HBO’s Next Big Sunday Night Show Is the Superhero Satire We Deserve

If we don’t want more homeless people on sidewalks, we have to invest in proposals like Measure A that stand a chance of resolving this horrible problem.

On December 12, 2015, the 195 country parties to the United Nations’ climate body adopted the Paris Agreement on climate change. The accord was historic, sending a message to governments, boardrooms, clean-tech innovators, civil society, and citizens that the leaders of the world had finally come together to combat climate change.The agreement was groundbreaking in many respects. It cast aside the old paradigm in which climate obligations applied only to developed countries. It articulated strong goals to limit global temperature and greenhouse-gas emissions. It required countries to submit nationally determined targets for reducing emissions, and to do this every five years, with each new target stronger than the previous one. It established a second five-year cycle for a “global stocktake” to see how the world is doing in the aggregate on climate change. It set up a transparency system for countries to report on their progress and for those reports to be reviewed by international experts. And it adopted a hybrid legal arrangement, with legally binding procedural rules complementing the nonbinding emission targets.Overall, the logic of the Paris Agreement was that the rising force of norms and expectations, buttressed by binding procedures, would be effective. It was based on the belief that countries would act with progressively higher ambition because strong climate action would become ever more visibly important to a government’s standing abroad and to its political support at home. Ideally, an effective Paris regime should strengthen norms and expectations around the world; and, in a mutually reinforcing manner, stronger domestic actions in those countries should strengthen the Paris accord.Nearly nine years later, how are we doing, and what more do we need to do? To answer those questions, we need to assess the three main factors currently shaping the climate world. Representatives of the UN Member States sit in attendance in General Assembly Hall for the climate agreement opening ceremony. (Albin Lohr-Jones / Pacific Press / Getty) First, our scientific understanding of risk keeps advancing, and the actual impacts of climate change keep coming at us harder and faster than expected. In the years following the Paris Agreement, the broadly accepted temperature limit shifted from a rise of “well below” 2 degrees Celsius to 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels, which would in turn alter the time frame for reaching “net zero” emissions from around 2070 to around 2050. The shift to 1.5 degrees was triggered by the 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, produced by the UN’s climate-science body, and has been underscored by additional authoritative reports, as well as a cascade of extreme events all over the world.And those events have just kept intensifying. In 2023, Phoenix had 31 consecutive days of temperatures 110 degrees Fahrenheit or higher. In July that year, water temperatures off the Florida Keys were above 90 degrees. Canadian wildfires burned nearly 45 million acres, crushing the country’s previous record of 18 million. In August 2023, Brazil’s winter, the temperature rose to 104 degrees. In 2022, China was scorched by a searing heat wave that lasted more than 70 days, affecting more than 900 million people. That same year, more than 61,000 Europeans died from heat-related stress. In 2024, more brutal heat waves struck far and wide, the most harrowing of which killed 1,300 people during the annual hajj in Mecca, with temperatures as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit. If we fail to do what is needed, we will surely compromise our ability to preserve a livable world.Second, progress in the clean-energy revolution—especially with the technologies of solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles, and heat pumps—has been nothing short of spectacular since the Paris Agreement, driven in part by the accord itself. And intensifying innovation is driving this revolution forward, including in the “hardest to abate” sectors, such as heavy industry, shipping, and aviation. And the developing clean-technology system is enormously more efficient and less wasteful than the fossil-fuel system.Third, very real obstacles lie in the way, beyond the inherent challenges of developing breakthrough technology. The main one is that the fossil-fuel industry, which still produces 80 percent of primary energy worldwide, has formidable political clout in the U.S. and abroad, and is doing everything in its power to keep production going as far as the eye can see. Progress on limiting fossil fuels was made late last year at the climate conference in Dubai, which called for a “transitioning away from all fossil fuels … to reach net zero emissions by 2050, in keeping with the science.” Some observers even called Dubai the beginning of the end for fossil-fuel dominance—a hopeful, but at this stage premature, conclusion.[Read: Trump isn’t a climate denier. He’s worse.]The central question now is how to overcome the obstacles to rapid decarbonization, acting both within the Paris regime and outside of it. During their 1985 Geneva Summit on the reduction of nuclear arsenals, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev took a walk during a break in the negotiations. As Gorbachev recalled the story, Reagan abruptly said to him, “What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’” Gorbachev said, “No doubt about it,” and Reagan answered, “We too.” There is a lesson here.The United States and the Soviet Union were adversaries, armed to the teeth against each other. But as their two presidents imagined an attack from beyond the boundaries of their shared planet, they agreed at once that they would help each other. The international community ought to look at climate change in roughly similar terms, as a threat that demands genuine partnership—something akin to