When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. I did not know this at the time, but she was likely under the influence of The Secret Life of Plants, a 1973 best seller that claimed, among many other things, that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and practice a form of telepathy. Thanks to these nonsense claims, mainstream botany mostly avoided the debate of whether plants can, in any way, be considered intelligent. But recently, some scientists have begun to devise experiments that break down elements of this big, broad question: Can plants be said to hear? Sense touch? Communicate? Make decisions? Recognize kin?In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to staff writer Zoë Schlanger, author of the upcoming The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. How could a thing without a brain be considered intelligent? Should we expand our definition of intelligence to include such an alien variety of it? And if we do, how will that change us? Schlanger has spoken with dozens of botanists, from the most renegade to the most cautious, and she reports back on the state of the revolution in thinking.Listen to the conversation here:Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket CastsThe following is a transcript of the episode:Hanna Rosin: Okay, so, you have a glowing petunia?Zoë Schlanger: It was very thrilling to me because I got the first full-size petunia ever. I beat the influencers. I got it like three weeks early, organized a little exclusive on the petunia.And the scientist who crafted the technology that made this possible hand delivered it to our offices in New York.And so I just met him on the sidewalk, and I rushed up to our office, to the darkest part of our office, with this plant, which is the podcast recording studio, and turned out all the lights and waited, and then slowly my eyes adjusted.It does take a minute for your eyes to, you know—our eyes are like cameras. The aperture has to sort of open to take in that low level of light. But once it did, you know—stunning experience to suddenly see your first glowing plant outside of a lab.[Music]Rosin: This is staff writer Zoë Schlanger. And what she’s describing is a real plant, the first commercially available houseplant that glows in the dark.Schlanger: It glows in this very subdued, sort of matte way. There’s no other way to describe it. It’s a bit like moonlight. It’s very contained. You really have the sense that it’s glowing from within.Rosin: Which, technically, it is. Scientists, including the one who delivered that plant to Zoë, borrowed a cluster of five genes—some from a bioluminescent fungus—and these genes somehow reroute the plant’s metabolism through a process that emits light.The company that developed the plants sold out of their first run of 50,000 petunias. Probably, many of those will show up on your favorite Instagram feeds any minute. But Zoë wasn’t doing it for the ’Gram. She’s interested because she believes that the glowing petunias offer the first chance at breaking through a deep human bias.Schlanger: I’m really interested in the ways that we, culturally, don’t really perceive plants as having as much vitality, let’s say, as animals.To suddenly have this product available, where if people are clued into the fact that they’re looking at the plant’s metabolism activating when they see that glow, it kind of brings them into this realm of livingness in our minds.You’re really seeing the plant being alive. It’s very much its livingness.[Music]Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m here today to tell you that your houseplant is not just alive but thinking—maybe. In her new book, The Light Eaters, Zoë Schlanger documents a revolution in the world of botany. Scientists—and these are respectable, academic scientists—are starting to ask themselves questions like: Can plants hear? Do they talk to each other? Are they intelligent?Now, The Atlantic does not have a full-time plant reporter. Zoë’s actual beat for years has been climate change. But she was getting tired of the doom and gloom.[Music]Schlanger: As anyone who reads climate change news knows, it’s harrowing, and as a reporter, I was just sort of getting numb to this material.Rosin: So Zoë went out looking for something that gave her the opposite of that feeling. And she found her thrill in—Schlanger: Botany journals.Rosin: Botany journals, which were, at this moment in history, so alive with a radical question.Schlanger: Plant scientists were debating openly in journals about whether or not plants could be considered intelligent.Rosin: Like, they were using the word intelligent?Schlanger: Yes. There had been a few kind of rabble-rousing scientists who had formed an alliance to try and push this idea into the fore of their field. And because of that, there was a discussion of whether or not neurobiology could be altered as a field to apply to plants.Rosin: Whoa. Okay. I have a loose sense that in the ’60s, there was a mushy idea that you could play music to your plants or that somehow you could communicate with your plants, and then there was some spirituality. But it wasn’t serious.Schlanger: Totally. You are talking about an era in which a book called The Secret Life of Plants came out. That was more like ’73, but it was sort of bubbling up through the culture up until that point. And this book was full of that sort of a thing. It is one of the reasons people started talking to their plants, and it contained the claim that plants enjoy classical music more than rock and roll.Rosin: Of course. Of course. Like babies. Like, everybody loves Beethoven.Schlanger: Exactly. Makes them smarter. And it included a CIA agent who strapped a lie-detector test to his houseplant and then thought about burning it. And he says that his thoughts made the plant’s lie-detector test kind of go wild, suggesting it was reading his mind.Rosin: Ooh. Okay.Schlanger: This book was so popular. For the first time, botany had a pop-science book that captivated people—perfect for the new-age moment. But the problem was a lot of it was just not true.Rosin: So it probably discredited the whole field of: Are plants intelligent?Schlanger: It did. It made all of the institutions that fund this kind of science kind of clam up and get nervous and stop funding it.Rosin: Uh-huh.Schlanger: But, for sure, in the last 15 years, technology has come up so far that they are able to confirm things they had never previously been able to in the Secret Life of Plants era.Rosin: And what are the kinds of things that are being debated?Schlanger: The main debate is: Are plants behaving intentionally? Are plants behaving at all? Can they be said to behave when something doesn’t have a mind? You get into all these murky discussions of what intelligence really means.If intelligence means responding in a way that has a good future outcome, then there’s probably a good argument for that.But does intelligence mean a sort of more academic awareness of events and this more mushy quality of consciousness? Then you get into stranger territory.And, science is a very conservative institution. Scientists don’t want to be using words that they can’t precisely define.So this caused a lot of fights and is still causing fights. Nobody can quite decide how to refer to plants.Rosin: So now, basically, plants are in this large, maybe post-Biblical-era debate about what else besides us could be said to be intelligent—like primates, dolphins, whales, pigs—that we’re used to. And maybe plants has now entered the legitimate realm of those discussions, rather than the far-out-there realm.Schlanger: Yeah, plants have entered the consciousness chat, for sure.Rosin: Oh my God, the consciousness chat.[Music]Schlanger: It’s very hard to make some of these plant-science findings tangible. The idea that, let’s say, a plant makes decisions or is communicating with airborne chemicals—you can’t see any of that.Rosin: So what’s the first, say, surprising thing that your eyes were opened to once you started to look into it? Like, an ability or a skill or a thing that a plant could do that you didn’t know about before?Schlanger: One of the biggest things was, I didn’t realize that plants could feel me touching them.That was a big one. I, you know, pet my houseplants all the time.Rosin: You do?Schlanger: Yeah, you know, fresh leaves that have just come out—they’re really soft. It’s lovely. But now I think about that twice because I realize that there are sensors.No one’s quite sure of the mechanics of this, but the plant has an ability to sense that touch and treat it like an assault. It might amp up its immune system to respond to that. It might change its growth pattern.Rosin: Uh-huh.Schlanger: From what we now know, many plants will ramp up their defenses when they’re touched too many times. That ultimately might mean a tougher exterior, a more flexible stem, or just an invisible cascade of chemicals to prevent infection.[Music]Rosin: So plants can sense touch, which isn’t intelligence in the same way that, say, writing a great book about plants is intelligence, but it is an element of intelligence—something like using one of your senses to make a decision. So let’s try another sense-related intelligence question: Do plants hear?[Music]Rosin: All right. So let’s get into one of the experiments. We’re going to listen to a sound here. I’m sorry, podcast people. This is a sound that people listening to shows hate, but here we go.[Caterpillar audio]Rosin: I actually think it’s kind of beautiful.Schlanger: Mm-hmm.Rosin: All right. What is that? What are we listening to?Schlanger: You are listening to the delicious noises of a cabbage white caterpillar chewing on a leaf. This recording was taken by these two researchers named Rex Cocroft and Heidi Appel, and they study the world of phytoacoustics, or the way that plants respond to sound.Rosin: Now, mind you, this isn’t an actual caterpillar chewing on an actual leaf. It’s a recording being played back to the plant.Schlanger: So they recorded these caterpillars chewing and clipped little guitar pickups to the same plants. And these pickups vibrate the leaf at the same frequency, amplitude that the caterpillar’s mouth chewing the leaf would. And what they wanted to know was, would a plant respond to just the noise of their predator eating them, even if they weren’t really being eaten?Rosin: Right. So not the smell or not the sensation of the caterpillar there, but just purely the sound.Schlanger: Exactly. Because we already know other plants will detect the saliva of a caterpillar and respond. But they just really want to know, what is the role of sound in a plant’s life?To their shock, honestly, the plants reacted by priming their chemical-defense systems. So when the researchers brought in real caterpillars, they were ready for them. They produced all these pesticides. They made their leaves unappetizing.Rosin: Okay. I want to elaborate on how wild that is, because what do you mean the plant is listening to an acoustic recreation, amplification of a caterpillar? Like, how?Schlanger: It’s astonishing to me too. The “how” of this is that sound is vibration.Rosin: Ah.Schlanger: So vibration is a physical stimulus. It’s a physical thing that the plant is encountering, which is kind of like how the hairs in our ears work. You know, they get hit by sound waves, and the hairs in our ears vibrate. And then that sends a message to our brain, and we perceive that as a sound.Rosin: I can see the philosophical problem now. Because as you first started talking, the plant is vibrating—I’m thinking, Okay, it’s just reflex. Like, once you say that, it seems like no big deal. But then once you explain how we hear, then it doesn’t seem vastly different, except I guess you don’t have the brain to transmit the signal through. So that is different.Schlanger: And that’s the boiling-hot core of the entire plant-science debate: How does the plant respond when there’s no centralized place for all these signals to go? How do you do this without a brain?Rosin: I see. That then leads to the question of: Can you have intelligence, consciousness, decision-making without a brain?Schlanger: Exactly. That gets into questions like: Is network intelligence possible? Do you need the signals to go to a centralized place, or can we accept a sort of more diffuse, whole-body awareness in the way that we think about a computer network?Rosin: Okay. After the break, now that we’ve gotten to the core of it, I make Zoë go through a lightning round of questions.Rosin: Do plants communicate with each other?Do plants recognize their relatives?This one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?Rosin: And then we figure out: What are we supposed to do with all this expanding knowledge about plants? Never walk in a grassy field again? That’s coming up.[Music]Rosin: Okay, this is a lightning round of questions, but I want you to answer at the speed of plants—not necessarily quickly, because they’re big and interesting questions.Do plants communicate with each other?Schlanger: Plants do have ways of communicating with each other. They’re able to synthesize all these incredibly specific chemicals in their bodies to match different conditions. And then they project them out via their pores. And then other plants take them up via these little pores. They have these pores on the backs of their leaves that look like little fish lips. It’s very funny under a microscope. And that contains some information.So if a plant is being eaten by caterpillars, it will synthesize a chemical that then alerts other plants to sort of up their defenses before the caterpillar or pest or whatever even reaches them.And there’s some really interesting research coming out now around regional “dialects” in plants, which blows my mind. These researchers have found that fields of isolated plants can have what they’re calling regional dialects that are specific to that single field that’s a more specific version of the general, more universal language of that species.Rosin: And when you say “dialects,” you mean they’re communicating with slight variations of a chemical, right? It’s not like, you know, they have different French accents or something.Schlanger: Right. It’s a regional variation of how they use chemicals to send signals, although the term dialect is actually how the researchers themselves describe it.Rosin: Okay, another wild question: Do plants recognize their relatives?Schlanger: So kin recognition in plants is a fascinating field. It’s a very muddy field. We have parsed very little of this so far.But we do know that sunflowers, for example—the traditional thinking with sunflowers is that you have to plant them quite far apart because otherwise they compete for resources so much that they try and shade each other out, so you end up with fewer sunflower seeds, which is not what sunflower farmers want. But certain research has found that when you place sunflowers with their genetic siblings, you can actually pack them so tightly because they will angle their stems to avoid shading each other.Rosin: (Gasps.) You mean they don’t steal resources from their relatives? They, like, protect their own?Schlanger: Exactly.Rosin: That’s crazy.Schlanger: And there’s clear evolutionary theory around this for higher animals, but we had not yet considered that for plants.Rosin: So that’s, like, widely accepted?Schlanger: Well, I wouldn’t say widely. (Laughs.) The caveats in this whole field are just unbelievable. But it’s also only been something that people have been considering for about 10 years, so it’s probably going to take another 20 before everyone’s like, Here’s how this works exactly.Rosin: Okay, this one is crazy: Do plants have personalities?Schlanger: So there’s some limited research emerging about variations in plant behavior and whether those variations do amount to a kind of personality.We’re used to scientists studying what you might call personality in animals, where an individual animal is more quote-unquote “shy” or more quote-unquote “bold” than other members of their species. But one researcher has applied that framing to plants and found what he believes are similar variations there.There’s some evidence to say that some plants are something like The Boy who Cried Wolf. They’ll kind of signal wildly at the slightest disturbance. And other plants are more reticent to do that. They’ll kind of wait for the disturbance to be really bad—for the pests to be really bothering them—before they let out their kind of distress call that alerts other plants to there being some kind of pest invasion.Rosin: You know, the way you’re talking about plants—it really sounds like how we talk about people, like how people make decisions. Is it fair to call how some plants interact with the world decision-making?Schlanger: So this is where I’d remind everyone that this is still a very new and very hotly debated area of science, especially when it comes to the language we use. And it’s easy to get into trouble when the language might make it sound like plants are people or plants have minds. They aren’t, and they don’t.But what I will say is that after spending all this time with the research, there’s a lot of plant behavior that looks a lot like decision-making. Often these are very, very simple decisions, like, input: There’s water over there. Output: Let’s grow towards it. But it also shows how much we don’t know. For instance, we know some plants are capable of storing information and then acting based on that information later.Or, you know, in some instances, plants can count and then choose to do an action based on a certain number of things. There’s a classic example that people call the memory of winter—that a plant needs to have a certain number of days of cold for it to then bloom in the spring.Rosin: But why isn’t it just responding to sensations? Like, if we’re talking about the difference between reflex and intention, which is how I’m thinking about it, is it just a reflex? There’s heat, you know. It’s stored a certain amount of sunlight. I’m not sure what the reflex would be in response to, as opposed to the word you used, which was counting.Schlanger: It comes down to a question of how far you need to distance what a plant is doing from what ourselves might be doing. There’s another example of counting plants in a Venus flytrap: They have all of these little hairs in their maw, in the leaves that snap closed, and it’s not enough for a little pebble to fall into that trap. It won’t close on a pebble. It needs multiple of those little hairs, those little trigger hairs touched. So it has to be a squirming animal that falls in there for the plant to bother closing. So it counts to at least five in that case.[Watch ticking sound]Schlanger: And then it counts time elapsed. If 30 seconds pass, and it doesn’t feel more movement, it’ll reset. But if the animal in there keeps moving, then they’re sure that they have a little fly or something, and digestion begins.Rosin: Right.Schlanger: And it tracks all this movement by counting how many hairs are triggered and over what amount of time. So that’s kind of math at another level that requires storage and addition in some ways.Rosin: Okay, so I’m asking you this now straightforwardly: Are plants intelligent?Schlanger: I, at this point, would say that they are, with the caveat that I came to this with a lot of skepticism of that perspective.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: I’ve seen enough to feel like all of the hedging that people do around this is maybe a bit overblown. And the most important thing is that they’re not intelligent in the way we expect ourselves to be intelligent.We’re dealing with an alien life form in a lot of ways. You wouldn’t expect aliens to have developed intelligence through the same routes as we did. But if we can expand our brains to sort of eliminate this human, academic version of intelligence, there’s no doubt they’re making choices for themselves.And they’re doing that despite everything coming at them. They’re dealing with a very complicated, continually changing environment, and they’re spontaneously reacting to rise to the occasion.Rosin: But, okay, so what does it matter? Like, we’re having a mini debate here about intelligence and maybe consciousness and decision-making and reflex. Like, it could be just semantics, so we’re arguing over definitions, but if we decide it’s reflexive, then what? And if we decide it’s a decision, then what?Schlanger: If we decide this is all reflexive, then we all continue how the culture has always continued. That just regards plants as quasi-living, not particularly sentient, capable of interesting things, but ultimately closer to a rock an animal—closer to a rock than, like, a whale or something.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: But if we decide that there’s some element of subjectivity in a plant, that starts to put them in a different category. I mean, it all is about how human culture responds to them.So, we draw these kind of lines in the sand between animals and plants. And then within animals, we draw lines in the sand between intelligent animals and dumb animals. And, you know, it seems like every year we start admitting new animals into this category of creatures we consider intelligent or conscious—I mean, dogs and dolphins. And, you know, it’s been only a decade or so since we’ve accepted those things as conscious.But in the last couple of years, we’re understanding that bees can, you know, have elaborate communication styles. They have this waggle dance that tells their hive mates where there’s good food sources, or they can actually detect different styles of art if they’re shown enough of the same pictures.So how much farther down that ladder do you look in a way? What’s, like, past insects?Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: What happens if we include plants in those categories? That opens up a lot of moral considerations. And then you have the potential for something like what we’ve seen with animal-rights movements.It brings up the question of what happens if we have a plant-rights movement, which is actually something that legal experts are writing and thinking about right now. It introduces this interesting idea: What do we do about the fact that we’re animals that need to eat plants? There’s just no way around that.Rosin: This seems like it really upends a lot of things that we just do routinely without thinking about it. Like, I was going to ask you: Do you still stroke your plants? I imagine you think twice about it now. That’s a small question.Then there’s the slightly bigger question of: When you put a plant in a pot in your house, is that the equivalent, or does that have some resonance with keeping an animal in a cage?And then I guess there’s the much bigger questions of, you know, broadly thinking about protecting plants on Earth.Schlanger: Yeah, it’s interesting you bring up the potted houseplant example. I have come to some amount of consternation around this because after I did a lot of research around plant communication and how plants interact with other organisms below ground, how their roots are hooked in with fungi and other microbes, and how there’s all this information being transferred below ground. And then I look over to my many houseplants sitting in their discrete pots.But I am soothed a bit because I’m looking at all these plants in my Brooklyn apartment, and they are all tropical varieties that have been raised in nurseries for probably generations.And when you raise a plant in optimal conditions for several generations, it loses its hardiness. These plants are not going to survive without us at this point, the ones in our houses.Rosin: (Laughs.) This seems like a dubious argument. This is like, this is a pet chinchilla that you bought that was raised in a, you know, from a family in a series of pet stores, and so—Schlanger: I mean, you know, it’s a bit like our dogs and cats. We’ve created these domesticated species, and now they need us. And that’s the situation.So that makes me feel better.Rosin: Okay, that’s good. I can bear it more with dogs and cats. Like, they do have a—well, dogs anyway—they do have a centuries-old mutual dependence.[Music]Rosin: Do you walk around now and see nature just vibrating? Like, how do you see the world differently than you did before you started this?Schlanger: I do walk into the park by my house very differently. I do have this new awareness that there’s all of this drama going on around me.Rosin: I feel like I’m going to have a hard time stepping on grass now.Schlanger: Yeah, they know you’re doing that, and they hate it. (Laughs.)Rosin: No, stop!Schlanger: But, I mean, caveat to the being worried about harming plants thing: We layer all of our human feelings onto this situation and all this new awareness we have about plants. The truth is plants are modular. They’re designed to lose a limb and be fine.You know, you cut grass; it grows right back. That’s not killing the organism. You can’t cut our arm off and it not have any consequences. But plants are designed to have this kind of diffuse, modular capacity to just grow a new arm.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: But it does introduce this kind of sense of wonder, that plants are no longer a background decoration in my life. They’re no longer this kind of general wash of green. I’m really aware that there’s all these individuals. There’s all of these distinct species. There’s all of this biological creativity, all this kind of evolutionary nuance that is playing out all around me.You know, it has the effect of unseating us a little bit from this assumption that we’re sitting sort of on the top of the evolutionary heap.Rosin: Mm-hmm.Schlanger: Once you start to realize the incredible evolutionary fine-tuning that goes into plants, it kind shifts the ground beneath humanity to settle us a little more among other species, and it’s a humbling realization that I think our species could use a lot more of.[Music]Rosin: This episode was produced by Kevin Townsend and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Ena Alvarado. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

A sperm donor fathers more than 150 children. A cryobank misleads prospective parents about a donor’s stellar credentials and spotless health record. A cancer survivor’s eggs are stored in a glorified meat locker that malfunctions, ruining her chance at biological motherhood. A doctor implants a dozen embryos in a woman, inviting life-threatening complications. A clinic puts a couple’s embryos into the wrong woman—and the biological parents have no recourse.All of these things have happened in America. There’s no reason they won’t happen again.When the Alabama Supreme Court ruled in February that frozen embryos are children, effectively banning in vitro fertilization, it produced an uproar. In response, the state legislature quickly granted IVF clinics sweeping immunity, regardless of what egregious errors they may make. This is the way the debate over assisted reproduction has typically played out in the United States: A vocal minority asserts that embryos are people and calls for total bans of reproductive technology; meanwhile, the industry goes unregulated, leaving prospective parents with few safeguards and even fewer options when things go wrong. Unconsidered are all the patients who want IVF to be legal and also want it to be regulated like any other medical practice.[Read: The people rooting for the end of IVF]People across the political spectrum should be concerned about how underregulated fertility care is. The stakes are high. An estimated 9 percent of American adults have used some form of assisted reproduction by the end of their childbearing years—including in vitro fertilization, intrauterine insemination, and donor gametes. One out of every 50 babies born in the United States was conceived via IVF. Many of the hundreds of thousands of people who show up at clinics each year are desperate; the tissues that they entrust to these clinics frequently represent their only hope of biological parenthood. In a country that claims to care about families, the dearth of regulation represents a failure that cuts across party lines.Kaitlyn Abdou spent $165,000 on IVF and never had a child. Although she experienced multiple miscarriages using artificial insemination and paid for an insurance plan with full fertility benefits, her insurer denied her coverage because, as a single, queer woman, she didn’t meet Massachusetts’s definition of infertility: a man and a woman who are unable to conceive after one year of trying. Like thousands of other Americans, Abdou fell through the cracks of inconsistent state-by-state mandates. So she sold her house to pay for the treatments.At the clinic, CNY Fertility, Abdou struggled to understand her options, because there were so many different potential add-ons to her treatment, many of which seemed to be backed by shaky science. Without large-scale studies and clinical best practices to consult, Abdou felt, like many patients, that the best medical information came from anecdotes in Facebook groups. After four months of doctor-ordered human-growth-hormone injections—a common tactic to try to improve egg quality, though not FDA-approved—Abdou’s right ovary burst during an egg retrieval. Despite the pain, the clinic sent Abdou home. She woke up in agony and then headed to the emergency room, where she learned that she was bleeding internally. “If I had slept through the night,” she told me, “I probably would have bled out and died.”At times, Abdou wondered if the lab had mishandled her embryos; when several blastocysts that had been developing well were suddenly not viable, Abdou couldn’t tell if the reason was chance or poor protocols. No one warned her that she might continue to lose one pregnancy after another: Over three years, she had five miscarriages before giving up. Her care team cited the importance of “staying positive.” But with each round of treatment, the clinic made more money. Abdou received no guidance about when to stop or information about how likely she was to succeed. (CNY Fertility did not respond to a request for comment.)After hearing horror stories from patients at other clinics, about freezers malfunctioning and doctors withholding basic information on embryo quality and ultrasound results, Abdou feels like her experience could have been far worse. “I was lucky,” she said.The U.S. fertility industry is unique in its lack of rules and oversight, compared with other countries and other fields of medicine. From the field’s inception, lawmakers have declined to regulate it. In the 1980s, anti-abortion conservatives blocked initial efforts at IVF regulation because of discomfort with the creation and destruction of embryos, as well as the perceived threat to morality posed by decoupling sex and reproduction. Although Democrats led the congressional hearings fighting for oversight, liberals also feared that restricting what could be done would limit who could access it, and would end up excluding single people and same-sex couples (who are, in fact, barred from accessing IVF in many other countries, including France, Italy, and China).Dov Fox, a reproductive-law professor at the University of San Diego and the author of Birth Rights and Wrongs, told me that Congress “just threw up their hands and said, ‘We’ll let the private sector sort it out.’”American consumers were left with the barest of federal rules—one law requiring testing donor sperm and eggs for sexually transmitted diseases, another requiring clinics to report their pregnancy and birth rates—with no penalties for noncompliance. Additionally, the FDA will not approve techniques that genetically modify embryos. In this vacuum, a patchwork of state statutes and case law developed, creating “a confusing legal tangle” for patients, according to Margaret Marsh, a professor at Rutgers University and a co-author of The Pursuit of Parenthood. For the most part, the industry is self-regulated by professional bodies that have no enforcement power, besides referring reckless doctors to state medical boards.Ironically, by opting out, the federal government played an enormous role in shaping the fertility industry and causing it to diverge from other medical specialties. In 1995, two Republican members of Congress added an appropriations-bill rider that banned federal funding of embryo research—a provision that still stands. In most medical fields, government grants get new treatments off the ground, which leads to rules, best practices, and data-collection guidelines meant to serve the public interest. In assisted reproduction, this is all absent. Wanda Ronner, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, and the other co-author of The Pursuit of Parenthood, told me, “We don’t even have independent, peer-reviewed research funded by the NIH to say ‘What’s the most effective way to make sure the embryo is okay to transfer?’ or even ‘What temperature to freeze the embryos?’ We don’t even have a lot of information on these fertility drugs and how they impact you.”Basic facts continue to elude researchers. “We do not even know how many frozen embryos we have in this country,” Marsh told me. The last count was performed 20 years ago and found 400,000. Today, “we have no idea.” Unlike new cancer drugs and novel surgeries, which go through multiple rounds of trials before receiving FDA approval, “a lot of innovation in fertility is clinical,” Sonia Suter, a law professor at George Washington University and a co-author of Reproductive Technologies and the Law, told me. Usually performed on small samples of patients, many of these experiments “don’t even require going through the research process.” This means patients like Abdou are left with sparse information about efficacy; instead, they are often test subjects themselves.Because of the federal research-funding ban, Fox told me, “assisted reproduction grew up less as a medical practice or research than as a business activity.”[Yuval Levin and O. Carter Snead: The real lessons of the Alabama IVF ruling]Ordinary safeguards are often absent. Every area of health care has so-called never events: catastrophic failures that are never supposed to happen, such as amputating the wrong limb or forgetting a scalpel inside a patient’s abdomen. The government requires hospitals to report these incidents—but no agency tracks reproductive disasters. Whereas donor blood is usually barcoded and drug storage frequently requires fingerprints to unlock, Fox points to multiple cases of egg and sperm banks labeling tissue with pen and paper.This lack of oversight extends into almost every aspect of assisted reproduction. The U.S. has no federal limits on how many times a man can donate sperm—leading to donors with hundreds of offspring and a rise in accidental incest between donor-conceived half-siblings. No one holds cryobanks responsible for the information that they provide customers. One bank promoted its most popular donor as a genius athlete with a Ph.D. and perfect health. In reality, he was a college dropout with a rap sheet. According to Fox, who produced a podcast about the case, “They know that nothing is going to be checked and that they can make more money if they lie.”Sex selection, banned in almost every other country, is big business in the United States. Genetic tests paired with IVF enable prospective parents to identify and implant either male or female embryos. This is illegal in Canada, Australia, and every European nation besides Cyprus, except in rare cases to avoid passing on X-chromosome-linked diseases. But in 2018, an estimated 75 percent of American clinics offered sex selection for nonmedical reasons, with the majority allowing people to undergo IVF solely to pick a son or a daughter—despite a 1999 condemnation from the professional body overseeing reproductive medicine. (It has since updated its position to a neutral stance.) Jeffrey Steinberg, a pioneer of the procedure who practices in California, estimates that trait selection comprises 5 to 10 percent of the American IVF market, or up to $90 million annually.New polygenic tests—which sequence embryos’ genomes and promise parents the ability to select those at the lowest risk for obesity, bipolar disorder, and other conditions—are attacked by critics as “Eugenics 2.0” yet are completely unregulated by the FDA. Most countries ban these tests, along with their marketing claims. But in the U.S., parents can use raw genetic data to pick embryos based on whatever criteria they want. They can even go online to find dubious advice about how to choose the smartest, tallest, most attractive offspring.Steinberg defended the status quo, telling me that regulation risks “putting the handcuffs on scientists.” He added, “If there’s anything society should have learned, it’s Keep their hands off of people’s reproductive choices.” Like many other fertility specialists, Steinberg uses the rhetoric of choice, borrowed from the abortion debate, to argue for loose regulations—a tactic that might backfire and imperil IVF as abortion restrictions mount across the nation.Despite its shortcomings, the U.S. fertility industry is booming. People travel from all over the world to get care here. Some seek services that are illegal elsewhere, such as sex selection, the purchase of donor gametes, and commercial surrogacy. Others can’t get care in their home country because they are single, queer, older, or ill.When negative outcomes arise, one could argue “that’s a price we’re willing to pay for a medicine of miracles that fills empty cribs and frees families of terrible diseases,” Fox said.No matter how hard clinics try, Steinberg said, mistakes are the cost of doing business. “Embryos are treated with the utmost respect, just like humans,” he told me. “But it’s never to say that a human doesn’t get sucked out of the window of an airplane or that an embryo doesn’t get dropped on the floor. It can happen. ... Life is life. Not everything will be absolutely perfect.”Reproductive technology can bring prospective parents great hope—which makes its failures especially brutal.Georgette Fleischer believes that she was the victim of fertility fraud. Fleischer quickly conceived her first child using donor gametes, but when she came back to give her six-month-old daughter a sibling with remaining gametes, New Hope Fertility Center, in New York, couldn’t produce a single viable embryo. According to a lawsuit Fleischer filed, New Hope denied her access to her medical records multiple times; when she finally got them, she learned that previously healthy sperm were now nearly all immotile or deformed. (The clinic created the embryos anyway, without informing Fleischer.)Eventually, Fleischer found a paper in the prestigious journal Fertility and Sterility published by the chief executive of New Hope, John Zhang, that documented his trials in freeze-drying and reconstituting sperm. The dates overlapped with Fleischer’s treatment, and the consequences resembled what had happened to her sperm, leading Fleischer to believe that Zhang had experimented on her tissue without asking her.“I was the perfect guinea pig,” Fleischer told me. She believes that she was targeted because she was an older single mother, reliant on both donor eggs and sperm. But even if Fleischer can prove that she was the victim of Zhang’s experimentation, only nine states have laws against experimenting on reproductive material without a patient’s consent. New York isn’t one of them.Fleischer reported Zhang to the FDA and the New York Department of Health, but she may never know the outcome. Her lawsuit laid out 12 claims; the judge dismissed all but medical malpractice and lack of informed consent. She’s appealing, claiming that the damage extends far beyond those narrow categories. But these cases are so hard to win, Fleischer told me, that she couldn’t find a lawyer and has had to represent herself. (In court filings, New Hope Fertility Center and Zhang denied Fleischer’s allegations; neither party responded to multiple requests for comment.)Fleischer exemplifies the vulnerability and desperation that many fertility patients feel, turning to technology when they can’t conceive because of age, cancer, risk of heritable diseases, sexual orientation, or lack of a partner. Clinical failures “leave those people who were already disadvantaged doubly or triply so,” Fox said.Marsh, the historian, told me that under the current system, “infertile people are being robbed.” A lack of clear information means that patients don’t know how to get the best care, scrambling while time runs out. Ronner, at Penn, said she and Marsh believe that reactionary, piecemeal approaches will only make things worse: “We worry that without clear national policies on assisted reproduction, access to IVF and control over embryos could become as difficult in many states as access to abortion already is.” She added that although IVF is available now, “that could change in a minute.”A decade ago, the CDC created an action plan for addressing infertility as a public-health issue; Ronner and Marsh point to its suggestions as a great place to start reform. They also advocate for creating a “distinctly American” version of the United Kingdom’s Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority, an independent body that oversees both research and clinical care.[Read: The calendar of human fertility is changing]Most other industrialized nations provide, subsidize, or mandate insurance coverage of IVF, which gives them a strong incentive to regulate the industry. This could eventually happen in the U.S.; 21 states and the District of Columbia now require insurance to cover some infertility treatment. But even that assistance is uneven: Arkansas, one of the few states to explicitly mandate IVF coverage, restricts that mandate to heterosexual married couples only.Although abortion remains a controversial political issue, the response to the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling—and the state’s swift passage of a law to protect IVF—shows broad support for family-building technology. According to a recent CBS/YouGov poll, 86 percent of Americans believe that IVF should be legal. Perhaps the uproar in response to the Alabama decision provides an opportunity to protect patients and provide guardrails around the treatments that create much-wanted children, without leaving regulation to the whims of the marketplace or reactionary rulings.America already has a model for regulation: the military. Eight military hospitals provide IVF at about a quarter of the average cost. Security protocols are strict, according to Donald Royster, a retired Air Force colonel and former head of the military IVF center at San Antonio Military Medical Center. Expensive add-ons, including preimplantation genetic testing, are far less common, keeping costs down while dodging thorny ethical questions.Patients also need specific ways to seek relief when things go wrong, according to Fox. Legislation and jurisprudence should recognize the special status of eggs, embryos, and sperm, instead of pretending that they are “lost property or killed persons or a broken contract or even medical malpractice.”Failing to acknowledge this only politicizes and imperils fertility care. Patient safety, accurate advertising, and legal accountability should not be partisan issues.

