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theatlantic.com

The Uncertain Future of the Yellow School Bus

Amid driver shortages and a dwindling ridership, the role of the bus is changing.

9 h

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.

10 h

theatlantic.com

George Miller Is Taking On the Apocalypse (Again)

14 h

theatlantic.com

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.

A Different Kind of Female Protagonist

15 h

theatlantic.com

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 Week

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.

19 h

theatlantic.com

Publishers Striking AI Deals Are Making a Fatal Error

19 h

theatlantic.com

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.

Making Fun of Your Friends Is Good for Them (And You)

19 h

theatlantic.com

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.

The Promise and Perils of Over-the-Counter Birth Control

19 h

theatlantic.com

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.

Inside the Decision to Kill Iran’s Qassem Soleimani

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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.

Photos of the Week: Victorian Picnic, Flamingo Flight, Shadow Puppets

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The Unbearable Greatness of Djokovic

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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.

Trump’s Assassination Fantasy Has a Darker Purpose

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When Donald Trump insinuated this week that his successor and the FBI were out to kill him, he showed how central violence has become to his conception of political leadership. The former president declared Tuesday on Truth Social, his social-media platform, that he “was shown reports Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ, in their illegal and UnConstitutional Raid of Mar-a-Lago, AUTHORIZED THE FBI TO USE DEADLY (LETHAL FORCE).”Trump has a way of projecting his own vices onto others. His view of presidential power is absolute—to the point that his lawyer recently argued before the Supreme Court that ordering the military to assassinate a political rival “could well be an official act.” There is probably some limiting principle to this particular argument, but the fact that the issue is even under discussion is not a good sign for our democracy. Perhaps he believes that Biden was out to shoot him because he thinks that’s an order that presidents can freely give.[Peter Wehner: What’s left to restrain Donald Trump?]The genesis of the former president’s complaint is that, when the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 to obtain classified documents that were at the center of an investigation, agents were explicitly authorized to use force. This was not remotely unusual: FBI agents are routinely armed. The “reports” that Trump saw misinterpreted the parameters of the search, which—as the security analysts Asha Rangappa and Tom Joscelyn explained in Just Security—was guided by elaborate restrictions on when weapons could be used. The FBI subsequently said it followed a “standard policy statement limiting the use of force.” Attorney General Merrick Garland noted today that similar conditions were used in a search related to classified documents at Biden’s home in Delaware.The FBI had also carefully arranged to enter Trump’s property when he would be out of state—an odd way of carrying out an assassination. Still, the idea that Trump had been at physical risk rocketed across Truth Social. The X account of the House Judiciary Committee Republicans reposted—with the addition of siren emojis—a thread insinuating that FBI agents were acting like the “Gestapo” and had “risked the lives of Donald Trump, his family, his staff, and MAL guests.” Trump’s campaign upped the hysteria with a fundraising email declaring that “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” and that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger.” By evening, the longtime Trump ally Steve Bannon was asserting that “this was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald John Trump or people associated with him.”This would be shocking news, if it were true. Trump and his fans have gone from simply damning the “deep state,” the loose term for anyone in national security or law enforcement who hinders his autocratic aims, to portraying federal agents as assassins. It’s a way of discrediting the legal process and the agencies that have legitimate official reasons to use force. This rhetoric also opens the door for Trump’s supporters to protect him from supposed injustices at any cost.In Trump’s mind, he is never the offender; he is the victim, again and again. “Stop the Steal” was an assertion of ownership over the presidency. His defense in the classified-information case is that the documents were legitimately his and he was protecting them from Biden’s seizure. He will not accept the 2024 election results should Biden get more votes, because, after all, only Trump can win fairly. And now the FBI has been accused of wanting to take Trump’s life. “You know they’re just itching to do the unthinkable,” the Trump fundraising message declared. These stories legitimize the use of force by presenting it as a matter of self-defense.[Juliette Kayyem: The government isn’t ready for the violence Trump might unleash]The claim that Biden and the FBI were looking to kill Trump is easy to dismiss as the typical hyperbolic ranting of the ex-president and his fans, and it competes in the news with other disturbing things he says and does. The assassination claim initially seemed to have come and gone in the news cycle. But the story was still out there, to be absorbed by Trump’s audience.Since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, Trump has become more and more apocalyptic in his language. This week, he sent another dangerous signal to his supporters: FBI agents are an armed enemy, ready to assassinate the former president. Unless, of course, Trump and his mob get to them first.

The Trumpian Vertigo of American Politics

These are profoundly disorienting times.

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Photos: Ukrainians Fight to Defend Kharkiv From Russian Attacks

Ukraine’s second-largest city and nearby villages have come under intensifying attacks from Russia’s invading forces.

