theatlantic.com
-
How Far Will Republicans Go to Become Trump’s Vice President? “Loyalty is job one.”theatlantic.com
-
Trump’s Stop-and-Frisk Agenda Even as Donald Trump relies on unprecedented support from Black and Latino voters, he is embracing policies that would expose their communities to much greater police surveillance and enforcement. The policies that Trump is pledging to implement around crime and policing in a second presidential term would reverse the broad trend of police reform that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd, four years ago today.Trump has endorsed a suite of proposals that would provide cities with more funds to hire police officers; pressure officials in major cities to employ more aggressive policing tactics, such as “stop and frisk,” in high-crime neighborhoods; and strengthen legal protection for law-enforcement officers accused of misconduct.“I suspect that in many places, you would see policing that is much harsher, much more punitive, [and] not nearly as concerned about the racial disparities in the way that policing happens,” Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who led multiple federal investigations of racial bias in police departments around the country, told me. “All of those things that we have been working for years to dismantle will be built up again.”The cumulative effect of Trump’s proposals would be to push local police departments toward arresting more people. That dynamic would inevitably increase the number of Black and Latino people entangled in the criminal-justice system, after years of declines in the total number of arrests.The magnitude of Trump’s plans on policing and crime has drawn little attention in the presidential race so far. But on virtually every front, Trump proposes to use federal influence to reverse the efforts toward police reform that have gained ground over roughly the past decade, and especially since Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 spurred the largest nationwide protests since the 1960s. “We will give our police back their power and their respect,” Trump declared in his appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last weekend.[Juliette Kayyem: The government isn’t ready for the violence Trump might unleash]In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out a sweeping second-term agenda on crime and policing. He promised “a record investment” in federal funds to help cities hire and train more police. He said he would require local law-enforcement agencies receiving federal grants to implement an array of hard-line “proven policing measures” including “stop-and-frisk, strictly enforcing existing gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs,” and cooperating with federal immigration agencies “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”Trump has also pledged to launch federal civil-rights investigations against the reform-oriented progressive prosecutors (or “radical Marxist prosecutors,” in Trump’s terms) who have been elected in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, among other big cities. He has promised to pursue the death penalty for drug dealers and has repeatedly called on police to shoot shoplifters: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said in one speech.Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has indicated that he will dispatch the National Guard and other federal law-enforcement personnel “to restore law and order” in cities where “local law enforcement refuses to act.” Trump, in fact, has said on multiple occasions that one of his biggest regrets from his first term is that he deferred to city officials, who resisted his calls to deploy the National Guard or other federal law-enforcement forces onto their streets. Trump and Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, have also said they intend to dispatch the National Guard to major cities to participate in his planned mass-deportation campaign.Trump has not provided detail on his crime proposals; some experts say that makes it difficult to evaluate their potential impact. “Reading over the Trump plan, I would say it is a mix of the good, the bad, the puzzling, and the incoherent,” Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s crime lab, told me.Trump’s most frequent promise has been his pledge “to indemnify all police officers and law-enforcement officials,” as he put in his NRA speech, “to protect them from being destroyed by radical-left lunatics who are angry that they are taking strong action on crime.”Exactly how Trump, at the federal level, could provide more legal protection to police officers is unclear. Experts point out that police officers already are shielded by the doctrine of “qualified immunity” against litigation, which the Supreme Court has upheld in multiple cases. Even in cases where law-enforcement agencies admit to misconduct, the damages are virtually always paid by the city, not the individual police officer.In 2021, with President Joe Biden’s support, House Democrats did pass police-reform legislation, named the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that limited qualified immunity and would have made suing police for misconduct easier, but that bill died in the Senate. Some states and local governments have since moved to weaken qualified immunity as a defense in state courts. Trump appears to envision passing national legislation that codifies broad protection for police and preempts any state effort to retrench it.Trump could also face problems precisely defining the policing tactics he wants to require local officials to adopt as a condition for receiving federal law-enforcement grants. Trump, for instance, has repeatedly praised the stop-and-frisk program launched in New York City by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Under that program, the New York Police Department stopped large numbers of people—many of them young Black and Latino men—and claimed to be searching for drugs or guns. But eventually a federal district judge declared that the program violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as its guarantee of equal protection, and the city later abandoned the tactic.Lopez, now a professor at Georgetown University Law School, says that Trump can’t order other police departments to precisely replicate the aggressive stop-and-frisk practices from New York City that have been found unconstitutional. But, she says, tying federal aid to stop-and-frisk and the other hard-line policies Trump is promoting could nonetheless exert a powerful signaling effect on local law enforcement.“At the federal level, you can use your influence, your dollars, your training to encourage practices that are more or less alienating to communities,” she told me. Trump’s touting of stop-and-frisk, Lopez added, is “a signal that his administration is going to really promote some of the most aggressive, alienating practices that police departments have partaken in.”Reinforcing the funding message is the approach Trump has laid out for civil-rights oversight of policing. Trump’s Justice Department stopped nearly all federal investigations into allegations of bias in police enforcement: His administration launched only one investigation of a police department (a single unit in Springfield, Massachusetts), abandoned a consent decree that Barack Obama’s Justice Department had negotiated for reforms in Chicago, and ultimately effectively banned department lawyers from seeking further consent decrees with other localities.Now Trump is pledging to instead pursue federal civil-rights investigations against the reform prosecutors who are challenging local policing and charging practices. That shift in emphasis would likely provide another nudge for cities toward more intrusive enforcement approaches. The rollback “in federal oversight of policing” that Trump pursued in his first term, Lopez says, “will look like child’s play if Trump is reelected.”Public-safety analysts sympathetic to Trump’s vision say it represents a necessary course correction after the array of criminal-justice reforms that policy makers have advanced roughly since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, argues that, partly because of those reforms, policing has “become a much harder job to do.” Mangual agrees that Trump’s agenda could result in more arrests of minority young people, but says that would be an acceptable cost for improving safety in the low-income, heavily minority neighborhoods where crime is often most prevalent. “If you are talking about things like adding more police and having them be more proactive in the field, I think it is absolutely the case, especially in high-crime communities, what you are going to see is improvement on those measures,” he told me.[Russell Berman: The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump]But critics believe that Trump’s approach would reduce police accountability and increase incarceration rates without providing more public safety. The unifying idea in Trump’s proposals seems to be “that all we need for public safety is more enforcement and punishment,” says Daniela Gilbert, director of Redefining Public Safety at the Vera Institute for Justice, a liberal police-reform advocacy group. “If that was effective, we’d already have safer communities.”Ludwig agrees with Mangual that low-income minority neighborhoods would gain the most from a reduction in crime. But, like Gilbert, Ludwig says it’s not clear that the agenda Trump has laid out would achieve that goal. “He’s saying two things: more policing and more aggressive policing,” Ludwig told me. “I think the more policing [is] good, the more aggressive policing—not helpful.”Although some other criminologists disagree, Ludwig says the evidence is that hiring and training more police does lower crime, and that those benefits will be felt “disproportionately in low-income communities of color.” But, Ludwig adds, the aspects of Trump’s agenda that are designed to pressure cities to stop and arrest more people for nonviolent offenses or to participate in deportation efforts would likely prove counterproductive by heightening tension and reducing cooperation between police and minority communities.The backdrop for this policy debate is an extremely volatile political environment on crime.Polls consistently show that significantly more voters say they trust Trump than Biden to handle crime. Although Biden usually leads on that question among nonwhite voters, even a substantial minority of Blacks and Latinos typically say they trust Trump more to address the problem. Trump’s strength on those measures is one component of the overall racial inversion evident in polling so far about the 2024 race, with Biden largely holding his 2020 support among white voters but suffering substantial erosion to Trump among racial minorities.A crucial question for the election is whether Trump can maintain those inroads among nonwhite voters while offering such a racially polarizing agenda across a wide range of issues. Trump’s embrace of criminal-justice and policing policies that could disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities is a prime example of that dynamic.Biden, in a manner reminiscent of Bill Clinton during the 1990s, has tried to find a “third way” on crime between Trump and the most liberal reformers in his own party. Biden backed the sweeping police-reform bill that the Democratic-controlled House passed in 2021 and issued a 2022 executive order prescribing various reforms on federal law-enforcement agencies. But he has also touted the $15 billion he won in the 2021 COVID-recovery act to support local law-enforcement budgets, and he has continued to push for federal aid to help cities hire 100,000 more police officers.Biden’s Justice Department has released findings of civil-rights investigations into the police departments of Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed during a botched raid on her apartment, and is conducting investigations of nine other jurisdictions. But the department has not completed legal consent decrees with any local police departments, a stark contrast with the 14 that Obama reached over his two terms. Lopez, who led those efforts for Obama, praises the quality of the Biden investigations into Minneapolis and Louisville, but says the diminished quantity of agreements reflects Biden’s general sympathy for traditional approaches to policing. “I think there is much more ambivalence under the Biden administration about this work than there was under the Obama administration,” she told me.But, as on many issues, a huge gulf still separates Biden’s careful balancing act from Trump’s sweeping plans to unshackle and unleash police. Even if Trump could not implement all the proposals he has unveiled, his overall agenda would likely encourage police to adopt more punitive tactics. “I want to think that we are all being alarmist about all this,” Lopez told me, “but I fear that it’s actually quite realistic that he is going to go much further than he did last time.”For good or ill, the Trump effect on policing would likely be felt most acutely in the heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods of places such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas that may decide whether he wins a second term and the chance to reverse the past decade’s fitful advances toward rethinking policing and criminal justice.Illustration Sources: Angela Weiss / Getty; Brett Carlsen / Getty; David Ryder / Getty; James Devaney / Getty; Jim Vondruska / Getty; Kyle Grillot / Getty*theatlantic.com
-