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has described our times as the “Age of Authenticity,” meaning an era when people are willing to publicize their secrets and indulge their urges, even if such a drive for personal truth involves transgressing traditional boundaries of self-control. Once, this type of exhibitionism was the preserve of a few celebrities, but now anybody can get in on the act: The quest for authenticity has spawned salacious memoirs, reality-TV shows of escalating disinhibition, and cathartic self-disclosure on social media.Such revelations are supposed to be good for us, because suppressing our thoughts and desires is considered unhealthy and unnatural. In psychology, this way of thinking is sometimes called self-determination theory, according to which we are happiest when we obey our inner drives.I would grant that living inauthentically and being repressed do not sound like a recipe for well-being. But the age of authenticity does not seem to have made us happier, either. Quite the reverse. Some scholars, such as Taylor and the historian and theologian Carl R. Trueman, have argued that American society has become far more expressively individualistic over the past few decades. Yet the average level of happiness has consistently fallen, even as reported levels of depression and anxiety have exploded.One possible explanation for this paradox is that the lowering of self-control was an understandable but significant error in our collective thinking, and it took us in exactly the wrong direction where happiness is concerned. Although understanding how this happened won’t turn our whole culture around, it can help you be happier in your own life.[Ed Yong: Self-control is just empathy with your future self]From a psychological perspective, a useful hypothesis of how self-management works is that two systems in the brain govern it: the behavioral activation system and the behavioral inhibition system. The first one excites the desire for rewards and other positive stimuli, and arouses your interest in doing things. The second one creates an aversion to punishment and negative consequences, and tells you not to do things.Generally, you can think about each system in this way: If the activation system rises or the inhibition system falls, self-control may decrease. Alternatively, if the inhibition system rises or the activation system falls, self-control may increase. And what works for an individual also scales by analogy for the group or community.So which combination makes us happier overall—more of the behavioral activation system and less of the behavioral inhibition system, or the other way around? The answer is that both combinations are effective. A team of eight psychologists showed this in a 2018 study on self-control in the Journal of Personality. The team fielded a series of undergraduate surveys. The researchers found that low levels of self-control were associated with the lowest levels of subjective well-being. Moving to a higher level of self-control increased the undergraduates’ happiness.Interestingly, in a separate study within the paper, the researchers also found that low-to-moderate levels of self-control—that is, a slightly below-average level of self-control—were associated with the lowest levels of momentary well-being. Yet a complete lack of self-control was associated with slightly higher momentary well-being. This is no wonder: Letting completely loose is commonly associated with very short-term bouts of pleasure.This implies that if you are a somewhat reserved, self-controlled person, you can raise your sense of well-being in one of two completely contrasting ways: by being more authentic and impulsive or by being more punctilious and modest. Given that choice, the former sounds a lot more fun. The idea that most people would choose disinhibition and that authenticity would become the spirit of the age makes intuitive sense.[Arthur C. Brooks: The link between self-reliance and well-being]The trouble is that the let-it-all-hang-out approach is restricted to momentary well-being, and has consequences for others. In 2011, scholars at Arizona State University studied the correlation of low self-control with irresponsible behavior that makes life worse for others. They found that low self-control, although potentially enjoyable to the one shedding inhibitions, is associated with criminal offending, academic fraud, binge drinking, drunk dialing, public profanity, and (weirdly) public flatulence. All of these behaviors have negative social consequences, some more serious than others, but any will affect the well-being of others.I would hazard this as a partial explanation at least for our national happiness funk: American culture has gone the wrong way about getting happier—by encouraging each of us to relax self-control to get happier, the unfortunate result is that we have become unhappier as a whole, and are now stuck that way. By seeking the short-term mood payoff that comes from disinhibition, we have become unapologetic, drunk-dialing, cussing, farting fraudsters who make one another miserable.That is a broad statement, and not intended to be taken literally. But if you think the characterization is preposterously extreme, have you looked at your social-media feed lately?For your own well-being, and everyone’s, increasing self-control might be much better than lowering it. To propose this at a societal level is nothing new; writers have been doing so for centuries. Benjamin Franklin, for example, exhorted “all well-bred people” to “forcibly restrain the Efforts of Nature to discharge that Wind.” But he had a broader vision, too, for how to realize greater collective happiness. “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will,” he advised, “and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”[Conor Friedersdorf: The case for restraint in all things]As Franklin suggests and the aforementioned research shows, even if others don’t mend their ways, controlling yourself more is a strategy that will raise your individual well-being. It can be hard to go against unfortunate social trends, so here are a couple of helpful things to keep in mind.First, be aware of the forces around you that may lower the activity of the inhibition system in your brain and thus push you toward lower self-control. According to scholars at the University of Toronto and Northwestern University, three bad influences to watch out for are excess alcohol, anonymity, and social power. None of these necessarily leads to antisocial behavior, but they easily can—and so take you in the wrong direction for happiness. (For instance, have you ever come across someone who’s happy to have said or done something drunk that they would have been embarrassed to say or do sober?)Similarly, who expects to find people being their best, most magnanimous selves when posting anonymously on social media? In fact, scholars who have studied anonymity on social media have found that although most users behave benignly, a small subset may demonstrate antisocial, even psychopathic, behavior. If you’re seeking to boost your self-control, shun any social media forum where your identity is hidden. Instead, accept responsibility for everything you say.Social power—meaning, your capacity to influence others—is a trickier subject. If you possess, say, an ability to publish material that many other people will read, see, or hear, you should ask yourself whether your desire to attract and retain an audience is leading you to abandon your privacy. Does what you reveal about yourself evoke in people a frisson of interest but also lead them to hold a low opinion of your taste and manners? How much better to err on the side of self-control.And consider the social influence we invest in leaders. We reduce our own well-being when we hand power to vulgarians. Just as it feels freeing to shed self-control but ultimately leads to negative consequences, so following leaders who act without constraints and break norms might feed our id but inevitably takes us individually and collectively down a dark path.[Read: The paradox of effort]You might think that because I am arguing that the happiest path is one in which we sublimate our true feelings and desires through greater self-control, I am advocating in effect for inauthenticity. But that’s not my intention; rather, I am arguing for authentic self-improvement. The choice to act in a particular way boils down to a choice of who we will be as people—the famous “As If Principle” in psychology shows that we become a certain way by acting as if you already are that way.This is what Aristotle meant when he wrote that “virtues are formed in a man by his doing the actions.” One important choice we have is to behave with either controlled grace or uncontrolled entitlement. Neither option is in reality more authentic than the other because, in becoming who we are through our choices, both paths are equally authentic; both embody who we’ve chosen to be as people. But only one path, that of controlled grace, leads to greater happiness for one and all. So the beautiful truth is that we can elect to become authentically better than we were—and happier to boot.

I had been avoiding my friend Jens Söring for months. Whenever his emails arrived, I’d open a reply window and stare with dread at the blinking cursor. I no longer knew what to say to him, this man who had spent 33 years in prison for a double homicide he swore he didn’t commit.Jens had been convicted of murder in 1990. I had been convicted of murder nearly 20 years later. But the parallels between our cases were striking. While studying abroad in Italy in 2007, I had been accused of killing my roommate Meredith Kercher with the help of a man I’d been dating for just a week. Jens, too, had been studying abroad—he was a German citizen attending the University of Virginia—and he, too, had been accused of a brutal killing, allegedly with the help of his girlfriend, Elizabeth Haysom. The murder weapon in both cases was a knife. Elizabeth had been portrayed in the media as a psychologically disturbed femme fatale; I’d been called “Luciferina” in the courtroom and “Foxy Knoxy” in the tabloids. Both of our cases involved a confession obtained without legal counsel present. And in both of our cases, biological evidence played an important role. I was freed only after independent experts debunked the supposed DNA evidence linking me to the crime. DNA analysis wasn’t available when Jens was tried—but applied decades later, it could be interpreted to support his claim of innocence. For a long time, I believed the major difference between Jens’s case and mine was this: I eventually got justice.In 2015, eight years after being arrested, I was definitively acquitted of the murder of Meredith Kercher by Italy’s highest court per non aver commesso il fatto—“for not having committed the act.” A man named Rudy Guede had already been identified as the killer, and had been convicted. I spoke with Jens for the first time a few years later, in 2019, through the prison phone system at Buckingham Correctional Center, in rural Virginia. By then, as a writer and podcaster, I had become an advocate for the wrongly convicted. Jens had already been imprisoned for 33 years—longer than I’d been alive. He would die in prison, if the Commonwealth of Virginia had its way.After talking with lawyers and advocates, impartial experts, and Jens himself, I had come to believe that Jens was innocent of murder, though he had admittedly, and foolishly, helped cover up murders in their aftermath. I publicly advocated for his release. And I offered him advice and served as a bridge to the community of wrongly convicted people in the United States and abroad, a community that had been essential to my own mental health. In our many exchanges, Jens came across as intelligent, bookish, and quick to laugh, but with a deep melancholy beneath the surface, an emotion I knew all too well. Listening to his voice, I often felt as if I were peering through a looking glass into another, sadder dimension. He seemed to me like a tragic version of myself. Our bond was more than a friendship; it was a kind of kinship.[Amanda Knox: Who owns Amanda Knox?]But now, armed with new information, I believed there was a strong possibility that Jens had been lying to me from the very beginning. I wrote the email, explaining the doubts I had. Jens was angry. “Let me say this quite bluntly,” he replied, in what would prove to be our last communication. “There is way more DNA evidence incriminating you than there is me … I mean, Amanda, WTF.”Derek and Nancy Haysom were murdered in their home outside Lynchburg, Virginia, on March 30, 1985. The Haysoms were wealthy—Nancy was an artist whose family was related to the Astors; Derek, who was born in South Africa and eventually moved to Canada, had made money in steel and finance. A Bedford County detective named Chuck Reid described the crime scene as a “slaughterhouse.” Derek, in particular, had put up a fight, and had been stabbed 36 times. Both he and Nancy had had their throats cut so deeply that they were nearly decapitated. The crime shocked the local community and quickly became a media sensation. The investigators wondered at first whether this had been a Manson Family–style “thrill kill,” but eventually came to the view that the excessive violence suggested someone with a personal motive. This aligned with evidence that the killer was someone whom the Haysoms had welcomed into their home. They had been eating dinner, and their plates were still on the table. Nancy was wearing a housecoat. There were no signs of forced entry. Nothing had been stolen. Detectives interviewed roughly 100 people in the months following the murders, and only in the fall did they become suspicious of the Haysoms’ daughter, Elizabeth, and her boyfriend, Jens Söring.Both were promising young students at UVA. Jens, the son of a German diplomat, was a Jefferson Scholar. Elizabeth had been educated at boarding schools in Europe. Their relationship had begun the previous fall. Jens and Elizabeth hardly seemed like the kind of people who would commit a double homicide. In any case, the pair had an alibi—they’d been in Washington, D.C., on the weekend of the murders. They had hotel receipts and movie-ticket stubs to prove it, along with a rental-car agreement.But a Bedford County investigator named Ricky Gardner took a closer look at that last item, and noticed a discrepancy in the mileage—429 miles beyond the distance from Charlottesville, where the car had been rented, to D.C. and back. Those excess miles would account for an additional round trip between Washington and the Haysom residence. Elizabeth and Jens offered an explanation for the excess mileage—getting lost—but its vagueness and implausibility invited further scrutiny; the drive from Charlottesville to D.C. is a straight shot on U.S. Route 29. Finally, in late September, the detectives asked Elizabeth to submit fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, which she provided. A few weeks later, facing the same request, Jens declined. Not long after, both fled the country, on separate flights.Seven months passed before a young couple, Christopher and Tara Lucy Noe, were detained in London at a Marks & Spencer department store, on suspicion of fraud. An in-house detective had witnessed them entering together with shopping bags, acting as if they didn’t know each other while inside, returning merchandise for cash, buying more clothes with checks at different registers, and then meeting up again out front. A call was made to Scotland Yard. Detectives Kenneth Beever and Terry Wright questioned the couple and obtained permission to search their apartment, which yielded evidence of a sophisticated check-fraud operation, together with wigs and other disguises. Authentic passports revealed the couple’s true identities: Jens Söring and Elizabeth Haysom. Detectives also found a large cache of letters the couple had written to each other and a joint travel diary that the pair had been keeping, which indicated that Jens and Elizabeth had been scamming their way across the globe, from Luxembourg to Thailand to the United Kingdom, using false IDs. More intriguing were references to a possible murder and the wiping of fingerprints. There was also a mention of “officers Reid and Gardner” in a place called Bedford.When asked about this, Jens at first claimed that the diary entries were ideas for a crime novel he was writing. But after a painstaking search of the many American towns named Bedford—this was in the pre-internet era—Detective Wright located Ricky Gardner in Virginia, and learned that Jens and Elizabeth were wanted in connection with the murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. Shortly thereafter, Jens confessed to the murders in multiple official interviews over the course of four days, giving a detailed account of how he had killed Elizabeth’s parents. The information relayed in his confessions corresponded with many aspects of the crime scene.Elizabeth confessed separately to participation in the murder scheme, admitting that she harbored a deep animosity toward her parents because of their controlling behavior and their disapproval of Jens. She said that she had planned the murders with him. According to her story, she had stayed in a hotel in Washington to help Jens fake an alibi, and he had driven to Lynchburg, killed the Haysoms, and then returned to the hotel. “It was my will that made him kill my parents,” she told the detectives, “and he wouldn’t have done it, I’m sure, if he hadn’t loved me so much and I he.”Elizabeth did not fight extradition, and in 1987, charged with two counts of accessory before the fact to capital murder, she pleaded guilty, forgoing a trial. During her sentencing hearing, Elizabeth condemned Jens as the killer and downplayed her own role in planning