a meteor headed toward Earth, a situation in which we will have the best chance of pulling through if we all pull together.We need a Paris regime built on partnership, not squabbling. We face a genuine crisis. Too many countries still try to pull backwards to the days of a firewall division between developed and developing countries, in order to deflect expectations about reducing emissions. But a focus on how much individual countries should not have to do is the wrong way to defend against a common threat to our planet. The Paris Agreement ensures that countries can set their own targets, but it calls for an approach reflecting a country’s “highest possible ambition.” Next year, all signatories are expected to announce new emission targets for 2035, and all the major emitters will need to deliver on those commitments if we are to keep alive the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. This is true for no country more than China, which accounts for some 30 percent of global emissions, more than all the developed countries put together.China, whose emissions appear to have peaked, ought to adopt a bold target of about 30 percent below that peak level by 2035. But if the past is prologue, China will assert its developing-country status to defend a target far short of that. Yet, for this sophisticated, second-largest economy in the world, with an enormous carbon footprint and unequaled capacity to produce renewable energy, electric vehicles, and so on, hiding behind its traditional status is a tactic past its sell-by date. Smoke billows from a large steel plant as a Chinese labourer works at an unauthorized steel factory, foreground, on November 4, 2016 in Inner Mongolia, China (Kevin Frayer / Getty) To make the Paris regime as effective as it should be, we need to reanimate the High Ambition Coalition that was once so pivotal. The coalition still exists, but it lacks the status it had in Paris, where it used its broad-based power of 100-plus countries, “rich and poor, large and small,” to insist that all nations, especially the major ones, pull their weight in reducing emissions. To revive that coalition, poor and vulnerable countries will need to feel fairly treated, and that will require solving the perennial problem of financial assistance.For a long time in climate negotiations, an angry, trust-depleting relationship between developing and developed countries has persisted over the question of finance. In the past few years, the need to mobilize much larger capital flows to the global South for climate and other global public goods has come into sharper view, with particular focus on deep reform of the World Bank to make it more responsive to the needs of our time.Finance ministries, including the U.S. Treasury Department, tend to be very cautious about taking the big steps needed to overhaul the World Bank and enable it to finance climate-change mitigation and other public goods. But to borrow a phrase that Larry Summers, my old Treasury boss, has used, the risk of inaction on this project far outweighs the risk of going too far. Moreover, addressing this problem would not only help the countries in need but also have the clear geopolitical benefit of strengthening relationships between the U.S. and its allies and the global South.I would also seek to use the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate Change, an international body launched in 2009 by President Barack Obama, to greater advantage. I would envision an annual, in-person MEF leaders’ meeting to discuss what needs to be done to accelerate decarbonization. I would start each such meeting with a concise report on the latest science, delivered with force by noted experts, so that all leaders are up to date on the urgency of the threat. I would also expand the MEF’s membership to match more closely the G20’s, adding Argentina, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the African Union, which would also enable the MEF leaders’ meeting to take place the day after the annual G20 summit.During the Obama years, U.S.-China climate cooperation was enormously important, a positive pillar in our overall relationship. The relationship is more strained now, but that makes reestablishing as much constructive climate collaboration as possible more vital, not less. This is something that John Kerry and John Podesta, as the leaders of the U.S. international climate effort under President Joe Biden, have both sought to do.All of these elements are important, but most central to our effort to contain climate change are political will and human motivation. In the last line of his report on 2011’s UN Climate Change Conference, held in Durban, South Africa, the clean-tech blogger David Roberts wrote that “only when a critical mass within [countries] becomes noisy and powerful enough to push governments into action” will we act at the right speed. He was right. Executing the global transition that we need will be a daunting task under any circumstances, but we have the energy and the talent, we know what policies to deploy, and we can afford it. The open question around the world is the human factor.[Zoë Schlanger: American environmentalism just got shoved into legal purgatory]Political leaders tend to worry about jobs, economic growth, national security, and the next election—and they hesitate to cross powerful interests. Business leaders worry mostly about the bottom line. And as a matter of human nature, people often find it hard both to grasp the urgency of the climate threat, when most days don’t seem immediately threatening, and to avoid inertia in the face of such an overwhelming crisis or giving in to a vague hope that somehow we will muddle through. Add to all of this the challenge in the U.S. and Europe from right-wing populism, which rebels against science, constraints, and bureaucrats.We are also slowed down by those who think of themselves as grown-ups and believe that decarbonization at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic—the gauzy pursuit of idealists who don’t understand the real world. But look at what the science is telling