Grupul utilizatorilor români de Lego a construit cea mai mare dioramă din lume, care a fost omologată de Cartea Recordurilor

Michael Douglas spoke about having intimacy coordinators on set, explaining he believes they take control away from the filmmakers, and that it is up to actors to make costars comfortable.

Mexico has begun requiring visas for Peruvians in response to a major influx of migrants from the South American country, according to senior U.S. officials.

If you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah bum-bah, as in, “There is only one solution! Intifada, revolution!” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada—an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “Globalize the Intifada!” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “We don’t want no Zionists here!” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.Chants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals. The “rally toolkit” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network. (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go!,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state!,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around!”Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.One slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews. Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom—that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article.Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya.” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “Intifada, Intifada” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

Donald Trump has been talking differently about abortion lately. The former president, who once promised to sign a federal ban into law, now insists that, if reelected, he would let each state chart its own course on the issue. Some states might ban all abortions, try to restrict pregnant women’s out-of-state travel, or perhaps even monitor their pregnancies. Others would allow abortions for almost any reason up to viability. Trump says he would let it all happen. As he told Time magazine, “I’m leaving everything up to the states.”The phrasing suggests that a second Trump presidency would take the federal government out of the abortion debate, an approach that evokes restraint and polls pretty well. But almost no one who works on either side of the issue believes that Trump will be so passive. If elected in November, Trump would reenter office with broad executive authority to restrict abortion access. Both his loyal anti-abortion supporters and his staunch pro-abortion-rights opponents agree that he would use at least some of those powers. The only real questions are which ones, and to what extent?“Essentially, states’ rights is Trump’s way of saying, ‘If you don’t like the GOP’s position on abortion, you can ignore it when it comes to me, because my being in office is not going to make a difference,’” Mary Ziegler, a UC Davis law professor who supports abortion rights, told me. “He’s been pretty explicit at various points that that’s what he thinks Republicans should say to win, and that their primary goal right now, when it comes to abortion, should be winning.”[From the January/February 2024 issue: A plan to outlaw abortion everywhere]Trump’s position on abortion has long appeared to track his political instincts rather than any fixed personal conviction. In 1999, he described himself as “very pro-choice.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, courting evangelical support, he recast himself as strictly anti-abortion. He vowed to sign a 20-week abortion ban, defund Planned Parenthood, and nominate Supreme Court justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade. Since Roe fell, he has been eager to take credit—he declared last summer that he was “proud to be the most pro-life president in American history”—while distancing himself from actual anti-abortion policies, which are broadly unpopular. Earlier this year, after criticizing Governor Ron DeSantis for signing a six-week ban into law in Florida, he toyed with endorsing a 15- or 16-week national ban, but has backed away since clinching the Republican nomination. A federal ban, Trump told Time, would “never happen” anyway, because even a Republican-controlled Congress wouldn’t have the votes.He’s right about that. A national 15-week ban would have almost no chance in Congress, and Trump therefore has no reason to alienate moderate voters by supporting one—especially given that he would have the tools to set even stricter policy without congressional buy-in.At a minimum, a second Trump administration is likely to reverse the steps that the Biden administration has taken to shore up abortion access. These include instructing hospitals in abortion-ban states that they must perform abortions in cases of medical emergencies, making it harder for law enforcement to access the medical records of women who travel out of state to receive an abortion, and, most significant, allowing abortion pills to be prescribed without an in-person doctor visit. The change was a major factor in abortion numbers going up after the Dobbs decision, in large part because women in states that have banned the procedure can still obtain abortion drugs from out of state. From July to September last year, at least one of every six abortions nationwide, about 14,000 a month, was completed via telehealth, according to research by the Society of Family Planning.Roger Severino, who served as a Health and Human Services official during Trump’s first term, told me that he expects a second Trump administration to immediately reverse these executive actions. Severino, who is not affiliated with the Trump campaign, said that the best evidence for what a second Trump term would look like is what Trump did during his first four years in office. “It was the most pro-life administration in history,” he said.If Trump stopped at rolling back Biden’s abortion policies, that would arguably fit the definition of leaving the issue to the states. But it would also represent a radical change from the status quo because states that prohibit abortion would have far more power to make sure that women who live within their borders cannot access the procedure. The effect on abortion numbers would be “enormous,” Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “All of a sudden, you would be back in a world where people would have to use brick-and-mortar clinics to get abortion care.”And Trump could go much further. He could appoint Food and Drug Administration officials who decide to revisit the approval of mifepristone, the first pill in a two-drug medication-abortion regimen. (The second drug is misoprostol.) Many members of the anti-abortion movement have argued that abortion pills are more dangerous than surgical abortions. (Some women have faced serious complications, though studies show the risks are far lower than those associated with most common drugs, or with giving birth.) In “Project 2025,” a blueprint for a second Trump term organized by the Heritage Foundation, Severino wrote that the FDA is “ethically and legally obliged to revisit and withdraw its initial approval of abortion pills.”If the FDA reversed its approval of mifepristone, women could still get misoprostol-only abortions, which are broadly considered to be safe and effective but tend to involve worse side effects, such as vomiting and diarrhea. The Alliance Defending Freedom, an influential conservative Christian legal organization that has challenged mifepristone’s approval in court, wants to go even further. Ryan Bangert, a senior vice president at ADF, told me that the group intends to limit misoprostol access as well. A victory could effectively stop all medication abortion, which currently accounts for nearly two-thirds of the country’s abortions.Trump could achieve similar results in other ways. The Comstock Act, a 19th-century statute, prohibits mailing “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing” intended to be used for abortion. It applies to the U.S. Postal Service and private carriers. The law sat mostly dormant for the past half-century, as Roe v. Wade rendered it a dead letter. Opinions differ as to the exact scope of its prohibitions. When the Dobbs decision came out, Biden’s Department of Justice announced that Comstock would apply only to illegal abortions. But Trump’s DOJ could interpret the law more expansively. “Project 2025,” which was written by a group that included some of Trump’s most loyal former officials, explicitly recommends enforcing the law against providers who send abortion pills through the mail. James Bopp Jr., the general counsel of the National Right to Life Committee, a prominent anti-abortion group, expects a Trump DOJ to use Comstock that way. And, he told me, the lobbyists he works with will be doing what they can to make sure that happens. Whether it does will likely come down to whom Trump appoints to key administration positions.Some experts believe that the Comstock Act can be read to prohibit the delivery of any medical equipment used in surgical abortions. At the broadest level, that interpretation would shut down an implausibly huge swath of non-abortion-related health care. But the next administration could engage in selective enforcement with the aim of imposing a de facto nationwide abortion ban. “Everything you use to produce an abortion is somehow sent through the mail,” David S. Cohen, a Drexel University law professor and abortion-rights supporter, told me. Trump’s administration wouldn’t need congressional approval to enforce the Comstock Act this way. “Trump might even be able to say, ‘Oh, that’s not what I want, but the attorney general is doing it, and who am I to stop the attorney general?’”Trump has so far refused to clarify his stance on the Comstock Act, telling Time that he would soon be “making a statement” on it. As my colleague Elaine Godfrey has written, many of Trump’s supporters in the anti-abortion movement hope he keeps quiet about the law until he’s safely in office—at which point, they seem confident, he’ll fulfill their hopes. “We don’t need a federal ban when we have Comstock on the books,” Jonathan Mitchell, a lawyer who has argued on Trump’s behalf before the Supreme Court, toldThe New York Times. But, he added, “I think the pro-life groups should keep their mouths shut as much as possible until the election.”Some lawyers close to Trump aren’t keeping their mouths shut. Jay Sekulow, one of Trump’s lead attorneys in his first impeachment trial, wrote in a brief to the Supreme Court that mailing abortion drugs, devices, or equipment is a federal offense under the Comstock Act. “The prohibition is simple, complete, and categorical,” Sekulow wrote.[Elaine Godfrey: The pro-life movement’s not-so-secret plan for Trump]Where will Trump’s political instincts lead him? With no reelection to worry about, he will have less to fear from any backlash. But, by the same token, he will have little reason to pander to the religious right. Severino, the former Trump official, argued that it would be impractical for law enforcement to intercept misoprostol, which has uses besides abortion, and medical tools. “The reach of Comstock has been exaggerated by the left for political purposes,” he told me.Abortion-rights advocates have heard this accusation before. They were told they were exaggerating the threat of a Trump presidency before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, given that the justices publicly insisted it was settled law, Greer Donley told me. And the anti-abortion movement isn’t hiding its wish list for a second Trump term. “Every single thing that people who support abortion rights have been worried about has been coming to pass,” Donley said. “It’s hard to argue that there’s any sort of hyperbole anymore.”