the crime. Any talk of killing her parents, she testified, had been merely “grotesque, childish fantasies”; she had failed to realize that Jens was taking the idea far more seriously. This claim was inconsistent with Elizabeth’s prior statements during interviews with detectives in London. Prosecutor James Updike’s cross-examination dug into this inconsistency, and by citing passages from her letters, he was able to damage her credibility, arguing that her original statements were truthful and that this new gloss was an attempt to lessen her culpability. Ultimately, Elizabeth was given two consecutive 45-year prison sentences for her role in the murder of her parents.Jens fought extradition, leading to a determination by the European Court of Human Rights, in 1989, that the potentially lengthy process of awaiting execution in the United States, were Jens to be convicted and sentenced to death, would violate Article III of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits inhumane and degrading treatment. Jens was extradited to Virginia only after the state agreed that it would not seek the death penalty.Jens stood trial in 1990, and to everyone’s surprise he pleaded not guilty. Hadn’t he already confessed? Yes, he said, but only because he had been trying to save Elizabeth from the death penalty by taking the blame himself—hoping that his status as a diplomat’s son would yield a relatively brief sentence as a youth offender in Germany. It was Elizabeth who had committed the murders, he now maintained. He had stayed behind in the hotel, thinking he was providing her with an alibi while she delivered a shipment of drugs—a long story involving a debt she supposedly owed to some dealers. Only later, he said, did he learn that she had killed her parents.In Jens’s telling, he was noble but naive, willing to risk prison time to save Elizabeth’s life. Could he really have been so in love that he’d help cover up a murder, lie to the police, flee the country, and then confess in her stead? His story was supported by the diagnoses of two psychiatrists who’d examined both Jens and Elizabeth while the pair were in custody in London. Elizabeth was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder; Jens was diagnosed with what his psychiatrists called folie à deux, now commonly known as shared psychosis, a rare disorder in which delusional beliefs are transferred from one person to another in a close relationship. And Elizabeth was the older and more sophisticated of the two.Updike, the prosecutor, made a case against Jens based on many pieces of evidence: the excess rental-car mileage; those diary entries and especially the letters, which revealed a deep hatred of the Haysoms, fantasies about their deaths, and hopes for an inheritance; Elizabeth’s testimony against Jens; and, of course, Jens’s multiple confessions.And Updike had something else. Although DNA analysis was not yet in use at the time, technicians had collected dozens of samples from bloodstains at the crime scene. Serology tests revealed that many of the samples tested as type A, a number of them tested as type AB, and two tested as type O. Derek Haysom had type A blood, and Nancy Haysom had type AB blood. Was it possible that the killer had been injured in the attack and left behind some of his or her own type O blood? The only suspect with type O blood was Jens Söring.The defense countered that 45 percent of the population has type O blood, but neither that nor the folie à deux defense was enough to sway the jury. After only four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Jens of two counts of first-degree murder. He was given two consecutive life sentences. Left: Elizabeth Haysom, 1987. Right: Jens Söring, 1990. (Dan Doughtie / AP; Sundance Selects) Jens appealed his conviction multiple times between 1990 and 1998, and the state courts ruled against him every time. Jens then appealed in a federal court, claiming that he had received ineffective assistance of counsel and that crucial evidence had not been shared with him during his trial. In 2000, the federal court also ruled against him. Eventually Jens appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which declined to hear his case.With that, his routes to freedom were closed, save for a pardon or parole, both of which were unlikely. But alongside his legal efforts, Jens had also been making literary ones. In 1995, with the help of a friend on the outside, he self-published an ebook called Mortal Thoughts, laying out his version of events. In his telling, Elizabeth comes across as manipulative, sexually mature, and caught in the grip of drugs; he, by contrast, was a young and sober virgin, helpless against her charms. Over the next few years, he wrote dozens of articles and several more books, including volumes on prison reform and Christian meditation, gaining him a handful of supporters, including a Catholic bishop. He slowly expanded what he called his “circle of friends,” finding advocates in the U.S. and in Germany. Some of them were critics of the U.S. penal system; they saw Jens as a model prisoner who had clearly reformed, even if he might be guilty. Others believed his story—that he had provided an alibi for the killer, yes, but that he was no killer himself.His big break came in 2007, when a German journalist, Karin Steinberger, wrote an article for the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung called “Forgotten Behind Bars,” portraying Jens as a victim of flawed and brutal American justice, and endorsing his claim that he had confessed only to protect Elizabeth. Jens’s circle of friends began to expand rapidly. Supporters organized a document archive, maintained a website, managed social-media profiles, and sent information to journalists to lay out their case. They noted, for instance, that the presence of type O blood was hardly conclusive, and they pointed to certain mistakes in Jens’s confessions. He’d gotten Nancy Haysom’s outfit wrong, for instance, and incorrectly described the position of the bodies. This could be seen as consistent with his claim that he had not been at the scene himself but was only repeating what Elizabeth had told him afterward.The strongest argument that emerged in Jens’s favor appeared to come from DNA evidence. This was new, and it was ultimately what drew me into his corner. The DNA evidence arrived in two stages. The first came in 2009, when tests were conducted on 42 evidence swabs that had been collected at the crime scene in 1985. After more than two decades, many had degraded so badly that they yielded no information, but a significant number provided usable results. And none of those samples produced DNA that was consistent with Jens’s. That didn’t prove him innocent, but it gave heart to his supporters. In 2010, the outgoing Virginia governor, during his last days in office, agreed to transfer Jens to Germany, but the action was rescinded by his successor.[From the June 2016 issue: The false promise of DNA testing]In 2012, the president of the European Parliament advocated for Jens to be transferred to a prison back home. That was followed by a request for extradition from more than 100 members of the Bundestag. Then, in 2016, came the documentary Killing for Love, the work of the journalist Karin Steinberger and the filmmaker Marcus Vetter. It was nominated for a major documentary prize in Germany and picked up by Sundance. The following year, Christian Wulff, a former president of Germany, petitioned the Virginia parole board to transfer Jens to his native country. Angela Merkel, then the German chancellor, reportedly lobbied President Barack Obama on Jens’s behalf.The Commonwealth of Virginia was unmoved, and Jens was repeatedly denied parole. But in 2016, Jens’s postconviction attorney, Steven Rosenfield, had an insight that pushed the DNA analysis to a second stage. The insight involved looking at the 2009 DNA test and the 1985 serology test side by side. The two blood swabs that had tested as type O in 1985 had both produced male DNA inconsistent with Jens’s. Two other swabs had tested as type AB—and were assumed to have come from Nancy Haysom—but analysis showed the presence of male DNA, and it was also inconsistent with Jens’s. Based on these facts, Rosenfield and two experts—Thomas McClintock, a forensic scientist at Liberty University, in Lynchburg, and Moses Schanfield, a forensic scientist at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C.—maintained that Jens could not have been the source of the type O blood (because the DNA from the samples was inconsistent with his) and that Nancy Haysom could not have been the source of the type AB blood (because the DNA from the samples was male). Rosenfield made the logical inference that the attack had been carried out by two unknown male suspects—one with type O blood and one with type AB blood. Presumably, both had suffered some sort of injury in the attack, enough to leave blood residue.It was a compelling theory, and soon a host of other high-profile advocates came to Jens’s defense, including the novelist John Grisham, the actor Martin Sheen, and my friend Jason Flom, a founding board member of the Innocence Project. Even Chuck Reid, the Bedford County detective, expressed doubts about Jens’s conviction. Rosenfield filed a petition for an immediate and absolute pardon. The petition was denied.It was around this time, in early 2019, that I first became aware of Jens Söring. In affiliation with SundanceTV, I had begun to host a podcast called The Truth About True Crime, which I co-produced and co-wrote with my husband, Christopher Robinson. Each season corresponded with a documentary on the Sundance channel, and for Season 3 we were asked to produce a series that tied in with Killing for Love, the German documentary about the Haysom murders. I had told my partners at Sundance that I would host the podcast only if I could form my own opinion about the various cases we covered, even if it contradicted the viewpoint of the associated documentaries. Sundance was fine with that. I went into the Haysom case with no preconceptions.In preparing my podcast, I watched Steinberger and Vetter’s documentary. I also read Jens’s 2017 book, A Far, Far Better Thing. I grew sympathetic toward Jens, but the opinions of McClintock and Schanfield were what solidified my belief in his innocence. Their forensic credentials were solid, and both had written letters in support of Jens. I spoke with McClintock for the podcast. He was convinced that the type O blood couldn’t have come from Jens and that the DNA revealed the presence of two unknown men. Jens, he believed, was likely innocent. At the very least, if the DNA evidence had been available at his original trial, Jens almost certainly would not have been convicted.For the podcast, I went on to speak with Andy Griffiths, a former detective from Sussex, England, and an expert on police interrogations. In a 2016 report written for Jens’s team, Griffiths had pointed out that Jens had been questioned without an attorney present, and that his statements to the police tracked a pattern in false confessions by young suspects: They often take the blame to protect others. While some saw Jens’s detailed knowledge of the crime scene as evidence of his guilt, Griffiths focused on inconsistencies that he believed the detectives should have pursued further. As Griffiths saw it, Jens, in his police interviews, was either looking for clues from the detectives as to what to say “or he has derived his crime-scene information from a third party.” He speculated that the “third party in this case would obviously be Elizabeth.”The police had also dismissed a lead about two local “drifters,” as they were described, named William Shifflett and Robert Albright, who were later arrested for a separate murder that occurred in a neighboring county around the same time as the Haysom killings. Could they be the two unknown males suggested by Rosenfield and his team?In my own mind, some of the most convincing evidence came in the form of Jens himself—that is, from the kind of person he seemed to be. I interviewed him many times in the course of producing the podcast, each tinny phone call limited to 20 minutes until the female voice of the prison phone system (“You have one minute remaining”) signaled the end of our time. Jens jokingly referred to that voice as “my girlfriend,” a rather dark bit of humor, given that the only real girlfriend he’d ever had was Elizabeth. Jens was educated and witty, like a professor you’d meet at a dinner party. He was also desperate, grasping for any hope of escape. I acutely understood how I, with my particular and very public history, offered him hope by way of example.In the end, Chris and I produced an eight-part podcast for Sundance about the case. We even butted heads with the network when we refused to play by the typical rules of the whodunit genre—that is, holding back the reveal—and insisted on framing this story as a wrongful conviction from the very first beat.Freedom finally came for Jens, but not the way he thought it would. In November 2019, I was in the baking aisle of a grocery store when my phone rang and a recorded voice announced a prepaid call from an inmate in the Virginia Department of Corrections. The first words Jens uttered had a muted jubilance I’d never heard from him before. “This is the last time I’ll ever call you from a prison phone,” he said.Jens had not been pardoned. He had been granted parole. Apparently, political pressure had finally worked. Elizabeth had been granted parole too: The authorities could not release a convicted double murderer while refusing to release someone who had pleaded guilty to accessory charges. The board’s official reasoning was based on the youth of the pair at the time of the offense, their “institutional adjustment” while behind bars, and the amount of time served. Both were to be permanently expelled from the country. Elizabeth, then 55, was deported to Canada, where she held citizenship. Jens, then 53, was deported to Germany. In legal terms, he was still a convicted double murderer. But he was free.Chris and I were eager to meet Jens in person. When I first arrived home from Italy, after four years in prison, what I’d needed, more than words or letters or welcome-home gifts, was hugs from my family and friends, who had been flattened into photographs and distant voices. I wanted to give Jens the longest hug. The pandemic, unfortunately, crushed any immediate hope of traveling to Germany.Jens and I spoke often on the phone, and I became something of a mentor. It was a strange mentorship, given that he was so much older than me and had spent many more years in prison. But for the past decade, I’d been struggling to rebuild my life in freedom, and had had to do so under the eye of the media, a path on which Jens was just starting out. I gave him advice on interview requests, on therapy, on public speaking, on dating, on self-care, on taking his time. My own instinct had been to rush back into my life to make up for all the years I’d missed. That led me to trust the wrong people at times, and at other times to avoid seeking help. I didn’t want Jens to make the same mistakes.[Read: Amanda Knox and the 21st-century witch hunt]Jens was particularly concerned about a man named Andrew Hammel, whom he described as a persistent troll. He’s trying to destroy my life, Jens told me. He keeps writing article after article saying I’m guilty. I’d experienced attacks like these. To this day, there is a devoted community of Amanda Knox “guilters” who run websites arguing that I’m a murderer. In the past decade and a half, I’ve been subjected to sensational treatment in the press in all its variety: in the tabloids, in books, in documentaries, in made-for-TV movies. Not long ago, I wrote an article for this magazine, “Who Owns Amanda Knox?,” reflecting on how the film Stillwater—a loose interpretation of my own story, made without my consent—reinforced an image of me as guilty. The stigma of a murder conviction never goes away, even after you’ve been exonerated. I told Jens to ignore Hammel; the people who mattered were those who believed in his innocence. I told him to enjoy his freedom and not be consumed by the battle to prove every last skeptic wrong. I’d had to accept this myself.In November 2021, as the pandemic abated, Chris and I flew to Hamburg with our four-month-old daughter to meet Jens and do a follow-up interview with him for our new podcast, Labyrinths, which told stories of people who’d felt lost or trapped and how they’d found their way again. It was an emotional few days. We strolled together through Hamburg, and Jens showed us his first-ever apartment and the decor he had carefully chosen; after three decades in the ugliness of prison, he’d embraced the chance to make his own space beautiful. He reflected on the years and opportunities he’d lost, and teared up while holding my infant daughter in his arms.While in Germany, I also sat for an interview with Charlotte Theile, a German reporter, to talk about my case. She was familiar with Labyrinths, and through correspondence, I’d grown to trust her acumen and thoroughness. A few months later, she reached out and said that she had listened to the new Labyrinths episode we’d put out, “The Ultimate Putz,” in which Jens reflected on how unwise he had been to try to take the blame for Elizabeth’s actions. Theile had then gone back and listened to the full season about Jens that we’d made for the Truth About True Crime podcast, which she said she’d enjoyed.But, she went on, she had then decided to listen to a new German podcast, Das System Söring (released in English as The Soering System in late 2023). The podcast, produced by Alice Brauner and Johanna Behre, featured interviews with Andrew Hammel, the man Jens had warned me about, and with Terry Wright, the British detective who’d taken Jens’s confessions in London. The “system” of the title referred to the way Jens had cultivated a perception of innocence and a network of supporters. Theile told me that she had approached the podcast with skepticism but ultimately had come away believing that Jens was very likely guilty.She urged me to read the Wright Report, a 454-page document compiled by Wright and officially titled A True Report on the Facts of the Investigation of the Murders of Derek and Nancy Haysom. It had been made available in January 2020, after my original podcast devoted to Jens’s case came out, on the website of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, where it appeared alongside an article by Hammel. This was the first I’d heard about it.