“I am a professor! I am a professor of economics!” said Caroline Fohlin, face down, pinned to the ground by police at Emory University, in Atlanta, during campus demonstrations in late April. Her glasses had been thrown from her face, her head knocked against the concrete. While Fohlin’s words might be taken to suggest entitlement—a belief that her faculty status should confer immunity—I heard something else: an appeal to neutrality. It seemed to me that Fohlin was not in the quad to join the students in their protest of the war in Gaza: She was just trying to look out for them.Other faculty members have been roughed up too. Video showing the arrest of Emory’s philosophy-department chair, Noëlle McAfee, went viral. So did a clip of the Dartmouth historian Annelise Orleck getting knocked over and zip-tied. At Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, Steve Tamari, a history professor at nearby Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, was filmed being tackled and dragged by police; Tamari says he was hospitalized with broken ribs and a broken hand. During a protest at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the sociology professor Samer Alatout was detained; he says police inflicted the head gash that was visible in images circulated on social media.Though sometimes called “student protests,” students are only some of those participating in the campus demonstrations and occupations of the past three weeks. My university reported that 100 people were arrested on April 27, of which 23 were students and at least four were employees. Various roles are represented at the protests, and those roles bear different meanings. The faculty members whose images have been shared most widely aren’t among the protesters so much as beside them; they’ve been watching over students as their guardians, instead of marching as their peers. This is helicopter protesting, fit for the helicopter-parent generation.Following her arrest at Emory, Fohlin’s attorney told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she “was not a protester,” but had just come down from her office out of concern for students on the quad. In so doing, she saw authorities wrestling an individual to the ground and approached to intervene: “What are you doing?” she asked the police, appearing to tap one on the back before another officer grabbed her. McAfee told a similar story in a local-television interview: “I saw something going on … A bunch of police had tackled a young person, and threw them on the ground, and were just pummeling them,” she said. McAfee, whose scholarship connects feminist theory to political life, acknowledged the gendered role of protector that she felt she was playing. “The mother in me said, Stop, stop,” she told reporters.The role of protector isn’t limited to women, of course. Before his detention, Tamari can be seen filming the protesters around him, perhaps as a means of documentation. In a statement issued later, Tamari positioned himself as a participant, but also a peacekeeper: “I joined the student-led protests on Saturday to stop the genocide and support and protect the students.” Alatout, the University of Wisconsin professor, expressed a similar ambition: “My and other faculty and staff’s position is that we are defending the students’ rights,” he said. “To demonstrate and to protest, and that we are defending them.”Protection has been a theme of the protests. Members of Congress have pressured university presidents to demonstrate that they have done enough to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitism. Disputes about the intention and etymology of campus chants and calls for Intifada, mixed with political motivations quite separate from the real operation of campus life, are also set against a years-long trend to cast safety as a matter of sensation, and sensation as equal to harm.One timely example: After the Columbia University protests, some law students reportedly called for exams to be canceled, because the events of the week had left them “irrevocably shaken.” To feel unsafe is to be unsafe in the contemporary campus scene, and one’s perception of a slight, or even an act of violence, has become akin to its reality. Professors have played a role in advancing that ethos in their classrooms and offices, in part out of political empathy, in part because they truly care about students and their well-being, and in part because their institutions now demand it.That situation has now circled back on itself. At UCLA last week, the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles and other organizations organized a rally on campus—a counterprotest, really, to the pro-Palestinian encampments—to “advocate for the protection of Jewish students,” as David N. Myers, one of the school’s history professors, put it. According to Myers, another, more agitated group of counterprotesters was also present, and came close to instigating a brawl with the anti-war activists. Myers wrote that he and other faculty “inserted ourselves between the two groups to serve as a buffer.” A few days later, the situation did turn violent, and some among the original student protesters were beaten by a mob, as the police stood aside. At first, police action was creating danger, then its absence did the same. Amid the confusion of today’s campus protests, it can be hard to predict who will be vulnerable to whom at any given time, and when protection can or should be provided.Clearly students there and then badly needed help, of a sort that faculty could not reasonably provide. In the current college climate, concern for safety is a constant, but rarely modulates above a steady background noise. At the protests, as during the school year, teachers mostly offer their protection as a means of staving off much lesser harms than those delivered by stick-wielding thugs. At Columbia, one professor urged news cameramen not to film students inside the encampment, according to The New York Times, seemingly to guard the students’ reputations.Columbia professors have been involved in student protests in the past, but they didn’t position themselves like this, as purveyors of moral support. Instead, they played the role of mediators. In 1968, when students occupied several buildings across campus, faculty at one point physically positioned themselves between the protesters and the police—in the interest of bringing the matter to a close. A faculty statement from the time read, in part, “As members of the faculty, we are determined to do everything within our power rapidly to resume the full life of this institution in the firm expectation that our proposals will permit a climate to prevail that will once again allow reason, judgment and order to reign.” That sentiment bears far more resemblance to the goals of today’s administrators and politicians—the restoration of order and resumption of business as usual on campus—than it does to the goals of professors who have intervened in recent weeks to keep students safe.Today’s protests might look similar to those previous ones when viewed in pictures, but their context is transformed. Students and parents have spent years demanding more and better