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Furiosa Is Not Fury Road. That’s a Good Thing.

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Even as a little girl, Furiosa understood the value of staying hidden in the wasteland of postapocalyptic Earth, where resources are scarce, war is everlasting, and strangers are immediately treated as threats. But keeping out of sight is not the easiest task in the Mad Max films. The director George Miller’s dystopian setting conceals little; his bleak hellscapes provide the perfect stage for thunderous exhibitionism, the kind that yields characters such as the Doof Warrior, who shreds a flame-throwing electric guitar to lead militias into battle. For most humans in this world, surviving means roaring through life with ruthless ferocity on armor-plated vehicles. The madder you are, the better off you’ll be.Yet Furiosa draws strength from quiet control; she’s a largely silent, sensible observer who refuses to succumb to the insanity of her surroundings. Her origin story, told in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, shows similar restraint: The film, in theaters this week, does not move at the breakneck pace of 2015’s stupendous Mad Max: Fury Road, an extended chase sequence of a movie that first introduced the character played by Charlize Theron. Instead, Furiosa is a complex, contemplative, and sprawling picture that explores the price of holding on to your humanity—hiding it, tending to it—in a world that argues against its very value. The result is a film that’s perhaps less propulsive than its predecessor but no less visceral to watch.[Read: Diary of a madman]Told across five chapters spanning 15 years, Furiosa combines coming-of-age nightmare, romantic tragedy, and revenge tale. We first meet Furiosa as a child (played by a fantastic Alyla Browne) held captive under Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, boasting a prosthetic nose and a jocular squawk), the leader of a biker gang that killed her mother. She then becomes one of the child brides of the warlord Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), and quickly learns how to use the chaos of his headquarters, the Citadel, to her advantage. An hour in, Furiosa grows up, and is played by Anya Taylor-Joy; the subsequent chapters chart her mission to punish Dementus; rise within the Citadel’s ranks to become a driver of Immortan Joe’s prized vehicle, the War Rig; and find a way back to her childhood home, an oasis she calls the Green Place.In other words, Furiosa is an emotional odyssey. The film is packed with settings, characters, and Mad Max lore, but its ambitious plotting and storytelling scope seem intended to underscore the pressure Furiosa faces. The more cacophonous and violent her experiences become, the more her raw compassion stands out—but rejecting the rot around her only gets harder. She can’t find her way back to the Green Place, after all, without following some of the rules of this broken society.Furiosa still delivers the action expected of a Mad Max film, of course. It opens with Furiosa’s mother hunting her daughter’s captors, in a set piece that rivals those in Fury Road. The astonishing third chapter, titled “The Stowaway,” depicts a brutal assault on the War Rig involving, of all things, airborne motorcycles. And Miller once again fills practically every frame with baroque, gnarly details: shots of a projectile ripping through a man’s skull millimeters in front of the camera, a cascade of bullets washing over a character’s face like water. Dementus is a particularly memorable creation, a showman whose idea of warfare involves staging elaborate, deceptive scenarios, and who yammers into a microphone any chance he gets.But what makes Furiosa truly gripping is how much goes unspoken. This is a story told not in dialogue but in the contrast between its grandiose moments of cruelty and its tender touches. Quiet images become more visible and striking as the film goes on: a patch of vegetation growing from the edge of a cliff at the Citadel, a shared glance between characters that conveys mutual respect, a caress of an injured shoulder. Miller overwhelms Furiosa with enough of the franchise’s signature orange dunes and blue skies to make you miss the color green—to feel the ache Furiosa feels.[Read: Climate collapse could happen fast]That the inevitable showdown between Dementus and Immortan Joe is told as if it’s a footnote to Furiosa’s story may disappoint viewers looking for something splashier, but the choice is appropriate. Her story isn’t about clashing warlords. It’s about how she, little by little, picks up lessons on survival from the worst of this world. From Dementus’s bloviating, she learns the value of a disguise. From Immortan Joe’s dispensable army of War Boys, she observes the cost of blindly devoting oneself to an impersonal cause. And in losing an arm, she becomes part-human, part-machine, akin to Immortan Joe.In an interview, Taylor-Joy explained that she wanted Furiosa, after so many scenes of silence, to have just one moment of cathartic release that would capture her profound determination. “I am a really strong advocate of female rage,” she said. When her scream arrives, it’s satisfying, but I’m not sure the moment is really necessary. In studying the character so carefully, Furiosa makes clear the difference between her self-preservation and others’ selfishness, between her steadfast pursuit of home and others’ stubborn need for power, and, most of all, between the depth of feeling in her silence and the cheap talk others exchange. There’s no mistaking Furiosa for timid. Taylor-Joy herself, in a fine-tuned performance, makes sure of that.Furiosa is bookended by two questions posed by two very different characters. “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” a figure known as “the History Man” asks in the opening narration. In the final chapter, Dementus taunts Furiosa, asking, “Do you have it in you to make it epic?” Many wanderers in this wasteland have blended those questions together: You brave the world’s cruelties by being as epic as possible—no holds barred, no punches pulled. But Furiosa has a different interpretation: You brave the world’s cruelties by rejecting the notion of epicness as a goal. Things do not always have to be callously done, fueled by hatred, greed, and gallons of guzzoline. In all this noise, the film demonstrates, there is beauty in the quiet. In all this loss, there can be something gained too.