Say Goodbye to Summer Oysters This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.There’s an old adage about oysters: During months whose names don’t contain the letter r—May, June, July, and August—it’s best to stay away.An oyster eaten outside these months should have a satisfying snap, like al dente pasta, says Shina Wysocki, the farm director at Chelsea Farms, in Washington State. That slightly firm texture is a sign that you’re eating a sexually immature oyster. But summer oysters—that is, oysters in their mating season—naturally get flabby, and their gonads swell with gametes. “It’s sperm and eggs,” says Gary Fleener, the senior scientist at Hog Island Oyster Co., in Marshall, California. “It coats your mouth like heavy cream does.” It is, shall we say, an eating experience that not everyone finds appetizing.For decades, however, oyster consumers have been able to ignore the conventional wisdom about oysters and r months. Regulations, refrigeration, and the rise of industrial-scale oyster farming now make it possible to eat oysters year-round. Even more crucially, in the late 1970s, scientists selectively bred a new kind of oyster, known as the triploid oyster, that’s sterile, faster growing, and less “spawny” than its naturally occurring counterparts. The emergence of triploids has untethered oyster consumption from the natural oyster life cycle, and consumer demand now peaks in the summer, when people want cold beer, chilled wine, and sea treats served on ice.[Read: The invention of the modern oyster]“Similar to how we use selective breeding in watermelon to produce seedless watermelon, you can do the same thing with oysters,” says Matthew George, the coastal-shellfish manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. In 2016, 50 percent of all Pacific oysters farmed on the West Coast of the United States were triploids. But recently, growers have noticed disproportionately higher triploid mortality rates.A recent study showing that triploid oysters may be more sensitive to extreme heat than their diploid progenitors has scientists and oyster farmers worrying about the future of these scrumptious shellfish—and questioning whether today’s hotter climate means that our enjoyment of oysters should return to a more seasonally driven schedule.Originally, George says, scientists figured that sterile triploid oysters would be more resilient than their cousins with just two sets of chromosomes. Rather than exerting energy to produce gonads, he says, the oysters could spend their resources on survival. But over time, oyster farmers have noticed that triploid oysters don’t fare as well during heat waves—or in general. “Anyone at my farm would tell you that triploids seem to be a bit fussy,” Fleener says.In the lab, George and his team confirmed triploid oysters’ sensitivity. When exposed to heat stress, triploid Pacific oysters die at a rate 2.5 times that of the diploids.Plus, juvenile triploid oysters (known in the industry as “seed”) are more expensive than diploid seed—and many farmers are becoming less willing to gamble on such poor odds for survival.Wysocki, of Chelsea Farms, used to buy triploid seed but isn’t currently growing any. “I spent a lot of money on triploid seed to have them die,” she says. Similarly, about eight years ago, Washington-based Taylor Shellfish Farms was planting 70 percent triploids and 30 percent diploids. That ratio has now flipped. And in 2022, Washington’s Hama Hama Oyster Company was planting 24 percent triploids. That number is now down to 18 percent, says Adam James, the general manager of shellfish operations at the company: “We’ve kind of moved away from purchasing lots of triploids, because we were seeing greater mortalities.”With global temperatures on the rise, triploids are likely to suffer. What does this mean for an industry in which consumer demand is at its peak when regular diploid oysters are too sexually ripe for many people’s palate? Will consumers have to readapt to oysters’ natural seasonal variability? Or should farmers and scientists double down on developing more resilient triploid oysters?Five years ago, Taylor Shellfish Farms started working on the latter. The company began selectively breeding oysters in the hope of eventually developing triploid oysters that survive better in the ocean.Neil Thompson, an oyster geneticist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is also working to selectively breed more disease-resistant diploid Pacific oysters with the aim of then breeding triploid oysters that are less sensitive to environmental stressors. The trick is to identify specific heritable traits that correlate with survival and then select for those in order to strengthen the oyster’s climate adaptability.[Read: Oyster insomnia is real]In the meantime, West Coast oyster farmers can continue to meet summer demand by finding ways to diversify the origins of their oysters, such as by sourcing the shellfish from colder locations when temperatures rise. Of course, shipping oysters from afar emits planet-warming carbon dioxide, so oyster growers are also exploring other techniques, including suspending their developing oysters in deeper, cooler water to delay spawning.Then there’s the marketing angle. “Maybe we need to find the language to talk about a creamy oyster without using the word spawny or gonad,” James says.As far as consumer behavior goes, farmers and restaurant owners don’t want to deter anyone from enjoying oysters in the summer. Rather, they encourage people to also seek the shellfish during the seasonal peak—when the weather is cold, the oysters have a snap, and the complex flavors imbued by the local bays and inlets are worthy of a chef’s kiss.theatlantic.com
-
What Therapy Is For Exploring what the practice is capable of—and what it can’t actually solve—may help patients better understand what they’re seeking.theatlantic.com
-
The Many Faces of a Hit Man They did not break the mold when they made Glen Powell. That’s not to say the actor isn’t talented—after first really noticing him as a strapping baseball hunk in the filmmaker Richard Linklater’s Everybody Wants Some!!, I figured Hollywood would take quick notice of his charms. Since then, he’s vaulted to fame in movies such as Set It Up, Top Gun: Maverick, and Anyone but You. But he’s a familiar sort of star, the kind of big-screen hottie with a twinkling smile who can slot right into any old blockbuster. And Linklater uses that dazzling anonymity to perfection in Hit Man, a movie that’s well aware of what a looker Powell is, but equally cognizant of his chameleonic nature.Based on a Texas Monthly article about a real-life police contractor, Hit Man is an airy comedy (written by Linklater and Powell) that hones and deploys the lead actor’s on-screen image in ways I couldn’t believe. Powell plays Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor who moonlights with the New Orleans Police Department as a pretend contract killer. He meets with potential clients, then helps the cops capture them as the clients arrange for him to murder someone. The film and article point out that the profession of “hit man” is basically an invented one—this is not a job that anyone can be sure is real. But America’s movie-addled idea of one is all that Gary has to be.Linklater has worked in every imaginable genre over his long career, but whether he’s making futuristic sci-fi like A Scanner Darkly or a true-crime drama like Bernie, his storytelling always has a sweet sort of shagginess to it. This is true of Hit Man, particularly in its first act: Gary, although friendly and handsome, is a pretty bland guy who stumbles into his part-time police gig almost by happenstance, and then leans into it like he’s taking an intro improv course. He buys clothes, wigs, and fake mustaches and affects funny accents, greeting each potential client as a new criminal stereotype (a biker dude, a Russian mobster, a fussy sociopath).[Read: Before Sunrise, 20 years later]It's fun to watch Powell slip into costume after costume, essentially a long-running joke to the audience about his versatility. Although Hollywood has been quick to cast him as the confident romantic lead, Powell reveals Gary to be a person who gets perverse joy out of pretending to be someone else (and doing a good job of it). Linklater, too, is having fun with the image of America’s everyman, creating a comedic noir where a seemingly mild-mannered hero has a shifty streak. The work Gary’s doing is also a little icky: essentially tricking people into confessing their murderous desires on tape, rather than catching them in the act.Still, the people Gary is ensnaring largely present as criminal lowlifes until he runs into Maddy Masters (Adria Arjona), a woman seeking Gary’s “hit man” to take care of her abusive husband. As in any good noir, Gary immediately falls for this beautiful woman, and that soft spot threatens to be his entire undoing, drawing him into a tangled web of actual criminality too tasty to spoil further. The film’s spiral into romantic drama wouldn’t work without Powell and Arjona’s crackling chemistry. Arjona has pulled her weight in stale supporting roles in a few bad action movies (Morbius, Pacific Rim Uprising), but this is a stunning star turn. She matches Powell’s charm and raises the stakes of what had been a more frivolous crime comedy.That’s what Linklater can do better than anyone when he’s locked in, though: turn a low-key, humorous indie into something more profound just through his mastery of tone and his trust in his actors. He’s been on an odd run of late, making adult dramas, such as Last Flag Flying and Where’d You Go, Bernadette, that felt leaden in their storytelling. Hit Man is his best movie since Everybody Wants Some!!, a testament to the strength of his partnership with Powell; it’s also just a sexy, fun movie for grown-ups that believes in its story rather than empty spectacle. One of Hit Man’s climactic scenes got awed gasps out of my audience akin to those Powell had earned for his aerial derring-do in Top Gun; this is a rare romantic comedy to see with a roaring crowd.theatlantic.com
-
The Uncertain Future of the Yellow School Bus Amid driver shortages and a dwindling ridership, the role of the bus is changing.theatlantic.com
-
Google Is Playing a Dangerous Game With AI Search The search giant’s new tool is answering questions about cancer, heart attacks, and Ozempic.theatlantic.com
-
George Miller Is Taking On the Apocalypse (Again) When George Miller started dreaming up his first Mad Max movie, in the late 1970s, he had just a vague sense of the world it would be set in; he knew only that his independent debut feature would be action-packed and shot cheaply in the Australian countryside. The resulting film offers a recognizable vision of modern life with an eerie air of societal collapse, as the patrolman Max Rockatansky (played by Mel Gibson) does battle with raging motorcycle gangs on wide, empty roads. Two sequels, Mad Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), upped the apocalyptic intensity but cared little for continuity: Each new, and essentially unplanned, entry throws Max into wild vehicular action with ever more bizarre desert supervillains.Miller helped fund Mad Max by working as an emergency medical doctor, and he was partly inspired by the chaos he witnessed on the job, as well as by accidents he saw growing up. The movie became the hit that defined his career. Although he’s worked on many other acclaimed films, such as The Witches of Eastwick, the Babe and Happy Feet films, and, recently, Three Thousand Years of Longing, Mad Max has always been his most important project. Now, 45 years after the original came out, he is releasing his fifth film in that cinematic universe: Furiosa, a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, his 2015 masterpiece. Fury Road restarted the series with a new lead actor, Tom Hardy, and teamed him up with a truck-driving road warrior named Furiosa, played by Charlize Theron. Furiosa builds out the carefully designed dystopia of its predecessor to explain the origins of its title character, now played by Anya Taylor-Joy.[Read: What’s really epic about Furiosa]To Miller, the continued existence of this franchise is something of a surprise. “I honestly never thought, after the first Mad Max, that I’d make another film. It was so tough,” Miller told me in an interview. “I was just lucky enough that it resonated with audiences, particularly internationally. I didn’t fool myself into thinking it was because I was particularly clever. It was because we had inadvertently tapped into some archetype, and I made it my business to understand what that was.”In the intervening years, Miller’s portrayal of a future built around cars, guns, and oil, where the surviving humans engage in caveman-level violence behind the wheels of souped-up jalopies, has felt only more trenchant. The Mad Max movies have always understood the terror of looming environmental collapse, but there was something uniquely prescient about Fury Road, which is set around a mountainous fortress called the Citadel, run by a chalk-faced mutant named Immortan Joe. Leading a gang of radioactive soldiers called the War Boys, Joe controls his populace by pumping from the ground what little H2O remains, while warning the Citadel’s teeming masses, “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water!”Fury Road’s horrifying depiction of a world bleached by climate change and peak oil, combined with its egomaniacal and ultra-patriarchal villains (Joe has a cadre of women in his dungeon whom he’s enslaved as “wives”), made it the perfect apocalyptic tale for the mid-2010s. “There’s a potential for the stories to be quite rich because they’re allegorical, in the same way that the American Western is basically allegorical,” Miller said. “It often would take about 10 years before a film is, to some degree or other, settled into the zeitgeist. That process is accelerating now, because information is flowing much more rapidly in all sorts of directions.”Indeed, much of Fury Road has settled into the language of the internet, be it the War Boys uttering their nonsensical prayers to Valhalla, or Max grumbling, “That’s bait.” Perhaps its most distinctive creation, though, is Theron’s Furiosa, a hard-charging Valkyrie with a robot arm, a shaved head covered in motor oil, and a steely gaze. She comes out of nowhere in the movie, engineering the rescue of Joe’s wives and getting Max mixed up in the chaos. When Miller and his Furiosa co-writer, Nico Lathouris, conceived of Fury Road, they sketched out an entire backstory for her, creating a prequel screenplay that they considered filming simultaneously or perhaps turning into an animated work. Anya Taylor-Joy as Furiosa (Warner Bros. Pictures) “Fury Road is [happening] almost in real time,” Miller told me. “All the exposition, all the backstory has to be on the run. In order to tell that, we had to know everything about everything—not only all the characters, the dynamics of the characters, about the world, but every prop, every gesture, every utterance had to be basically defined in some way.” The troubled, super-intense process of making Fury Road delayed any plans at a filmed prequel, however, animated or not. “We needed the story of Furiosa to tell the story of Fury Road, and we end up all these years later making it,” Miller said, adding that he was drawn back to the project because of how different it would be, in terms of pacing and rhythm.Furiosa, though still full