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Too Few Americans Are Eating a Remarkable Fruit
Breadfruit is a staple in tropical places—and climate change is pushing its range north.
theatlantic.com
Now Is the Time to Wrestle With Frantz Fanon
Does the patron saint of political violence have anything to teach us today?
3 h
theatlantic.com
Donald Trump, Meme Stock
How the ex-president’s social-media platform became the new Bed Bath & Beyond
4 h
theatlantic.com
‘It’s Almost as If They Support a Hypothetical War’
“This is our 9/11,” an Israeli Defense Forces spokesperson said a few days after the rape, torture, kidnapping, and mass murder of Israelis on October 7. Or it was worse than 9/11. “Twenty 9/11s,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said a few weeks later, once the scale of the devastation was evident. As for the current military campaign in Gaza? Earlier this month, Netanyahu told new IDF cadets, “We are preventing the next 9/11.”I’m a New Yorker. For me, 9/11 was the unbearable loss of thousands of lives. But I’m also a veteran of America’s War on Terror, so for me, 9/11 was also the pretext for disastrous, poorly conceived wars that spread death and destruction, destabilized the Middle East, created new enemies, and empowered Iran.[George Packer: Israel must not react stupidly]Finally, I’m an American. My country is supporting Israel militarily and diplomatically, and so I have a stake in answering this question: Is the United States enabling Israel to make the same terrible mistakes we did after 9/11?In principle, Israel has a case for military action in Gaza, and it goes something like this. Across its border sat an army of tens of thousands of men intent on massacring civilians. Ghazi Hamad, from Hamas’s political bureau, declared that the atrocities of October 7 were “just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.” Yes, rooting out Hamas would be brutal—the group welcomes civilian collateral damage and has entrenched itself in hundreds of miles of tunnels honeycombed through civilian infrastructure. But peace is illusory as long as Hamas remains in power.Perhaps, in an alternate world, Israel could have fought such a war with restraint, in order to degrade Hamas’s military power without playing into its hands by causing unnecessary civilian suffering. Israel would have helped, rather than hindered, the efforts of outside states to funnel humanitarian aid into Gaza—showing that it distinguished the Palestinian people from Hamas battalions and valued their lives. If Israel had very different internal politics, it might even have signaled a positive vision for the war’s end—one premised on rebuilding a Gazan government led by Palestinians not committed to Israel’s destruction but to a fair-minded two-state solution that would ensure full political rights for Gazans. But this is not the war that Israel has fought.“Sometimes it sounds like certain officials, it’s almost as if they support a hypothetical war, instead of the actual war that Israel is fighting,” Adil Haque, an executive editor at Just Security and an international-law professor at Rutgers University, told me.Friends of mine who support Israel have compared the Gaza campaign to the American and Iraqi fight against the Islamic State in Mosul, another large urban area of about 2 million people defended by an entrenched enemy hiding among civilians. At least 9,000 innocents died, many from American air strikes.I walked through the devastation in Mosul two years after the battle, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. Blocks of rubble, the skeletal remains of homes and shops, survivors living in the shatters who spoke of starvation and horror, collecting rainwater or risking their lives to go to the river, where soldiers shot at them. “It’s like Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” one man told me in the ruins of his home. But he also said that ISIS was gone from Mosul forever. “Even if all I have is a piece of wood,” he said, “I would fight them rather than let them return.”The war Israel is actually fighting in Gaza bears little resemblance to that brutal and far from perfect, but necessary, campaign. Rather, in Gaza, Israel has shown itself willing to cause heavy civilian casualties and unwilling to care for a population left without basic necessities for survival. It has offered no realistic plan for an eventual political settlement. Far from the hypothetical war for Israeli security, this looks like a war of revenge. Palestinians gather to collect aid food in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on February 26, 2024, amid continuing battles between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. ( AFP / Getty) Israel’s approach to civilian lives and infrastructure is the first and most obvious problem. John Spencer, the chair of urban-warfare studies at West Point, told The Wall Street Journal this month that Israel sets the “gold standard” for avoiding civilian casualties. Defenders of Israel cite its use of precision munitions and its distribution of leaflets and phone calls warning civilians to evacuate combat areas.But evacuation orders can only do so much for a trapped population facing destroyed infrastructure, dangerous exit routes, and unrealistic time frames. Israel’s original evacuation order for northern Gaza gave 1.1 million people just 24 hours to leave. As Paula Gaviria Betancur, the United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights of internally displaced persons, noted at the time, “It is inconceivable that more than half of Gaza’s population could traverse an active war zone, without devastating humanitarian consequences, particularly while deprived of essential supplies and basic services.”And precision munitions are good only when used precisely. Senior Israeli officials complained even before the war that the list of possible military targets in Gaza was “very problematic.” Then Israel dropped a massive amount of ordnance on Gazan neighborhoods—6,000 bombs in the first six days of the war alone. For comparison, the international coalition fighting ISIS dropped an average of 2,500 bombs a month across all of Syria and Iraq. To think that Israel was precisely targeting 1,000 strikes a day strains credulity. Satellite images do not show pinpoint strikes but whole flattened neighborhoods. From October 7 to November 26, Israel damaged or destroyed more than 37,000 structures, and as CNN reported in December, about 40 to 45 percent of the air-to-ground munitions used at that point were unguided missiles. Certainly Hamas’s practice of building its tunnels beneath civilian infrastructure means that destroying the tunnels will cause widespread damage, but the scale of this bombing campaign goes well beyond that.What does this mean for death tolls? Larry Lewis, the director of the Center for Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence at the Center for Naval Analyses, found that even if we accept the IDF’s claim that 12,000 of the roughly 29,000 Gazans reported dead by February 20 were enemy fighters, that would still mean that for every 100 Israeli air strikes, the IDF killed an average of 54 civilians. In the U.S. campaign in Raqqa, the American military caused an estimated 1.7 civilian deaths per 100 strikes.Israel’s lack of concern for civilian casualties is clear from well-documented individual strikes. On October 31, Israel struck the Jabaliya refugee camp with what appears to have been at least two 2,000-pound bombs, destroying entire housing blocks. News footage soon after showed at least 47 bodies, including children, pulled from the rubble in the refugee camp. Eventually the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry would claim 195 dead and hundreds more injured. The target of the strike was Ibrahim Biari, a Hamas commander who helped plan October 7, as well as a tunnel network and other Hamas fighters.[Read: Is the destruction of Gaza making Israel any safer?]During the Battle of Mosul, strikes that could be anticipated to kill 10 civilians or more required sign-off from the commanding general of Central Command, which oversees all American military activity across the greater Middle East. Deliberate strikes might have been analyzed by multiple working groups, and precautions taken to limit civilian casualties by using a more precise weapon with a smaller blast radius. A strike might have been canceled if the harm to civilians outweighed the possible battlefield advantage. In the Jabaliya strike, Israel caused foreseeable civilian casualties an order of magnitude greater than anything America would have signed off on during the past decades of war. And yes, 2,000-pound bombs are among the munitions that the United States has been sending to Israel, and which Israel has been using for strikes that American commanders would never permit from their own armed forces.Even more troubling has been Israel’s failure to allow humanitarian relief to reach the civilian population it has put at risk. On October 9, Israel’s defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declared a “complete siege” of Gaza, stating, “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Since then, the Israeli bombing campaign has destroyed Gaza’s agriculture and infrastructure, and Israel has restricted aid coming from outside the Strip.The United States has played a game of push and pull, providing weapons but telling Israeli authorities that they must allow humanitarian aid into Gaza; Israel fails to sufficiently comply, and Gazans starve. In February, the deputy executive director of the World Food Programme, Carl Skau, announced that one out of every six Gazan children under the age of 2 was acutely malnourished. “Hundreds of trucks are waiting to enter, and it is absolutely imperative to make crossing points work effectively and open additional crossing points,” the European Union’s foreign-policy chief, Josep Borrell, said on March 18. “It is just a matter of political will. Israel has to do it.”A UN Security Council resolution noted on December 22 that under international law, all parties must “allow, facilitate, and enable the immediate, safe, and unhindered delivery of humanitarian assistance at scale directly to the Palestinian civilian population.” That Israel lets some aid through is not a defense. As Tom Dannenbaum, an associate professor of international law at Tufts University, pointed out at the beginning of the conflict, even when starvation is being used as a weapon of war, “often there can be a trickle of humanitarian relief or a stop-start permission of essentials into a territory that is besieged.” In Gaza, starving children fill desperately strained hospital wards. Israel can make no plausible argument that it’s meeting its obligations here.Perhaps the most damning indictment of Israel’s conduct is that it is fighting this war without any realistic vision of its outcome, other than the military defeat of Hamas. The “day after” plan that Netanyahu released in February suggests an indefinite Israeli military occupation of Gaza, rejects international negotiations toward a permanent settlement with the Palestinian people, and gives only a vague nod toward a reconstruction plan “financed and led by countries acceptable to Israel.” On March 14, Ophir Falk, one of Netanyahu’s advisers, declared in The Wall Street Journal that the military campaign was “guaranteeing that Gaza will never pose a threat to Israel again.” This is delusional.Violent repression can backfire or produce Pyrrhic victories. Look at my war. Toppling Saddam Hussein created a fertile chaos for insurgent groups of all types. When I deployed to Iraq as part of the American surge of troops in 2007, we successfully worked with Sunni leaders to bring down the level of violence, only for ISIS to rise from the country’s unstable politics over the decade that followed.Repression rarely completely eradicates terrorist groups. Even Israeli intelligence admits that Hamas will survive this war. And as the terrorism expert Audrey Kurth Cronin has noted, repression is difficult for democracies to sustain, because it “exacts an enormous cost in money, casualties, and individual rights, and works best in places where the members of terrorist groups can be separated from the broader population.” The latter is manifestly not the case in Gaza.Sheer force cannot make Palestinians accept the violence done to them, the destruction wrought on their homes, and their fate as a subject population, deprived of self-determination. Recent polls show two-thirds of Gazans blaming Israel for their suffering, and most of the rest blaming the United States, while in the West Bank support for armed struggle has risen. Defenders of Israel will often reference a quote attributed to Golda Meir: “If the Arabs put down their weapons today, there would be no more violence. If the Jews put down their weapons today, there would be no more Israel.” But that’s not how Palestinians experience it. Even before October 7, the rate of settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank was on track to reach an all-time high in 2023. More attacks followed.Making this combustible situation still worse are international actors who benefit from stoking conflict. Iran has long helped train, supply, and fund armed Palestinian groups, offering a reported $350 million in 2023 alone. More arms, training, and funding will flow in the future, not only to Gaza but around the region. Netanyahu has suggested that Israel will maintain military control of Gaza, operating a security buffer zone inside Gaza and closing the border with Egypt. From a military perspective alone, such an expensive commitment to endless repression within Gaza would be shortsighted. As Cronin points out, historically, “using overwhelming force tends to disperse the threat to neighboring regions.”A good pretext for a war does not make a war just. War needs to be carried out without brutality and drive at a just political end. Israel is failing on both counts. Hamas may be horrific, but just because you’ve diagnosed a malignant tumor doesn’t mean you hand a rusty scalpel to a drunk and tell him to cut away while the patient screams in terror.