Trump Claims He Can Free an American Detainee—If He’s Reelected

The former president said that if he wins in November, Putin will release Evan Gershkovich. It’s an odd assertion, even by Trump’s standards.

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The Two Women Who Wrote as “Michael Field”

Their poems about the experience of beauty help explain the choice to write as one person.

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How Trump’s Problems Become Everyone’s

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Donald Trump is facing some of the most serious threats to his financial empire in his long and tumultuous career. That’s his problem.But the methods he’s using to get out of those troubles make him beholden to wealthy people with interests of their own—which, if reelected president, he would be in a position to advance. And that could be everyone’s problem.Trump’s money woes begin with his urgent need for huge amounts of liquid cash—both to cover his never-ending legal fees and judgments, and to fund his campaign. A jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll more than $83 million in a defamation case in January. (Trump has posted a $92 million bond while he appeals the verdict.) In February, a judge in New York fined him nearly half a billion dollars in a civil fraud case involving property valuations. He owes legal fees for many other cases he’s involved in. Making matters worse, various aspects of his business suffered during his presidency because of negative publicity, and those troubles are compounded by the current weakness of the commercial real-estate market.To make up for these challenges, Trump has turned to a few sources. He obtained a highly unusual bond from a California businessman for the civil fraud case, having convinced an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. He has been using political donations to pay his hefty legal bills, and his campaign’s effective merger with the Republican National Committee creates a new stream of cash for those. He has also brazenly pleaded for cash from large donors, reportedly telling a gathering of oil executives that he would pursue favorable policies if they raised $1 billion for his campaign and he won in November. Finally, the Trump Media and Technology Group went public this spring, providing Trump with a potentially enormous windfall, at least on paper. (“It’s one of the most obvious worthless stocks I have ever seen,’’ Alan Jagolinzer, an accounting professor at the University of Cambridge in England, told The New York Times.) Each of these revenue streams gives leverage—financial, and perhaps psychological—over Trump to rich people whose fortunes could be affected by actions of the federal government.[David A. Graham: Trump’s money problems are very real and very bad]“He made very clear throughout his presidency, and in the plan since then, that he is very open to people currying favor with him by financing him in a variety of ways,” Noah Bookbinder, the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. Previously, someone looking for favor could donate to his campaign, schedule an event at a Trump golf course, or spend big at his hotel in Washington. Now the hotel is gone, but other possibilities have arisen.“Donald Trump's finances and the ways of potentially influencing him have gotten more complicated than what we were talking about in 2016, and even 2020,” Bookbinder said. “It’s a whole new world of ways to potentially funnel money to Donald Trump.”Trump’s ongoing trial in Manhattan, on charges that he falsified business records to cover up a hush-money payment, showcases a small-scale example of how this works. David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that after he agreed to pay $150,000 to purchase and sit on the story of a woman who said she had sex with Trump, he was invited to a Trump Tower meeting with officials including FBI Director James Comey and future Cabinet-level officials, and later feted with a White House dinner. This is deeply embarrassing—for Trump, given the reason he was indebted to Pecker; for the officials, who were made to mingle with a tabloid publisher (“Here is David Pecker, he’s the publisher of the National Enquirer, and he probably knows more than anybody else in this room,” Trump joked, per Pecker’s testimony; the men didn’t laugh, he recalled); and for the country. As a matter of substance, it’s probably relatively harmless.But if $150,000 gets you a meeting with the director of the FBI, what does $175 million get you?That’s the question raised by Trump’s bond in his civil fraud case. A defendant who is appealing a judgment is obliged to either post the amount he owes or to get a bonding company to offer an IOU—assuring that if the appeal is unsuccessful, the penalty will be paid. Trump’s attorneys testified in court that they had tried and failed to obtain a bond for the full amount of more than $450 million, and persuaded an appellate court to reduce the amount to $175 million. Trump was then able to secure a bond—but rather than use a New York State bonding company, he got it from Knight Specialty Insurance, a California-based company. Knight is owned by Don Hankey, a relatively unknown billionaire who has made millions in subprime loans.The bond was odd. Initial filings for it contained errors that had to be corrected. Knight wasn’t licensed in New York, and the attorney general’s office raised questions about whether the company had enough money to actually cover the bond. Justice Arthur Engoron, the judge in the case, only approved it after a hearing in which Trump agreed to place collateral assets under Knight’s control.The strangeness doesn’t end there. Hankey told Reuters that he charged Trump below market rate for the bond. He also said he supported Trump politically previously and in the current election and called the case against him “unfair,” though he said they had never met. Hankey has a financial incentive to get in Trump’s good graces: Federal regulators have taken actions against companies he controls at least four times in the past decade, NBC News reported, including repeated fines levied by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. As president, Trump could shield Hankey’s business from enforcement. He has made political interference in the Justice Department a centerpiece of his campaign for president, and during his first term, the CFPB was moribund and shackled.“If you look at the laws of what an in-kind contribution is, it is exactly this, when you give a goods or services for not the full price because you want to curry favor with a candidate,” Adam Pollock, an attorney in New York and former assistant attorney general, told me. “In this day and age, nobody ever prosecutes those kind of in-kind contributions anymore, ever. But there’s a reason those laws exist. It’s because you don’t want to provide that kind of untoward access of how money corrupts politics. And I think we’re all just so jaded.”Worth noting is that if Trump loses the appeal, he will still have to pay the penalty, or else he faces the prospect of the state attorney general seizing assets. (If appeals courts affirm Engoron’s ruling, Trump and his sons will also be barred from serving as officers of a company in the state for several years, which could paralyze the Trump Organization’s operations as they exist.) Trump has already acknowledged that he doesn’t have sufficient cash. That’s not a huge surprise—many of his holdings are in real estate, which is not liquid—but it is a problem for him, especially because the market for some of the assets he holds, specifically his large portfolio of urban office buildings, is depressed right now.So when Trump Media and Technology Group, the parent of Trump’s Truth Social site, became a public company earlier this spring, it seemed like a timely windfall for the former president. Trump has a knack for wriggling out of a jam, and this looks like yet another example. His stake in the company is estimated at about $6 billion. But experts told me that paper wealth like this doesn’t always translate to liquid assets. The company’s equity is trading more like a meme stock than anything related to its underlying fundamental value: The price has dropped, and analysts expect it to fall further eventually. Regardless, Trump is barred from selling shares for months and may be unable to use stock as collateral. Once he is allowed to sell, he will be unable to cash out quickly, as doing so would tank the share price. (The company faces other question marks related to its auditor, who has agreed to cease operations and been charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission with “massive fraud.”)This means that TMTG may not provide a miraculous cash infusion benefiting Trump, but it’s still a big gain for him. TMTG also illustrates other ways in which Trump is susceptible to financial leverage. The investor Jeff Yass was one of the biggest shareholders in the company that merged with Trump’s to go public. Assuming Yass still owns the shares, that gives him substantial sway in keeping the inflated stock price high, which would in turn help Trump’s net worth swell. Perhaps Yass would not have invested simply to aid Trump—or to cozy up to him. But he and his wife are already the biggest political donors so far this election cycle, with all of their funds going to conservative causes. A Trump campaign source told The New York Times that Yass was expected to donate to pro-Trump efforts; Yass said he never had and would not. Because many donations can be hidden, the truth is almost impossible to know.[David A. Graham: Trump flaunts his corruption]Yass is also a major investor in ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. Trump was once a noisy critic of the Chinese-owned social-media platform. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” he said in 2020. He issued an executive order to do so if ByteDance didn’t sell TikTok, but the order was soon blocked by judges. When Congress, backed by the Biden administration, took up a law to do the same this year, however, Trump suddenly turned against it. “Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” he posted on Truth Social in April. The reversal came shortly after a meeting with Yass.The public has no way to know why Trump flip-flopped, and both Trump and Yass say they didn’t discuss TikTok at their meeting, but some skepticism is reasonable under the circumstances. “We don't know for sure whether [the meeting] resulted in Donald Trump changing his position,” Bookbinder told me. “But it's certainly something where the American people have to question that.” Any other person of means might also conclude that a good way to get Trump to take up a view that benefits them—including reversing a long-held position—is to make a large investment in him.Meanwhile, many of the old methods of influencing Trump remain. A Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund invested $2 billion in a private-equity firm founded by Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner has recently been raising money for the former president’s campaign. Serious questions also surround a development in Serbia led by Kushner and Ric Grenell, a former Trump-administration official who is rumored to be a candidate for secretary of state or national-security adviser in a second term. Serbian and American observers have charged that the deal, which did not move through typical channels, is an attempt to win favor with Trump. All involved parties deny it, naturally.That Trump would seek these bailouts should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with his business career. When he has struck serious financial difficulties in the past, he has sought and usually found some new source of funds. In 1990, for example, with Trump’s casino in Atlantic City foundering, his father walked onto the floor and bought $3.5 million in chips. (This turned out to violate state rules.) Later, when others had cut him off because of his habit of not paying his debts, he found in Deutsche Bank a willing lender. But DB was no more successful in dealing with Trump. An old joke goes that if you owe the bank $1 million, the bank owns you, but if you owe the bank $100 million, you own the bank. Trump defaulted on more than $600 million in DB loans.When he was fined in the civil fraud case earlier this year, Trump found that none of his old lenders, including DB, were willing to help. His new sources of cash knew Trump’s history of stiffing those he owes, but they may have calculated that they stand to gain something far more valuable than repayment with interest: the power of the federal government at their beck and call.

