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A jumbled cast of GOP characters have inserted themselves into the former president’s legal drama.

theatlantic.com

Photos From the 2024 Westminster Dog Show

The 148th annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show took place in New York City over the past week, showcasing more than 3,000 dogs of 200 different breeds and varieties. This year’s Best in Show was awarded to a miniature poodle named Sage. Gathered below are images from this year’s competition, held at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Cent

17 ч

theatlantic.com

Google and OpenAI Are Battling for AI Supremacy

19 ч

theatlantic.com

This is Atlantic Intelligence, a limited-run series in which our writers help you wrap your mind around artificial intelligence and a new machine age. Sign up here.This week has felt like the early days of the generative-AI boom, filled with dazzling events concerning the future of the technology.On Monday, OpenAI held a last-minute “Spring Update” event in which the company announced its newest AI model, GPT-4o, in an impressive live demo. Running on the iPhone’s ChatGPT app, the model appeared able to understand live camera footage, help solve a math problem, and translate a live conversation between English and Italian speakers. Every previous smartphone assistant, including Apple’s Siri, now appears obsolete—and the smartphone itself might be reimagined as the device most “perfectly positioned to run generative-AI programs,” as I wrote on Monday.Not to be outdone, Google followed suit yesterday during its annual developer conference, which focused almost exclusively on generative AI. Alongside various technological advances, the company laid out its vision for search in the AI era: “Google will do the Googling for you,” Liz Reid, the company’s head of search, declared. In other words, chatbots will take the work out of finding information online. Lurking beneath the announcements was an acknowledgment that AI is better suited at synthesizing existing information and formatting it into an accessible format than providing clear, definitive answers. “That’s not omniscience; it’s the ability to tap into Google’s preexisting index of the web,” I noted yesterday.OpenAI’s and Google’s announcements are a duel over not just which product is best, but which kind of generative AI will be most useful to people. The ChatGPT app promises to do everything, all in one place; AI-powered Google search promises to be more of an open-ended guide. Whether users will embrace either vision of a remade web remains to be seen.— Matteo Wong, associate editorWhat to Read Next The live translation exhibited in OpenAI’s demo gestures toward a world in which people no longer feel compelled to learn foreign languages. Louise Matsakis explored this potential AI-induced death of bilingualism in March, writing, “We may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.” Another, perhaps even more alarming future for the world’s languages: Generative AI, which is most proficient in the handful of languages with plentiful training data, may push thousands of other tongues into extinction. “If generative AI indeed becomes the portal through which the internet is accessed,” I wrote in March, “then billions of people may in fact be worse off than they are today.” P.S.The buzz over AI image generators and deepfakes was preceded, decades ago, by similar excitement and hand-wringing over Adobe’s Photoshop, then “the primary battlefield for debates around fake imagery,” my colleague Caroline Mimbs Nyce wrote last week. In the age of AI, Photoshop is struggling to adjust to being just one player in a crowded field.— Matteo

The 8 Dynamics That Will Shape the Election

And that will decide the outcome in November

19 ч

theatlantic.com

China Has Only Itself to Blame for a Trade War

23 ч

theatlantic.com

A global trade war is starting, and China is at the center of it. A reckoning for Beijing’s economic model, which is designed to promote Chinese industry at the expense of the rest of the world, has long been coming. China’s trading partners have had enough. The result will be a wave of protectionism, with potentially dire consequences for both China and the global economy.The most obvious and dramatic evidence for this was unveiled yesterday by President Joe Biden, who announced that his administration would quadruple the existing tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles, to 100 percent. He will also hike tariffs on steel, aluminum, medical equipment, semiconductors, solar cells, and lithium batteries. The Chinese government instantly protested and threatened action of its own. “The United States should immediately correct its wrong practices,” the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said in a statement. “China will take resolute measures to defend its own rights and interests.”Yet China’s leaders have no one to blame but themselves. They joined a global trading system and then gamed that system. Biden’s tariffs are the natural response, though not an entirely positive one. Protectionism raises costs, hurts consumers, shields unworthy companies from competition, and punishes worthier ones. Disputes over trade will only intensify the rivalry between the world’s two great powers.This souring of trade relations wasn’t always foreordained—but it had become virtually unavoidable. Chinese leader Xi Jinping has failed to reform his economy in ways that would have made this trade war less likely. Facing this confrontation with the United States, he is even less likely to make reforms today. The result is trade conflict and heightened political tensions that benefit no one.[Derek Thompson: Trade wars are not good, or easy to win]Biden targeted EVs for a reason. Beijing’s leaders wanted to dominate that industry and threw the weight of the state behind Chinese companies. The program was undeniably successful. China is at the forefront of the EV industry, while the United States, with the exception of Tesla, has barely gotten out of the parking lot. But electrical automotive is also a sector in which China’s government has played such a heavy role, and created so much manufacturing capacity, that other governments believe their own industries are at risk.Both that prowess and that excess were on display recently at the Beijing Auto Show. The exhibition included no fewer than 278 EV models. That’s indicative of a market jammed with 139 EV brands. The already gridlocked Chinese car market didn’t dissuade the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi from jumping in, with its first EV offering in the show’s spotlight. China simply has too many car companies with too many factories making too many cars. Counting both EVs and internal-combustion-engine vehicles, China’s auto industry now has the capacity to produce almost twice as many vehicles as Chinese consumers are buying, according to the Shanghai-based consultancy Automobility Limited. Although oversupply in the EV sector, where demand is still growing, is not as severe as in the legacy business, Chinese automakers are still adding assembly lines. BYD, for instance, plans to more than double its EV production capacity by 2026.China now has the largest domestic car market in the world, but even Chinese consumers cannot sustain so many factories, especially as the country’s economy slows. So automakers are off-loading their surplus products into the global marketplace. China vied with Japan for the title of world’s largest car exporter last yearThis hefty outflow of Chinese cars has earned unwelcome attention from policy makers in the U.S. and Europe. They contend that the Chinese government unduly supports and promotes China’s bloated automobile sector; as a consequence, their own automakers are threatened by a deluge of cheap Chinese vehicles. During an official visit to China in late April, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said that the issue of China’s excess capacity was “front and center” for Washington. Chinese industry, he added, is “flooding markets, undermining competition, putting at risk livelihoods and businesses around the world.” While also visiting China in April, Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, expressed similar concerns.“The one thing that must always be clear is that competition must be fair,” Scholz said in a speech in Shanghai. China’s leaders think it already is. They retort that the success of Chinese automakers is due entirely to their competitive advantages. Premier Li Qiang told Scholz that greater supply “is conducive to full market competition and promoting the survival of the fittest.”[Michael Schuman: To China, all’s fair in love and trade wars]The state news agency Xinhua argued that China’s edge “has been honed through diligent efforts and genuine expertise, rooted in market competition, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” and went on to claim that “the world doesn’t want less of China’s capacity, but wants more.” Therefore, the criticism of China’s industry “may look like an economic discussion,” a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said, but it “ignores more than 200 years of the basic concept of comparative advantage in Western economics.”The fact that some Chinese EV companies have developed highly competitive products and technology, and benefit from real cost advantages in a relatively low-wage economy, is certainly true. Yet the government’s role in building and sustaining that sector is undeniable as well. Chinese economic planners wished to accelerate the EV sector’s development, so, almost a decade ago, they targeted electric vehicles for special state assistance through their Made in China 2025 industrial program. The assistance was controversial from the start because American and European business leaders and policy makers feared—rightly, it now appears—that Beijing’s backing for its favored industries would distort global markets. Tax breaks, low-interest loans, subsidies to make EVs more affordable, and other aid followed.These interventions encouraged private capital to jump in as well. The result was an explosion of investment in start-ups, factories, and supply chains. As Bert Hofman, an expert on China’s economy at the National University of Singapore, told me: “If the central government says this is the new growth area, electric vehicles are the future, everybody and their grandmothers start something in electric vehicles.”All governments place their thumb on the scale to promote their national industries to some degree. China’s thumb simply weighs more heavily. A 2022 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington conservatively estimated that China spent $248 billion supporting its industries in 2019. That’s twice as much as the United States did. “It’s the whole financial system, the whole economic system that is leveraged for industrial policy, which is very different than what’s been happening in market economies,” Camille Boullenois, an analyst of Chinese industry at the research firm Rhodium Group, told me. Where electric vehicles are concerned, “it’s very hard to imagine the industry growing as fast without government support.”The excess capacity, however, is not so much by design. As the automobile industry in China was revving up, the economy was slowing down. Bill Russo, Automobility’s founder, explained to me that automakers overestimated the growth of the Chinese car market and ended up building factories to churn out vehicles for customers that never materialized. Passenger-car sales are still below where they were in 2017 thanks to a stumbling economy, the ravages of the pandemic, and other factors. Such investment, he said, “has been the formula for cashing in on China’s growth, and you’re going to have a reckoning at one point in time—and that’s what we’re faced with right now.”This problem is not confined to cars. China’s steel industry has maintained its output even though demand at home has been declining. The Australian bank Westpac said recently that steel exports, which are approaching record levels, have become a “release valve” for this excess. Even as China’s leaders rebutted foreign criticism of its bloated industries, they released draft regulations in early May to rein in expansion of lithium-battery manufacturing. Chinese state-owned media are reporting that a glut of solar panels—another sector dominated by Chinese companies—is depressing prices and squeezing profits. A surge of Chinese investment into manufacturing “legacy” microchips (those using older technology) is sparking fears they could flood the global marketplace.[Richard Fontaine: The China problem isn’t going away]Facing this Chinese onslaught, governments around the world are stepping in to protect their own industries. The European Commission is currently conducting an investigation into China’s subsidizing of electric vehicles with an eye to imposing its own tariffs on their import. Rhodium anticipates that the EU will apply a duty of 15 to 30 percent on EVs, but the group argues that even this may not be sufficient to deter Chinese automakers. The Biden administration’s move to a 100 percent EV tariff no doubt reflects similar thinking. Chile has already slapped tariffs on some Chinese steel products, while Brazil imposed quotas and duties to stave off an influx of cheap steel, mainly from China.Beijing could fend off these restrictions by reforming its domestic market. The flip side of China’s excessive supply is weak demand. This is caused not just by slowing growth, but also by its entire economic model. As Michael Pettis, a specialist in China’s economy at Peking University, recently pointed out, Beijing’s dirigiste policy has a side effect of subsidizing China’s industry even more than it appears, by both directly and indirectly transferring wealth from families to factories: Rather than encouraging spending on goods, all of the economic incentives are to make capital investment in manufacturing. China’s economic model favors producers over consumers, which holds down household incomes and limits their spending. Lacking customers at home, Chinese industry is forced to seek them abroad.New policies that nudge Chinese families to spend more and save less could alleviate the problem. One way to do this would be to strengthen the country’s feeble social safety net. But Chinese leaders have done little to encourage that transition, perhaps because the necessary liberalizing reforms could weaken the Communist Party’s control over the economy and society. That leaves China’s industrial giants little option but to spew their excess into the global marketplace, in an effort to sustain growth and employment. The outcome is that China sells to the world more goods than it buys from it. Hofman calculated that China recorded trade surpluses with 173 economies in 2023 and deficits with only 50. That added up to a merchandise trade surplus of more than $800 billion.Xi Jinping seems set on making matters worse. His principal economic goal of achieving “self-sufficiency” aims to reduce what China purchases from other countries and substitute goods made by foreign companies with Chinese alternatives—especially in industries, such as green energy, that other governments find strategic. In doing so, Xi is practically inviting more intense trade disputes.In Xi’s thinking, economic growth “is going to come from churning out a lot of this stuff and exporting it to the world,” Leland Miller, a co-founder of the research firm China Beige Book, told me. “Why they think they can get away with that when they are already running giant, politically charged trade surpluses with most of the world, including the United States, and they’re going to supercharge those surpluses and think that’s going to be successful … it doesn’t make much sense.”The big point is that China is not just exporting too much stuff; it’s also exporting its economic problems. Xi intends to maintain Chinese jobs and factories at the expense of other countries’ workers and companies, to avoid necessary but potentially disruptive reform at home. That means Xi is actually undermining the great hope of China’s rise. A wealthier China was supposed to be an engine of global prosperity. Xi’s version is promoting protectionism and confrontation that threaten that prosperity.Facing political pressure at home, politicians around the world are forced to defend their economies from Xi’s strategy, even if that leads to trade wars that sour relations with Beijing. This is not a good outcome for the global economy or for geopolitical stability. But Xi’s policies have made it inevitable.