They appear every spring, like crocuses or robins or perhaps black flies: commencement addresses. Thousands of them, across the country and across the variety of American higher education—two-year schools, four-year schools, small colleges, universities both public and private, schools of every kind. And they will appear again, despite how unusual this spring has been. Many campuses have been roiled by protests about the war in Gaza, and some institutions will curtail graduation ceremonies. But the members of this undergraduate class, who had their high-school graduations shut down by COVID in 2020, have long looked forward to a second chance at a commencement ceremony. Over the next month or so, even in the face of disruptions or cancellations, commencement addresses will be delivered to about 4 million students earning some kind of college degree.Most of these addresses will pass into oblivion. It is a cliché for commencement speakers to open their remarks by confessing that they remember nothing about their own graduation: They have forgotten not just what was said, but who said it. Yet even if most commencement addresses prove far from memorable, the press and public eagerly anticipate them. News stories appear throughout the winter and early spring announcing who will speak where. Then, when the speakers have spoken, journalists and commentators rush to judge which should be considered the year’s best.A few speeches are anointed as classics to be visited or revisited for years. Admiral William McRaven’s 2014 address at the University of Texas at Austin has had more than 60 million YouTube viewers, all eager to learn the 10 takeaways from his Navy SEAL training. Thousands of Americans likely hear echoes in their head every morning of his promise that if you “make your bed,” it will change your life. More than 60 million people have also watched Steve Jobs’s Stanford University speech from 2005, which eerily anticipates his own death and urges graduates to “follow your heart.” J. K. Rowling’s 2008 Harvard talk about failure and imagination has attracted tens of millions of viewers, as has David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College address, “This Is Water.” All of these also ended up in print as well, designed to make attractive gifts. Admiral McRaven’s book became a New York Times No. 1 best seller. When Wallace died, in 2008, The Wall Street Journal republished the speech in his memory.[Read: A commencement address too honest to deliver in person]Commencement greatest hits reach well beyond these chart-toppers. Time, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Slate, Elle, and countless other outlets run articles each year on the season’s winners. “Looking for some new words of wisdom?” NPR asks on its website. The headline of its online database lists the 350 “Best Commencement Speeches, Ever” in alphabetical order (but, curiously, by first name), from Aaron Sorkin to Zubin Damania. Can all 350 really be the “best”?The assumption behind commencement speeches seems to be that even as graduates don their black robes and mortarboards, they don’t yet know quite enough. They must await, or perhaps endure, some final instruction, absorb some last missing life lesson, before they can be safely launched into what their education has supposedly prepared them for. Almost always these days, this instructional capstone is delivered by someone outside the institution, someone expected to have insight that extends beyond a university’s walls—perhaps representing a first step in the students’ transition into the “real world.” Many colleges and universities try to attract the most famous person they can. As graduation season approaches, speaker announcements take on the hallmarks of a competition: Which institutions did President Barack Obama choose for his three or four addresses each year? Who snagged Oprah Winfrey? Or Taylor Swift?Seeking a famous speaker may, on one level, represent an unseemly preoccupation with celebrity. But it fits the logic of the occasion. What better time to hear from someone who is regarded as, at least in some way, distinguished? Someone who has led what an institution perceives to be an inspiring and successful life? Yet even before our present moment of cancel culture and partisanship, university leaders have had to worry about selecting a speaker who might spark disruptions in a ceremony meant to be a celebration. High Point University, in North Carolina, which in 2005 welcomed Rudy Giuliani—admired in the aftermath of 9/11 as “America’s mayor”—presumably would not make that choice again today. Every spring sees its complement of speakers who are protested, heckled, or disinvited.Speakers, in turn, are attracted by a prestigious invitation, or perhaps by the presence of a child or grandchild in the graduating class—and, at times, by the offer of a substantial honorarium. Some institutions, though a minority, pay their speakers what can be hefty sums. One agent who represents a portfolio of prominent entertainers observed that fees for graduation speakers may go as high as $500,000. “Universities are vying for customers in the form of admissions, and this can be a great way to advertise and get people on campus,” she explained. When Matthew McConaughey’s $135,000 honorarium from the University of Houston was made public by inquisitive journalists in 2015, he quickly assured critics that he had donated it to charity. The Boston Globe touched off a small scandal when it reported the same year that three state schools had paid speakers $25,000 to $35,000 each.Serving as a commencement speaker is not all glory. Usually the honored guest must perform as the centerpiece of the lunches, dinners, and meet and greets that surround the actual ceremony. And of course there is the speech. Someone has to write it. It seems unimaginable that anyone other than David Foster Wallace could have created “This Is Water,” and Kenyon students remember seeing him surrounded by sheets of paper, inking in edits and scribbling addenda right up to the start of the ceremony. At Harvard, J. K. Rowling opened her remarks by admitting to the months of anxiety she experienced as she wrote her address. At least, she noted, her worries had resulted in her losing weight. Rowling’s speech was greeted with a two-minute standing ovation. Yet she vowed never to give a commencement address again.Many speeches are composed by someone other than the person who utters the words. Commencement speeches are not just a cultural ritual; they are an industry. A former Obama speechwriter told me recently that the springtime atmosphere at the Washington, D.C., public-affairs and communications firm where he now works is like the high-pressure environment of an accounting firm during tax season. Some of the market comprises regular clients, but a number of customers are one-offs. A lot of speechwriters hate doing commencement speeches, he said; they find it nearly impossible to come up with something fresh and compelling. These addresses, he went on, are unlike other genres of speeches, which tend to focus on the speaker. A commencement address has to be about the graduates: It is their day. Getting the “trite ideas out”—Pursue your passions! Turn failure into opportunity!—can be the first step toward “shaking loose” an idea, an angle that is distinctive to a particular speaker, place, and moment.In any given year, a speaker in high demand will deliver addresses at several colleges and universities. Barack Obama gave 23 graduation speeches during his presidency. In principle, these speeches should not be the same; each audience, each institution, each graduate wants to feel special. Besides, in this digital age, you are going to get caught. When word got around, in advance of his 2005 Class Day speech at Harvard, that the Meet the Press host Tim Russert sometimes recycled his remarks, students at Harvard passed around bingo cards printed with some of his favorite phrases and encouraged attendees to play.Senator Chuck Schumer doesn’t care about being caught. He loves graduations, and shows up, sometimes unannounced—perhaps even uninvited, though none of his hosts has ever said so—at as many as eight commencement ceremonies across the state of New York every year. He delivers the same speech every time. A student complained on a Reddit thread that he had heard the speech five times in six years—at his high-school, college, and graduate-school commencements, and at his sister’s high-school and college ceremonies. “OH F****,” his long-suffering family finally proclaimed, “NOT AGAIN.” (Perhaps, another Reddit contributor suggested, the graduates could arrange to do a sing-along.) When John Oliver, the host of HBO’s Last Week Tonight, learned about Senator Schumer’s springtime follies, he couldn’t resist showing clips of him saying exactly the same thing year after year after year, with the same verbal sound effects and hand gestures—an “endless graduation-speech time loop.”The peril of graduation speeches is that, however hard you struggle, you are in danger of repeating not just yourself but every person who has ever given one. Asked to generate a commencement address, ChatGPT produces a script that sounds like every speech you’ve ever heard, because it is in fact just that: a distillation of everything everyone has ever said, or at least everything that ChatGPT has found available in its training data. Graduates should practice resilience, pursue purpose, nurture relationships, embrace change, innovate, accept their responsibility to lead, and persevere as they embark on their journey into “a world of infinite possibilities.”