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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

16 ч

theatlantic.com

Google and OpenAI Are Battling for AI Supremacy

17 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 Baby Reindeer Mess Was Inevitable

22 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

22 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

23 ч

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

23 ч

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.

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.

The Real ID Deadline Will Never Arrive

2 д

theatlantic.com

If you fly regularly, you’ve probably seen signs saying that the Real ID Act will soon go into full effect. When that happens, all domestic travelers using a driver’s license at TSA checkpoints will have to show a federally compliant one—or be turned away. On May 7, exactly a year ahead of the latest purported enforcement date, a USA Today story bore the headline “The 2025 Real ID Deadline for New Licenses Is Really Real This Time, DHS Says.” Maybe the Department of Homeland Security needs to pinkie-swear to make the 2025 date really, really real, because those airport signs and travel stories have been telling us about a final deadline for more than 15 years. And yet, that deadline has never arrived. If past extensions are any indication, it probably never will.The 2005 Real ID law created a national system for sharing driver information, set more onerous documentation standards for driver’s licenses than states had previously used, and added security rules that pushed states to mail licenses to applicants rather than issuing them on the spot. During the years of collective panic that followed the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, lawmakers and executive-branch agencies pushed through a raft of measures—common-sense ones, such as fortified cockpit doors, but also more controversial ones, such as expanded data surveillance and airport body-scanning machines. To this day, recorded airport announcements still warn passengers about “heightened security measures” that have been in place for more than a decade and might well remain heightened in perpetuity. Originally meant to take full effect in 2008, Real ID now looks like a particularly misguided bit of post-9/11 security theater. The measure survives in public policy despite, or perhaps precisely because of, its lack of urgency.The deadline has been delayed again and again. The initial holdup was that many states bristled at federal encroachment on their turf and at the cost of revamping their license systems to meet the new standards. More recently, Homeland Security has cited the slow uptake of Real ID cards—the department estimated last year that 44 percent of the population did not have a compliant license—and administrative backlogs related to the coronavirus pandemic.[Derek Thompson: Air travel is a disaster right now. Here’s why ]If requiring a Real ID license for every airline passenger were essential to preventing another 9/11-style attack, this would have become clear years ago. As my 2006 book, Identity Crisis, pointed out, supporters of Real ID could not plausibly claim that the policy would thwart foreign terrorists, who can travel within the United States using passports. Perhaps that’s why supporters pivoted after the Real ID Act’s passage to touting the policy as protection against identity fraud and illegal immigration. These assertions don’t hold up either. Identity fraud typically involves hacking into victims’ financial accounts, or starting new ones, under circumstances in which banks and merchants don’t check ID. Controlling illegal immigration through an identification system would require something much further-reaching than Real ID: registering all Americans from birth and all lawful newcomers from the moment of entry, using a strong biometric identifier. Then, checking people against a centrally managed database when they applied for a job, sought health care, or made a credit-card payment would trip up the people who aren’t in it. Many people, including me, intuitively oppose such a system because it would be intrusive on its own terms and because of how it might be used to track and control people’s activities. Whether you are worried about access to ammunition or access to reproductive services, you can reasonably harbor doubts about the potential uses and abuses of any national ID system.Real ID is a peculiar hybrid—the closest thing to a national ID that was politically viable at the time of the act’s passage. But the marginal security gains are not worth even the short-term costs: burdensome document demands, longer lines at motor-vehicle departments, slower license issuance.Applying cost-benefit analysis and other rigorous tools to policy making was difficult in the post-9/11 era and remains so today. Remote risks, such as novel attacks on transportation, must be weighed against inconveniences to hundreds of millions of travelers. Even today, the invocation of terrorism activates many people’s “lizard brain,” in which the fight-or-flight instinct overwhelms rational thinking about security. Knowing this, politicians and security-agency administrators fear being blamed for any future attack with at least notional connections to fraudulent state identification cards. Now that most states are at least partially compliant with federal standards, the percentage of Americans with a Real ID license is likely to tick upward over time. And with the help of technology, the U.S. government is steadily expanding its role in identity verification. The TSA is rolling out its ostensibly voluntary facial-scanning system at more and more airports. In December 2020, Congress passed legislation allowing for digital driver’s licenses, carried on smartphones and smartwatches, that would comply with Real ID requirements. This nominal upgrade to the licensing regime may make identity checking far more common and data gathering easier; it also expands Homeland Security’s influence over the configuration of licenses. A digital driver’s license is not like a paper one without the bulk. As the ACLU’s Jay Stanley warned in a 2021 report, its functions could include “phoning home” to central databases, revealing when and where you present it, and allowing tracking by businesses and government institutions that check it. Because of these and other dangers, the American public should think carefully before adopting digital licenses in the name of convenience in coming years.[Russell Berman: The obvious voting-rights solution that no Democrat will propose]In the meantime, Americans who travel frequently will be barraged with exhortations to adopt 2005’s state-of-the-art license technology, Real ID. Fortunately, the threat of being denied boarding without a compliant license is hollow. If every Real ID holdout decided to get a compliant license between now and May 2025, states probably wouldn’t be able to handle the administrative burden. Under any likely scenario, the political costs of turning Americans away at airports in May 2025 will be too high.Here’s my prediction: Well before next May, the Real ID compliance deadline will be rolled back again. The only uncertainty is the reason the federal government will give us.