of action, is a sprawling, picaresque saga set over 15 years, a departure from the intense burst of adrenaline that is Fury Road, which takes place over a few days. The new film follows Furiosa (played as a girl by Alyla Browne and as an adult by Taylor-Joy) as she’s kidnapped from her verdant homeland by a biker warlord named Dementus (Chris Hemsworth), who then begins a pitched, decade-long series of battles with Immortan Joe for control of the expansive territory known as the Wasteland. The film follows Furiosa as she bounces from Dementus to Joe, working alongside the War Boys and eventually coming under the wing of a soldier named Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke), who teaches her the way of the road warrior as she seeks vengeance against her kidnappers.Whereas Fury Road throws the audience into action and never lets up, Furiosa takes its time and soaks in the details of Miller’s world. And where Fury Road is basically a jailbreak movie, Furiosa is a meditation on the limits of revenge—and it isn’t afraid to frustrate the viewer. “People are saying, I think in a good way, that it’s different from Fury Road. And that’s what you try for,” said Miller, who is used to making sequels that upend people’s expectations, such as the anarchically dark Babe: Pig in the City and the lovingly bizarre Happy Feet Two, which features Brad Pitt and Matt Damon as a pair of krill searching for the meaning of existence. “A story always needs something fresh so there’s no stasis in that evolution. And yet, it has to be familiar,” Miller said. Damien Maloney for The Atlantic Much like Theron’s performance, Taylor-Joy’s is largely silent. Furiosa speaks some 30 lines of dialogue over the course of the film but communicates waves of emotion with a glare. For Miller, the most interesting characters in the history of cinema tend to be the laconic ones. “Furiosa says very few words because it’s necessary,” he told me. “She becomes a creature of action rather than words, which is basically the only thing that really means anything in the Wasteland.”Furiosa’s penchant for silence also defines her perfectly opposite the self-important villain duo of Immortan Joe and Dementus. When designing Joe, Miller went as medieval as he could, putting him in the tallest tower and turning him into a godlike figure for those around him. “He basically operates in the way that many had through history, pre-20th-century technology; most of the demagogues used gravity as their competitive advantage,” Miller said. “Dementus, however, is a completely different animal. His competitive advantage is mobility, and, like all those characters through history, from the Romans to Genghis Khan to Hannibal, he’s marauding across the land.”Whereas Joe gives brief, strongman speeches from high up in his Citadel, Dementus is a hyper-verbose, clownish creature, blessed with Hemsworth’s mighty physique but relying “much more on his charisma, which is aided by an unpredictability,” Miller said. “We don’t know which way he’s going to go. He’s always intriguing to watch, dangerous, and he uses humor. He’s a trickster, which is [another] common character in stories.” The quiet Furiosa, then, seems all the more heroic in comparison, saying nothing and seething as Dementus tries to justify his wickedness in monologue after monologue.“What I’ve learned from animation and filmmaking and trying to understand the rhythms of cutting is that … humans are reading faces,” Miller said. He described cinema studies in which researchers track viewers’ attention to determine which part of the screen they’re focusing on during a movie—“almost inevitably, they’re looking at the eyes.” Furiosa has a complex view of the world its hero is navigating, but it has a stark, simple take on how to know whom to trust: just stare into their eyes. “It’s prehuman,” Miller told me. “It’s something that we need for our survival and understanding.” That’s what makes Furiosa his perfect screen hero: She’s the star of a modern blockbuster but sprung from the earliest, sparest days of cinematic language, conveying everything she needs to with a look.theatlantic.com
-
A Different Kind of Female Protagonist This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.This week, we published two essays about new books featuring unusual, surprising female protagonists. In her review of Swimming in Paris, a collection of three pieces of memoir by the French author Colombe Schneck, Katie Roiphe observes that Schneck’s writing is “sinewy, tough, sharp”; that it “rejects the narrative of personal innocence that many writers are infatuated with,” instead turning her unsparing analysis on herself.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section: The Brooklyn sequel asks the most American of questions about immigration. A powerful indictment of the art world Read: Making fun of your friends is good for them (and you). Though Schneck’s work reckons with the “difficulty of women’s experience, the obstacles and inequities it entails,” writes Roiphe, “the narrator is not presented as a consummate victim.” She is a woman who suffers (and she suffers because she is a woman), but that’s not all she is. Not an ounce of self-pity is to be found in Schneck’s work; her strongest critiques are applied to herself, not society. She denounces her own snobbishness, her competitiveness, her jealousy. She isn’t afraid to portray herself in a less-than-positive light, to accept the consequences of her choices.In Exhibit, R. O. Kwon’s second novel, the protagonist, Jin, is a young Korean American photographer who, faced with her husband’s sudden, unwelcome desire to have a child, her inability to make art she’s proud of, and her desire to explore BDSM, begins a secret affair with a woman she meets at a party.That woman is Lidija, an injured former ballet dancer who introduces Jin to kink. As Hannah Giorgis writes, Kwon isn’t interested in justifying Jin’s behavior or in weighing the morality of her decision to act on her desires. The novel is more about the nature and complexity of that wanting. Jin is uncomfortable with her own wish to submit during sex, for instance, because of stereotypes that cast Asian women as subservient. But with Lidija, she can explore her inclinations. Kwon seems to be suggesting that absent a power difference, pain isn’t necessarily abuse.Kwon doesn’t excuse Jin’s cheating or provide any rationalization for her behavior. In the novel’s world, to live by “right” and “wrong” is a fool’s errand, beside the point. Giorgis describes Jin and Lidija’s relationship as “clarifying and sacrosanct even as it sows deceit.” Wrong, yes, but also, in some ways, good.Both Schneck and Kwon seem to be writing about the political realities that can shape the most intimate aspects of our lives. But there’s no sentimentality or even a sense of resentment of their position. For both these writers, women aren’t victims of their circumstances. They’re something much more interesting.A French Reproach to Our Big, Baggy American MemoirsBy Katie RoipheIn her slim books, the French writer Colombe Schneck stares honestly at her own life, without illusions or sentimentality.Read the full article. Photograph by Imai Hisae. Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya What Happens When Desire Fuels a LifeBy Hannah GiorgisR. O. Kwon’s new novel, Exhibit, takes an expansive view of the things that women are punished for wanting.What to ReadLone Women, by Victor LaValleExploration isn’t always about running toward something—at times, it’s about running away from something else. Lone Women uses the trappings of the American West, a complicated, enduring cultural symbol of a supposedly untouched frontier, to delve into the human tendency to try to escape the past. It follows Adelaide Henry, a Black woman who leaves her family's California farm in 1915 under violent circumstances and lugs a mysterious trunk to Montana, where the U.S. government is offering free land to those who homestead there. The trunk’s undisclosed, possibly supernatural contents disturb Adelaide, and seem directly related to what she’s trying to leave behind. Over the course of the book, we see her failed attempt to shut that part of her past away as she tries to build a life in the brutal landscape of the Great Plains, a place that can destroy anyone who’s unprepared or without friends—or be a refuge for those looking to build a new home with space for the love, and suffering, that comes with living. —Vanessa ArmstrongFrom our list: Six books that explore what’s out thereOut Next Weektheatlantic.com
-
How the Biggest Climate Legislation Ever Could Still Fail Clean-energy investment in America is off the charts—but it still isn’t translating into enough electricity that people can actually use.theatlantic.com
-
Publishers Striking AI Deals Are Making a Fatal Error In 2011, I sat at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and watched Rupert Murdoch announce the beginning of a “new digital renaissance” for news. The newspaper mogul was unveiling an iPad-inspired publication called The Daily. “The iPad demands that we completely reimagine our craft,” he said. The Daily shut down the following year, after burning through a reported $40 million. For as long as I have reported on internet companies, I have watched news leaders try to bend their businesses to the will of Apple, Google, Meta, and more. Chasing tech’s distribution and cash, news firms strike deals to try to ride out the next digital wave. They make concessions to platforms that attempt to take all of the audience (and trust) that great journalism attracts, without ever having to do the complicated and expensive work of the journalism itself. And it never, ever works as planned.Publishers like News Corp did it with Apple and the iPad, investing huge sums in flashy content that didn’t make them any money but helped Apple sell more hardware. They took payouts from Google to offer their journalism for free through search, only to find that it eroded their subscription businesses. They lined up to produce original video shows for Facebook and to reformat their articles to work well in its new app. Then the social-media company canceled the shows and the app. Many news organizations went out of business.The Wall Street Journal recently laid off staffers who were part of a Google-funded program to get journalists to post to YouTube channels when the funding for the program dried up. And still, just as the news business is entering a death spiral, these publishers are making all the same mistakes, and more, with AI.[Adrienne LaFrance: The Coming Humanist Renaissance]Publishers are deep in negotiations with tech firms such as OpenAI to sell their journalism as training for the companies’ models. It turns out that accurate, well-written news is one of the most valuable sources for these models, which have been hoovering up humans’ intellectual output without permission. These AI platforms need timely news and facts to get consumers to trust them. And now, facing the threat of lawsuits, they are pursuing business deals to absolve them of the theft. These deals amount to settling without litigation. The publishers willing to roll over this way aren’t just failing to defend their own intellectual property—they are also trading their own hard-earned credibility for a little cash from the companies that are simultaneously undervaluing them and building products quite clearly intended to replace them.Late last year Axel Springer, the European publisher who owns Politico and Business Insider, sealed a deal with OpenAI reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars over several years. OpenAI has been offering other publishers $1 million to $5 million a year to license their content. News Corp’s new five-year deal with OpenAI is reportedly valued at as much as $250 million in cash and OpenAI credits. Conversations are heating up. As its negotiations with OpenAI failed, The New York Times sued the firm—as did Alden Global Capital, which owns the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune. They were brave moves, although I worry that they are likely to end in deals too.That media companies would rush to do these deals after being so burned by their tech deals of the past is extraordinarily distressing. And these AI partnerships are far worse for publishers. Ten years ago, it was at least plausible to believe that tech companies would become serious about distributing news to consumers. They were building actual products such as Google News. Today’s AI chatbots are so early and make mistakes often. Just this week, Google’s AI suggested you should glue cheese to pizza crust to keep it from slipping off.OpenAI and others say they are interested in building new models for distributing and crediting news, and many news executives I respect believe them. But it’s hard to see how any AI product built by a tech company would create meaningful new distribution and revenue for news. These companies are using AI to disrupt internet search—to help users find a single answer faster than browsing a few links. So why would anyone want to read a bunch of news articles when an AI could give them the answer, maybe with a tiny footnote crediting the publisher that no user will ever click on?Companies act in their interest. But OpenAI isn’t even an ordinary business. It’s a nonprofit (with a for-profit arm) that wants to promote general artificial intelligence that benefits humanity—though can’t quite agree on what that means. Even if its executives were ardent believers in the importance of news, helping journalism wouldn’t be on their long-term priority list.[Ross Andersen: Does Sam Altman Know What He’s Creating?]That’s all before we talk about how to price the news. Ask six publishers how they should be paid by these tech companies, and they will spout off six different ideas. One common idea publishers describe is getting a slice of the tech companies’ revenue based on the percentage of the total training data their publications represent. That’s impossible to track, and there’s no way tech companies would agree to it. Even if they did agree to it, there would be no way to check their calculations—the data sets used for training are vast and inscrutable. And let’s remember that these AI companies are themselves struggling to find a consumer business model. How do you negotiate for a slice of something that doesn’t yet exist?The news industry finds itself in this dangerous spot, yet again, in part because it lacks a long-term focus and strategic patience. Once-family-owned outlets, such as The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, have been sold to interested billionaires. Others, like The Wall Street Journal, are beholden to the public markets and face coming generational change among their owners. Television journalism is at the whims of the largest media conglomerates, which are now looking to slice, dice, and sell off their empires at peak market value. Many large media companies are run by executives who want to live to see another quarter, not set up their companies for the next 50 years. At the same time, the industry’s lobbying power is eroding. A recent congressional hearing on the topic of AI and news was overshadowed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s meeting with House Speaker Mike Johnson. Tech companies clearly have far more clout than media companies.Things are about to get worse. Legacy and upstart media alike are bleeding money and talent by the week. More outlets are likely to shut down while others will end up in the hands of powerful individuals using them for their own agendas (see the former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s activist play for BuzzFeed).The long-term solutions are far from clear. But the answer to this moment is painfully obvious. Publishers should be patient and refrain from licensing away their content for relative pennies. They should protect the value of their work, and their archives. They should have the integrity to say no. It’s simply too early to get into bed with the companies that trained their models on professional content without permission and have no compelling case for how they will help build the news business.Instead of keeping their business-development departments busy, newsrooms should focus on what they do best: making great journalism and serving it up to their readers. Technology companies aren’t in the business of news. And they shouldn’t be. Publishers have to stop looking to them to rescue the news business. We must start saving ourselves.theatlantic.com