[Graeme Wood: Pressuring Israel works]All of which calls into question America’s support for this war. Washington never even tried to make its aid conditional on Israel’s abiding by the standards of wartime conduct that Americans have come to expect. The Biden administration has twice bypassed congressional review in order to provide weapons to Israel. Senator Bernie Sanders proposed having the State Department investigate possible Israeli human-rights violations, but the Senate rejected the bid. Any policy relying on less debate and greater ignorance should raise alarms in a democracy. The administration’s policy has already hurt America’s standing globally.“All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost,” a senior G7 diplomat told the Financial Times in October. “Forget about rules, forget about world order. They won’t ever listen to us again.”Defenders of the war often ask: If not this, what should Israel be doing? Some of the answers to that question are fairly easy. Israel should not approve strikes that will predictably kill more than 100 civilians for limited military gain. It should not bomb entire neighborhoods to rubble. And it must make an aggressive commitment to providing humanitarian relief, rather than being a stumbling block to groups trying to save lives in the midst of starvation.Other answers are more difficult, because to imagine a postwar Gaza that might lead to peace, or at least to the weakening of violent forces around the region, would be to imagine a very different Israeli government—one that could credibly commit to helping facilitate the rebuilding of a Palestinian government in Gaza and the provision of full political rights to the people there. Instead, Israel has a government that just announced the largest West Bank land seizure in decades, and whose prime minister offers nothing to Palestinians but “full Israeli security control of all the territory west of the Jordan.”The Biden administration has assured its critics that it is pressuring Israel to do better. It recently allowed a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire to pass, even as it abstained and criticized the resolution for failing to condemn Hamas. But this will hardly repair the damage to America’s international reputation. Washington needs to address the war that is, not the hypothetical war U.S. officials would like to see. As Adil Haque told me, “It’s been five and a half months now, and there’s no indication that Israel will ever change its tactics in a significant way, so you either support the way it fights, or you can’t support it at all.” Washington needs to stop making excuses for Israel and stop supporting this war.So perhaps October 7 will be Israel’s 9/11, or 20 9/11s—not just because of the scale of the losses, but because of the foolishness and cruelty of the response. And a few years from now, if I talk with a survivor of this devastating war, will he blame Hamas for provoking it? I would guess that he’ll blame the country that bombed him without mercy and restricted the delivery of food while his family starved to death. And he’ll blame America for enabling it. And so will the rest of the world. And they’ll be right.
4 h
theatlantic.com
How Not to Be Bored When You Have to Wait
Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.Like many, I travel a lot for work. Unlike many, I never get tired of it. On the open road are always interesting people and new places. Phoenix in July or Fairbanks in the winter? Bring it on. There is one thing about travel that bugs me, though, and has ever since my tender years: the constant waiting. When I travel, I wait in the TSA line, wait to board the plane, wait in restaurants, wait to check into hotels, and on and on.This pet peeve about waiting is shared by most Americans, 64 percent of whom have to wait in line at a business at least a few times a week, and two-thirds of whom say that their predominant emotion while doing so is negative (according to a survey by Waitwhile, a company whose business is, literally, queuing management). Small wonder that scholars find that waiting for products and services strongly lowers satisfaction and loyalty to a service provider; according to the Waitwhile survey, 82 percent of customers actively avoid going to a business with a line.For years, I have tried to design my life in such a way to lower how much time I have to spend waiting, and it has worked: I ask for the check as soon as the server brings me my lunch; I have all the subscriptions that help to streamline one’s passage through the airport; I patronize hotels that have self-service check-in kiosks. No doubt my waiting time is a fraction of what it used to be. But recently, I have realized that despite these improvements, I’m not any less aggravated by the waiting I still have to endure.[Read: What boredom actually means]This mystery has led me to conclude that I have gone about the whole problem in the wrong way. I have been trying to engineer the outside world to make it better for me. I should instead have been working on myself, to live better in a world of waiting.The problem with waiting for something we want—even when the waiting is not anxiety-provoking (as it can be for a medical result)—is that it produces two conditions that humans hate: boredom and lack of autonomy.One way of understanding boredom is that it’s a state in which you fail to find meaning. Standing in line, knowing that you’re doing so to get or do something but are being forced to spend the time unproductively, is what feels meaningless. That can lead to frustration.People resist the frustration of boredom so much that they will literally choose pain to pass the time: In one famous 2016 study, researchers ran an experiment in which they assigned participants to watch movies that were sad, neutral, or boring, during which they could self-administer painful electric shocks. Those watching the boring film shocked themselves more frequently and at higher intensity than the people watching the other films.Waiting also lowers your sense of autonomy—or, to use the psychological parlance, creates an external locus of control, which means that your behavior can’t change the situation at hand. This is extremely uncomfortable. Think of the last time you waited in an airport for a long-delayed flight, and the vexation that came from not being able to do anything about it except wait. For people who feel this a lot in their life—not just waiting in the occasional line but feeling as if they generally don’t have control over their circumstances, for economic, health, or social and family reasons—such a lack of autonomy is associated with depression.[Read: Boredom is winning]You have probably noticed that to compound these problems, time seems to slow down when you’re waiting for something. As a rule, time perception is highly contextual and subjective, and the perceived duration of an experience may seem to stretch out when we are under stress. In one experiment from the 1980s showing this, researchers asked people with arachnophobia to look at spiders—of which they were intensely afraid—for two stretches of 45 seconds apiece. They found that the phobic subjects systematically overestimated the amount of spider-watching time endured, especially after the second viewing of the spiders, which was likely related to the subjects’ already heightened stress levels.Your annoyance in a bank line probably isn’t as extreme as that, but the frustration likely still makes the time drag. All of this leads to a vicious circle of waiting and frustration: The discomfort from waiting makes the waiting seem to go on longer, and this perceived extended waiting time increases your frustration.Two obvious solutions to the waiting problem suggest themselves. The first is what I have always done, which is to try to engineer the external environment to eliminate as much waiting as possible. This means scheduling activities meticulously to avoid traffic when possible, subscribing to services that allow you to jump lines, and eating at weird hours when restaurants aren’t crowded. That strategy helps a little, for a while, but as psychologists have long found—and as I’ve discovered for myself—the psychic gains from repeatedly attaining such gratification don’t usually last. That is because of a psychological phenomenon known as affective habituation: the process by which the positive feeling falls when we get something again and again. Although the expense and inconvenience of these things are permanent, studies have shown that the benefits wear off quickly and become a new normal that is very nearly as frustrating as the old one.[Megan Garber: The great fracturing of American attention]Another waiting strategy most people have turned to of late is distraction by device. When a line forms, nearly everyone pulls out their phone to fritter away the time, playing games, checking email, and, especially, scrolling social media. You might think that this solution must work, the way everyone does it, but in fact it might not work at all.In one study published in 2021, researchers monitored the level of boredom (and fatigue) that people reported over the course of their workday. As their boredom increased, the more likely they were to use their phone. This did not provide relief, however. On the contrary, they reported more boredom and fatigue after having used the phone. Your phone may attract your attention, but after the first few seconds, it may expose the false promise that it really isn’t much more interesting than staring at the wall; meanwhile, it sucks up your energy.If these solutions that try to change the outside world are not helpful, looking within ourselves could be a better bet. I can recommend two ways to transform waiting time from something to endure into an investment in yourself.The first is the practice of mindfulness. The most common definition of this is a meditation technique in which one persists in focusing on the present moment. People typically find this quite difficult, even frustrating. But mindfulness can be much simpler and easier than the orthodox meditation practice. As my colleague Ellen Langer, whom I regard as a pioneer in mindfulness research, told me, “It’s simply noticing new things.”To do this involves putting down the phone when waiting in line—or for a train, or at the airport, or wherever—and simply paying attention. You may not have done this in a long time—perhaps not since you first got a smartphone. You will find—and the research backs this up—that looking around and deliberately taking note of what you observe will probably lower the discomfort from boredom.[Read: The benefits of a short attention span]The second personal change you can try is to practice the virtue of patience. Impatience is obviously central to the waiting-frustration cycle, and research has shown that those who have more patience have higher life satisfaction and lower levels of depression. Of course, the advice “Be patient” doesn’t seem especially helpful, does it? On the contrary, when an airline says “Thank you for your patience,” I quietly seethe with rage (that special road warrior’s rage exquisitely honed for airlines).Fortunately, scholars have found a solution that, like mindfulness, has a strong connection with Eastern wisdom: the loving-kindness meditation. This is a mental exercise of directing warm emotions toward others, including friends, enemies, the whole world—even airlines. Research has found that this practice can increase patience. As a bonus, you can use it anywhere.The best way to lower the misery of waiting, then, turns out to be not to change the world but to change oneself. That insight can apply not just to waiting but to life itself. Most of us go about our days feeling dissatisfied with the world, that it is failing in some way to conform to our preferences and convenience. But on a moment’s reflection, we realize how absurd it is to suppose that it might. To do so is like canoeing down a river and railing against the winding course it takes rather than simply following those bends as best we can.After research and upon reflection, I am trying a new strategy for waiting—and for a good deal else that bugs me—which is this: observing the world without distraction, and wishing others the love and happiness I want for myself.But if that fails, maybe I’ll just start shocking myself.