“I know that Jens Söring is a friend of yours,” Theile wrote. “But for me it just doesn’t feel right that you linked your case so closely to Jens Söring. He is not a version of you that got to spend more time in prison. His case is completely different from yours. He lived in London as a criminal, wearing fake beards and stealing from banks”—this last being a reference to the check-fraud scheme that had ultimately led to his arrest. “He had lots of criminal energy. And from what I can see, he is still trying to manipulate people.”I did not dig into the Wright Report immediately. I was raising a child and working on other projects. Jens was already paroled and living as a free man in Germany. Looking further into his case would have meant less time advocating for potentially innocent people still in prison. In the meantime, Jens was telling me to avoid Hammel at all costs. Beware, he may try to reach out to you. Don’t respond. Hammel, he said, was an obsessive troll, a crackpot conspiracy theorist. I had grown to trust Jens, so I took his word for it.But eventually, I did confront the Wright Report, prepared to encounter what I was certain would be half-truths and mischaracterizations. That isn’t what I found.When Terry Wright learned, in 2016, that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the crime scene, and that the DNA that had been recovered seemed to indicate the presence of two unknown males, he was curious about the findings and open to revising his opinion. He began reviewing the 30-year-old case, thinking that if the evidence really did support Jens’s innocence, he would write a letter to the governor of Virginia, urging him to issue a pardon. But what Wright found only further convinced him of Jens’s guilt. His report goes into every element of the case, with a particular focus on Jens’s confessions as well as on the DNA.Wright argued that the DNA results were not exonerating after all. Specifically, they did not indicate the presence of two unknown males, which Jens’s defenders had come to accept as a basic premise. Wright made three fundamental points.First, the evidence samples in the Haysom case were not vials of blood, like you’d find in a hospital lab. They were cotton swabs that had been rubbed on bloodstained surfaces, and the swabs would have picked up other material, such as skin cells, saliva, and sweat. The testing done on these swabs in 2009 could not indicate where the DNA had come from, only the fact of its presence. The DNA from the blood may have been too degraded to capture.Second, although the DNA from the swabs was degraded and partial, the results that were usable appeared to be consistent with one another. Which meant that although the various swabs held different blood types, the DNA on them appeared to come from a single male.Third, the consistent male-DNA profile was highly likely to belong to Derek Haysom. A formal DNA sample had never been collected from Haysom—this was 1985—but that conclusion made sense. The killings had taken place in his house, and his skin cells, saliva, sweat, and other nonblood DNA would have been everywhere, and picked up by the swabs wherever they were rubbed.If Wright’s argument was correct—that the DNA on the swabs hadn’t necessarily come from the blood on the swabs—it meant that the type O blood could still very well have come from Jens. Crucially, it also meant that there was no evidence to support the idea that two unknown males had been present at the crime scene.I was not equipped to assess whether Wright’s theory was plausible, and even if it was, it didn’t prove that Jens was guilty. But the very idea of an alternate interpretation of the DNA shook my confidence.I should have known better than to give the original interpretation such weight, because of the lessons from my own case. Once the prosecution claimed that it had DNA proof of my guilt—my DNA on the handle of a knife, Meredith’s DNA on the blade—every piece of exonerating evidence was cast aside by the jury and the media as irrelevant: DNA doesn’t lie. Well, it did when it came to the accusations against me. Independent experts eventually determined that the supposed DNA evidence was the result of lab contamination. Without it, the evidence in my favor was overwhelming.Yet I had made a similar mistake in Jens’s case, albeit in reverse. Once I’d learned that the DNA excluded Jens as a source of the type O blood—and then, more important, that forensic evidence pointed to a pair of unknown men as the killers—I’d found reasons to discount every piece of evidence pointing to his guilt. I’ve long been aware of how cognitive bias affects one’s thinking. We all bring preconceptions to the information we encounter. That’s why it’s best if a fingerprint analyst isn’t told that a suspect has confessed, and why a medical examiner should not be made aware of witness testimony or DNA evidence. I’ve advocated for practices such as these, but I failed to heed similar precautions. The supposed DNA exoneration of Jens Söring, which had been my starting point, became my sole point of reference. If the DNA evidence proved his innocence, then logic dictated that everything else, no matter how circumstantially damning, had to have some rational explanation. But now, reading the Wright Report—and with DNA findings removed from consideration—I was seeing all of that evidence with fresh eyes.From the very first moment, there were signs pointing to Jens, not Elizabeth, as the actual killer. When the detectives had initially asked Elizabeth and Jens for fingerprints, footprints, and blood samples, Elizabeth had complied. Jens had stalled, offering a rambling excuse about his diplomatic status, and how being involved in a homicide investigation could compromise his scholarship and lead to deportation. Then, a few days later, after wiping all the fingerprints from his car and apartment and emptying his bank account, he’d fled the country.The confessions were particularly troubling. Though it was true that Jens had not had an attorney present—as Andy Griffiths noted—he had repeatedly been given British and American legal warnings, and he’d explicitly waived his right to an attorney both verbally and in written statements. (When Jens claimed on appeal that he’d been denied access to a lawyer, the court determined that there was “clear and convincing evidence” to the contrary.) Jens had confessed to the murders many times and on multiple days, often speaking to the detectives at his own request. He had done so in front of British detectives, American investigators, and a German prosecutor. The story he told was highly specific. He explained how Derek and Nancy had let him into their home and offered him a drink; how he’d confronted them about their disapproval of his relationship with Elizabeth; and how he’d snapped and killed them, even demonstrating how he’d come up behind Derek to slit his throat. He described how he’d fled the scene and hit a dog with the car as he sped away; how he’d thrown away his bloody clothes; how he’d returned to the Washington, D.C., hotel. He even told the detectives that hotel security-camera footage should be able to confirm this last point. (As it happened, the hotel cameras provided only live feeds and did not save a backup record.) Jens knew who had been sitting where at the dinner table, what the Haysoms had been eating and drinking, and how they’d been killed. He even showed the detectives a scar on his hand from a wound he said he’d suffered during the attack.I felt particularly sick recalling that detail. At his trial, prosecutors had produced eyewitness testimony that Jens wore a bandage on one hand at the Haysoms’ funeral, corroborating that bit of his confession. In his defense, Jens had unspooled a counter-narrative—that he’d injured his hand in a car accident. Believing that the DNA findings exonerated Jens, I took this explanation as fact. In other ways, too, I had been predisposed to dismiss potential evidence of Jens’s guilt, especially his confessions. A false confession had helped seal my own guilty verdict, and a part of me had felt vindicated to find further evidence that confessions were not a gold standard. But without the exculpatory DNA, I began to see how many reasons there were to believe that Jens’s confessions were genuine.Jens did not recant his confession immediately, the way I had recanted my false confession hours after I was released from the interrogation room. He kept to his story for four years, until 1990, when his trial was set to begin. Explaining away the confessions had been a huge challenge for his defense. In pretrial hearings, Jens accused Detective Beever, in London, of threatening to harm Elizabeth if he didn’t confess. That story wasn’t supported by evidence, so Jens pivoted, finally landing on the story he has kept to ever since: that he lied to save Elizabeth from the death penalty. In light of all this, the minor errors he’d made—Nancy Haysom’s outfit (he got the right color but the wrong type of garment), the position of the bodies (he got the right rooms and positions but the wrong orientations)—were likely attributable to simple memory lapses in recalling the event more than a year later.The love letters and diary entries highlighted in the Wright Report were also damning. I am by nature wary of such evidence. My own accusers pointed to a short story I’d written in college as proof that I harbored rape fantasies. But the letters and diary entries weren’t creative-writing assignments. In letters written before the murders, Jens had written comments such as “My God, I’ve got the dinner scene planned out.” And this: “I can see myself depriving people of their property quite easily—your dad, for instance. Even more easily can I see myself depriving many souls (if they exist) of their physical bodies (which might not exist, either) in the course of fulfilling my many, many excessively bizarre sexual fantasies.” Jens speculated that he and Elizabeth could use a spate of local burglaries for cover: “That there have been many burglaries in the area opens the possibility for another one with the same general circumstances, only this time the unfortunate owners …”I had not seen these letters and diary entries until reading the Wright Report. Believing that the DNA evidence exonerated Jens, I’d found no reason to dig through circumstantial evidence like this. Now I couldn’t look away.Perhaps most frightening of all was this passage: “I’ve felt this, I’m feeling it now inside me, this need to plant one’s foot in somebody’s face, to always crush … I have not explored the side of me that wishes to crush to any real extent—I have yet to kill, possibly the ultimate act of crushing.”As I read those words, Jens’s face flashed in my mind, his gentle smile, his eyes looking down at my infant daughter in his arms.My inquiries led me next to Jens’s biggest critic, Andrew Hammel. I had at first assumed that Hammel must be part of the niche online movement of “innocence fraud” activists. I had a personal window into this community, a loose cluster of podcasters and YouTubers who seem to believe that Innocence Project lawyers and advocates are working to free killers because they’re hopelessly deluded. “You, of all people, should be distrustful of reporters,” Jens had written in our final email exchange. “And you, of all people, should be distrustful of reports and documents produced by people who are strongly motivated to prove a defendant’s guilt.”But when I actually read Hammel’s writing, including his book Martyr or Murderer: Jens Soering, the Media, and the Truth, he didn’t come across as the troll I was expecting. He was more of a provocateur. Of course, that didn’t mean his arguments were correct. But he seemed to be a logical thinker and a thorough researcher who engaged with evidence in good faith. I asked if I could interview him for Labyrinths. Jens Söring in Germany after his parole and extradition, 2019 (Daniel Roland / Getty) Hammel, I learned, was a lawyer who had done death-penalty defense work for a decade before turning to academia and journalism. He was intimately aware of the efforts of the Innocence Project. He told me that, in his view, debunking fraudulent innocence claims was essential to the work of exonerating people who really were innocent: It provided a record of hard-edged credibility.Hammel made a compelling case for Jens’s guilt, his arguments mostly tracking those in the Wright Report. He also provided important context for the DNA testing. The analysis done in 2009 had been ordered by Virginia as part of a review of thousands of cases. It had not been requested by Jens or his defense counsel. In fact, Jens had refused to file the petition necessary to do more DNA testing in his case. As Hammel saw it, that is what you would expect from someone who worries that DNA testing would be incriminating rather than exonerating.Hammel also told me about the work of two journalists in Charlottesville, Courteney Stuart and Rachel Ryan. They had made a podcast, released after mine, called Small Town, Big Crime. Through records requests, they had obtained DNA profiles from the supposed alternate suspects in the Haysom murders, Shifflett and Albright. They had then asked Jens’s own expert, Tom McClintock, to compare their DNA to the DNA recovered from the Haysom scene. He did, and found the samples to be inconsistent. That ruled out Shifflett and Albright. “I was bummed out, I’m telling you,” McClintock acknowledged on the Small Town, Big Crime podcast. Those specific findings about Shifflett and Albright lent weight to Terry Wright’s broader evaluation of the DNA evidence—that it failed to substantiate any two-unknown-males theory.Hammel gave me one more lead, and it involved someone Jens had never mentioned: Dan E. Krane, a forensic scientist and biology professor at Wright State University, in Ohio. Krane was a DNA expert who in 2018 had participated in a special segment about Jens’s case on 20/20—a segment that leaned in favor of Jens. He had confirmed on the program that none of Jens’s DNA had been found at the scene, a simple statement of fact. But Krane’s expert views, Hammel told me, aligned with those of Terry Wright on one key point. I decided I needed to speak with Krane.In advance of our conversation, conducted on Zoom, Krane forwarded to me a report he had written in 2017 that began by laying out his credentials. He had published more than 50 scholarly papers on subjects such as the use of DNA typing in forensic science. He had testified in more than 100 criminal proceedings that involved forensic DNA. He was the author of a widely used textbook on bioinformatics.