Donald Trump Just Had an Incredible Legal Week (Yes, Really)

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Gil Cohen-Magen/ReutersThe International Criminal Court’s prosecutor on Monday said that he has requested a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and three Hamas leaders.More to follow...Read more at The Daily Beast.

Fifteen days before I arrived, she was run over in the night by an Israeli tank.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony on May 13, 2024. The International Criminal Court announced Monday that it is seeking arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar on war crime charges. The charges are tied to the deadly Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel and the subsequent war in...

"The morning for the Russian occupiers in Luhansk started not with coffee, but with a missile strike," said X user Dmitri from War Translated.

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US Secretary of State Antony Blinken performs “Rockin’ in the Free World” with members of The 1999 band at the Barman Dictat bar in Kyiv on May 14, 2024. | Brendan Smialowski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images Still rockin’ in the free world? When Secretary of State Antony Blinken strapped on a guitar and took the stage at a Kyiv rock club last week to sing Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World,” he didn’t amuse many of the Biden administration’s critics, who questioned whether the jam session was in good taste at a time when children are starving in Gaza and when Russian forces are making rapid gains in eastern Ukraine, partly due to the long delay in delivering US weapons to the front. But the song’s eponymous chorus (Blinken skipped the far more caustic verses, which make it clear that Young was being ironic) is a good representation of how the Biden administration would like its foreign policy to be viewed, particularly when it comes to support for Ukraine. As Blinken told the crowd, Ukraine’s forces “are fighting not just for a free Ukraine but for the free world — and the free world is with you too.” Almost from the beginning, President Joe Biden has defined his administration as locked in a struggle to push back against the global erosion of democracy and “win the 21st century” against authoritarian powers like China and Russia. He has often described this struggle as guiding not just America’s foreign policy but its domestic priorities, saying America must prove that democracy “still works” to deliver economic growth and prosperity. This type of rhetoric only intensified after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Biden has framed as a test of the democratic world’s resolve. The democracy versus autocracy framing drew a stark contrast with Donald Trump, who as president took a narrowly transactional view of foreign policy, had chummy relationships with leaders like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, and the Saudi royal family, and undermined democratic norms at home. It also drew a more subtle contrast with Barack Obama, whose signature foreign policy achievements — the Iran nuclear deal, the diplomatic opening to Cuba, breakthrough climate change diplomacy with China — often involved doing business with some of the world’s most repressive governments. “I believe that — every ounce of my being — that democracy will and must prevail,” Biden told the Munich Security Conference a few weeks after taking office. Putting that belief into practice has been more difficult. What’s the US actually doing in the world? In practice, the Biden administration’s foreign policy has been more conventional than the rhetoric suggests: “Realpolitik from top to bottom,” as international relations scholar Paul Poast put it earlier this year. The goal has not so much been to defeat authoritarianism writ large as to compete with and contain particular authoritarian powers: China, Russia, and Iran. Sometimes, as in US support for Ukraine’s war effort and military aid to Taiwan, this can fairly be described as standing up for a beleaguered democracy. Sometimes, as in the upgrading of relations between the US and Vietnam that came during Biden’s visit to the country last year, it’s hard to see it that way. Conveniently for the US, Vietnam — a major American trade partner — is increasingly wary about China’s territorial aims in the South China Sea, but the two countries have very similar political systems: single-party Communist regimes without national elections. When the US convened a virtual “summit of democracies” in 2021, a good portion of the coverage and commentary focused not on the meetings themselves, but on the guest list. For instance, Hungary, a country whose government was backsliding on democracy and the rule of law and becoming increasingly friendly to Russia, was excluded. Poland, a country whose government was (at the time) backsliding on democracy and the rule of law, but was staunchly anti-Russian, was not. In 2022, the US hosted the Summit of the Americas — a periodic gathering of Western Hemisphere leaders — but excluded Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, all authoritarian governments subject to US sanctions. The administration’s principled pro-democracy stance was undercut somewhat by the fact that the White House was simultaneously planning a presidential trip to Saudi Arabia. The Saudis, as they have from numerous previous administrations, evidently get a pass when it comes to Biden’s freedom agenda. The president famously promised on the campaign trail to make Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, a “pariah” over his role in the killing of journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi. In 2022, with the war in Ukraine putting pressure on global oil markets, Biden and “MBS” shared an awkward fist bump in Riyadh. More recently, the administration has been pushing an ambitious deal under which Saudi Arabia would formally recognize Israel in exchange for concessions from Israel on Palestinian statehood and formal security guarantees from the US. The US hasn’t agreed to a pact like this with any country since Japan in 1960. Then there’s India, where nearly a billion voters are going to the polls this month, but where moves by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist government to sideline its opponents and crack down on the media have raised questions about how much longer the “world’s largest democracy” will live up to that title. The administration has been conspicuously quiet about the democratic backsliding in a country it considers a vital bulwark against Chinese power. This soft touch has continued even in the face of compelling evidence of plans by India’s intelligence services to kill the government’s critics on US soil. And finally, there’s Israel’s war on Gaza. The administration’s arguments that countries in the Global South should be doing more to back Ukraine and punish Russia in the name of the rules-based international order fall a little flat when the US continues to provide weapons to a country that even the State Department concludes is likely violating the laws of war. This administration is hardly the first to fall short of its own rhetoric when it comes to democracy and human rights. And it’s not as if Trump would do more to advance democracy or human rights if elected instead — not when it comes to Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or any other country. But the sweep and ambition of this president and his team’s rhetoric make it hard not to note the inconsistencies as they rock on in an increasingly unfree world. This story originally appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