-
Making Fun of Your Friends Is Good for Them (And You) Professional comedy, which most of us consume in modest doses, is not how humor infuses our day-to-day lives. Nor are proper jokes, with feed lines and punch lines, the primary vehicle for laughter. Instead, top billing goes to the wisecracks we share with family and friends—those spontaneously funny, though often mocking, remarks that leaven our daily chatter. When my English-professor wife is forced to spend her morning drafting an email to colleagues instead of working on an essay for a journal, I console her, dryly, that she can always submit her email to the Journal of Administrative Memos. Our queer teen jokes with us about the “BLT” community—an affectionate riff on the ever-growing acronym. And when I’m forced to admit my day job as a philosopher who writes about knowing how to live, I try to puncture the pretension with a postscript: “It’s important to work on the things you’re not good at.” Like I said: not proper jokes, but they were funny at the time.David Shoemaker’s new book, Wisecracks, is not about comedians, or jokes. Instead, he aims to illuminate the ethics of “banter, teasing, mockery, prankery, taking the piss, leg-pulling, joshing, and quippery.” Shoemaker’s claim is bold: that morally questionable humor is not just ethically okay but positively good.A few high-profile cases have shown the extreme side of such humor, among them Dave Chappelle on trans people and Jimmy Carr on Roma and the Holocaust. But Shoemaker turns attention away from public controversy to ordinary life, lowering the rhetorical temperature. Many of us make fun of family and friends, their flaws and foibles, in ways that involve mockery or stereotyping—wisecracks we wouldn’t venture in public. Context matters, which makes it hard to offer examples, because the context that makes a wisecrack fine between close friends is very different from the context of an article in The Atlantic. I trust that, like me, you know firsthand the kinds of conversations Shoemaker has in mind. In giving them their due, he sheds new light on the ethics of these everyday interactions.Shoemaker spends a chapter each on deception, mockery, and stereotyping, arguing that there are moral reasons against all three but that those reasons are often outweighed by the arguments in favor.“Probably the most familiar type [of put-on] involves getting someone who cares about you to believe that you’ve failed at something when you’ve actually succeeded,” Shoemaker writes—as when I return glumly from my third driving test only to reveal, to laughing relief, that I’ve finally passed. According to Shoemaker, “Pranks and put-ons … require real deception, and that deception is of an immoral sort”—a characterization that strikes me as being a little strong. Whatever trickery is involved when I tell you that the word gullible has been taken out of the dictionary, I doubt it warrants the “blaming anger” Shoemaker explores. Nor is it obvious that friendly mockery causes “embarrassment or humiliation”—reactions it may instead defuse. But as it gets more edgy, wisecracking does mean moral risk, leaving open the potential that people may be genuinely deceived, or hurt, or disrespected.We need good reason to take such risks, because it’s not generally permissible to expose someone to lies or harm merely for one’s own pleasure. Struggling to see much upside for the victims of pranks in being pranked, Shoemaker comes down pretty hard: “Interpersonal pranks are the lowest form of humor not because they require deception (leg-pulling does that too), but because they often aim to cause intrinsically harmful psychological states.” One of his more extreme examples is the bucket of pig’s blood dumped on the head of the eponymous antihero in Stephen King’s Carrie.But many wisecracks fare better—including those that mock or stereotype. As Shoemaker contends, wisecracking can at times be a source of profound solidarity. When friends make fun of us for what would otherwise be embarrassing mistakes, failures, or foibles, they destigmatize them. When we mock a stereotype that others use for harm, we forge a connection that turns prejudice into subversive pleasure. Shoemaker’s most challenging prescription is a plea for us to joke with close friends about their disabilities, even if the disabilities are not ones we share. To refuse to do so is not just to signal that the disability is too harmful or too shameful for laughter, but to exclude someone from the community of humor: “It’s to discriminate against them in a crucial arena of interpersonal life solely in virtue of some arbitrary impairment or deviation from a physical or psychological ‘norm’ … It’s to deprive them of opportunities for engagement and solidarity and bonding that remain open to others. And that’s immoral.”This doesn’t mean it’s not a delicate enterprise, or that we can’t go wrong—but there’s a moral argument for mockery, in context. To return to professional comedy, which we initially set aside: I think of Jimmy Carr, performing at a cancer-hospice gig with other comics, noting with discomfort that his peers had been afraid to joke about death. Hastening to the mic for the last spot of the evening, Carr opened with “C’mon, we haven’t got much time … well, I have” and followed up by asking “Is anyone here from last year?” I believe him when he says that the tension in the room dissolved, for a moment, in laughter. The moral risk paid off.Humor offers more than just solidarity. It helps us cope with “the vicissitudes, difficulties, and absurdities of life” by changing our emotional relationship with them, Shoemaker writes. This is perhaps its deepest value and the one that I most cherish. It’s also the most mysterious.Shoemaker connects the consoling power of humor with a conception of absurdity proposed by the philosopher Thomas Nagel. Immersed in life, we believe that our work, our interests, our politics, and the people we care about really matter. But, according to Nagel, when we step back and reflect from a cosmic perspective, we find our knowledge of their value fragile or unfounded. We cannot prove they matter at all; life seems absurd. “Nagel thinks this absurdity isn’t some great tragedy,” Shoemaker writes, seemingly deadpan, “to be addressed only by suicide or Buddhism.” Instead, the recognition that (maybe) nothing matters comes as comic relief: “From the point of view of the universe, none of our stakes could be lower, which is what makes humans at the same time so vicious and yet so hilarious.”[Read: The dark art of comedy in Ukraine]There’s something in this thought, but it feels like a rim shot to me. The joke does not quite land. What humor helps us confront, I think, is not the insignificance of our existence but the problem of human suffering. Shoemaker quotes Mark Twain: “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.” He goes on to describe how first responders use humor to cope with trauma: “They distract and detach.” To join them, he writes, “we may need to take off our ‘emotional empathy lenses,’ and put on our ‘psychopath lenses’”—laughing at pain with “what Henri Bergson called ‘the momentary anaesthesia of the heart.’”Such disengagement may be functional at times, but I don’t think it’s the only way that humor helps us cope with hardship. It doesn’t fit all of Shoemaker’s own examples. At one point, he writes about comedy revues performed by and for rape survivors: “As one person in the audience described the show, ‘I found it 100 per cent more funny than being raped.’” The point is surely not diversion or emotional numbing. It’s solidarity—and maybe something more.When I think about the value of dark humor, I don’t think of distraction or detachment, or the possibility that nothing really matters, but of the alchemy by which the worst things we go through can be transmuted into laughter and therefore, momentarily, overcome. How can we take pleasure in what is terrible without cruelty or illusion, without pretending that it wasn’t so bad after all or that everything works out for the best? Intellectually, this puzzle may be insoluble. Emotionally, we seem to solve it, sometimes, when we joke about the unacceptable, turning the lead of suffering into the gold, or the fool’s gold, of humor.theatlantic.com
-
The Promise and Perils of Over-the-Counter Birth Control Perhaps you’ve noticed something new at your local market. Opill, the first oral contraceptive approved by the FDA for over-the-counter use, began shipping to U.S. stores in March. It has no age restrictions and does not require a physician’s sign-off; you can now buy a three-month supply at Walmart or Target the same way you might pick up Tylenol or tampons or a six-pack of seltzer.This is, without a doubt, a momentous development in the realm of reproductive health. In the post-Dobbs environment, in which access to abortion care has been severely restricted across the United States, easier access to contraceptives is significant. Yet Opill also debuts as more and more women, in public forums and in their physicians’ offices, are raising concerns about the effects of hormonal birth control on their physical and mental well-being—and are pushing back against the idea that pharmaceuticals are their best options for trying to prevent pregnancy.For the past few years, the “Why women are going off the pill” essay has become a staple of lifestyle journalism. A search for birth control on TikTok yields thousands of videos, many taking a negative stance on hormonal methods. Side effects are a common complaint: mood changes, headaches, irregular bleeding, lower libido—or, in some instances, more dangerous complications, such as blood clots. Many of the critiques note that women’s concerns have a history of being overlooked or dismissed by the medical establishment, and that women are still waiting for an improvement on the birth-control status quo.[Read: The Coming Birth-Control Revolution]In many spaces, this upsurge in discussion has been treated not with curiosity, but with contempt. Those airing dissatisfaction, or simply describing potential side effects, have been called antifeminist or accused of threatening other women’s birth-control access. Commentary critical of the pill has been dismissed as misinformation by mainstream news outlets—not always unfairly, as much of the material on social media can’t exactly be called reliable. (“Wellness” figures hawking fertility-awareness “coaching” abound, as do right-wing influencers with barely concealed agendas.)But at the same time, many people online are recounting real stories of real symptoms, and expressing legitimate qualms about the options they’ve been given. Their distrust is not unfounded. Kate Clancy, a biological anthropologist and professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the author of Period: The Real Story of Menstruation, told me that women “are very often subject to medical betrayal—to having really awful experiences in a medical context.” Clancy said she was “glad there’s improved access.” But if you already harbor mistrust, “if you already have reasons to say, ‘Wow, these pharmaceuticals were not really made for me,’ then over time I understand why people arrive at a place where they are dissatisfied with current options.”This is where the tenor and content of the discourse can be vexing: The public takedowns of skeptical women risk silencing the important conversations people ought to be able to have in service of meeting their health-care needs. If women’s overall betterment is the goal, then narrowly prioritizing access—celebrating a development such as Opill while shouting down the women simply trying to talk about their experiences—is counterproductive. To address reproductive health in full, taking into account questions about rights, responsibilities, and the physical and social ramifications of pharmaceutical solutions, requires a wider lens.A few years ago, I was prescribed an oral contraceptive after a conversation with my doctor that could most generously be described as extremely brief. In the month I took the pill, I was overtaken by a debilitating brain fog that felt like a loss of self. I was irritable, snappish. I made my living as a professional columnist, yet suddenly I felt bad at writing—not in the sense of the usual scribbler’s procrastination, but in that I genuinely couldn’t generate ideas or string together words. I contemplated leaving my job. I cried a lot.I realized the cause of this identity shift only after my prescription ran out and