services on campus, including services to help students feel and be safe and comfortable. Universities have swelled into giant bureaucracies in response to regulatory demands and competition. College life itself, especially at elite private universities, is now consumed by professionalization more than self-discovery, thanks in part to the astronomical cost of attendance. Campuses have become more diverse, making today’s faculty motivations different and more varied than those driving the (whiter, maler) Columbia faculty of ’68, who yearned for reason’s victory. And politics has become more identitarian, giving selfhood greater sway.In this new context, professors and students have developed a relationship of protection above all others. Faculty have been converted from instructors into personal coaches. Much is gained in this change, including its expression at campus protests; professors such as McAfee and Myers have shown bravery on behalf of students. And yet, something is also lost: By inserting ourselves into students’ lives as guardians of their welfare, we risk failing to protect an important aspect of their intellectual, political, and personal development—namely, their independence.Recounting the intervention that had led to her arrest at Dartmouth, Annelise Orleck reported saying to the police, “Leave our students alone. They’re students. They’re not criminals.” Like some other faculty, Orleck drew a line at calling in law enforcement, a choice she said was unprecedented in her 34 years at the college. But since Columbia set the precedent to do so, policing itself has become a subject of campus demonstrations. Participants may well be risking arrest by design. At the same time, students seem ambivalent about the degree to which they really are at odds with authority, rather than reliant upon it. At Columbia, one was mocked after demanding “humanitarian aid” in the form of food and water after taking over Hamilton Hall. “I guess it’s ultimately a question of what kind of community and obligation Columbia feels it has to its students,” she said.What, exactly, is the nature of that obligation? Attending college is an American coming-of-age ritual, and a means of giving students room to figure out how to live and act in the world. Orleck’s reminder that students are just students undercuts that mission, in a way. It’s both protective and infantilizing. It strips students of their power before they’ve even had a chance to test it out. None of us wants our students or our colleagues to be harmed. But there’s value in learning how it feels to take risks, and to reap their rewards.

In April, when Judge Juan Merchan first heard arguments about whether Donald Trump was violating a gag order in his criminal case in Manhattan, he sharply and skeptically questioned the former president’s attorneys, accusing one of “losing all credibility.” When he found Trump in contempt last week, he did so in a detailed, impassioned ruling that defended his gag order and the need for political speech.The second time around, things were less tense. Merchan was far more relaxed during a contempt hearing last week. His ruling today found Trump in contempt on only one of the four counts prosecutors claimed, and his written decision was shorter and drier. He fined Trump $1,000, adding to a $9,000 penalty levied last week.In the courtroom this morning, however, Merchan was blunter, explicitly threatening to imprison Trump if he won’t stop. “Going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction,” he said. “Mr. Trump, it’s important you understand, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail.”But, Merchan said, he has an obligation to “protect the dignity of the justice system,” adding: “The magnitude of this decision is not lost on me, but at the end of the day I have a job to do. So as much as I don’t want to impose a jail sanction,” he said, “I want you to understand that I will if necessary and appropriate.”The pairing of Merchan’s somewhat perfunctory ruling today with his previous, more emotional courtroom delivery reveals the difficult situation that Merchan faces. He must choose between exercising a power he doesn’t want to exercise, and rendering himself powerless.Knowing Trump’s true mind is impossible, and some of the reporters best-sourced in his camp say he doesn’t want to be sent to jail. But the former president is behaving like a man who has calculated that getting thrown in the clink for a night or two for the offense of posting some mean things on Truth Social would be great publicity.Even worse for Merchan, that might be right. Trump’s legal defense in the trial seems to be a bit shaky. The overarching strategy seems to be to sow doubts about little parts of the prosecution’s story, rather than mounting some counternarrative. The defendant has reportedly been grumbling that his lawyers are not aggressive enough, while they keep running afoul of Merchan.But Trump has always been more interested in the political defense, in which he has a clear counternarrative: He says that the big bad justice system, run by Democrats, is out to get him and interfere with the election in order to hurt him. (The irony is that this master of projection sits accused of election interference in the Manhattan trial.) And what could show that better than the outlandish penalty of jail for off-brand tweets? That might not convince any skeptics, but it could rile up his base.Yet, as Merchan said, he can’t just let the attacks go. Trump has made his various trials into a test of the principle of equal justice under the law, arguing that he should not face accountability for his own actions. Merchan called Trump’s defiance “a direct attack on the rule of law,” and though the scale is much smaller than the immunity case at the Supreme Court last month, he’s right: Any other defendant who repeatedly violated an order from a judge would expect to face escalating sanctions. Merchan may have little interest in defending expected witness Michael Cohen, whose inability to stay quiet he called out in his previous ruling, but he really does need to defend the jury and other witnesses from intimidation—to say nothing of his need to enforce his own orders.The result is something like watching a parent ineffectually scold a toddler. (This is not the first time that Trump has warranted that comparison, in many cases from his own aides.)Maybe this time the judge’s warning will get through and Trump will rein himself in. “He’s now sitting quietly, frowning, still seemingly absorbing that message from the judge,” The New York Times reported, noting that this is far more restrained than his reaction when the federal judge in his defamation trial threatened jail. Then again, his campaign today called Merchan’s threat a “Third World authoritarian tactic.”One other notable observer doesn’t think the threat will work. “Because this is now the tenth time that this Court has found Defendant in criminal contempt, spanning three separate motions, it is apparent that monetary fines have not, and will not, suffice to deter Defendant from violating this Court’s lawful orders,” he wrote. That observer was Merchan himself in today’s decision.