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One day the French writer Colombe Schneck, a total stranger, came to my house. She was a friend of a friend who lived in Paris, and it had somehow been arranged that she would drop by. The afternoon was gray and drizzly, and I felt slightly awkward about having this visitor I had never met coming to my house. But then she walked in, brisk, at ease. I liked her immediately. We launched right into big subjects; there was no chatter or small talk. In her frank, spare style, with its transporting particulars, she told me an anecdote about a reluctant visit she had made to a writer acquaintance’s death bed in a Paris hospital that might have been the best story anyone has ever told me. It somehow straightened and reordered something inside me. Even though I am a writing professor, I had forgotten the power of stories to do this.Of course, I was curious about whether Schneck’s writing would have the same vividness and force as the story she had told me, and this spring, her books are appearing in English for the first time. Three of her slender volumes are collected together as Swimming in Paris: A Life in Three Stories. In them, she writes about growing up in an intellectual, bourgeois Parisian milieu and an abortion she had as a teenager that shook her feeling of invincibility; a close childhood friend who died of cancer in her early 50s; and swimming and dating postdivorce.Schneck’s writing is sinewy, tough, sharp. The memoir comes out of a distinctly French tradition that includes writers such as Françoise Sagan, Marguerite Duras, and Annie Ernaux. This is a tradition of lean prose; the sentences are evocative, stylish, direct. In stripping away excess self-reflection, these books give us the bones of the story. They rely on rich, suggestive detail rather than prolonged passages of introspection.Their rigorously frank narrators spare no one, not even themselves. They are bracing and refreshing, almost impatient with the comforting delusions most of us traffic in. When Schneck’s friend is dying in one story, she writes, “There is no such thing as empathy, no one can put themself in her place or take on even a little of her pain.” There is in Schneck’s books, as in Annie Ernaux’s, an utter refusal of sentimentality. Instead, there is an honest, intelligent, cool assessment of things.In the new trilogy, Schneck often turns her razor critiques on her own behavior. In one section she even writes about herself in the third person as “Colombe,” as if to emphasize the analytic distance from her own experience. The books have no interest in the glorification or valorization of the self. Though Schneck wrestles with the difficulty of women’s experience, the obstacles and inequities it entails, the narrator is not presented as a consummate victim.She begins, “My childhood was utopian. I was not a girl, I did not have a girl’s body, I was just me, Colombe: irascible, determined, stubborn, violent, brutal, clumsy, thieving, lying, mistreating my dolls and spinning stories about them, bad at school unless the subject intrigued me.”One of my students recently sent me a quote from a writer named John Paul Brammer: “Many personal essays have little more to say than … why would this happen to me, a delicate newborn foal wobbling so blamelessly through life?” Schneck is very adamantly not in the newborn-foal school of memoir writing. She rejects the narrative of personal innocence that many writers are infatuated with. As her friend is dying, Schneck is suffering from a breakup, and she writes, “Colombe wanted to die, but then she is ashamed of thinking such a thing.”In the section on her friend, she exposes her snobbisms, her jealousies, her lies, her competitive feelings, and other unsavory impulses. She reports a time when a cameraman at the television station where she works tells her that his father is a mailman. “Colombe laughs, it’s the first time she has met a mailman’s son. This laugh is one of her greatest embarrassments, one of her biggest regrets. She would like to erase it.”The story about her friend, whom she calls “Héloïse,” is the most striking in the collection—a meditation on a friendship that began in childhood. As she puts it, “Whenever they speak they might be eleven or they might be forty-nine.” They go to the same liberal private school, vacation together in Saint-Tropez, each get married, have children and jobs, get divorced, have love affairs, and then her friend gets cancer. Héloïse is, Schneck writes, “one of the great witnesses of my life.”In one of the book’s whimsical moments, Schneck invents a fictional sociologist from a working-class background who analyzes the two girls’ bourgeois upbringing. She drops in throughout the story to do a little sociological observation: “The imaginary sociologist, who has not retired, pops her head in. She is disappointed, she had hoped that Héloïse and Colombe, given their education, their degrees, their background, their friends, would have escaped their condition as women, wives, mothers.”In this portrait of a friendship, Schneck captures the competitive jostling, the way love accrues over years, the deep, almost wordless connection between the old friends. She gets at the reassurance that only they can provide for each other. After being fired and divorcing her husband, Colombe finally confesses, –I can’t take it anymore, it’s too hard.Héloïse said:–I’m on my way.She met up with Colombe and the two went for a walk. Heather, ferns, birches, oaks.–You can’t fight the whole world, Colombe. Pick the battles that matter, and let the rest go. Take care of your children. You have to work and earn money. The rest is not important.Colombe, who is not accustomed to obeying, obeys her …Later, Colombe will love telling Héloïse what she owes her: the right to be a little bit imperfect. Toward the end of Heloise’s life, a painful dinner ensues where, over oysters, Héloïse wants to talk about dying, but Colombe can’t allow them to have that conversation. She also describes a moment when she runs back to Héloïse’s house to get a phone charger while Héloïse, very near the end of her life, is getting chemotherapy. Finding the charger in the bathroom, Colombe compares her friend’s fancy face cream with her own drugstore brand and can’t resist dipping her finger into it and putting it on her face.Schneck writes of her friend’s death: “So Colombe perseveres in writing this story, knowing that writing is no consolation, nor reading either; yet suddenly a sentence can create a slight disruption in the order of things, and it is this disruption that allows her to carry on, before it is her turn to die.”[Read: The year I tore through Annie Ernaux’s books]In some sense, this memoir is for people who are the tiniest bit tired of memoir. It gives one the feeling of greater understanding, a sudden, expansive view from the top of a hill. Even though Schneck works at a scale that is deliberately small, insistently concrete, and extremely lean, her writing somehow exposes whole vistas of the female experience.In Schneck’s books, no fattiness exists, no unnecessary flourish, no therapist’s-office stuff, no prettifying, no false reaching for redemption or uplift. Schneck’s charm is in her directness—one could say bluntness—her eye for vivid specifics, her cutting through to the significant. The brevity is in a sense a reproach to our big, baggy American memoirs, our excessive self-regard, our sheer wordiness on the subject of ourselves.One wishes the American publisher had been bold enough to release each of the skinny books separately, as they appeared in the original French, but the pressure of the marketplace must have made this seem too daunting. To me, the tininess of the books is uniquely satisfying. It is both their pleasure and their mystery: how compact they are, how the straightforward, unassuming form opens up to deep reservoirs of feeling. The smallness is the power of these volumes; the deceptive simplicity is the allure.