Cows Have Almost Certainly Infected More Than Two People With Bird Flu

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It was bound to happen again. For the second time in two months, the United States has confirmed a case of bird flu in a dairy worker employed by a farm with H5N1-infected cows. “The only thing I’m surprised about is that it’s taken this long to get another confirmed case,” Steve Valeika, a veterinarian and an epidemiologist based in North Carolina, told me.The true case count is almost certainly higher. For weeks, anecdotal reports of sick farmworkers have been trickling in from around the nation, where H5N1 has been detected in dozens of herds in nine states, according to federal counts. Testing among humans and animals remains limited, and buy-in from farms is still spotty. The gap between reality and what the government can measure is hindering the world from realizing the full scope of the outbreak. And it may hamper experts’ ability to detect human-to-human spread, should that someday occur. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there have been dozens of cases at this point,” Valeika said.The risk to most of the public is still low, as federal guidelines continue to emphasize. But that assurance feels tenuous when “the threat to farmworkers remains high,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the pandemic center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Too often, infectious disease most affects a society’s most vulnerable people; now the future of this virus depends on America’s ability to protect a community whose health and safety are routinely discounted.[Read: America’s infectious-disease barometer is off]Like the first case of a dairy worker contracting avian flu, this second one has at least one reassuring element: Exposure in both cases seems to have involved heavy, repeated contact with infected, lactating animals and resulted in a mild illness that involved only eye symptoms. (In another U.S. case, from 2022, in which a man contracted the virus from poultry, fatigue was the only reported symptom.) Cow udders and human eyes both contain receptors for H5N1 that resemble the ones primarily found in birds, and experts suspect that those receptors are an easy entry point for the virus, which still seems to be very much an avian pathogen. To spread in earnest among people, the virus would still probably need to make a few more evolutionary leaps. For most of the public, “I’m not worried about H5 right now,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me.People who work on dairy farms, though, have reason to worry, Lakdawala added. In the so-called parlors where dairy cows are milked, animals are strapped into machines that latch on to their udders, pump until the rate of flow slows, then release, swinging “off the animal at eye height,” Lakdawala told me, and blasting bystanders with frothy liquid. The machines aren’t necessarily sanitized between each animal—and what cleaning does occur often involves a high-pressure hose-down that also mists up milk. The entire process involves a lot of direct maneuvering of udders, as workers load machinery onto each cow and prime their initial milk flow manually. If workers aren’t directly getting milk on their hands—which will, at some point, touch their face—they’re “constantly being bombarded with aerosols, droplets, and spray,” Lakdawala said.When infected cows are present, that can mean a lot of virus exposure. Lakdawala’s lab has been studying how long H5N1 can persist on milky surfaces, and the initial results, not yet published in a scientific journal, suggest that the virus may linger for at least one to three hours on the same sorts of plastic and metal commonly used in milking equipment. That creates a clear conduit for the virus to move among animals, Lakdawala said—and a very easy path for a human to pick it up, too. Improper disposal of milk could also pose some transmission risk, especially milk from infected farm cows, which still have to be milked if they’re lactating. (Several farm cats appear to have caught the virus from drinking raw milk.) The USDA recommends heat-treating all milk before it’s discarded, but some farms, especially smaller ones, may not have consistent access to the necessary equipment or human power, Lakdawala told me.The CDC has urged farmworkers to don goggles, gloves, high-quality respirators, and other protective equipment in these environments. But those recommendations can’t really be enforced, and it’s unclear how many farms have been following them, or how many workers on those farms are complying. In the rising spring and summer heat, wearing that gear may get even less palatable, Lakdawala pointed out, especially in the steamy, cramped environments in which the people with the most exposure do the brunt of their work. Goggles and other tight-fitting eye protection, in particular, are tricky: “They get dirty very quickly,” Lakdawala said. Workers can’t see what they’re doing through milk-spattered lenses.Enthusiasm for testing cows and people has also been low on farms, as business owners and employees alike weigh the economic and personal risks they face if one of their herd is reported as sick. And although asymptomatic cows are likely responsible for a good degree of spread, the USDA requires testing of only a subset of the cows being moved between states. That basically ensures that “we won’t find a virus before a farmworker is exposed,” Nuzzo told me. Similarly, the CDC maintains that “testing of asymptomatic persons” for H5N1 “is not routinely recommended,” and close contacts of infected people aren’t guaranteed a screen for the virus. Those sorts of delays could allow infections to simmer—potentially past the window in which intervention with treatments such as Tamiflu or forestalling transmission to close contacts is possible. The fact that this second case was caught doesn’t mean that testing is anywhere near sufficient: The diagnosis was made for a farmworker in Michigan, which has more aggressively tested its dairy herds, Nuzzo said. Nuzzo and Lakdawala both argue that stockpiled vaccines should be offered en masse to farmworkers while their risk remains so high—but federal officials haven’t yet made the injections available. (The USDA and the CDC did not respond to requests for comment.)[Read: The bird-flu host we should worry about]These shortfalls would be concerning for any population contending with under-the-radar infections. But among farmworkers especially—a group that includes many migrants and uninsured individuals living in rural regions—H5N1 could play on existing health disparities, Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth, told me. If protecting farmworkers is a priority, Valeika said, “I think we’re kind of failing.”Researchers are also unsure just how much risk infected farmworkers may pose to their close contacts. Other forms of pink eye are pretty transmissible—and someone who has recently rubbed their eye, Lakdawala said, could presumably pass H5N1 by touching someone else’s hand, which could then touch their face. Experts also remain worried that an infection in the eye might find a way to travel to other parts of the body, including the respiratory tract, especially if the virus were to pick up the sorts of mutations that could adapt it to the receptors in our lungs. (The Michigan dairy worker’s nose swab, thankfully, turned up negative for an H5 virus.)The virus doesn’t yet seem poised for such a jump. But these flu infections are still a problem for everyone. “If we fail to stop it in the highest-risk groups,” Sosin told me, the threat to the rest of the public will only grow. H5N1 may never spread human-to-human. If it does, though, it will almost certainly have been helped along by transmission in a community of people that American society has failed to properly protect.

Immigration Is a Kind of Betrayal

In his sequel to Brooklyn, Colm Tóibín asks whether you can ever go home again after moving to a new country.

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Praising Trump With Faint Damnation

How can people who claim to be followers of Jesus support a man of undisguised moral degeneracy?

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Russia’s Psychological Warfare Against Ukraine