In the Greek village of Vrontados, each year during Greek Orthodox Easter celebrations, members of two rival churches hold a traditional “rocket war” by firing thousands of homemade fireworks towards each other while services are held. The goal for each side is to hit the bell in the tower of the opposing church. The festival, called Rouketopolemos, has been celebrated by the churches of Agios Markos and Panagia Erithiani for at least 135 years. Gathered here are images of this year's battle, along with others from recent years.

Humans have always been explorers. For better or worse, something in our collective makeup seems to push us to discover new things, understand the enigmatic, or reach past the limits of what we imagine is possible. Some people dream about what the cosmos could contain; scientists launch probes into space, and astronauts travel beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Others go on life-threatening quests, such as climbing the planet’s tallest peaks and diving into the sea’s deepest trenches, to tap into the wonder, fear, and awe that come from experiencing—and surviving—the places on Earth most hostile to human life.The six books below reflect on what drives our species to seek out the uncharted and unknown. In each, what propels an individual’s desire to expand their experiences differs; some stories follow people yearning for adventure or to set a record, while other protagonists turn to exploration when they want to run away from something. No matter where these books take us, whether they cover searching for life beyond our planet or diving miles deep into the ocean to discover ecosystems heretofore unknown, their pages bring readers along for the ride. Gallery Books Contact, by Carl SaganIn Sagan’s 1985 novel, the astronomer Ellie Arroway is the leader of a scientific endeavor called Project Argus, a network of radio telescopes that picks up a message from an extraterrestrial source. The missive includes blueprints to build a machine that can take a group of humans … somewhere. Sagan’s story weaves Ellie’s personal life, particularly her relationship with her parents, together with Earth’s many competing efforts to build (or destroy) a working version of this machine. Though the novel doesn’t shy away from humanity’s propensity to sow discord and violence, Sagan’s story has a through line of hope—Contact is ultimately about how people’s tendency to seek the unknowable can lead them to better understand themselves and others. By the end of the novel, Ellie—who has traveled to the stars and back—realizes that “for small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” This message resonates nearly four decades later, as humans wade farther and farther into the galaxy. Doubleday The Underworld: Journeys to the Depths of the Ocean, by Susan CaseyFor all of humanity’s stargazing, the deepest trenches of Earth’s oceans remain relatively unexplored. Many people consider the sea “the earth’s haunted basement—sinister, shrouded in blackness, spewing molten rock and poisonous gases, a den of freaky beings and hoary specters—and they would rather stay upstairs,” Casey writes in her book about those who do seek to journey to the bottom of the sea, where “intraterrestrial” life thrives. Casey herself is one of those people, and in The Underworld, she showcases others whose vocations send them into the ocean’s depths. But the book isn’t only about humans: Equal time is given to the creatures that live down there—including animals that aquanauts have given flippant monikers to, such as assfish, snailfish, weirdfish, and rattails—and underwater natural phenomena, such as black smoker hydrothermal vents, chimneylike structures that spew a sulfide-rich “smoke” into the water. Through Casey’s research, interviews, and firsthand experience, readers journey to the abyssal and hadal zones of the ocean, which run 10,000 to 36,000 feet deep, and get to share the “alchemical mix of wonder and fear” the author finds there.Read: The Titanic sub and the draw of extreme tourism One World Lone Women, by Victor LaValleExploration isn’t always about running toward something—at times, it’s about running away from something else. Lone Women uses the trappings of the American West, a complicated, enduring cultural symbol of a supposedly untouched frontier, to delve into the human tendency to try to escape the past. It follows Adelaide Henry, a Black woman who leaves her family's California farm in 1915 under violent circumstances and lugs a mysterious trunk to Montana, where the U.S. government is offering free land to those who homestead there. The trunk’s undisclosed, possibly supernatural contents disturb Adelaide, and seem directly related to what she’s trying to leave behind. Over the course of the book, we see her failed attempt to shut that part of her past away as she tries to build a life in the brutal landscape of the Great Plains, a place that can destroy anyone who’s unprepared or without friends—or be a refuge for those looking to build a new home with space for the love, and suffering, that comes with living. Read: The ‘curious’ robots searching for the ocean’s secrets Vintage The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey, by Candice MillardTeddy Roosevelt lived his life by fighting his way through it, pummeling any hardships or setbacks with relentless action and an indomitable force of will. In 1912, he lost a presidential election that would have given him a third term. The defeat devastated him, and—as he was wont to do—he sought an endeavor that would put his mental and physical limits to the test. He decided on an expedition to an unmapped expanse of land in South America, which to North Americans represented an alluring, seemingly impenetrable wilderness. Once he landed in Brazil, he was persuaded to explore an Amazonian tributary ominously and aptly called the River of Doubt. “If it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so,” he wrote. Roosevelt did, in fact, almost die on that trek. He and the men who accompanied him were, “for all their own experience and knowledge, vulnerable outsiders,” Millard writes. She goes on to describe how their hubris on that journey made them “clumsy, conspicuous prey” at the mercy of not only the Cinta Larga tribe, whose members shadowed them throughout and could have killed them easily if they’d decided to, but also the flora and fauna they knew little about. The River of Doubt is a riveting look at how exploration can be laden with arrogance and ignorance. Millard vividly recounts how Roosevelt brought both with him into the Amazon, and