Of all the creatures stricken with this new and terrible H5N1 flu—the foxes, the bears, the eagles, ducks, chickens, and many other birds—dairy cattle are some of the most intimate with us. In the United States, more than 9 million milk cows live on farms, where people muck their manure, help birth their calves, tend their sick, and milk them daily. That kind of proximity is exactly what gives a virus countless opportunities to encounter humans—and then evolve from an animals-only virus into one that troubles people too.But as unnerving as H5N1’s current spread in cows might be, “I would be a whole lot more concerned if this was an event in pigs,” Richard Webby, the director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Studies on the Ecology of Influenza in Animals and Birds, told me. Like cows, pigs share plenty of spaces with us. They also have a nasty track record with flu: Swine airways are evolutionary playgrounds where bird-loving flu viruses can convert—and have converted—into ones that prefer to infect us. A flu virus that jumped from swine to humans, for instance, catalyzed the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. If there’s a list of riskiest animals for an avian flu to infiltrate, “pigs are clearly at the top,” Webby said.To successfully spread in a new species, a flu virus must infiltrate that creature’s cells, reproduce inside of them, and then make it to the next host. This H5N1 has managed that feat in several animals, but so far, “we’re actually still dealing with a very avian virus,” Michelle Wille, a virologist at the University of Melbourne, told me. For the virus to spread widely in humans, scientists think that it would need to pick up several new traits; so far, they’ve detected only one such modification, which has boosted the virus’s ability to replicate inside mammalian cells.In particular, the virus does not seem to have acquired what Webby considers the most crucial modification, one that would help it more efficiently enter human-airway cells in the first place. To do that, H5N1 would need to adjust its ability to latch on to particular sugars on cell surfaces, which effectively serve as locks to the cell’s interior. For decades, though, the virus has preferred the version of those sugars that’s most commonly found in the gastrointestinal tract of birds, and still seems to. Experts would really start to worry, Webby said, if it started glomming very tightly instead onto the ones most commonly found in human airways.[Read: Bird flu has never done this before]That said, the difference between those sugars is architecturally quite small. And although scientists might colloquially call some bird receptors and others human receptors, mammals can produce bird receptors, and vice versa. (Humans, for instance, have bird receptors in their eyes, which likely explains why the farm worker who appears to have caught H5N1 from a dairy cow developed only conjunctivitis.) The right animal host could encourage the virus to switch its preference from birds to humans—and pigs fit that bill. They just so happen to harbor both bird receptors and human receptors in their respiratory tract, giving the flu viruses that infect them plenty of opportunity to transform.Just by hanging out in pigs for a while, H5N1 could enhance its ability to enter our cells. Or, perhaps even more concerning, it could encounter a flu that had already evolved to infect humans, and swaps bits of its genome with that virus. Pigs catch our viruses all the time. And should one of those pathogens hybridize with this H5N1, becoming human-adapted enough to spread among people but still avian-adapted enough to elude our immune system, a large-scale outbreak could begin. In the late 1970s, after an H1N1 avian-flu virus hopped from wild waterfowl into Europe’s pig population, it took just a few years to start infecting people in Europe and Asia. Eventually, that same virus helped birth 2009’s pandemic swine flu.Right now flu surveillance among swine needs to be dialed up, experts told me; protections for farm workers who handle the animals should ramp up too. Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me that she’d also like to see cow’s milk on farms better contained and more quickly heat-treated, so that other animals in the vicinity won’t be exposed to the liquid in its raw form. (Several farm cats, for instance, appear to have caught H5N1 by drinking raw milk on farms.)At this point, any worry about the virus evolving dramatically in pigs is still theoretical. H5N1 hasn’t yet been detected in farm pigs, and experimental infections have found that the virus, although capable of infecting and replicating in swine, doesn’t seem to transmit easily among them. Even if that were to change, pigs may not end up being the ideal venue for the many other genetic gymnastics that would help this virus adapt to us.That said, “we don’t fully understand all of the mutations or genetic requirements” needed to convert an avian virus, Louise Moncla, a virologist at the University of Pennsylvania, told me. Viruses sometimes surprise us: 2009’s H1N1 flu, for instance, caused a pandemic without making the genetic change that seems to have helped this new H5N1 along. Which means it’s not a complete comfort that H5N1 isn’t spreading in pigs yet—especially when so many cows are getting sick now.[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]Scientists know relatively little about flu in cows. Although cattle have been known to catch certain kinds of flu before, the current outbreak is the first time a type-A influenza, the group that H5N1 belongs to, has been detected in their kind. Researchers are only now starting to understand the animals’ susceptibility to these pathogens, and a recent preprint study, which Webby contributed to, revealed human-esque flu receptors in several parts of the cow body, some of which have bird receptors too—a finding that suggests that the risk posed by continued spread in cows is higher than once thought. Webby, for one, isn’t panicking yet, and he told me that the results mainly help explain why cow udders, now confirmed to be full of bird receptors, have turned out to be such great homes for H5N1. And because cows are likely spreading the virus to one another via milking equipment—basically a free ride for the pathogen—there may be little pressure for the virus to change its MO.The bigger risk is simpler. “The things that make me the most nervous are the species that we regularly interact with all the time,” Moncla told me. The more cows catch the virus, the more exposure there will be for us, giving the virus more chances to explore and potentially adapt to our respiratory tract. Commercial milking is a messy affair: The processing machinery sprays and mists the liquid all about. Lakdawala imagines that milking an infected cow without protective equipment could be “like me squirting 10,000 or 100,000 viral particles into someone’s nose.” Just one of those particles needs to carry the right set of genetic changes for this flu to become a human one.

The superhuman protagonist of The Crow, the comic-book movie that went on to become a cult hit after its release 30 years ago, doesn’t relish being undead and invincible. When he first shows his face on-screen, Eric Draven, played by Brandon Lee, is crawling out of his own grave in near-feral agony. His fingers claw at the mud around his tomb. His clothes, drenched by rain, cling to his skin. He never gets to his feet; instead, he writhes on his back, screaming in pain.To say this isn’t a standard superhero’s welcome is an understatement—but then, The Crow didn’t care to obey the genre’s conventions. Grim, stylish, and brazenly violent, the film is a gothic fable about a young rock musician and his girlfriend who, on the eve of their wedding, are murdered. When Draven, the former heavy-metal guitarist, is resurrected from the dead a year later by a mystical crow—just go with it—he’s not a noble crime fighter, but a wounded predator hunting the killers. “They’re all dead,” he snarls. “They just don’t know it yet.”The Crow premiered in 1994, at a moment when superhero films themselves appeared to be in dire shape. Gone were the shiny Superman movies of the 1970s and ’80s. In Batman Returns, released in 1992, Tim Burton refined his approach to the genre’s aesthetic—less spandex, more noir—and delivered a much grittier story, but his Batman sequel fell far short of the box-office bar set by its predecessor in 1989. Films based on Marvel comics were forgettable, and although the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was successful, it was intended