[Read: What John F. Kennedy’s moon speech reveals 50 years later]We have all heard this speech. We’ll hear versions of it again this spring. But we hope for something better, and we’ll scour newspapers and the internet to see if it has been delivered somewhere. We ask powerful, accomplished people to stand before us and, for a moment, present a different self—to open up, become vulnerable, be reflective, let us see inside. What is a meaningful life, and how do I live one? These are questions that are customarily reserved for late nights in undergraduate dormitories, for the years before the at-once tedious and terrifying burdens of Real Life—careers, mortgages, children, aging bodies, disappointed hopes—overtake us.Everything and nothing is at stake in a commencement address. Maybe you have already heard it eight times. Maybe there was nothing worth hearing in the first place. But perhaps you will encounter a speaker who, even in this tumultuous spring, can reach across the chasm of innocence and experience separating graduates and the person talking to them. The old endeavor to imagine themselves young and look through fresh eyes again; the young begin to imagine themselves old, as they will become all too soon.The best commencement address is a gift—of self and of hope across generations. It is not surprising that these speeches so rarely succeed. The surprise should be when they do. Innocence can only faintly imagine experience. No generation can really explain to another what is to come. And experience can never recapture innocence, however wistful we may be for what has been lost. The beauty of commencement speeches is that they represent a moment when we try.

When Nan Goldin danced in low-life go-go bars in Paterson, N.J.,I was a girl in Paterson, N.J., living next to a low-life go-go bar.While men fed her tips and she tucked them into her bikini,a fist hit an eye in a house in Paterson, like a flash going offin a dark kitchen. And in the corner, a girl stood watching.In the go-go dance of memory, the woman who was the girlcannot recall the fist reach the eye, but sees an arm blockinga door. Nan Goldin took the bus back to New York, and the girlsat next to her, not knowing she was an artist. The girl lookedout the window and said, in each house a family, in each kitchena fist and an eye. Nan Goldin counted the tips to see how much filmshe could buy. A friend dragged Nan Goldin from the apartmentthat night. The self-portrait of her bloodied eye saved her. The girl’sbrother told her years later: What you don’t remember is thathe gave her a black eye. She watches from a corner of her lifethe eye turn red, black, purple, green, yellow. Nan Goldin is the artistwho made art that saved the girl, and the girl will make an artof her life. She takes the bus from Paterson, N.J., to Nan Goldin’sloft, and inserts a slide of the black eye into Nan Goldin’sprojector. The girl wishes her mother could be there, to see herselflarger than life on the screen. Nan Goldin danced go-go in Patersonso she wouldn’t have to take off her top. The memory is not a stripteasethat ends with a blackened eye. The girl slips it like a slide into the partmemory won’t reveal, to complete the scene in which she is small andcannot help her mother leave. Nan Goldin photographed herself to forcethe door open. She pushed through it. I pushed through it.This poem appears in the June 2024 print edition.

Illustrations by Vartika Sharma1In the early spring of 2020, Barb Herrera taped a signed note to a wall of her bedroom in Orlando, Florida, just above her pillow. NOTICE TO EMS! it said. No Vent! No Intubation! She’d heard that hospitals were overflowing, and that doctors were being forced to choose which COVID patients they would try to save and which to abandon. She wanted to spare them the trouble.Barb was nearly 60 years old, and weighed about 400 pounds. She has type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, and a host of other health concerns. At the start of the pandemic, she figured she was doomed. When she sent her list of passwords to her kids, who all live far away, they couldn’t help but think the same. “I was in an incredibly dark place,” she told me. “I would have died.”Until recently, Barb could barely walk—at least not without putting herself at risk of getting yet another fracture in her feet. Moving around the house exhausted her; she showered only every other week. She couldn’t make it to the mailbox on her own. Barb had spent a lifetime dealing with the inconveniences of being, as she puts it, “huge.” But what really scared her—and what embarrassed her, because dread and shame have a way of getting tangled up—were the moments when her little room, about 10 feet wide and not much longer, was less a hideout than a trap. At one point in 2021, she says, she tripped and fell on the way to the toilet. Her housemate and landlord—a high-school friend—was not at home to help, so Barb had to call the paramedics. “It took four guys to get me up,” she said.Later that year, when Barb finally did get COVID, her case was fairly mild. But she didn’t feel quite right after she recovered: She was having trouble breathing, and there was something off about her heart. Finally, in April 2022, she went to the hospital and her vital signs were taken.The average body mass index for American adults is 30. Barb’s BMI was around 75. A blood-sugar test showed that her diabetes was not under control—her blood sugar was in the range where she might be at risk of blindness or stroke. And an EKG confirmed that her heart was skipping beats. A cardiac electrophysiologist, Shravan Ambati, came in for a consultation. He said the missed beats could be treated with medication, but he made a mental note of her severe obesity—he’d seen only one or two patients of Barb’s size in his 14-year career. Before he left, he paused to give her some advice. If she didn’t lose weight, he said, “the Barb of five years from now is not going to like you very much at all.” As she remembers it, he crossed his arms and added: “You will either change your life, or you’ll end up in a nursing home.”“That was it. That was it,” Barb told me. Imagining herself getting old inside a home, “in a row of old people who are fat as hell, just sitting there waiting to die,” she vowed to do everything she could to get well. She would try to change her life. Eventually, like millions of Americans, she would try the new miracle cure. Again.2In a way, Barb has never stopped trying to change her life. At 10 years old, she was prescribed amphetamines; at 12, she went to WeightWatchers. Later she would go on liquid diets, and nearly every form of solid diet. She’s been vegan and gluten-free, avoided fat, cut back on carbs, and sworn off processed foods. She’s taken drugs that changed her neurochemistry and gotten surgery to shrink her stomach to the size of a shot glass. She’s gone to food-addiction groups. She’s eaten Lean Cuisines. She’s been an avid swimmer at the Y. Barb Herrera weighed about 300 pounds by the time she was 30. (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) Through it all, she’s lost a lot of weight. Really an extraordinary quantity—well more than a quarter ton, if you add it up across her life. But every miracle so far has come with hidden costs: anemia, drug-induced depression, damage to her heart. Always, in the end, the weight has come back. Always, in the end, “success” has left her feeling worse.In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight; certainly many millions have, like Barb, spent decades running on a treadmill of solutions, never getting anywhere. The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started. New rules for eating have been rolled out and then rolled back. Pills have been invented and abandoned. Laws have been rewritten to improve the quality of people’s diets and curb caloric intake—to make society less “obesogenic” on the whole. Efforts have been made to reduce discrimination over body size in employment settings and in health care. Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic. Thomas Wadden, a clinical psychologist and obesity researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied weight-loss interventions for more than 40 years (and who has received both research grants and fees from Novo Nordisk), remembers when he first learned about those findings, at an internal meeting at the company the year before. “My jaw just dropped,” he told me. “I really could not believe what we were seeing.” Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”[Radio Atlantic: Could Ozempic derail the body-positivity movement?]Semaglutide is in the class of GLP-1 receptor agonists, chemicals derived from lizard venom that mimic gut hormones and appear to reshape our metabolism and eating behavior for as long as the drugs are taken. Earlier versions were already being used to treat diabetes; then, in 2022, a newer one from Eli Lilly—tirzepatide, sold as Zepbound or Mounjaro—produced an average weight loss of 20 percent in a clinical trial. Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.)The past four decades of American history underline just how much is riding on these drugs—and serve as a sobering reminder that it is impossible to know, in the first few years of any novel intervention, whether its success will last.The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight. That’s not to mention all the people who might benefit from treatment but don’t have access to it: For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.But there’s growing pressure for GLP-1 drugs to be covered without restrictions by Medicare, and subject to price negotiation. Eventually they will start to come off patent. When that happens, usage is likely to explode. The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify—and if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk. The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years. Today, adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time? Could the drugs produce lasting damage, or end up losing some of their benefit?Athena Philis-Tsimikas, an endocrinologist who works at Scripps Health in San Diego and whose research has received ample funding from Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly, says the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out. Exenatide, at least, keeps working over many years, and its side effects don’t appear to worsen. Still, we have less to go on with the newer drugs, Philis-Tsimikas said. “All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”The GLP-1 drugs may well represent a shocking breakthrough for the field of public health, on the order of vaccines and sanitation. They could also fizzle out, or end in a surge of tragic, unforeseen results. But in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.3Barb’s first weight-loss miracle, and America’s, came during a moment of profound despair. In 1995, while working in a birthing center, she’d tripped on a scale—“the irony of all ironies,” she told me—and cracked her ankle. When she showed up for the surgery that followed, Barb, then 34 and weighing 330 pounds, learned that she had type 2 diabetes. In a way, this felt like her inheritance: Both grandparents on Barb’s father’s side had obesity and diabetes, as did her dad, his brother, and two sisters. Her mother, too, had obesity. Now, despite Barb’s own years of efforts to maintain her health, that legacy had her in its grip.The doctors threatened Barb (as doctors often have): If she didn’t find a way to eat in moderation, she might not make it through the end of 1997. Then she got some new advice: Yes, Barb should eat better food and exercise, but also maybe she should try a pair of drugs, dexfenfluramine and phentermine, together known as “fen-phen.” The former had just received approval from the FDA, and research showed that a combination of the two, taken several times a day, was highly effective at reducing weight.[Read: The weight-loss-drug revolution is a miracle—and a menace]The treatment was a revelation. Even when she talks about it now, Barb begins to cry. She’d tried so many diets in the past, and made so little progress, but as soon as she started on the weight-loss medication, something changed. A low and steady hum that she’d experienced ever since she was a kid—Where can I eat? How can I eat? When can I eat?—disappeared, leaving her in a strange new state of quiet. “The fen-phen turned that off just within a day. It was gone,” she told me, struggling to get out the words. “What it did was tell me that I’m not crazy, that it really wasn’t me.”At the time, Wadden, the obesity researcher and clinician, was hearing similar reports from his patients, who started telling him that their relationship with food had been transformed, that suddenly they were free of constant cravings. Over the course of a small, year-long study of the drugs that Wadden ran with a colleague at Penn, Robert Berkowitz, participants lost about 14 percent of their body weight on average. That’s the same level of success that would be seen for semaglutide several decades later. “Bob and I really were high-fiving each other,” Wadden told me. “We were feeling like, God, we’ve got a cure for obesity.”The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories. But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991. In 1988, Oprah Winfrey brought a wagon of fat on air to represent the 67 pounds she’d lost using a liquid diet. (Associated Press) “I’ll never diet again,” Oprah Winfrey had announced on her TV show at the end of 1990. Not long before, she’d kicked off a major trend by talking up her own success with a brand of weight-loss shakes called Optifast. But Winfrey’s slimmer figure had been fleeting, and now the $33 billion diet industry was under scrutiny for making bogus scientific claims.Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses. Others have smashed their bathroom scales with the abandon that some women in the 1960’s burned their bras.”That same Times story included a quote from Wadden, who cautioned that these changing attitudes might end up being “dangerous.” But Wadden’s own views of dieting were also changing. His prior research showed that patients could lose up to one-fifth of their body weight by going on very strict diets that allowed for no more than 800 calories a day. But he’d found that it was difficult for his patients to maintain that loss for long, once the formal program was over. Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent.National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.Then a bolt of science landed in this muddle and despair. In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,” the editorial explained, “that scientists may, eventually, come up with a drug treatment to help overweight Americans shed unwanted, unhealthy pounds.”Leptin-based treatments for obesity were in the works, according to the researchers, and might be ready for the public in five years, maybe 10. In the meantime, the suggestion that obesity was a biochemical disease, more a function of a person’s genes than of their faulty habits or lack of will, dovetailed with the nation’s shift away from dieting. If there was any hope of solving the problem of obesity, maybe this was it.Wadden was ready to switch gears. “I realized that we had sort of reached our limits on what we could do with diet and physical activity,” he said. Now, instead, he started looking into pharmaceuticals. He’d already run one weight-loss study using sertraline, better known as Zoloft, and found that it had no effect. In 1995, he turned to fen-phen.Fen-phen wasn’t new, exactly—versions of its component drugs had been prescribed for decades. But when those pills were taken separately, their side effects were difficult to handle: “Fen” would make you drowsy and might give you diarrhea; “phen” could be agitating and lead to constipation. By the 1990s, though, doctors had begun to give the two together, such that their side effects would cancel each other out. And then a new and better version of “fen”—not fenfluramine but dexfenfluramine—came under FDA review.Some regulators worried that this better “fen” posed a risk of brain damage. And there were signs that “fen” in any form might lead to pulmonary hypertension, a heart-related ailment. But Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.” To prevent Americans with obesity from getting dexfenfluramine, supporters said, would be to surrender to a deadly epidemic. Judith Stern, an obesity expert and nutritionist at UC Davis, was clear about the stakes: “If they recommend no,” she said of the FDA-committee members, “these doctors ought to be shot.”In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million. “What we have here is probably the fastest launch of any drug in the history of the pharmaceutical industry,” one financial analyst told reporters.This wasn’t just a drug launch. It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life. That paradigm, Time explained, reflected a deeper shift in medicine. In a formulation that prefigures the nearly identical claims being made about Ozempic and its ilk today, the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”Barb started on fen-phen two weeks after it was approved. “I had never in my life felt normal until after about a week or two on the medications,” she’d later say. “My life before was hell.” She was losing weight, her blood sugar was improving, and she was getting to the pool, swimming 100 lengths five or six days a week. A few months later, when she read in her local newspaper that the Florida Board of Medicine was considering putting limits on the use of fen-phen, she was disturbed enough to send a letter to the editor. “I thank the creators of fen/phen for helping to save my life,” she wrote. “I don’t want to see the medications regulated so intensely that people like me are left out.”4For another year, Barb kept taking fen-phen, and for another year she kept losing weight. By July of 1997, she’d lost 111 pounds.Thomas Wadden and his colleague’s fen-phen study had by then completed its second year. The data showed that their patients’ shocking weight loss had mostly been maintained, as long as they stayed on the drugs. But before Wadden had the chance to write up the results, he got a call from Susan Yanovski, then a program officer at the National Institutes of Health and now a co-director of the NIH’s Office of Obesity Research. We’ve got a problem, Yanovski told him.News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque. They had “a glistening white appearance,” the doctors said, suggestive of disease. Now Yanovski wanted Wadden to look more closely at the women in his study.Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm. “That just felt like a crushing blow,” he told me. Several weeks later, a larger data set from the FDA confirmed the issue. Wadden worried to reporters that the whole fiasco would end up setting back obesity treatment by many years.[Read: The Ozempic revolution is stuck]The news put Barb in a panic. Not about her heart: The drug hadn’t caused her any problems, as far as she could tell; it had only solved them. But now they were taking it away. What then? She’d already spoken out about her new and better life to local outlets; now she did so again, on national TV. On September 16, the day after fenfluramine in both of its forms was pulled from the market, Barb appeared on CBS This Morning. She explained then, as she later would to me, that fen-phen had flipped a switch inside her brain. There was desperation in her voice.A few days later, she was in a limousine in New York City, invited to be on The Montel Williams Show. She wore a crisp floral dress; a chyron would identify her as “BARBARA: Will continue taking diet drug despite FDA recall.” “I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”“I did all this stuff to shout it from the rooftops that I was doing so well on fen-phen,” Barb told me. Still, all the warnings she’d been hearing on the news, and from her fellow Montel guests, started building up inside her head. When she got back to Orlando, she went to see her doctor, just in case. His testing showed that she did indeed have damage to her mitral valve, and that fen-phen seemed to be the cause. Barb swimming in 2003 (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) Five months later, she was back on CBS to talk about her tragic turnabout. The newscast showed Doppler footage of the backwards flow of blood into her heart. She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”5The Publix supermarket chain has, since its founding more than 90 years ago in central Florida, offered “people weighers,” free for use by all. They’re big, old-fashioned things, shaped like lollipops, with a dial readout at the top and handlebars of stainless steel. By the time I visited Barb last fall, in a subdivision of Orlando, she was determined to go and use one.She’d taken heed of what Ambati, the cardiologist, had told her when she went into the hospital in April 2022. She cut back on salt and stopped ordering from Uber Eats. That alone was enough to bring her weight down 40 pounds. Then she started on Trulicity, the brand name for a GLP-1 drug called dulaglutide that is prescribed to people with diabetes. (The drug was covered for her use by Medicaid.) In clinical trials, patients on dulaglutide tend to lose about 10 pounds, on average, in a year. For Barb, the effects were far more dramatic. When we first met in person, she’d been on Trulicity for 14 months—and had lost more than one-third of her body weight. “It’s not even like I’m skinny, but compared to 405, I feel like an Olympic runner,” she told me.We arrived at the supermarket in tandem with another middle-aged woman who was also there to check her weight. “Okay, you first, jump on!” Barb said. “My dream weight. I love it!” she said, when the pointer tipped to 230 pounds. “Not mine,” the other woman grumbled. Then Barb got on the scale and watched it spin to a little past 250. She was very pleased. The last number of the dial was 300. Even registering within its bounds was new.Some people with obesity describe a sense of being trapped inside another person’s body, such that their outward shape doesn’t really match their inner one. For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.”She has experienced this phenomenon before. After learning that she had heart-valve damage from fen-phen, Barb joined a class-action lawsuit against the maker of dexfenfluramine, and eventually received a substantial payout. In 2001, she put that money toward what would be her second weight-loss miracle—bariatric surgery. The effects were jarring, she remembers. Within just three months, she’d lost 100 pounds; within a year, she’d lost 190. She could ride a bike now, and do a cartwheel. “It was freakin’ wild,” she told me. “I didn’t have an idea of my body size.” She found herself still worried over whether chairs would break when she sat down. Turnstiles were confusing. For most of her adult life, she’d had to rotate sideways to go through them if she couldn’t find a gate, so that’s what she continued doing. Then one day her partner said, “No, just walk through straight,” and that’s what she did.Weight-loss surgery was somewhat unusual at the time, despite its record of success. About 60,000 such procedures were performed in 2001, by one estimate; compare that with the millions of Americans who had been taking fen-phen just a few years earlier. Bariatric surgeons and obesity physicians have debated why this treatment has been so grossly “underutilized.” (Even now, fewer than 1 percent of eligible patients with obesity have the procedure.) Surely some are dissuaded by the scalpel: As with any surgery, this one carries risks. It’s also clear that many doctors have refrained from recommending it. But the fen-phen fiasco of the late 1990s cast its shadow on the field as well. The very idea of “treating” excess weight, whether with a pill or with a knife, had been discredited. It seemed ill-advised, if not old-fashioned.[Read: The science behind Ozempic was wrong]By the turn of the millennium, a newer way to think about America’s rising rates of obesity was starting to take hold. The push was led by Thomas Wadden’s close friend and colleague Kelly Brownell. In the 1970s, the two had played together in a bluegrass band—Wadden on upright bass, Brownell on guitar—and they later worked together at the University of Pennsylvania. But when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.Inspired by successful efforts to reduce tobacco use, Brownell laid out a raft of new proposals in the ’90s to counter the effects of junk-food culture: a tax on non-nutritious snacks; a crackdown on deceptive health claims; regulation of what gets sold to kids inside school buildings. Those ideas didn’t find much traction while the nation was obsessed with fen-phen, but they caught on quickly in the years that followed, amid new and scary claims that obesity was indirectly hurting all Americans, not just the people with a lot of excess weight.In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.) In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.As the environmental theory gained currency, public-health officials took notice. In 2006, for example, the New York City Board of Health moved to require that calorie counts be posted on many chain restaurants’ menus, so customers would know how much they were eating. The city also banned trans fats. While first lady, Michelle Obama planted an organic garden at the White House as part of her effort to promote healthy eating. (Aude Guerrucci / Getty) Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could. The nation’s school-lunch program was overhauled. Nutrition labels got an update from the FDA, with more prominent displays of calories and a line for “added sugars.” Food benefits for families in poverty were adjusted to allow the purchase of more fruits and vegetables. The Affordable Care Act brought calorie labeling to chain restaurants nationwide and pushed for weight-loss programs through employer-based insurance plans.Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country. The first lady also led a separate, private-sector push for change within Big Food. In 2010, the beverage giants agreed to add calorie labels to the front of their bottles and cans; PepsiCo pledged major cuts in fat, sodium, and added sugars across its entire product line within a decade.An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.Brownell led the growing calls for an excise tax on soft drinks, like the one in place for cigarettes, as a way of limiting their sales. Few such measures were passed—the beverage industry did everything it could to shut them down—but the message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out. And although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.But sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,” Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and the director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at Tufts University, told me. But that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.[Read: What happens when you’ve been on Ozempic for 20 years?]Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.And obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.6The success of Barb’s gastric-bypass surgery was also limited. “Most people reach their lowest weight about a year post-surgery,” Gretchen White, an epidemiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, told me. “We call it their weight nadir.”Barb’s weight nadir came 14 months after surgery; she remembers exactly when things began to turn around. She was in a store buying jeans, and realized she could fit into a size 8. By then she’d lost 210 pounds; her BMI was down to 27—lower than the average for a woman her age. Her body had changed so much that she was scared. “It was just too freaky to be that small,” she told me. “I wasn’t me. I wasn’t substantial.” She was used to feeling unseen, but now, in this new state, she felt like she was disappearing in a different way. “It’s really weird when you’re really, really fat,” she said. “People look at you, but they also look through you. You’re just, like, invisible. And then when you’re really small you’re invisible too, because you’re one of the herd. You’re one of everybody.”At that point, she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions. Her experience was not unusual. Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg tried to implement a ban on oversize sugary drinks. (Allison Joyce / Getty) But if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it, and by then the money from her fen-phen settlement had run out. The pounds kept coming back.Barb’s relationship to medicine had long been complicated by her size. She found the health-care system ill-equipped—or just unwilling—to give her even basic care. During one hospital visit in 1993, she remembers, a nurse struggled to wrap a blood-pressure cuff around her upper arm. When it didn’t fit, he tried to strap it on with tape, but even then, the cuff kept splitting open. “It just grabs your skin and gives you bruises. It’s really painful,” she said. Later she’d find out that the measurement can also be taken by putting the cuff around a person’s forearm. But at the time, she could only cry.“That was the moment that I was like, This is fucked up. This is just wrong, that I have to sit here and cry in the emergency room because someone is incompetent with my body.” She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit. At one appointment, for the removal of a cancerous skin lesion on her back, Barb’s health-care team tried rolling her onto her side while she was under anesthesia, and accidentally let her slip. When she woke, she found a laceration to her breast and bruises on her arm.Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.In 1999, when Rebecca Puhl arrived at Yale to work with Kelly Brownell toward her Ph.D. in clinical psychology, she’d given little thought to weight-based discrimination. But Brownell had received a grant to research the topic, and he put Puhl on the project. “She basically created a field,” Brownell said. While he focused on the dark seductions of our food environment, Puhl studied size discrimination, and how it could be treated as a health condition of its own. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.Puhl’s approach took for granted that being very fat could make you sick. Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.[Read: Why scientists can’t agree on whether it’s unhealthy to be overweight]Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look. Bacon’s mentor at the time was Judith Stern—the obesity expert who in 1995 proposed that any FDA adviser who voted against approving dexfenfluramine “ought to be shot.” By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners. Bacon struggled to find a publisher. “I have a stack of well over 100 rejections,” they told me.But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid. The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”But that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity. “Even amongst Medicaid beneficiaries, we see differences in who is getting access to therapies,” she told me. “I think this is built into the system.”That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism. But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events. (“They were accusing me of taking center stage and not appropriately deferring to marginalized people,” Bacon told me. “That’s never been true.”)As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell. Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed. (Puhl has been testifying regularly in support of the same proposed bill in Massachusetts since 2007, to no avail.) And, as always, obesity rates themselves kept going up.In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion. In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight. If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat. Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.7Not long before my visit to Orlando in October, Barb had asked her endocrinologist to switch her from Trulicity to Mounjaro, because she’d heard it was more effective. (This, too, was covered under Medicaid.) A few weeks later, Barb blogged about the feeling of being stuck—physically stuck—inside her body. “Anyone who has been immobilized by fat and then freed, understands my sense of amazement that I can walk without a walker and not ride the scooter in the store,” she wrote. “Two years ago, all I could do was wait to die. I never thought I would be released from my prison of fat.” Barb has been a frequent visitor to Disney World, but until recently she needed an electric scooter to navigate the park. (Courtesy of Barb Herrera) In all that time when she could barely move, of all the places that she couldn’t really go, Disney World stood out. Barb is the sort of person who holds many fascinations—meditation, 1980s lesbian politics, the rock band Queen—but Disney may be chief among them. She has a Tinker Bell tattoo on her calf, and a trio of Mickey Mouse balloons on her shoulder. Her wallet shows the plus-size villain Ursula, from The Little Mermaid. “It’s just a place where you can go and be treated beautifully,” she said. “No matter who you are, no matter what country you’re from, no matter what language you speak. It’s just wonderful and beautiful.”She’d been raised in the theme park, more or less: Her mother got a job there in the 1970s, and that meant Barb could go for free—which she did as often as she could, almost from the time that it first opened, and for decades after. She was at Disney when Epcot opened in 1982, just weeks before she gave birth to her first child. Later on she helped produce a book about where to eat at Disney if you’re vegetarian, and published tips for how to get around the parks—and navigate the seating for their rides—whether you’re “Pooh-size” or “Baloo-size.” She worked at Disney, too, first as an independent tour guide and photographer, then as a phone operator for the resorts. “They used to pull me off of the telephones to go test new rides to see how large people could do on them,” she told me.But lately she’d only watched the park’s events on livestream. The last time she’d gone in person, in 2021, she was using a scooter for mobility. “I dream of one day walking at Disney World once again,” she’d written on her blog. So we called a car and headed over.Barb was exhilarated—so was I—when we strolled into the multistory lobby of the Animal Kingdom Lodge, with its shiny floors, vaulted ceilings, indoor suspension bridge, and 16-foot, multicolored Igbo Ijele mask. Barb bought a pair of Minnie Mouse ears at the gift shop, and kibitzed for a while with the cashier. Before, she would have had to ask me to go and get the ears on her behalf, she said, so she wouldn’t have to maneuver through the store on wheels. We walked down the stairs—we walked down the stairs, Barb observed with wonderment—to get breakfast at a restaurant called Boma. “Welcome, welcome, welcome! Have a Boma-tastic breakfast!” the host said.Barb relished being in the lodge again, and had lots to say, to me and everyone. “My mom was a cast member for 42 years,” she informed our server at one point. Even just that fact was a reminder of how much Disney World, and the people in it, had evolved during her lifetime. When her mom started to gain weight, Barb remembered, her manager demanded that she go on a diet. “They didn’t even make a costume bigger than a 16,” Barb said. As Americans got bigger, that policy had to be abandoned. “They needed people to work,” she said, with a glance around the restaurant, where kids and parents alike were squeezing into seats, not all of which looked entirely sufficient. It was easy to imagine what the crowd at Boma might have looked like 20 years ago, when the restaurant first opened, and when the adult obesity rate was just half of what it is today.“I feel smaller than a lot of these people, which is really interesting,” Barb said. “I don’t even know if I am, but I feel like it. And that is surreal.”Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”[Read: How obesity became a disease]His bluegrass buddy, Kelly Brownell, stepped down from his teaching and administrative responsibilities last July. “I see the drugs as having great benefit,” Brownell told me, even as he quickly cited the unknowns: whether the drugs’ cost will be overwhelming, or if they’ll be unsafe or ineffective after long-term use. “There’s also the risk that attention will be drawn away from certain changes that need to be made to address the problem,” he said. When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.For Dariush Mozaffarian, the nutritionist and cardiologist at Tufts, the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now. Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies. “The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways? When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.” Already people on these drugs are getting stigmatized twice over: first for the weight at which they started, and then again for how they chose to lose it.Barb herself has been evangelizing for her current medications with as much fervor as she showed for fen-phen. She has a blog devoted to her experience with GLP-1 drugs, called Health at Any Cost. As we stood up from our breakfast in the Animal Kingdom Lodge, Barb checked her phone and saw a text from her daughter Meghann, who had started on tirzepatide a couple of months before Barb did. “ ‘Thirty-five pounds down,’ ” Barb read aloud. “ ‘Medium top. Extra-large leggings, down from 4X’ … She looks like the child I knew. When she was so big, she looked so different.”In November, Barb’s son, Tristan, started on tirzepatide too. She attributes his and Meghann’s struggles to their genes. Later that month, when she was out at Meghann’s house in San Antonio for Thanksgiving, she sent me a photo of the three of them together—“the Tirzepatide triplets.”She’d always worried that her kids might be doomed to experience the same chronic conditions that she has. All she could do before was tell them to “stay active.” Now she imagines that this chain might finally be broken. “Is the future for my progeny filled with light and the joy of not being fat?” she wrote in a blog post last fall. Barb at home in Orlando in April. Since starting on GLP-1 drugs two years ago, she has lost more than 200 pounds. (Stacy Kranitz for The Atlantic) Barb’s energy was still limited, and on the day we visited Disney World, she didn’t yet feel ready to venture out much past the lodge. Before we went back to her house, I pressed her on the limits of this fantasy about her kids’ and grandkids’ lives. How could she muster so much optimism, given all the false miracles that she’d experienced before? She’d gone on fen-phen and ended up with heart damage. She’d had a gastric

Photographs by Gordon ParksIam the granddaughter of domestic workers. My maternal grandmother was Luretha Little, an only child, who left her parents behind in North Carolina, and then her husband and two young sons in Virginia in search of freedom in New Jersey, where her sons eventually joined her and where my mother was born in 1955. In Newark, Luretha and her second husband, Elijah Griffin, had four more children. They ran a janitorial business, cleaning the offices of white doctors in Woodbridge and white scientists in New Brunswick. Sometimes they brought their children and put them to work: the twin boys swept the floors, and my mother dusted desks and polished ashtrays. My paternal grandmother, Hilda Ramdoo, was nicknamed Dolly because she was a pretty baby. One of nine children born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, she had seven of her own. By the time my father was an adult, his mother had temporarily left her husband, Antonio Tillet, and remaining six children to work in Caracas, where she cleaned the homes of the Venezuelan elite; she later went to Boston, where her entire family eventually joined her, and where I was born in 1975.I think a lot about these two women and their countless hours of labor in the homes or offices of others. Though they were separated by race, nationality, and age, because of their gender and class they were relegated to the same job. But they also had full lives. Seven children each. Luretha loved Mahalia and Motown. Dolly was one of the first women to start a Carnival band in Trinidad. They were pious and proper and quick-tongued and outspoken. I think a lot about what existed for them beyond work when I look at Gordon Parks’s most memorable image: the 1942 photograph he initially labeled Washington D.C. Government Charwoman, but renamed American Gothic during the revolutionary 1960s.More than half a century later, Parks recounted making this first portrait of Ella Watson, the 59-year-old African American cleaning woman who, like him, worked at the Farm Security Administration offices in Washington, D.C. “So it happened that, in one of the government’s most sacred strongholds,” he wrote, “I set up my camera for my first professional photograph.”“On the wall,” he continued, “was a huge American flag hanging from the ceiling to the floor.” Parks asked Watson “to stand before it, placed the mop in one hand, a broom in the other, then instructed her to look into the lens.”This capture of Watson at work—wearing a neatly pressed polka-dotted puffed-sleeve dress and wire-rimmed glasses, her hair parted to the side, with a straw broom and rag mop on either side of her and a slightly out-of-focus American flag hanging behind her—is now so familiar to me that I don’t remember when I first saw it. But I didn’t know until recently that it is what Parks considered his “first” professional photograph, setting him on the path to becoming one of the most innovative and influential photographers of all time. Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, leaves for work at 4:30pm. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) In July and August 1942, Parks took more than 90 photographs of Watson, her family, and her community, in a project that rejected long-standing caricatures of Black women as mammies or subservient maids. More than a decade before hundreds of Black women domestic workers helped organize the Montgomery bus boycott, Parks’s series with Watson revealed Black domestics as they often were: patriotic, political, and pious.In his memoir, A Choice of Weapons, Parks recalled entering the FSA offices for the first time, walking “confidently down the corridor, following the arrows to my destination, sensing history all around me, feeling knowledge behind every door I passed.” Roy Stryker, the head of the FSA’s Historical Section, sensing that Parks’s naivete would not serve him or his future subjects well, encouraged him to leave his camera behind and get to know the city by going for a bus ride, taking in a movie, shopping at a drugstore or a department store, or dining at local restaurants. “I wanted to kill everyone,” Parks said about those experiences. “I’ve never been so mad.” Unlike in Saint Paul, where he came of age, or even his more recent home, Chicago, in D.C., he faced the harsh reality of the district’s strict segregation laws and was denied service or entry everywhere he went. Furious, Parks told Stryker that he needed to document this story of American racism and then plotted his plan in bold strokes. “I wanted to photograph every rotten discrimination in the city, and show the world how evil Washington was,” Parks said. “I had the biggest, vaguest ideas in the world.” After making it clear that such a project would require him to hire all of Life magazine’s photographers for the rest of their lives, Stryker encouraged Parks to focus on and follow one person to achieve his goals. Stryker indicated a woman who was mopping the hallway floor nearby. “Go have a talk with her before you go home this evening,” he said. “See what she has to say about life and things. You might find her interesting.” (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Born in late March 1883 in Washington, D.C., Ella Watson had been a domestic for most of her life by the time she met Parks. In 1898, at age 15, she left school and later that year found a job ironing at the Frazee Laundry in Washington. She worked intermittently, listing “maid” and “laundress” as her employment on the census until she found a temporary position as a custodian at the State Department in 1919. The following year, she doubled up, working as a caretaker in a white family’s home and cleaning another federal agency building. She managed to secure steady employment at the Post Office Department for most of the 1920s, then moved to the Treasury Department (where the FSA was also located) in 1929; she remained there until 1944. “I came to find out a very significant thing,” Parks later remembered. Watson “had moved into the [office] building at the same time, she said, as the [white] woman who was now a notary public. They came there with the same education, the same mental facilities and equipment, and she was now scrubbing this woman’s room every evening.”I have always wondered whether Parks saw parts of his biography in Watson’s story. Long before he worked for the railroad, much less became a professional photographer, a teenage Gordon Parks was homeless in his new city of Saint Paul. He worked weekends at his boardinghouse to make ends meet, washing dishes and mopping floors. A few years later, like millions of Americans during the Depression, he was destitute again. Having lost all his belongings on an earlier trip to Chicago, a desperate Parks got a gig at the Hotel Southland. Because of his race, this run-down establishment barred him from renting one of the rooms he was responsible for cleaning.Having to clean for the hotel’s white, working-class, and almost always drunk guests brought out the worst in him. The Southland was filled with a “bad breath of smoke, alcohol, sour bodies and human excrement” and “pickpockets, alcoholics, bums, addicts, perverts, panhandlers,” and the only way Parks could survive was to “hold my own here, where profanity meant prestige and politeness invited abuse.” Hating every day of