“Saliva is a remarkably good source of DNA,” Krane told me. “A milliliter of saliva will have 10 times as much DNA in it as a milliliter of blood. We’re transferring saliva DNA all over the place all the time. If Derek Haysom had sneezed at some point in the past year, before the crime occurred, I’d frankly be surprised if you didn’t find his DNA.” Krane noted that there is no possible test to determine whether the swabs in the Haysom case had picked up not only blood but other sources of DNA. Odds are, he said, that they would have. He went on: “Just because a sample tested positive for blood and you got DNA from that sample, that doesn’t mean that the DNA came from the blood that was in the sample.” Krane believed, as Wright had surmised, that the DNA recovered from the old crime-scene samples was likely Derek Haysom’s.He gave no credence to the theory advanced by Jens and his experts—linking the DNA to the blood itself and pointing a finger at two unknown male contributors. To begin with, Krane didn’t have confidence in the original serology testing; there were discrepancies in some of the notes. But focus just on the DNA—on the fact that the parts that could be compared from the various recovered samples all matched up. The two-unknown-males theory, Krane said, requires a combination of virtually impossible events: Unknown male No. 1 (the supposed source of the type O blood) would have to have DNA consistent with that of unknown male No. 2 (the supposed source of the type AB blood), and both of their DNA profiles would also have to be consistent with that of Derek Haysom (the source of the type A blood). “That these three people would have the same combination of alleles—that’s just staggeringly unlikely,” Krane told me.Could Elizabeth have committed the murders while Jens waited at the hotel, unawares—the scenario Jens had spun? That raised its own set of questions. If that’s what happened, then where did the type O blood come from? If it was from an accomplice, who was that person? And what possible reason could Elizabeth have to protect that person at her and Jens’s expense all these decades later?Elizabeth. When I first started researching the Haysom case, I had identified with Elizabeth, up to a point. She had been cast by Jens and by the media as a manipulative seductress, as I had been portrayed. I recalled feeling disconcerted when I saw Elizabeth described that way in one of Jens’s books. She and Jens have not been in communication and have not seen each other since she testified at Jens’s trial—naming Jens as her parents’ killer and confessing that she had put him up to it. From prison, Elizabeth wrote a column for a local paper called “Glimpses From the Inside”—reflective, diary-like accounts about her own incarceration and life in general. I wanted to speak with Elizabeth, so I wrote her a letter in 2019. She responded from prison and seemed open to talking, but once I told her that I was also talking with Jens, she broke off communication. She has apparently been living in Canada since her release, and she appears to have changed her name. I have been unable to make contact. I wish I could speak with her now.I had given Jens a large platform, and in advocating for his innocence, I had also advocated for Elizabeth’s guilt as the person who had wielded the knife. I had contributed to her vilification as a liar and as the actual killer. It was Elizabeth, after all, who pleaded guilty as an accessory to capital murder. She had begged forgiveness and expressed deep remorse. Her paternal half-siblings have forgiven her, according to a 2023 Netflix documentary about the case, Till Murder Do Us Part: Soering vs. Haysom. Reflecting on all of this, I realized that I owed Elizabeth an apology, and that I owed the families of Derek and Nancy Haysom, and my own audience, more transparency about how my thinking had evolved. In an episode of Labyrinths I released with Andrew Hammel in September 2023, I retracted my claims about Jens’s innocence and said frankly what I now believe: We may never know definitively whether Jens killed Derek and Nancy Haysom, but the evidence incriminating him is hard to rebut—his repeated official confessions; his own words, in letters and diaries; his bandaged hand at the funeral; Elizabeth’s testimony. Meanwhile, the exonerating evidence has evaporated.Unsurprisingly, the release of my interview with Hammel caused strife among advocates who still support Jens. Some of them are unwilling to reexamine their beliefs about what the DNA evidence actually shows in this case. Some worry that I have damaged the innocence movement by giving critics a platform. And after 33 years in prison, hasn’t Jens been through enough? I do agree that paroling Jens and Elizabeth, now both close to 60, was the right decision: More than three decades in prison is serious punishment for a serious crime. But even if my friends in the innocence community never come around to my view of Jens and the Haysom murders, I hope that they will understand why I felt compelled to explain my position—and why innocence advocates need to be forthright when they believe that claims of innocence do not hold up. My friendships with the wrongly convicted have been as important to me as my relationships with my own family. With Jens, my yearning for a connection had influenced my judgment. I am left with a disturbing question: Had Jens created a character he knew I couldn’t help but embrace? I fear I know the answer, but even now, I don’t want it to be true.​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

In 1939, Ernest Hemingway left a large collection of his belongings—the manuscript of his earliest short story, childhood trinkets, memorabilia from his time at war, intimate letters, books, and more—in a storeroom behind Sloppy Joe’s, a bar he frequented in Key West that was owned by some friends of his. When Penn State University’s Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway acquired the items in 2021, it represented the most significant trove of Hemingway memorabilia discovered in generations. But not everything went to Penn State. Some materials found at Sloppy Joe’s instead entered the rare-book marketplace, including 40 books from Hemingway’s personal collection. I know this because I have them.As modernist rare-book collectors, my father and I decided to add these works to our collection when we came across the listing. They include Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, inscribed to Hemingway by his “loving mother” (with whom he had a contentious relationship, according to his letters, and whom he blamed for his father’s suicide); his high-school debate textbook, ornamented with doodles of a tree and a snake; and a war novel holding a pencil-written note to himself—a reminder to compose a story about the “death of Lieut. Taylor with flu in Milan.” These books stretch from Hemingway’s youngest years to 1939, when he turned 40; they not only illuminate Hemingway’s reading habits, but they also date particular books he owned to certain periods of his life.As I fell down a rabbit hole investigating whether Hemingway ultimately wrote a story about a Lieut. Taylor (a mystery I’m still trying to solve), I wondered about which other literary pearls are housed in private collections.Just because a book is a first edition does not always mean it is “rare”—the same goes for the old book on your shelf that was published back in 1857. A book’s demand, condition, publishing history, whether it is signed or inscribed, and even the timing of when a book enters the market are all factors that affect its value. A dust jacket–less first edition of The Great Gatsby is not as rare as a copy wearing the famous dust jacket. The former commands, on average, $4,500 to $8,000 (mostly depending on its condition), while a copy with an unrestored dust jacket is likely to command at least $100,000. Even rarer is an inscribed copy—the most recent of which sold in September for £226,800 at Christie’s, or about $283,000. (This same copy had sold at Bonhams for $191,000 in 2015, demonstrating how its value skyrocketed in less than a decade.) I turn to The Great Gatsby not only because it’s arguably the most famous rare book in terms of 20th-century first editions, but also to illustrate that its value has the capacity to vary, and that a truly one-of-a-kind book involves more than merely being a first edition with a dust jacket. The copy that sold at Christie’s belonged to Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, whose fame potentially played into the book’s value. But that value comes primarily from the quality and nature of Fitzgerald’s inscription, which was presented to a friend, Harold Goldman, whom Fitzgerald refers to as “the original ‘Gatsby’” in his note. The cover of a debate book on which Hemingway drew a tree and a snake (Courtesy of the author) [Read: A new way to read Gatsby]In addition to being a collector and an obsessive reader, I’m also an academic—meaning I understand acutely how crucial it is for people to be able to explore literary history through primary documents, and how even the smallest marginalia may carry immense meaning. Does the copy of The Great Gatsby signed to Goldman belong in an institution, such as the New York Public Library or a university’s special collections, where the public can see and access it, whether it be for the pleasure of viewership or for scholarship? (Conversations on the ethics of private ownership permeate the fine-art world too, wherein wealthy individuals—such as Madonna and Jay-Z—own Basquiats, Warhols, and Picassos.) Rare-book dealers will tell you that private collections involve less red tape than institutions—bureaucratic hurdles to access that aren’t in the public interest. For example, in libraries, uncataloged books can lie untouched for months, or even longer, because of a librarian’s other responsibilities or a lack of resources and time. For these reasons, donations or newly purchased books may not be as readily available as one may think. At the same time, Rebecca Romney, a co-founder of the rare-book firm Type Punch Matrix and the rare-books consultant for the TV show Pawn Stars, told me that “it’s not uncommon for collectors to have open invitations for scholars to come to their collection. It’s more the rule than the exception. This is the whole point”—collectors want to share their collections.The dilemma regarding the ethical placement of a rare book isn’t convoluted for Tom Lecky, who was the head of the rare-books and manuscripts department at the auction firm Christie’s for 17 years and now runs Riverrun Books & Manuscripts. When I mentioned the Hemingway manuscript of “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” that sold for $248,000 at Christie’s back in 2000, he pointed out that institutions had had “every bit the opportunity to buy it as a private individual.” Other singular works that have been up for auction are James Joyce’s “Circe” manuscript, Sylvia Plath’s personally annotated Bible, a serial printing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era newspaper, and the proofs of that first Great Gatsby dust jacket. In each case, I was captivated by their fate. The National Library of Ireland bought Joyce’s manuscript for $1.5 million and digitized it; Plath’s Bible went to an undisclosed buyer for about $11,000; so did the newspapers, for $126,000. Nobody placed a winning bid for the Gatsby cover art.For Lecky, the ethical question we should be asking isn’t whether institutions should acquire rare books instead of collectors, but what happens when “a private owner owns something that no one knows that they have.” Lecky, like many others in the trade, works to dispel myths about how private collections work. Private collections tend to be temporary and books often jump between hands, but for the time that a collector owns a book, in my view, they should make efforts to share it. “Most collectors don’t think of it as possession but caretaking,” Lecky said. “They’re a piece of the chain in the provenance, not the end of it.”Historically, private collectors have formed the foundations of institutions. “There are entire libraries and museums that were created by collectors,” Barbara Heritage, the director of collections, exhibitions, and scholarly initiatives at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, told me—the Morgan Library & Museum; the Getty Research Institute; the Folger Shakespeare Library; and the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, to name a few.Many rare books, manuscripts, and items in the collections at these institutions are donated by or purchased from private collectors. In other cases, a donor supplies the funds for an institution to make general or specific acquisitions. If you’ve visited the permanent “Polonsky Exhibition of the New York Public Library’s Treasures,” you might have seen one-of-a-kind items on rotation, such as an early manuscript draft of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a lock of Mary Shelley’s hair, and a page from the manuscript of an unpublished chapter of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. These pieces were “acquired through the generosity of” a donor or were donated by a collector.Collectors tend to donate or sell their collections to institutions if they don’t put them back into the marketplace via auction houses or rare-book sellers. “Collecting isn’t mere shopping,” Heritage said. “The best collecting requires vision, passion, knowledge, and creativity—and, above all, persistence.” Collecting, for Heritage, has the capacity to be a form of advocacy through the creation of knowledge and the ability to tie together strands of knowledge that otherwise couldn’t be done unless one has a lifelong devotion to a particular subject. Some collectors have honed niche collections that have since been deposited in libraries (either wholly or partially). Walter O. Evans collected Black artwork and literature that now constitute mainstay collections—such as the Walter O. Evans Collection of Frederick Douglass and Douglass Family Papers and the Walter O. Evans collection of James Baldwin—at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. The Douglass papers in Evans’s collection have been digitized so that scholars, students, and the public can access them.[Read: The way we write history has changed]Or consider the archives created from the collections of Lisa Unger Baskin, who sold her trove of women-related ephemera—including thousands of books dating from 1240 to the late 20th century—to Duke University. Unger Baskin’s political activism is reflected in her collection of materials created by women. She told me how, for example, she priced herself out of the market because she participated in the creation of a market that values women’s work. With a sharp eye, she bought many materials that others didn’t pay attention to, such as Charlotte Brontë’s needlework, which she scooped up in London for £60. Before selling to Duke, Unger Baskin considered four other universities. Their financial offers were obviously salient, but she liked that Duke promised to make her assemblage a teaching collection, so she accepted its proposal and sold everything to the school, including a desk that was designed and used by Virginia Woolf. Because Unger Baskin continues to collect, she has a contract with Duke stipulating that the rest of her collection will also go there.Sammy Jay, a senior literature specialist at Peter Harrington Rare Books, told me that collectors are “scholars in a hybrid sense.” For Stuart A. Rose—the namesake of the Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library at Emory University—amassing materials is synonymous with sharing them with the public. He chose to donate much of his collection to his alma mater rather than put it back into the marketplace. (Like Unger Baskin, he’s still collecting. Unlike her, he has yet to make up his mind about what he’ll do with the materials he continues to acquire.) Today, he opens his home to classes at Ohio State University and says he has never turned down a scholar who wants to reference a book in his collection, which includes a copy of The Great Gatsby inscribed by Fitzgerald, one of the first 100 copies of Ulysses signed by Joyce, and what he claims is the most extensive private collection of Jane Austen’s corpus.Though all private collections are at risk of theft, flooding, and fire, collectors argue that these threats are no different from those that institutions face. Private collections tend to have less traffic and less handling, and this limited exposure can help with preservation. Yet preservation may be vulnerable when selling publicly. As Lecky pointed out, “A collection can be formed over 50 years and then suddenly it goes to auction and there are five days of auction exhibit, and in those five days, those books are handled more than they’ve been in the last 50 years.” When rare books are in institutions, Rose believes they should be on view, so that the public can see “what makes a book great.”Rose’s exhibition will be the first on view at one of the two new exhibition halls at the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, D.C., set to be unveiled in June. Other private collectors have taken a less traditional approach to presenting their collections. The artistic director Kim Jones made Woolf’s Orlando a central theme in Fendi’s spring/summer women’s collection in 2021, and used Jack Kerouac’s On the Road as the basis for Dior’s men’s fall 2022 fashion show. Both fashion shows were complemented by exhibits featuring the books that were cornerstones of the collections.If one believes that literary relics should be held only in public environments, then trying to define the ideal private collector is a contradiction in terms. But in practice, access can be complicated. Consider again the inscribed copy of The Great Gatsby, signed by Fitzgerald to his “original Gatsby.” As part of the auction, Christie’s included pictures of the book and its inscription in the listing, along with a detailed description. Though private collecting may rob someone of an unmediated experience with that book, the sale leaves a trail of photos, making it arguably more accessible than it would be in either a private or public collection. Perhaps book enthusiasts should focus less on ownership and more on establishing a broad cultural responsibility to share unique books and manuscripts, be it in the form of a public exhibition, digitization, or appointment-only home visits.At the same time, the rare-books market is evolving as the medium itself changes, which is seen in the popularity of audiobooks and ebooks. Have we, or are we about to, hit a civilizational point in which all writers from today onward will not compose handwritten manuscripts and letters? Will the only manuscripts and letters that circulate the marketplace be pre-2020? Are visible drafts—which allow us to trace an author’s structuring and even restructuring of a novel—a thing of the past, as the errors in our online documents are constantly replaced by spell-check and are saved over and over again, erasing the history of a truly original document? One can project that the marketplace will begin to include technological objects, which will come at exorbitant costs. If bundles of Joan Didion’s empty notebooks sold for $11,000 apiece and her Celine faux-tortoiseshell sunglasses were purchased for $27,000 in 2022, what price tag will be put on an author’s cellphone or laptop, if they choose to sell them? Salman Rushdie, for example, sold his personal archive to Emory, including a Mac desktop, three Mac laptops, and an external hard drive.The ceaseless evolution of technology, the proliferation of cheaply produced paperbacks, and a change in what we consider to be literary objects will undoubtedly affect the future of the trade and the contents of our archives. Will time reveal a pushback in adopting technology in the writing process, or will note-taking software, email, and SMS expand our understanding and the breadth of a personal archive? Lately I have been thinking about how and when I will have to rehome my own collection of rare books and how I see my career unfolding in the rare-book world. As I contemplate these questions, I know that my guiding principle will be accessibility. And in the meantime, I plan to accept an invitation to bring my Hemingways to Penn State University to be digitized.