how much both cost him.Read: The difference between exploring and tourism Vintage Into the Wild, by Jon KrakauerIn April 1992, a 24-year-old man named Chris McCandless walked into the wilds three hours outside Fairbanks, Alaska, intent to live off the land without any modern conveniences. “I don’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or where I am. None of that matters,” he told the man who dropped him off at the edge of the bush. McCandless never made it out—he died in the home he’d made in an abandoned bus sometime that August. His journey was reckless—he was unprepared in terms of both supplies and the knowledge of how to survive. His story, which Krakauer first recounted in an article for Outside magazine, angered many: How could McCandless have been so foolhardy? (Krakauer’s account also doesn’t capture all of his subject’s life: Chris’s sister Carine alleged years later that their parents had physically and mentally abused both children; they called her memoir “fictionalized.”) McCandless, however, was confounded by people passively staying within the confines of a civilization that he found crushing. Krakauer’s recounting of his final months is captivating, giving readers a window into McCandless’s mentality; it is a tragic portrait of a man whose urge to escape into nature was so strong and alluring that, decades later, the circumstances of his death have morphed into legend. William Morrow Seveneves, by Neal StephensonAt certain moments, the impetus to go somewhere new isn’t about gaining knowledge or traveling simply for the novelty: Sometimes, it’s the only way to survive. In Seveneves, the moon explodes, making Earth uninhabitable for humans. The bulk of the story centers on the 1,500 or so people who struggle in the aftermath of the disaster, living initially in ad hoc habitats built around the International Space Station. Most of them die in these first years, destroyed by mounting internal discord and by the struggle to gain the basic resources—water, air, food—required for life. Stephenson goes deep into the science of their attempts to make it, and the book will fire up anyone who, for example, wants to know in detail how humans might be able to capture water from a passing ice comet. Ultimately, only seven women able to bear children remain, and they later set up base in a cleft of the broken moon. Then, about two-thirds of the way through the book, the action leaps 5,000 years into the future, where a civilization with billions of genetically altered humans seeks to reclaim Earth. Stephenson’s considerable extrapolations about what humans—or their genetically altered future descendants—will do to survive make the novel a fun, philosophical, and surprisingly hopeful read.

Students at dozens of colleges and universities across the country are occupying quads, lawns, and buildings in opposition to Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, demanding that their universities divest from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies. But is cutting such financial ties even possible? And even if it were, would the loss of colleges’ investments actually change the bottom line for businesses operating in the region or providing arms for the conflict?Institutions of higher education hold close to $1 trillion in their endowments, much of it parked in index funds, hedge funds, and private-equity funds that invest in equities, bonds, derivatives, real estate, start-ups, and so on. They do not generally make individual investments themselves, meaning that divestment would not be as simple as executing a few stock orders.That does not mean they have no say over where their money is going, however. Many universities already can claim that they avoid pouring money into industries that damage the planet or hurt people. In one survey of 688 schools with endowments, 187 said they had a “responsible investment strategy.” Many put their cash in “ESG” funds that invest only in firms committed to meeting environmental and social standards (such as measuring their carbon output and reporting on the gender and racial balance of their workforce). Other endowments engage in “impact investing,” pushing cash to for-profit enterprises working for the common good (such as ones building homes, grocery stores, and schools in low-income neighborhoods). Still others bar investment in gambling and tobacco.Plus, universities have divested before. In the 1980s, protesters at schools around the country formed encampments and demanded divestment from businesses operating in apartheid South Africa. Many schools agreed. (Endowments were smaller and simpler then.) In the past decade, scores of colleges and universities—including Columbia, Brown, and Harvard—have divested from fossil-fuel firms after being petitioned by campus activists; others pulled money out of Russia after its incursion into Ukraine; others divested from private prisons and the retailers of assault weapons.Divestment from Israel would not be straightforward. It might not be immediate. (And at least one state, Ohio, has a law barring its public universities from divesting from Israel.) But it is certainly possible, Charlie Eaton, a sociologist at UC Merced who studies university endowments, told me. “If you’re a Columbia or a Brown or a Princeton or a Harvard, you have a lot of leverage as a very large investor. If you’ve got an endowment that’s valued in the tens of billions of dollars, you can find somebody who will manage the funds according to your preferences.”If schools chose to do this, they would face little financial risk. Their investments are so big that pulling back from arms manufacturers and Israeli companies, a tiny share of the global economy, would do essentially nothing to their bottom line.