for children. Producing mainstream comic-book-based entertainment posed a challenge for the studios. Could a hero be fresh but familiar enough to spawn the next great franchise?Before it began production, The Crow may have looked like an ideal solution. Based on an acclaimed if niche series of comics by James O’Barr, the adaptation had secured a handsome rising star in the 28-year-old Lee. The story seemed straightforward enough; it had a sentimental core, and incorporated a handful of lighter, more accessible supporting characters to balance the darker themes. But the finished film, steeped in the director Alex Proyas’s grungy vision and clouded by Lee’s tragic death after an accident on set, turned out to be a singular, and strange, phenomenon. Its melancholic mood and theme are worth remembering as a remake arrives in theaters this August, at a time of dwindling box-office returns for Marvel and DC Comics. For fans who have tired of tidy morals, formulaic action, and flashy effects, The Crow of three decades ago offers an antidote, proof that the comic-book genre can be a vehicle for a wrenching evocation of human suffering.In retrospect, Lee’s fate—a prop gun loaded with blanks malfunctioned, causing a projectile to hit him in the abdomen—has largely eclipsed his remarkable performance in The Crow, which is crucial to the film’s jarring power. He delivers hokey one-liners with hard-edged gusto. He moves balletically across the screen, imbuing Draven with an unexpected softness. He shed 20 pounds before filming began, and his gauntness signaled his character’s difference, not just in appearance but in ethos, from hunkier comic-book heroes. Caught in an abyss of grief, Draven is menacing but vulnerable, delirious enough to paint himself in black-and-white harlequin makeup for his murderous missions, but too stricken to reconnect fully with who he had been before his death. Even in lighter scenes, Lee quietly conveys that Draven is so consumed by sadness, he can’t see beyond revenge.The film’s prevailing visual and sonic grammar foregrounds bleakness, motion, noise. Drawing from the story’s ink-and-paper origins, The Crow presents a Detroit that seems permanently covered in grime and shrouded in mist, with kinetic camerawork exaggerating the city’s angular alleyways. Burton’s Batman had already begun challenging the superhero genre’s gaudier impulses, but The Crow takes the shadowy tableaus to another level. Proyas spent his early career directing moody music videos for artists such as Sting and Crowded House; here, he assembles a film that looks like a mid-’90s rock video. It sounds like one, too: The soundtrack includes Nine Inch Nails, the Cure, and Violent Femmes. Every “serious” comic-book movie since has likely borrowed something from The Crow, whether it’s the smoky aesthetics or the abrupt needle drops.O’Barr wrote the original comics after a drunk driver killed his fiancée; he tried to purge his anger on the page, only to discover that his suffering grew as he worked. That pain carries over into the film: The Crow contains enough moments to suggest the shape of a traditional comic-book tale, including energetically staged fight scenes, antagonists with absurd code names, and even a catchphrase for Draven: “It can’t rain all the time.” But the overarching, and arresting, effect is to leave the audience shaken, rather than to offer resolution.Unlike other superhero projects, the movie’s narrative is not about good prevailing over evil—or about the indestructible Draven using his great power responsibly. By the end of the film, he has left a bloody trail in his ultimately triumphant pursuit of the criminals who attacked him and his fiancée, Shelly (Sofia Shinas), and he has nowhere to go but back to his grave. There he’s embraced by Shelly in a vision, which may seem like a happy conclusion—the couple reunited, justice served. But Draven’s crusade never restores them to life together. If anything, his recurrent hazy, half-formed flashbacks suggest that Shelly has become nothing more than a memory that hounds him, fueling his fury and angst.Perhaps it’s wrong even to call The Crow a superhero film. It’s a reconfiguration of the form, an assertion that such movies don’t have to be mere vessels for quippy dialogue and eye-popping effects. They can invite viewers to examine human nature as its own wildly unpredictable force. Our feelings underscore our humanity, but they can be overpowering too, imprisoning rather than liberating us.Made for roughly $23 million, The Crow went on to net more than $50 million in the United States. It yielded several unremarkable sequels, each a reminder of just what a rare asset the original had in Lee’s fierce yet nuanced performance. None achieved the first film’s unsettling blend of corrosive emotion and concussive action.But Hollywood hasn’t been able to resist the allure of remaking the original. Efforts to introduce a new Eric Draven to audiences have been under way since the late 2000s, and the parade of actors rumored to have almost played him over the years is impressive: It includes Oscar nominees (Bradley Cooper, Ryan Gosling), men cast as other superheroes (Jason Momoa, Nicholas Hoult), and Alexander Skarsgård, whose younger brother Bill—best known for his work as the murderous clown Pennywise in the latest It films—will soon actually make it to the screen in the role.The comic-book film genre’s garish-to-grim cycles have become familiar, but The Crow endures because it upended expectations and ignored conventional boundaries. A legacy like that is inviting—and daunting. In an interview conducted during the film’s production, Lee explained why he wanted to play Draven, and bequeathed some useful wisdom, or perhaps a warning, to successors. “There are no rules,” he said, “about how a person who has come back from the dead is going to behave.”This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Engrossing Darkness of The Crow.”

Photographs by Olivia Joan GalliLast fall, on an overcast Sunday morning, I took a train from New York to Montclair, New Jersey, to see Auntie, my mother’s older sister. Auntie is our family archivist, the woman we turn to when we want to understand where we came from. She’s taken to genealogy, tending our family tree, keeping up with distant cousins I’ve never met. But she has also spent the past decade unearthing a different sort of history, a kind that many Black families like mine leave buried, or never discover at all. It was this history I’d come to talk with her about.Auntie picked me up at the train station and drove me to her house. When she unlocked the door, I felt like I was walking into my childhood. Everything in her home seemed exactly as it had been when I spent Christmases there with my grandmother—the burgundy carpets; the piano that Auntie plays masterfully; the dining-room table where we all used to sit, talk, and eat. That day, Auntie had prepared us a lunch to share: tender pieces of beef, sweet potatoes, kale, and the baked rice my grandma Victoria used to make.When Auntie went to the kitchen to gather the food, I scanned the table. At the center was a map of Mississippi, unfurled, the top weighted down with an apple-shaped trivet. Auntie told me that the map had belonged to Victoria. She had kept it in her bedroom, mounted above the wood paneling that lined her room in Princeton, New Jersey, where she and my grandfather raised my mother, Auntie, and my two uncles. I’d never noticed my grandmother’s map, but a framed outline of Mississippi now hangs from a wall in my own bedroom, the major cities marked with blooming magnolias, the state flower. My grandmother had left markings on her map—X’s over Meridian, Vicksburg, and Jackson, and a shaded dot over a town in Hinds County, between Jackson and Vicksburg, called Edwards.I wondered whether the X’s indicated havens or sites of tragedy. As for Edwards, I knew the dot represented the start of Auntie’s story. Following an act of brutality in 1888, my ancestors began the process of uprooting themselves from the town, ushering themselves into a defining era of Black life in America: the Great Migration.I first learned about the lynching of Bob Broome in 2015, when Auntie emailed my mother a PDF of news clippings describing the events leading up to his murder. She’d come across the clippings on Ancestry.com, on the profile page of a distant family member. Bob was Victoria’s great-uncle. “Another piece of family history from Mississippi we never knew about,” Auntie wrote. “I’M SURE there is more to this story.”I knew that her discovery was important, but I didn’t feel capable then of trying to