us, and witness the crescendo of climate disasters: heat waves, forest fires, floods, droughts, and ocean warming. What realistic assessment are the grown-ups waiting for? (Top) Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan at the 1985 Geneva Summit. (Bottom) Firefighters from the Mountains Restoration Conservation Authority monitor a back burn set near the Line fire in the San Bernardino National Forest outside of Running Springs, Calif., early on Sept. 10, 2024. (Bettmann / Getty; Philip Cheung / NYT / Redux) In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, no one could have imagined that entire cities of 5 million to 10 million people would be shut down overnight. That would have seemed absurd—until it didn’t. Faced with the nightmarish prospect of a plague raging through their streets, political leaders in 2020 did the unthinkable. That lesson about decisive collective action should guide our response to the climate crisis. However challenging taking action might be, the question that must be asked is Compared with what?We need normative change, a shift in hearts and minds that can demonstrate to political leaders that their own future depends on unequivocal action to protect our world. This prescription may seem a weak reed, but new norms can move mountains. They have the power to define what is right, what is acceptable, what is important, what we expect, what we demand.This kind of shift has already started—decades ago, in fact. The original Earth Day was the product of a new environmental consciousness created by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, Silent Spring, and of public horror in 1969 that the Cuyahoga River in Ohio was so polluted it caught fire. In September 1969, Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin began working on a nationwide environmental teach-in, hoping to capture the energy young people had shown in protests over Vietnam and civil rights. On April 22, 1970, some 20 million people attended thousands of events across America, and this galvanizing public demand led in short order to the creation, during Richard Nixon’s presidency, of the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), and the Endangered Species Act (1973), and much more after that.In 1987, broad public concern about the diminishing ozone layer led to the successful Montreal Protocol. In 2010, after the U.S. embassy in Beijing started to publish accurate, real-time information about dangerous air pollution, the city’s citizens began protesting; even China’s autocratic government responded to the public pressure by taking steps to clean up Beijing’s air.Many factors can combine to drive normative change: news footage of extreme events; the technology revolution that makes once-niche products mainstream; large-scale civil-society action; markets’ embrace of clean energy and disinvestment from fossil fuels. As the energy analyst Kingsmill Bond has long argued, the approaching peak of fossil-fuel production will bring overcapacity, lower prices, stranded assets, and a rapid shift of investment to new challengers. All of this will reinforce a sense that clean energy works, is growing, is our future.We need always to keep in mind that climate change is as serious as scientists say it is and nature shows it is. No one who has belittled the issue or assumed that holding the global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius, or 2.5 ,or even 3, would be okay has turned out to be right. We should accept that 1.5 degrees is the right goal, and we should stay as close to it as possible.We should never slip into the comfort of thinking that we can muddle through. The risks are too dire. As Jared Diamond demonstrated in his 2004 book, Collapse, humans have not always coped with environmental risk: Whole civilizations have disappeared because they failed to recognize and address such crises. Today, we have the advantage of extraordinary technological know-how, but we still have the all-too-human capacity to let the polarized, adversarial character of our societies confound our ability to act.Yet hope has a real basis. The speed of our technological progress gives us a chance to reach our goals or come close. In its Outlook 2023 report, the International Energy Agency declared that, based on what governments are doing and have pledged, global temperature rise can be limited to about 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, compared with the 2.1-degree estimate it made in 2021—a striking sign of the pace at which the clean-energy transition is moving. And, of course, we also have the capacity to do more than governments have so far pledged.The task of building broad, engaged, committed support for climate action is essential. Only that can establish a powerful new norm regarding the need for net-zero emissions. Governments, businesses, and civil societies can do what must be done. And when anyone says the goals are too hard, too difficult, cost too much, require too much effort or too much change, ask them: Compared with what?

Business magnate Elon Musk joined Trump on the rally stage in Butler, Pa., where he compared Trump's "character" after being fired upon at the same site just 12 weeks prior.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is under fire for apparently contradicting herself regarding the use of FEMA funds for illegal immigrants.

SNL/NBCWhen Andy Samberg first returned to Saturday Night Live in the season 50 premiere to play second gentleman Doug Emhoff, fans didn’t realize he’d be bringing his comedy rap group The Lonely Island back with him.For their first digital short on SNL since “Natalie’s Rap 2” in 2018, The Lonely Island returned with a premise even more profane: Samberg and Akiva Schaffer play two entrepreneurs pitching their exciting new business idea: what if there were glory holes, but for sushi?“Hear us out, you got nothing to fear. Sushi Glory Hole is a good idea,” Samberg and Schaffer rap. “So hear us out while we tell you what the concept’s all about: It’s sushi being fed through a hole in the wall… Where you going?”Read more at The Daily Beast.