The Baby Reindeer Mess Was Inevitable

24 ч

theatlantic.com

This story contains spoilers for the Netflix limited series Baby Reindeer.In the finale of Baby Reindeer, the comedian Donny Dunn (played by the show’s creator, Richard Gadd) achieves the kind of success he’d always wanted: He lands podcast interviews, performs before appreciative crowds inside big clubs, and scrolls through scores of online comments praising him for his bravery. He has transformed, as he puts it, “from a walking ghost to the center of a media storm”—all because a random audience member filmed and uploaded to YouTube a set during which Donny fell apart and delivered confessions instead of jokes. He’d told the room that he’d been groomed and abused years earlier by a man he’d considered his mentor, and that the resulting mix of self-hatred, humiliation, and guilt led him to indulge a stalker named Martha (Jessica Gunning).Donny is based on Gadd himself, and the British series—an expanded, episodic version of Gadd’s one-man show of the same name—opens with a card that reads “This is a true story.” Gadd has said that he was indeed stalked and harassed by a middle-aged woman who claimed to be a lawyer, and that he had been sexually abused by someone in the industry he’d greatly admired. The names of these people and certain details about the events were changed, but, as Gadd said in an interview, the show was “all emotionally 100 percent true.”[Read: We’ve lost the plot]The response to Baby Reindeer has been a lot more complicated than Donny’s brush with acclaim. Though the show has received glowing reviews since its April debut and became a hit on Netflix, topping the streamer’s English-language charts three weeks in a row, the fallout has been, to put it mildly, a mess. Some viewers tried to uncover the identity of Gadd’s entertainment-industry abuser and ended up targeting an innocent former co-worker of Gadd’s. As for Martha, internet sleuths found a woman who matched her description, leading tabloids such as the Daily Mail to track her down. The woman has said she believes that the character of Martha was based on her, and admitted to sending Gadd emails and tweets, but denied stalking him or committing criminal behavior during their interactions. She has since accused Gadd of stalking her, and, last week, she was interviewed by Piers Morgan, which led to a fresh wave of online commentary. Maybe that’s the last of it; Gadd himself has refused to “confirm or deny anything relating to the real life people who the characters are based on in the show.” Or maybe such a high-profile appearance will beget more headlines, which will beget even more discussion.None of this is really a surprise when you consider the show’s structure. Baby Reindeer spends most of its time dissecting Donny—and, by extension, Gadd himself—but the stalker story is its most seductive hook. The show’s thrillerlike twists offer a kind of voyeuristic accessibility into Donny’s staggering turmoil. But by branding itself as a true story, the series implicitly invites viewers to ponder what’s real and what’s been embellished—this intrigue is what helped turn the show into a word-of-mouth hit. As such, it’s become nearly impossible to see the story of Baby Reindeer on its own terms, separate from the conversation about Gadd’s ethics and whether he did enough to prevent the real people involved from being publicly identifiable. The show itself actually makes trenchant observations about obsession, shame, and abuse—all of which have been overshadowed by the frenzy it helped create.This apparently wasn’t Gadd’s intention. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real-life people could be,” he wrote in an Instagram Story. “That’s not the point of our show.” The point, it seemed, had been catharsis—for Gadd, and for anyone who might resonate with his journey. The original stage show, he told The Guardian, became “a lifeline … The way people received the show, and received me, and accepted what happened to me: it saved my life.” In making the show, he sought to make sense of how his earlier abuse informed his behavior around his stalker: why he remained in contact with her for so long and why he failed to draw clear boundaries.The show succeeds in many ways at capturing Gadd’s cathartic self-reflection. Donny’s narration anchors the series in his queasy point of view, his voice-over repeatedly veering into critical takedowns of his own behavior. He tends to state how much he loathes himself, his need for relevancy, and his similarities to Martha. Baby Reindeer’s fourth and strongest episode, told in a visceral series of flashbacks, is especially uncomfortable: The disorienting camerawork places us inside Donny’s confused, blurry mind as he returns to his groomer’s apartment over and over, knowing each time that he’ll be drugged and raped. Even the title credits emphasize how trapped Donny is in his head: The words “created & written by Richard Gadd” are typed on-screen and then backspaced away, as if Gadd can’t fully say what he wants to express. The effect is overwhelming—Donny is so raw and honest about how he feels about himself that you immediately empathize with him. [Read: A grim new low for internet sleuthing]But Baby Reindeer also quietly, perhaps inadvertently, encourages prying into the people being depicted on-screen—to participate, in other words, in the very form of “toxic empathy” Gadd said he struggled with during the time he engaged with Martha. Netflix has maintained that it took “every reasonable precaution in disguising the real-life identities of the people involved,” yet the show seems to have kept plenty of other details intact: Netflix U.K.’s Instagram account declares that the misspelled emails depicted in the show were pulled from Gadd’s inbox. An in-joke about curtains is reproduced in the drama; the alleged real-life Martha referred to it in a public social-media post, which viewers easily found online. Donny’s emphasis on how much he couldn’t quit Martha often overshadows the richer parts of his story. The show spends several episodes exploring Donny’s budding romance with a trans woman, Teri (Nava Mau), and his evolving understanding of his parents, who have more in common with him than he thought. But Donny’s relationship with Martha bookends the series, affirming its importance over everything else. Viewers are left with Martha’s voice ringing in their ears. It’s no wonder that so many began hunting for her once they finished the show.I want to give Gadd the benefit of the doubt. Reliving his real-life trauma to play Donny can’t have been easy, and he said on a panel discussion recently that he had expected Baby Reindeer to “sit as maybe a little cult, artistic gem on the Netflix platform.” “If I wanted the real life people to be found, I would’ve made it a documentary,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in a conversation conducted before the Piers Morgan interview. “I’ve spoken publicly about how I don’t want people to do it and if I start playing a game of whack-a-mole, then I’m almost adding to it. I don’t think I’ll ever comment on it ever again.” (It’s unclear whether the woman who claims to be the real-life Martha was ever formally charged or investigated for alleged stalking.)For better or worse, the selling of the show as a true story positioned it to become the subject of internet sleuthing, and buried what’s really potent about it beyond the stalker storyline. Baby Reindeer examines the destructive nature of abuse, the way that a survivor can do seemingly irrational things—returning to the site of the abuse, obsessing over actions and inactions—just to be sure the whole ordeal wasn’t imagined. Donny found solace in the easy validation Martha provided and saw in her the same self-loathing and loneliness he had within him.During Donny’s unplanned confession onstage, he explains why he couldn’t let go of the possibility that his abusive mentor could actually make him famous. “When you’re famous, people see you as that,” he said. “They think, It’s the guy from that thing!” In reality, of course, fame can simply be the start of a cycle of exploitative empathy. At its core, Baby Reindeer understood this. But inevitably, too many of its viewers did not.

The Death of the Corner Office

24 ч

theatlantic.com

If you walked into an office building during the second half of the 20th century, you could probably figure out who had power with a single glance: Just look for the person in the corner office. The corner offices of yore were big, with large windows offering city views and constant streams of light, plus unbeatable levels of privacy. Everyone wanted them, but only those at the top got them. Land in one, and you’d know you’d made it. Fast-forward to today, and that emblem of corporate success is dying off. The number of private offices along the side of a building, a category that includes those in the corner, has shrunk by about half since 2021, according to the real-estate company CBRE. But today’s workplace transformation goes beyond the corner. All assigned desks and offices are on the decline, comprising only 45 percent of the average office, compared with 56 percent in 2021. Employers of many kinds—law firms, oil companies, biotech businesses, railway operators—are doing without them. They’re being replaced with coffee areas, conference rooms, and other collaborative spaces, Janet Pogue, the global director of workplace research at Gensler, a design firm, told me. In 2023, communal areas constituted 20 percent of the average office floor, up from 14 percent in 2021, CBRE found. [Read: Corporate buzzwords are how workers pretend to be adults]Some take this shift as evidence of a revolution in egalitarianism. But tearing down the walls of the corner office hasn’t exactly made the workplace more democratic. Executives still claim many of the new shared spaces as their own, take the lead during team meetings, and enjoy other subtle privileges. They may no longer occupy a seat of such visible power, but they still exert sway over the rest of the office, using spaces as they please and influencing what others can do in them.The relationship between office geography and power has always been in flux. The earliest workplaces displayed a “total inversion of our image of the traditional office-space hierarchy,” Dale Bradley, a professor at Brock University who has researched the history of the office, told me. Take the Larkin Building, which was designed in 1904 for a soap company. There, executives sat in the center of the first floor. “These guys are on display all the time,” Bradley said. Lower-level employees, meanwhile, were pushed to the edges of the building.But as the years passed, bosses decided they’d rather not be so visible. Shortly before World War II, they started moving into the corners, where they could easily block themselves off, and the symbol of corporate power that we know today took root. By mid-century, developers were bragging about how many corner offices they could cram onto each floor. In 1966, The New York Times wrote about a Philadelphia office building that had eight corners—“twice the normal supply.” Toronto’s Scotia Plaza did even better, with as many as 22 on some floors. This influence seeped into literature too. Books with titles such as Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office and Winners Dream: A Journey From Corner Store to Corner Office made clear that attaining the corner office was the apex of capitalist triumph. Then, about two decades ago, office designers began phasing them out. Google’s open-plan office redesign in 2005 was one of the earlier and most high-profile signs of changing attitudes: Modern workplaces were emphasizing collaboration, and corner offices were seen as too siloed. In 2020, the office came under attack again. Especially during the early pandemic, fewer executives were showing up to work in person, and their palatial corner offices were going to waste. “Nobody else really feels comfortable going into somebody else’s space and sitting there,” Kay Sargent, a director at the design firm HOK, told me. Now new office leases are about 20 percent smaller than they were before COVID, and companies are reconfiguring their floor plans to include more communal areas so that more employees fit into less space.Without the corner office, status is conveyed in new ways. No matter the setup, “human beings will still find a way of creating hierarchy,” Lenny Beaudoin, CBRE’s global head of workplace design, explained. Bosses might have more computer monitors, bigger desks, or even just a permanent spot rather than a rotating one, Matthew Davis, a business professor at Leeds University Business School, told me. Power also manifests intangibly—for instance, only a select few might be able to not check Slack or come and go from the office without explanation. It’s the same benefit of having a far-flung corner office, re-created digitally: You know you’re important if you can escape surveillance.[Read: ‘Resimercial:’ the terrible word for today’s trendy office aesthetic]And even if they’re not in the corner, a lot of executives do still have offices. Those have largely slimmed down, but many are connected to conference rooms or other collaborative spaces, such as broadcast rooms in finance firms, recording studios at media companies, and labs in the life sciences. Many higher-ups essentially seize these for themselves whenever they come in, Pogue, at Gensler, told me. From there, they can shape any collaboration that takes place, ensuring it plays out in their space and under their supervision. Many modern companies “have as many conference rooms as there are executives,” Sargent said, and it’s become a “dirty little secret” that conference rooms are the new corner offices.A collaborative space doesn’t need to be directly attached to a boss’s office for this dynamic to play out. When a high-ranking executive parks themselves in a big conference room or spreads their stuff across the long table in the office coffee shop, no one is going to tell them to leave. The communal spaces are free to use only if the boss isn’t there. Across all iterations of the workplace, higher-ups have always found ways to get what they want. We may one day return to an older layout of explicit hierarchy: Beaudoin, the CBRE designer, told me that he recently worked with a bank that decided to reinstall corner offices for a group of senior leaders, hoping it would bring them back to the office. But even if recent changes prove lasting, with space designed to be up for grabs, there won’t be any illusions about who has the power to grab it.