make sense of what it meant to me. As I embarked on a career telling other people’s stories, however, I eventually realized that the lynching was a hole in my own, something I needed to investigate if I was to understand who I am and where I came from. A few years ago, I began reading every newspaper account of Bob Broome’s life and death that Auntie and I could find. I learned more about him and about the aftermath of his killing. But in the maddeningly threadbare historical record, I also found accounts and sources that contradicted one another.Bob Broome was 19 or 20 when he was killed. On August 12, 1888, a Sunday, he walked to church with a group of several “colored girls,” according to multiple accounts, as he probably did every week. All versions of the story agree that on this walk, Bob and his company came across a white man escorting a woman to church. Back then in Mississippi, the proper thing for a Black man to do in that situation would have been to yield the sidewalk and walk in the street. But my uncle decided not to.A report out of nearby Jackson alleges that Bob pushed the white man, E. B. Robertson, who responded with a promise that Bob “would see him again.” According to the Sacramento Daily Union (the story was syndicated across the country), my uncle’s group pushed the woman in a rude manner and told Robertson they would “get him.” After church, Robertson was with three or four friends, explaining the sidewalk interaction, when “six negroes” rushed them.All of these stories appeared in the white press. According to these accounts, Bob and his companions, including his brother Ike, my great-great-grandfather, approached Robertson’s group outside a store. The papers say my uncle Bob and a man named Curtis Shortney opened fire. One of the white men, Dr. L. W. Holliday, was shot in the head and ultimately died; two other white men were injured. Several newspaper stories claim my uncle shot Holliday, with a couple calling him the “ring leader.” It is unclear exactly whom reporters interviewed for these articles, but if the reporting went as it usually did for lynchings, these were white journalists talking to white sources. Every article claims that the white men were either unarmed or had weapons but never fired them.Bob, his brother Ike, and a third Black man were arrested that day; their companions, including Shortney, fled the scene. While Bob was being held in a jail in nearby Utica, a mob of hundreds of white men entered and abducted him. Bob, “before being hanged, vehemently protested his innocence,” The New York Times reported. But just a few beats later, the Times all but calls my uncle a liar, insisting that his proclamation was “known to be a contradiction on its face.” Members of the mob threw a rope over an oak-tree branch at the local cemetery and hauled my ancestor upward, hanging him until he choked to death. A lynch mob killed Shortney a month later.[From the May 2022 issue: Burying a burning]In the white press, these lynchings are described as ordinary facts of life, the stories sandwiched between reports about Treasury bonds and an upcoming eclipse. The Times article about Bob noted that days after his lynching, all was quiet again in Utica, “as if nothing had occurred.” The headlines from across the country focus on the allegations against my uncle, treating his extralegal murder simply as a matter of course. The Boston Globe’s headline read “Fired on the White Men” and, a few lines later, “A Negro Insults a White Man and His Lady Companion.” The subtitle of The Daily Commercial Herald, a white newspaper in nearby Vicksburg, Mississippi, read: “Murderous and Insolent Negro Hanged by Indignant Citizens of Utica.”The summary executions of Bob Broome and Curtis Shortney had the convenient effect of leaving these stories in white-owned newspapers largely unexamined and unchallenged in the public record. But the Black press was incredulous. In the pages of The Richmond Planet, a Black newspaper in Virginia’s capital, Auntie had found a column dismissing the widespread characterization of Bob as a menace. This report was skeptical of the white newspapers’ coverage, arguing that it was more likely that the white men had attacked the Black group, who shot back. “Of course it is claimed that the attack was sudden and no resistance was made by the whites,” the article reads. The author and her aunt at her aunt’s home in New Jersey (Olivia Joan Galli for The Atlantic) The newspapers we found don’t say much more about the lynching, but Auntie did find one additional account of Bob Broome’s final moments—and about what happened to my great-great-grandfather Ike. A few days after the lynching, a reader wrote to the editor of The Daily Commercial Herald claiming to have been a witness to key events. “Knowing you always want to give your readers the correct views on all subjects,” the letter opens, the witness offers to provide more of “the particulars” of my uncle’s lynching. According to the letter writer, when the lynch mob arrived the morning after the shooting, the white deputy sheriff, John Broome, assisted by two white men, E. H. Broome and D. T. Yates, told the crowd that they could not take the prisoners away until the case was investigated. Bob, Ike, and the third Black man were moved to the mayor’s office in the meantime. But more men from neighboring counties joined the mob and showed up at the mayor’s office, where they “badly hurt” Deputy Sheriff Broome with the butt of a gun. The white men seized Bob and hanged him, while Ike and the other Black man were relocated to another jail. The witness’s account said the white Broomes “did all that was in the power of man to do to save the lives of the prisoners.”I don’t know whether or how these white Broomes were related to each other or to the Black Broomes, but unspoken kinship between the formerly enslaved and their white enslavers was the rule, rather than the exception, in places like Edwards. I believe that whoever wrote to the paper’s editor wanted to document all those Broome surnames across the color line, maybe to explain Ike’s survival as a magnanimous gesture, even a family favor. If the witness is to be believed, the intervention of these white Broomes is the only reason my branch of the family tree ever grew. As Auntie put it to me, “We almost didn’t make it into the world.”Each time I pick up my research, the newspaper coverage reads differently to me. Did my uncle really unload a .38-caliber British bulldog pistol in broad daylight, as one paper had it, or do such details merit only greater skepticism? We know too much about Mississippi to trust indiscriminately the accounts in the white press. Perhaps the story offered in The Richmond Planet is the most likely: He was set upon by attackers and fired back in self-defense. But I also think about the possibility that his story unfolded more or less the way it appears in the white newspapers. Maybe my uncle Bob had had enough of being forced into second-class citizenship, and he reacted with all the rage he could muster. From the moment he refused to step off the sidewalk, he must have known that his young life could soon end—Black folk had been lynched for less. He might have sat through the church service planning his revenge for a lifetime of humiliation, calculating how quickly he could retrieve his gun.In the Black press, Bob’s willingness to defend himself was seen as righteous. The Richmond Planet described him in heroic terms. “It is this kind of dealing with southern Bourbons that will bring about a change,” the unnamed author wrote. “We must have martyrs and we place the name of the fearless Broom [sic] on that list.” Bob’s actions were viewed as necessary self-protection in a regime of targeted violence: “May our people awaken to the necessity of protecting themselves when the law fails to protect them.” My mother has become particularly interested in reclaiming her ancestor as a martyr—someone who, in her words, took a stand. Martyrdom would mean that he put his life on the line for something greater than himself—that his death inspired others to defend themselves.