[Annie Lowrey: If you’re worried about the climate, move your money]The specific decisions a college would have to make are more complicated. Schools could divest from Israeli firms and military contractors around the world if they actually wanted to. But what about firms with major operations in Israel? Firms whose wares or services are purchased by the Israel Defense Forces? Some students at Columbia argue that the school should drop its investments in all companies “profiting from Israeli apartheid,” including Amazon, Airbnb, Hyundai, and Google, among others.A yet-bigger question is whether divestment would do anything. In terms of changing the financial outlook for the firms being called out, the clear answer is no, not much. The old investing chestnut applies: For every seller, there is a buyer. If University A sells its shares in military contractor B and Israeli technology firm C, pension fund D is going to pick them up. Unless a huge share of the world’s investors refuses to put money into the companies in question, share prices and financing costs won’t be impacted much. Indeed, studies of ESG investing show no effect on a company’s expected returns. The South Africa divestment campaign did not seem to do much either.That said, some studies of fossil-fuel divestment show a small, but measurable, effect. Divestment has reduced the share price of American coal companies, for instance. The world’s financiers came to see investing in coal as riskier, in essence, and lower returns as likelier.Still, this kind of analysis misses the point. Most students understand that divestment would not bring down the Israeli economy or end the war. Their goal is not really a financial one but a political one: They don’t want their universities supporting Israel or associated with the human tragedy in Gaza. They oppose the war.Likewise, the real opposition to divestment is political, not technical. Most Americans believe that Israel has a valid reason to be targeting Hamas; the country is split on whether the campaign of bombardment itself is justified. Many donors to colleges and universities find the protests anti-Semitic, and support Israel, and don’t want to see administrators give in. Some are even promising to quit giving money to their alma maters if the schools divest.University administrators, for their part, seem to be searching for ways to make everyone happy, by promising to study the issue or hold votes on their investment strategies. Brown committed to meet with a divestment coalition. The University of Minnesota agreed to share more information about its holdings. It seems unlikely that much will come from these initiatives. But if colleges felt compelled to divest, they could certainly do so.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Kevin Townsend, a senior producer on our podcast team. He currently works on the Radio Atlantic podcast and has helped produce Holy Week—about the week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—and the Peabody-winning Floodlines, which explores the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.Kevin enjoys reading Philip Levine’s poems and visiting the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., where he can sit with Mark Rothko’s large-scale works. He’s also a Canadian-punk-music fan—Metz is one of his favorite bands—and a self-proclaimed Star Trek nerd who’s excited to binge the final season of Star Trek: Discovery.First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: Amanda Knox: “What if Jens Söring actually did it?” How Daniel Radcliffe outran Harry Potter The blindness of elites The Culture Survey: Kevin TownsendA quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: In college, I developed a steady rotation of quiet songs that didn’t distract me while I was studying. Artists such as Tycho and Washed Out were some of my favorites.Recently, I’ve been into Floating Points, the moniker for Samuel Shepherd, a British electronic-music producer. I could recommend his Late Night Tales album or Elaenia, but the one that stands out most to me is his collaborative album, Promises, featuring the saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It’s a gorgeous, layered work that’s best listened to all the way through—but if you’re pressed for time, “Movement 6” is an exceptional track.As for a loud song, one of my favorite bands is the Canadian punk trio Metz. I’ve had “A Boat to Drown In” on heavy rotation for the past year. It doesn’t have the thrumming precision of their earlier singles such as “Headache” and “Wet Blanket,” but the song is a knockout every time. Metz just released a new record, Up on Gravity Hill, that I’m excited to get lost in.The last museum or gallery show that I loved: “Mark Rothko: Paintings on Paper,” an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, showcased some of the abstract painter’s lesser-known works. The show closed recently, but the museum’s permanent collection features a good number of his works, including some of his famous color-field paintings. The National Gallery is also home to many pieces from the collection of the now-closed Corcoran Gallery of Art, and they’re worth a visit—especially the Hudson River School paintings, which must be seen in person in all of their maximalist glory.Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: A few months ago, on my honeymoon, I reread No Country for Old Men. It’s far from a romantic beach read, but few writers are as tersely gripping as Cormac McCarthy. The Coen brothers’ film adaptation is fantastic, but the novel—published in 2005, two years into the Iraq War—encompasses a wider story about generations of men at war. It’s worth reading even if you’ve seen the movie.I also brought with me a book I’d long meant to read: Lulu Miller’s Why Fish Don’t Exist. Part science history, part memoir, the book is mostly a biography of David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president and a taxonomist who catalogued thousands of species of fish. It’s a unique and remarkable read that I can’t recommend highly enough. Fundamentally, it’s about our need for order—in our personal world, and in the natural world around us.Miller’s book reminds me of a recent Radio Atlantic episode that I produced, in which Atlantic staff writer Zoë Schlanger discusses her new book, The Light Eaters, about the underappreciated biological creativity of plants. Miller and Schlanger both examine and challenge the hierarchies we apply to the natural world—and why humanity can be better off questioning those ideas.A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: My favorite poet is Philip Levine. His work is spare and direct, alive with love for the unsung corners of America and the people who inhabit them. Levine lived in Detroit during the Depression and spent more than three decades teaching in Fresno. Having grown up in Pittsburgh and moved to California as a teenager, I connected easily with the world he saw.“What Work Is” and “The Simple Truth” are two of his poems that I often return to, especially for the final lines, which feel like gut punches. [Related: An interview with Philip Levine (From 1999)]Speaking of final-line gut punches, the poem (and line) that I think of most frequently is by another favorite poet of mine: the recently departed Louise Glück. “Nostos,” from her 1996 book, Meadowlands, touches on how essential yet fragile our memories are, and there’s a haunting sweetness to its last line: “We look at the world once, in childhood. / The rest is memory.