A Gaza Protester Who’s Willing to Suffer

1 д

theatlantic.com

The protesters on university campuses have an image problem: They look like they are having way too much fun. In tone, the demonstrations do not match the subject matter, which they allege is genocide, the least fun of all human activities. For 20-year-olds, some activities that would be miserable to a normal person—screaming hysterically, being arrested, living in ragged encampments—are in fact an exhilarating way to spend one’s time, and certainly preferable to studying for exams. Young people like to rough it, within reason. Earlier this month, the protesters at the University of Chicago begged to be resupplied with dwindling essentials such as Chapstick and dental dams.Most universities have delayed threats of serious punishment. Even students who are eventually arrested are likely to suffer only minor blemishes to their records. And many of these blemishes are desirable: What better way to prove you were young and alive in 2024 than to have a framed mug shot from the day you were zip-tied and booked? Such mementos will have an honored place on the desks of protesters who someday follow a square occupation, like corporate law or podiatry.Fun does not discredit a cause, but a protester who enjoys himself has a harder time demonstrating his commitment than one willing to suffer. This weekend I spoke with one of the latter. David Chmielewski, a Princeton English major from Torrington, Connecticut, along with 11 other Princeton community members, spent 10 days on a hunger strike to call for the university to divest from Israel. “We wanted to commit ourselves to making clear how dire the situation is, with the forced famine that’s happening in the Gaza Strip,” Chmielewski said. He and the others consumed nothing but water, electrolytes, and necessary medicine. “There’s something very powerful about being able to use your body to show that commitment.” He said the group stopped on Saturday after talks with Princeton administrators yielded promising results.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Many have ridiculed the hunger strikers for the short duration of their fast, and for not emerging from the ordeal sallow and hollow-cheeked. (“PROTESTER WHINES OVER SELF-IMPOSED HUNGER STRIKE,” read the chyron on a Fox News broadcast.) Ten days isn’t long, but it is nine days longer than I’ve ever gone without food, so I am not inclined to downplay the unpleasantness of the experience. In fact, I respect Chmielewski. And just as it is important to ridicule protesters who have no idea what they are protesting, or who infringe on the rights of others, or who hate Jews, one should acknowledge when others press their cause, whatever its merit, in a morally faultless way.Chmielewski said his group was inspired by hunger strikers earlier this year at Brown (where the strike lasted eight days), at Dartmouth (where it lasted 12 days), and at Harvard (half a day). “We’re also drawing on a longer tradition of the hunger strike as a nonviolent-resistance tactic,” he told me, citing the Irish-republican hunger strikes of the 1920s and those of Gandhi and others in the movement for Indian independence. The Princeton protesters, he said, have had weeks to evolve in their tactics, without having been wiped out by clashes with police. “Other student groups may not have been afforded that luxury of time,” Chmielewski said. “We’ve had a lot of time to sit and reflect on what we can do to pressure the university but also to center Palestinians.”The language of “centering”—borrowed from the feminist theory of bell hooks and others—refers to the practice of giving credence and priority to the views of those historically ignored or victimized. It is in my opinion misguided, insofar as history’s victims are like history’s oppressors: human, and therefore flawed to the core and wrong about most things. And in the case of the Palestinians, the practice of “centering” seems to introduce a contradiction. Was it not odd, I asked Chmielewski, that centering the Palestinian perspective would lead him to adopt tactics that have never attracted a significant following among Palestinians?Chmielewski countered that Palestinian political prisoners have gone on hunger strikes by the thousands at various points in the past few decades. That’s true, but many of those striking were doing so only because they were in prison for violent crimes, and nonviolence had become the only option available. Nonviolent resistance as a preferred tactic remains rare—and rejected completely by Hamas—even though a growing literature in political science (particularly the work of Erica Chenoweth and the late Gene Sharp) has demonstrated that it is often very effective. It is less effective when allied with organized armed resistance. Chmielewski’s peers seem content with such an alliance. “Glory to the martyrs,” his Princeton group declared in a recent social-media post. “The empire will burn.”The question of why Palestinians have shown conspicuously little interest in the tactic that he himself has adopted is, Chmielewski told me, “better asked of a Palestinian.” “I don’t necessarily feel qualified to speak to the exact reasons for the dynamics of what tactics Palestinians have adopted historically,” he said. He was, I should add, smart and articulate, and one reason I liked him was his willingness to admit ignorance. Another was that unlike many other protesters, he did not hide behind a mask and committed himself to his cause by name.His conclusion from the experience was not narrowly about hunger in Gaza at all. “I’m not sure I know the right word” for what he experienced by not eating, he told me. “Spiritual? Poetic? Imaginative?” He said the hunger strike, although nominally about his university’s divestment, gave him a sense that “another world is possible, because you’re refraining from material needs. Everyone tells you you need these material things. But then stepping away from them gives you this permission to imagine other possibilities for existing in the world. It gives you permission to imagine a better world, because it’s taking you a step back from this world of … raw materiality.”I sensed that he was getting what one should get from one’s time at university: an education. Maybe it was the ketosis talking. (Several days of not eating can leave one giddy, even energetic.) I came away persuaded less by his cause than by his dedication and the worthiness of nonviolence as a tactic of first resort. I hope there will be more who practice it—in Princeton, Gaza, and Israel.