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Recently, in a few cities across the country, Starbucks quietly unveiled a pair of drinks, one resembling a pistachio milkshake, the other a mossy sludge. Unlike with green beverages already on the Starbucks menu, their hue does not come from matcha, mint, or grapes. They are green because they contain actual greens—or, at least, a dried and powdered form of them sold by the supplement company AG1. Now getting a hefty dose of vegetables—including, but not limited to, broccoli, spinach, and, uh, “grasses”—is as easy as ordering an iced AG1 Coconutmilk Blend or its sibling, the Watermelon Blend.Powdered greens are hardly a new concept: Dehydrated, pulverized vegetables, sweetened with natural sugars, have been stirred into shakes and smoothies for decades. But AG1, formerly known as Athletic Greens, is one of many powdered-greens brands that are having a moment. Inescapable on the social-media feeds of wellness influencers, powdered greens are riding the same wave as green juices and Erewhon smoothies. These health-coded, aesthetically pleasing, status-symbol products are cool, pleasant-tasting vectors for plain old vegetables.Powdered greens claim all sorts of benefits, such as more energy, stronger immunity, and a happier gut. But above all, they promise convenience—a “hack” for eating vegetables, as Suja, another powdered-greens company, frames it. The basic premise is that eating vegetables is a slog, but a necessary one. Buying and consuming fresh vegetables—cleaning, chopping, cooking, and chewing them—is apparently so energetically taxing, so time-consuming, so horrible that it’s better to sneak them into tasty drinks, some of which are flavored like candy.Yes, swirling powder into liquid is less strenuous than massaging kale. And drinking food is a faster way to choke down something foul-tasting. There was a time when eating vegetables was challenging and disgusting, but not now. Greens have never been so cheap, tasty, or accessible. There are so many better ways to eat veggies than slurping them down like baby food.The wellness industry is full of products marketed as shortcuts to better health, some more dubious than others. At the very least, powdered greens can be a genuinely useful way to get a solid amount of vegetables. Americans “really under-consume leafy greens,” Anna Rosales, a dietician and senior director at the Institute for Food Technologists, told me. According to the USDA, only 10 percent of people eat the recommended amount of vegetables, which is roughly 2.5 cups a day. That’s a problem because greens reduce the risk of chronic ailments such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.Greens that are dried through freezing instead of heat retain more nutrients and fiber, Rosales said. But green powders should be viewed as a “safety net”—they’re meant to “help us get to a place where we’re closer to the dietary recommendations.” They’re not a replacement for greens, or an excuse to eat less of them. In pretty much every way, normal greens are better than the powdered kind. The classic complaint about vegetables is that people don’t have time to buy and prepare fresh produce. As a working parent, I can relate. Often, grocery shopping and cooking are simply out of the question. How about just grabbing a salad to go?Earlier this year, I wrote about the fast-casual salad chains expanding out of coastal cities and into Middle America. They aren’t all $18-a-bowl places such as Sweetgreen; an exclusively drive-through chain called Salad and Go, based in the Southwest, offers options for less than $7—about the same price as a Big Mac.Standard fast-food chains, some of which waffled on salad in previous decades, now regularly sell it: Wendy’s and Chick-fil-A’s offerings have even been praised for being quite tasty. Growing interest in salad is pressuring restaurants to make them better, or at least more interesting: Caesar salads are mutating to include all sorts of weird ingredients such as tequila and fava beans, as my colleague Ellen Cushing wrote, but “even bastardized ones rock, and people want to buy them.”Even if salad isn’t your thing, ready-made vegetable dishes are easier than ever to get a hold of. Gone are the days when the only options available at fast-casual restaurants were the celery sticks that came with chicken wings. Crispy brussels sprouts, spinach-artichoke dip, and sweet-potato fries (along with salad) are now standard fare at national chains such as Applebee’s, Olive Garden, and Cheesecake Factory. (While not particularly healthy in these forms, they count toward your vegetable intake: Just eight brussels sprouts comprise a single serving.)Even at-home options are better now. It takes about the same time to shake up a cup of greens as it does to heat up a frozen dish of, say, roasted-squash-and-tomato pasta or spinach saag paneer. Many meal-subscription services will ship such dishes directly to your home. Most grocery stores offer precut vegetables to save on cooking prep time (or to eat directly out of the tray). And discount stores such as Dollar General have even begun to sell fresh produce. There are simply more ways than ever to get your greens.Of course, eating at restaurants and subscribing to meal plans are out of budget for a lot of people. Many Americans struggle to meet the fruit-and-vegetable dietary guidelines because of cost, which has only increased with inflation. Regular vegetables aren’t cheap, but neither is the powdered stuff. Powdered greens range from $1 to $3.30 per drink, according to a recent roundup by Fortune; a month’s supply of AG1 would set you back $99. The number of vegetable servings in each unit of green powder depends on the brand, yet even those that offer three or four servings of vegetables per scoop aren’t exactly cost-effective. A 12-ounce bag of frozen broccoli at Walmart, which would supply you with four servings of vegetables, costs a little more than $1.The real allure of powdered greens may not be time or cost, but rather that they feel like a cheat code for health. A company called Kroma Wellness markets its Supergreens Elixir Jar as the “easiest way to nourish your body”; another, Bloom, claims that “you don’t have to make any revolutionary changes to feel your best this year—all it takes is one daily scoop!” Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist who hosts a popular health podcast, is also the science adviser for AG1, and has called it the “simplest, most straightforward way” to get his daily dose of nutrients. The hard way, in contrast, would be to overhaul your diet and lifestyle so that you consistently eat enough greens—and learn to like them. Doing so is guaranteed to improve your health, but not overnight, and not without significant effort. You certainly won’t experience the immediate sense of accomplishment you get after downing a glass of greens.Even so, as it has become easier than ever to eat vegetables, habits can be hard to break. Children holding their nose while they choke down lima beans is not so different from adults guzzling sweetened greens through a straw. Sometimes, parents add pureed beets to brownies, mash squash into macaroni and cheese, and fold black beans into burgers because children won’t eat them otherwise. Yet this practice is contested: Some argue that kids should just learn to enjoy their vegetables. Adults should do the same.Powdered greens are the latest complication in America’s long, messy relationship with vegetables. At best, vegetables are thought of as side dishes; at worst, they’re the thing you spit into a napkin when no one’s looking. Vegetarians have been mocked for more than a century. That all children hate greens is baked into pop culture. The notion that vegetables are a second-tier food is so pervasive that it’s easy to overlook the fact that vegetables are actually really good now—so good that you don’t need to chug them down in sugary drinks. Powdered greens may be helping some adults get more vegetables, but they perpetuate the underlying problem: They still treat greens as something you have to, rather than want to, eat.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, featuring our newest advice column, “Dear James,” from James Parker.Are you something of a mystery to yourself?Do you suffer from existential panic, spiritual fatigue, libidinal tangles, and compulsive idiocy? Are your moods beyond your control? Is every straw, for you, the last straw? Do you suspect, from time to time, that the world around you might be an enormous hallucination? Do you forget people’s names and then worry about it terribly? Do you weep at bad movies but find yourself unaccountably numb in the face of genuine sadness? Is stress wrecking your complexion, your joints, your digestive system? Do you experience a surge of pristine chaotic energy at precisely the moment that you should be falling asleep? Are you doing much too much of this, and not nearly enough of that?If so, “Dear James” might be for you.Below are the latest editions, which tackle issues as varied as post-graduation anxiety and an addiction to wellness podcasts.If you’re looking for advice, drop a note to dearjames@theatlantic.com. Sign up here to receive this column weekly.The Reading ListI See Every Tiny Problem as a Social Injustice I’m totally exhausted with myself. By James ParkerI Hate My Post-College Life I’m utterly lost. By James ParkerCold Showers Are Free So is meditation. And push-ups. And breathing. By James ParkerHere are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The elite college students who can’t read books Remember that DNA you gave 23andMe? The rise of the right-wing tattletale The Week Ahead Saturday Night, a comedy film about the 90 minutes of preparation before the October 1975 debut of Saturday Night Live (in theaters everywhere Friday) Season 4 of Abbott Elementary, a sitcom about a group of Philadelphia public-school teachers (streaming Wednesday on Hulu) Our Evenings, a novel by Alan Hollinghurst about the son of a Burmese man and a British dressmaker who gets a scholarship to a prestigious boarding school (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic Revenge of the OfficeBy Rose Horowitch Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company’s more than 350,000 corporate employees must return to the office five days a week come January. In a memo, Jassy explained that he wants teams to be “joined at the hip” as they try to out-innovate other companies. His employees don’t seem happy about it. The Amazon announcement was met with white-collar America’s version of a protest—a petition, angry LinkedIn posts, tense debates on Slack—and experts predict that some top talent will leave for companies with more flexible policies. Since May 2023, Amazon has allowed corporate employees to work from home two days a week by default. But to Jassy, 15 months of hybrid work only demonstrated the superiority of full-time in-office collaboration. Read the full article.More in Culture The playwright in the age of AI Gisèle Pelicot and the most unthinkable, ordinary crime Your individuality doesn’t matter. Industry knows why. Lost bullied its unlikeliest hero. Kris Kristofferson was country music’s philosopher king. Game Change knew exactly what was coming. What’s the appeal of indie rock’s new golden boy? More evidence that celebrities just don’t like you Catch Up on The Atlantic Did Donald Trump notice J. D. Vance’s strangest answer? The Christian radicals are coming. An alarming new trend in hurricane deaths Photo Album A woman holds a plastic bag over her head to shelter herself from the rain as she walks along Fifth Avenue in New York City. (Charly Triballeau / AFP / Getty) Check out these photos of the week from around the world, showing a woman walking in the rain, devastating floods in Nepal and the United States, early Christmas celebrations in Venezuela, and more.P.S.Take a look at James Parker’s latest TikTok video about his column and why he wants to hear what’s ailing, torturing, and nagging readers.