President Joe Biden won a decisive Electoral College victory in 2020 by restoring old Democratic advantages in the Rust Belt while establishing new beachheads in the Sun Belt.But this year, his position in polls has weakened on both fronts. The result is that, even this far from Election Day, signs are developing that Biden could face a last-mile problem in the Electoral College.Even a modest recovery in Biden’s current support could put him in position to win states worth 255 Electoral College votes, strategists in both parties agree. His problem is that every option for capturing the final 15 Electoral College votes he would need to reach a winning majority of 270 looks significantly more difficult.At this point, former President Donald Trump’s gains have provided him with more plausible alternatives to cross the last mile to 270. Trump’s personal vulnerabilities, Biden’s edge in building a campaign organization, and abortion rights’ prominence in several key swing states could erase that advantage. But for now, Biden looks to have less margin for error than the former president.[Read: Will Biden have a Gaza problem in November’s poll?]Biden’s odds may particularly diminish if he cannot hold all three of the former “blue wall” states across the Rust Belt that he recaptured in 2020 after Trump had taken them four years earlier: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Biden is running more competitively in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin than in any other swing states. But in Michigan, Biden has struggled in most polls, whipsawed by defections among multiple groups Democrats rely on, including Arab Americans, auto workers, young people, and Black Americans.As James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist told me, if Biden can recover to win Michigan along with Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, “you are not going to lose.” But, Carville added, if Biden can’t hold all three, “you are going to have to catch an inside straight to win.”For both campaigns, the math of the next Electoral College map starts with the results from the last campaign. In 2020, Biden won 25 states, the District of Columbia and a congressional district centered on Omaha, in Nebraska—one of the two states that awards some of its Electoral College votes by district. Last time, Trump won 25 states and a rural congressional district in Maine, the other state that awards some of its electors by district.The places Biden won are worth 303 Electoral College votes in 2024; Trump’s places are worth 235. Biden’s advantage disappears, though, when looking at the states that appear to be securely in each side’s grip.Of the 25 states Trump won, North Carolina was the only one he carried by less than three percentage points; Florida was the only other state Trump won by less than four points.It’s not clear that Biden can truly threaten Trump in either state. Biden’s campaign, stressing criticism of Florida’s six-week abortion ban that went into effect today, has signaled some interest in contesting the state. But amid all the signs of Florida’s rightward drift in recent years, few operatives in either party believe the Biden campaign will undertake the enormous investment required to fully compete there.Biden’s team has committed to a serious push in North Carolina. There, he could be helped by a gubernatorial race that pits Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein against Republican Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, a social conservative who has described LGBTQ people as “filth” and spoken favorably about the era when women could not vote. Democrats also believe that Biden can harvest discontent over the 12-week abortion ban that the GOP-controlled state legislature passed last yearBut Democrats have not won a presidential or U.S. Senate race in North Carolina since 2008. Despite Democratic gains in white-collar suburbs around Charlotte and Raleigh, Trump’s campaign believes that a steady flow of conservative-leaning white retirees from elsewhere is tilting the state to the right; polls to this point consistently show Trump leading, often by comfortable margins.Biden has a much greater area of vulnerable terrain to defend. In 2020, he carried three of his 25 states by less than a single percentage point—Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin—and won Pennsylvania by a little more than one point. He also won Michigan and Nevada by about 2.5 percentage points each; in all, Biden carried six states by less than three points, compared with just one for Trump. Even Minnesota and New Hampshire, both of which Biden won by about seven points, don’t look entirely safe for him in 2024, though he remains favored in each.Many operatives in both parties separate the six states Biden carried most narrowly into three distinct tiers. Biden has looked best in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Biden’s position has been weakest in Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia. Michigan falls into its own tier in between.This ranking and Trump’s consistent lead in North Carolina reflect the upside-down racial dynamics of the 2024 race to this point. As Democrats always do, Biden still runs better among voters of color than among white voters. But the trend in support since 2020 has defied the usual pattern. Both state and national polls, as I’ve written, regularly show Biden closely matching the share of the vote he won in 2020 among white voters. But these same polls routinely show Trump significantly improving on his 2020 performance among Black and Latino voters, especially men. Biden is also holding much more of his 2020 support among seniors than he is among young people.These demographic patterns are shaping the geography of the 2024 race. They explain why Biden has lost more ground since 2020 in the racially diverse and generally younger Sun Belt states than he has in the older and more preponderantly white Rust Belt states. Slipping support among voters of color (primarily Black voters) threatens Biden in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin too, but the danger for him isn’t as great as in the Sun Belt states, where minorities are a much larger share of the total electorate. Biden running better in the swing states that are less, rather than more, diverse “is an irony that we’re not used to,” says Bradley Beychok, a co-founder of the liberal advocacy group American Bridge 21st Century, which is running a massive campaign to reach mostly white swing voters in the Rust Belt battlegrounds.Given these unexpected patterns, Democratic strategists I’ve spoken with this year almost uniformly agree with Carville that the most promising route for Biden to reach 270 Electoral College votes goes through the traditional industrial battlegrounds of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “If you look at all the battleground-state polling, and don’t get too fixated on this poll or that, the polling consistently shows you that Biden runs better in the three industrial Midwest states than he does in the four swing Sun Belt states,” Doug Sosnik, who served as the chief White House political strategist for Bill Clinton, told me.Democratic hopes for a Biden reelection almost all start with him holding Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, where polls now generally show a dead heat. If Biden wins both and holds all the states that he won in 2020 by at least three points—as well as Washington, D.C., and the Omaha congressional district—that would bring the president to 255 Electoral College votes. At that point, even if Biden loses all of the Sun Belt battlegrounds, he could reach the 270-vote threshold just by taking Michigan, with its 15 votes, as well.But Michigan has been a persistent weak spot for Biden. Although a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday showed Biden narrowly leading Trump in Michigan, most polls for months have shown the former president, who campaigned there today, reliably ahead. “In all the internal polling I’m seeing and doing in Michigan, I’ve never had Joe Biden leading Donald Trump,” Richard Czuba, an independent Michigan pollster who conducts surveys for business and civic groups, told me.[Read: How Trump is dividing minority voters]Czuba doesn’t consider Michigan out of reach for Biden. He believes that Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has qualified for the ballot, will ultimately draw more votes from Trump. Democrats have also rebuilt a formidable political organization, he noted, while the state Republican Party is in disarray, which will help Biden in a close race. And defending abortion rights remains a powerful advantage for Democrats, Czuba said, with Governor Gretchen Whitmer an effective and popular messenger for that cause.But Czuba said Biden is facing obstacles in Michigan that extend beyond his often-discussed problems with Arab American voters over the war in Gaza, discontent on college campuses around the same issue, and Trump’s claim that the transition to electric vehicles will produce a “bloodbath” for the auto industry. Biden is also deeply unpopular among independents in the state, Czuba said concerns about his age are a principal concern. “That’s the overriding issue we’re hearing,” he told me. “I don’t think any of those independents voted for Joe Biden thinking he was going to run for reelection.” On top of all that, Sunday’s CBS News/YouGov poll showed Trump winning about one in six Black voters in Michigan, roughly double his share in 2020.If Biden can’t win Michigan, his remaining options for reaching 270 Electoral College votes are all difficult at best. Many Democrats believe that if Biden loses Michigan, the most plausible alternative for him is to win both Arizona and Nevada, which have a combined 17 votes. Georgia or North Carolina, each with 16 votes, could also substitute for Michigan, but both now lean solidly toward Trump. After Michigan, or the combination of Arizona and Nevada, “there’s a fault line where the math works but the probabilities are pretty significantly lower,” Sosnik said.Public polls this spring aren’t much better for Biden in Arizona and Nevada than in Georgia and North Carolina. And just as Biden faces erosion with Black voters in the Southeast, he’s underperforming among Latinos in the Southwest. Yet most Democrats are more optimistic about their chances in the Southwest than the Southeast.In Nevada, that’s partly because the Democrats’ turnout machinery, which includes the powerful Culinary Union Local 226, has established a formidable record of winning close races. Both states have also been big winners in the private-investment boom flowing from the three big bills Biden passed in his first two years in office: Nevada received $9 billion in clean-energy investments, and Arizona got a whopping $64 billion from semiconductor manufacturers. The sweep of Trump’s plans for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants could undo some of his gains with Latinos.But mostly, Democratic hopes in both states center on abortion. Ballot initiatives inscribing abortion rights into the state constitution seem on track to qualify for the ballot in both, and polls show most voters in each state believe abortion should remain legal in all or most cases. In Arizona, the issue has been inflamed by the recent decision from the Republican-controlled state supreme court to reinstate a near-total ban on abortion dating back to 1864.Beychok says a message of defending democracy and personal freedoms, including access to abortion and other reproductive care, remains Biden’s best asset across the Sun Belt and Rust Belt swing states. “Abortion, democracy, and freedom have been greater than whatever Republicans have decided to throw against the wall,” he told me. “They can go and scream about Biden’s age, or ‘the squad,’ or inflation and the cost of things. The problem is they have been singing that song for years and they have continued to lose elections.”If Biden has a path to a second term, those issues will likely need to clear the way again—in the Rust Belt and Sun Belt alike.

In the spring of 1988, I made a lifelong friend thanks to a video-game cheat code. As preparation for a family move to Pensacola, Florida, I visited my new school. While there, I casually told a future classmate named Tim that the numbers 007 373 5963 would take him straight to the final fight of the very popular Nintendo boxing game Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. My buddies and I in Oxford, Mississippi, all knew this code by heart, but it turned out to be rare and valuable information in Pensacola. Years later, Tim revealed to me that it was my knowledge of the Punch Out cheat code that made him want to be friends.I wouldn’t have understood this at age 9, but I had just engaged in a successful act of cultural arbitrage. If financial arbitrage involves the acquisition of commodities in a market where they are inexpensive and selling them for profit in a market where they are expensive, cultural arbitrage is the acquisition of information, goods, or styles in one location where they are common and dispersing them in places where they are rare. The “profit” is paid out not in money but in esteem and social clout. Individuals gain respect when others find their information useful or entertaining—and repeated deployments may help them build entire personas based on being smart, worldly, and connected.In the past, tastemakers in the worlds of fashion, art, and music established careers through this sort of arbitrage—plucking interesting developments from subcultures to dangle as novelties in the mass market. The legendary writer Glenn O’Brien, for example, made his name by introducing the edgiest downtown New York bands to suits at record labels uptown and, later, by incorporating elements from punk rock, contemporary art, and underground S&M clubs in the creation of Madonna’s scandalous 1992 book, Sex.But the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary profits going to those responsible for relaying the information. Moreover, the sheer speed of modern communication reduces how long any one piece of knowledge is valuable. This, in turn, devalues the acquisition and hoarding of knowledge as a whole, and fewer individuals can easily construct entire identities built on doing so.There are obvious, concrete advantages to a world with information equality, such as expanding global access to health and educational materials—with a stable internet connection, anyone can learn basic computer programming from online tutorials and lectures on YouTube. Finding the optimal place to eat at any moment is certainly easier than it used to be. And, in the case of Google, to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” even serves as the company’s mission. The most commonly cited disadvantage to this extraordinary societal change, and for good reason, is that disinformation and misinformation can use the same easy pathways to spread unchecked. But after three decades of living with the internet, it’s clear that there are other, more subtle losses that come with instant access to knowledge, and we’ve yet to wrestle—interpersonally and culturally—with the implications.To draw from my own example, there was much respect to be gained in the 1980s from telling friends about video-game cheat codes, because this rare knowledge could be obtained only through deep gameplay, friendships with experienced gamers, or access to niche gaming publications. As economists say, this information was costly. Today, the entire body of Punch Out codes—and their contemporary equivalents—can be unearthed within seconds. Knowledge of a cheat code no longer represents entrée to an exclusive world—it’s simply the fruit of a basic web search.Admittedly, an increased difficulty in impressing friends with neat tips and trivia hardly constitutes a social crisis. And perhaps benefitting from closely kept secrets was too easy in the past, anyway: In my Punch-Out example, I gained a disproportionately large amount of esteem for something that required very little effort or skill. But when these exchanges were rarer—and therefore more meaningful—they could lead to positive effects on the overall culture. In a time of scarcity, information had more value, which provided a natural motivation for curious individuals to learn more about what was happening at the margins of society.[Read: Why kids online are chasing “clout”]Arbitrageurs would then “cash in” by introducing these artifacts to mainstream audiences, which triggered broader imitation of things once considered niche. This helped accelerate the diffusion of information from the underground into the mainstream, not only providing sophisticated consumers with an exciting stream of unfamiliar ideas but also breathing new life into mass culture. The end result of this collision was cultural hybridization—the creation of new styles and forms.This process helps explain the most significant stylistic shifts in 20th-century pop music. Living in the port city of Liverpool, where sailors imported American rock-and-roll records, the Beatles leveraged this early access to the latest stateside recordings to give themselves a head start over other British bands. A decade later, the music producer Chris Blackwell, who co-founded Island Records using his upbringing in Jamaica and knowledge of its music, signed Bob Marley and turned reggae into a globally recognized genre. Over the past 15 years, Drake has picked up this mantle as music’s great arbitrageur, using his singular celebrity to produce collaborations with then-emerging talent such as Migos and the Weeknd that cemented his own reputation as a tastemaker. Creative ideas appear to be impressive innovations to average consumers only once they get a foothold in wider society, which requires a difficult jump from so-called early adopters (who are curious to find new products and art forms) to the more conservative mainstream (who tend to like what they already know). And in the cultural marketplace, arbitrage succeeds more than pure invention because it introduces works that feel novel yet have proven track records of impressing others somewhere else. Before importing reggae to the United States and the United Kingdom, Blackwell knew that this music delighted Jamaicans—and that its popularity within a community that was fighting oppression would appeal to countercultural sympathizers as well.That global platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, and Wikipedia reduce the glory of acquiring deep information has not stopped the hunt. Instead, it’s pushed everyone to solve a much more narrow set of information inequalities in their own, smaller communities. Big-league influencers may have trouble looking for the big score, but “day traders” in niche fan groups can achieve minor status boosts by being the first to deliver news about their favorite idols to fellow fans. Arguably, individual fandoms have never been stronger—yet because information moves so quickly, these communities exert less influence on larger audiences that have less time or inclination to keep up with every micro-development. And though such superfans may claim to reject public opinion, they secretly need their insights to be respected outside the group in order to feel like something other than just dedicated hobbyists.At the same time, the hyper-politicization of culture on the internet has constrained arbitrage from a different angle: The previously common practice of being influenced by minority communities now elicits charges of appropriation. Such moral judgments are not new: The Nigerian musician Fela Kuti initially accused Paul McCartney of intending to steal “Black man’s music” after the former Beatle went to Lagos to record the Wings album Band on the Run. A greater awareness of the issue in recent years, however, means that third parties now actively police the exact moments when inspiration becomes theft. When the white influencer Charli D’Amelio boosted her own fame by popularizing the “Renegade” dance on TiKTok, the journalist Taylor Lorenz traced its origin back to its Black creator, Jalaiah Harmon. In this case, the heightened sensitivity toward appropriation had arguably positive effects: Harmon’s dance became world-renowned, and she eventually received proper credit for it. But these new standards make arbitrage a much weightier undertaking than it used to be, potentially requiring groundwork in coordinating permission and approval from originators.[Read: How Ariana Grande fell off the cultural-appropriation tightrope]In the past decade, some observers have wondered whether cultural innovation is slowing down. They’ve pointed to the stultifying effects of legacy IP at the box office, the way fast fashion has flattened any genuine sense of clothing trends, the indefatigability of Taylor Swift’s ongoing pop-chart dominance. The devaluing of cultural arbitrage—and the decrease in instances of hybridization—is certainly an additional factor to be considered. This is not just a problem for hipsters, however; it ends up affecting everyone who enjoys participating in popular art with other people. The wider entertainment industry always needs new ideas, and with reduced instances of cultural arbitrage, few that come to mainstream consumers now feel particularly valuable.Some countervailing trends might organically reenergize cultural arbitrage over time. The move from billion-user platforms back to balkanized networks on clubbier apps such as Discord could allow savvy individuals to step in and bridge distinct worlds. We also may seek to reduce the amount of information shared online—keeping information exchange personal and limited to real life may restore some value to what tastemakers know. Restaurant reservations have become valuable for this very reason: There are limited seats in a real place. The Canadian indie-music project Cindy Lee recently released a double album, available for download only on GeoCities and as a YouTube stream rather than on streaming sites such as Spotify. The self-created scarcity gave the album palpable buzz, and the lack of easy access didn’t get in the way of critical reviews or online discussion.The internet arrived at a time when we gained social clout from arbitraging information, so our first instinct was to share information online. Perhaps we are now entering an era of information hoarding. This may mean that, for a while, the most interesting developments will happen somewhere off the grid. But over time, this practice will restore some value to art and cultural exploration, and bring back opportunities for tastemaking. Whatever the case, we first must recognize the role that arbitrage played in preventing our culture from growing stale while literally making us friends along the way. Winning respect by sharing video-game cheat codes may be a thing of the past, but we need to promote new methods for innovators and mediators to move the culture—otherwise it may not move much at all.

A Republican does not become speaker of the House for the job security. Each of the past four GOP speakers—John Boehner, Paul Ryan, Kevin McCarthy, and Mike Johnson—faced the ever-present threat of defenestration at the hands of conservative hard-liners. The axe fell on McCarthy in October, and it has hovered above his successor, Johnson, from the moment he was sworn in.That is, until yesterday. In an unusual statement, the leaders of the Democratic opposition emerged from a party meeting to declare that they would rescue Johnson if the speaker’s main Republican enemy at the moment, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, forced a vote to oust him. Democrats chose not to help save McCarthy’s job last fall, and in standing with Johnson, they are rewarding him for bringing to the floor a foreign-aid package that includes $61 billion in funds for Ukraine and was opposed by a majority of his own members.[Read: A Democrat’s case for saving Mike Johnson]Democrats see an opportunity to do what they’ve wanted Republican speakers to do for years: sideline the far right. The GOP’s slim majority has proved to be ungovernable on a party-line basis; far-right conservatives have routinely blocked bills from receiving votes on the House floor, forcing Johnson to work with Democrats in what has become an informal coalition government. Democrats made clear that their pledge of support applied only to Greene’s attempt to remove Johnson, leaving themselves free to ditch him in the future. Come November, they’ll want to render him irrelevant by retaking the House majority. But by thwarting Greene’s motion to vacate, Democrats hope they can ensure that Johnson will keep turning to them for the next seven months of his term rather than seek votes from conservative hard-liners who will push legislation ever further to the right.“We want to turn the page,” Representative Pete Aguilar of California, the third-ranking House Democrat, told reporters. He explained that Democrats were not issuing a vote of confidence in Johnson—an archconservative who played a leading role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election—so much as they were trying to head off the chaos that Greene was threatening to foist upon the House. “She is a legislative arsonist, and she is holding the gas tank,” Aguilar said. “We don’t need to be a part of that.” Democrats won’t have to affirmatively vote for Johnson in order to save him; they plan to vote alongside most Republicans to table a motion to vacate the speaker’s chair should Greene bring one to the floor, as she has promised to do.McCarthy’s ouster by a group led by Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida paralyzed the House for weeks as Republicans considered and promptly rejected a series of would-be speakers, until they coalesced around Johnson, a fourth-term lawmaker little known outside the Capitol and his Louisiana district. Democrats were then in no mood to bail out McCarthy, who had turned to them for help keeping the government open but only weeks earlier had tried to hold on to his job by green-lighting an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden.Now the circumstances are different. The impeachment case has fizzled, and Democrats saw in Johnson’s move on Ukraine—despite months of delay—an act of much greater political courage than McCarthy’s last-minute decision to avert a government shutdown. They also respect him more than they do his predecessor. “I empathize with him in a way I could not with Kevin McCarthy, who was just this classic suit calculating his next advancement as a politician,” Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a first-term Democrat from Washington State, told me recently, explaining why she planned to help Johnson.[Elaina Plott Calabro: The accidental speaker]Greene took the Democrats’ move to save Johnson as a validation of her argument against him—that he kowtows to the establishment rather than fighting for “America First” policies at any cost. “Mike Johnson is officially the Democrat Speaker of the House,” she wrote on X in response to the Democrats’ announcement.After the Ukraine aid passed, Greene had hoped that a public backlash by conservative constituents against Johnson would lead to a groundswell of Republicans turning on him. That did not materialize. Only two other GOP lawmakers have said they would back her. Nor has former President Donald Trump lent support to her effort. Though Trump has been tepid in his praise of Johnson, he’s sympathized with the speaker for leading such a slim majority.Greene first introduced her motion to vacate more than a month ago and insisted yesterday that she would still demand a vote on it. If she does, no one will be surprised when it fails, but that will demonstrate something America hasn’t seen in a while: what a Republican-controlled House looks like when its hard-liners have finally been defanged.