Introducing: Good on Paper

2 д

theatlantic.com

Have you ever heard a commonly held belief or a fast-developing worldview and asked: Is that idea right? Or just good on paper? Each week, host Jerusalem Demsas and a guest take a closer look at the facts and research that challenge the popular narratives of the day, to better understand why we believe what we believe. Good on Paper launches Tuesday, June 4.Listen to the conversation here:The following is a transcript of the episode:Jerusalem Demsas: What’s an idea that you’ve felt was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?Alice Evans: Oh my God. So much of my life, so much of my life.Demsas: [Laughs]Demsas: What if the conventional wisdom driving our public discourse isn’t quite right?Natalia Emanuel: This is the question in many ways.Demsas: What if new evidence on housing or immigration or relationships flies in the face of what we believe?Evans: Wow, okay. Big question.Demsas: What if the policies we support give us results we don’t like?Nick Papageorge: We were playing with data, and we found a pattern that didn’t make sense.Emanuel: One of the first people we presented to said, Are we sure this isn’t mansplaining?Evans: Okay, great. So I maybe sound a little bit Marxian now.Demsas: My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic. And I’m hosting a new podcast called Good on Paper. It’s a policy show that will question what we really know about the world and challenge the popular narratives of the day. Like, were the 2020 protests—both the Black Lives Matter and anti-lockdown ones—actually full of radicals?Papageorge: That was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes and then there are these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. But then, you start to look.Demsas: Or—is remote work actually good for workers?Emanuel: If you have even one colleague who is remote, that yields about 30 percent of the loss from having everyone be remote.Demsas: Wait, so if one person on your team goes remote, that you just lose all of that?Emanuel: Well, a third of it, yeah.Demsas: A third of it, that’s huge!Emanuel: Right, it’s huge—from just one person.Demsas: From The Atlantic comes Good on Paper. First episode drops June 4 wherever you get your podcasts. Come be surprised.Evans: I do a Lara Croft roly-poly, spinning off to the side. At this point, I hand over the phone, and I sprint, and I’m bleeding, and I’m covered in blood.Demsas: Well, I just think it’s—Evans: So, yeah, that is something that had not gone to plan. Getting punched in the face was not on the agenda.Demsas: Not good on paper.