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: It’s May, so, honestly: the NHL playoffs. (And it’s been a great year for hockey.) But when it comes to actual television, I’m excited to binge the fifth and final season of Star Trek: Discovery.It’s bittersweet that the series is ending. Sonequa Martin-Green gives an Emmy-worthy lead performance, but for all of the show’s greatness, it can lean a bit too much into space opera, with the galaxy at stake every season and a character on the verge of tears every episode. Trek is usually at its best when it’s trying to be TV, not cinema. (And that’s including the films—Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan succeeded by essentially serving up a movie-length episode.) [Related: A critic’s case against cinema]Being a friend of DeSoto, I want to give another Trek-related recommendation: The Greatest Generation and Greatest Trek podcasts, which go episode by episode through the wider Trek Industrial Complex. The humor, analysis, and clever audio production elevate the shows above the quality of your typical rewatch podcast. I came to The Greatest Generation as an audio-production and comedy nerd, and it turned me into a Trek nerd as well. So be warned.Something I recently rewatched, reread, or otherwise revisited: The Hunt for Red October. Somehow, it gets better with every watch. “Give me a ping, Vasili. One ping only, please.”The Week Ahead Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, an action sci-fi movie about a young ape who must face a tyrannical new ape leader (in theaters Friday) Dark Matter, a mystery series, based on the best-selling novel, about a man who is pulled into an alternate reality and must save his family from himself (premieres Wednesday on Apple TV+) First Love, a collection of essays by Lilly Dancyger that portray women’s friendships as their great loves (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of Elena Dudum. I Am Building an Archive to Prove That Palestine ExistsBy Elena Dudum My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.” His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him … Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.” Read the full article.More in Culture How do you make a genuinely weird mainstream movie? The godfather of American comedy The sci-fi writer who invented conspiracy theory Hacks goes for the jugular. “What I wish someone had told me 30 years ago” Will Americans ever get sick of cheap junk? The complicated ethics of rare-book collecting The diminishing returns of having good taste When poetry could define a life Catch Up on The Atlantic What’s left to restrain Donald Trump? Democrats defang the House’s far right. America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed, Tyler Austin Harper argues. Photo Album Shed hunters unpack their haul on the opening day of the Wyoming shed-hunt season. (Natalie Behring / Getty) Take a look at these images of devastating floods across Kenya, a pagan fire festival in Scotland, antler gathering in Wyoming, and more.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Last month, a pro-Palestinian activist stood in front of me on Columbia University’s campus with a sign that read By Any Means Necessary. She smiled. She seemed like a nice person. I am an Israeli graduate student at the university, and I know holding that sign is within her rights. And yet, its message was so painful and disturbing that after that moment, I left New York for a few days.If I’d had the courage, I would have asked that student, "What exactly do you mean by ‘any means necessary’?” Holding up signs? Leading demonstrations? Or do knives also fall under that category? Guns and rifles as well? Raping and taking civilians hostage? (As of this writing, 133 hostages are still being held in Gaza.) And whom would these means be employed against? Columbia? The Israeli government? Soldiers? Civilians? Children?Since my return to Columbia, tensions have escalated dramatically. After protesters broke into Hamilton Hall on Tuesday night, the administration sent in the NYPD to evacuate the building and arrest the occupiers. This is the second time such measures have been taken—and they may only intensify the frustration and hostility of all involved. More worrying, this frustration might push more students to believe that “by any means necessary” is the only way to achieve their goals.At this point, anyone reading this essay might suspect that I am not objective, and they would be absolutely right. Because if you ask me what I think about when I see the words by any means necessary, it is only one thing. I think about Sagi: my best friend, whom I knew since sixth grade, the funniest and kindest person I have ever met.On the morning of October 7, Sagi Golan woke up at home with his boyfriend, Omer Ohana, whom he was supposed to marry two weeks later. They had already bought their beautiful white suits, and I had bought a plane ticket to the wedding. As a reservist, Sagi immediately headed south, where he fought bravely for hours at Kibbutz Be’eri, saving the lives of innocent adults and children, until he was killed in combat with terrorists. One hundred civilians were killed in Be’eri, and 30 more were taken hostage.I am a writer who has published short stories and a novel, but the day Sagi was killed, I lost my words. I couldn’t get a plane ticket to Israel for the funeral, so I just showed up at the airport. I was so confused and upset that when the ticketing agent tried to understand why I was trying to get on a plane without a ticket, I said, “My best friend … a wedding … a funeral …” The agent, a complete stranger, asked if he could give me a hug. Half an hour later, he’d arranged a one-way ticket.I landed an hour before Sagi’s funeral. The flowers that were meant for my best friend's wedding were laid upon his grave.