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After months of struggle with little movement, the war in Ukraine may be nearing a crucial point. The fight has not been going well for Ukraine. With American aid stalled, tired fighters on the front lines faced ammunition shortages just as Russia brought new sources of recruits and weapons online.But although painfully delayed, military support from the United States is on its way. The aid package passed in April is the first since Republicans took control of the House of Representatives more than a year ago, but it’s also the largest yet. Now the question is: Will it make a difference in time?The Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum joins host Hanna Rosin on Radio Atlantic to discuss the state of the war and how the fight extends well beyond the battlefield itself.According to Applebaum, the psychological toll Ukraine faced from the aid holdup is only the beginning. Russia may not be able to occupy Ukraine’s cities, but it can wage a kind of psychological warfare to make them unlivable.She also describes an information war Russia has brought much closer to home for Americans. Her June cover story in The Atlantic chronicles the “new propaganda war” that Russia, China, and other illiberal states are waging on the democratic world, and how that war can shape the fate of Ukraine.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode: News clip: Russian forces are advancing in Ukraine, including a major offensive near Ukraine’s second-largest city. News clip: President Zelensky has warned that Russia’s latest push in Ukraine’s northeast could be the first wave of a wider offensive. News clip: Congress approved $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine in April. The approval came after months of dire warnings from Ukraine that its troops are running out of weapons and losing ground to Russian fighters. Hanna Rosin: The news out of Ukraine has recently turned bleak. Russia broke through critical lines in the north, and the Ukrainian side seems depleted of manpower and weapons. Now, a major part of what changed the dynamic was the halt in U.S. aid. The aid was stalled since Republicans took over the House of Representatives, although a month ago they passed the first aid bill in over a year, which may or may not be too late to turn things around.Now, I know that there is a connection between what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine and U.S. politics. But I did not truly grasp how deep that connection was and how it could affect not just the upcoming election but all of American culture, until I talked to staff writer Anne Applebaum. Anne is the first person I always want to talk to in these moments when major shifts are under way, because she can read between the lines.I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic, and this week: how Russia has brought its war much closer to home than Americans may realize.Anne has a new book coming out this summer called Autocracy, Inc. And in it, she’s been putting together the pieces: how the war in Ukraine is not just a fight for ground but a fight for psychological territory—in Russia, in the U.S. election, and pretty much all over the world.[Music]Rosin: So things have shifted on the battlefield in Ukraine. I know that much. Can you explain exactly what happened?Anne Applebaum: So, in essence, there are two different stories. There’s a story about the front line in northern and eastern Ukraine. And there we see what’s now a full-scale, very large Russian offensive.Rosin: All of a sudden? Like it just—all of a sudden?Applebaum: It’s been pushing for a while, but there was a relaunched attack in recent days and weeks against the city of Kharkiv, which is in the far north—quite near the Russian border, sort of northeast Ukraine—as well as in the east, in the sort of Donetsk region.The Russians moved tens of thousands of troops into the area, supposedly 50,000 east of Kharkiv, and redoubled their attacks on Ukrainian cities and infrastructure. That seems to have been a plan, and it seems to have been timed to happen now.Rosin: And why was it suddenly successful? Like, I feel like it’s been stalled and stalled and stalled for almost a year.Applebaum: The Ukrainians have been running out of ammunition for a long time, and during the six months in which we weren’t helping them and the European ammunition was also still on its way, the Ukrainians were holding ground but were losing weapons and equipment. And during that same period, the Russians regathered their forces. And in the last few days, they decided to push forward, as I said, in those two places.Rosin: And did anything change on the Russian side, like new strategy, new something?Applebaum: A couple things changed on the Russian side—one was the recruitment of more soldiers. They now pay people a lot of money to be in the army. And in very poor parts of Russia, they will now go and fight. Also, there’s a kind of constant, back-and-forth electronic warfare, drone warfare. The Russians got better at using drones and better at blocking Ukrainian drones and equipment.That’s one of these things where they do one thing and then the Ukrainians learn another thing. So there’s a kind of constant spiral, and that’s changing all the time. But they did recover from an earlier phase in the war when the Ukrainians could beat them using high tech a lot more easily.I should say there’s another piece of the war, however. The second piece of the story is that the Ukrainians are now using long-range weapons—some European, some American, some stuff they’ve been given recently—to hit targets in Crimea and also in Russia itself. They hit an airfield. They’ve been hitting gas and oil storage facilities, production facilities.And they’ve supposedly taken out perhaps as much as 10 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity. They’ve hit major military targets in Crimea. And so this is their new form of innovation—is to block Russian efforts from farther back. It’s almost like a separate war from the war on the front line.Rosin: I see. So the traditional battlefield that we report on and have been tracking and monitoring looks bleak, but there’s other things happening elsewhere. Okay. That’s good to know.A last battlefield question: What’s the importance of the cities, the particular cities and places where Russia has made incursions?Applebaum: So the attack on Kharkiv, which is sort of Ukraine’s second city—it was actually, at one point in history, it was the capital of Ukraine. It’s a major cultural and industrial center.The fact that the Russians are now so focused on it—focused on taking out their power stations, taking out their infrastructure, seemingly in order to force people out, to make people leave Kharkiv—is a pretty major shift in the war. They weren’t attacking Kharkiv earlier in the war.Rosin: Tactically or psychologically? Because it’s such an important city.Applebaum: I think it’s probably psychological. The idea is to make it unlivable. And my guess is that that’s really the Russian strategy for all of Ukraine, is to make it unlivable. They can’t capture it. I mean, capturing Kharkiv would be a kind of six-month Stalingrad-like urban battle. That would be my guess.And they probably don’t want to do that. So what they probably want to do instead is force everyone to leave. If there’s no electricity and there’s no water and the center is bombed out and you can’t live there, then that’s a different kind of victory.Rosin: Okay. I understand the strategy so much better. You mentioned U.S. aid. Everybody talks about U.S. aid. I feel like you, for months, have been warning: U.S. aid is critical. Please pass an aid bill. Looking back on this year, how critical is or has U.S. aid been to this shift in momentum?Applebaum: So U.S. aid and the argument in the U.S. over the aid were hugely important—both for real reasons, in that, you know, the U.S. aid provides ammunition and bullets and guns on the ground, and for psychological reasons.Because what the Russians are trying to do is to exhaust Ukraine, to convince people that Ukraine can’t win, to convince Ukrainians that they have no allies, and thereby to get them to stop fighting. And so the Russians are hoping to win through a psychological game as much as a military game.Rosin: Interesting. Okay, so it’s not just literal weapons—and I mean, it’s also literal weapons.Applebaum: It’s also literal weapons, but it’s not only the literal weapons.Rosin: It’s: You are friendless and alone.Applebaum: You’re friendless and alone, and your major supplier, which is the United States, or your big friend in Washington, isn’t going to help you anymore. And, you know, this had some impact on Ukrainians.I mean, there’s a certain scratchiness that Ukrainians now have about the U.S. You know, We relied on them. And then, you know, U.S. domestic politics undermined that. You know, remember Biden went there and, you know—first U.S. president to visit a war zone in a place where the U.S. didn’t even have troops on the ground—and promised them he would stand by them. And then he didn’t. And, okay, it wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t him alone. But nevertheless, that was experienced by a lot of people as a kind of betrayal.That was very psychologically damaging. It meant that there were soldiers on the front line who didn’t have anything to shoot back with.Rosin: So when you say “scratchiness,” that’s what you mean? Just a mistrust?Applebaum: Mistrust. Doubt. The sense of being part of a big, friendly alliance is chipped away quite a bit. I mean, it has to be said that during this time, there have been a bunch of new European projects to give them aid.There was the so-called Czech ammunition initiative. The Czechs are major producers of ammunition and weapons and have been for many decades. And there are a number of big European projects that are just getting off the ground to make new weapons, to make ammunition and so on. So other things have been happening, but the U.S. aid was expected to carry Ukraine over for six months, and it wasn’t there.Rosin: Right. So, U.S. aid was literally important, and it was meant as a bridge. So it’s like there is no more bridge.Applebaum: Yes. Yes. I mean, it’s fixed now, in other words, so the aid is coming. It’s hard for me to tell from outside how fast it’s