my regular personality snapped back into place, seemingly overnight. I hadn’t turned into a failure. Hormonal birth control had derailed me.The pill is something of a catchall term, used to describe a variety of oral contraceptives that make the uterus inhospitable to pregnancy and often prevent ovulation. “Combination” pills, the most common type—and the kind I was prescribed—contain synthetic estrogen and progestin (a synthetic version of the hormone progesterone); “mini-pills,” of which Opill is one, contain progestin alone. Early versions of oral contraceptives had extremely high doses of both hormones, leading to sometimes severe side effects. Newer versions, with more carefully calibrated doses, have lessened, though not eliminated, those risks.Today, oral contraceptives are the second-most popular birth-control method for women in the United States, after permanent sterilization. Fourteen percent of girls and women ages 15 to 49 use them, according to a federal survey from 2017 to 2019, the latest data available; nearly one in five American girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are on the pill. Over the decades, several studies have found that many people who start taking the pill will eventually go off it because the side effects are so intolerable. Concerns about side effects are also frequently named as a reason women resist taking their “preferred contraceptive method” in the first place.It is not a stretch to imagine that young women taking an over-the-counter pill, unmonitored, could be left dealing with symptoms they might not be prepared for—without the recourse or the wherewithal to ask questions, or without the knowledge that what they’re experiencing is worthy of concern. Sarah E. Hill, a psychology professor at Texas Christian University and the author of This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: How the Pill Changes Everything, told me she’s in favor of removing barriers to access and supports Opill coming to market. But “I worry about it,” she said. “For everybody, but I worry about it most intensely for adolescents, whose brains are still developing.” Recent studies have found evidence of an increased risk of depression in some of the youngest users of hormonal birth control, and Hill said it troubles her to think about “young women who are most vulnerable to getting these kinds of side effects going on this medication and not being watched.”Nearly all medications come with potential negative side effects, and we still use them as tools. You can get liver damage from taking too much Tylenol, but in the right amounts, the drug can lower a worrying fever. And in the case of birth control, of course, any adverse effects must be weighed against the life-changing alternative: becoming pregnant, one of the riskiest undertakings many women will ever experience. Forty-six percent of pregnancies in the U.S. are unintended, one of the highest rates among wealthy nations, and the rate tends to be highest among low-income populations and younger women. Those are the same populations most likely to take advantage of a pill that has no age restrictions and does not require a visit with a health-care provider for a prescription and subsequent renewals.My own disturbing experience was, I know, not a universal one (though there is at least one high-quality study, of more than 1 million Danish women and girls, suggesting a linkage between hormonal birth control—especially progestin-only formulations—and higher rates of depression). And some people decide that even significant side effects are worth it when they desperately want to prevent pregnancy and hormonal birth control is the only, or the most readily accessible, option. Here is where Opill could be transformative—imagine a woman being pressured into pregnancy who can now buy birth control without alerting her partner, or a working mother who doesn’t have the time or resources to meet with a prescribing doctor but can walk to the nearest CVS.But I do wonder: If I had started taking hormonal birth control unsupervised, as a teen or a young adult, would I have spent my entire adulthood believing my personality to be different than it was? What would that have meant for me—and the trajectory of my life?It would be an understatement to say that women have put up with a lot in the name of reproductive health, including many discomforts and inconveniences that men have refused to endure, and that the conventions of medical research have allowed them to avoid. This is not to say that efforts have not been made to get men to do their part.Andrea Tone, a medical historian and professor at McGill University, told me that in the 1960s and early ’70s, “activists clamored for a contraceptive pill for men so that they, too, could share its responsibilities and risks.” Clinical trials for male hormonal birth control began as early as the 1970s. But a 2016 study noted that a trial for a hormonal injection was canceled after men reported side effects, including acne and depression—never mind that for decades, women have endured these afflictions and worse.[Read: New Male Contraceptives Could Be Infuriatingly Pain-Free and Easy]In a recent Atlantic article, my colleague Katherine J. Wu detailed current research and potential innovations in male-managed birth control, noting that although the list of contraceptive options available to women has lengthened since the introduction of the pill 64 years ago, most of the changes have been incremental, and women are still left to deal with a wide variety of side effects and inconveniences. In contrast, the medical system seems to bend over backward to ensure male users are comfortable: Experts have said they doubt that the side effects typical of the female contraceptives on the market would be deemed acceptable by evaluators of the clinical trials of male birth-control methods.Easier access to the pill eliminates real barriers. But in a medical industry that has long centered male comfort when it comes to reproductive health, an undue burden will always be placed on the people capable of becoming pregnant. As Tone put it, “Making pill-based hormonal contraception available OTC normalizes birth control as a female responsibility and, possibly, even an expectation.”That expectation may very well continue to serve as an excuse for overprescribing, for overlooking women’s concerns, and for failing to hold accountable a health-care system that has historically not served women well. Ease of access is “a really good thing,” Clancy, the University of Illinois professor, told me. “But there are things in addition to contraception we need to be doing to improve the lives of people who can get pregnant, like broader social infrastructure to improve their care.” Instead, she said, “we just choose to kick the can down to the microsolution and make it about individuals making decisions.”This is where the knee-jerk pushback to discussion of hormonal birth control’s potential downsides becomes harmful. To support individuals, we need more conversation, not less. It should be possible to celebrate increased access to birth control and to validate women’s negative experiences. It should be possible to praise Opill and to push back against the unfair assumption that women must bear the material and physical costs of contraception.In a 2023 survey of people assigned female at birth, conducted by the reproductive-justice nonprofit Power to Decide, almost a quarter of respondents ages 15 to 19 said that they lacked sufficient information to decide which birth-control method was right for them—a gap that speaks to a larger problem with the American approach to reproductive health. In an ideal world, the health-care providers I spoke with told me, doctors would spend more time with patients, health literacy would be higher, and reproductive responsibility would be shared between women and men. To create such a world would require not only a cultural shift but also a remaking of the American way of providing care—a not-impossible task, but a much heavier lift than selling a pill. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
-
Inside the Decision to Kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani Any assessment of the Middle East’s future must contend with an unpleasant fact: Iran remains committed to objectives that threaten both the region and U.S. interests. And those objectives are coming within reach as the country’s ballistic-missile arsenal and air-defense systems grow, and its drone technology improves.All of this was on display last month, when Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel. No lives were lost—the result of not only Israel’s capable defenses but also the contributions of U.S. and allied forces. The attack showed that America’s continued presence in the region is crucial to dissuade further aggression. But our current policy isn’t responsive to this reality. U.S. military capabilities in the Middle East have steadily declined, emboldening Iran, whose leverage strengthens as international support for Israel wanes. Moreover, America’s clear desire to draw down in the region has undermined our relationships with allies.Recent history demonstrates that a strong U.S. posture in the Middle East deters Iran. As the leader of U.S. Central Command, I had direct operational responsibility for the strike that killed Qassem Soleimani, the ruthless general responsible for the deaths of hundreds of U.S. service members. Iran had begun to doubt America’s will, which the strike on Soleimani then proved. The attack, in early 2020, forced Iran’s leaders to recalculate their months-long escalation against U.S. forces. Ultimately, I believe, it saved many lives.[Read: Is Iran a country or a cause?]The situation in Iran has changed, but the Soleimani strike offers a lesson that is going unheeded. Iran may seem unpredictable at times, but it respects American strength and responds to deterrence. When we withdraw, Iran advances. When we assert ourselves—having weighed the risks and prepared for all possibilities—Iran retreats. Soleimani’s life and death are a testament to this rule, which should guide our future policy in the Middle East.Soleimani is a central character in the modern history of U.S.-Iran relations. Over 30 years, he became the face of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), a distinctly independent branch of the armed forces tasked with ensuring the integrity of the Islamic Republic. Soleimani joined the IRGC in 1979, one year before Saddam Hussein invaded Iran. In the ensuing war, Soleimani developed a reputation as fearless and controlling, rising to the rank of division commander while still in his 20s. He emerged from the war with a bitter disdain for America, whose aid to Iraq he blamed for his country’s defeat. This article has been adapted from McKenzie’s new book. In 1997 or 1998, Soleimani became the commander of the Quds Force, an elite group within the IRGC that focuses on unconventional operations beyond Iran’s borders. Soleimani was indispensable in its development, relying on his charisma and fluent Arabic to expand Iran’s influence in the region. As commander, Soleimani had a direct line to Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, becoming like a son to him. He was promoted to major general in 2011 and by 2014 was a hero in Iran, having been the subject of an extensive New Yorker essay. I often heard a story—perhaps apocryphal—about a senior official in the Obama administration plaintively asking an intel briefer, “Can’t you find a picture of him where he doesn’t look like George Clooney?”As Soleimani’s fame grew, so did his ego. He became dictatorial, acting across the region often without consulting other Iranian intelligence entities, the conventional military, or even the larger IRGC. He shrewdly supported the return of American forces to Iraq, prompting the U.S. to do the heavy lifting of defeating the Islamic State. Then he drove us out of Iraq, killing U.S. and coalition service members, as well as innocent Iraqis and Syrians, with staggering efficiency. In his mind, he was untouchable: Asked about this in 2019, he replied, “What are they going to do, kill me?”When I first joined Centcom as a young general, I watched the Obama administration—and the Bush administration before that—fail to counter the dynamism and leadership that Soleimani brought to the fight. I also watched the Israelis try their hand against him with no luck. So when I took over as commander in March 2019, one of the very first things I did was inquire if we had a plan to strike him, should the president ask us to do so. The answer was unsatisfying.I directed Centcom’s joint special operations task force (JSOTF) commander to develop solutions. Other organizations were interested in Soleimani as well—including the CIA and regional partners—and we saw evidence that some of them had lobbied the White House to act against him. Several schemes were debated and set aside, either because they weren’t operationally feasible or because the political cost seemed too great. But they eventually grew into suitable options if the White House directed us to act.Beginning two months into my tenure as commander, and continuing through mid-December 2019, American bases in Iraq were struck 19 times by mortar and rocket fire. Soleimani was clearly orchestrating the attacks, principally through his networks within Kataib Hezbollah, a radical paramilitary group in Iraq. The series of strikes culminated on the evening of Friday, December 27, when one of our air bases was hit by some 30 rockets. Four U.S. service members and two Iraqi-federal-police members were injured, and a U.S. contractor was killed. Whereas the previous attacks had been intended to annoy or to warn, this attack—launched into a densely populated area of the base—was intended to create mass casualties. I knew we had to respond.Early the next morning, key members of my staff crowded into my home office, in Tampa, to review a range of options that we had been refining for months. This was all anticipatory; the authority to execute an attack could come only from President Donald Trump through Mark Esper, the secretary of defense, but we knew they would want us to present them with choices. We had a target in Yemen that we had been looking at for some time: a Quds Force commander with a long history of coordinating operations against U.S. and coalition forces. Other possible targets included an intelligence-collection ship crewed by the IRGC in the southern Red Sea—the Saviz—as well as air-defense