[Mark Leibovich: House Republicans at the ‘Liberation Camp’]Back in New York, I barely left my apartment. I barely ate, barely slept. By that time, protests had already become routine on campus, but I was so deep in my own grief that I didn’t even notice. This went on for months. Toward the end of the fall semester, a professor took me aside after class. He told me that in his youth, he’d had friends who spent summers at kibbutzim in Israel, describing the people there as the nicest in the world. Neither he nor his friends were Jewish, but they were captivated by the concept of a cooperative socialist society. “Hearing about the attacks on those kibbutzim on October 7 was deeply painful for me,” he said. “So I can’t even imagine how painful it is for you.”That professor is a strong critic of the Israeli government and its policies. But in that particular moment, he chose to address only my pain. Although I’m still grieving and will be for a long while, his compassion helped me start to heal, and allowed me to better perceive the suffering of many others, Israelis and Palestinians, whose lives have been shattered since October 7.As an Israeli, I despise the rhetoric emerging from certain extremist politicians, who have claimed that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza or advocated for a forced deportation of Palestinians. I also believe that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go down as one of the worst leaders in the history of the Jewish people. His willingness to grant political power and public legitimacy to racist and fascist ideologues is a moral stain on the history of the nation, and I am alarmed by the possibility that Netanyahu would reject a hostage deal and a cease-fire to preserve his own power.But some of the demonstrators are calling for something categorically different from an end to the Netanyahu government or even the war. Some of them are suggesting, implicitly, that there is no place for Jewish life between the river and the sea. Indeed, many of their slogans have nothing to do with peace. Almost every day, I hear protesters chant “Brick by brick, wall by wall, Israel has to fall” and “Intifada Revolution.” Growing up in Israel during the early 2000s, I lived through the Second Intifada. I witnessed buses blown up by suicide bombers and mass shootings in city centers, terrorist attacks that killed many innocent civilians in the name of an “Intifada Revolution.”Recently, a video surfaced of a student leader saying, “Zionists don’t deserve to live”; on campus, an individual stood in front of Jewish students with a sign reading Al-Qassam’s next targets. In the encampment itself, signs hang with small red triangles that might seem like an innocent design choice. Whether the protesters realize it or not, Hamas uses that icon to indicate Israelis that they’ve targeted and murdered.I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush. Bringing the NYPD onto campus on April 18, when the encampment had just been established, likely contributed to the escalation, and I know that off-campus bad actors, including politicians, are taking advantage of the volatile situation and fueling tensions. Most of the student protesters are peaceful; Jews are participating in the demonstrations. But most is not all. And what’s significant is that many students on campus minimize or ignore extreme or violent rhetoric, and some even laugh and cheer along. I’ve heard Columbia students claim that these incidents are so petty that they are not worth discussing at all. I find myself debating intelligent people who treat reported facts like myths if they don’t align with their narrative.Universities don’t have to be battlefields. More people, including faculty and students, should speak out against hateful rhetoric that is morally wrong, even if this rhetoric is protected by the First Amendment. Fundamentally, I don’t see how the protesters’ insistence on using the language of violence will contribute to the Palestinian cause, or their own. They have to know that their actions have only strengthened the extreme-right political forces in the U.S. and Israel, who are already using these statements to consolidate more power. Their expressions and actions trample the voices of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists who advocate for complexity and compassion. And they further entrench today’s distorted public discourse, which demands complete conformity from people within the same group and zero compassion for those in another.

Shangri-la is best-known as a fictional place—an idyllic valley first imagined by a British novelist in the 1930s—but look at a map and you’ll find it. Sitting at the foot of the Himalayas in southwestern China, Shangri-la went by a more prosaic name until 2001, when the city was rebranded by Chinese officials eager to boost tourism. Their ploy worked.The star of Shangri-la is the Ganden Sumtseling Monastery. Since its destruction in 1966, during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, this Tibetan Buddhist monastery has been rebuilt into a sprawling complex crowned by golden rooftops and home to more than 700 monks. It was humming with construction when I visited in October—and filled with Chinese tourists.Like many monasteries, Sumtseling is thriving thanks to Tibetan Buddhism’s growing popularity in China. When the government loosened restrictions on religious worship in the 1990s, the practice took off, especially among urban elites unsatisfied with the Chinese Communist Party’s materialist worldview. It’s an open secret that even high-ranking party officials follow Tibetan lamas.Tibetan Buddhism’s recent spread presents both a threat and an opportunity for President Xi Jinping. He wants to make China politically and culturally homogenous, a goal that could be jeopardized by a tradition steeped in Tibetan language and history. But Xi is enacting a program that seeks to turn the rising popularity of Tibetan Buddhism to his advantage—to transform the tradition from a hotbed of dissent into an instrument of assimilation and party propaganda. If it works, it could smooth his path to lifelong power and help him remake China according to his nationalist vision.[Read: Xi Jinping is fighting a culture war at home]Tibetan Buddhism isn’t only a spiritual practice; it’s an expression of Tibet’s cultural identity and resistance to Chinese rule. The CCP annexed Tibet in 1951, claiming that the then-independent country belonged to historical China and had to be liberated from the Dalai Lama’s Buddhist theocracy. The Dalai Lama fled to India to establish a Tibetan government-in-exile, and Tibet has been a source of opposition to Beijing ever since.According to the Tibetan scholar Dhondup Rekjong, Xi’s ultimate goal is to erase Tibet’s language and cultural identity entirely. In a campaign similar to the CCP’s oppression of China’s Uyghur Muslims, Tibetan teachers and writers have been arrested as “separatists” for promoting the Tibetan language, and more than 1 million Tibetan children have been sent to boarding schools to be assimilated into Chinese culture. Xi’s effort to control Tibetan Buddhism is just one piece of this long-standing effort to suppress Tibetan identity, but it has taken on an additional valence as the practice expands in