is not a symptom of a broken system; rather, it is evidence of one “working just as designed,” as Onyebuchi put it in an interview. Ella must make a wrenching choice: fight for a defanged kind of freedom within such a system or usher in a new world order no matter the cost. In real life, too often, you cannot control your circumstances, only your actions. But you may find relief in reading a book that reaches a different conclusion.[Read: When national turmoil becomes personal anxiety]Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993, by Sarah SchulmanThis 700-plus-page history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power’s New York chapter is, I promise you, a page-turner. Schulman and the filmmaker Jim Hubbard, who were both in ACT UP New York, interviewed 188 members over the course of 17 years about the organization’s work on behalf of those living with HIV/AIDS—“a despised group of people, with no rights, facing a terminal disease for which there were no treatments,” Schulman writes. Part memoir and part oral history, Let the Record Show is a master class on the utility of anger and a historical corrective to chronicles that depict straight white men as the main heroes of the AIDS crisis. In reality, a diverse coalition of activists helped transform HIV into a highly manageable condition. “People who are desperate are much more effective than people who have time to waste,” Schulman argues. ACT UP was known for its brash public actions, and Schulman covers not just what the group accomplished but also how it did it, with electrifying detail. There can be no balm for the fact that many ACT UP members did not survive long enough to be interviewed. There is only awe at the way a group of people “unable to sit out a historic cataclysm” were determined to “force our country to change against its will,” and did.

Some of the early picks from this year’s competition, featuring close-up, macro, and micro photography

The Atlantic expands health coverage with new section, reporting on the body, mind, and how we live

The other night, a friend came over. A dear friend. A friend who has helped me out when I’ve been sick, and who brought over takeout when I had just given birth. Still, before he arrived, I vacuumed.I thought about this while reading the Gender Equity Policy Institute’s recent report on gender and domestic labor. The study finds that mothers spend twice as much time as fathers “on the essential and unpaid work” of taking care of kids and the home, and that women spend more time on this than men, regardless of parental and relationship status. “Simply being a woman” is the instrumental variable, the study concludes.The time gaps are large for all women, and especially large for certain subgroups. Moms with a high-school education or less spend 19 hours a week on cleaning and child care, versus seven hours for dads with a comparable education. Latina mothers devote 26 hours a week to chores and kids, Latino dads less than a third of that time.Remarkably, having a male domestic partner means more work for women, not less. Married women spend more time on housework than single women; married men spend roughly the same amount as single men. Women’s lower wages and higher propensity to take part-time jobs explain some of the difference: To maximize the household’s total income, the person earning more does less around the house. But other studies have found that women who earn as much as or more than their male partner still devote more time to domestic care. Queer relationships, unsurprisingly, tend to be more equitable.Perhaps most enraging: The gender divide results in women having fewer hours than men to devote to socializing, exercising, going out, or practicing a hobby. No wonder women tend to experience more stress and burnout.A generation after the publication of Arlie Russell Hochschild’s The Second Shift, a lot has changed, and nothing has changed. Women are much more likely to work outside the home, but the distribution of work within the home has not become commensurately equitable. Surveys show that women are not exactly happy with the situation. What would it take for things to be different?It was once thought that technology was part of the answer. Decades of labor-saving innovations cut the hours Americans spent on chores. A dishwasher saves a household an estimated 200 hours a year, a laundry machine three-plus hours of backbreaking work per load. Yet even as technology improved, homes got bigger, filled with more items to care for. As my colleague Derek Thompson has noted, standards of cleanliness have risen over time too: “Automatic washers and dryers raised our expectations for clean clothes and encouraged people to go out and buy new shirts and pants; housewives therefore had more loads of laundry to wash, dry, and fold.”You see this tidiness treadmill on TikTok and Instagram: People recommend how to wash your walls, “refresh” your furniture season by season, and organize everything in your pantry in clear acrylic bins. This labor isn’t time-saving; it is never-ending.The Gender Equity Policy Institute suggests, well, policy changes, including “use it or lose it” parental-leave programs for new fathers, caregiving credits for the Social Security system, and expanded early-child-care programs. But the report acknowledges that the unhappy divide is cultural, and requires cultural shifts as well.Caretaking is a central way that women perform their gender. The advertising of domestic goods and cleaning products remains intently focused on women. The