and oil infrastructure in southern Iran.After all of the options were thoroughly debated, I told my staff that we would recommend targets only inside Iraq and Syria—where we were already conducting military operations—to avoid broadening the conflict. We felt that four “logistics targets” and three “personality targets” were associated with the strike. Two of the personalities were Kataib Hezbollah facilitators; the third was Soleimani. We would also forward but not recommend action on the Yemen, Red Sea, and southern-Iran options.By mid-morning, I had sent my recommendations to Secretary Esper through Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By late afternoon, we’d received approval to execute my preferred choice: striking a variety of logistics targets but not Soleimani or the facilitators.We would strike the next day, Sunday, after which Esper and Milley would brief Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Milley had suggested to me that Trump might not think the attacks were enough. I knew how those meetings worked—I’d been in a few of them—and I had complete confidence in Milley. He could hold his own in the rough-and-tumble of a presidential briefing, which often featured lots of opinions from lots of people, not all of whom knew the full risks involved in an operation or those that would emerge after it was completed. The author in a meeting at Centcom’s headquarters in Tampa in 2019 (Department of Defense) Because I knew the president remained very interested in Soleimani, on Saturday evening I put my final edits on a paper that outlined what could happen if we chose to strike him. There was no question that he was a valid target, and his loss would make Iranian decision making much harder. It would also be a strong indication of U.S. will, which had been absent in our dealings with Iran for many years. But I was extremely concerned about how Iran might respond. The strike could have a deterring effect, or it could trigger a massive retaliation. After careful consideration, I believed that they would respond but probably not with an act of war—a possibility that had worried me for many years. But they still had lots of alternatives to cause us pain. I sent the paper to the secretary, routed through the chairman. I did not recommend against striking Soleimani, but I described the risks it entailed.[Read: Qassem Soleimani haunted the Arab world]We flew the Kataib Hezbollah strikes on Sunday afternoon with good results. We struck five sites across Syria and Iraq all within about a four-minute span. In at least one location, we struck during a Kataib Hezbollah staff meeting, killing several key leaders. After the strike, as Esper and Milley flew to Mar-a-Lago, we provided them with damage assessments and any other details we could gather from the attacks. We put together a simple one-slide presentation that Milley used to brief the president.The chairman called that evening with a report on the briefing. As Milley had warned, Trump wasn’t satisfied; he instructed us to strike Soleimani if he went to Iraq. I was in my home office when Milley relayed this. My staffers were crammed around me, but I didn’t have the phone on speaker, so none of them could hear. I froze for a second or two, then asked him to repeat himself. I’d heard correctly.Milley also told me that the president had approved strikes on the Quds Force commander in Yemen and on the Saviz, Iran’s ship in the Red Sea. There was a sense in the meeting, he said, that these strikes would bring Iran to the bargaining table. I could tell that the chairman did not agree with this position—and neither did I. We felt the strikes might restore deterrence, but we didn’t see a path to broader negotiations.As we ended our call, I read back to the chairman what we’d been told to do—a product of a lifetime of receiving orders under stressful conditions. I called in the few members of my staff who weren’t already on hand for a 7 p.m. meeting. Everyone’s head snapped back just a little when I told them our instructions. We all knew what could come from these decisions, including the possibility that many of our friends on the other side of the world would have to go into the fire. We didn’t have time to dwell on it.I knew that we could execute quickly on the Saviz and the commander in Yemen, but Soleimani was a more challenging target. In late fall, we had developed options to strike him in both Syria and Iraq. We preferred Syria; a strike against him in Iraq would inflame the Shiite militant groups, possibly resulting in a strong military and political backlash. It now looked like those concerns, which I knew the chairman shared, would be overridden.The kind of targeting we were pursuing has three steps: finding, fixing, and finishing. Finding is a science, but fixing—translating all we know about the target’s movements and habits into a narrow window of time, space, and opportunity—is an art. Finishing, too, is an art: hitting a target while keeping collateral damage to an absolute minimum.The Soleimani fix and finish solutions had come a long way since I’d first inquired about them in the spring. We now knew that when Soleimani arrived in Iraq, he typically landed at Baghdad International Airport and was quickly driven away. Thankfully traffic was often light on the airport’s access road, which generations of soldiers, airmen, and Marines knew as “Route Irish,” its military designation during the Iraq War. Quite a few U.S. and coalition service members had died on it thanks to Soleimani and his henchmen. The fix part of the equation grew complicated when Soleimani got off Route Irish and entered the crowded streets of Baghdad.Striking Soleimani in the moments after he deplaned would also likely minimize collateral damage. We would use MQ-9 uncrewed aircraft armed with Hellfire missiles to attack his vehicle and that of his security escort. As always, there were significant constraints—the MQ-9s couldn’t stay above the airport for too long, so we had to know roughly when he would arrive. Our preference was to execute at night, with no cloud cover, but to some extent we were at the mercy of Soleimani’s schedule.We had information suggesting that he would fly from Tehran to Baghdad on Tuesday, December 31. After much discussion, we decided to strike Soleimani first and then, within minutes, the commander in Yemen, so that he couldn’t be warned. We decided to save the Saviz for later; I wasn’t eager to sink it (and fortunately, we wouldn’t have to).Meanwhile, protests began to develop at our embassy in Baghdad in response to the Kataib Hezbollah strikes. The images were disturbing and seemed to harden the desire in Washington to strike Soleimani. The specter of a Benghazi-like episode underlined everything we did. We ordered in Marines for added security and put AH-64 gunships overhead in a show of force. I grew more worried about what could happen after we hit Soleimani. Would it spur the crowd to try to overrun the embassy? What would our relationship with the Iraqi government look like in the aftermath of an attack?[Read: Iran is not a ‘normal’ country]I sensed that the National Security Council—which includes the secretaries of state and defense, and the national security adviser—was operating under the view that Iran would not retaliate against the United States. Even Milley told me, “The Shia militant groups will go apeshit, but I don’t think Iran will do anything directly against us.” I disagreed. To his great credit, the chairman understood my arguments and made sure we were prepared if it did. The author in Afghanistan in August 2021 (1st Lt. Mark Andries / U.S. Marine Corps) I went into Centcom headquarters early on December 31, the day we hoped to strike. The morning wore on while we waited for signs of Soleimani’s movement. Two huge monitors hung on the far wall. One showed a rotating series of black-and-white images from the MQ-9s. The other showed the hundreds of planes, including civilian airliners, that were crossing Iraq and Iran.Soleimani finally left home and boarded a plane in Tehran, though we weren’t sure if the flight was chartered or commercial. The jet took off at about 9:45 a.m. ET for a two-hour flight to Baghdad. We were ready for him: Our aircraft were overhead and in good positions. When his plane approached Baghdad, however, it didn’t descend. I was on a conference call with Milley and Secretary Esper as we watched it pass the city at 30,000 feet.Someone from the Pentagon asked me, “Can you shoot this fucker down?” Without deciding to execute the request, I called my air-component commander in Qatar. “If I give you an order to shoot this aircraft down, can you make it work?” The Air Force responded quickly, and we moved two fighters into a trail position behind the jet. We now had an option in hand to finish the mission if we were told to do so. We worked feverishly to determine if the flight was chartered or commercial.It soon became apparent that the plane was headed to Damascus. We also learned that the jet was a much-delayed civilian flight, meaning at least 50 innocent people were probably on board. I immediately advised Milley that we should not shoot. Not even Soleimani was worth that loss of life. He and I quickly agreed that we would not engage. Our fighters rolled off, and the jet began its descent into Damascus. We also pulled back our aircraft from the mission in Yemen. We all took a deep breath and reconsidered our options. “Guidance from the president remains,” I told the staff and commanders at 10:48 a.m. “We’re going to take a shot when we have a shot.”There were indications that Soleimani would travel from Damascus back to Baghdad in the next 36 hours. We still had another opportunity.New Year’s Day came. I had an obligation in Tampa to deliver the game ball for the Outback Bowl. My security and communications teams came with me. The day was nearly cloudless; I hoped it would be in Baghdad too. The game went well—if you were cheering for Minnesota. We were among the Auburn faithful, so it was a long afternoon.Before halftime, I received a call from Esper. I spent most of the second half on the phone with him and Milley, crouching in the suite’s bathroom, talking on a secure handset as my communications assistant stood outside the door, holding a Wi-Fi hotspot in the air. I told them that our latest intelligence suggested that Soleimani would leave Damascus soon, as early as the next day, and fly to Baghdad. The call ended in time for me to watch the end of a very disappointing game. It was a restless night.The next day, I went to Centcom headquarters. By late afternoon, tension had begun to build. The flight we expected Soleimani to take was delayed an hour, and then another. I sat quietly at the head of the table and drank copious amounts of coffee. Everyone is looking at the commander during times like this; I knew that any unease on my part would be felt by all. I was confident that we were prepared, but many things were outside our control, and we would need to be ready to adapt. The countless hours that staff members and commanders had put into contingency planning were now ready to pay off. Time turns against you in these moments. It becomes compressed and precious. You need to rely on the work done before time becomes the most valuable commodity in the universe.Finally, movement! Soleimani was delivered to the airplane in Damascus, boarding from the tarmac. The jet backed out and taxied for takeoff. The flight, a regularly scheduled commercial jet, took off from Damascus at 3:30 p.m. ET. I called the chairman. He and the secretaries of defense and state would monitor the action from a secure conference room in the Pentagon. The aircraft soon appeared on our tracking systems, and I watched it crawl east. Remembering our disappointment of a few days before, I kept a close eye on the altitude. Thankfully the plane began descending over Baghdad, landing at 4:35 p.m., shortly before midnight local time.It was cloudy. Our MQ-9s flew low to maintain visibility, which meant they initially had to stay some distance away to avoid being heard or seen. We watched as stairs were rolled up to the front cabin door. At 4:40 p.m., we confirmed that it was Soleimani. My JSOTF commander called me and said, “Sir, things will now happen very quickly. If there’s any intent to stop it, we need to make that call now.” I had my orders, so I simply told him, “Take your shot when you have it.”We watched Soleimani get into a car and pull away alongside a security vehicle. They began to negotiate the warren of ramps, parking areas, and streets to get to Irish. It was now 4:42 p.m. I had long since passed the authority to strike to the JSOTF commander, and he had further passed it down to the team that would release the weapons. Hard experience had taught us that devolving this authority to the lowest possible level as early as possible allowed for those with the best knowledge of the situation to act quickly, without referring back to headquarters.The two vehicles picked up speed. Everyone’s eyes were glued to the big monitors. No one spoke. Then, suddenly, a great flash of white arced across the screen. Pieces of Soleimani’s car flew through the air. After a second or two, the security vehicle was struck. There was no cheering, no fist-bumping—just silence, as we watched the cars go up in flames. A minute later, we attacked again, dropping eight more weapons. The operation appeared to be a success, but we couldn’t yet confirm. The burning wreckage of the drone strike that killed Soleimani (Iraqi Prime Minister’s Press Office / NYT / Redux) We had another target to attack, so our attention shifted to Yemen, where we carried out a similar strike on an isolated house where we believed the Quds Force commander to be. We later determined that we’d missed him, but the timing of the two strikes—13 minutes apart—was a remarkable achievement.Soon it became clear that we had gotten Soleimani. I was home by about 9 p.m., when the first news reports started to appear. Only then did I have time to think about what had happened.The decision to strike Soleimani was made by Trump, who was getting input from his advisers that Iran would not retaliate, a view that no one at Centcom or in the intelligence community shared. That didn’t mean the strike was unwarranted; it meant we weren’t sanguine about the aftermath.[Eliot A. Cohen: Iran cannot be conciliated]In the end, I believe that the president made the right decision. Had Soleimani not been stopped, more U.S., coalition, and Iraqi lives would have been lost as the direct result of his leadership. I believe more attacks were likely to happen in the immediate future. Soleimani wasn’t going to undertake them himself, but they would inevitably follow his trip to Iraq. The risk of inaction was greater than the risk of action.Iran had doubted our ability to demonstrate such force, and for good reason—we had never done so over the course of at least two administrations. Now, for the first time in many years, Iran had seen the naked power of the United States. It had to recalculate. Small-scale attacks continued, particularly those that couldn’t be directly attributed to Iran. But operational guidance to both Iranian forces and their proxies had changed: Avoid major attacks on U.S. forces. This was a watershed moment in the U.S.-Iran relationship.Striking Soleimani showed Iran a kind of resolve that had long been absent from U.S. policy. This cycle played out again last month, when Iran attacked Israel: American engagement countered Iranian aggression.If we plan to remain in the Middle East, we must be prepared to show that same resolve. The risk of escalation is inevitable but manageable; it is the refusal to accept this risk that has hobbled our policy for so long. The lessons of the Soleimani strike are clear, and we shouldn’t forget them. The Iranians will respect our strength. They will take advantage of our weakness.This article has been adapted from Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr.’s new book, The Melting Point: High Command and War in the 21st Century.theatlantic.com