China.To co-opt Tibetan Buddhism’s popularity, the CCP recruits religious leaders willing to implement what it calls Sinicized Buddhism—a combination of state-sanctioned religious teachings and socialist propaganda taught by party-approved clergy—and rewards their monasteries with money and status. The well-funded Sumtseling monastery, for example, has been officially designated by the CCP as a “forerunner in implementing the Sinification of Buddhism.” To detach Buddhism from Tibetan culture, monks are pressured to replace traditional Tibetan-language scriptures with Chinese translations. According to Rekjong, they will soon be expected to practice in Mandarin.The approach is part of a broader campaign to influence all religions in China. As of January 1, every religious group is legally required to “carry out patriotic education and enhance the national awareness and patriotic sentiments of clergy and believers.” Failure to pledge loyalty to Xi, display the Chinese flag, and preach “patriotic sentiments” is now punishable by law. If Mao wanted to eliminate religion, Xi wants to nationalize it.Co-opting Tibetan Buddhism will bring Xi one step closer to achieving what he and the CCP call the “Chinese dream,” a vision that seeks to unite China’s ethnic groups—its Han majority, Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, and dozens more—in their dedication to the motherland and party. Xi has already consolidated more political power than just about any other modern leader, but realizing the Chinese dream will require something arguably more difficult: winning the hearts and minds of his subjects. As communist ideology loses its allure, Xi is enlisting religion to sell his program to the people.But it may not be that easy. Joshua Esler, a researcher who studies Tibetan culture at the Sheridan Institute of Higher Education, in Australia, told me that Tibetan Buddhism has grown so popular precisely because it offers the Chinese something their government can’t. Many Han Chinese, he said, “believe that Tibetan Buddhism has retained a spiritual authenticity that is lost in China.” They see Tibet as an alternative to the corruption, materialism, and environmental degradation that characterize life under the CCP. Any government interference in Tibetan Buddhism might alienate its followers, pushing them toward Buddhist leaders who secretly support the exiled Dalai Lama.[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]As for Tibetans themselves, Sinicized Buddhism is unlikely to become popular anytime soon. Many of them consider monasteries that have too eagerly embraced Xi’s program to be sellouts. But as the government ramps up its campaign—and as a new generation of assimilated Tibetans comes of age—that might begin to change.After visiting Shangri-la, I went to the remote Tibetan town of Daocheng, where a young monk named Phuntsok showed me around his monastery. “Without the Communist Party, we would not have freedom of religion,” Phuntsok told me as we walked through ornate chapels. He extolled the CCP’s support for Tibetan Buddhism, and no wonder: Locals told me that the monastery, Yangteng Gonpa, had received substantial government funding. A freshly paved road snaked up the mountainside on which the monastery was perched, ending at a parking lot built to accommodate hundreds of visitors. A new welcome gate was being erected, and the tourism office promoted Yangteng as one of the area’s main attractions.I followed Phuntsok up to the second floor of a chapel, where he showed me an exhibit celebrating the monastery’s “liberation” by the Red Army in 1950. The space doubled as a classroom; a whiteboard showed the faint outlines of a lesson on how monks can “actively guide religion to adapt to socialist society.” Though the monastery belongs to the Buddhist tradition of the Dalai Lama, Phuntsok didn’t mention the exiled spiritual leader, whose name and image are censored in Tibet. Mural at the Yangteng Gonpa monastery celebrating its “liberation” by the Red Army (Photograph by Judith Hertog) Instead, Phuntsok praised Gyaltsen Norbu, a Buddhist leader who was handpicked by the CCP as a child to be the Panchen Lama, a position second only to the Dalai Lama. (Many Tibetans don’t recognize Norbu as legitimate; in 1995, the Dalai Lama identified another child as the Panchen Lama, whom Chinese authorities promptly detained, and whose whereabouts remain unknown.) When the 88-year-old Dalai Lama dies, Norbu will likely be tasked by the CCP to select his replacement, who will be raised under CCP supervision and expected to promote Sinicized Buddhism. Westerners tend to imagine the Dalai Lama as a force for peace and human rights, but the position can just as easily be put into the service of totalitarianism.Gray Tuttle, a Tibetan-studies professor at Columbia University, told me that the CCP is wary of any religious movement that isn’t under its control. In 2017, the government issued orders to tear down Larung Gar, Tibet’s most popular Buddhist monastery. Thousands of residents, including many Han Chinese, were displaced from the remote valley where they had come to study. The official reason for the evictions was that the monastery didn’t comply with safety regulations; the likelier explanation is that, despite the government’s initial support for the monastery, the CCP felt threatened by its success and the influence of its teachers. “The CCP definitely wants to limit the charismatic power of any particular lama,” Tuttle told me.The challenge Xi has set for himself, then, is to reshape Tibetan Buddhism without undermining its allure. Judging by the large crowds at Sumtseling, he’s succeeding—at least among some Han Chinese. “Tibetan lamas possess the deepest knowledge,” a Han woman named Jin Yi, who had traveled 400 miles to the monastery to meet her guru, told me. But devotees like her were considerably outnumbered by tourists, many of them dressed up as Tibetan pilgrims and modeling for photos—striking lotus poses, spinning prayer wheels, or staring in feigned rapture at Buddhist murals. Few entered the chapels, where photography was prohibited. Government-sponsored monasteries like Sumtseling might attract tourists looking for a photo op, but lavish temples won’t win over true believers.

Hope exhausted years agobut I still try.Heart thumps on doggedlyand wants to knowif nice surprises might in time arrive,and mind likewise. I readto keep a lookoutunbeknownst,or make a wild surmise. I dreamthe ground I plough and plantmight even nowsprout greenery I never saw beforeand not, as I expect, remainas rolling oceans do in falling snow.