majority of children still grow up watching their mother do more housework than their father. The gender chore gap shows up in children as young as 8.Men doing more housework is an obvious solution, but not one that I am particularly hopeful about. Virtually every woman I know who is unhappy with her household division of labor has tried and failed to get her male partner to pick up the slack. The belief that men care less about having a messy home is pervasive, and supported by at least some evidence. In one anthropological study, researchers had people give them a video tour of their house. Mothers almost unanimously apologized for the rooms not being tidier. “Fathers in their home tours would walk in the same rooms their wives had come through and often made no mention whatsoever of the messiness,” UCLA’s Jeanne Arnold reported. “This was pretty astonishing.”Perhaps the problem is women, and the remedy is for women to do less housework and tolerate a consequentially messier home. “The tidiness level of a home is a matter of simple preference with no right or wrong,” my colleague Jonathan Chait has written, offering an “easy answer” to the chore wars. “My wife and I happily learned to converge on each other’s level of tidiness. We settled—fairly, I think—on a home that’s neater than I’d prefer to keep it, but less neat than she would.”Yet men are perfectly capable of recognizing a mess when it is not theirs. The sociologists Sarah Thébaud, Leah Ruppanner, and Sabino Kornrich asked people to look at photographs of an open-plan living room and kitchen; half saw a living space cluttered with dishes and laundry, and the other half saw a tidy area. The participants rated how clean the room was on a 100-point scale, and said how urgent they thought it was for the owner to take care of it. Men and women had essentially the same ratings of how clean the space was and how important tidying up was.In a second experiment, the same researchers told study participants that the photos were taken by someone looking to rent out their place on an Airbnb-type site. Some participants viewed rooms hosted by “Jennifer,” some by “John.” The participants thought that Jennifer’s clean space was less tidy than John’s, and were more judgmental in their assessments of the female host.Women internalize this kind of judgment, making the individual desire to keep things clean inextricable from the social expectation to do so. Women are critiqued for having pans in the sink and grime on the countertops in a way that men aren’t. Women’s cortisol levels go up when their space is messy in a way that men’s cortisol levels don’t. Asking women to clean less means asking women to accept more criticism, to buck their culture, to put aside their desire for a socially desirable space. At the same time, men internalize the message that an untidy home is not their responsibility.The best path forward might be for men and women to applaud messy, normal, mismatched, lived-in spaces. We should recognize that multinational conglomerates are in the business of devising problems that need solutions, which are conveniently available at Walmart and Target; we should admit that everything done in front of a camera is a performance, not reality; we should acknowledge that being welcomed into someone’s house is a gift of connection, not an invitation to judge. Easy enough for me to say. I am one of the millions of us who cannot seem to put down the vacuum, even if I do not want to pick it up.

BRCA mutations can lead to cancer in the pancreas, prostate, and maybe more parts of the body.

Empowering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will test one of American public health’s greatest successes.

Group fitness classes aren’t just about exercise.

When you hear that thousands of writers have signed a petition, you can already guess what they are calling for: What other than boycotting Israel could generate such enthusiasm among the literati?A staggering 6,000 writers and publishing professionals have signed a letter to address “the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.” They are calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions. The letter says that these institutions have played a crucial role in “normalizing … injustices” and that cooperating with them harms Palestinians—the implication being that withholding cooperation will help Palestinians. Signatories include some of the best writers alive. If you like to read, chances are a favorite of yours is on here. Among the best-known are the novelists Percival Everett, Sally Rooney, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Annie Ernaux. Some of my own favorites include the Indian writer Arundhati Roy, the Canadian novelist Miriam Toews, and the British critic Owen Hatherley.