Summer Reading 2024

2 д

theatlantic.com

Warm weather brings with it freedom and leisure—and it can also call to mind the particular pleasure of losing yourself in a book. The relatively idle quality of summer opens up the chance to read something just for fun, or it provides a needed stretch of time for finally picking up the paperback that’s been patiently waiting on your bedside table. This year, The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods. Perhaps you want to transport yourself to another place, or you’re determined to learn something completely new. It’s also the right time to start the book you’ll read all summer or immerse yourself in a cult classic. You might hope to feel wonder about the universe or dive into someone else’s mind—or maybe you just need to indulge in a breezy beach read. Here are 25 books to pick up as your summer unfurls.Transport Yourself to Another PlaceI Capture the Castleby Dodie SmithCassandra Mortmain, 17, lives in a crumbling medieval castle in 1930s England. Her father purchased it with the royalties from his one successful novel, the income from which has long since run dry. As an escape—and as practice for her own novel, which she hopes might spring her family from its now-less-than-genteel poverty—Cassandra has dedicated herself to “capturing” the characters around her in a diaristic, curious first person: irascible, blocked-writer father; bohemian stepmother; beautiful, dissatisfied older sister; lovelorn farmhand. Cassandra’s circumstances are at odds with her romantic temperament, but they animate her narration; charm, humor, and frustration spark off of every page. I Capture the Castle has the enjoyably familiar trappings of the Jane Austen marriage plot—there are wealthy bachelor neighbors and sisterly schemes in the damp yet charming English countryside. But in this book, the tropes collapse in on one another in comic and quietly poignant ways as the reader is welcomed into the nostalgic mood of interwar Britain, with its tea cozies and tweeds and trousseaus bought in London. It’s a novel that you sink into like a chintz armchair, only to emerge warm but wistful as the light fails and the evening mist appears. — Christine EmbaWandering Starsby Tommy OrangeOrange’s previous novel, There There, conjured an interconnected cast of characters who were a part of a widespread Native community in Oakland, California. Wandering Stars, a sequel of sorts, is in part an exploration of what happens after the earlier book’s dramatic and painful ending—but it is also Orange’s attempt to provide a deeper, historical backstory to the contemporary, urban reality he described so well. The novel rewinds more than 100 years, beginning in the 19th century with a survivor of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre and following his bloodline through the decades, with characters wandering to and around California until they end up back in the present day, in Oakland. You can’t understand these people unless you delve into the years of brutality and assimilation that brought them here, Orange implicitly argues—and he brilliantly captures the confusion of the youngest generation, which feels disconnected from its roots even as its inheritance weighs heavily. — Emma SarappoSomeone Like Usby Dinaw MengestuAt one point in Mengestu’s new novel, the main character, Mamush, having missed a flight from his home in Paris to Washington, D.C., decides on a whim to buy a ticket to Chicago instead. He’s not dressed for the freezing cold, which provokes a stranger’s concern, but Mamush remains nonplussed: “What she saw was a shadow version of me,” he thinks. “My real self was hundreds of miles away in the suburbs of northern Virginia.” The soul of this short, disorienting book, which drifts between continents and cities, does indeed lie in the anonymous, dense suburbs north and south of Washington, D.C. These communities are where Mamush, a failed journalist, grew up in a milieu of Ethiopian immigrants. Mamush’s French wife, Hannah, struggles to wrap her mind around these American nonplaces—and even Mamush fails to describe them with anything but the blandest words. “We lived in apartment buildings, surrounded by other apartment buildings, behind which were four-lane highways that led to similar apartments,” he remembers. His trip home, meant to be a family reunion, becomes a sobering and eerie voyage after a sudden tragedy. But as his visit unlocks long-buried memories and secrets, these places that began as ciphers end up specific enough to make the hairs on one’s neck stand up in recognition. — E.S.Learn Something Completely NewThe Secret Life of Groceriesby Benjamin LorrGreat nonfiction books take you into worlds you could never otherwise know: deepest space, Earth’s extremities, the past. The best nonfiction books explore places you know intimately but haven’t thought nearly enough