[From the September 2021 issue: His name was Emmett Till]In 1892, four years after my uncle’s murder, Ida B. Wells published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” in which she wrote that “the more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” In that pamphlet, an oft-repeated quote of hers first appeared in print: “A Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” After the Civil War, southern states had passed laws banning Black gun ownership. For Wells, the gun wasn’t just a means of self-defense against individual acts of violence, but a collective symbol that we were taking our destiny into our own hands.The gun never lost its place of honor in our family. My great-grandmother DeElla was known in the family as a good shot. “She always had a gun—she had a rifle at the farm,” my mother told me. “And she could use that rifle and kill a squirrel some yards away. We know that must have come from Mississippi time.” My mother’s eldest brother, also named Bob, laughed as he told me about DeElla’s security measures. “I always remember her alarm system, which was all the empty cans that she had, inside the door,” he told me. “I always thought if someone had been foolish enough to break into her house, the last thing he would have remembered in life was a bunch of clanging metal and then a bright flash about three feet in front of his face.”The lynching more than a decade before her birth shaped DeElla and her vigilance. But as the years passed, and our direct connection to Mississippi dwindled, so did the necessity of the gun. For us, migration was a new kind of self-protection. It required us to leave behind the familiar in order to forge lives as free from the fetter of white supremacy as possible. My northbound family endeavored to protect themselves in new ways, hoping to use education, homeownership, and educational attainment as a shield.After we studied my grandmother’s map of Mississippi, Auntie brought out another artifact: a collection of typewritten pages titled “Till Death Do Us Join.” It’s a document my grandmother composed to memorialize our family’s Mississippi history sometime after her mother died, in 1978. I imagine that she sat and poured her heart out on the typewriter she kept next to a window just outside her bedroom.According to “Till Death Do Us Join,” my family remained in Edwards for another generation after Bob Broome’s death. Ike Broome stayed near the place where he’d almost been killed, and where his brother’s murderers walked around freely. Raising a family in a place where their lives were so plainly not worth much must have been terrifying, but this was far from a unique terror. Across the South, many Black people facing racial violence lacked the capital to escape, or faced further retribution for trying to leave the plantations where they labored. Every available option carried the risk of disaster.[The Experiment Podcast: Ko Bragg on fighting to remember Mississippi burning]A little more than a decade after his brother was murdered, Ike Broome had a daughter—DeElla. She grew up on a farm in Edwards near that of Charles Toms, a man who’d been born to an enslaved Black woman and a white man. As the story goes, DeElla was promised to Charles’s son Walter, after fetching the Toms family a pail of water. Charles’s white father had provided for his education—though not as generously as he did for Charles’s Harvard-educated white half brothers—and he taught math in and served as principal of a one-room schoolhouse in town. A newspaper clipping from 1888 thatmentions Bob Broome’s killing (The Boston Globe) Charles left his teaching job around 1913, as one of his sons later recalled, to go work as a statistician for the federal government in Washington, D.C. He may have made the trek before the rest of the family because he was light enough to pass for white—and white people often assumed he was. He was demoted when his employer found out he was Black.Still, Charles’s sons, Walter and his namesake, Charles Jr., followed him to Washington. But leaving Mississippi behind was a drawn-out process. “Edwards was still home and D.C. their place of business,” my grandmother wrote. The women of the family remained at home in Edwards. World War I sent the men even farther away, as the Toms brothers both joined segregated units, and had the relatively rare distinction, as Black soldiers, of seeing combat in Europe. When the men finally came back to the States, both wounded in action according to “Till Death Do Us Join,” DeElla made her way from Mississippi to Washington to start a life with Walter, her husband.Grandma Victoria’s letter says that DeElla and Walter raised her and four other children, the first generation of our family born outside the Deep South, in a growing community of Edwards transplants. Her grandfather Charles Sr. anchored the family in the historic Black community of Shaw, where Duke Ellington learned rag and Charles Jr. would build a life with Florence Letcher Toms, a founding member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.Occasionally, aunts would come up to visit, sleeping in their car along the route because they had nowhere else to stay. The people mostly flowed in one direction: Victoria’s parents took her to Mississippi only two times. According to my mother, Victoria recalled seeing her own father, whom she regarded as the greatest man in the world, shrink as they drove farther and farther into the Jim Crow South.Later, after receiving her undergraduate degree from Howard University and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University, Victoria joined the faculty at Tennessee State University, a historically Black institution in Nashville. During her time there, efforts to desegregate city schools began a years-long crisis marked by white-supremacist violence. Between her own experiences and the stories passed down to her from her Mississippi-born parents, Victoria knew enough about the brutality of the South to want to spare her own children from it. As a grown woman, she had a firm mantra: “Don’t ever go below the Mason-Dixon Line.” Her warning applied to the entire “hostile South,” as she called it, though she made exceptions for Maryland and D.C. And it was especially true for Mississippi.Keeping this distance meant severing the remaining ties between my grandmother and her people, but it was a price she seemed willing to pay. My mother recalls that when she was in college, one of her professors thought that reestablishing a connection to Mississippi might be an interesting assignment for her. She wrote letters to relatives in Edwards whom she’d found while paging through my grandmother’s address book. But Victoria intercepted the responses; she relayed that the relatives were happy to hear from my mom, but that there would be no Mississippi visit. “It was almost like that curtain, that veil, was down,” Mom told me. “It just wasn’t the time.”Yet, reading “Till Death Do Us Join,” I realized that maintaining that curtain may have hurt my grandmother more than she’d ever let on. She seemed sad that she only saw her road-tripping aunts on special occasions. “Our daily lives did not overlap,” my grandmother wrote. “Sickness or funeral became occasions for contacting the family. Death had its hold upon the living. Why could we not have reached into their daily happiness.”I sense that she valued this closeness, and longed for more of it, for a Mississippi that would have let us all remain. But once Victoria had decided that the North was her home, she worked hard to make it so. While teaching at Tennessee State, my grandmother had met and married a fellow professor named Robert Ellis. He was a plasma physicist, and they decided to raise their four children in New Jersey, where my grandfather’s career had taken him. My grandparents instilled in their children, who instilled it in my cousins and me, that you go where you need to go for schooling, career opportunities, partnership—even if that means you’re far from home.My grandfather was one of the preeminent physicists of his generation, joining the top-secret Cold War program to harness the power of nuclear fusion, and then running the experimental projects of its successor program, the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, after declassification. His work has become part of our family lore as well. My mother has her own mantra: “Same moon, same stars.” It appears on all of the handwritten cards she sends to family and friends; I have it tattooed on my right arm. It signifies that no matter how far apart we are, we look up at the same night sky, and our lives are governed by the same universal constants. The laws of physics—of gravity, inertia, momentum, action, and reaction—apply to us all.In 2011, when I was 17, Victoria died. She’d suffered from Alzheimer’s, which meant that many things she knew about Mississippi were forgotten twice: once by the world, and then in her mind. Auntie and I shared our regrets about missing the opportunity to ask our grandmothers about their lives, their stories, their perspective on Mississippi.But Victoria’s prohibition on traveling south also passed