[Read: The cowardice of open letters]Predictably, the letter has led to a backlash. Almost 1,000 writers issued a counter-letter. They include the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright David Mamet, the essayist Adam Gopnik, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, and the Nobel laureate Herta Müller. My favorite signatory on this one is another Nobel laureate, the fiery left-wing feminist Austrian Elfriede Jelinek, known for her 1983 masterpiece The Piano Teacher. I am as horrified as anyone by Israel’s brutal and criminal war in Gaza and its decades-long regime of occupation. As a writer, my primary solidarity is with the dozens of journalists killed in the conflict in the past year, the majority of whom were Palestinian. But I also have no doubt as to which side of this literary civil war I am on.I’ve never joined a cultural boycott of any country—not Israel, not Russia, and not Iran, my own country of birth. The latter informs my outlook on the issue.I grew up in one of the most culturally isolated countries on Earth. Our case was of course very different from Israel’s. Iran’s isolation was partly the doing of its own government, which banned foreign cultural products that violated its religious and political strictures—meaning most of them. Cinemas hardly ever showed newly released foreign films (rare exceptions included Michael Moore’s Sicko and Frank Darabont’s The Green Mile). The censors constrained what foreign literature Iranian publishers could translate and publish.But our isolation also owed to the international sanctions on Iran that made any financial exchange with foreign entities into a potentially criminal affair. For example, we might have accessed banned foreign literature by ordering copies in original languages from abroad—except that this was not so easy in a country that had no credit cards, partly because international banks faced legal penalties for transacting with anybody inside it. When I was a teenager, my mom once helped me order a copy of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation through Amazon, using a prepaid card we went to some trouble to obtain from Dubai. The ordering process was labyrinthine, and even then, the book took six months to arrive. (My Palestinian friends in the occupied West Bank tell me of similar travails, because their post is sometimes held by Israel for months.) In 2002, Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was exposed, and the United States imposed a progression of sanctions that effectively blocked even this circuitous route. Today, many such simple exchanges between Iran and Western countries are close to impossible.Some opponents of the Iranian regime abroad have reinforced Iran’s isolation by equating cultural exchange with an unwanted “normalization” of the regime. They have protested the inclusion of Iranian films at festivals and the travel of Western cultural figures to Iran. I left Iran in 2008, but I have never supported such efforts, because I saw for myself how cultural isolation served Iran’s oppressors. Many of us in Iranian society wanted nothing more than to find allies, counterparts, and inspiration abroad, and our regime wanted nothing less for us. Boycotting the country simply advanced the cause of our adversaries—namely, to cut the Iranian population off from influences that could bolster its courage and expand the reach of its solidarity.That the Iranian people yearned for such contact was evident to those Western thinkers who did manage to visit. Jürgen Habermas, Immanuel Wallerstein, Michael Ignatieff, and Richard Rorty were among those who traveled to Iran and were treated like pop stars, filling meeting halls and taking part in enthusiastic exchanges with Iranians. Sadly these visits have dwindled in recent years, not just because of the regime's restrictions, but also because sanctions make any such exchange a tremendous hassle and a potential violation of U.S. law. (Foreign visitors also fear coming, because of the regime’s grim track record of taking Western citizens hostage.) That Iranians can still enjoy a good deal of foreign literature in Persian translation owes entirely to the courage and persistence of Iranian publishers, many of whom have tangled with both the censors, who determine what is permissible, and the sanctions, which make dealings with publishers around the world difficult.When I hear of boycotts on Israeli writers, I think of those Israeli writers who have been published in Persian translation regardless of these obstacles. I ask myself who would benefit if fewer Iranians could read Amos Oz’s enchanting fairy tale, Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest, rendered in Persian by the Marxist poet Shahrouz Rashid. The book tells of two children in an unnamed village who decide, against the advice of their parents, to seek out a demon that has taken all the animals away. Some critics saw this story as an allusion to the Holocaust. I remember discussing it with friends in Tehran and finding within it our own meanings and references. We dreamed of meeting Oz, who died in 2018, and of sharing our interpretations with him. What good is served by severing such cross-cultural exchange?Some supporters of boycotts will address these concerns by saying that their means are selective, that they punish only those writers or other artists who are linked, financially or ideologically, with states engaged in objectionable behavior, and that doing so has a track record of success in changing state behavior. But the question of which artists to tar as complicit with their governments’ policies is not a simple one, and boycotts are a blunt instrument at best.For instance, the writers’ petition explicitly calls for sanctioning only those Israeli cultural institutions that are “complicit in violating Palestinian rights” or “have never publicly recognized the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people.” Any Israeli cultural institution that has had to rely on state funding, in any form or at any point, could conceivably fall afoul of this criterion. Perhaps this explains why LitHub, the outlet that first published the letter, has done away with niceties and simply headlined it as a “pledge to boycott Israeli cultural institutions,” as have most other outlets.