The Art of Survival

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theatlantic.com

Photographs by Heather Sten for The Atlantic The first time I met Suleika Jaouad, I fell in love with her a little. This, I would soon learn, is a fairly common reaction to Suleika: Everyone who meets her falls in love with her a little. It was 2015, and Suleika was just 26 years old—buoyant, finally off maintenance chemo, and radiant on account of it, her thick brown hair arranged in a boop-a-doop pixie cut. We were attending the same conference, and her boyfriend, a young New Orleans musician named Jon Batiste, was there too. The couple had an irresistible backstory: They first met at band camp as teenagers (she in Birkenstocks, he with a mouthful of train-track orthodonture), and then reconnected romantically as adults. They made for a captivating pair, though the weather systems surrounding them couldn’t have been more different: She was enveloping and collected people; he was shy and abstracted, as if involved in a long, vigorous conversation with himself.At some point, I was told that Jon was going to be the new bandleader on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. I remember thinking, Cool, but not much more, having no idea what kind of genius he was. Yet one knew from just looking at them that Jon and Suleika were destined for an unusual life. They were sophisticated and great-looking, ambitious and disciplined, adoring and mutually invested in each other’s success. Suleika had written a column for The New York Times called “Life, Interrupted” about the brutal challenges of living with acute myeloid leukemia, had beaten the disease, and was now doing advocacy work and writing a memoir. Jon would soon be appearing nightly on our television sets and continuing to make music of his own.They are married now. He’s the more famous of the two, with an Academy Award, a Golden Globe, and five Grammys; he’s also the focus of the documentary American Symphony, which earned him a 2024 Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. (Additionally, Jon is The Atlantic’s first music director.)But Suleika has her own passionate following. I recently told a friend that I was writing about her, and she started burbling with envy, saying how much she loved The Isolation Journals, Suleika’s Substack newsletter; how much she loved her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms; how certain she was that the two of them would be fast friends if only they could meet in real life. I didn’t have the heart to say: Well, yes, I’m sure that’s true, you guys probably would be friends, but I’m also fairly certain that her hundreds of thousands of readers and quarter-million-plus Instagram followers feel the exact same way.[Suleika Jaouad: I survived cancer, and then I needed to remember how to live]That’s the thing about Suleika: She’s like O-negative blood, compatible with any type. The awful irony is that almost no one’s lifeblood is compatible with Suleika’s, at least not in the most meaningful sense. Because Suleika had not, in fact, left her cancer behind her. In 2021, she spun out of remission, requiring a second bone-marrow transplant. But her only compatible donor was her brother, Adam, and it was his bone marrow that her cancer cells had managed to outfox in the first place. That means she’ll very likely need a third transplant in the years ahead, ideally from someone else. But there is no one else. Yet.When Suleika was first diagnosed, in 2011, her doctors put her odds of survival at 35 percent. I asked her in October what her odds are now. “Less than that,” she said slowly, though she added that her prognosis could change if the science does, or if a new suitable donor materializes.Suleika likes to say that “survival is a creative act,” which has a slightly peculiar ring to it, at once too tidy and too obscure. But what she means, really, is: Living with the implicit or explicit threat of cancer for your entire adulthood forces you to strain the limits of your imagination to find life’s fulfillments. She has surrounded herself with loyal, loving friends. She has made her environments warm and stylish. (Her Brooklyn brownstone was recently featured in Architectural Digest.) But most important, she has made a daily practice of converting pain into art. (She’s fond of quoting the poet Louise Glück: “Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance.”) Between Two Kingdoms spent 22 weeks as a New York Times best seller. This summer, she will have her first art exhibition, inspired by the watercolors she did in the hospital during her second transplant. She has a contract for two more books, one a compendium of writing prompts and meditations on journaling, the other a collection of her paintings and essays.The self-help aisles are heaving with advice about how to be happy. But it’s one thing to read such guidance; it’s another to actually live it. Yet at 35, Suleika is sharing with her readers how she’s trying to do the hardest thing, even if it’s the most basic thing: wrench meaning from our short time here.A brief confession before we go any further. I had a meta-motive for wanting to sit down with Suleika: When our interviews began, I was on month 16 of long COVID. There’d be days when I was too dizzy to sit, let alone stand, and my head would judder and vibrate like a lawn mower if I started to walk. Suleika was the one person I knew I could interview while lying down.I was all too aware that there was an existential gap in our suffering, but I still wondered if, from observing her, I’d learn something about how to cope, just as thousands of other physically and spiritually broken people had. She’d figured out how to stop resisting her illness, spending many productive hours from bed, hadn’t she? Whereas I was still in an iron mode of resistance, braying at the gods. During an extended hospital stay for her second bone-marrow transplant, in February 2022, Suleika took up painting. (Kate Sterlin) It’s easy to miss Jon and Suleika’s home in the Delaware River Valley. It is also easy, once you find it, to mistakenly believe that it is inhabited by hobbits. They live in a compact, cheery farmhouse, the walkway lined with solar-powered lanterns, the grounds checkered with wild shrubs and pyramids of gourds. This is where the couple retreated during the pandemic, and it is where I went the first night I had dinner with Jon and Suleika, along with four of their friends. The atmosphere at the table was relaxed and festive, and everyone was almost unnaturally attractive, like castoffs from a rom-com that never went into production. After dinner, Jon took a seat at the piano in the living room, and one of his friends, the saxophonist and mathematician Marcus Miller, joined him. Their improvising was exactly as great as you’d imagine. Crazier still? Everyone acted like it was no big deal. To me, it was a penthouse scene in a Noël Coward play; to them, it was a Monday.The next morning, I opened my phone to reexperience my favorite moment of the evening. We are all still eating dinner. Jon has called up a song on his phone from the gospel artist JJ Hairston’s Not Holding Back, one of two featuring Pastor David Wilford. Jon is not just luxuriating in it; he’s doing that thing, that Aeolian-harp thing, where he lets the music ripple through him, practically becoming it. He’s involved in some dialogue with Marcus about it too, one that’s primarily gestural, marveling at all the choices Hairston and Wilford made, chuckling at them, nodding, pointing, and exuberantly mugging: Jon fans himself as if he’s an overheated lady at church; he mock-plays along on an imaginary piano; he stomps his foot; he jumps and hops; he opens his eyes wide and punctuates every few bars with “Ohhhhh!”“We gotta start it back from the beginning!” Jon cries, holding his hand up. And he replays the song.“OHHHH!” Jon whoops. You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … You’re gonna live … to see it happen. (Jon fans himself.) You’re gonna live … to seeeeeeeeee it happen. I said live live live live live! (Jubilant piano riff here, which Jon pantomimes with a flourish.)Live live live live live!Jon is now singing to everyone at the table, pointing at us, serenading us with: “You’re gonna live … to seeeeeeeeee it happen.”“I don’t know what you’re going through,” Pastor Wilford sings.“But whatever it is—” Marcus’s fiancée says, spontaneously.“—I’m gonna live,” Suleika replies.Only then did I notice the lyrics.I’d heard them at the time, but they hadn’t really registered.She’s going to live: a prediction, a command, a dearly held wish. Suleika in her Brooklyn studio, with some recent works in progress (Heather Sten for The Atlantic) A chilly Monday morning in Brooklyn this past October. I meet Suleika at her brownstone at 7 a.m. Her left eyelid has been drooping for months, and her doctors want an MRI of her brain to rule out anything ominous. As we head off to the brand-new Brooklyn arm of Memorial Sloan Kettering, she pulls on a giant overcoat with a Basquiat design. “My hospital jacket,” she explains. She especially loved wearing it after her hair and eyebrows had fallen out. “Instead of looking at me, people would look at my coat.”Our Uber pulls up in front of Sloan Kettering, and I sit in the waiting room. After about 45 minutes, Suleika emerges. I ask how it went. The usual clanging and banging, she says. “The story I told myself this morning is that I was in an avant-garde nightclub, and the band playing was called the Woodpecker Collective.”Suleika’s cancer started, as she wrote in Between Two Kingdoms, with an itch. It was a tenacious itch, one that originated on the tops of her feet and gradually coiled up her legs. Then came the naps. Naps begetting naps begetting more naps. But this was 2010, Suleika’s senior year at Princeton, and everyone was tired their senior year, right? She powered her way through with energy drinks, Adderall, and the occasional line of coke.That fall, Suleika got a tiny furnished apartment in Paris, went to work as a paralegal, and was soon joined by her then-boyfriend. For a few months, life was grand. But she was still tired, so tired, and she kept getting infections that drove her to the local health clinic. On the day she finally dragged herself to the American Hospital of Paris, she fainted on the sidewalk. The doctors tested her for everything “from HIV to lupus to cat scratch fever,” she wrote. But never leukemia.Suleika stayed in the American Hospital of Paris for a week, buoyed by fresh croissants and steroids. But shortly after being discharged, she was back, her mouth covered in sores, her complexion “blue-gray, like dead meat.” The doctor told her that if her red-blood-cell count got any lower, she wouldn’t be allowed to board an airplane. She flew home. Two weeks later, she received her diagnosis.In 2021, when she feared she had relapsed, Suleika’s medical team didn’t recommend doing a bone-marrow biopsy, even though her blood counts had been dropping for two straight years and she’d been feeling depleted. There were plausible explanations, of course: She’d had Lyme disease and a host of infections; she was, as always, working without cease. But ultimately, Suleika had to demand a biopsy, and she likely wouldn’t have gone through with it if her friend, the writer Elizabeth Gilbert, hadn’t cleared her schedule to accompany her.“I get there, and they’re like, ‘We don’t have to do this. We’re just doing this to ease your anxiety,’ ” Suleika tells me. “And I felt so embarrassed, like I was being melodramatic.” Women: so high-strung, so fluttery.Suleika could go on about the tar pit of biases that lurks beneath her medical encounters. At 22, for instance, she wasn’t told by a single doctor that her treatments would likely leave her infertile; she found out on the internet (and quickly harvested her eggs). Nor did she know that her leukemia protocols would shunt her into menopause; her fellow female patients had to tell her. And certainly no one told her that she had multiple options for mitigating her pain; she had to learn about that from her younger friends in the pediatrics ward.“Why can’t we apply the same principles that we do in pediatrics to adult care?” she asks me. “Small things, like putting on numbing gel for accessing ports.” Or big things, like biopsies. They’re positively medieval procedures, with a long, wide needle boring deep into the core of your pelvis. Kids get them under sedation. Adults typically receive only a local anesthetic. During her 2021 biopsy, it took the doctor four tries to get what she needed. Suleika bit down so hard on her hand that it bled.“It was the grisliest thing I’ve ever seen,” Gilbert told me. “It was like a paper punch going through bone.”Now, for her biopsies, Suleika asks to be knocked out.It is tempting to look at Suleika’s illness as an origin story, the thing that forced her to live an exceptional life. But another way to think about it is that Suleika is an exceptional person to whom illness happened. Speak with her friends, and you get the sense that she has always lived her life like the rest of us, but in a much larger font.When Suleika falls in love, she falls ferociously in love; with female friends, she’s the queen of the grown-up sleepover and intimate discussion. Her intensity revealed itself early. In fourth grade, she started the double bass, and by the time she was 14, she was practicing five hours a day. In 11th grade, she was rising at 4 a.m. each Saturday to commute to Juilliard from her home in upstate New York. At Princeton, she also played in the orchestra, but almost no one knew about it, because her life already looked so full. Lizzie Presser, her closest friend, remembers being at a costume party when Suleika abruptly turned to her and said, “Shit, I’m late.”Late?She had to be onstage with the Princeton University Orchestra in a matter of minutes.“She never talked about playing,” Presser told me. But they left the party, and Presser went to the balcony of the main campus auditorium. “The curtain comes up, and there’s Suleika in the center, in a white flapper dress that barely covered her thighs, and she’s in the role of principal bass—flanked by men in tuxes! Surrounded by them like a flock of birds.”After Suleika was finally diagnosed with cancer, roughly a year after graduation, she got very, very sick, and to make her better, her doctors had to make her sicker, poisoning her with what they hoped would be enough chemotherapy to drive her leukemic blasts below 5 percent, a requirement for receiving a bone-marrow transplant. The process took nearly a year.For a few months, she stared bleakly at the television, watching episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. She tried reading cancer memoirs, but most of them disgusted her, with their tyrannical emphasis on grit and story arcs ending in triumph. “At that point, I was going into bone-marrow failure,” she says. “I frankly didn’t think I was going to make it to transplant. So reading those stories sort of felt like a middle finger.”Yet she always kept a journal. Eventually, that journal became a blog, and one of her blog entries became a story in HuffPost and earned her a call from an editor at The New York Times. Sensing that her time was now limited, Suleika found herself asking, at 23, if she could have her own weekly column about what it was like to be a young person with cancer—oh, and could it have an accompanying video component too?The series would win her an Emmy.Suleika’s column became a phenomenon, speaking to a far greater range of people than she ever imagined. She heard from a senator’s wife who was struggling with fertility issues, a high-school teacher in California who’d lost a son, a prisoner in Texas who was trapped on death row. Everyone seemed to have a shame-and-pain part of themselves, or an unreconciled sadness, a private perdition.In April 2012, she underwent a bone-marrow transplant, and a few months later, her doctors told her it seemed to be working, but cautioned that it would be many months more before they knew for certain. She spent the next two years mainlining a toxic slurry of maintenance chemo, which left her feeling wretched, exhausted, seasick. When the treatments were finished, she realized that she no longer had any idea how to live among the well. So she cooked up an ambitious project for herself, deciding that she and her dog would make a 15,000-mile, 33-state loop around America, with the aim of visiting many of the correspondents who’d moved or inspired her.It should be noted at this point that Suleika did not yet have a driver’s license.That trip became the second half of her memoir, which became one of the best modern chronicles of cancer and its aftermath, a broad-spectrum rendering of illness’s many physical and psychological hues. (Especially the fury. God, how I loved the parts about the fury.) In a review on Instagram, the author Ann Patchett went so far as to say that she might not have had to write Truth & Beauty, her stunning book about her friend Lucy Grealy, had Suleika’s book already existed. Jon and Suleika at an artists’ residency in 2018. They first met as teenagers at band camp, then reconnected years later. (Lise-Anne Marsal / Trunk Archive) In the years since, Suleika has continued to write, both essays and reportage. (An article she did for The New York Times Magazine about prison hospice was especially good.) She made dogged but unsuccessful efforts to get her Texas prison correspondent off death row. And she has built a variety of communities, both virtual and embodied.She originally purchased her home in the Delaware River Valley, for example, to be among an enclave of artists and writers who had already settled there, but she has also since befriended the locals, including her neighbor Jody, a building-trades guy with four missing fingers (childhood accident) and a business card that says I’m 60. I know shit. Call me. In Brooklyn, Suleika lives within a couple blocks of Lizzie Presser, but she also socializes with Presser’s mother, sometimes independently, and she’s become so close to the couple next door that she now plans to build a walkway between her back terrace and theirs.And Suleika has magicked an entire community into existence with The Isolation Journals, a virtual salon designed to help readers access their own creativity when the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have punctured their lives. Hatched during the third week of the pandemic (Suleika reckoned she knew a thing or two about the unnatural rationing of human contact), the newsletter offers writing prompts, video discussions with artists about the creative process, and reflections on how to focus on the good while acknowledging the terrible.Suleika discovered that she’d tapped into a deep human need. Her Substack now has more than 160,000 subscribers. When she informed them in December 2021 that her cancer had returned, she received hundreds of care packages and old-fashioned letters in the first week alone.During her relapse, Suleika startled everyone with yet another reinvention, declaring, after completing her first watercolor, that she was going to be a painter. “It seemed,” her friend Carmen Radley told me, “like it came out of nowhere.”But it both did and didn’t. Suleika tends to live in generative mode; that’s her reflex. Part of the reason she took up painting was because she was on such a potent drip of psychoactive medication to subdue her pain that it blurred her vision too much to write. (A combination of ketamine and fentanyl. At one point, she hallucinated a menacing French child named George.) Her paintings from Sloan Kettering have a visceral, fantastical quality, usually featuring some colorful mix of animals and her ravaged body threaded with tubes. She likes how wild and imprecise watercolor is, how improvisational, so different from the careful calibration of writing. It’s an adventure in “happy accidents.”In the late fall, during an event at Princeton, she was asked by an audience member what advice she’d give to someone who was hesitant to mine their emotional reserves to create something.“Give yourself permission to be a bad artist,” she said.I’m back at Suleika’s house in the Delaware River Valley. She greets me at the door and shows me into the kitchen, where on the counter I see a rainbow box of pills. Inside is a monster’s miscellany of antivirals and antiemetics, antibiotics and immunosuppressants—and she’s not even doing chemotherapy, in defiance of her doctors’ wishes. This is the minimum that a transplant patient like Suleika requires.Suleika and I start chatting on her couch in the living room. At some point, Jon, who’s been fussing in his music studio, pads into the room carrying three books, one so corpulent, it looks like it might bust its own spine. It’s David J. Garrow’s 1,472-page volume about Barack Obama.“What do you think?” he asks me.I tell him I haven’t read it and therefore cannot offer an opinion.He gives a sly smile. “Oh yes, you can.”What to make of Jon? At first, he terrifies me. He plays 12 instruments, the bulk of which he taught himself. He’s a man of unflagging Christian faith, pure and indivisible: You sense that he’s living for a higher and more serious purpose, faithfully reading scripture, never indulging in caffeine or drugs or alcohol. But most striking is his magpie creativity, his hungry and wayfaring brain. For a while, I worried I was boring him.Beyond that, Jon is often hard to read, and he’s a person who tests a writer’s descriptive powers. What you really long for when you’re near him is the accompaniment of sound effects, audiotape, videotape; without them, it’s almost impossible to give the full measure of the man. He talks to you slightly sideways, his body angled away from you at 45 degrees. When he’s energized, he doesn’t jump so much as boing. He’s a mesmerizing combination of gnomic insights and probing questions, of silences and sudden joyous yowls (“Yeaaaaaaaahhhhhh,” “Woooooooo,” etc.).[Read: Jon Batiste on the powerful tune that drives “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”]Suleika mentions that Jon spent forever lugging around a box set of Stephen Sondheim lyrics. I ask if he knew Sondheim. Turns out that he not only knew him, but also corresponded with him until he died—and did a special arrangement of two pieces from Assassins for him for his birthday.“Is there a recording of it somewhere?” I ask.“Yeah.”“Where?”“On my phone!” Sure. Because we all keep private birthday gifts to Stephen Sondheim on our phone. “You want to hear it?”Not long after that, I become relaxed around Jon. The turning point arrives when Suleika briefly steps outside with their dogs. I confess that in the face of other people’s suffering, I sometimes become a stammering stumblebum. How does he always seem to know the right thing to say to Suleika?