4 h
theatlantic.com
The Strange Intimacy of Middle Names
In 2011, demographic researchers across America realized something surprising: Census forms had a lot of spots left blank. When one person fills it out for the whole household, they might skip certain sections—especially the middle-name column. Sixty percent of people left out the middle names of their extended family members, and nearly 80 percent omitted those of roommates they weren’t related to. Respondents weren’t trying to keep secrets. Much of the time, they just didn’t know the middle names of the people they lived with.Middle names occupy a strange space in American society. We use them most in bureaucratic contexts. They show up on driver’s licenses and passports, but they aren’t required when booking plane tickets. You probably don’t include it in your signature, and you probably don’t put it in your social-media profiles. For many of us, the name feels like a secret. Only about 22 percent of Americans think they know the middle names of at least half of their friends or acquaintances, according to a poll conducted for The Atlantic by The Harris Poll. Yet you still might be offended if a spouse or a close friend forgets yours. Knowing this seemingly benign piece of information has become emblematic of your connection. “She don’t even know your middle name,” Cardi B laments about an ex-partner’s new fling in her song “Be Careful.” But the intimacy you miss out on when you don’t know someone’s middle name can be more than symbolic. The names can be Trojan horses of meaning about ourselves or our ancestors, couriers of overlooked parts of our identity.[Read: The least common, least loved names in America]This wasn’t always the case. Middle names were probably an export of medieval Italy’s tradition of double first names, the historian Stephen Wilson wrote in The Means Of Naming: A Social History. Over the next few centuries, the practice of giving children two names ricocheted across the European elite. In the late 19th century, it gained traction in America, predominantly among the upper class. It spread across social strata during the early 1900s as part of the rise of life insurance and Social Security cards. Prior to World War I, many Americans didn’t maintain consistent spellings of their first and last names. But with more official documents tracking who they were, spelling their names the same way each time and tacking on an extra one to distinguish family members with the same name just made sense. The result was a veritable takeover: By the late 1970s, 75 percent of Americans had middle names.In many other cultures, middle names either don’t exist or don’t serve the same purpose. Countries such as Japan, Korea, and China don’t have anything that directly correlates to American middle names, though many Americans with family from these countries give their kids one anyway. Meanwhile, in other communities in the United States, middle names are quite prominent. You might know a neighbor’s middle name, for instance, if you live in the American South. Southerners are more likely to go by their middle name than people living in any other part of the country, probably because they more often hand down the same first name across multiple generations and need a differentiator. Others in the region may opt for compound first-and-middle names, such as “Sarah Beth.” These are also common in many Hispanic families.But for many of the rest of us, hearing our middle name can seem oddly formal. It’s jarring when a parent uses it to scold us, because doing so injects a dose of ceremony and distance into a typically close relationship, Wijnand van Tilburg, a professor at the University of Essex, in England, told me. Some of us have become so hardwired to associate our middle name with wrongdoing, in fact, that even seeing it written down makes us less indulgent. In one study, participants were less likely to want a product that might be seen as a guilty pleasure—in this case, a bottle made to hold sugary drinks—after they imagined their full name, middle name included, engraved on it.Despite these formal, bureaucratic connotations, a variety of factors—be they idiosyncratic preferences or deep familial meaning—shape why these names are chosen, transforming them into far more than legalese. For some parents, the names are a creative exercise. Many of the most popular middle names in America—such as Marie and Ann, which ranked in the top-10 middle names for every single decade from 1900 until 2015—may have been chosen for their pleasing poetic rhythm, Sophie Kihm, the editor in chief of the baby-naming site Nameberry, told me. Metaphor-driven names such as Moxie are taking off too, as are more artistic ones, such as Symphony and Rembrandt. Kihm is also seeing a lot of animal names, such as Hawk and Lynx; the rapper Macklemore gave his daughter the middle name Koala. Others use the spot for something more personal. Forty-three percent of middle names honor a family member, compared with just 27 percent of first names. Indeed, middle names are commonly used to acknowledge where you came from. Many middle-class Mexican American families have chosen to give their children an English first name and a Spanish middle name; Kihm told me she’s seen many Asian Americans do the same in their respective languages. [Read: The rise of gender-neutral names isn’t what it seems ]In some cases, the middle name might reflect what parents would be most drawn to, if they weren’t concerned with social scrutiny. “People are willing to take bigger risks there than they are with the first name,” Kihm told me. Although scholars have observed that political tensions can trickle down into how parents name their kids, the virtue signals rarely spread to middle names. In America, the rise of anti-French sentiment during the early years of the Iraq War led to a marked decline in French first names—but there was no discernible impact on middle names. Recently, even as gender-neutral first names have become common, middle names have quietly subverted gender norms further. Kihm pointed out that girls are getting more traditionally masculine middle names, and vice versa. James, for instance, has become a popular middle name for girls; Rihanna recently gave her son the middle name Rose.This slot, then, is a place for parents to hide their values in plain sight. Sometimes we seem to expect the middle name to reveal something fundamental. Look no further than the TV and movie trope in which a character announces that some meaningful word—subtle, courageous, slick—is actually their middle name. (In Austin Powers, it goes: “Danger is my middle name.”) Your middle name, in this understanding, is a secret weapon, a raw reflection of your personality or of a hidden skill. This has filtered into actual naming trends in the past decade, as middle names with symbolic meaning such as Love have become more popular, according to Kihm.Middle names can’t telegraph all of who we are. But maybe sharing them feels so intimate because they carry a small piece of us. More than being a few letters printed on your ID, they’re a window into your family history, your parents’ tastes, and sometimes even their aspirations for who you might become.
4 h
theatlantic.com
Do Trump Supporters Mind When He Mocks Biden’s Stutter?
Recently the Atlantic political reporter John Hendrickson and I set out on a kind of social experiment. A friend of Hendrickson’s had sent him a video of Donald Trump mocking President Joe Biden’s stutter. In the hierarchy of Trump insults, this one did not rate especially high. But it resonated with Hendrickson, who wrote a book about his own stuttering. And what especially resonated with him was the audience’s laughter. “They don’t have to laugh,” Hendrickson told me. “They’re either choosing to laugh, or it’s an involuntary reaction, and they’re naturally laughing.” Hendrickson had a theory that disability was politically neutral, or should be, so he decided to test it out. How do Trump’s supporters actually feel about him making fun of people with disabilities?In this episode of Radio Atlantic, Hendrickson and I attend a Trump rally in Dayton, Ohio, to ask his supporters that question. Almost none of them like how Trump demeans people. And yet they all plan to vote for him anyway. The gap between those two sentiments reveals a lot about how people come to terms with their own decisions, values, and obvious contradictions.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Google Podcasts | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode: John Hendrickson: I believe it was in the afternoon, early evening. I was on my way to meet my friends to go bowling. Hanna Rosin: This is staff writer John Hendrickson. John covers politics for The Atlantic. He’s also had a stutter since he was a kid. Hendrickson: And I was on the subway, and I got a text from a different friend who sent me a tweet that contained a video. So I held it up to my ear and I listened to it. Donald Trump: Two nights ago we all heard Crooked Joe’s angry, dark, hate-filled rant of a State of the Union address. Wasn’t it—didn’t it bring us together? Remember, he said, I’m gonna bring the country tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together. Hendrickson: And the thing that jumped out at me was how Trump’s audience laughed. Trump: Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together. Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. In his decade or so in politics, Donald Trump often talks like a bully. We know he nicknames opponents. “Little Marco.” “Crazy Nancy.” “Birdbrain”—that was for Nikki Haley.Now, when it’s just him and Biden, Trump has used: “Crooked Joe” or “Sleepy Joe.” Or calls him “a low-IQ individual” or “cognitively impaired.”But there’s one line he hasn’t crossed. Until this year. Hendrickson: Through it all though, he never openly mocked Biden’s stutter. It’s been this ongoing thing about Biden has dementia—all different versions of that idea. But he didn’t outright make fun of Biden for being a person who stutters until January of this year. Trump: That’s why Crooked Joe is staging his pathetic, fear-mongering campaign event in Pennsylvania today. Did you see him? He was stuttering through the whole thing. He’s going, I’m gonna—he’s a threat to democracy. Hendrickson: Biden had delivered a big speech to mark the anniversary of January 6. Trump: He’s saying, I’m a threat to democracy. He’s a threat to duh-duh-duh-democracy. Wow, okay. I couldn’t read the word. Hendrickson: Trump has said and done worse things than this, obviously. He’s done many, many worse things than this. But the juvenile element of it—there is just something really particular about this. It was sort of uniquely grotesque. Rosin: So John and I decided to test out a question: What did Trump’s supporters really think of him making fun of Biden? If John went to a rally and asked them, what would they say to his face?Before we get there, though, something to know first.A lot of people think of Biden as someone who used to stutter, if they think about it at all. Biden himself has generally talked about it as something he overcame.But when John was covering Biden in the 2020 race, he saw something different. As John described it, in the middle of a speech, Biden would suddenly stop, pinch his eyes closed, thrust his hands forward “as if trying to pull the missing sound from his mouth.”In Biden, John recognized not a former stutterer but someone who was working very hard—and largely successfully—to manage his stutter.In 2020, Biden agreed to sit down for an interview with John. Biden shared some painful memories with him, like the nun who made fun of him in seventh grade: “Mr. Buh-Buh-Buh-Biden.”And in that same article, John—who hadn’t written much about his stutter—shared some of his own memories, like about the kid at baseball camp who would yell “stutter boy” and snap his fingers, as if John were a dog.After that article came out, something unexpected happened to John: He became a kind of public face of adults who stuttered. Like, he even went on TV to talk about the article, something he’d never imagined he’d want to do. Stephanie Ruhle: Joining me now, the author of that piece, John Hendrickson, senior politics editor for The Atlantic. John, I’m so glad you’re here. This story is very personal to you. You’ve experienced life with a stutter. What about your experience has helped you identify Joe Biden’s? And it’s something that most of us just saw as him misspeaking. Hendrickson: People misunderstand stuttering a lot. You know, it isn’t merely repetition of a word. It isn’t merely blocking on a word. It’s tons of things. It’s loss of eye contact, as I’m doing at this exact moment. Just because it takes a little longer every now and then to get out a sentence, it doesn’t mean that the person doesn’t know what they’re trying to say. Rosin: John got an overwhelming response to the piece. Within days, hundreds and hundreds of people who stutter sent him messages. They