[Read: When writers silence writers]Since it was founded in 2005, the Palestinian-led movement for boycotts, sanctions, and divestment (BDS) against Israel has shown that it likes to paint with a broad brush, censuring organizations that promote contact between Palestinians and Israelis on the grounds that they “normalize” Israel: In the past, BDS has boycotted the Arab-Jewish orchestra started by the Palestinian scholar Edward Said; one of its most recent targets was Standing Together, a courageous group of anti-war Israeli citizens, both Jewish and Palestinian, whose leaders and members have faced arrest in their long fight against Israel’s occupation. A similar zeal seems to animate those who have promoted a boycott of Russian culture following Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.Many of those who advocate cultural sanctions point to South Africa as the shining example of boycott success. As is often the case with politicized appeals to history, the purpose here is to draw a strong moral injunction: Who could possibly stand on the side of the apartheid regime, which was triumphantly brought down in the 1990s and replaced by a multiracial democracy? But the history of the boycott movement against South Africa is more complicated than those analogizing it commonly acknowledge.Started in 1959 following a call by the African National Congress, the movement encompassed pledges not to work with South African universities or publishers and not to perform in South African venues. Several major U.S. publishers refused to provide books to South African libraries. The boycott’s proponents included not only fiery left-wingers but liberal doyens, such as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the American Library Association (ALA), which refused to work with any publisher that traded with South Africa. In 1980, the United Nations General Assembly voted to back the boycott and asked member states to “prevent all cultural, academic, sports, and other exchanges with the racist regime of South Africa.” When apartheid finally collapsed in the 1990s, Nelson Mandela proudly proclaimed the return of his country to the international community.But for all that they may have achieved, the boycotts were far from uncontroversial, even among opponents of apartheid. Many South African trade unions and social movements were in favor of them, but the Congress of South African Trade Unions, the main workers’ organization that helped bring down the regime, was concerned that divestment could lead to the loss of jobs and pensions. Parts of that group embraced selective boycotts instead of a blanket ban.Sanctions were even more contested in the art world. In 1975, Khabi Mngoma, the legendary principal of Johannesburg’s African Music and Drama Association (AMDA), which had produced stars such as Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masekela, visited New York to campaign against the boycott movement. “We feel isolated inside South Africa,” he told The New York Times, “and we also feel isolated by the outside world.”Mngoma was especially incensed that Black Americans were boycotting his country. “The students in our school, for example, would gain tremendously simply by being exposed in seminars and other classes to the expertise of black American artists,” he said. “By staying away, blacks here do us a great disservice.” But the zealots of the boycott movement didn’t listen to the likes of Mngoma. In 1972, Muhammad Ali was scheduled to compete in South Africa, but a vociferous campaign dissuaded him from doing so.Mngoma believed that engagement could be more constructive than sanction. On an earlier trip to New York, in 1968, he met with theater personalities and tried to persuade them to perform in South Africa instead of boycotting; they could tax white audiences and channel the money to Black theater. That strategy had some successes. The Broadway musicals Cabaret and Fiddler on the Roof were performed in South Africa and contributed tens of thousands of dollars in royalties to AMDA. Later, the American playwright Arthur Miller agreed to stage his plays in South Africa, but only for desegregated audiences. The singer Paul Simon recorded his Graceland album in South Africa in 1986, insisting on the importance of working with Black artists in the country. A year later, he headlined an enormous anti-apartheid concert in Zimbabwe with Makeba and Masekela. That same year, boycott proponents picketed his concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall and denounced him.Just how important a role the boycotts played in ending apartheid is disputed. Mattie C. Webb, a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at Yale, tells me they were significant, “but they were only one factor in a broader movement that also included internal social movements against apartheid. The sanctions themselves were limited, and frankly came rather late in the broader struggle against apartheid.” Lior Sternfeld, an Israeli American historian of Iran at Penn State, put a finer point on this, telling me: “I have tried in vain to find any empirical evidence that the boycott movement helped topple the South African regime.”Sternfeld has taken an interest in the question because of his work involving Israel and Iran. He is a critic of Israeli policy—both the occupation and the conduct of the war in Gaza—and he makes no brief for Israeli universities, which he says have tried “to get cozy with the government.” He does favor some sanctions—for example, kicking Israel out of the FIFA World Cup and other sporting events, as has been done to Russia. But he believes that cultural boycotts will primarily hurt Israeli intellectuals, who are already demonized by their government.