“It’s like music, to say the right thing,” he says. Then a long pause, even by Jon standards. “It requires”—another pause—“being attuned to the moment. And the person. And yourself all at once.” A third pause. “It’s really less about the right or wrong thing to say—or to play. Because people feel what you’re saying more than hear what you’re saying.”His phone rings. He goes outside to take the call.In that moment, it dawned on me: Jon and Suleika are both emotional seismographs, keenly aware of other people’s sensitivities and vulnerabilities. They’re just outfitted with different drums.“That’s a common misconception about Jon—that he’s in his own world, that he’s lost in the music in his mind,” Suleika says. “But Jon sees, notices, everything. Everything. He can sense when I’m anxious even when I don’t realize I’m anxious.”And honestly, I should have known this before, based on Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony. It’s a beautiful film, following a co-occurring high and low in the couple’s life in 2022, with Jon reaching the pinnacle of his career—nominated for 11 Grammy awards, hard at work on an original piece of music to be performed at Carnegie Hall—at just the same moment that Suleika is vividly relapsing. You see Jon tenderly shaving Suleika’s head; you see the two of them playing a version of Simon Says, with him mirroring her every movement as she makes her way down a hospital hallway, yoked to an IV pole.He takes the “in sickness and in health” part of his job extremely seriously. Jon proposed 24 hours after Suleika discovered that she’d relapsed.But when Suleika is well, she’s the one who makes Jon’s life possible. Until he began dating Suleika, Jon lived like a nomad, touring with his band around Europe and the U.S., usually in a rented van, and staying in run-down hotels. His apartment was a dragon’s nest of, in Jon’s words, “papers, music, manuscripts, gifts, awards, clothes, pawn-shop instruments, laptops.” The first time Suleika spent the night, a spider bit her on the eye.Whereas Suleika has an abiding urge to nest, having lived on three continents with her Swiss mother and Tunisian father by the time she was 12 years old. (And she always lived modestly—her mother came from a tiny village and her father’s parents could not read or write.) Her focus on home and friendship has provided Jon a bulwark against the devouring demands of fame. If it weren’t for Suleika, it’s also possible that he’d work until he expired. He has the nocturnal rhythms of a bat.Jon wanders back inside again. The call has clearly keyed him up. He beelines for the couch and climbs on top of Suleika, planting himself face down in her lap. “Mmmmmmmm,” he moans. “I’m an overstimulated introvert.”“I think one of my roles in Jon’s life is to soothe his nervous system.”If you hadn’t met Suleika, I ask, what would your life look like?“I don’t know,” he says. He thinks. “I’d be going too fast for the machine.”So she’s a brake pedal?“More elegant than that. A brake pedal ? No.”Sorry, I say. I can’t do machine metaphors.“She’s the software that calibrates the machine,” he explains, his face still buried in her lap.Whenever Suleika is at her lowest, she always manages, somehow, to make her most creative leaps. During her last transplant, even when she was at her most despairing, even when she was as close to death as she thinks she’s ever come—her throat too scorched to speak, her body simmering with three different infections—she summoned the strength to prop herself up and paint at 2 a.m., when she was seized by an image of a marionette being borne away by birds. She kept paper and watercolors right next to her bed.But me? Even with a far more benign illness, I do no such thing. I have not taken up knitting, or making collages, or writing fiction or doing macramé or conjuring an online haven for long-haulers. Instead, I’m just sad and stuck. How, I ask her one day, has she managed to make such a productive life for herself, in spite of all the shit? It requires so much energy.“It takes a lot more energy to do battle with demons,” she points out. Meaning one’s own depression.Yes, I say, but that’s a rational answer. Demons aren’t rational. Some of us feel like we’re made of those demons. I would currently say I am 86 percent demons.“I think I had to get to a place where my sense of despair—and boredom, honestly—was so great, I had to do something,” she says. “That sent me on this research project about all the different bedridden artists and writers and musicians throughout history who’d figured out creative work-arounds.” Like Frida Kahlo. “Her mom gifted her a sort of lap easel and attached a mirror to the canopy of her bed.” Or Henri Matisse, she adds, who, when he was old and infirm, affixed a bit of charcoal to the end of a long stick and drew studies for the Chapel of the Rosary on the walls of his apartment, all while lying in bed.But Suleika recognizes she’s had many years of practice when it comes to living horizontally. “I can also understand,” she tells me, “as I’m saying all this, if your response is a bit like, Fuck you. Nothing about this feels good or will ever feel good or can ever be useful. I’ve been in that place too.”Like binge-watching Grey’s Anatomy, for instance. Which is about where I’m at, I tell her.“I sometimes worry that I’ve become the kind of person who makes people who are not ‘suffering well’ feel like shit,” she confesses.Suleika makes her living in the first person, actively writing about her life and pressing “Send” each week. But at some point, I begin to wonder whether there’s another Suleika, a more private Suleika, tucked inside the public one. Her readers now expect her to be a certain kind of inspirational person. Does she even have the freedom to maneuver through the world without being that woman?It took time for me to realize that Suleika is sometimes selective about what she shares.Here is one part that we do not always see, for instance: how much she suffers. Those high-gigawatt drugs she takes can have brutal side effects, and she’s routinely subjected to torturous procedures.“Suleika is who she is on the page,” Elizabeth Gilbert said. “But that identity is flanked by two characteristics that I’m not sure anyone understands the extent of.” One is that she’s got a punk, rebellious streak. But the other “is how fucking tough she is,” Gilbert said. “How fucking stoic. She’s a Marine.” After that excruciating biopsy, she and Suleika went out to dinner. “If that had been me, you wouldn’t have seen me for a week.”Some discomfort is so routine for Suleika that she never bothers to discuss it. In January, shortly after she appeared on the Today show with Jon to promote American Symphony, I told her she did great.“I projectile-vomited in broad daylight in the streets of New York City afterwards,” she replies, with startling matter-of-factness. “Right before my next thing on Park Avenue.”She … what? I try to imagine Suleika, made up for television and in a blazer of elegant blue velvet, vomiting on the Upper East Side.“I have vomited in public more times than I can count,” she says. “I’m always trying to find a private spot between two parked cars or behind a tree. Often I don’t get there.”So: Chronic nausea barely rates a mention in her work. Also underdiscussed: Suleika is always and forever tired. But how many times can you write that you are always and forever tired? Yet she is, with only a few good hours a day, usually. Nor does Suleika dwell on the fact that she’s a regular stewpot of respiratory infections. She’s been sick all winter with one thing or another.“Every dinner since you’ve been to my house,” she says, “I’ve left either halfway through or shortly after while everyone’s hanging out and having fun. I go straight to bed and I don’t say a word. I call it my ‘Tunisian exit.’ ”Her relentless fatigue and nausea and infections have an ancillary consequence: anxiety about making plans. “Like, will I be well enough?” she explains. “Should I just cancel now so that I don’t mess up anybody else’s schedule? Or will I feel well that day and regret that I canceled? I have that conversation with myself about every single preplanned social activity or work commitment.”On December 24, Suleika’s Isolation Journals newsletter talked about her first experience hosting Christmas, for which her mother, father, and brother flew in from Tunis. She described the “obnoxiously” large tree she purchased, the two-hour meeting her family had about their dinner feast, the old-school paper snowflakes her mom pasted to the windows.What she didn’t write about was how she felt, which was terrible, or how many holiday plans with her family came undone. “Since pretty much mid-December, I’ve barely been able to function,” she tells me. “I spent all of Christmas in bed. We were going to go ice-skating. We were going to go Christmas shopping in the city. We were going to do all the things, and I didn’t do a single one.”Suleika often writes about trying “to hold the beauty and cruelty of life in the same palm.” But one wonders if writing so publicly and so frequently—if being an inspiration to so many—makes her feel some unconscious obligation to focus more on the former. When Between Two Kingdoms came out in February 2021, Suleika already suspected something was amiss. Her blood counts were dropping, she was always tired, and she had blistering migraines. But she was so elated that her memoir was finally out there in the world that the joy energized her. On her publicity tour, she told interviewers that yes, she was cured.“I would hear all the time from people with similar illnesses,” Suleika says. “People who’d write to me and say, ‘You give me hope that this can be my life too, 10 years out.’ ” When her doctors finally confirmed she’d relapsed, in the fall of 2021, it spooked her so much that she didn’t share the news in The Isolation Journals for three weeks. “I felt awful,” she says. “The very particular weirdness of having a public platform related not just to illness but to survival …” She trails off.“Because Suleika has the exuberance that she has, the force of will that she has, I sometimes forget that she has gone through what she’s gone through,” her friend Carmen Radley said. “Superhuman people aren’t afraid of getting sick again, are they? But I think she was terrified of it.”That’s really the thing her readers don’t always see: the fear.And it’s not because Suleika is dishonest. It’s because she is, as Gilbert says, so fucking stoic. It’s because her quotidian nausea is relative to the pain of, let’s say, vomiting up the entire lining of her esophagus, which she has done more than once. It’s because she doesn’t want to cause a fuss over every upset when there may come a day when she needs the cavalry to come charging in at full gallop. It’s because she doesn’t want her relationship with Jon to be defined as that of a patient and caregiver. “I don’t want people to view me first and foremost as a sick person,” she says.But fear is what she is now experiencing, during our phone conversation in January: the prospect of a second relapse and a third transplant. Why is she getting so many respiratory infections? Why is she always so tired? Why, when she went back on Adderall recently (common for post-transplant patients, to boost their energy), did it do absolutely nothing? “I’m like, Did I get some dud pills? ”She has not written about this anxiety. “To say it out loud,” she says, “is to make it real.”She is bracing herself for another biopsy next week. If the cancer has returned, her brother remains her only donor option. The bone-marrow registry tilts very heavily toward white people, because the bulk of the donors are white—a problem so personally relevant and galling to Suleika that she’s become involved with an organization called NMDP, formerly called Be the Match, to encourage more people to donate.Ever since her second transplant, in 2022, Suleika has had night terrors. Once, while fast asleep, she hit Jon with a closed fist. “And then I did it again the next night,” she says. “I was so scared of doing it again, I wanted to sleep in the guest room, and Jon said, ‘No, we have to sleep in the same bed.’ ” For six weeks, she saw a sleep therapist.Suleika both writes and talks, with surprising clarity, about the philosophical problem of living with uncertainty. But there’s a reason that liminal places are often depicted as more hellish than hell. The betwixt and between is where the tortured ghost of Hamlet’s father rattles around, boiling with rage and sorrow. It’s where Hamlet himself dwells—trapped between childhood and adulthood, uncertain whether he wants to live or die.It’s the time between biopsy and results. Which in some larger sense is every day if you’re Suleika—not knowing, with the recurring specter of acute myeloid leukemia, if you have months left on this planet or 50 years.“I do feel like I’m living my own double life sometimes,” Suleika says, “in terms of how I’m feeling and what I’m sharing and showing—not just to the world, but even to the people closest to me. And to myself.”Jon is playing a concert at Carnegie Hall in the run-up to his 2022 appearance at the Grammys. He’s seated at the piano.“I want to dedicate this last one to Suleika,” he tells the audience.Then there’s silence. And more silence. And more and more silence. Jon is staring intently at the keys. This is perhaps the most spellbinding moment in American Symphony. The camera becomes so uncomfortable with Jon’s stillness that it pans slowly down to Jon’s fingers, still lingering on those keys, and then slowly back up to his face.The live audience, even the viewing audience, doesn’t know it, but Suleika’s hospital bracelet is in his pocket. World Music Radio, Jon’s 2023 record, rests on the piano in Suleika and Jon’s Brooklyn home. (Heather Sten for The Atlantic) He finally begins to play. Tunefully and deliberately at first, but soon frenetically and repetitively, and then dissonantly and angrily, a blur of hydraulics, until out of this chaos emerges something utterly freaking majestic.I later ask Jon what was running through his head in that long moment of quiet.“Mmmmmmm,” he says. “Don’t force life.”“I understood you to be in prayer,” Suleika says.“That’s what it is,” he says, looking appreciatively at her. “Psalm 46: ‘Be still and know I am God.’ The most natural state is in a state of prayer. Stillness. Knowing. Connected to the love. And then you can send it to the person.”He turns back to me. “That whole concert—the concept was to sit at the piano for two hours straight with no music and no preparation,” he says. “It was called ‘Streams,’ like stream of consciousness. The divine stream, where all things creative come from. You can always dip into it if you have access to that.”Suleika’s. Latest. Biopsy. Is. Negative! When we speak on the phone again in late January, I can hear her relief.But I still hear anxiety, even fear. As if she’d received dreadful news. In fact, she had.Just before her biopsy, two of her young friends with acute myeloid leukemia had relapsed. One is in her mid-30s and has two young children. The other had been doing great, jetting off to weddings and resuming her day job. Then, one week after receiving perfect labs, she went into cardiac arrest. Her doctors told her she was likely out of options.The day before her biopsy, Suleika and her father went to visit this friend in the hospital. “It was just heartbreaking,” she says, “and, selfishly, terrifying.” The experience was like staring at a green-gray hologram of the potential future. When she saw her own nurse, she asked for one, just one, reassuring anecdote. “And she was like, ‘Well, we have one guy who just had a second bone-marrow transplant, and he’s doing great.’ And I was like, ‘That’s not helpful to me. I want stories of people who are 20 years out and thriving.’ ”Suleika’s case is practically without analogy. Her team likes to call her “a medical unicorn”: Almost no one relapses as far into remission as Suleika did.“When you have a recurrence, the tenor shifts,” Suleika says. “People are no longer saying, ‘You’re going to beat this; everything’s going to be okay.’ ”Seeing her friend reminded Suleika, for the umpteenth time, that the membrane between health and illness is thin. And Suleika had just enough reason to remain nervous about her present state. Her “chimerism”—the percentage of her brother’s donor cells versus her own—had recently slipped down to 99 percent. The doctors had assured her that small fluctuations were normal. But she wasn’t going to exhale, clearly, until she learned she wasn’t continuing her descent. “I’ve gone from being in a mode of recovering from this most recent transplant and trying to get my life together,” she says, “to shifting into a place of being afraid of relapse.”I wonder whether forgoing maintenance chemo this time around has also compounded her anxiety. After her second transplant, Suleika’s doctors urged her to continue it in perpetuity. She lasted less than a year. There was no life in her life, just intolerable nausea and listlessness. On one of the rare evenings that she rallied to leave her home—a state dinner at the White House in December 2022; Jon was performing—she felt queasy throughout, terrified that at any moment she’d throw up in front of the Bidens. She decided to stop chemo.But Suleika says she has no regrets about having stopped, given that she was never especially convinced that chemo would even extend her life. Rather, what frightens her is that remission is a fragile state—something she learned firsthand in 2021. “I have a ticking clock in the back of my head,” she says. “Now I’m thinking I’ll be lucky if I get to five years before relapse.”So here we are, back where we started: How does one live with an everyday, every-hour awareness of how much healthy time might remain—perhaps all the time that might remain—as a very specific math equation? How does this translate into creative habits, a modus vivendi, a philosophy of life?[Read: What to read when you need to start over]“For me,” Suleika says, “it means building a world in my home right now. It means gathering the people I love most and spending as much time as I can with them. It means bringing home foster dogs every month, practically, even though nothing about that makes sense for our lives right now.” During her spells of insomnia, when the cancer goblins are rapping at her consciousness, Suleika scours Petfinder.com for underloved runts. “It means drilling into projects I’m most excited about,” she continues, “but it also means creating unstructured time for reading and exploring and painting.”She’s doing, as she likes to say, “all the things.” Or as Anthony Burgess wrote in Little Wilson and Big God: “Wedged as we are between two eternities of idleness, there is no excuse for being idle now.”A few months earlier, while we were lying on the couch in her Brooklyn brownstone, I had screwed up the courage to ask Suleika how often she thinks about her own mortality.“I think about it,” she told me. “I’m not afraid of death. I’ve now witnessed enough people die and been with them in those moments.”How about Jon?“Jon is deeply afraid of death.”His or yours?“Everyone’s. But very afraid of his own death.”Has he talked with you about how he’d do—or what he’d do—if you weren’t there?“He won’t talk about that with me.”Do you want him to?“No. Because I don’t think he can. It’s too painful for him.”He is carrying a lot. And he’s more vulnerable, more sensitive, than his iridescent shell would suggest.“I know Jon is not my child,” she said. “But I also worry about—I was going to say orphaning him, but that’s a little too Freudian.”Actually, I said, I think it’s pretty common for spouses to fear abandoning each other.“I think I feel that way in particular about Jon because …” She spoke carefully, thoughtfully. “I know him so deeply and I know how unknown he is to most.”Yet it is also Jon, powered by his faith and his bottomless drive, who helps keep Suleika moving toward that future he’s determined to have.“Daydreaming can feel really dangerous when you don’t know if you’re going to exist in the future,” she told me. “It becomes an act of willful defiance. So I force myself to have a five-year plan.”And part of that plan, she now informs me, isn’t just completing two books, but a very different sort of birth.She and Jon would like to take concrete steps toward having a child in the near future.In spite of the uncertainty.In spite of what Suleika calls her “survival math.”“Jon is really helpful to me here,” she says. “It’s the same logic he applied to getting married the night before the bone-marrow transplant, which is: We had a plan, and we are not going to let this get in the way of our plan. This is how Jon operates in his life in general. He dreams as big as he can dream and lets nothing hold him back until he’s done absolutely everything in his power.”Suleika has written about how she doesn’t want to have a baby only to abandon the child. She still has those concerns.“But I’ve talked about it with the Miles family.” She’s referring to dear friends with three kids of their own. “I’ve talked about it with Lizzie G. and Lizzie P.” Meaning Gilbert, Presser. “And they were like, If that were to happen, your kid will be surrounded by so much love.” From Jon above all, but also from them, from many others. “What Jon has ultimately said to me,” she says, “is that the most important thing is for a child to know how deeply loved they are. And whatever future child we have—whether it’s biologically our own or adopted or we become foster parents or just really doting aunties and uncles to the other people’s kids—there are many ways to do this.”Two days after we speak, I get a text from Suleika: “Some good news just rolled in!!! Back to 100, baby.” Her chimerism is no longer at 99 percent. With this news, her mood improves; the familiar buoyancy returns.Yet even before she knew this, Suleika was forging ahead, refusing to let her past define her future. How many of us can do that? The past is the ragged territory from which we take our cues, make our most basic assumptions. But planning for a child: That is a rejection of a life interrupted. That’s an insistence on continuity.Continuity is the implicit subject in one of her most striking paintings. It’s a colorful oceanscape of jellyfish, a life form that fascinates Suleika, particularly the Turritopsis dohrnii, considered in some sense to be immortal. Whenever it’s injured, it reverts back into a polyp, eventually releasing tiny jellyfish genetically identical to its previous adult self. It’s a creature that reincarnates, continues on, in response to—and in spite of—mortal threat.Children and art: the two most meaningful things, Stephen Sondheim famously wrote, we mortals can leave behind. Suleika’s life’s emphasis, always, has been on the act of creation—and communicating to others how essential it is to who we are. Children and art, children or art, the courage to create: Those will be her legacy, no matter what.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Art of Survival.”