-
Photos of the Week: Victorian Picnic, Flamingo Flight, Shadow Puppets An airline for dogs in New York, horse racing in Baltimore, the Olympic torch relay in southwestern France, a Catholic pilgrimage in a Spanish village, the World Para Athletics Championships in Japan, a tornado’s path of destruction in Iowa, and much moreTo receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.theatlantic.com
-
The Unbearable Greatness of Djokovic If there was a moment—a single shot, in fact—when the chemical composition of men’s tennis changed, it came on September 10, 2011, in the semifinals of the U.S. Open, as Novak Djokovic faced Roger Federer. At the time, Djokovic had won just three Grand Slam tournaments, compared with Federer’s towering 16. Federer took a two-sets-to-love lead and appeared to be cruising to victory. But Djokovic—who had improved his fitness in recent years, taking up yoga and giving up gluten—won the next two sets, sending the match to a fifth and deciding set.The fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium stood strongly behind Federer. This annoyed Djokovic. At times, he grimaced at the fans and mocked them, bringing jeers. At 4–3 in the fifth set, Federer broke Djokovic’s serve to seize a 5–3 lead, providing him the opportunity to serve out the match. The crowd rose to its feet, cheering wildly. Federer then took a 40–15 lead, giving him two match points. Victory was a serve away.What happened next is revealing: Djokovic is sneering; he appears disgusted with the whole scene. Federer hits a hard serve out wide to Djokovic’s forehand. It’s a good serve. But Djokovic, powered by what appears to be pure disdain, smacks the ball as hard as he can—like he doesn’t even care, like he’s not even trying to win the point, an insolent whip of the racket—for a where-did-that-come-from? cross-court winner. The fans roar, and Djokovic eggs them on sarcastically as though to say, So now you’re cheering for me? Federer looks stunned. But he still has another match point in hand. The fans remain mostly behind him. He sets up to serve again. Djokovic is grinning and nodding his head, like some malevolent imp. This time Federer serves to Djokovic’s backhand and Djokovic returns the ball into the middle of the court, where Federer botches a forehand. The unforced error brings the game to deuce. After that, the players trade points for a bit, but Djokovic eventually wins the game, and then the next three, to win the match.[Read: Tennis explains everything]Afterward Federer, deflated and incredulous, seemed to feel that Djokovic had committed some kind of offense against tennis, dishonoring the sport. The Serb, he said, had given up: Facing double match point, Federer said, Djokovic didn’t look like someone “who believes much anymore in winning. To lose against someone like that, it’s very disappointing, because you feel like he was mentally out of it already. Just gets the lucky shot at the end, and off you go.” Do you really think Djokovic’s blistering return on the first match point was attributable to “luck,” a reporter asked, as opposed to “confidence”? “Confidence? Are you kidding me?” Federer said. “I mean, please. Some players grow up and play like that—being down 5–2 in the third, and they all just start slapping shots … For me, this is very hard to understand. How can you play a shot like that on match point?” It was a rare failure of grace for the gentlemanly Swiss.That single shot by Djokovic seemed to break something in Federer; he was different after that. Sure, he still won two more Australian Open championships and two more Wimbledon championships—an enviable career in itself for just about any other player. But Djokovic had lodged a grain of sand in the gears of Federer’s machinery, throwing it off just enough to make his winning seem less inevitable. Djokovic, for his part, went on to beat Rafael Nadal in the finals the next day, and from there just kept methodically adding to his collection of Grand Slam titles. Since that day 12 years ago, Djokovic has won 21 (and counting) additional Grand Slam titles to Nadal’s 14 and Federer’s four.Even when, as part of a surprising late-career resurgence, Federer made it back to the Wimbledon final against Djokovic, in 2019, those match points he’d held and lost in 2011 seemed to reverberate across the years, echoing in his head. They were certainly echoing in mine as I watched: Once again, Federer had two match points against Djokovic on his own serve in the fifth set—and once again Djokovic fought off the match points and won the championship, the first player since 1948 to come from down a match point to win the Wimbledon final.Ever since that back-from-the-dead comeback against Federer in 2011, Djokovic has been enshrouded in a ruthless, cold-blooded unkillability. Until you’ve driven a stake through his heart by winning match point, he keeps coming and coming and coming. He revels in playing possum, cavalierly frittering sets away early against weaker players in order to make the eventual comeback and execution all the more delicious.What is perhaps most intimidating about Djokovic is the steeliness of his nerve. The ice water in his veins gets chillier as the stakes get higher: The more important the point, the more likely he is to win it. The ATP keeps track of what it calls “pressure stats,” which measure performance on the highest-value, highest-stakes points (break points, tiebreakers, etc). Djokovic, unsurprisingly, has the highest ranking on the pressure-stats list among current players. But he also ranks highest all time by that metric, ahead of Pete Sampras, Nadal, and Federer. Before he lost a tiebreaker to Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon championship last summer, Djokovic had won a staggering 15 straight tiebreakers in major tournaments. When everything is on the line, he rarely falters. Which suggests that the ridiculous shot that broke Federer’s spirit in 2011 was not pure luck, but an early demonstration of his ability to absorb the crowd’s hostility and channel it into a kind of dark energy that elevates his game to a superhuman level.Inconveniently for partisans of Federer or Nadal, Djokovic’s case for being the best of the Big Three—and the greatest male player of all time, and one of the greatest athletes of all time, across all sports—grows ever stronger. Even though he lost in the semifinals of the Australian Open to Jannik Sinner in January, if he wins any of this year’s remaining Grand Slam tournaments—and oddsmakers currently have him as the favorite for the U.S. Open, and a close second-favorite at the French Open and Wimbledon—it will reach the point of irrefutability. And I’m having a hard time with that—because, like many other tennis fans, I can’t stand the guy.Some of Djokovic’s unlikability surely comes with the fearsome intensity needed to be a great champion: Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant and Larry Bird and Tom Brady and Muhammad Ali were ruthless toward anyone they were competing against (and sometimes alongside of). And there have been plenty of unlikable tennis players before. Jimmy Connors—who, if you believe Andre Agassi, was narcissistic and cantankerous—was beloved for his gritty playing style and for, at least in this country, his brash Americanness. Others, such as the Romanian Ilie Năstase (nicknamed “Nasty” for antics like using an unconventionally “spaghetti-strung” racket, throwing temper tantrums, participating in a near-riot in a stadium, and making sexist and racist comments) and John McEnroe (who was a petulant brat on the court before becoming a revered elder statesman of the sport), acquired a kind of dark charisma, and they were embraced as rakish antiheroes.But all of these players have relished their roles. Daniil Medvedev, the Russian currently ranked No. 5 in the world, also embraces his status as a villain, reveling in his obnoxiousness; this gives him a perverse charm. His comfort in his villainy, seasoned lightly with irony, endears him to fans. (Or at least to this fan.)Djokovic’s problem is that he manifestly hates being hated, hates that he doesn’t receive the love and respect that Nadal and Federer did, even as he surpasses their on-court achievements. When Djokovic started winning majors in the late 2000s, he seemed to expect that he would be embraced by fans the way Federer and Nadal were. And when he wasn’t, his resentment fueled his desire for adulation, which made him try harder to be liked, which only tended to alienate people, as he oscillated between attempts at ingratiating himself with the fans and outbursts of resentment when they didn’t respond to him as he wanted. “I just feel like he has a sick obsession with wanting to be liked,” Nick Kyrgios, the fearsomely talented but volatile Australian player, said of him in 2019. “I just feel he wants to be liked so much that I just can’t stand him.”Djokovic has mostly his own behavior to blame for his complex public image. He claims a mystical connection to wolves, based on an encounter he says he had with one as a little boy in Serbia. And there is indeed something lupine about Djokovic: the bared teeth, the feral snarling, the predatory ruthlessness, the bulging-eyed howls he emits after winning key points. Maybe he acquired these qualities as a survival mechanism during childhood. At age 11, he spent months sheltering from nightly bombings in Belgrade. During the day, he’d practice on what was left of bombed-out tennis courts. “We’d go to the site of the most recent attacks, figuring that if they bombed one place yesterday, they probably wouldn’t bomb it today,” he wrote in his 2013 book, Serve to Win. It’s the sort of triumph-in-the-face-of-adversity tale that tends to endear a player to the public. But the book’s subtitle—The 14-Day Gluten-Free Plan for Physical and Mental Excellence—bespeaks Djokovic’s more mercenary instincts (which, in fairness, may also be a product of those wartime years).[From the August 1903 issue: Lawn tennis]A few years ago, an enterprising tennis fan compiled a YouTube video called “89 Reasons Everyone Hates Novak Djokovic.” Before ATP Media blocked the video on copyright grounds, nearly half a million viewers were treated to 24 minutes of Djokovic smashing rackets, yelling at ball kids, yelling at fans, yelling at umpires, yelling at his coaches, quitting matches when he was behind, and taking questionable (and sometimes preposterous) injury timeouts. He was disqualified from the 2021 U.S. Open when, after losing a game in a fourth-round match, he struck a ball in frustration and pegged a line judge directly in the throat. He refused to get vaccinated against COVID-19, which led him to get deported from Australia and miss the 2022 Australian Open, as well as the 2022 U.S. Open because he wasn’t eligible for a visa. He knowingly exposed people to the virus when he did an interview and a photo shoot in France, the latter unmasked, after testing positive.Djokovic has been photographed having a meal with a former commander of the Drina Wolves, among the perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide; more recently, his father showed up at a tournament with what appeared to be a pro–Vladimir Putin motorcycle gang waving Russian flags. (Djokovic Sr. apologized for the “disruption.”) And for those already predisposed to find Djokovic a shady character, his ardent anti-vaccine stance sits oddly alongside his willingness to ingest mysterious concoctions mixed with undeniable surreptitiousness by his team, not to mention his belief in the power of the Taopatch (a plastic-and-metal patch he wears affixed his chest whose “nanocrystals emit photons toward the body providing several health benefits,” according to the company that sells it). All of which makes him the Aaron Rodgers of professional tennis. (Rodgers, unsurprisingly, has taken to Instagram in support of Djokovic’s anti-vax stance.)[Jemele Hill: The selfishness of Novak Djokovic]Djokovic’s will to win is fearsome. But when necessary, he resorts to head games and skulduggery. He has an uncanny knack for resurrecting himself from the dead after visits to the bathroom. In the final of the Cincinnati Open against Carlos Alcaraz last summer, Djokovic was getting badly outplayed by the young Spaniard, and seemed to be suffering from heat stroke (as the Tennis Channel commentator Jim Courier put it at the time), requiring medical attention and struggling to stay on his feet. Then, after a trip to the restroom, he roared back to life, Lazarus from the dead, ultimately prevailing 5–7, 7–6, 7–6. In the finals of the French Open against Stefanos Tsitsipas in 2021, down two sets to love, Djokovic took a seven-minute bathroom break and then came back to win. What tactical or emotional adjustment, he was asked, had he made in the bathroom that allowed him to come back from two sets down against a player 11 years his junior? “I told myself I can do it, encouraged myself,” Djokovic said. In the quarterfinals of Wimbledon the following year, after dropping the first two sets to Sinner, 14 years his junior, he retreated to—where else?