coming. It seems some things got there right away. These long-range weapons got there right away. Other things seem to be taking longer.So that’s hard for me to tell, but there was some damage that was done by the delay. So, both psychological damage and damage in terms of lost territory and lost ability to fight.Rosin: Can we look at this from the U.S. side for a minute, since there is about to be an election? Do you just look at it as standard deadlock, or do you see some isolationism rising up in a more powerful way than it had before? How do you read the long delay from the American side?Applebaum: So I don’t think isolationism is the right word to use. I think what we were seeing was something different, which was a concerted effort to block aid that was coming from Donald Trump and people around Trump and was supported by people inside the Republican Party who are actually pro-Russian.So I don’t think it’s just that they want America to withdraw and live in splendid isolation. I think there is a piece of the Republican Party that actively supports Russia. There are members of Congress who repeat Russian propaganda on the floor of the House and of the Senate, and who actively spread Russian propaganda on social media. Those people aren’t isolationists. I mean, there’s something a little bit more than that happening.Rosin: Okay. So that sounds conspiratorial to the uninitiated. So, prove yourself!Applebaum: So to unpack—I mean, so first of all: Don’t listen to me. Listen to the various Senate and House leaders who have also said this. So, Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and Tom Tillis, who’s a Republican Senator—they’re all people who have said on the record, on TV, in the last few weeks and months, have talked about their colleagues repeating Russian propaganda.There’s one specific story. For example, there’s a story that circulated on social media a few months ago that said that President Zelensky of Ukraine had purchased two yachts, and there were pictures of the yachts that came in some kind of post.Obviously, President Zelensky has not purchased any yachts. Kiev is landlocked. What does he need the yachts for anyway? It was a completely made-up story that nevertheless was passed around the sort of MAGA-Russian echo chamber, which are more or less the same thing.That story: During the debate about Ukraine aid, Senator Tillis said he heard his colleagues in the Senate—Republican colleagues in the Senate—cite that story and say, for example, We shouldn’t give Ukraine aid, because Zelensky will just spend it on his yachts.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Applebaum: So that is a direct example of a false story that comes from the swamp of the internet, that is being passed around, and that is then repeated by a member of the United States Senate as a reason why we shouldn’t help Ukraine.You couldn’t get a more pure example of how fever dreams created in some troll’s brain or on somebody’s phone then become a part of the conversation in Congress.And there’s another set of arguments that are coming from Donald Trump’s camp, and Trump himself says some of it in public. He says he wants to do a deal with Russia. And there have been little leaks about what that deal might look like. And perhaps the deal includes some kind of negotiation over the border. Perhaps the deal includes some new U.S. relationship with Russia. Perhaps the deal includes some kind of deal to do with fuel prices, oil prices.There’s clearly an interest in the Trump camp to have some kind of alliance with Russia. And some people also in the Trump orbit talk about breaking up Russia and China: We need a relationship with Russia in order to oppose China, which is one of these things that sounds great until you remember how much Russia and China have in common and that the reasons why they’re in alliance have nothing to do with us.But that’s a separate topic. But there are enough people in that world who are looking for reasons why we should be allied with Russia and not with Ukraine that it’s not some kind of coincidence.Rosin: I see. Okay. So what I’m taking from that is it’s not a totally coherent plan or motivation. There’s a little bit of pro-Russia business interests. There’s a little bit of Trump magic. There’s a whole bunch of interests, but somehow the result is that there’s a repeating of propaganda.Applebaum: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a conspiracy, and 99 percent of it is visible to the naked eye.I’m just quoting you things that people have said. And it’s simply a desire by a part of the Republican party to have a different role in the world. Like, we don’t want to be the country that aids struggling democracies. We want to be the country that does deals. We’re going to do a deal with Russia. We’ll do a deal with whoever we can do deals with.The idea is that the United States isn’t a leader of NATO. The United States isn’t the leader of the democratic world. Instead, the United States is one power among many who does transactional deals with whoever it deems to be in its interest at that moment.And that was Trump’s foreign policy in the first term. He was restrained in it. He was prevented from doing everything that he wanted to do. He wanted to drop out of NATO, but he was talked out of it by John Bolton and others. But that’s not a new phenomenon. That’s the way a part of the party is going.Rosin: And interestingly, that faction did not win. There was U.S. aid—U.S. aid was delivered. How critical do you think the new infusion of aid is or will be?Applebaum: So the new infusion of aid is critical. Again, I’m not on the ground, and I can’t tell you what exactly has got there and what exactly it will be doing. But, psychologically, it means the Ukrainians know more stuff is coming. So they’re not being shot at on the front lines with no help arriving.So they have: Something is coming. It’s on the way. That’s very important. And then also some of the new weapons we’ve already seen in effect. So the hits on Crimea and on some of the other places on the front lines seem to be effective because of some of the new U.S. weapons.[Music]Rosin: All right. So that’s the situation in Ukraine. When we come back: Russian propaganda—how surprisingly effective it’s been, and how it’s taken root far from Moscow, both in the United States and elsewhere, and what that means for the future of democracy everywhere.[Music]Rosin: So where we are now: There’s this critical moment in the war, and then there are all these shifting, underlying alliances that we saw come out in the debate over aid. And a lot of them have to do with shifting propaganda and messaging, which is really interesting. How is Vladimir Putin messaging this moment? Like, what’s he saying?Applebaum: So, Putin’s messaging—what Putin himself says—is of no significance. Russian messaging and Russian propaganda comes through a lot of different channels.So it comes through proxies. It comes through some Russian ambassadors. There’s of course Russian TV. There’s RT. And some of it is laundered through—it’s called information laundering—it’s laundered through other kinds of publications that have links to Russia that you can’t see.So there will be newspapers or websites in Africa or Latin America, which look on the surface like they don’t have anything to do with Russia but, in fact, they have links to Russia.Rosin: This is why we have you, Anne Applebaum, to draw these lines.Applebaum: I mean, I’m actually very interested in how it works in Africa, which I think is more interesting than how it works in the U.S., but that’s a separate story. But, you know, some of it, as we know, comes through trolls on social media. Twitter is now pretty much awash in different kinds of Russian trolls.It’s hard to say if they’re really Russians or they’re just people who like Russia or they’re being paid.Rosin: Who knows.Applebaum: Who knows. But there’s a lot of it. So a lot of the attempts that social media companies made a few years ago to control some of this stuff, some of them don’t work as well anymore, especially on Twitter, but not only.So the messages come in different ways. And I should also say that the other new factor is that the messages are sometimes amplified by other autocracies. So in addition to Russian messaging, you now have Chinese messaging, some of which echoes Russian messaging. You have Iranian messaging—same thing. Venezuelan messaging—same thing.Rosin: What do you mean, “Same thing”? Like, same message about the Ukraine war?Applebaum: Same messages about the Ukraine war.Rosin: What’s the message?Applebaum: The message is: The Ukrainians are Nazis. The Ukrainians can’t win. The war is America’s fault. This is a NATO war against Russia that was provoked by NATO.There’s another strand alongside it that also says, you know, Ukraine is decaying and chaotic and catastrophic. The United States is also decaying and divided and catastrophic. These are all losing powers, and you shouldn’t support them.I’m being very, very over general, but there is now a kind of authoritarian set of narratives, which more or less are all about that, and they’re now repeated by lots of different actors in different countries. I mean, there are some specific things about Ukraine.In a cover story I wrote for The Atlantic, I describe a story that was very important at the very beginning of the war: the so-called biolabs conspiracy theory, which was an idea that the U.S. is building biological weapons in laboratories in Ukraine, and that somehow that’s a reason for the war. This was completely fake. It was debunked multiple times, including at the UN.Nevertheless, it was repeated by Russian sources. It was repeated by Chinese sources. It went out—China has a huge media network in Africa. That whole story went out on that network. You could find it all over, you know, Ecuador and Chile and so on.And that was a story that was so prevalent at the beginning of the war that something like 30 percent of Americans saw it and may well have believed it. And, certainly, a lot of Africans and Latin Americans also saw it and may well have believed it.Rosin: You’re speaking, and I’m feeling utterly defeated. I mean, that’s the truth. I feel utterly defeated by these washes and washes and washes of information coming from all corners that are going to snag in some people’s minds and sort of corrode