The Writer Who Leaves Behind a Pounding Heart

1 д

theatlantic.com

Because of my reverence for Alice Munro’s work, I was often asked if I’d ever met her. I felt that I had totally met her in her books and said as much. I never desired to meet her in person, for what I loved would not necessarily be there. The one time I was scheduled actually to meet her—at a reading and ceremony in her honor—she canceled. Stupidly, I was relieved. Because what could one possibly say to this human, Alice Munro, who was also a genius but would probably turn out to resemble a nice, ordinary, once-beautiful-now-forever-middle-aged woman with an Ontario accent (though perhaps also a sparkle in her eyes)? Reality was too full of annoying disguises—one of her many themes. Would she appear to lack something?Throughout her stories, there is admiration for skills of every sort—piloting an airplane, horseback riding, plucking turkeys—but she did not drive a car. This boggled my mind! Yet it also caused me to think that maybe marriages could be held together this way. The husband would have to drop you off and pick you up so he always knew where you were, even if you didn’t always know where he was (or deeply care). Perhaps this was an essentially literary—Munrovian—condition. Also, in the plus column, I could see in her work that she did not admire rich people but also did not sentimentalize the poor, though her sympathies and interests were more deeply located there. The way a hired girl in “Hired Girl” sweeps the floor and then hides the dirt behind the broom propped in the corner was exactly how I swept when young. A metaphor for secrets, but also an actual (poor) way of sweeping. I was always thinking about her in one way or another, so actually meeting her seemed beside the point. I loved her forensic plots and her gothic gruesomeness. In one collection, she has two decapitations. What would be the point of actually meeting her?Her stories were radically structured—built like avant-garde sculpture. In this way, she completely revolutionized the short story, pulling it away from conventional form altogether. She understood that life was layered, that stretches of time did not neaten themselves out into a convenient linear shape but piled themselves up in layers that were sometimes translucent and contained revisions of thought and opinion, like a palimpsest. These layers seemed to have access to one another. This nonlinear way of course mimics the mind and memory and how life is bewilderingly lived and then recalled. She embraced Chekhov’s movement away from the judgmental finish and built on it, supplying similar narrative oxygen to the lives of North American girls and women. Because the story genre is end-oriented—one must stick the landing—she brought this power to her open endings as well, which were sometimes torn from the middle of the story and thrown down like a beating heart on an altar.One wonders whether she felt that all of her artistic devotion and productivity had been worth it. I hope so. I do not want to pity her; I want only to treasure her. Munro’s career seemed to involve an entire life handed over to art, so, from a distance, it is hard to know whether she felt she’d missed out on some other, easier, sweeter life. (Though, I suppose, for a writer there is no other kind of life.) She is one of those women writers who took a rebel’s stance toward motherhood and partially (not completely) left their children in order to get the literary work done and be free of conventional and gendered expectations. (Literary men, of course, leave their children all the time.) To turn one’s life inside out in order to make short stories for people you’ve never met is a kind of contortion and sacrifice one cannot stop to measure, or the gift may flee. Such hesitation, I suppose, would be like a magician stopping to feed and then cage the tiresome rabbit, who then will not go back into the hat.When someone of Munro’s stature passes away, the world feels a little empty for a while and may never completely get back to its ever-elusive purpose. Still, there remains her great, great work. Even if, like all literature, it wrestled un-victoriously with the meaning of the world, even if, like all interesting characters, hers were not always at their most admirable, her writing kept its eye on the dramas of power in human relations and communities. She explored the upset and consequences of love, hate, desire, devotion, despair, illness, social class, gender—and, most of all, time, its magical uses in art and its sly surprises in life. And so, at the culminating close, there is a still-pounding heart. May she reside in pages forever.

New Google Has a Lot in Common With Old Google

The company is rebuilding its search engine with new generative-AI features.

1 д

theatlantic.com

The Battleground States That Will Shape the Election

New polling shows Biden falling behind Trump in key swing states. What issues matter most to voters there?

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theatlantic.com

Listen to What Jerry Seinfeld Actually Said

2 д

theatlantic.com

On Sunday at Duke University, the comedian Jerry Seinfeld delivered a commencement address that was, bizarrely, overshadowed in the media by a tiny, nondisruptive protest.Seinfeld gave a compliment and a warning to his Gen Z audience.First came the compliment. “I totally admire the ambitions of your generation to create a more just and inclusive society,” he said. “I think it is also wonderful that you care so much about not hurting other people’s feelings in the million and one ways we all do that.”Then came the warning. “What I need to tell you as a comedian: Do not lose your sense of humor. You can have no idea at this point in your life how much you are going to need it to get through. Not enough of life makes sense for you to be able to survive it without humor.”Seinfeld went on to defend “the slightly uncomfortable feeling of awkward humor,” arguing that it is “not something you need to fix,” because even as Gen Z improves the world, it will remain “a pretty insane mess.” Humor, he said, is “the most survival-essential quality you will ever have or need to navigate through the human experience.”[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]All of that is newsworthy. Seinfeld is a perceptive observer of life and an undeniable expert on comedy. Plus, as he told the graduates, “I am 70. I am done. You are just starting. I only want to help you.” If he is convinced that humor is a crucial salve—“the most important thing I am confident that I know about life”—those of us who’ll never enjoy his success or wealth had really better keep laughing. Yet coverage of the commencement treated something just before his speech as more newsworthy: As the Associated Press reported, roughly 30 student protesters walked out of the graduation ceremony as Seinfeld was introduced. They represented a tiny fraction of the 7,000 students present.Media outlets covered the Duke graduation with headlines like these: “As Seinfeld Receives Honorary Degree at Duke, Students Walk Out in Protest” (The New York Times); “Duke Students Walk Out to Protest Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech in Latest Grad Disruption” (USA Today); “Duke Students Walk Out of Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech Amid Wave of Graduation Antiwar Protests” (NBC News); “Jerry Seinfeld’s Speech at Duke Commencement Prompts Walkout Protesting His Support for Israel” (Reuters); “Duke University Students Walk Out on Jerry Seinfeld’s Commencement Speech, Chant ‘Free Palestine’” (Fox News); “Watch: Anti-Israel Students Walk Out of Duke University Commencement to Protest Jerry Seinfeld” (Breitbart News).Why was that the focus? The war in Gaza is, of course, more newsworthy than any commencement and has been covered extensively. Many protests about the war are newsworthy, too.[Read: This is helicopter protesting]But the airing of grievances at Duke was not notable for the number of people who participated, or for any insight offered on Gaza, or for even a remote prospect of affecting the conflict. To the credit of the students who walked out, it didn’t even disrupt the speech. So it was suspect, I think, to treat the protest as more important than the event that the activists sought to leverage for attention. A protest in and of itself does not confer importance.Journalists often fail to distinguish between substantively newsworthy protests and mere deployment of the protest mode—a bias that activists have learned to exploit. Social media is optimized to signal-boost conflict more than attempts at distilling wisdom. And too many Americans revel in rather than resist conflicts.The result at Duke: Coverage of a newsworthy speech was informed, more than any other factor, by the subset of the audience that did not hear it. At least, in the midst of a tragic war abroad and a vexing culture war at home, we can shake our heads and laugh about that absurdity.