swapped stories about growing up with a stutter. John went on to write a book about it titled Life on Delay. And he got more comfortable talking in public. Here he is again on TV. Hendrickson: Most people don’t even know what stuttering is. Barely anybody outside the community or outside the speech-language-pathologist community even knows that it’s a neurological disorder. Pretty much everybody thinks it’s just a manifestation of nervousness or anxiety or that a person is dumb. We have a real antiquated cultural view of this thing. Rosin: So John had spent several years dragging people out of those dark ages. And then, his friend sent him that video of Trump at the rally imitating the stutter in front of an audience. Trump: Tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh-together. I’m gonna bring it together. Rosin: Why do you think Trump crossed that line? Like, he has not made fun of Joe Biden’s stutter for now years. So do you have any guesses about why now? Hendrickson: I think it’s notable that the two times Trump has openly done this have both come on the heels of a big Biden speech. In January, it was Biden’s pro-democracy speech on the anniversary of the insurrection. Trump mocked him, saying “duh-duh-duh-democracy.” And then two days after Biden’s State of the Union address, Trump mocked him, saying he’s going to bring this country “tuh-tuh-tuh-together.” Rosin: Now, here’s where I’d play some tape of Biden himself. Because he didn’t actually stutter on the word “together.” He actually didn’t even say those exact words. Trump is doing more of what John considers a vaudeville impression of Biden, knowing that the president’s stutter is a way to attack him.Now, John’s a seasoned reporter, and Biden and Trump are politicians. So John isn’t worried about their feelings. He is, however, worried about the audience laughing, what it means that a crowd heard Trump say, “duh-duh-duh-democracy,” and found it funny. Hendrickson: It’s too easy to roll your eyes and say, Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump, which I think, to a degree, I can be sympathetic to that argument. But that doesn’t mean his supporters, who are also adults—they don’t have to laugh. They’re either choosing to laugh or it’s an involuntary reaction, and they’re naturally laughing. Rosin: Did you hear that immediately, or did you have to rewatch it to see that? Hendrickson: I immediately heard it. And that happened back in January as well. And I think that’s the thing that compels me to go talk to his supporters this weekend. [Turn signal clicking] AI voice: Turn right onto Northwoods Boulevard. Rosin: I guess we’re just at the edge of an airport. Hendrickson: I think this is North Dayton. Rosin: North Dayton. Okay. Rosin: A week after mocking Biden’s stutter, Trump had a rally planned in Ohio. AI voice: In a quarter mile, turn right onto North Dixie Drive. Rosin: So John and I rented a car and made our way to the tarmac of the Dayton International Airport. John had a pretty specific goal. Hendrickson: I am less interested in Trump himself and more interested in talking to as many of his supporters as I can and asking them: How do you feel about Trump mocking people with disabilities? I’ve interviewed many Trump supporters over the past nine years, and 99.9 percent of them have been polite, and they don’t mock me or make fun of me. They’re human beings. And so, given that Trump has now repeatedly—and openly—mocked Biden’s stutter, and he’s previously mocked other disabilities, I’m interested if it bothers his supporters or not, because a topic like disability is bipartisan. It is neutral. It is apolitical. Rosin: Well, we hope. We hope. But that’s maybe the hypothesis that you’re testing. [Music]Rosin: After the break, John and I test that hypothesis with the crowd in Ohio. Rally vendor: Trump shirts, Trump shirts, Trump shirts. Rally vendor: Buy-one-get-one hats. Hendrickson: I’m amazed at how his rallies have evolved into this kind of Grateful Dead traveling roadshow. Vendors follow him around the country, and even certain attendees follow him around the country. Rosin: This is what you mean by the carnival atmosphere. There’s like lots and lots of merchants. Hendrickson: I’m amazed at the sheer volume of different T-shirts: “Trumpinator: I’ll Be Back.” “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president.”Trump and Mount Rushmore—and so he’s on there, but he’s also on a motorcycle. Hendrickson: You know, not just food vendors and T-shirt vendors, but everything you can think of. And it truly is this community. It has this weird juxtaposition of being a very jovial, celebratory, warm—and he plays all this nostalgic music—and then he gets up there, and he delivers these apocalyptic monologues. So it’s just—it’s unlike anything else.Rosin: We made our way through the vendors, across the windy tarmac, to the line of people waiting to get through security. John and I skipped over the guy in the “Media Lies” T-shirt and got to work with our informal survey. Hendrickson: Do you have any interest in a brief interview about the event? Rallygoer: Uh, sure. Hendrickson: First time you ever seen Trump, or have you seen him before? Rallygoer: First time in person, yes. Rosin: There were diehards who’d traveled hours to be there, locals just excited he was back in Ohio, a couple of undecideds looking to hear him in person. We would get the basics, and then John would ask if they saw the Georgia rally where Trump had mocked Biden’s stutter. Hendrickson: Did you happen to catch any of Trump’s Georgia event that he did a week ago on Saturday? Rallygoer (Todd Rossbach): I did, as a matter of fact. Rome, Georgia. Rallygoer (Melina): I did not. Actually, I didn’t even know he was in Dayton until I saw it on TikTok this morning. (Laughs.) We jumped in the car and came. Rosin: And then the question. Hendrickson: Last week, Trump mocked Biden’s stutter. He was saying: “We’re going to bring the country together. Tuh-tuh-tuh-together.” Rallygoer (Cindy Rossbach): It’s not the Christian way to be. And it doesn’t—I just feel like it makes Trump look bad, when he’s probably not a bad person. Rosin: This is Cindy Rossbach. She and her husband, Todd, had different opinions. Rallygoer (Todd Rossbach): After what we’ve seen from the administration—you know, they wanna put him in jail for life—I think he’s got every right to do whatever he wants to do at this point. Rallygoer (Cindy Rossbach): I disagree because I think when you make fun of people, it just makes you look bad. Rosin: We kept talking to more people. This is Melina, from Chillicothe, Ohio. Rallygoer (Melina): He’s going to say what he says. When he was in office, our economy was great. We got along with every other country. That’s all I care about. (Laughter.) Rosin: And Vanessa Miller, from Cincinnati. Rallygoer (Vanessa Miller): Trump is a good man. He’s not perfect. Biden is not handicapped. He’s just an ass, and he does not care about this country. So if Trump made fun of Biden, well, like I said, he’s not perfect, but it wasn’t about a disability. It was about how he has made this country dysfunctional, not disabled. Rosin: A lot of people just detoured into the mental-acuity lane. Here’s Sharon, from the Dayton area. Rallygoer (Sharon): The president that we have today can’t speak. He can’t walk. He can’t talk. And he’s definitely not thinking for himself. He’s not making the decisions. He is somebody’s puppet. Hendrickson: And so, Biden has a neurological disorder. He has a stutter. I do too. Do you know anybody who has one? Rallygoer (Sharon): Yeah, my cousin had a stutter. You know, it’s just, you can’t play into your feelings. You have to take this stuff seriously when it comes to our policy and our country. Rosin: Most people touched it lightly, if at all, and then moved on to bigger things: dementia, economy, country. One man we talked to, R. C. Pittman, didn’t mind getting into it, though. He came with Bikers for Trump, and we chose to talk to him because we were interested in disabilityand Pittman was in a transport chair. He said he can’t walk very well. Hendrickson: Have you ever known anybody growing up, or presently, like Biden, who has a stutter like I do? Rallygoer (Pittman): Yeah. And we made fun of ’em. And we poked fun at ’em. And they didn’t get offended. You know, the same thing with me. I had big ears. They used to call me Dumbo when I was a kid. We had a guy that rides with us, one of our chapter members—took his leg off from here down. So now instead of Geronimo, up there on his bike—like mine says Casper. That’s my road name. We changed his from Geronimo to Stumpy. I mean, did it offend him? Hell no. He’s Stumpy. It would be the same as me saying: D-D-D-Damn, boy. Can’t you talk better than that? It’s not degrading. You follow me? It’s words. It’s an expression of thought. Rosin: After we thanked him and moved on, I asked John what he thought. Hendrickson: I am interested in that concept of, like, you know, the difference between teasing and degrading. Rosin: Yeah, I actually thought that was interesting. Hendrickson: Well, and I wonder if his biker friend who’s an amputee—you know, they call him Stumpy—like, does that secretly bother him or not? Rosin: Yeah, I did wonder about that. Like, can we have Stumpy’s phone number? Rosin: If teasing is a thing between friends, Trump and Biden are clearly not friends. But again, John did not come here to think about how Trump’s words affect Biden’s feelings. Biden’s a public figure and a politician. He came here to see how they land on the crowd and then beyond the crowd, outside in the world. Hendrickson: But I think that the concern among members of the disability community is that kids and teenagers are going to watch Trump say, “tuh-tuh-tuh-together,” and then think it’s okay to then go do that to other people. Rallygoer (Todd Rossbach): There is an aspect of that. It’s unfortunate, yeah. Rosin: One striking thing from our time in Ohio was the number of people we talked to who worked with kids, sometimes even kids with learning disabilities. Cheryl from Ohio, for example. She has a learning disability herself, so she feels especially connected to kids who struggle. Rosin: And if a kid asks you, Why is the president making fun of people with disabilities? What would you say? Rallygoer (Cheryl): I tell them they’re not actually making fun. They’re just trying to—they are using those words to win. That’s how you win. You’re just finding a way for you to become the winner, and they become the loser. Rosin: So it’s like trash-talking? Rallygoer (Cheryl): It’s just trash-talking. [Music] Rallygoer (Shana from Indiana): I’ve worked in special education my whole life, so I definitely don’t agree with that at all. Rosin: You don’t agree with what? Rallygoer (Shana from Indiana): Anybody making fun of people that have disabilities. Rosin: This is Shana from Indiana. She has a special-ed degree. She taught middle schoolers with learning disabilities. I asked her if she’d ever seen bullying in her classroom or if kids ever made fun of each other. And she said, “All the time.” Rosin: If one of your kids said, Hey, why is our president making fun of disabled people? Like, I thought you told us not to do that. What would you say to a kid, as a teacher? Rallygoer (Shana from Indiana): What would I say? That regardless of what comes out of people’s mouths, that we’re to forgive them. And does it mean that they did it on purpose? Because our hearts are wicked. Rosin: Lastly, this is Susie Mikaloff, from Ohio, who taught math for three decades. Rallygoer (Susie Mikaloff): This is small on the scale of what the kids are subjected to nowadays. So I think, overall, he can show them he’s a good leader. So when you look at what he’s done and what he can do with the nation, then you just have to put that aside. You have to forgive that. So I forgive him for doing that. [Music]Hendrickson: I find it interesting that some of these teachers, and special-ed teachers, could be so compassionate Monday through Friday and then go to a Trump rally on Saturday. Trump: They’re sending their prisoners to see us. They’re sending—and they’re bringing them right to the border. I’ve seen the humanity, and these humanity—these are bad. These are animals. Okay? And we have to stop it. Rosin: Back in the hotel after the rally, John and I unpacked our thoughts about the day of interviews. We both were stuck on the people who worked with kids, in particular the special-ed teachers. Hendrickson: And that doesn’t mean that they’re not compassionate on Saturday, but it’s another level of Trump supporter to go to the rally. It’s just an odd juxtaposition to think of a really thoughtful, compassionate special-ed teacher, Monday through Friday serving their students and then getting up Saturday and going to this rally where the person’s talking about “bloodbath.” Rosin: Mm-hmm. Do you think they think of him as compassionate or not compassionate, or they just don’t think about it? Hendrickson: I think people are attracted to Trump’s power. Rosin: It’s just interesting to see the different slices of them, like the way they were in the Trump rally, the way they could be moved by that. But then there’s this whole other side of them. Like, I believe that those people who said they had a friend who stutters, that they would be kind to that friend. Like, I could see that, that they would care about those people, in context with those people. And that’s all I have to say. There’s no, like, squaring the two different versions of that person. There’s, like, rally person, and then there’s classroom person, and they’re both inside the same person. Hendrickson: And that’s what Trump is so good at, is pulling out the darker side of people. Rosin: Yeah. Hendrickson: Yeah. That doesn’t mean that a person’s a bad person. And it’s not like every day you walk around in life and you’re 60 percent good, 40 percent bad. But just, Trump has a way of making the bad stuff okay. [Music]Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smerciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