—the bathroom, where he said he managed to “reanimate” himself with a “pep talk” in the lavatory mirror, during which he gave himself “positive affirmations” and channeled the spirit of Kobe Bryant. Then he came back out and dominated the next three sets.Djokovic makes such frequent and effective use of bathroom breaks that in 2021 The Wall Street Journal conducted a statistical analysis, calculating that he’d won 83.3 percent of the sets he played following bathroom breaks in major tournaments since 2013, five percentage points higher than his overall win rate. Aside from talking to himself in the mirror, what is he up to in the privacy of the bathroom? Anti-Djokovic conspiracists point meaningfully to his willingness to ingest those mysterious concoctions prepared by his coaches during matches. But the International Tennis Federation has an anti-doping policy and conducts regular drug testing; Djokovic has complained about the intrusiveness of the testing but has never failed one. And the rules do permit bathroom breaks, limited to three-minutes twice per match (five minutes if they are also changing clothes). Those time limits are rarely enforced, however, and Djokovic takes regular advantage of that.I’ve tried to like Djokovic. I appreciate his style of play: He is arguably the best service returner in the history of the game, and one of the best overall defensive retrievers, stretching for impossible shots with his boneless Gumby limbs. And those 89 (or more) reasons to hate him notwithstanding, maybe he’s not a bad guy. Other men and women on the pro tour say they like him. Even Kygrios, the Aussie who professed a few years ago to find him insufferable, has come around to say that he and Djokovic now have a “bromance.” He has advocated for more money for lower-ranked players. He was the only player Naomi Osaka called out for supporting her when she controversially refused, on mental-health grounds, to do press conferences at the French Open in 2021. He is smart, speaks multiple languages, and is an uncanny mimic.But rooting interests in sports can be irrational and ill-founded, the arbitrariness of their application bearing no relation to their intensity. Maybe my inability to like Djokovic reflects badly on me. That I prefer Roger Federer, all effortless elegance and Swiss-watch precision, perhaps suggests an aesthetic (even an aristocratic) prejudice against the grittier, sweatier, try-hard style that Djokovic brings to the game. But no one is sweatier or grittier than Rafael Nadal, a Tasmanian devil in a cloud of red clay, and I adore him not only for his brute baseline grinding and the nuclear intensity of his game but for his manifest sweetness of soul: He is proof that an adamantine will to win can coexist with sportsmanship and humility.Djokovic may be most likable, or most relatable, in defeat. When he fell to Medvedev in the 2021 U.S. Open finals, failing in his quest to win a rare calendar Grand Slam (all four majors in the same year), and ended up sobbing under a towel in his chair, he received the most enthusiastic and appreciative cheers of his career. And when he was gracious in defeat to Alcaraz in the Wimbledon final last summer, some noted that maybe now he could finally move, as John McEnroe had before him, from ill-mannered churl to respected tennis statesman. Maybe now, in the evening of his career, he could finally earn not just the respect but the love accorded to Nadal and Federer.But Djokovic seems more inclined to rage against the dying of the light. He told 60 Minutes that the younger players who are trying to wrest away his crown “awaken a beast in me.” (A wolf, I suspect.) At the U.S. Open last September, he collected his 24th Grand Slam. Before losing to Sinner in Melbourne in January, he’d had a 33-match winning streak at the Australian Open, stretching across four years (which included his scorched-earth revenge tour in 2023, when he won the Open after being banned for his vaccination status the year before). He is currently the No. 1 player in the world, by a fair margin—the oldest, at 37, ever to hold the top spot. And he continues to run on vinegar and bile: During his two weeks at the Australian Open this year, he criticized the up-and-coming Black American player Ben Shelton for not showing him proper “respect”; yelled at a heckling fan, telling him to come down and “say that to my face”; and aggressively stared down opponents after winning shots. More recently, in his semifinal loss to the Norwegian Casper Ruud at Monte Carlo in April, he shouted at a fan to “shut the fuck up.”That last incident may be telling, because Djokovic’s outburst came when he was unraveling in the third set, during a match he uncharacteristically failed to come back and win. Might this be evidence that Djokovic is, finally, losing his invincibility? Sometimes when the end comes, it comes fast; what once seemed impossible looks in retrospect to have been inevitable. Ruud, a soft-spoken Scandinavian with one of the most powerful forehands in the game, had never before come close to beating Djokovic. But Ruud, at least, is a top-10 player.Luca Nardi is not. A few weeks before Monte Carlo, in the third round at Indian Wells, Nardi, a 20-year-old Italian, who was ranked 123rd in the world at the time, became the lowest-ranked player to beat Djokovic in 18 years—and the lowest-ranked player ever to beat him in a big tournament. At the time of their meeting, Djokovic had won 19 more Grand Slam championships than Nardi had won professional matches (five). Nardi had in fact failed to gain regular access to the main draw at Indian Wells, sneaking in only as what’s known as a “lucky loser”—a player who gets a free pass into the tournament despite failing to qualify for it, by replacing a competitor who has to withdraw at the 11th hour due to injury.That Djokovic got defeated by a lucky loser was shocking. Less shocking, perhaps, was Djokovic’s behavior during and after the match. In the third game of the second set, Nardi momentarily froze in confusion during a point because he thought a ball that landed in would be called out. He recovered in time to hit the ball and win the point from an off-guard Djokovic, who’d been thrown by Nardi’s pause. Nardi had done nothing wrong. But Djokovic complained to the umpire that Nardi’s hesitation should have been ruled a “hindrance,” and that the point should have been taken away from him. “It’s a desperation move,” Andy Roddick, the most recent American player to be ranked No. 1 in the world (way back in 2004), said of Djokovic’s attempt to litigate the point after it was played. “I don’t see any world where Novak should ever be desperate against someone ranked 123 in the world.”What happened afterward was worse. Nardi had grown up idolizing Djokovic, with a poster of him on the wall of his childhood bedroom, and he had just won by far the biggest match of his career. But when meeting at the net for their post-match handshake, Djokovic offered only barbed congratulations, presuming to chastise him. “It’s not right,” Djokovic said, in Italian, “but bravo.” The tennis journalist Ricky Dimon, among others, called out the world No. 1 for this. “Appalling that Djokovic brought up the stopping play when he shook Nardi’s hand at the net,” he wrote on X. “1) that point had nothing to do with the outcome of the match, 2) it’s not Nardi’s call to make, 3) umpire made the right call.”A month later, in the third round of the Rome Open, which he has won six times, Djokovic again lost weakly to a lower-ranked player, this time to the world No. 32, Alejandro Tabilo of Chile, who had never before beaten a top-10 player. Djokovic looked adrift on the court; his timing and balance were off. More astonishing, he looked anxious, double-faulting at key moments, including match point. Afterward, he made excuses. After his previous match, two days earlier, he’d been hit on the head with a water bottle accidentally dropped by an autograph-seeking fan in the stands, and Djokovic intimated that a concussion might have caused him to struggle with his balance. Maybe so. A few days ago, Djokovic surprised the tennis world by accepting a late wild-card entry into this week’s Geneva Open, a relatively low-level tournament. He seems belatedly to have concluded that he needs to try to play himself back into championship form before the French Open starts. But if he’s not had enough match play recently, that’s his own doing. After his earlier losses to Nardi and Ruud, Djokovic had immediately withdrawn from the next tournaments he’d been scheduled to play in, the Miami Open and the Madrid Open, respectively. This was driven, he said, by the need to conserve energy for the Grand Slams, which has been his strategy in recent years. Competing for the major championships at Djokovic’s age requires careful stewarding of resources. And the French Open begins on Sunday. But the abrupt withdrawals had a whiff of pique—of sulking in defeat, of insulating himself from losing to lesser mortals by refusing to play them until he’s on a stage commensurate with his stature and in fit enough condition to beat them.But his strategy may be working: As of Thursday, he was into the Geneva semifinals, suggesting that once again he may be rounding into form at just the right time to defend his French Open title starting next week.For a long time I resisted the notion that Djokovic could ever be the equal of Federer and Nadal. But as the years passed and the Serb’s trophies piled up, my arguments on behalf of the Swiss and the Spaniard have had to become more and more sophistic. I may finally have run out of arguments. But I’ll make one final attempt.In that 2019 Wimbledon final, Federer outplayed Djokovic for much of the match, and he actually won more points than Djokovic did. But tennis scoring, like the Electoral College, allows the person who does the most winning to lose. And, like the 2016 election, this raises tantalizing counterfactuals: But for three points—one each in 2010 (another U.S. Open semifinal in which Djokovic fought off two match points to upset Federer), 2011, and 2019—Federer might now have 23 Grand Slam titles and Djokovic only 22, and the complexion of the argument over the Greatest Player of All Time would look different.[Caira Conner: How will we remember Roger Federer? ]Yet I confess that if my life depended on a single point of tennis and I had to pick a pro in his prime to play it for me, I might select Djokovic as my champion. Because had Djokovic not been banned from two Grand Slams for being unvaccinated against COVID, and disqualified from another for pegging that line judge in the throat, he might well have 27 Grand Slam titles. (Such is the role of contingency and luck in the unfolding of sports narratives, as in life.)So, okay, I (grudgingly) acknowledge Djokovic’s greatness. But that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy watching him lose, or that I want his reign of dominance to extend any longer. And the evidence is mounting that it won’t. Years hence, we may be able to isolate the match, or the very point, when in retrospect it became clear that his grip on dominance had weakened. Will it turn out to be at last summer’s Wimbledon, when Alcaraz stared down Djokovic in the second-set tiebreak, winning it 8–6 and breaking the Serb’s astonishing streak of 15 straight tiebreak wins, puncturing his aura of invincibility, dispelling the illusion that he could never be beaten in the highest-stakes moments? Or will it be his loss in this year’s Australian Open semifinals, when he appeared strangely listless—or maybe, finally, just old—as he got steamrolled by the hard-hitting Sinner? Will it be his hapless loss to Alejandro Tabilo in Rome? Or will it be his loss to the lucky loser Luca Nardi at Indian Wells, his botching of that weird second-set point and his truculent, ungracious response to it?That sports reveal character is a truism spouted regularly by coaches and motivational speakers. But it is not inaccurate. An essential part of Djokovic’s character, certainly, is his steely mental fortitude; that’s why I’d want him playing the point to save my life. But for the player I’d like children to emulate, in tennis or in life? Give me Alcaraz or Sinner—the future of men’s tennis—who both exhibit not just fiery competitive spirit but sportsmanship on the court, and generosity and kindness off it. Or give me Roger Federer.Or give me Rafa Nadal, who—while his contemporary Djokovic was enjoying one of the best years of his career—endured a Job-like litany of injuries and setbacks, missing almost all of 2023 and falling to No. 644 in the world with dignity and stoicism. Who, as his body betrays him in multiple ways (abdominal tear, hip tear, another abdominal tear, quadriceps tear, abdominal tear again, back trouble, all after an injury that required him to play with his left foot anesthetized, so it was like he was playing on a stump), is trying to make a capstone run in what will almost surely be the last year of his career. It would be wonderful—truly storybook—if Nadal could claim a final Grand Slam title at Roland Garros, the French red clay courts he has lorded over for two decades, amassing a staggering 112–3 record and 14 championships there. Alas, that’s unlikely to happen. (Various oddsmakers have him anywhere from the third favorite to the eighth, despite his having won only a few professional matches in the past 16 months and being ranked in the 600s.) As the tournament approached and his performances were lackluster, Nadal kept saying that if his body did not feel better by the start of Roland Garros, he would not play. But he has arrived in Paris and is in the draw, though he had the back luck to land Alexander Zverev, who is currently No. 4 in the world, as his first-round opponent Sunday.I, and millions of others around the world, would swoon if Nadal were to somehow magically win his 15th French Open. But as the tournament begins, my main hope is that Djokovic does not win it. And, for the first time in years, my expectation is that he won’t; the intimations of his tennis mortality have become too loud, the depredations of age finally overtaking him. As his physical powers wane, his fanatical competitiveness and otherworldly mental toughness can only carry him so far. To my eye, Djokovic may be suddenly, finally, done. Which is what I’ve believed about Djokovic in dozens of individual matches over the years … almost all of which he came back to win.theatlantic.com