about. The Secret Life of Groceries begins elbow-deep in trout guts and melting ice, a smell “thick in the air like you are exhuming something dangerous, which perhaps you are,” as the low-wage laborers who make a Manhattan Whole Foods fit for the daily rush do their best to clean the fish case. Lorr starts there because it’s a near-perfect metaphor for the American grocery store and its global machinery: It is gross, it is miraculous, it is where plants and animals become products, and where desire becomes consumption. After following him from specialty-food shows to shrimping boats to new-employee orientation, you’ll never think of groceries the same way again. — Ellen CushingBecoming Earthby Ferris JabrIn his new book, Jabr invites the reader to consider the true definition of life. Earth doesn’t just play host to living beings, in his telling; it’s alive itself because it is fundamentally made up of the plants and creatures that transform its land, air, and water. “Life, then, is more spectral than categorical, more verb than noun,” he explains. It is “not a distinct class of matter, nor a property of matter, but rather a process—a performance.” Plankton release gases that can alter the climate; microbes below the planet’s surface sculpt rock into caverns and, Jabr suggests, might have even helped form the continents. Jabr is a science journalist who has written searching articles on inter-tree communication, the possibilities of botanical medicine, and the beauty of certain animals; here, he travels from the kelp forests near California’s Santa Catalina Island to an observatory high above the Amazon rainforest in Brazil to his own backyard in Portland. Along the way, he makes a convincing, mind-opening case that “the history of life on Earth is the history of life remaking Earth,” which means that humans are just one part of a changing, multifarious whole—and that we must work urgently to mitigate our disproportionate effects on the planet. — Maya ChungDaybookby Anne TruittTruitt’s sculptures—tall wooden columns of pure color—are almost mystically smooth. But her writing, especially in her first published journal, Daybook, flies in the face of those unbroken surfaces: She chronicles her complex experiences as a mother and a working artist, giving readers an intimate look into how her biography and her process cannot be separated. Daybook, which covers Truitt’s life in the late 1970s, emerges directly from her maxim that “artists have no choice but to express their lives.” In her case, that means capturing serene meditations on the creative spark, recounting the labor of applying 40 coats of paint to her forms, and groaning over the financial discomfort of raising three kids. Most spectacular are her ruminations on how life is what we feed to art in order to make it grow. Watching her daughter take a bath is a source of inspiration. “I had been absorbing her brown body against the white tub, the yellow top of the nail brush, the dark green shampoo bottle, Sam’s blue towel, her orange towel, and could make a sculpture called Mary in the Tub if I ever chose to,” she muses. Daybook is full of all the luminous colors Truitt, who died in 2004, evoked—the soothing lilacs, blaring yellows, revolutionary reds. It’s a powerful lesson that an artist is not only a person who planes towering poplar sculptures but also someone who removes a splinter from a child’s finger. — Hillary KellyDelmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poetby James AtlasYou might not ever have heard of Schwartz, and it doesn’t really matter. Atlas’s biography of him is such a psychologically acute, stylishly executed portrait of a doomed genius and his milieu of New York intellectuals that it effortlessly propels the reader through its pages. Schwartz was supposed to become the American W. H. Auden; he had the potential to be the greatest poet of his generation, and his work provoked the awe of peers such as Saul Bellow (who loosely based the novel Humboldt’s Gift on Schwartz’s troubled life). Atlas depicts a legendary conversationalist, a brilliant wit (Schwartz coined the aphorism “Even paranoids have real enemies”), and a life brutally overtaken by mental illness. — Franklin FoerStart the Book You’ll Read All SummerAt the Edge of Empireby Edward WongFor years, the only uniform that Wong, The New York Times’ former Beijing bureau chief, could imagine his father wearing was the red blazer he put on to go work at a Chinese restaurant every day. Then he saw a photo of young Yook Kearn Wong dressed as a soldier, and two stories opened up. His nonagenarian father had once been in Mao’s army and witnessed firsthand the Communist attempt to resurrect a Chinese empire; he dramatically left China in 1962 for Hong Kong and then Washington, D.C., disillusioned with what he had seen. This mix of memoir and efficiently recounted history covers 80 turbulent