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theatlantic.com
Photographing Black Self-Creation in the American South
Photos by Rahim FortuneContemporary rural places are rendered all but invisible in the American public imagination; we are a nation that celebrates big cities and suburbs. But rural towns are not only an integral part of the national fabric; they are often key to understanding our story. Hardtack, a new book from the photographer Rahim Fortune, is a case in point.Fortune’s portraiture captures the work of Black self-creation in the thick of a humid, hard-earned history. In these images—all shot in the South, many in East Texas—the land is a character, and its people are authors. Depicting a place is always complex, but in this region, it is especially so. Some of the greatest biodiversity in the world is here, which is why people call much of southeastern Texas the “Big Thicket.” And in Ark-La-Tex (a portmanteau-crossroads, because nature doesn’t respect the lines of statecraft), the intertwined stories of the haves and the have-nots—Black, white, Indigenous, settlers and captives, driven out and ground down—are a thicket that cannot be disentangled.Beginning after the Civil War, freedpeople founded and ran Black towns throughout the South and the Midwest. In Texas, these were aptly named “freedom colonies.” Establishing these towns provided Black people with the opportunity for self-governance and independence. The towns were also protection from the backbreaking realities of debt peonage and sharecropping. The people were no longer chattel; they were citizens. Some of these colonies flourished for a time. But they suffered, too, falling prey to common patterns—the centuries-long dispossession of small homesteads by the wealthy; the depopulation of rural places in favor of the allure of bigger cities, better-paying jobs, a life outside the reach of Jim Crow.[Read: Eight books that explain the South]As King Cotton receded in prominence, the sawmills stepped in, making a big business of felling pines and hardwood trees. Then, in 1930, the East Texas Oil Field was discovered. With bread lines spreading across America, the jockeying for oil was fast and furious. Oilmen were global players in politics and business, cutting deals in international negotiations to power the world.In Black churches, oil is a term of art, used to describe a vocalization that is lush with spirit; singers are told to “put some oil on it”—to anoint their voice. It might be that the hazards of the oil industry—a business of fires and explosions as well as boom and bust—facilitate an ever more passionate faith in God. Hardscrabble living will do that.Poverty persists in East Texas today, and folks still must scuffle to stay free. In this state, you find some of the highest incarceration rates in the world. And the work has stayed hard: working cattle for milk and meat, harvesting big bunches of roses for other people’s beloveds in far-flung places, laboring over cotton and oil. Sacrifice is built into living. Residents must be prepared for tornadoes and floods that can feel biblical.Words sit humbly alongside the clarion beauty in Fortune’s photographs. Look to see evidence of the imagination made real through human hands everywhere: in the land that is cleared; in the architecture that endures; in the quilts and elegant coiffures, the pressed and stitched shirts, the felted cowboy hats. There is a lot to be proud of. Yet the working hands raised in thanksgiving and supplication are offered in humility before God. Nature encroaches, seemingly stronger than mere muscle and faith. In person, there is so much green and blue, gold and brown—the colors of plants, water, people. Yet shot in black and white, much of what it means to be human is made crystal clear. The deliberation of a swooped bang, a diaphanous skirt cut and sewn on the bias, a thick knuckle—it is more than beauty; it is elegance in endurance. Windmill House, Hutto, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Praise Dancers, Edna, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Grandma’s Hands, Houston, Texas, 2020 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Sam’s BBQ, Austin, Texas, 2016 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Praying Cowboy, Gladewater, Texas, 2021 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Mother & Daughters, Austin, Texas, 2021 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Northside Home, Houston, Texas, 2020 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Ace (Miss Juneteenth), Galveston, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) AME Church Interior, Tucker, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Demolished School, Edna, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Deonte, New Sweden, Texas, 2022 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Brothers at Parade, Houston, Texas, 2023 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) Brackish Water, Otter Creek, Florida, 2020 (Rahim Fortune / Loose Joints) This article is adapted from “Good Fortune,” an essay by Imani Perry that appears in Rahim Fortune’s new book, Hardtack.
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theatlantic.com
Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I’d applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. “Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure,” he’d later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a psychologist: As a young recruit in the Israel Defense Forces, he’d assessed and overhauled the pointless 15-to-20-minute chats that were being used for sorting soldiers into different units. And yet there he and I were, sitting down for a 15-to-20-minute chat of our own.I remember he was sweet, smart, and very strange. I knew him as a founder of behavioral economics, and I had a bare familiarity with the work on cognitive biases and judgment heuristics for which he was soon to win a Nobel Prize. I did not know that he’d lately switched the focus of his research to the science of well-being and how to measure it objectively. When I said during the interview that I’d been working in a brain-imaging lab, he began to talk about a plan he had to measure people’s level of delight directly from their brain. If neural happiness could be assessed, he said, then it could be maximized. I had little expertise—I’d only been a lab assistant—but the notion seemed far-fetched: You can’t just sum up a person’s happiness by counting voxels on a brain scan. I was chatting with a genius, yet somehow on this point he seemed … misguided?I still believe that he was wrong, on this and many other things. He believed so, too. Daniel Kahneman was the world’s greatest scholar of how people get things wrong. And he was a great observer of his own mistakes. He declared his wrongness many times, on matters large and small, in public and in private. He was wrong, he said, about the work that had won the Nobel Prize. He wallowed in the state of having been mistaken; it became a topic for his lectures, a pedagogical ideal. Science has its vaunted self-corrective impulse, but even so, few working scientists—and fewer still of those who gain significant renown—will ever really cop to their mistakes. Kahneman never stopped admitting fault. He did it almost to a fault.Whether this instinct to self-debunk was a product of his intellectual humility, the politesse one learns from growing up in Paris, or some compulsion born of melancholia, I’m not qualified to say. What, exactly, was going on inside his brilliant mind is a matter for his friends, family, and biographers. Seen from the outside, though, his habit of reversal was an extraordinary gift. Kahneman’s careful, doubting mode of doing science was heroic. He got everything wrong, and yet somehow he was always right.In 2011, he compiled his life’s work to that point into Thinking, Fast and Slow. Truly, the book is as strange as he was. While it might be found in airport bookstores next to business how-to and science-based self-help guides, its genre is unique. Across its 400-plus pages Kahleman lays out an extravagant taxonomy of human biases, fallacies, heuristics, and neglects, in the hope of making us aware of our mistakes, so that we might call out the mistakes that other people make. That’s all we can aspire to, he repeatedly reminds us, because mere recognition of an error doesn’t typically make it go away. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available, and cognitive illusions are generally more difficult to recognize than perceptual illusions,” he writes in the book’s conclusion. “The voice of reason may be much fainter than the loud and clear voice of an erroneous intuition.” That’s the struggle: We may not hear that voice, but we must attempt to listen.Kahneman lived with one ear cocked; he made errors just the same. The book itself was a terrific struggle, as he said in interviews. He was miserable while writing it, and so plagued by doubts that he paid some colleagues to review the manuscript and then tell him, anonymously, whether he should throw it in the garbage to preserve his reputation. They said otherwise, and others deemed the finished book a masterpiece. Yet the timing of its publication turned out to be unfortunate. In its pages, Kahneman marveled at great length over the findings of a subfield of psychology known as social priming. But that work—not his own—quickly fell into disrepute, and a larger crisis over irreproducible results began to spread. Many of the studies that Kahneman had touted in his book—he called one an “instant classic” and said of others, “Disbelief is not an option”—turned out to be unsound. Their sample sizes were far too small, and their statistics could not be trusted. To say the book was riddled with scientific errors would not be entirely unfair.If anyone should have caught those errors, it was Kahneman. Forty years earlier, in the very first paper that he wrote with his close friend and colleague Amos Tversky, he had shown that even trained psychologists—even people like himself—are subject to a “consistent misperception of the world” that leads them to make poor judgments about sample sizes, and to draw the wrong conclusions from their data. In that sense, Kahneman had personally discovered and named the very cognitive bias that would eventually corrupt the academic literature that he cited in his book.In 2012, as the extent of that corruption became apparent, Kahneman intervened. While some of those whose work was now in question grew defensive, he put out an open letter calling for more scrutiny. In private email chains, he reportedly goaded colleagues to engage with critics and to participate in rigorous efforts to replicate their work. In the end, Kahneman admitted in a public forum that he’d been far too trusting of some suspect data. “I knew all I needed to know to moderate my enthusiasm for the surprising and elegant findings that I cited, but I did not think it through,” he wrote. He acknowledged the “special irony” of his mistake.Kahneman once said that being wrong feels good, that it gives the pleasure of a sense of motion: “I used to think something and now I think something else.” He was always wrong, always learning, always going somewhere new. In the 2010s, he abandoned the work on happiness that we’d discussed during my grad-school interview, because he realized—to his surprise—that no one really wanted to be happy in the first place. People are more interested in being satisfied, which is something different. “I was very interested in maximizing experience, but this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do,” he told Tyler Cowen in an interview in 2018. “Happiness feels good in the moment. But it’s in the moment. What you’re left with are your memories. And that’s a very striking thing—that memories stay with you, and the reality of life is gone in an instant.”The memories remain.