his short-lived experience there, Parks concluded, “It was a harsh and ugly time,” marked mainly by his “longing for the time when I could get into a tub of hot water and soak out the smell of the place.”I do not know if Parks divulged his past to Watson, but she shared much with him. “Would you allow me to photograph you?” he awkwardly asked her one early-summer evening in 1942. “In an old dress like this?” she humbly replied. Soon Parks had his most enduring photograph, but he realized he knew little of his subject beyond the image. When he approached her later to ask if he could continue to document her and learn more about her life, Watson joked that it might take some time because she was a grandmother. She then told a life story that sounded to Parks like “a bad dream.” By the time he met her, her husband had died (in 1927), and she was raising her adopted teenage daughter and her adopted daughter’s nieces and nephews. Watson, a single mother and the sole provider for the family, was left to survive on an annual wage of $1,080. And she knew she was locked permanently into this status.Whether Parks consciously identified with Watson as a domestic remains unclear. But in the actual photographs, we can see his identification with and respect for her as a laborer in unexpected ways. Rather than remove all evidence of himself in the portraits of Watson cleaning the offices, he subtly included traces of his photography equipment. Parks established a reciprocity between their lives and their labor. He knew it was not a one-to-one correlation. “By comparison,” he reflected after learning of Watson’s hardships, “my experiences were akin to a peaceful afternoon.” The images were trenchant critiques of the limited economic opportunities available to Black people, particularly Black women in Jim Crow America, while they also told Watson’s story with visual nuance and depth. Washington, DC. August 1942. Ella Watson cleaning after regular working hours. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, reading the Bible to her house-hold. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Stryker immediately understood the disruptive power of Government Charwoman. Balking after Parks showed it to him, he said, “Well, you’re catching on, but that picture could get us all fired.” Aware that southern members of Congress had already complained about the FSA’s publishing images of Black people impoverished in the segregated South, Stryker encouraged Parks to continue documenting Watson.The most dominant image of Black domestic workers in mainstream America at the time was that of a mammy, a Black woman who happily served at the whims of white employers. By 1941, the image had peaked: Hattie McDaniel won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role as Ruth “Mammy,” a formerly enslaved woman on the Tara plantation and house servant to Scarlett O’Hara in the pro-Confederate movie Gone With the Wind. Years later, when a friend criticized her for “playing so many servant parts, or ‘handkerchief heads’ as they came to be called,” McDaniel responded, “Hell, I’d rather play a maid than be one.”Although Parks was not alone in creating a counternarrative to racist stereotypes, his image remains one of the most enduring. Two years before Parks arrived in the capital, his literary hero Richard Wright sent his agent a manuscript titled Slave Market (later renamed Black Hope), about the plight of Black housemaids. Wright hoped the novel might “reveal in a symbolic manner the potentially strategic position, socially and politically, which women occupy in the world today.” But he never published the book, and another eight years would pass before Lutie Johnson, a domestic worker turned blues singer, would appear in print in Ann Petry’s social-realist novel The Street.Parks never saw Watson as just a symbol. Through sustained documentation of her life, the civil-rights aesthetic he pursued and perfected for the rest of his career took form. In that brief encounter with Watson, her friends, and her family, Parks realized his capacity to depict Black people in his art the way he knew them in the world: as multidimensional, multitudinous, and agents of social change.He achieved this, in part, through a swap. Parks later admitted to having Grant Wood’s American Gothic in mind when he placed Watson in a pose similar to that of both figures in Wood’s 1930 painting. Parks likely saw the painting—now one of the most recognizable of 20th-century American art—during a train layover in Chicago in 1937. Unlike the sharp social commentary of the FSA photographs, Wood’s painting was both bucolic and nostalgic. The obvious middle-classness harkened back to an age of prosperity and stability before the Great Depression. “What does matter is whether or not these faces are true to American life,” Wood wrote about his models in a 1941 letter, “and reveal something about it.”Recently, I went to see Wood’s American Gothic on a lark. I had seen the painting many times as one of the many tourists who flock to the American wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, looked at it from various angles, and debated its import as kitsch or haute culture. But this time, I had Parks and Watson in my head, and I found myself less interested in the farmer and his daughter (many people mistake the woman for a wife) and more invested in Parks’s transformation of a double portrait into a single one.In Parks’s version, Watson stood in for both figures. In Wood’s painting, the division of labor falls along traditional gender lines. The older man and the younger woman are outdoors, and the pitchfork is the main clue to their labor. The farmer uses it daily, making it a crucial part of his routine and work, as the painting suggests, in public. The young woman’s gaze suggests a dependency on him, and her kitchen garb indicates that she does not work alongside him but might take care of the home. By replacing those two figures with Watson, a Black cleaning woman, Parks troubled the notions of gender, race, and work. As Watson cleaned those stairwells and offices in the after-hours, the wartime bureaucracy of the FSA became a domestic space, and women’s labor was no longer unseen.I am drawn to those photographs that fully refuse Watson’s invisibility and revel in her interiority. Parks travels with her far beyond the office building and witnesses her different types of emotional, familial, and intergenerational labor: her preparing to go to and returning from work; her feeding and dressing her grandchildren, and combing their hair. Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson receives anointment from Reverend Clara Smith during the Flower bowl demonstration, a service held once a year at the St Martin’s Spiritual church. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Washington DC. August 1942. Mrs. Ella Watson, a government chairwoman, with three grandchildren and her adopted daughter. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) Interspersed are moments in which Watson created an alternative to the racism she experienced at work and a curative to her daily grind. As poignant as but less popular than her overt dissent in front of the American flag in the most famous photograph is her embrace of religious ritual and her exercising her right to rest. Tenderness is on display when Watson’s grandchild naps midafternoon or when we see her silhouette projected on the mirror behind her bedroom altar. Eyes closed, head down, Watson appears in a solo portrait again, but this time in prayer. Parks helps us see how, despite her economic poverty, surrounded by rows of neatly lined-up statues and candles, Watson made her home a sanctuary, a place where she, and maybe even he, for a time, could connect to something far better than the segregated country into which they both were born.“I was in my very late teens when I was first made aware of the images,” Ella Watson’s great-granddaughter Rosslyn Samuels told me in an interview. “And I didn’t grasp the magnitude of it until my later years, because, to me, she was just Grandma.” When she saw Parks’s photographs, she said, “I thought, Oh, someone took professional pictures of her. I regret not knowing about them when she was alive, because she and I shared a bedroom, and we talked about everything.” Knowing Watson only as a retiree meant that Samuels’s primary memories of her great-grandmother are more like the photographs Parks took outside the office, the large majority of moments he documented: Watson as a loving, pious, nurturing Black woman who seemed to delight in looking after those she loved.And here, Watson still inspires. “I get an overwhelming feeling when I look at Parks’s photographs of her now,” Samuels revealed. “It’s just like, ‘Wow.’ But … I’m not surprised, because she was always so big to us. She had that impact on a lot of people. We revered her. And it’s not like she commanded it; she just had a certain effect on people.”Fortunately, one of them was a 29-year-old photographer named Gordon Parks. (The Gordon Parks Foundation) This article has been excerpted from “’She Was Always So Big to Us’: Ella Watson as Style and Substance," an essay by Salamishah Tillet, that appears in Gordon Parks's new book American Gothic: Gordon Parks and Ella Watson.

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