years. Wong is especially detailed about the decades his father spent in the People’s Liberation Army; he was sent to Manchuria, where he trained with the Chinese air force, and Xinjiang, where he met the Muslim populations of Uyghurs and Kazakhs that the state has struggled to subdue. Along with his father’s history, Wong unpacks his own years reporting on Xi Jinping’s consolidation of power and quashing of dissent—a mirror of what his father saw. This book’s power comes from Wong’s broad sense of the patterns of Chinese history, reflected in the lives of a father and son, and from his ability to toggle effortlessly between the epic and the intimate. — Gal BeckermanKristin Lavransdatterby Sigrid Undset, translated by Tiina NunnallyKristin, the pivotal character in Undset’s historical 1,000-page trilogy, is introduced as a young girl in 14th-century Norway. She is the adored daughter of Lavrans, a widely respected nobleman who runs their family’s estate with wisdom and faith, and a member of a well-drawn social world of relatives, friends, and neighbors with defined feudal roles. As she grows up, she becomes beautiful, bighearted, and religious, though she is also willful and disobedient in ways that will bring her deep sorrow for the rest of her life. Kristin’s saga, rich with detail, has shades of Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ tragedy and Brideshead Revisited’s piety, but more than anything, the story is deeply human. Readers follow an imperfect, striving, warm, petty, utterly understandable woman from her childhood during the peak of medieval Norwegian strength to her death during the Black Plague, a time when Catholicism ordered social and political life but pagan traditions and beliefs were not yet forgotten. Her journey from maid to sinner to pilgrim to matriarch, first published in the 1920s, is gorgeous, fresh, and propulsive in Nunnally’s translation. A century later, spending weeks or months tracking the years of Kristin’s life remains wildly rewarding. — E.S.The Bee Stingby Paul MurrayThe setup for the Irish author Murray’s fourth novel is a classic one: Take one family and explore its dynamics in intimate detail, turning it over to reveal all of its flawed facets, and expose it as a microcosm of larger social and cultural forces roiling us all. Jonathan Franzen is the current American master of this particular novelistic gambit, but Murray brings new energy to the enterprise with his portrait of the Barneses, Dickie and Imelda, and their two children, Cass and PJ. They’re a once-prosperous family living in a small Irish town; they’ve been suddenly struck down by the 2008 financial crash, which sends Dickie’s chain of car dealerships and garages into freefall. You could read this book in a week, and you’ll want to, but give yourself the whole summer to appreciate how fully Murray inhabits the perspectives of each family member chapter after chapter. Their psychologies—scarred in so many ways, both subtle and dramatic—become impossible to turn away from. After 600 pages, the elements Murray has been putting in place build to a wrenching climax, one that, like in all great tragedies, was foretold from the first page of this beautifully crafted book. — G.B.Immerse Yourself in a Cult ClassicIn the Actby Rachel IngallsIf nothing else, read In the Act for the fights. Helen and Edgar, who are unhappily married, have developed a caustic fluency in the art of spiteful exchange. “You’re being unreasonable,” he says at one point. “Of course I am. I’m a woman,” she replies. “You’ve already explained that to me.” But also, read Ingalls’s sneakily brilliant 1987 novella for the absurd plot, which begins at a grouchy, oddball simmer—Edgar is adamant that Helen give him privacy to work on a mysterious project in the attic; Helen, suspicious of the sounds she hears up there, is determined to learn more—and ultimately reaches an exhilarating, tragicomic boil. In between, we discover the particular, creative way in which Edgar is two-timing Helen, the equally creative way in which she takes revenge, and just how delightful a story can be when each lean, mean sentence carries its weight. — Jane Yong KimLet’s Talk About Loveby Carl WilsonWhat might a music critic with a knee-jerk distaste for Celine Dion stand to gain from careful, open-minded consideration of her work? This is the premise of Wilson’s 2007 touchstone of cultural criticism, which proved so popular that an expanded edition, released in 2014, includes response essays by luminaries such as Mary Gaitskill and James Franco. Let’s Talk About Love focuses on the singer of “My Heart Will Go On,” yes, but at its core it’s an investigation of taste: why we like the things we like, how our identities and social status get mixed up in our aesthetic preferences, and how one should wrestle with other people’s wildly different reactions to works of art. The