them. Like, that’s the image I had as you were talking.So in a moment like this, all that is the groundwork. What you just described is the groundwork that’s been going on since the Ukraine war began.Applebaum: It’s been going on for a decade.I mean, it has to be said, the Ukrainians are also good at messaging, and they have resisted that pretty well. And they were very good at it in the first year of the war. The majority of Americans still support Ukraine. And the majority of Europeans still support Ukraine. So it’s not as if the Russians are winning everywhere all the time. It’s just that it turned out they had affected a key part of the Republican Party, which, actually, by the way, took me by surprise.When the aid didn’t pass early last autumn, I was initially surprised.Rosin: Surprised that this broader message was seeping up into—Applebaum: It was the broader message and the degree to which Trump didn’t want it passed and was blocking it, and that therefore—first it was Kevin McCarthy, later Mike Johnson—were also willing to block it. That was not something I expected.Rosin: Because you, in your mind, are used to like: Okay, there’s some isolationist strain. But the idea that the argument itself has taken on all kinds of force, motivation—Applebaum: The idea that they had that much power at the top of the Republican Party. Because many senior Republicans, the leaders of all the important committees in the House, are all people who have been to Ukraine, who have been very pro-Ukraine, who understand the significance of Ukraine and the war in the world and were willing to help. And so none of the congressional leadership were buying any of this Russian propaganda. But then it turned out that it still mattered. Because of Donald Trump.Rosin: I’m trying to wrap my head around this global propaganda war that you’re describing. I’m used to thinking of propaganda, I guess, in an old-fashioned way, which is something that happens over there in countries that are autocracies, and the autocrats impose it on their beleaguered citizens, and it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Like, it’s something I anthropologically witnessed.Applebaum: That’s very 20th century. That’s the 20th-century idea. So in the 20th century, when you think of what was Soviet propaganda, it was posters with tractor drivers, and they had square jaws, and they were digging lots of wheat, and there would be overproduction in the steel industry and so on—Rosin: And we might buy them in a campy way—Applebaum: We might buy them in a campy way. I’m sure I own some. So that was 20th-century Soviet propaganda, which ultimately failed because it was so easy to compare that with reality. So even when I first went to the Soviet Union in the ’80s, people could see that wasn’t true. That was the major flaw of that form of propaganda.What happens now, led by the Russians, and this has been true for a decade—modern Russian propaganda, and now other autocracies echo it, is not focused so much on promoting the greatness of Russia. Sometimes there’s a bit of that. Mostly, it’s focused on the degeneracy and decline of democracy. So the idea is to make sure that Russians don’t imagine there’s something better anywhere else.Rosin: Because they wouldn’t know. Like, you can tell that Russian propaganda about Russia is a lie because you’re actually waiting on a bread line. So you know that it’s not as good as the posters are showing, but you don’t necessarily know.Applebaum: But you haven’t been to Sweden or the United Kingdom or wherever. And a lot of it was—the implication of it was—now I’m just paraphrasing, but it was: Okay, not everything in Russia is perfect. And, okay, we may have some corruption, and we have some oligarchs. But look over there at the hideous decline of, you know, England and France and Germany and America. You wouldn’t want to be like that.And the purpose of this is that the main opponents of Putin and Putinism were people—and over the last two decades, have been people—who used the language of democracy and transparency and anti-corruption.Rosin: And freedom.Applebaum: And freedom.Rosin: Yeah.Applebaum: And that kind of language was also aligned with an idea that there were better societies—like, you know, in Europe and North America—and Russia could be like them.And remember that many Russians in the ’90s did hope that their country would become a democracy and believed well into the 2000s that it was still a possibility and were used to the idea that these countries are our friends.And so what Putin has set out to do is to poison that idea—so poison the idea that there’s anything better—and to poison the idea of the ideas, poison the language: democracy, freedom, transparency, rule of law, anti-corruption. All those things have to be shown to be false.And this has been done in various ways. So there’s a version of this inside Russia, and there’s a version abroad. But inside Russia, it’s been part of an anti-LGBT campaign. You know, The Western world is degenerate. Putin has said it himself: There are many different kinds of genders. Who even knows what happens over there anymore. An implication of degeneracy. Here we still have some kind of clean, more traditional way of life.Rosin: Men and women.Applebaum: Exactly. And that was mostly originally designed for the Russian audience. But it also had a certain echo and an appeal to a far-right audience in the United States and in Europe.You know, the Russians do it because they want to weaken the United States. They want the U.S. to leave Europe. They want, you know, American decline to accelerate. And Americans do it because they want to take over the government and replace it with a different kind of government.And so many of the people who will repeat Russian propaganda have been repeating some of those same ideas also for decades.I mean, this story goes back probably 20 years, so this is nothing especially new, but it became much more turbocharged in 2014 during the first Russian invasion of Ukraine.Rosin: It sounds like what you’re saying is: We are vulnerable. I mean, it seems like their propaganda war is winning, the autocrats. Like, I feel like the Americans are duped in this scenario.Applebaum: I mean, first of all, it’s not clear yet that they’re winning.I mean, again, a majority of Americans support Ukraine, and a majority of Americans support the idea that the U.S. should be a democracy. So, we’re not finished yet. It’s a very delicate thing.I mean, are we being manipulated and duped by foreigners? Or is it elements in our own society that are seeking to manipulate us and dupe us?In other words, the farthest thing I want to do is say that somehow the Russians are intervening in our politics and changing it. I think it’s more complicated than that. I think we have a very important element of U.S. politics that believes the same things and uses the same tactics and is very happy to be amplified by the Russians for its own ends.So usually what happens is that Russian propaganda doesn’t invent things that are new. So, for example, in France, the Russians did not invent Marine Le Pen, who’s the French far-right leader. She’s been part of French politics for decades. They just amplify her. In her case, they gave her some money.In Spain, there’s a Catalan separatist movement, which has also been supported by the Russians in different ways. Did they invent that? No. It was already there. It’s been part of Spanish politics for decades.What they do is they take an existing fault line or an existing division, and then they help it get worse. So whether that’s through, you know, social media campaigns, in some cases through money, in some cases through helping particular individuals, they seek to amplify.Rosin: So it’s almost like there’s this coalescing global division and on one side a sort of autocracy and nostalgia.Applebaum: Except that it’s—Rosin: And the other side is what, like, freedom and democracy?Applebaum: Except that it’s more complicated because there is no—it’s not the Cold War. There’s no geographic line. There’s no Berlin Wall, and good guys are on one side and bad guys are on the other.These are struggles that are taking place within each democracy and actually within each autocracy. I’m leaving out the fact that there are democrats in Russia and movements in Iran and in China, for example, that have also wanted greater freedom, greater autonomy, rule of law.A lot of it’s about transparency. You know, We want to know where the money is. How did our leaders become so rich? That’s what the Navalny movement was about, for example, in Russia.Rosin: Right, right.Applebaum: And so there is a battle going on between two worldviews, but the divisions aren’t geographical. They’re in people’s heads.Rosin: Right. Okay, so with Ukraine and this whole propaganda war in mind that you’re describing, what are the stakes for the 2024 election?Applebaum: I think the stakes for the 2024 election are really stark. Is the United States going to remain allied with other democracies? Is it going to continue on the path of the struggle against kleptocracy, which is finally beginning to gain a little bit of traction? So against money laundering and anonymous companies and so on. Is the United States going to militarily resist Russian incursions in Europe? And this is a package of things. Is the United States going to maintain its alliances with Japan and South Korea and Taiwan?Or is the United States going to become a transactional power whose friends one day might be Russia, another day might be North Korea, who no longer leads a recognizable democratic alliance, either on the ground in the world or mentally?I mean, are we still going to be seen as a country that stands for a set of ideas—as well as a country that respects language about human rights and human dignity and so on—or are we going to become a transactional power like so many others?And that’s one of the questions that’s on the ballot in November.Rosin: Well, that is very clear. Anne, thank you for helping us put all these pieces together. That was very helpful.Applebaum: Thank you.[Music]Rosin: To read more of Anne Applebaum’s work, check out her June cover story of The Atlantic, “The New Propaganda War.” And look for her upcoming book, Autocracy, Inc., this summer.This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Some Dominican Wisdom We Can All Use