“I have always believed that activism is about engagement, whereas BDS is articulated as a call for disengagement,” he told me. “I oppose the boycotts because it is important to have some sort of a bridge to Israeli intelligentsia.”Sternfeld’s position, like mine, is informed by observing the results of sanctions against Iran. He points specifically to How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare, a book published earlier this year by four Iranian American scholars, which argues that isolation has had adverse effects on Iran’s political culture and has counterproductively strengthened the regime’s repressive apparatus. The Iranian scholar Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, an outspoken opponent of the sanctions on Iran, has raised questions about boycotting Israel for similar reasons, to the ire of some on the left.Lately Iran and Israel have found themselves ever more dangerously at odds, and the lack of people-to-people contact between the two countries doesn’t help. That’s one reason Sternfeld accepted a surprising overture in September: The Iranian mission to the United Nations invited him to attend an interfaith meeting with President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. This encounter made Pezeshkian the first post-revolutionary Iranian president to knowingly and openly meet with an Israeli citizen. Iranian hard-liners attacked him for it relentlessly. As for Sternfeld, some critics of the Iranian regime in the United States denounced him for taking the meeting, even as hard-liners in Tehran called him a Zionist infiltrator.Iran bans its citizens from visiting Israel, but numerous Iranian writers and artists in exile have traveled to the country anyway in recent years. Their visits have helped show Israelis, used to hearing of the “Iranian threat” from their government, a more human side of the country.The filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf was a guest of honor at the Jerusalem Film Festival in 2013. Makhmalbaf was once an Islamist revolutionary; he spent four and a half years in prison before the 1979 revolution. But he went through a remarkable metamorphosis in the 1990s, becoming an anti-regime dissident and winding up in exile in Paris.“I am one of the ambassadors for Iranian art to Israel, and my message was of peace and friendship,” he told The Guardian of his trip at the time. “When I flew to Israel last week, I felt like a man flying to another planet, like a man flying to the moon.” Makhmalbaf criticized the logic of boycotters, saying, “If I make a film in Iran, and you come to my country to watch it, does it mean you confirm dictatorship in Iran and you have no respect for political prisoners in Iran?” he asked rhetorically of his critics. “If you go to the US, does it mean you confirm their attack on Afghanistan and Iraq?"Orly Cohen, a Tehran-born scholar who has lived in Israel most of her life, has helped organize the trips of several Iranian artists to the country. Now a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Haifa, she has also translated the work of Iranian poets into Hebrew.“In the Israeli news, all Israelis hear of Iran is war,” she told me by phone. “They don’t know about Iran’s culture and how much beautiful art is made in the country today.”[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel–but they can’t stop it]Cohen translated a book of poems by Mehdi Mousavi, known in Iran as the “father of postmodern poetry,” and facilitated his visit to Israel last year for its publication. He was the subject of a cover story in Haaretz, and he struck up a relationship with a well-known Iraqi-born poet, Ronny Someck. “He was seen as a bridge of friendship,” Cohen told me. “For the first time,” she said of Mousavi’s Israeli audience, “they saw Iran through Iranian, not Israeli, eyes.”Cohen also helped organize an exhibition about Iranian feminist movements at Jerusalem’s Museum of Islamic Art. Israeli feminists took an interest, but what surprised Cohen more was the feedback from religious Jews, some of whom were inspired by the example of Iranian women standing up to religious repression.Boycotts preclude such experiences and connections. In the years since 2005, when the Palestinian movement adopted BDS, the tenuous links that once allowed Israeli and Palestinian scholars and artists to be in contact have been cut one after another. Israeli peace activists used to travel frequently to the West Bank and speak at events there. But in 2014, Amira Hass, Haaretz’s correspondent in Ramallah and a vociferous critic of the Israeli occupation, was kicked out of an event at Bir Zeit University by two professors.Some boycotters do seem concerned about punishing people like Hass, hence the guidelines that carve out ostensible exceptions for those who are critical of the policies of the boycotted state. But I don’t see how any freedom-loving writer can embrace such a position. What distinguishes us from authoritarians and censors if we impose ideological litmus tests to decide which writers can present their work at festivals—if we ask them to declare their opposition to a political regime before they are allowed to speak?This world is full of walls that divide peoples, and of regimes that impose ideological purity tests on writers. If writers are to use our collective powers, it should not be to add to them.