book will have you scrutinizing your own preferences, but its true pleasure is unlocked simply by following along as a critic listens to music and thinks deeply about it—particularly one as intelligent, rigorous, and undogmatic as Wilson. — Chelsea LeuRipley’s Gameby Patricia HighsmithThe suave serial murderer Tom Ripley’s actions can be notoriously hard for readers to predict—but in Highsmith’s third novel about the con man, Ripley surprises himself. No longer the youthful compulsive killer of The Talented Mr. Ripley, the character is aging and getting bored. So when a poor man named Jonathan responds coolly to him at a party, Ripley fashions an elaborate drama for his own amusement: He cons the mild-mannered and entirely inexperienced Jonathan into taking a job as a freelance assassin targeting Mafia members, but the more Ripley watches Jonathan struggle with the task and his morals, the more Ripley itches to get his own hands dirty again. When I revisited Highsmith’s books ahead of their (rather dour) Netflix adaptation, I found myself unexpectedly drawn most to Ripley’s Game and its absurd humor. The novel explores a classic Highsmith preoccupation: how reducing strangers to archetypes can feel irresistible. Ripley is as much a petty meddler as he is a cold-blooded murderer—and that makes him endlessly fun to follow. — Shirley LiSirena Selenaby Mayra Santos-FebresIn 1990s San Juan, Puerto Rico, the drag queen Martha Divine hears a young boy singing boleros while picking up cans. She helps transform him into Sirena Selena—a beguiling drag performer who is soon invited to sing at a luxury hotel in the Dominican Republic and inspires an erotic obsession in one of its rich investors. Santos-Febres has pointed out that the Caribbean has long “been a desire factory for the rest of the world,” and her story looks squarely at the power dynamics inherent in these fantasies, especially those between tourists and locals. When it was published in 2000, Selena’s story was immediately heralded as crucial Puerto Rican literature, and it remains beloved partially for the force of its central allegory: Tourism, it argues, forces Caribbean people into a performance of exoticism—yet another type of drag. Santos-Febres will make you reconsider gender and the travel industry while luring you in with prose so sumptuous that reading it feels like putting on a pair of delicate satin gloves. — Valerie TrappFeel Wonder About the UniverseYou Are Here: Poetry in the Natural Worldedited by Ada LimónThis collection of verse defines the natural world loosely: Here, yes, we have lovely descriptions of ancient redwoods and the “buttery platters of fungus” ascending their trunks; sparrows and spiderwebs and “geckos in their mysterious work.” But the book is largely about human nature, and our place in a world that contains so many other living things. An address to a saguaro becomes a meditation on immigration; a walk with a baby is tinged with sadness for the climate disasters surely to come; bearded irises give someone the strength to keep living; lilacs and skunk cabbage are envisioned through the haze of distant memory—it’s an ephemeral act, “like wrapping a scoop of snow in tissue paper.” Who are we, the poets ask, as individuals and as a species? How have our surroundings shaped our pasts and our presents, and what can they tell us about how to exist in the future? The Earth here is rather like a supporting character—a foil—who can surprise us, devastate us, and bring us back to ourselves. As Limón writes in a gorgeous introduction, she started repeating “You are here” to herself after seeing the phrase on a trail map. When I feel like a disembodied mind this summer, I’ll take myself to the ocean, this book in hand, and try doing the same. — Faith HillLives Other Than My Ownby Emmanuel CarrèreCarrère’s books demand some surrender on their reader’s part. You have to be okay not knowing exactly where the story—to the extent that there is anything resembling a traditional story—is going. You are there to spend time with his mind. Lives Other Than My Own, my favorite of his works, is no exception. It begins in Sri Lanka in 2004, where Carrère was witness to the tsunami that pulverized the island. Amid the immense death and destruction, Carrère befriends a French family whose little girl drowned in the waves. But just as Carrère pulls us into this grieving family’s emotional upheaval, his mind drifts. He returns from Sri Lanka to Paris and shifts his attention to his girlfriend’s sister, Juliette, a judge who has just died of cancer; he then carries out an investigation of sorts about the life she lived and the loved ones she left behind. The two strands don’t obviously connect—but they also make perfect sense next to each other. Each one fundamentally shakes Carrère, forcing him to ponder death, love, and how a meaningful existence comes