Biden’s Weakness With Young Voters Isn’t About Gaza

2 д

theatlantic.com

America’s young voters are fired up about the war in Gaza—aren’t they? Campus protests and the controversies around them have dominated media attention for weeks. So has the possibility that youth anger about the war will cost President Joe Biden the election. “Joe Biden Is Losing Young Voters Over Israel,” a USA Today headline declared last month. The New York Times columnist Thomas B. Edsall recently argued that nothing would help Biden more with young voters than negotiating a cease-fire in Gaza.The available evidence, however, overwhelmingly suggests otherwise. For all the attention they’ve drawn, the campus protesters are outliers. Biden has a problem with young voters, but it does not appear to be because of Gaza.This may feel counterintuitive. More than 80 percent of young people disapprove of the way Biden is handling the war, according to a recent CNN survey—the most of any cohort. And poll after poll shows Biden losing support among 20-somethings, the group that helped propel him to victory four years ago. In 2020, Biden won the 18-to-29-year-old vote by 24 percentage points. This time around, some polls suggest that the demographic is a toss-up between him and Donald Trump. If Biden is losing support from young people, and young people overwhelmingly object to his handling of the war in Gaza, a natural conclusion would be that the war is the reason for the lack of support.[Jill Filipovic: Say plainly wha]t the protesters wantBut that’s a mistake, because there’s a big difference between opinions and priorities. People have all kinds of views, sometimes strong ones, on various topics, but only a few issues will determine how they vote. And very few Americans—even young ones—rank the Israel-Hamas war as one of their top political priorities.“Obviously for some people it is the most important issue, and we need to respect that,” John Della Volpe, who directs polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, told me. “But what we’re seeing on college campuses, based upon this data, is not reflective of what the youth voter in general is thinking about.”In the April 2024 edition of the Harvard Youth Poll, which Della Volpe runs, 18-to-29-year-olds rated the Israel-Palestine conflict 15th out of 16 possible priorities. (Student debt came last.) Among self-identified Democrats, it was tied for third from the bottom. In another survey of registered voters in swing states, just 4 percent of 18-to-27-year-olds said the war was the most important issue affecting their vote. Even on college campuses, the epicenter of the protest movement, an Axios/Generation Lab poll found that only 13 percent of students considered “the conflict in the Middle East” to be one of their top-three issues. An April CBS poll found that the young voters who wanted Biden to pressure Israel to stop attacking Gaza would vote for him at about the same rate as those who didn’t.In fact, most young people don’t seem to be paying much attention to what’s going on beyond America’s borders. The 18-to-29-year-old age group is the least likely to say they’re following the war, according to a March survey from the Pew Research Center: 14 percent said they were closely tracking updates, while 58 percent said they weren’t following news of the conflict at all. “If you take a broader view, people who are in their teens and 20s are the least likely group of Americans to pay attention to politics, period,” David Barker, a professor of government at American University, told me. Many seem to be unsure how to feel about the war. “I think that the natural response for anybody, let alone young people, is just to be like, ‘Okay, what’s the price of milk?’” Barker said.Granted, if 2016 and 2020 are any guide, the election will likely be so close that any Democratic defections could be said to have determined the results, particularly in the swing states that Biden needs to win. In 2020, young people voted for Biden by a bigger margin than any other age group. “This is going to come down to small numbers of votes in six or seven key states,” Robert Lieberman, a political-science professor at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Any change, no matter the size, “could tip the election one way or the other.” A New York Times/Siena College swing-state poll out this week found that 13 percent of people who said they voted for Biden in 2020, but don’t plan to in 2024, are basing their decision on the war in the Middle East or on foreign policy. That’s a sliver of a sliver of the population, far fewer than those who cited the economy or inflation—but any sliver could be the decisive one.[David Frum: The plot to wreck the Democratic convention]Even if people don’t vote based on the conflict itself, they might vote based on what it represents. The chaos of an international conflict, and the domestic protests it inspires, could contribute to the impression that Biden is not in control.Still, with the election six months away, some experts predict that young voters will shift back toward Biden as they start paying closer attention to politics. If that doesn’t happen, it will likely be for the same reasons that are depressing his standing with other age groups—above all, the economy. “I ultimately expect that Biden’s fate will be determined less by something like this conflict in Gaza and more, frankly, by which direction inflation and unemployment go over the course of the next few months,” Barker said.There’s no denying that the Israel-Palestine conflict, along with the related controversies emanating from it, has affected and will continue to affect domestic U.S. politics—and the moral questions posed by the war extend far beyond electoral calculations. But the issue is unlikely to trigger any demographic realignment. When it comes to the issues they care about most, young Americans appear closer to the overall electorate than to the activist groups that claim to represent them.

Announcing New Atlantic Podcast, Good on Paper With Jerusalem Demsas, Launching June 4

The weekly interview podcast will engage with the important policy questions of the day and question what we actually know about the world.

2 д

theatlantic.com

Pope Francis’s China Gamble

2 д

theatlantic.com

No pope has ever set foot in China, but 10 years ago, Francis came the closest. On a flight to South Korea in August 2014, he became the first Vicar of Christ to enter Chinese airspace. Apparently that wasn’t enough. “Do I want to go to China?” Francis mused a few days later to those of us journalists accompanying him on his flight back to Rome. “Of course: Tomorrow!”Francis has been more conciliatory to the People’s Republic than any of his predecessors. His approach has brought some stability to the Church in China, but it has also meant accepting restrictions on the religious freedom of Chinese Catholics and undermining the Vatican’s credibility as a champion of the oppressed. Francis sees himself as holding the Chinese Church together; he might be helping to stifle it in the process.That trade-off becomes apparent when comparing the two major groups that make up China’s estimated 10 million Catholics. One is the state-controlled Church, overseen by the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, which has a long history of appointing bishops without the Vatican’s approval—a nightmare for popes because it presents the danger of a schism. In 2018, Francis mitigated that threat by negotiating an agreement in which the Chinese government and the Vatican cooperate on the appointment of bishops. The details of the pact, which is up for renewal in the fall, remain secret, but the pope has said it gives him final say. In return, the Vatican promised not to authorize any bishop that Beijing doesn’t support.The agreement came at the expense of China’s second group of Catholics: the so-called underground Church, which previously ordained its own bishops with Rome’s approval and is now in effect being told by the Vatican to join the state-controlled Church. The underground community rejects President Xi Jinping’s campaign of “Sinicization,” a program that seeks to reinforce Chinese national identity, in part by demanding that all religious teaching and practice accord with the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Occasionally that means prohibiting religious worship entirely: Shortly before the Vatican and Beijing signed the deal, new legislation went into effect that led to stricter enforcement of such rules as a ban on minors attending Mass. And sometimes Sinicization means muddling Catholic doctrine with CCP dogma. As one priest in the official Church claimed in 2019, “The Ten Commandments and the core socialist values are the same.”Whether the Chinese Church can remain authentically Catholic in the face of Sinicization is an open question. That Francis came to terms with the government just as the program intensified felt to some underground Catholics like a betrayal, a sign that he might tolerate the continued compromising of their faith. He accommodates Beijing in order to stabilize the Church in China, but Chinese authorities aren’t interested in the faith that Francis professes. They’ve made clear that they want a Church that submits to the state; such a Church might be stable, but would it be Catholic?[John L. Allen Jr.: Why Pope Francis isn’t with the West on Ukraine]Safeguarding orthodox Catholicism in China depends on whether Francis and his successors can strike the right balance between cooperation and confrontation. The Vatican must cultivate greater influence in Beijing while also defending the faith—a daunting challenge for even the canniest diplomat.The past six years make clear that the agreement on bishops has largely been a disappointment. Even some in the Vatican concede that it hasn’t lived up to expectations. “We would have liked to see more results,” Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s equivalent of a foreign minister, told America magazine in 2022. (The Vatican declined to comment for this article.) Only nine bishops have been consecrated under the agreement, and some 40 dioceses still have no leader. In the meantime, Beijing is happy to leave those dioceses under the administration of mere priests, Father Gianni Criveller, the editorial director of the Catholic publication AsiaNews, told me. Because bishops possess greater authority, they are harder for the government to control.The agreement has yielded three new bishops in the past six months—the first new ones since 2021—but little else suggests much improvement in the relationship between the Vatican and China. Formal diplomatic relations remain a distant prospect, and China has rebuffed the Vatican’s proposal for a permanent representative office in Beijing, according to a Vatican official with knowledge of the talks, who described them on the condition of anonymity. The latest “Five-Year Plan for the Sinicization of Catholicism in China,” adopted by the government-controlled Church in December, makes no reference to the Vatican or the pope.Still, the Vatican achieved its primary goal of reducing the risk of schism. “The aim is the unity of the Church,” said Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, defending the agreement in 2020. “All the bishops in China are in communion with the pope. There are no more illegitimate bishops.” Unity, in this case, means integrating China’s underground clergy into Beijing’s state-recognized hierarchy. In other words, Chinese Catholicism will be more and more controlled by the government, an undesirable outcome for Francis but one that he’s apparently willing to bear.Some see that calculation as prudent. Francesco Sisci, a Sinologist and an expert on Vatican-China relations, told me that if the Vatican continued cooperating with the underground Church and holding the CCP at a distance, “you have to wait for the current power to fall, and who knows if the new power will be better than the old? In my opinion, the choice to go underground is much riskier.” As Richard Madsen, a professor emeritus of sociology at UC San Diego, put it to me, the agreement on bishops “gives a certain stability to the Church … so that in the long run it can develop and flourish.”But Catholicism in China certainly doesn’t seem to be flourishing now. As Fenggang Yang, a sociology professor at Purdue University, told me, the Vatican’s conciliatory approach has demoralized Chinese Catholics. The agreement has put greater pressure on the underground churches to join the official Church, he noted, reducing their freedom to evangelize. The Vatican knew this was coming. In 2023, Archbishop Gallagher said that the deal “was always going to be used by the Chinese party to bring greater pressure on the Catholic community, particularly on the so-called underground Church.” Still, he defended the agreement, calling it “what was possible at the time.” Not all Chinese Christians are having such difficulty; Yang said that the decentralized evangelical Protestant “house churches” have continued to grow despite repression.[Read: For Xi Jinping, religion is power]History suggests that resistance rather than compromise makes for a vital Church. During the Cold War, the Vatican pursued a policy of accommodation with Communist states in the Soviet bloc, negotiating over the appointment of bishops. But it was in Poland—where the Catholic hierarchy was least cooperative with the authorities, and where an underground Church was strongest—that Catholicism remained most vibrant.Unlike Poland, China has only a small Catholic minority. But even there, the more uncompromising and persecuted portion of the faithful—the underground Church—has the higher morale, Criveller told me. “Those in the official Church are theoretically freer because they do not have to worship in secret, but in fact all their initiatives must be approved and agreed on with the officials in charge of religious affairs,” he said. “They are more easily discouraged.” Criveller noted that many Catholics in the state-controlled Church lose respect for bishops and clergy who are seen as “too aligned with government policy.” Ceding ground to Beijing might limit oppression, but it can weaken the authority of the Church.The pope’s willingness to negotiate the 2018 agreement reflects two central features of his pontificate: his multipolar view of the world and his preference for dialogue over confrontation. Francis often flouts the geopolitical consensus of the West, questioning its authority and sympathizing with its adversaries—suggesting, for example, that NATO may have provoked the war in Ukraine by “barking at Russia’s gate.” China’s increasing power, which has so alarmed the West, is for Francis all the more reason to engage the country. While calling for the religious freedom of Christians in China and elsewhere, he also seeks closer ties with the governments that persecute them.These tendencies have become more pronounced since the deal. The Vatican has grown both more conciliatory toward the state-controlled Church and less supportive of the underground Church. In 2019, the Vatican publicly encouraged underground clergy to comply with the CCP’s demand to register with civil authorities, even though they would be required to sign a statement endorsing the “independence, autonomy and self-administration” of the Church in China. At least 10 underground bishops have refused, according to the Vatican official; one was arrested earlier this year.In another sign of acquiescence, Rome begrudgingly accepted the decision by Chinese authorities to transfer a bishop to its Shanghai diocese last year without consulting the pope. The bishop, Joseph Shen Bin, is the head of the Chinese bishops’ conference, which the Vatican doesn’t recognize, and an avid proponent of Sinicization. As he recently told an interviewer, “We must adhere to patriotism and love for the Church, uphold the principle of independence and self-management of the Church … and persist in the direction of Sinicization of Catholicism in China. This is the bottom line, no one can violate it, and it is also a high-voltage line, no one should touch it.”Vatican officials have suggested that Sinicization is akin to the Catholic Church’s long-standing practice of inculturation—that is, presenting the Church’s teachings and practices in the terms of different cultures. But Yang, the Purdue professor, makes a crucial distinction: The goal of Sinicization, he argued in Christianity Today, “is not cultural assimilation but political domestication—to ensure submission to the Chinese Communist party-state.”Shen Bin is forthright about this. In another recent interview, he stressed that Sinicization means not only adapting liturgy and sacred art to traditional Chinese culture, but also interpreting Catholic teaching in accordance with Communist doctrine. Sinicization, he said, “should use the core socialist values as guidance to provide a creative interpretation of theological classics and religious doctrines that aligns with the requirements of contemporary China’s development and progress, as well as with China’s splendid traditional culture.” By accepting the dominance of the official Church, whose bishops Shen Bin leads, the Vatican is in practice accepting the supremacy of politics over religion.Another cost of Francis’s overtures has come in the form of his silence about China’s human-rights violations. In July 2020, amid China’s crackdown on prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong, Francis decided not to deliver prepared remarks calling for “nonviolence, and respect for the dignity and rights of all” in the city, and voicing hope that “social life, and especially religious life, may be expressed in full and true freedom.” Vatican diplomats privately expressed puzzlement at the pope’s decision.Francis has drawn particular criticism for his failure to denounce China’s treatment of its Uyghur Muslim minority, whom Beijing has forced into reeducation camps to eradicate their religion and culture—a striking omission given the pope’s emphasis on promoting dialogue with Islam. The most he’s said on the matter came in a book published in 2020, in which he made a brief reference to “the poor Uighurs,” including them in a list of “persecuted peoples.”[Tahir Hamut Izgil: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps]The Vatican’s reluctance to denounce China has also caused tension in its dealings with the United States. In September 2020, then–Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seemed to criticize Pope Francis’s relative silence while speaking to an audience in Rome that included the Vatican’s foreign minister. After noting the Vatican’s unique ability to help protect religious freedom in China, he admonished: “Earthly considerations shouldn’t discourage principled stances based on eternal truths.” Sisci, the Sinologist, told me that Pompeo’s comments only helped Francis in his dealing with the Chinese authorities, reassuring them that the pope was not “an instrument of U.S. policy.”For now, the agreement on bishops is temporary, requiring renewal every two years. This raises the question of what Francis’s successor might do. The next pope likely won’t have his hands tied; he will be free to join the West in taking a more confrontational—or, as Pompeo would have it, principled—tack with China.Alternatively, he can wait and see if Francis’s approach bears fruit. There’s an old saying that applies to the Church and China in equal measure: They think in centuries. The wait could be a while.