on with her. The year Victoria died, my mother took a job in Philadelphia, Mississippi, as one of two pediatricians in the county. Two summers later, she started dating the man who became my stepfather, Obbie Riley, who’d been born there before a career in the Coast Guard took him all over the country.Mom and I had moved quite a few times throughout my childhood, but this relocation felt different. I was surprised by how quickly Mississippi felt like home. Yet the longer we stayed, and the more I fell in love with the place, the more resentment I felt. I envied the Mississippians who’d been born and raised there, who had parents and grandparents who’d been raised there. I’d always longed to be from a place in that way.My stepfather has that. With a rifle in his white pickup truck, he spends his Sundays making the rounds, checking in on friends and relatives. He’ll crisscross the county for hours, slurping a stew in one house, slicing pie in another, sitting porchside with generations of loved ones.This is what we missed out on, Auntie told me in her dining room. If our family hadn’t scattered, we would better know our elders. To keep all my ancestors straight, I refer to a handwritten family tree that my grandmother left behind; I took a picture of it when I was at Auntie’s house. Every time I zoom in and scan a different branch, I’m embarrassed by how little I know. “The distance pushed people apart,” Auntie said. “I think there is some strength from knowing your people, some security.”[Read: They called her ‘Black Jet’]The traditional historical understanding of the Great Migration emphasizes the “pull” of economic opportunity in the North and West for Black people, especially during the industrial mobilizations of the two world wars. Certainly such pulls acted on my family, too: The lure of better jobs elsewhere, as my grandmother put it, gave Ike Broome’s son-in-law the chance to make a life for himself and his family in Washington. But this understanding fails to explain the yearning that we still have for Mississippi, and the ambivalence my grandmother had about shunning the South.Mississippi had its own pull, even as violence of the kind visited on Bob Broome made life there grim for Black families. A 1992 study by Stewart E. Tolnay and E. M. Beck indicated that a main predictor of migration by Black people from southern counties before 1930 was the cumulative number of lynchings in those counties. The collective memory of those lynchings was a force that compounded over time. Hope and despair commingled for my family, as it did for so many others. As the physicists in my family might describe it, these forces worked in tandem to push my ancestors north, and tear them from the South.Only after I learned the details of Bob’s death did I feel that I truly comprehended my family’s path. In returning to Mississippi, my mother and I were part of a new movement of Black Americans, one in which hundreds of thousands of people are now returning to the states where they’d once been enslaved. I think of this “Reverse Great Migration” as a continuation of the original one, a reaction, a system finally finding equilibrium. I feel like we moved home to Mississippi to even the score for the tragedy of the lynching in 1888, and for all that my family lost in our wanderings after that. We returned to the land where DeElla Broome hurried between farmhouses fetching water, where Charles Toms ran the schoolhouse.It took well over a century for my family to excavate what happened in Edwards, buried under generations of silence. Now we possess an uncommon consolation. Even our partial, imperfect knowledge of our Mississippi history—gleaned from my grandmother’s writing and from newspaper coverage, however ambiguous it may be—is more documentation than many Black Americans have about their ancestors.[From the November 2017 issue: The building of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice]The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, in Montgomery, Alabama, commemorates lynching victims; it is the nation’s only site dedicated specifically to reckoning with lynching as racial terror. Bob Broome is one of more than 4,000 people memorialized there. I’ve visited the memorial, and the steel marker dedicated to those who were lynched in Hinds County, Mississippi—22 reported deaths, standing in for untold others that were not documented. Although those beautiful steel slabs do more for memory than they do for repair, at least we know. With that knowledge, we move forward, with Mississippi as ours again.This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The History My Family Left Behind.”

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Getty Images Maybe you actually smell fine. Whole-body deodorants are upon us. They’re not an entirely new concept: Axe Body Spray, Unilever’s fusion of fragrance and deodorant, has been singeing nostrils since 1983, and in 2018, Lumé, created by an OB/GYN, came on the scene for “pits, privates, and beyond.” This spring, legacy brands jumped on board en masse: Since the start of 2024 alone, Secret, Dove, Old Spice, and Native launched whole-body products consumers can apply as sticks, sprays, and creams. What the funk is going on? “It is either, at best, an absurd, comical money grab — and at worst, a concerning phenomenon for your health,” says Sarah Everts, author of The Joy of Sweat. Sweating is a human superpower, she says; few other species can use sweat to avoid overheating. To Everts and other critics, the existence of whole-body deodorants should raise our curiosity about why we feel the need to smell a certain way — or not. They should also make us wonder who stands to profit by changing social norms about sweat, hygiene, and odor. Sweat and the strategies for managing it might seem relatively simple, but they’re not. The market for deodorants, especially the kind intended for application everywhere, rests on a foundation of collective confusion about how these products and our bodies actually work. Different parts of the body make different kinds of sweat — and different kinds of smells Not all sweat is created equal: Human bodies have two kinds of sweat glands, and their products are not exactly the same. Apocrine sweat glands are typically concentrated in the places where hair grows during puberty — the armpits, the groin, and the butt. These glands make a waxy substance that certain bacteria love to eat, and it’s the byproducts of that microbial banquet that create the musky aromas most commonly associated with body odor. “The sweat in our armpits is different — quite different — from the sweat that covers your body,” says Andrew Best, a biological anthropologist who studies sweat at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. That’s because the rest of your body is covered with eccrine sweat glands, whose product is a more watery, salty liquid that’s less appealing to bacteria but does a bang-up job of keeping us cool. Eccrine sweat is what covers most of our body during exercise. It might occasionally evoke recently ingested food and drink, with particularly piquant notes after a garlic bread binge or a very boozy night. Still, because it’s not well-suited for bacterial consumption, eccrine sweat just doesn’t usually generate the odors that apocrine sweat does. There is such a thing as dysfunctional sweating: About 10 million Americans produce way more sweat than their body’s temperature-regulating needs, either as a consequence of certain medical conditions or medications, or just because it’s the way they’re wired — a condition called hyperhidrosis. Other, less common medical conditions produce particularly pungent sweat. But most of the sweat most people produce serves a positive biological function: “Sweating is almost always good,” says Best. Deodorants and antiperspirants aren’t the same The over-the-counter products available to combat sweat typically do one of two things: They either prevent sweat glands from producing sweat to begin with (antiperspirants), or they change the smell of the sweat (deodorants). Antiperspirants block sweat pores using one of several aluminum-containing compounds. In the Food and Drug Administration’s book, the fact that antiperspirants change the way a body part functions — in this case, a sweat gland — makes them over-the-counter drugs. That classification means companies face more restrictions if they want to include these aluminum compounds in products. (A rumor literally spread by an email chain letter in the 1990s and a long-abandoned 1960s-era hypothesis have led many people to avoid using aluminum-based odor control