together. — G.B.Tentacleby Rita Indiana, translated by Achy ObejasTentacle may be a bit of a spooky read for this summer: In its world, initially set a few years into the future, the island of Hispaniola was devastated by a tidal wave in 2024 that wiped away coral reefs and food stands. But as you read on, the story asks you to let go of your attachments to chronology, flitting among three time periods: a post-storm island that is livable only for the ultrarich; an early-2000s milieu of beach-town artists; and a colonial-era past centered on a band of buccaneers. The book was originally written in Dominican Spanish and sprinkled with Yoruba and French, and the English translation retains a fiery love for the dynamic Earth. In one of the timelines, “an enormous school of surgeonfish” shoots out of a coral reef like “an electric-blue stream.” In another, the same sea is described as “a dark and putrid stew.” Holding voltaic awe in one hand and profound grief in the other, Indiana helps us see how the years behind us have led to our present climate crisis, and ignites a desire to fight for all we can still save. — V.T.Dive Into Someone Else’s MindAmong the Thugsby Bill BufordEvery time I come across footage of January 6, I think of this book, the greatest study of mob violence ever written. Since its publication in 1990, English police have largely eliminated what was once euphemistically called “hooliganism” from the soccer stadium, but Buford’s first-person account of embedding with the Inter-City Jibbers, a group of pugilistic Manchester United fans, remains as readable and relevant as ever. He unforgettably recounts the experience of being pummeled by Italian police in Sardinia—and he describes the human capacity for brutality with terrible candor and compelling empathy. The violence he experiences is addictive, adrenaline-induced euphoria, as is his technicolor, emotionally vibrant account of it. — F.F.Broughtupsyby Christina CookeBy the time that 20-year-old Akúa travels back to Jamaica to see her estranged sister, she’s spent half her life in the United States and Canada. Before Akúa even arrives at her sister’s house, she begins to realize how difficult the transition to her birthplace will be. In the cramped taxi ride from the Kingston airport, other passengers joke with one another in patois, “their words flying hot and quick.” Akúa’s inability to join their banter leaves her feeling like she’s “listening through water,” one of many such indignities detailed by her evocative, searching narration. But language isn’t the only thing that weighs heavily on her relationship with the island; she also has to confront the grief and familial resentment that have unmoored her in the years since her mother’s death. Cooke’s vibrant debut novel is a queer coming-of-age story and a chronicle of diasporic rediscovery: Akúa makes new memories with her sister—and with rebellious strangers whose lives challenge the religious conservatism around them all. Along the way, Akúa’s loneliness starts to lift, and the island’s misfits help make Jamaica feel like home again. — Hannah GiorgisMina’s Matchboxby Yoko Ogawa, translated by Stephen B. SnyderIn 1972, a young Japanese girl named Tomoko is sent by her mother to live with her aunt’s family in the seaside town of Ashiya. Things are a bit odd in their house: Her wealthy, half-German uncle disappears for long stretches; her sickly cousin, Mina, spends much of her time hidden away indoors, but rides a pygmy hippopotamus named Pochiko to school; her aunt searches for typos in books and pamphlets, obsessively identifying these “jewels glittering in a sea of sand.” Most enchanting are Mina’s many matchboxes, hidden underneath her bed, each of them featuring an intricate, beautiful picture. Mina collects them like talismans and writes devastating stories about the characters that appear on their illustrated labels. Everything, from the eerie events that happen at home to the bigger, global events such as the terror attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics, is filtered through a child’s perspective—curious but lacking adult judgment. Tomoko’s narration is subtle, almost detached, but the reader is immersed in her ardent love for her fragile cousin, and comes to appreciate how history seeps into every life, even the most sheltered ones. — M.C.This Is Salvagedby Vauhini VaraThe physical experience of being a human is pretty weird, with our little flappy arms and occasional runny noses. To read Vara’s short stories is to briefly inhabit a mind attuned to the fumbling and freedom of having a body. One character draws our attention to “a crust clinging in the tiny bulbed corner” of an eye. Another pronounces that we don’t “talk enough about labial sweat.” Even flowers are not immune to the indecency of physicality: “Blooming seemed too formal for what the flowers were doing on their stems. They