The Wild Blood Dynasty

2 д

theatlantic.com

American Bloods—what a title! Hammering out agreement on the meaning of American is hard enough, but factor in blood—our precious bodily fluid, susceptible to poisoning in the fevered fascist imagination—and a brawl might just be brewing. If you’ve figured out that Blood is a surname, the subtitle of John Kaag’s new book (The Untamed Dynasty That Shaped a Nation) could possibly defuse the situation, but it too is provocative: If the Blood dynasty shaped the nation, why have we never heard of it?Kaag, a philosophy professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, lives in a house on the banks of the Concord River that was built in 1745 by a colonial named Josiah Blood. A decade later, in that same house, Thaddeus Blood was born. He was at the scene with a musket on April 19, 1775, when the “shot heard round the world” was fired; as an old man, he was interviewed about the experience by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Kaag saw that the Blood clan would offer him a chance to explore big ideas in relation to individual lives, to start close to home and expand outward, weaving together personalities, cultural history, and philosophy in an attempt to ask not just where we came from but where we’re going.He has made a habit of combining philosophy with first-person narratives of a confessional cast. In American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016), he tells us about his first two marriages while communing with his “intellectual heroes,” the New England thinkers Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James. In Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), he treks up and down an alp or two with the German iconoclast. The new project is much more ambitious. Working with a bigger cast on an expansive stage, he’s hoping to unlock secrets of Americanness. No wonder the strain shows.Kaag sets out to trace the nation’s growth (and “excruciating growing pains”) as refracted through “one of America’s first and most expansive pioneer families,” whose lineage happens to run straight through his family home. Listed in the index of a privately published genealogy he finds in his house are thousands of Bloods, from Aaron to Zebulon. In addition to Josiah and Thaddeus, Kaag plucks out a handful of others, curious characters born between 1618 and 1838, who found themselves in the thick of roiling history or crossed paths with famous American thinkers.[From the April 2023 issue: Adam Begley on why you should be reading Sebastian Barry]Kaag makes the case that, “unlike many other more visible or iconic American dynasties” (he mentions the Cabots, Lowells, Astors, Roosevelts), the Bloodsconsistently, and with remarkable regularity, reveal a particular frontier ethos: their genealogy tracks what Henry David Thoreau called “wildness,” an original untamed spirit that would recede in the making of America but never be extinguished entirely. The United States may have been founded on “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but it was always shot through with something unbalanced, heedless, undomesticated, fearful.The making of America meant pushing back the frontier, establishing civilization where before, as the Puritan William Bradford testified, there had been “a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wild beasts & wild men.” Kaag asserts that New England colonials drew a clear, unwavering line between the civilized and the wild, but he believes that the Blood dynasty shared a more complicated ethos: Its members “continually explored life and its extremes,” absorbing the lesson that “human existence was not cleanly demarcated but unshakably wild.”Hardly alone in wanting, just now, to weigh the risk of mayhem in America, he asks, “What untamed stories lie beneath the skin of our more or less well-functioning society? How persistent is the wildness that once defined our country?” The answers, he warns, won’t be tidy, though he can’t resist assigning conveniently emblematic roles to his small sample of Zelig-like Bloods.Naked opportunism guided the first figure in Kaag’s book: Thomas Blood, who was not American but is the most notorious individual to bear the name. In 1671, he tried to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London. A rogue as well as a thief, Thomas sets the tone for the American branch of the family, which was started by his nephews, who were among the early New England settlers, arriving sometime in the 1630s. By mid-century, Robert Blood had established a farm on a 3,000-acre tract just north of Concord, then very much the frayed edge of civilization. A “troublesome” man, Robert was a good citizen when it suited him and a renegade when taxes fell due. He nonetheless understood that the best defense against external threats was neighborly cooperation. The wary dance he did with local authority, in Kaag’s telling, “presages in miniature the political dynamics” as the colonies began to rebel against the British Crown.The old favorites Emerson and Thoreau, Transcendentalists who championed American cultural independence and the primacy of the individual soul, take the stage as Kaag fast-forwards roughly a century to focus on Bloods intersecting with homegrown ferment. Robert’s great-great-grandson Thaddeus made an enduring impression on Emerson, who admired the rare courage that the veteran of the skirmish at the Old North Bridge had displayed as a young minuteman. Kaag suggests (though certainly doesn’t prove) that Emerson’s conversation with Thaddeus in 1835 was the catalyst for what he calls Emerson’s own “acts of insurrection”: two speeches delivered in the next several years, “The American Scholar” and the bombshell “Divinity School Address,” in which he renounced all organized religion (and in particular what he elsewhere derided as “corpse-cold Unitarianism”).“The American Scholar” called for a new type of educated American, an active, engaged intellectual boldly embracing the rough-and-tumble of a new nation—what a pleasure to see the 34-year-old Emerson roll up his sleeves and resolve to “run eagerly into this resounding tumult,” to take his place “in the ring to suffer and to work”! And yet Kaag’s next Blood, Perez, son of Thaddeus, shrank from the tumult. A recluse and an amateur astronomer, Perez spent his time in his woodshed, seated on a swivel chair, peering at the heavens through a telescope. Undeterred, Kaag finds a way to fit him into his exploration of wildness by claiming that Perez had a “lasting and profound” friendship with Thoreau and helped him “define his conception of human freedom.” In the first sentence of “Walking” (an essay published in this magazine, posthumously, in 1862), Thoreau associates wildness with “absolute freedom”—as distinct from “a freedom and culture merely civil.” According to Kaag, both Perez and Thoreau freed themselves from “the tawdry distractions of modern life,” and the eccentric old stargazer inspired Thoreau “to see the inner, noble form of a seemingly common man.”[From the June 1862 issue: Henry David Thoreau’s “Walking”]The resounding tumult returns with James Clinton Blood, a co-founder and the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, and a passing acquaintance of John Brown, whose gory attacks on militant pro-slavery settlers helped give “Bloody Kansas” its name. James had gone west as part of an abolitionist scheme to keep the territory from becoming a slave state, and acted as an agent and a scout, buying up land from Native tribes. He survived the Lawrence Massacre of 1863 (when Confederate guerrillas killed some 150 unarmed men and boys), and in the postwar decades “happily watched the frontier town civilize itself.”James is meant to be representative of the many Bloods who participated in the settlement of the American West and who “came to understand the border as a paradoxical space, where the most vicious of beings could also be the most vulnerable.” I don’t know whom Kaag is referring to in that last clause or what he means. He’s keenly aware that we can’t contemplate “the bleeding of Kansas” unless we reckon with the calamitous war fought over the moral abomination of slavery and also the genocidal persecution of the Native population. In earlier chapters, he mentions a few of the enslaved people bought and sold by various 18th-century Bloods, and here he describes the dismal fate of the Plains tribes who were cheated out of their land or driven off or simply exterminated. We never learn, though, whether James’s land deals were made in good faith or how other untamed Bloods fared on the new frontier. This seems the wrong moment to fudge: The stories we tell about how, exactly, the Wild West civilized itself color our ideas about who we are as a nation.American Bloods is not a panoramic intellectual history or even a conjoined narrative. Nor does Kaag substantiate the claim that the Bloods “circulated through each era, an animating force of American history, just below the surface.” Don’t let the fancy blood metaphor distract you: Heredity cannot plausibly account for the persistence of an ideology or a spirit over a span of centuries. Instead of telling an unbroken story, Kaag has assembled a series of portraits, some more engaging than others, the degree of interest determined by which great men are adjacent to the male Blood in question. At one point, he alludes to what he calls “a largely forgotten counternarrative: the Blood women.” But his only substantive contribution to that counternarrative is to present us with the charismatic women’s-rights advocate Victoria Woodhull, who married Colonel James Harvey Blood, a veteran of the Union Army and a committed spiritualist. Kaag calls Woodhull “arguably the most famous and scandalous of the American Bloods,” and it’s perfectly obvious why he would want to adopt her: Extreme and mercurial, she’s an ideal embodiment of many divergent, unconventional responses to the trauma of the Civil War.Victoria met James in St. Louis in the mid-1860s. Twenty-six years old and strikingly beautiful, she was working as a medium and a “spiritual physician” when James consulted her, seeking treatment for wounds suffered in battle. She fell into a trance and announced that their destinies were linked. James liked the idea: Obeying the spirits, they left St. Louis and their spouses behind. The new marriage lasted barely a decade—but it was some decade.In New York, the soothsaying of this Blood-by-marriage morphed into investment advice (lapped up by an aged Cornelius Vanderbilt), and Victoria made “an utter fortune from her wildness,” as Kaag puts it. She founded a brokerage house and a crusading weekly newspaper, and waged energetic campaigns for free love and equal rights. Kaag concedes that Victoria’s “methods” as a healer and fortune teller “were fraudulent—which is to say too wild for belief.” He doesn’t try to make sense of her dishonesty, or condemn the blatant hypocrisy of her final incarnation: Having ditched James, she married a rich English banker, renouncing radicalism to secure for herself “the standing and success that women of previous generations could not have envisioned.” Kaag leaves it to the reader to connect her successive self-reinventions with the larger Blood narrative.Having toured this gallery of “untamed beasts” exhibiting so many different shades of American wildness, we might ask what wild means to Kaag himself. I’m not sure. But it’s clear that one important step in his quest to make space for the “contradictions and tensions and paradoxes” of daily life has been coming to terms with Benjamin Blood, a promiscuously talented poet-philosopher. Benjamin’s rhapsodic mysticism, eccentricity, and primal vigor were particularly appealing to William James. This Blood taught Kaag’s hero that “the secret of Being,” in James’s words, “is not the dark immensity beyond knowledge, but at home, this side, beneath the feet, and overlooked by knowledge.”A practical idealist, high-minded yet of the people (he’s been called “a mystic of the commonplace”), Benjamin was born in 1832 in upstate New York. Over the course of his 86 years, he was an inventor, a gambler, a gymnast, and a boxer, as well as a poet, metaphysician, and compulsive writer of letters to the editor—in short, the antithesis of a library-bound thinker. Dissatisfied with philosophizing, he told James that he “felt compelled to go into more active life,” to work 10 hours a day in a local mill. “I have worn out many styles,” he boasted, “and am cosmopolitan, liberal to others, and contented with myself.” His intellectual pursuits, Kaag writes, should be regarded “as an afterthought to action, the trace of a life lived as fully as possible.”Deeply impressed by a self-published pamphlet, The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy (1874), James struck up a correspondence with the author and eventually volunteered to try to make him famous. He kept his word: The last essay he ever wrote, “A Pluralistic Mystic” (1910), is a hymn to Benjamin’s uncommon merit.James directs our attention to a remarkable passage in which Benjamin explains that “the universe is wild—game flavored as a hawk’s wing.” Celebrating the contingent and the unfinished, Benjamin declares that “nature is miracle all. She knows no laws; the same returns not, save to bring the different.” We can never fully grasp reality; our understanding, in Benjamin’s words, is “ever not quite.” Or as James himself insisted, uneasy about what seemed an oppressively bureaucratic and professionalized 20th century, “There is no complete generalization, no total point of view.”Kaag warmly welcomes the idea of the incomplete, of a cobbled-together and eternally unfinished worldview; he finds it frustrating but also encouraging. At the same time, he can’t resist imposing an overarching unity. Eager to wrap things up neatly, he claims that Benjamin Blood’s philosophy of open-ended, open-hearted pluralism—and of active engagement in the wider world—somehow “silently guided the Blood family from its very inception.” And yet the thought of the whole crew, from Thomas to Perez to Victoria, all wedded to a single ethos hardly sits well with Benjamin’s belief that “the genius of being is whimsical rather than consistent.”What does this have to do with America? Kaag is telling us that wildness is with us always, yesterday and today, even the dangerous, corrupt, fraudulent varieties, but that beneficent wildness makes room for exploration, new ideas, new ways of being. A more perfect union is always possible—though ever not quite.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Wild Blood Dynasty.”