products due to fears about breast cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, respectively; heaps of science have since shown these fears are unfounded.) Although many products intended for underarm application combine an antiperspirant with a deodorant in one, products labeled as deodorants alone aren’t supposed to contain these aluminum compounds. They’re not intended to block your sweat pores; rather, they aim to change the odors that result from the sweat once it’s already on your skin. Distinguishing between antiperspirants and deodorants is important because sweat actually plays a huge role in keeping us cool when we’re overheating, and blocking too much of it could threaten a person’s ability to regulate their temperature. In part for that reason, antiperspirants are typically labeled for use only under the arms (conveniently, the origins of most of the smells people using these products are trying to control). Deodorants, on the other hand, can use a range of approaches to reduce the smell of sweat all over the body without interfering with its cooling function, says Kelly Dobos, a cosmetic chemist in Cincinnati. (Dobos has never worked for any of the companies now marketing full-body deodorants, although she has in the past done non-deodorant-related work for the parent company of Ban, which now makes a deodorizing lotion for private parts.) Dobos reviewed the ingredient lists of a range of whole-body deodorants, including legacy brands and newer brands. The spray products typically contained little more than alcohol and fragrance — they’re basically perfumes, she says, and the alcohol concentration in these products probably isn’t high enough to kill the good bacteria living on your skin, which have a staggering range of protective functions. Meanwhile, several of the creams contained lactic or mandelic acids, whose low pH creates an environment that favors the growth of those good, non-stinky bacteria, crowding out odor-causing germs. A handful of sticks and creams contained starch, aimed at absorbing wetness. Some brands’ entire ranges contained zinc compounds known to neutralize stinky molecules; other active ingredients include compounds called cyclodextrins intended to absorb odor, and enzymes called microbial ferments that purportedly degrade odor-causing molecules. Many of these ingredients also turn up in standalone deodorants intended for underarm application. One product, a Lumé “sweat control” deodorant cream, contained an aluminum compound that’s actually an antiperspirant, which raises concerns about a problem with the product’s labeling, says Dobos. “​​I have a feeling the FDA will give them a call.” Do most people actually need full-body deodorant? With the exception of improperly labeled products, most whole-body deodorants can do …whatever it is they do without hijacking the body’s cooling system. Still, before people decide to fork over the money for yet another cosmetic product, it’s worth thinking about whether sweat from behind your knees, your skin folds, or even your nether regions is actually a problem in need of a solution. After all, these products are not meant to target odors from underarm sweat. Rather, they take aim at odors due to apocrine sweat in the groin — not something casual contacts typically perceive because groins are (usually) under a few layers of fabric and a few feet away from others’ noses — and eccrine sweat elsewhere on the body, which is largely inoffensive to most noses, even when there’s a lot of it. “Just bathing should take care of whatever quote-unquote ‘problem’ you think you have. And if you need to be throwing more at your microbiome than a simple daily shower,” Best says, “it’s probably your perceptions of your smell that are the problem, not actually the smell.” “Nobody’s being fooled into thinking that you’re a citrus fruit,” added Everts. Because deodorants qualify as cosmetics and not as drugs, the companies that produce them don’t have to do safety or effectiveness testing before selling them to the public. That means products that could cause skin irritation or allergic reactions — especially in the more sensitive skin of the groin — can still be freely marketed for whole-body use. “It is the Wild West,” says Adam Friedman, a dermatologist at George Washington University who is also a faculty member of the International Hyperhidrosis Society. Sweat itself can irritate the skin, and for people with pathologic sweating such as those with hyperhidrosis, whole-body deodorants are likely to disappoint because they don’t actually reduce sweat output. “[They’ll] have no effect on excessive sweating and may even cause harm,” says Friedman — but because people with these conditions are so desperate for help, it’s a marketing no-brainer to try to sell them solutions. When it comes to skin conditions, he says, it’s “very easy to take advantage of those suffering.” If you try a whole-body deodorant, avoid applying it to mucous membranes (the wet surfaces beyond labial folds and anuses) and use it only on select portions of intact, non-irritated skin to lower the chances the product causes more problems than it solves. Dobos noted the ingredients in most whole-body deodorants are largely benign and probably won’t disrupt your skin’s microbiome too much if used in moderation. In her view, these products are unlikely to be biologically problematic. “But they’re probably still culturally problematic [in that they set] the wrong expectations for young people regarding how their body should smell,” says Best. Hygiene norms can be manipulated to make money (off of you) Body odor exists on a spectrum, and one end of that spectrum includes smells that are globally recognized as gnarly, much as there’s broad human consensus that sewage and dead animals have offensive aromas. So yes, human sweat can smell quite bad. As early as the first century BCE, the Roman poet Catullus dissed a male contemporary for the “grim goat” housed in his armpits, saying (poetically) it was the reason he never got laid. But it’s also true that a lot of American norms around body odor originated with people who had a financial stake in creating them. The inventors of the first modern antiperspirant couldn’t get people to buy it for the first decade after they developed it; sales only took off after a 1919 ad in Ladies’ Home Journal hinted that women with insufficiently “dainty and sweet” underarms would never land a husband. Americans may be particularly easy marks for advertising campaigns that promise conspicuous hygiene. The nation’s peculiar association between cleanliness and godliness, imported by Puritans and Quakers centuries ago, helped personal odor become a particularly strong signifier of moral, physical, and racial purity in the US early in the nation’s history, writes anthropologist Marybeth MacPhee. These ideas led to olfactory discrimination against Black Americans, creating a particularly strong incentive to “smell clean” as a strategy for acceptance into (or protection from) white society; they have also been used to disparage immigrants with different diets and fragrance norms as diseased or low status over the years. Such concepts clearly have commercial utility, as well: They’ve helped create a lucrative market for dubiously necessary hygiene products in the US — especially among women and sometimes to their detriment, as in the cases of douching and talcum powder. If you have a problem with smells coming from your groin, “you need to be going to a doctor, not a store,” says Everts. But with whole-body deodorants, companies are urging consumers to sanitize all body aromas — not just the goat-y ones. Among the experts I spoke to, there was strong consensus that whole-body deodorants exist largely to make money for the companies that sell them. Deodorant and antiperspirant sales have been pretty steady for the past few years, says Dobos; adding a new product with new uses potentially increases the amount of money both manufacturers and retailers can make. “They’ve manufactured a problem so they can sell us a product to fix it,” says Best. Whether you’re buying or not, it’s worth thinking about what it means to reject all of your body’s natural smells, not just its most offensive ones. The fundamental odor unique to each of us — not the stuff coming out of our armpits, but the rest of the aromas our bodies make — is part of our identity, says Everts. “It’s a symphony of subtle smells that make you who you are and help the people who love you and spend time with you identify you,” she says. “Why would you mess with that?”

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