theatlantic.com
How Climate Change Is Making Allergy Season Worse
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.Rising temperatures are leading to what my colleague Yasmin Tayag has called an “allergy apocalypse.” I spoke with Yasmin, who covers science for The Atlantic, about our ever-expanding allergy season, the relationship between rising temperatures and pollen, and the extent to which pollen may rob us of the pleasures of summer.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic: Anshel Pfeffer: “Benjamin Netanyahu is Israel’s worst prime minister ever.” The one third-party candidate Biden is worried about Can you ever really escape your ex? More Than a Seasonal AnnoyanceLora Kelley: It’s barely spring, and it feels like people are already suffering from allergies on the East Coast. To what extent has allergy season been expanding in recent years—and is it still fair to call it a “season”?Yasmin Tayag: There is a lot of research showing that pollen seasons are beginning earlier compared with several decades ago. They’re also more intense, in that there’s more pollen in the air. This is happening largely as a result of warming temperatures across the country.For now, allergy season does have a start and end date—you can still call it a “season.” In general, tree pollen kicks off allergy season in early spring, then it’s caused by grasses in the spring and summer, and ragweed in the fall. But in some parts of the country, allergy season is thought to last even longer: Florida’s is almost year-round. In those cases, it’s not a matter of a season.Lora: Could you walk me through the relationship between rising temperatures and rises in pollen?Yasmin: On the whole, temperatures rising means we see more pollen for longer. When the temperatures are warmer earlier in the year, the trees start releasing and creating pollen earlier. An increased amount of carbon dioxide in the air is also thought to increase pollen production.Not all plants respond to temperature in the same way. Predicting where allergies will be really bad also has to do with the plant life in that region and whether those plants are sensitive to temperature.Lora: Why are some adults only recently starting to show allergy symptoms?Yasmin: There are some people who are genetically predisposed to allergies. They get symptoms as soon as the pollen is in the air. Some people have a much higher pollen threshold, meaning they can be exposed to pollen for longer or handle a higher level of pollen exposure before showing symptoms for the first time. But with a much longer and more intense season, more people are meeting that threshold.Your surrounding environment can also affect your allergies. If you live in a place that doesn’t have a ton of trees or is very cool, you might have fewer symptoms than someone with the same DNA living in a perpetually warm place.Allergies can be more than a seasonal annoyance. They can be devastating for people who have asthma, in particular, because they can trigger asthma attacks.Lora: Is there anything people can do to avoid this fate?Yasmin: Not much. You can manage your exposure, and, in general, people can manage their symptoms.As pollen levels go up year after year, people can get into the habit of checking the pollen count before they go outside. If it’s going to be an allergy day, take the necessary precautions to reduce your exposure. That can mean staying indoors as much as possible, or shutting your windows. In some instances, you might even want to change clothes when you enter the house so you don’t track pollen inside.There are other therapies that are sometimes effective, such as exposure therapies, where over time you build up the amount of pollen you encounter so your body gets used to it. As an allergy sufferer myself, I recommend traveling with allergy medication; maybe your symptoms will spike in the middle of the day. And wear waterproof mascara.Lora: How could higher pollen levels shift our relationship to nature and the outdoors?Yasmin: I think it means spending less time outside, which is terrible. And what I really feel sad about is having to close your windows in the summertime—being shut out from the summer breeze. We already spend so much of the year cooped up indoors, and to further isolate ourselves indoors because there’s so much pollen in the air feels like missing out on the best parts of the warmer seasons.Related: There is no stopping the allergy apocalypse. Climate change is making allergy season even worse. (From 2022) Today’s News Authorities announced last night that the six missing construction workers who were on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed are presumed dead. Former Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman, a longtime congressman who was the first Jewish candidate on the national ticket of a major party, died from complications from a fall, according to a statement from his family. Yesterday, NBC News cut ties with Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee who previously disputed the 2020 election results, days after hiring her. Evening Read Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: CSA-Archive / Getty. A Bad GambleBy Jemele Hill This week, the pro baseball superstar Shohei Ohtani addressed the media for the first time since his name surfaced in an investigation of an alleged illegal gambling ring. He told reporters that the $4.5 million in wire transfers from his account had been sent without his knowledge by his friend and interpreter, and that he had “never bet on baseball or any other sports.” Opening Day is this week, and Major League Baseball can’t be happy about this cloud over its biggest star. But with gambling so deeply embedded in mainstream sports culture, and most sports leagues now in partnership with gambling operations, these kinds of scandals have become far more common. Read the full article.More From The Atlantic Why Trump won’t stop suing the media and losing “Lunch at the Polo Club” Culture Break LaToya Ruby Frazier Examine. Spend time with the intimate, intergenerational portraits taken by the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier.Read. Lisa Ko’s new novel, Memory Piece, details three women’s desire for freedom from capitalism, expectations, and the public eye, Lily Meyer writes.Play our daily crossword.Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.Explore all of our newsletters here.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
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The Next Stage of RFK Jr.’s Insurgency
The outsider candidate has money, a running mate, and a growing army of supporters determined to upend the election.
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A Bad Gamble
Shohei Ohtani and the future of sports betting
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Family Ties
The steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock’s skies. U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Monongahela River (2013) © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery In The Notion of Family, a series she began as a teenager in 2001 and continued to work on for more than a decade, Frazier examines the physical and psychic toll wrought by industrial decay. The series presents more than simple snapshots of devastation. The Notion of Family is an intimate, intergenerational exploration of the care that Black women show one another as corporations and public safety nets falter. It is also intensely personal: Frazier photographed herself alongside her mother and grandmother, who helped guide her creative decisions. We see a young Frazier sitting on the living-room floor with her grandmother, surrounded by dolls and statuettes. In another photo, Frazier gazes into the mirror while her mother applies a chemical relaxer to her hair. U.S.S. Edgar Thomson Steel Works and Monongahela River (2013) © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery Grandma Ruby and Me (2005) © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery The images are some of her earliest works on view this spring in “Monuments of Solidarity,” the first major-museum survey of Frazier’s career, at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In a body of work that now spans multiple decades, Frazier has continued bearing witness to postindustrial landscapes—and the people left navigating them. Her aim, she has written, is to resist, through everything she creates, the forces of “historical erasure and historical amnesia.”This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “Family Ties.”
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Can You Ever Really Escape Your Ex?
Your repeated attraction to a certain “type” may be down more to psychological comfort than to a mysterious connection.
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Benjamin Netanyahu Is Israel’s Worst Prime Minister Ever
One man’s ambition has undermined Israel’s security and consumed its politics.
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The Fantasy of a Truly Free Life
In Lisa Ko’s ambitious, messy novel, characters disappear, sell out, and opt out, all in search of a meaningful existence.
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Trump’s Lucky Break
A New York appeals court threw him a lifeline—but the road ahead is long.
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Baltimore Lost More Than a Bridge
You could see the Francis Scott Key Bridge from Fort McHenry, the pentagon-shaped keep that inspired the bridge’s namesake to write the verses that became our national anthem. You could see it from the pagoda in Patterson Park, another strangely geometric landmark from which I’ve cheered on teams at Baltimore’s annual kinetic-sculpture race. You could see it from the top of Johns Hopkins Hospital, the city’s biggest employer. This morning, my husband sent me a photo of the familiar view out his window at work—now dominated not by the soaring bridge, but by a hulking container ship, halted in the middle of the water with metal strewn over and around it.Videos of the bridge’s collapse are stunning. At about 1:30 a.m., the ship, called the Dali, lost power and crashed into one of the bridge’s central pillars. Within 15 seconds, the straight line of the bridge’s span bends and breaks, and the entire structure tumbles into the harbor.The bridge was one of only three roadways crossing Baltimore’s defining waterways, and until this morning, each of those routes served its own purpose. The I-95 tunnel, which cuts across the mouth of the harbor, was for people commuting between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The famously congested Baltimore Harbor Tunnel—part of I-895—passed beneath the Patapsco River and is for people bypassing the city completely. The Key Bridge, farther down the river toward the Chesapeake Bay, handled the least traffic of the three. But it was part of the Baltimore Beltway, the circular highway that forms the unofficial boundary of the Baltimore metro area and shuttles into the city to help make it run. Of the three routes, the Key Bridge was the most visible and beautiful, standing alone above the water in a long, graceful arch.[David A. Graham: Why ships keep crashing]Officials had enough notice of the Dali’s distress that it blocked cars from entering the bridge before its collapse, but Maryland’s transportation secretary told reporters this morning that the department was searching for six missing construction workers who may have fallen into the 48-degree water. The crew was working to fix potholes—to keep Baltimore’s beat-up roads in good enough shape to keep traffic flowing into the city. Two workers have already been pulled from the water, one of whom was in such bad shape that they couldn’t be asked what happened. As of about 10:08 a.m., no one but the construction crew was believed to have fallen into the water. But had the collapse happened a few hours later, hundreds of people might well be dead: On average, about 31,000 cars and trucks cross the bridge every day.The cars, for now, can be rerouted. But the remnants of the bridge (not to mention the Dali) are blocking the city’s waterways for any other ships that are scheduled to enter. Baltimore is now America’s 17th-biggest port by tonnage—a respectable rank, if a far cry from the early days of the United States, when shipping made the city the third-most-populous in the country—and may well drop further down the list if the harbor remains inaccessible. (Maryland Governor Wes Moore has yet to comment on when the port might reopen for business.) But Baltimore is a city defined by water. The Gwynns Falls and the Jones Falls trickle through our parks. The Inner Harbor is our Times Square; our economy is tied up in trade and transportation. Ships are in the city’s bones. The brackish harbor is in its heart.Baltimore is also a city that can’t catch a break, full of people who find joy in its absurdities. The Trash Wheel Family—a set of four solar and hydro-powered, googly-eyed machines that keep litter in the city’s rivers from entering the harbor—are local celebrities. Every week, a group of magnet-fishers meets at the harbor to pluck benches, scooters, and other treasures from the water, proudly displaying their haul along the sidewalk. Every year, bicycle-powered moving sculptures shaped like dragons and dogs and fire trucks compete to paddle down a short stretch of the harbor without capsizing. But no one ever really forgets that the harbor itself is visibly polluted, that much of the city’s infrastructure is breaking and broken, that the state has held back funding to fix it, that Baltimore’s mayoral administrations have been riddled with corruption, that people are still getting by on too little, that the murder rate is still too high.[Read: The aftermath of the Baltimore bridge collapse]Baltimore Harbor is one of the city’s most important links to the rest of the world; to cut it off is to clog our blood supply. Moore has already said that the bridge will be rebuilt to honor this morning’s victims. We can still get out of the city with trains and cars. But this morning, Baltimore feels that much more claustrophobic. Looking out toward the Chesapeake used to be an exercise in optimism, in feeling all the possibilities of being connected to the wider world and the terrifyingly wide swell of the Atlantic. Today, it’s an exercise in mourning and resolve.