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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Ta-Nehisi Coates attends the Alight Align Arise: Advancing the Movement for Repair national conference on June 7, 2023, in Atlanta, Georgia. | Carol Lee Rose/Getty Images for Decolonizing Wealth Project With his new book The Message, Ta-Nehisi Coates, a journalist who indelibly shaped the national conversation on race in America during the Obama years, turns his scrupulous attention toward yet another tinderbox of a problem: that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His conclusions are highly provocative — and damning toward the Israeli government.  Coates, a former writer for the Atlantic, skyrocketed to prominence with the 2014 publication of “The Case for Reparations,” a deeply researched essay on the history of racial housing discrimination in America that became a national sensation. The essay almost single-handedly turned reparations from a joke into a serious talking point in American politics, and in the process, it made Coates an intellectual celebrity.  By 2018, Coates was a National Book Award winner, a Pulitzer finalist, and widely discussed as the next James Baldwin. Yet around that time, Coates took a step back from his perch as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He got off Twitter. He stepped down from the Atlantic. He published a novel and wrote a Black Panther arc for Marvel. He started teaching journalism at Howard. The writer who set the conversation on race in America during the 2010s decided he had had enough halfway through the Trump years. The Message is Coates getting back into political discourse for the first time in years, and characteristically, he’s not starting off with an easy problem. In his new book, Coates sets out to make the case that the treatment of Palestinians in Israel is analogous to the treatment of Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, and that as such, it is morally reprehensible — an incendiary argument but one that Coates imbues with the force of his own newly discovered conviction. “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger or more intense than it did in Israel,” Coates writes.  He has always positioned himself as a diagnostician rather than a physician In The Message, Coates makes it clear early on that he’ll be presenting his argument primarily from the perspective of Palestinians, whom he describes as “voiceless” and, as such, in need of the platform he can offer them. He declines to mention Hamas. He also declines to suggest potential solutions for the problem of Israel and Palestine, a move that is not unusual for him; he has always positioned himself as a diagnostician rather than a physician.  That perspective has predictably earned Coates detractors who find his omissions disgraceful. In a widely seen interview with Coates on CBS Mornings, host Tony Dokoupil declared that Coates’s work would “not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist,” before pressing Coates on whether Israel should have a right to exist. “The perspective that you just outlined, there is no shortage of that perspective in American media,” Coates replied. He added, “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.” Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new book, “The Message,” is a trio of interconnected essays that examine how the stories people tell — or avoid telling — can shape and even distort reality: “I am most concerned always with those that don’t have a voice.” https://t.co/bDsBxZMbah pic.twitter.com/G4WCkI146I— CBS Mornings (@CBSMornings) September 30, 2024 What has always made Coates’s work most striking is not just his ability to muster a convincing argument. He’s also simply a beautiful prose stylist. Coates cares about the mechanics of a sentence, about its rhythms and imagery. He makes you want to read him, even if what he’s saying feels frightening or hard to take, because his voice is so astounding on the page.  Coates writes that his aim in writing The Message is to “haunt” his readers, to give them images and ideas they cannot get out of their minds. In that, he succeeds. The Message is haunting. It gets under your skin. People who will not read other books on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will read this one by dint of Coates’s unparalleled stature, and they will remember it.  Coates is the rare writer who can turn his political writing into haunted houses. And he’s never more effective than when he transforms himself into the main character.  Searching for a moment of ecstatic discovery The Message is made up of four separate essays, of which the essay on Palestine is the last and longest. The book becomes a sort of travelogue, each essay taking place in a new town, where Coates tracks the different ways race has manifested itself there.  The book is also framed as a letter to his Howard writing students, laced liberally with his philosophy on what writing should look like. Each new location prompts thoughts on what Coates’s duty is as a writer, or what the effects of writing properly done can be.  He writes that he finds the most aesthetic pleasure in writing when he is able, through research and argument, to answer one of his own questions and convince himself of that answer. “Through reading, through reporting, I begin to comprehend a truth. That moment of comprehension is ecstatic,” Coates writes. “Writing and rewriting is the attempt to communicate not just a truth but the ecstasy of a truth. It is not enough for me to convince the reader of my argument; I want them to feel that same private joy that I feel alone.” Coates’s writing at its best is animated by that private joy, by the ecstasy he feels when he has reached a new understanding of the world. You can see his sheer grim delight in making these discoveries in “The Case for Reparations.”  “To ignore the fact that one of the oldest republics in the world was erected on a foundation of white supremacy, to pretend that the problems of a dual society are the same as the problems of unregulated capitalism, is to cover the sin of national plunder with the sin of national lying,” Coates writes in that essay, the rhythms of his sentences building and mounting as if he were a preacher at the pulpit. “The lie ignores the fact that reducing American poverty and ending white supremacy are not the same.”  Coates’s writing at its best is animated by that private joy, by the ecstasy he feels when he has reached a new understanding of the world There’s a triumph to the way he writes here: I figured it out; they tried to hide it but I figured it out; I’m going to make you see exactly what I figured out. The thing he has figured out, put plainly, is that America is a rich country because it was built on stolen land, with stolen labor and stolen resources. That is the basis of the argument for reparations.  By contrast, Coates’s 2015 essay “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” is probably one of the least-influential of his major features for the Atlantic. In his essay collection We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates describes it as “an end point for my inquiries,” and that sense of resignation bleeds into the writing.  There, Coates doesn’t seem to make any major theoretical advances in his own understanding of the world. As such, even though the essay is well-researched and well-argued, it seems to lie inert on the page. It’s not a piece that haunts.  The comfort of redemptive myths  In The Message, Coates once again returns to his own ecstatic search for truth.  Each of the three essays preceding the final one on Palestine serves to establish Coates as his own main character, a man whose understanding of the world will be fundamentally changed by what he sees in Palestine during a 10-day trip in 2023. What he finds out shocks him into a new state of knowledge.  He begins at Howard, which he attended as a student and which he credits with teaching him that his writing must “be in service to a larger emancipatory project.” It’s here that he lays out his values as a writer, his passionate love for language, his belief that its pleasures must be harnessed for a greater political good.  In his second essay, Coates travels to Senegal and grapples with his own discomfort with the “vindicationist tradition” of Black America that says that Black people were born to be royalty, the kings and queens of Africa. He understands that this redemptive myth is a response to centuries of oppressive pseudoscience and philosophy that sought to prove that Black people were naturally inferior to whites — but still, he’s suspicious of any story that relies so heavily on the idea that social hierarchies are good when your personal group is the one on top. He visits Gorée, the island that is popularly held to have been the largest slave-trading center on the African coast. Coates is aware that historians now dispute that idea, but he finds himself still immensely moved by the experience of visiting it. For Coates, Gorée becomes a sort of personal Israel, a promised land, a mythic homeland he is aware does not truly belong to him. “We have a right to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined,” Coates concludes. “We have a right to imagine ourselves as pharaohs, and then again the responsibility to ask if a pharaoh is even worthy of our needs, our dreams, our imagination.”  Coates travels next to South Carolina, where a teacher had been forced to drop Between the World and Me from her curriculum because it made some of her white students uncomfortable. This essay serves as a kind of proof of the ideas Coates laid out at Howard: that beautiful language marshaled for a worthy political project can change people’s minds.  He keeps meeting Southern white people who say that his writing has reshaped the way they look at the world, and that, Coates concludes, is why conservative governments are always trying to ban his books and the works of other Black writers. People in positions of power, he says, are threatened by narratives that question their natural superiority. “It all works not simply to misinform but to miseducate; not just to assure the right answers are memorized but that the wrong questions are never asked,” Coates writes.  Applying the lens of American racial caste politics  When Coates reaches Israel in the final and longest essay of The Message, the arcs of the previous essays become foreshadowing for what he is on the precipice of learning.  Coates reads Israel as a sort of twisted realization of the dream of the vindicationist tradition. He imagines Zionist Jews as people who, like the descendents of enslaved Africans, have been deprived of power for centuries and millennia, and who then find a way to claim strength and safety for themselves — only to brutally inflict that power on others. This is his reading of the founding of Israel: that the first Arab-Israeli war offered a chance for Israel’s founders to prove that they were not the Jews who had been so horribly killed in the Holocaust, that they were strong and that they could fight and conquer in their own name. Coates spends 10 days in Israel over the summer of 2023, before the current war broke out, traveling between the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Once there, he struggles to understand how he could have been so unaware of how brutal life is for Palestinians in Israel and Israeli-occupied territories. He has always had the sense, he writes, that “Israel as a country … was doing something deeply unfair to the Palestinian people,” but “I was not clear on exactly what.”  