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Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.An old saying commonly attributed to Mark Twain runs, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” Misinformation—or what some call “fake news”—is clearly a huge problem in our society, leading to a great deal of conflict. But this principle is, from my observation, also the biggest obstacle facing every young adult starting out on a new life after college graduation. Focusing on all the things you don’t know yet is easy. The greater problem is everything the world has told you about your future that simply isn’t true.Our culture’s propensity to spread misinformation is nothing new, of course; history abounds with instances of faddish nonsense that influenced conventional wisdom. Fortunately, history also abounds with people and groups dedicated to stamping out fallacious error and declaring truths about life, even when doing so has been inconvenient or costly. A prime example is the Dominican order of priests, nuns, and friars—the Mendicant Order of Preachers that was officially founded in France in 1216 by the Castilian priest Dominic de Guzmán.From their earliest days, the Dominicans have done battle with lies, folly, and ignorance, and what the Order of Preachers has taught to combat falsehood still serves today. To show what I mean, let me give three cases of patent untruths you have probably heard, the Dominican rebuttal, and the supporting evidence from modern science that can help you avoid costly errors and get a good start in the next phase of life.[Havelock Ellis: Science and mysticism]You have probably been told that college is a place you go to figure out your career plans and life ambitions—where you discover what your passion is, what you’re good at, and what the world needs specifically from you. College in particular is supposed to give you this information, in a road-to-Damascus sort of way, and you should graduate clear and confident in your goals. If that doesn’t happen, well, maybe you’ll never have a job you love or really succeed as a result.This is not true.In fact, you should not have your future all figured out. Not now, and not later. We learn this from the 13th-century Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart. He taught that we should “live without a why” (sunder warumbe in Middle High German). By this, he did not at all mean that we should be directionless or that life is meaningless. On the contrary, no one was more steadfast than Eckhart in teaching what the ultimate objective of life should be: to act in a spirit of pure love before all else, and not to let worldly aims of money, power, and prestige distract us from this objective.By all means, we should have goals in life. But they should be intentions to give us direction. They should not be attachments, so that the priority of loving others can always take precedence.This might sound heretical in our ambitious culture (in his time, Eckhart himself was periodically accused of heresy). But modern social science suggests that it is outstanding advice—and quite easy to follow. Social psychologists have long shown that people are happiest and most productive when they make progress toward ordinary goals for themselves in school, work, and life. To set goals such as getting a decent grade, graduating from college, finding a full-time job, and saving to buy a house is perfectly healthy.What is not healthy is to be attached to worldly goals in such a way that your happiness depends on them. This leads to the so-called arrival fallacy, in which you believe that bliss attends hitting your goal, a belief that almost invariably leads to frustration and disappointment.If you are at loose ends right now, and unsure about your future, that’s just fine. It means you are fit to serve the highest good as you find it on your journey. Go ahead and set a career goal, but always resolve not to let it distract you from love and service. And that way, you also stay open to finding yourself on another, better path.[Annie Lowrey: The monk who thinks the world is ending]The second big lie you may have absorbed osmotically through the culture has to do with pain and suffering. If one unofficial 1960s motto was “If it feels good, do it,” today’s might be “If it feels bad, make it stop.” Sadness and fear are commonly considered symptoms of pathology; many people have come to see ordinary unhappiness and stress as evidence that they have a disorder. Well-intentioned parents spend a huge amount of energy trying to shield their children from pain of all kinds, physical and emotional—even though good evidence suggests that some experience of adversity can build a capacity for resilience. So those who have been too thoroughly shielded can be forgiven when starting out their life journey for seeing the avoidance of suffering as a primary goal.Saint Rose of Lima had thoughts on this. She was a Dominican tertiary (a layperson who lives as a nun or monk, but outside a monastery) in 17th-century Peru, and was the first person born in the Americas to be canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church. Rose dedicated herself to serving the poorest of the poor, and suffered her own ill health and torment, dying at age 31. She was a true expert on suffering, both hers and others’. You might think she would hate and resent it, but you would be wrong. “Grace comes after tribulation,” she said, paraphrasing Jesus. “Without the burden of afflictions it is impossible to reach the height of grace,” she elaborated. “The gifts of grace increase as the struggles increase.”Far from being a martyr to her pain, Rose was a social scientist before her time. The truth is that the people who are happiest with their lives encounter plenty of suffering too. They don’t seek it, but they also do not consider it to be some sort of sickness; nor are they afraid of it. On the contrary, they know that suffering is necessary to learn and grow. Research shows that experiences of sadness can improve memory, judgment, motivation, and goodness toward others.Similarly, fear is an essential part of the human experience because it is how we learn and develop psychological courage, which is core to our well-being. Negative or unpleasant emotions and experiences give us the resistance we need to get stronger. A strategy of evading sources of suffering is no way to live fully. Even if it were possible, it would stunt our development as human beings and lower our satisfaction with life.Obviously, suffering can reflect a behavioral or psychological maladaptation, and it may involve an actual medical problem, such as clinical depression. But suffering per se is not evidence that you are broken; it is evidence that you are a living human, experiencing a full range of emotions. If, like Rose, you accept your suffering, that challenge can be a key part of your path to success in life: You don’t have to be canonized to be sanctified.[Arthur C. Brooks: How to find your faith]Perhaps the biggest lie of all that can hold back your life’s journey in the modern world is that you should seek your own individual truth in life. Each of us has different life experiences and struggles, and this means—the contemporary conventional wisdom proposes—that truth is relative, because you have your own truth. The goal is to find that unique personal verity, embrace it, make it your identity, and not let anyone question it.On this issue, we turn to probably the greatest Dominican mind of all, Saint Thomas Aquinas. The 13th-century “Angelic Doctor,” as he became known, embraced Aristotelian philosophy, added in Muslim and Judaic ideas, and interpreted Christian thought in a way that arguably has more continuing influence today than the work of any other Catholic writer.In his Summa Theologica, he observed that perfect happiness is not possible in this life, but we can approach it if we are “busied with one thing, i.e. the contemplation of truth.” The obvious question at this point is—to quote Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judaea who questioned Jesus—“What is truth?” The knowledge that conforms to my lived experience? No, Aquinas teaches, only one true and divine truth exists—an ineffable mystery that we can’t fully attain on Earth. But possessing that ultimate truth is not the point; what matters for your progress toward happiness is to approach it with an open heart and an open mind.By this logic, establishing and living according to “your truth,” which is entirely relative, will not lead to your well-being. Quite the contrary. And past research seems to back this up. In 1984, the psychologist Daniel Lapsley was studying the causes of rising depression among early and late adolescents, a phenomenon that has only escalated since. He asked his young subjects to react to numerous statements such as “Everyone’s opinion is just as good as everyone else’s” and “There is no such thing as the truth.” His conclusion from their responses was clear: A belief in relative truth was a strong predictor of depression.[Arthur C. Brooks: Five teachings of the Dalai Lama I try to live by]To start today on a path toward enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, consider the possibility that you don’t need to learn anything new. Instead, you may want to unlearn some false lessons that have pervaded the culture over the past few years. The first untruth is that you must know your destination; the second is that a good life is one that minimizes suffering; and the third is that you must know and live your own truth. The Dominican sages and the modern scientists together show that these are all fake news and serious impediments to a happy life.In their place, I suggest that you start your path of life by repeating each morning these three affirmations: 1. I do not know what this day will bring, but I will live it the best I can, with an attitude of love and generosity.2. I am grateful for the good I experience today, but I do not fear the bad, which is part of being alive and an opportunity for learning and growth.3. I do not possess the absolute truth, but today I will seek it with honesty, an open heart, and a spirit of adventure. Even if you prefer not to adopt this practice, let me offer the one universal cheat code that can defeat almost all of the lies you will ever encounter. This is attributed to Saint Dominic himself, the founder of the Order. “Arm yourself with prayer rather than a sword,” he said, and “wear humility rather than fine clothes.”You will notice that all of the modern untruths I’ve identified have one big thing in common: They say you should focus on yourself—your future, your career, your discomfort, your truth. All moral teaching aside, how boring is that? I can think of no better way to miss the awesome majesty of life than to focus egotistically on a psychodrama in which you are the star.Happy people can zoom out to see and fully enjoy the world around them. But that means standing up to the lie that you are the center of things. That is the essence of humility and a great secret to happiness. We could add one more affirmation to complete the list above: I will focus today on the miraculous world outside myself.This column is adapted from the commencement speech delivered on May 19, 2024, at Providence College, a Catholic institution founded by Dominican friars.

The Future of AI Voice Assistants Will Be Weird

It’s far more interesting than a reference to Her.

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theatlantic.com