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Winners of the 2024 World Nature Photography Awards
The winning images and photographers of this year’s World Nature Photography Awards have just been announced. Contest organizers have once more shared some of the winning images, shown below, from their 14 categories. Captions were provided by the photographers and have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
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The Baltimore Bridge Collapse and America’s Fragility
The rapid collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore early this morning touched off a frantic search for survivors—and gave Americans a frightening reminder of the fragility of the many systems that allow us to go about our lives. The sun rose to reveal twisted metal atop the cargo ship Dali, a long underwater obstruction keeping ships from moving in and out of the Port of Baltimore, a major tear in the transportation network, and great uncertainty about how the catastrophe would ripple across the economy.When the errant Dali struck a support pillar, motorists were using the bridge, and work crews were fixing potholes on it. Local officials’ immediate focus is, as it should be, on rescuing any who might have survived and comforting the families still waiting for news. Authorities quickly and rightly put to rest speculation about terrorism. An investigation into what happened on the ship has been announced. In the meantime, the public and its elected leaders must improvise answers to a question that few people were contemplating last night: What would happen if a major piece of our infrastructure disappeared in the dark? How do we respond to what could be a lengthy disruption to a lifeline of the region’s maritime and transportation networks?Whether any bridge’s support structure could withstand a direct hit by a ship as large as the Dali is an open question at this hour. Maryland Governor Wes Moore said at a news conference this morning that the fallen Baltimore bridge was “fully up to code.”A lot of American infrastructure is in poor shape. What’s clear across the country is that, even as the U.S. tries to ramp up repairs to our old bridges, rails, roads, and dams, we are not keeping up with their decay—much less bringing them into the modern era, building more redundancy into our systems, or developing contingency plans for sudden disruptions. We need to spend more time and resources thinking about Plan B.In Baltimore, some immediate problems are already evident: The now-destroyed bridge was the preferred highway route for trucks carrying materials—such as bulk gas, explosives, and radioactive matter—that are too hazardous to pass through the city’s major surface roads or underwater tunnels under the harbor.The waters around the bridge are also disrupted. Baltimore’s port supports more than 15,000 jobs, by one estimate, and is a major importation point for cars and trucks, construction materials, and goods affecting many other industries. Ship hulls rip easily; figuring out which debris remains under water and removing threats to maritime navigation will take some time. Boats and ships will be restricted in their ability to travel near the wreckage, until at least the pieces of the bridge are excavated from the waters.[Read: More bridges will collapse]For many people, the most visible disruption will be to general vehicular traffic in the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., areas and throughout the Northeast Corridor. Employers will have to relieve commuters from needing to travel; school children and others will experience delays if not cancellations; work and learn from home alternatives, at least for some time, will need to be instituted.None of this is easily practiced, but maybe it is time we begin to plan for it. The destruction of the Key Bridge appears to be a tragic accident, but it also offers a lesson.Those who plan complex systems often talk in terms of avoiding “single points of failure.” But the vulnerability of key pieces of infrastructure is all the more reason to plan in advance for how our transportation and economic systems can bounce back quickly from sudden setbacks.People in the emergency-management field throw the word resiliency around a lot. But resiliency isn’t something that a society just has; the word itself comes from a Latin verb meaning jump or leap, and it suggests movement and action—the consistent effort to prevent catastrophes whenever possible and limit their harms whenever necessary. The bridge collapse in Baltimore underscores the need for more of that kind of planning—not just bracing for impact and hoping for the best.
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The End of Foreign-Language Education
A few days ago, I watched a video of myself talking in perfect Chinese. I’ve been studying the language on and off for only a few years, and I’m far from fluent. But there I was, pronouncing each character flawlessly in the correct tone, just as a native speaker would. Gone were my grammar mistakes and awkward pauses, replaced by a smooth and slightly alien-sounding voice. “My favorite food is sushi,” I said—wo zui xihuan de shiwu shi shousi—with no hint of excitement or joy.I’d created the video using software from a Los Angeles–based artificial-intelligence start-up called HeyGen. It allows users to generate deepfake videos of real people “saying” almost anything based on a single picture of their face and a script, which is paired with a synthetic voice and can be translated into more than 40 languages. By merely uploading a selfie taken on my iPhone, I was able to glimpse a level of Mandarin fluency that may elude me for the rest of my life.HeyGen’s visuals are flawed—the way it animates selfies almost reminded me of the animatronics in Disney’s It’s a Small World ride—but its language technology is good enough to make me question whether learning Mandarin is a wasted effort. Neural networks, the machine-learning systems that power generative-AI programs such as ChatGPT, have rapidly improved the quality of automatic translation over the past several years, making even older tools like Google Translate far more accurate.At the same time, the number of students studying foreign languages in the U.S. and other countries is shrinking. Total enrollment in language courses other than English at American colleges decreased 29.3 percent from 2009 to 2021, according to the latest data from the Modern Language Association, better known as the MLA. In Australia, only 8.6 percent of high-school seniors were studying a foreign language in 2021—a historic low. In South Korea and New Zealand, universities are closing their French, German, and Italian departments. One recent study from the education company EF Education First found that English proficiency is decreasing among young people in some places.Many factors could help explain the downward trend, including pandemic-related school disruptions, growing isolationism, and funding cuts to humanities programs. But whether the cause of the shift is political, cultural, or some mix of things, it’s clear that people are turning away from language learning just as automatic translation becomes ubiquitous across the internet.[Read: High-school English needed a makeover before ChatGPT]Within a few years, AI translation may become so commonplace and frictionless that billions of people take for granted the fact that the emails they receive, videos they watch, and albums they listen to were originally produced in a language other than their native one. Something enormous will be lost in exchange for that convenience. Studies have suggested that language shapes the way people interpret reality. Learning a different way to speak, read, and write helps people discover new ways to see the world—experts I spoke with likened it to discovering a new way to think. No machine can replace such a profoundly human experience. Yet tech companies are weaving automatic translation into more and more products. As the technology becomes normalized, we may find that we’ve allowed deep human connections to be replaced by communication that’s technically proficient but ultimately hollow.AI language tools are now in social-media apps, messaging platforms, and streaming sites. Spotify is experimenting with using a voice-generation tool from the ChatGPT maker OpenAI to translate podcasts in the host’s own voice, while Samsung is touting that its new Galaxy S24 smartphone can translate phone calls as they’re occurring. Roblox, meanwhile, claimed last month that its AI translation tool is so fast and accurate, its English-speaking users might not realize that their conversation partner “is actually in Korea.” The technology—which works especially well for “high-resource languages” such as English and Chinese, and less so for languages such as Swahili and Urdu—is being used in much more high-stakes situations as well, such as translating the testimony of asylum seekers and firsthand accounts from conflict zones. Musicians are already using it to translate songs, and at least one couple credited it with helping them to fall in love.One of the most telling use cases comes from a start-up called Jumpspeak, which makes a language-learning app similar to Duolingo and Babbel. Instead of hiring actual bilingual actors, Jumpspeak appears to have used AI-generated “people” reading AI-translated scripts in at least four ads on Instagram and Facebook. At least some of the personas shown in the ads appear to be default characters available on HeyGen’s platform. “I struggled to learn languages my whole life. Then I learned Spanish in six months, I got a job opportunity in France, and I learned French. I learned Mandarin before visiting China,” a synthetic avatar says in one of the ads, while switching between all three languages. Even a language-learning app is surrendering to the allure of AI, at least in its marketing.Alexandru Voica, a communications professional who works for another video-generating AI service, told me he came across Jumpspeak’s ads while looking for a program to teach his children Romanian, the language spoken by their grandparents. He argued that the ads demonstrated how deepfakes and automated-translation software could be used to mislead or deceive people. “I'm worried that some in the industry are currently in a race to the bottom on AI safety,” he told me in an email. (The ads were taken down after I started reporting this story, but it’s not clear if Meta or Jumpspeak removed them; neither company returned requests for comment. HeyGen also did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its product being used in Jumpspeak’s marketing.)The world is already seeing how all of this can go wrong. Earlier this month, a far-right conspiracy theorist shared several AI-generated clips on X of Adolf Hitler giving a 1939 speech in English instead of the original German. The videos, which were purportedly produced using software from a company called ElevenLabs, featured a re-creation of Hitler’s own voice. It was a strange experience, hearing Hitler speak in English, and some people left comments suggesting that they found him easy to empathize with: “It sounds like these people cared about their country above all else,” one X user reportedly wrote in response to the videos. ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (The Atlantic uses ElevenLabs’ AI voice generator to narrate some articles.)[Read: The last frontier of machine translation]Gabriel Nicholas, a research fellow at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, told me that part of the problem with machine-translation programs is that they’re often falsely perceived as being neutral, rather than “bringing their own perspective upon how to move text from one language to another.” The truth is that there is no single right or correct way to transpose a sentence from French to Russian or any other language—it’s an art rather than a science. “Students will ask, ‘How do you say this in Spanish?’ and I’ll say, ‘You just don’t say it the same way in Spanish; the way you would approach it is different,’” Deborah Cohn, a Spanish- and Portuguese-language professor at Indiana University Bloomington who has written about the importance of language learning for bolstering U.S. national security, told me.I recently came across a beautiful and particularly illustrative example of this fact in an article written by a translator in China named Anne. “Building a ladder between widely different languages, such as Chinese and English, is sometimes as difficult as a doctor building a bridge in a patient's heart,” she wrote. The metaphor initially struck me as slightly odd, but thankfully I wasn’t relying on ChatGPT to translate Anne’s words from their original Mandarin. I was reading a human translation by a professor named Jeffrey Ding, who helpfully noted that Anne may have been referring to a type of heart surgery that has recently become common in China. It's a small detail, but understanding that context brought me much closer to the true meaning of what Anne was trying to say.[Read: The college essay is dead]But most students will likely never achieve anything close to the fluency required to tell whether a translation rings close enough to the original or not. If professors accept that automated technology will far outpace the technical skills of the average Russian or Arabic major, their focus would ideally shift from grammar drills to developing cultural competency, or understanding the beliefs and practices of people from different backgrounds. Instead of cutting language courses in response to AI, schools should “stress more than ever the intercultural components of language learning that tremendously benefit the students taking these classes,” Jen William, the head of the School of Languages and Cultures at Purdue University and a member of the executive committee of the Association of Language Departments, told me.Paula Krebs, the executive director of the MLA, referenced a beloved 1991 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation to make a similar point. In “Darmok,” the crew aboard the starship Enterprise struggles to communicate with aliens living on a planet called El-Adrel IV. They have access to a “universal translator” that allows them to understand the basic syntax and semantics of what the Tamarians are saying, but the greater meaning of their utterances remains a mystery.It later becomes clear that their language revolves around allegories rooted in the Tamarians’ unique history and practices. Even though Captain Picard was translating all the words they were saying, he “couldn’t understand the metaphors of their culture,” Krebs told me. More than 30 years later, something like a universal translator is now being developed on Earth. But it similarly doesn’t have the power to bridge cultural divides the way that humans can.