Moreover, his sense from American political coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict left him with a sense that the whole situation “was so fraught that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” But the fact that a situation might be complex, he concludes, does not mean he cannot recognize brutality when he sees it. After visiting Palestine, he’s astounded to realize how few reporters and editors claimed Palestinian heritage in American newsrooms. He comes to see this blind spot of American journalism as analogous to the way conservatives keep trying to censor his books in the South: “No other story, save one that enables theft, can be tolerated” by the powerful, he concludes. Describing the project of Israel as one of theft is classic Coates. What he brings to his descriptions of Palestine is his bone-deep knowledge of American racial caste politics, for which he developed his specialized and distinctive vocabulary. At the Atlantic, Coates described the state policies that strip wealth and resources from Black Americans as “plunder,” and he uses the same words to describe Israel’s policies governing Palestinians. “It is not just the cops shooting your son, though that happens,” Coates writes. “It is not just a racist carceral project, though that is here too. And it is not just inequality before the law, though that was everywhere I looked. It is the thing that each of those devices served—a plunder of your home, a plunder both near and perpetual.” What Israel wants, Coates argues, is Palestinian land, minus the Palestinians who live on it. Any policy in service of that larger aim is what he describes as plunder.  Coates describes being accosted on the street by an armed soldier who demands he identify his religion. He writes about being held at a checkpoint for hours because his guides are Palestinians. He marvels at Israeli law, which he says “clearly and directly calls for a two-tier society,” with its arcane sub-citizen hierarchies for Palestinian residents, its stinginess in allowing Palestinian citizens to pass their Israeli citizenship on to their descendents.  I figured it out; they tried to hide it but I figured it out; I’m going to make you see exactly what I figured out Learning that in Israel, any structure designed for gathering water requires a government permit and that such permits are rarely granted to Palestinians, he cracks that “Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and fountains but the water itself.” It’s this learning that powers The Message forward. The whole book is lit up by his outrage at his old inferior understanding of Palestine and his palpable pleasure in forging the new. “My sense of the world was stunted,” he writes, “and never did I feel it expand in the way I felt it expanding in Palestine.”  There’s that sense of triumph again: I figured it out; they tried to hide it but I figured it out; I’m going to make you see exactly what I figured out. Has he actually figured it out? It’s a fair question. Critics more nuanced than Dokoupil have already taken issue with Coates’s decision not to discuss the fact that, for instance, Israel is surrounded by states committed to destroying it, or to mention the horrific attack carried out by Hamas on October 7 last year and all that came after. It would be reasonable to argue that not only has Coates failed to figure it out, but that he neglected to even try to wrap his mind around the bigger picture of what’s happening in Israel and Gaza. I think that would be a misreading of his project. What Coates is trying to capture, more than anything, is the experience of being an ordinary Palestinian living in Israel under the vicious disdain of the state. He is interested largely in the physical experience of oppression. He succeeds in capturing that specific reality as completely as anyone could. If what he’s figuring out is how to write convincingly about the horrors of apartheid through a lens of America’s own racial caste system, he’s got it. If what he’s figuring out is how to write a book on Israel and Palestine that will be as paradigm shifting as “The Case for Reparations,” he’s failed. The problem of a diagnosis with no solution  Coates’s great weakness here is, probably, his old insistence that he doesn’t offer solutions, just describes problems.  While “Reparations” characteristically and pointedly declined to engage with the question of what reparations should look like, there was an inherent action point. The United States government has repeatedly stolen wealth from its Black citizens, and so it should pay reparations for that theft. Coates even pointed to a congressional bill introduced every year since 1989 and never taken up in the full House or Senate that would create a federal commission to study the issue.  The problem of Israel and Palestine is very different, however, from the problem of reparations. Finding a solution to the conflict has been a locus of geopolitics for decades and has yielded few tangible results, especially in the conditions for Palestinians under Israeli occupation.   It is not Coates’s job to create peace in the region with The Message. Yet this weakness does mean that his book lacks the one-two punch of “Reparations:” problem, solution. Coates is not the first person to say that the situation of the Palestinians is unconscionable. He is simply one of the most famous to do so, and probably the most beautiful writer.  Beauty here is a driving force for Coates. Part of his philosophy is that only truthful writing is really beautiful, and he says that he wrote The Message in an attempt to live up to that idea. Notably, in “The Case for Reparations,” Coates offers what he saw then as a successful example of governments making financial reparations for their sins: Germany, which paid reparations to the Israeli government.  “I was seeking a world beyond plunder,” Coates says of writing “The Case for Reparations,” “but my proof of concept was just more plunder.” Once he reaches Palestine, he writes, he feels astonishment “for my own ignorance, for my own incuriosity, for the limits of my sense of Reparations.”  The Message is Coates’s attempt to make his own reparations to Palestine: using the fame and the goodwill and the platform he acquired from writing “The Case for Reparations” to bring awareness to the suffering he has managed to elide for so long.

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