were doing something obscene: spurting; spilling.” Vara injects that same irreverence into all of her characters’ situations: Two girls work as phone-sex operators after the death of one of their siblings. One woman transforms into a buffalo. “I felt wet, porous, as if the world were washing in and out of me, a nudity of the soul,” says another character. These stories, similarly, reveal the leaky boundaries between our bodies and the universe, and bare what’s vulnerable, and beautiful, underneath. — V.T.Indulge in a Breezy Beach ReadGlossyby Marisa MeltzerThere was a brief moment in 2017 when The Atlantic’s London bureau shared a WeWork floor with the U.K. marketing team for Glossier, and this was when I first became fascinated with the cult beauty brand, its playful tubes of color, and its virtuoso Instagram presence. Meltzer’s 2023 book, Glossy, is a rich, gossipy history of the company’s rise. But it’s also a fairly succinct examination of womanhood in the 2010s: the cursed girlboss ethos, the growth of social media, the aesthetic nature of aspiration in a moment when feminism was a trend more than a movement. Meltzer thoroughly examines how Glossier’s founder, Emily Weiss, ascended seamlessly from her supporting role on The Hills to blogging to founding a billion-dollar brand; the book delivers thrilling details and structural analysis along the way. (Beauty is a business with extremely high profit margins, which explains a lot about its ubiquity in our culture when you think about it.) Mostly, the book left me marveling at how selling a business in this environment was as much about selling yourself as any particular product. — Sophie GilbertThe Coinby Yasmin Zaher“Woman unravels in New York City” is hardly an innovative storyline for a novel. Yet The Coin, the Palestinian journalist Zaher’s debut—which is, yes, about a woman unraveling in New York City—feels arrestingly new. Its unnamed protagonist, a Palestinian multimillionaire who teaches at a middle school for gifted, underprivileged boys, is a neat freak, a misanthrope, a dirty-minded isolate who dislikes the United States profoundly but lives there because “I wanted a certain life for myself … Wearing heels was important to me.” Her narration is spiky and honest, her choices gleefully, consciously bad. The pleasure she takes in making those decisions and then recounting them is what makes The Coin both unusual and compelling. Our protagonist denies herself nothing she wants, and she denies her audience no detail. The combination renders the book tough to put down. — Lily MeyerThe English Understand Woolby Helen DeWittMy copy of The English Understand Wool came with a little silver sticker on the front proclaiming it actually funny. Perspicacious sticker: This book is funny in the sense that it will make you laugh—for real, out loud, more than once—but also in the sense that it’s a little off-kilter and unlike anything else. Its narrator is Marguerite, a 17-year-old who has been taught by her elegant, commanding maman to play piano and bridge, spot fine tailoring from a distance, and live a life unmarred by mauvais ton: “bad taste.” On a trip to London from their home in Marrakech, Marguerite learns something that elevates the novella from a charming comedy of manners to a truly divine combination of psychological thriller, caper, tender coming-of-age story, and barbed publishing-industry satire. It also does all of this in just over 60 pages, making this a book you can actually finish over a single drink from your beach cooler—though once you do, you may well return to the beginning to try to figure out how DeWitt pulled it off. — E.C.The Birthday Partyby Laurent MauvignierDespite its title, The Birthday Party isn’t … fun, per se. It’s violent and exceedingly dark; when it was longlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize, the judges said, “It is a very scary book.” And it’s not a quick read—following a couple, their young daughter, and that family’s lone neighbor as they’re visited by three menacing men, the plot is unspooled detail by minute detail over the course of roughly 500 pages. Single sentences stretch on so long that by the end of one, you might have forgotten its beginning. But the novel, in its own way, is breezy: Mauvignier drifts gently as a leaf in the wind among characters’ perspectives, swirling acrobatically through their interior worlds and sketching their psyches finely before he plunges them into terror. The first explicitly frightening event happens about 100 pages in; by that point, I’d come to care about these people a great deal, and my jaw hurt from anxious clenching, knowing something bad was on the way. The action is made more suspenseful because it explodes in slow motion—gripping enough to make you forget about the sand in your teeth and the seagull circling your sandwich. That’s my kind of beach read. — F.H.