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A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
“In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me,” Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: “Ozempic and Wegovy,” she says. “Mounjaro and Zepbound.” The class of drugs to which these four belong, called GLP-1 receptor agonists, is the reason for the special.For a brief and telling moment, though, Oprah’s story of the revolution falters. It happens midway through the program, when she’s just brought on two obesity doctors, W. Scott Butsch and Amanda Velazquez, to talk about the GLP-1 wonder drugs. “Were you all surprised in your practices when people started losing weight?” she asks. Butsch gets a little tongue-tied: “Yeah, I mean, I think we have—we’ve already been using other medications for the last 10, 20 years,” he says. “But these were just a little bit more effective.”Oprah is nonplussed. She didn’t know about these other drugs, before Ozempic, that were already helping people with obesity. “Where was I?” she cries. “Where was the announcement?” Velazquez milks the moment for a laugh—“We didn’t have TikTok; that was our problem,” she says—and the show moves on. Whatever the identity of these medicines that came before, these almost-as-effective ones, they will not receive another mention. The show proceeds as if they don’t exist.And yet: They do. Amid the hype around the GLP-1s, with their multibillion-dollar sales and corresponding reputation as a modern miracle of medicine, a sort of pharmaco-amnesia has taken hold across America. Patients and physicians alike have forgotten, if indeed they ever knew, that the agents of the “weight-loss revolution”—Ozempic and Wegovy, Mounjaro and Zepbound—are just the latest medications for obesity. And that older drugs—among them Qsymia, Orlistat, and Contrave—are still available. Indeed, the best of these latter treatments might produce, on average, one-half the benefit you’d get from using GLP-1s in terms of weight loss, at less than one-30th the price.That result should not be ignored. Given the lack of widespread insurance coverage for the newer drugs, as well as marked lapses in supplies, many people have been left out of Oprah’s revolution. For last week’s special, she interviewed a mother and her daughter who say, to pursed-lipped expressions of concern, that they’d love to be on a drug like Wegovy or Zepbound, but “cannot access it financially.” Although the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has just announced that GLP-1 drugs for obesity may now be covered for seniors who also have cardiovascular disease, insurers have been pulling back. Next week, the North Carolina state workers’ health plan will cut off GLP-1 coverage for close to 25,000 people. Other, older drugs could help curb this crisis.[Read: Older Americans are about to lose a lot of weight]The newer drugs are much more potent. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, produced an additional 12 percent loss of body weight, on average, compared with placebos in clinical trials; the equivalent result for the highest dose of tirzepatide, which is in Mounjaro and Zepbound, was 18 percent. Meanwhile, the most popular of the older drugs for treating obesity, an amphetamine derivative called phentermine, has been shown to produce, on average, a 3 or 4 percent loss of total body weight. When phentermine is prescribed along with another older drug called topiramate—they’re sold in combination as Qsymia—the effect is stronger: more than 9 percent additional weight loss as compared with placebo, according to one trial.The newer drugs have also been investigated in very larg e numbers of patients and been shown to measurably reduce obesity-related complications such as strokes, heart attacks, and death. “We have all this data showing that GLP-1 drugs are reducing cardiovascular events and having other benefits,” Eduardo Grunvald, the medical director of the weight-management program at UC San Diego Health, told me, “and we have no data on the other drugs on those issues.” (Like many prominent obesity doctors, including Butsch and Velazquez, Grunvald has received thousands of dollars in consulting fees and honoraria from the maker of Wegovy. He has also received payments from the company behind Contrave.) All else being equal, the GLP-1s are the better option.But all else is rarely equal. For one thing, the average weight-loss effects reported in the literature can’t tell you how each specific patient will respond to treatment. When people take Wegovy or Zepbound, more than half of them are strong responders, according to the published research, with weight loss that amounts to more than 15 percent. At the same time, roughly one in seven people gets no clear benefit at all. The older drugs also have a diversity of outcomes. Qsymia doesn’t seem to work for about one-third of those who take it, but another third finds Ozempesque success, losing at least 15 percent of body weight. “I’ve had patients who have lost as much or more weight with Qsymia as they do with GLP-1s,” Grunvald said. “It’s about finding that lock and key for a particular individual.”[Read: Ozempic can turn into No-zempic]Depending on that fit, a patient may end up saving quite a bit of money. Since 2016, Sarah Ro, a primary-care physician based in Hillsborough, North Carolina, has run a weight-management program that serves rural communities. She’s been treating patients with the older drugs, she told me, and getting good results: “I regularly have people losing 50 pounds on phentermine alone, or phentermine-topiramate.” These drugs are generally covered by insurance, but Ro prescribes them as generics that are cheap enough to pay for out of pocket either way. “It’s like 10 to 11 bucks for phentermine, and 12 bucks for topiramate,” she said. A similar month’s supply of Wegovy or Zepbound injections is listed at more than $1,000.“I have to be honest with you, the whole craze and wave of uptake of the GLP-1 medications was a little bit of a surprise to me,” Grunvald said. “We had this decade of drugs that were actually effective, but people really didn’t latch onto them.” Again, he emphasized the obvious fact that the GLP-1 medications work much better, overall, than the old ones. But he and other experts with whom I spoke suggested that the higher potency alone cannot explain an utter turnabout in patient demand, from nearly zero to almost unmanageable.Several noted that the older drugs are “stigmatized,” as Grunvald put it. In particular, a lot of people are wary of phentermine, on account of its status as an amphetamine derivative, and also its connection to the “fen-phen” scandal of the 1990s, when it was sold as part of an enormously popular (and effective) drug combination that turned out to have dangerous effects on people’s hearts. But as David Saxon of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus explained to me, the problems with fen-phen derived from the “fen” and not the “phen”—which is to say, a different drug called fenfluramine. “Phen,” for its part, has been prescribed as a weight-loss drug for more than half a century—far longer than any GLP-1 agonist has been on the market—and has shown no clear signs of causing serious problems. Its known side effects are similar to those of Adderall, a drug that is now used by more than 40 million Americans.Topiramate brings other risks, including birth defects, tingling sensations, and changes in mood. Especially at higher doses, it can lead to brain fog. But again, the specifics here will vary from one patient to the next. And GLP-1s have their own side effects, most notably gastrointestinal distress that can be quite unpleasant. About one-sixth of people taking semaglutide are forced to stop; a guest on Oprah’s special said she had to quit after ending up in the emergency room, vomiting blood. Some of these patients may do just fine on phentermine or topiramate. “Honestly, I see more side effects with the GLP-1 drugs than with the other drugs,” Grunvald told me. “I get more messages and phone calls about side effects than I used to.”Some of the older drugs’ peculiar side effects can even wind up being useful, Ro suggested. Many of her patients with obesity are fond of Mountain Dew, she told me; some are drinking two liters every day. She counsels cutting back on sugary beverages, but topiramate can really help, because it can distort the taste of carbonation. In the clinical literature, this dysgeusia is deemed unwanted—it’s called a “taste perversion.” For Ro, it can be a tool for weaning off unhealthy habits. “We have such a wonderful response to using topiramate,” she said.Now she’s girding for the change in North Carolina’s health-insurance coverage for state workers. She tells her patients not to panic; if they can’t afford to pay for Wegovy or Zepbound out of pocket, she can switch them to different agents. “Everybody’s talking about GLP-1s, and it’s like, ‘GLP-1s or bust,’” she said. “And I’m going, ‘Hello! You know, my patients never had that much access to GLP-1s anyway.’” Those patients may not end up getting the best possible treatments for obesity—add this to the running list of health disparities—but they can have a drug that works. For anyone who is living with meaningful complications of obesity, having some weight loss will likely be better than having none at all.If Oprah never got the memo, the problem may have less to do with medicine than with expectation. The older drugs can work, but their average effects on body weight are in the range of 5 to 10 percent, which is about what some people can expect to achieve through major changes to their lifestyle. “Remember, you’re fighting against the cultural current that says, ‘What, you’re taking one of those medicines? That’s awful! You ought to be able to do that yourself,’” Ted Kyle, a pharmacist and an obesity-policy consultant, told me. “The efficacy is not enough to get you over that hump of cultural resistance, and of the stigma attached to taking medicines for obesity.” And then, when a patient on an older drug has reached their new plateau for body weight, which could be just 10 pounds less than where they were before, they may not be so inclined to keep up with their prescription. Are they really going to stay on a medication for the rest of their life, if its effects are not utterly transformative?Again, it all depends on who you are. Just like the drugs, lifestyle interventions must be used indefinitely, and just like the drugs, they may work out great for certain patients and be of little help to others. “There are some people who get a response to a diet that is comparable to bariatric surgery,” Kyle told me. “It’s just not many of them. And it takes a really smart provider of obesity care to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to work with you to get you to your best possible outcomes.’” (Many primary-care doctors simply aren’t trained in how to use the older drugs, Ro said.) If we aren’t ready to give up on recommending healthy diets and more exercise, then let’s not forget the other options. These drugs work. The weight-loss revolution didn’t start in 2021.
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theatlantic.com