On April 21, a week after Iran’s first-ever direct attack on Israel, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei met with his military commanders to gloat. The assault had failed to cause much damage in Israel, but Khamenei claimed victory and tried to give it a patriotic color.“What matters most,” he said, “is the emergence of the will of the Iranian nation and Iran’s military forces in an important international arena.”Such national chest-thumping is to be expected from any head of state. But something stood out about the Iranian attacks that made this nationalist reading suspect. Technically speaking, the strikes had been carried out not by Iran’s military but by a militia, a U.S.-designated terrorist organization whose name doesn’t even include Iran: the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. The IRGC’s Aerospace Force, one of its six divisions, was what fired 300 drones and missiles at Israel.This is not some bureaucratic “fun fact.” Rather, it illustrates a fundamental truth about Iran: the duality of its institutions, many of which are explicitly defined to be autonomous of both the nation and the state. That duality, in turn, leads to much head-scratching and confusion about Iran. Is the Islamic Republic a rational and potentially pragmatic actor, like most other nation-states, or is it an ideologically motivated actor, bent on pursuing mayhem in support of its goals?The charged nature of Washington debate about Iran often leads partisans to give simple, binary answers to this question. But those who follow Iran more closely realize that the dilemma has produced a tough, protracted battle within the regime itself. In 2006, a journalist asked Henry Kissinger about the future of Iranian-American relations. The doyen of American strategy responded, “Iran has to take a decision whether it wants to be a nation or a cause. If a nation, it must realize that its national interest doesn’t conflict with ours. If the Iranian concern is security and development of their country, this is compatible with American interests.”[Read: Ordinary Iranians don’t want war with Israel]Khamenei, the man who holds ultimate power in today’s Iran, has himself been inconsistent on this point. He is after all not just Iran’s commander in chief but also a revolutionary in chief who heads the Axis of Resistance, an international coalition of anti-West and anti-Israel militias.Not all Iranians are happy to lend their nation-state to such a coalition. Thus a continuous battle rages, in Iran’s society and its establishment, not only over what Iran’s foreign policy should be, but over the more fundamental question of whom it should serve. Should it be the vehicle for the pursuit of Iran’s national interests—or of an Islamist revolutionary agenda that knows no borders?The IRGC is an instrument of the latter conception. That Iran is nowhere in its title is no accident: The IRGC was formed in 1979 from a variety of Islamist militias, precisely because the revolutionaries who had just overthrown the monarchy didn’t trust traditional institutions, such as Iran’s powerful military, and wanted to serve goals beyond Iran’s borders. The IRGC’s founders saw themselves as loyal first and foremost to the revolution’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who couldn’t have been more explicit about rejecting Iranian nationalism in favor of a transnational revolutionary Islamism.Doing so meant reorienting Iran’s foreign policy entirely. Under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran had maintained ties with Israel as well as its Arab neighbors, even proposing to mediate between them. The monarchy had christened Iran’s position a “national independent policy” and positioned Iran as Western-leaning but nonaligned, touting the country’s long and proud tradition as a founding member of both the League of Nations and the United Nations.Khomeini wanted both to do away with this tradition and to burnish his credentials as an international revolutionary leader. He began by fully embracing the anti-Israeli cause, declaring the last Friday of the month of Ramadan to be Quds (Jerusalem) Day, an occasion for global rallies in opposition to the Jewish state. In a televised message on Quds Day 1980, Khomeini stated forcefully: “Nationally minded people are of no use to us. We want Muslim people. Islam opposes nationality.”As Islamist revolutionaries took over Iran and built their Islamic Republic, some envisaged erasing Iran’s national identity altogether. A faction close to Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi dreamed of fusing Iran and Libya into a new revolutionary state. A cleric took a group of goons to vandalize the tomb of Ferdowsi, Iran’s cherished medieval national poet, near Mashhad. Many regime leaders were openly contemptuous of pre-Islamic Iranian traditions, even the single most important one: the Iranian new year, or Nowruz. In 1981, Khomeini explicitly asked Iranians not to put much emphasis on “their so-called Nowruz.”But Khomeini’s radicalism soon collided with reality. Few people anywhere would willingly give up their national identity; Iranians are famously patriotic, and for them, the demand was a nonstarter. Nowruz would stay, as would Ferdowsi’s tomb. But the battle over whether revolutionary Iran would behave as a nation or as an Islamist cause never ceased.When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq invaded Iran in September 1980, masses of Iranians mobilized to defend their country, in what was clearly a patriotic effort. Former pilots of the Shah’s imperial armies were released from prison to fly sorties. From his exile, the recently overthrown crown prince offered to come back to join the armed forces (he was denied). Iran’s war dead included many non-Muslims—Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and Baha’is. And yet, Khomeini conceived of the war not as one of national defense but as a “holy war” to spread the revolution.Iran liberated all of its territory from Iraqi forces in 1982, but Khomeini declared that the war had to go on “until all sedition has been eliminated from the world.” He sent Iranian forces into Iraq, where they kept pushing for six more futile years, until at last he accepted a UN-mandated cease-fire in 1988. That same year, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties with Saudi Arabia. By the time Khomeini died, in 1989, the country appeared to be setting a more moderate course, even shedding its internationalist revolutionary pretensions.Shadi Hamid: The reason Iran turned out to be so repressiveWhether it would really do so would be up to Khomeini’s successor. Khamenei was a hard-line revolutionary activist, known for translating into Persian the works of Sayyid Qutb, the notorious ideologue of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. But he owed his ascent to the leadership in part to the new president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, whose pragmatism many thought would rub off on Khamenei as well. Rafsanjani came to represent something of an Iranian Deng Xiaoping, more interested in technocracy than in ideological purity.The alliance turned out to be one of convenience, and from the 1990s to 2010s, Iran became the scene of a ferocious struggle among three broad factions: conservatives led by Khamenei, reformists (led by Mohammad Khatami, who would succeed Rafsanjani as president in 1997) who wanted to democratize, and centrists (led by Rafsanjani) who wished to maintain the closed political system but make the country’s foreign policy less ideological and more practical. As Khamenei sought to strengthen his faction against the other two, he realized that the IRGC was his best cudgel. He used it to repress and exclude from power both the reformists and the centrists. Khamenei extended the state’s largesse to his allies in the militia as it pursued its most ambitious project: that of building up an Axis of Resistance in the region, including groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Iraq’s Shiite militias.With the help of these proxies, the IRGC conducted a campaign of terror against its ideological enemies, Israel above all. It helped bomb Israel’s embassy in 1992 and, two years later, a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. The latter action killed 85 people, making it the deadliest terrorist attack in Argentine history. Starting in 2003, wars and crises in the Middle East allowed the Axis to spread and strengthen—and, as it did so, to capture Iran’s regional foreign policy.Khamenei understood that the rise of the IRGC’s regional power risked dangerously isolating Tehran and putting it on a collision course with Washington. And so he attempted to balance out the IRGC’s radicalism by giving some ground to the pragmatism of the centrists who favored ties with the West. Hassan Rouhani, a Rafsanjani acolyte, was elected president in 2013 with a popular mandate to conduct direct negotiations with the West over Iran’s nuclear program. He and his U.S.-educated foreign minister, Javad Zarif, had the support of both reformists and centrists. They bitterly opposed the IRGC, and the militia in turn opposed their talks with the United States.The Rouhani government finally inked a deal with the United States and five other powerful countries in 2015, only for it to be thrown out three years later by President Donald Trump. The anti-IRGC coalition was severely weakened, and Khamenei swung heavily in the other direction—which better fit with his own politics in any case.The long-lasting battle over Iran’s foreign policy has now been largely settled in favor of the octogenarian supreme leader and his allies. Since 2020, only pro-Khamenei conservatives have been permitted to run for office in major elections. The IRGC openly operates Iranian embassies in most of the Middle East, and ideological commitments, rather than national interest, drive Iranian foreign policy. This turn is most evident in Iran’s shameful support for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which only makes sense as an expression of Khamenei’s anti-Western zeal. In fact, Khamenei’s men have broken with the country’s traditional nonalignment by repeatedly favoring ties with China, Russia, and North Korea. The facade of Iran’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tehran is still emblazoned with the revolutionary slogan “Neither Western nor Eastern”—but pro-Khamenei foreign-policy hands now speak of a “Look East” policy to justify their new orientation.Khamenei never made the transition from Islamist activist to Iranian statesman. Having hijacked the Iranian nation for a cause, he hitched its fortunes to those of militias that wreak havoc in every country where they operate. With the IRGC's attacks on Israel, he has now put the country on the path to a war most Iranians neither want nor can afford. Having just turned 85 years old, Khamenei has lost the respect of most Iranians and even many establishment figures. Iran is worse today in every single way than it was 20 years ago: socially repressed, politically closed, diplomatically isolated, and economically destroyed.Many Iranians are now simply waiting for the leader to die. His cause-centered foreign policy has brought only disaster. Those who want Iran to once more act like a nation are politically marginalized, but in a post-Khamenei Iran, they will fight for a country that pursues its national interests, including peace with its neighbors and the world.

The first time I photographed Gerald Ford, he was a day away from being nominated as vice president, after Spiro Agnew had resigned in disgrace. The portrait I made ran on the cover of Time, a first for both of us. Ford was my assignment, then he became my friend. As president, he appointed me, at age 27, as his chief White House photographer, granting me total access. The more I got to know him, the more I admired his humanity and empathy. I remained close to him and his wife, Betty, until the end of their lives. And I was honored to serve as a trustee on the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation for more than 20 years.On April 9, however, I resigned from that position. It was over a matter that might seem trivial on the surface, but that I believe constituted another step in America’s retreat from democracy—the failure of an institution bearing the name of one of our most honorable presidents to stand in the way of authoritarianism.Each year, the foundation awards its Gerald R. Ford Medal for Distinguished Public Service, recognizing an individual who embodies Ford’s high ideals: integrity, honesty, candor, strength of character, determination in the face of adversity, among other attributes. Past winners have included John Paul Stevens, George H. W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Colin Powell, and Bob and Elizabeth Dole. This year, in my capacity as a trustee, I pushed hard for former Representative Liz Cheney to receive the recognition.After the January 6 insurrection, Cheney famously helped lead the push to impeach President Donald Trump. “The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she wrote in a statement a few days after the riot. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Four months later, she was stripped of her House leadership position by an ungrateful and angry Republican caucus. A month and a half later, she joined the House select committee investigating January 6; she soon was named co-chair. The next year, Trump got his revenge: Cheney was defeated in her Wyoming primary by a rival he had backed.Despite this—and numerous death threats—Cheney has been unwavering in standing against Trump and the risk his 2024 candidacy represents.[Mark Leibovich: Liz Cheney, the Republican from the state of reality]Cheney is a friend of mine; I have known her since she was 8 years old and have photographed and spent time with her and her family for decades. But I wasn’t alone in my thinking: Many of my fellow trustees also believed she clearly deserved the recognition. Ford himself would have been delighted by the selection. He first met Cheney when she was a little girl, and her father, future Vice President Dick Cheney, was Ford’s chief of staff. (Cheney herself is a trustee of the foundation in good standing, but several other trustees have received the award in the past.) President Gerald Ford and an 8-year-old Liz Cheney in February 1975.(David Hume Kennerly / Center for Creative Photography / The University of Arizona) Yet when the foundation’s executive committee received Cheney’s nomination, its members denied her the award. Instead, they offered it first to a former president, who did not accept, and then to another well-known person, who also declined. When the door briefly reopened for more nominations, I made another passionate pitch for Cheney. The committee passed on her again, ultimately deciding to give the award to former Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, whose last job as a public servant ended more than a decade ago.To me, the decision was inexplicable; Cheney obviously had been more deserving. Sensing that the foundation’s executive committee no longer shared my principles, I resigned from the board, as I wrote in a letter to my fellow trustees.Shortly after that letter was published by Politico, the foundation’s executive director, Gleaves Whitney, issued a public statement explaining the committee’s decision and confirming what I had heard from fellow trustees: “At the time the award was being discussed, it was publicly reported that Liz was under active consideration for a presidential run. Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Liz in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the Foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the Internal Revenue Service.”Giving the award to Cheney, Whitney said, would not be “prudent.” Translation: The foundation was afraid. In another statement, Whitney said that Cheney could be considered for the award in the future. That was not only totally embarrassing, but too late.I believe the foundation did what it did because of the same pressures hollowing out many Republican institutions and weakening many conservative leaders across America—the fear of retaliation from the forces of Trumpism, forces that deeply loathe Cheney and the values she represents. Fear that president No. 45 might become No. 47. Fear that wealthy donors might be on Trump’s team overtly or covertly and might withhold money from the foundation. Fear of phantom circumstances.[Read the January/February 2024 issue: If Trump wins]I see Whitney’s legalistic tap dance as a cop-out. Cheney has not announced that she is running; she hasn’t been a candidate for any elective office since she lost her primary two years ago. What’s more, in 2004, the foundation gave its annual recognition to then–Vice President Cheney while he was an active candidate for a second term. In a recent letter to trustees, Whitney wrote, correctly, “We face a very different political environment today than in 2004.” He added that, in 2006, the IRS had cracked down on nonprofits supporting political candidates. But again, Cheney is not a political candidate. Two years ago, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation wasn’t afraid to pay her tribute with its Profile in Courage Award (granted jointly to her, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and three others).Mitch Daniels might seem like a safe choice for the recognition, a moderate in the mold of Ford. But he has shown none of the valor that Cheney has in confronting Trump. Despite acknowledging that Joe Biden won the 2020 election, Daniels has made only tepid comments about the threat Trump presents to democracy. In 2022, for example, The Bulwark’s Mona Charen asked Daniels about a recent warning from President Biden that American democracy was in danger of being subverted by election-denying “MAGA Republicans.” Daniels said he had spent 10 years “ducking” such questions. He allowed that he would “make no objection” to Biden’s statement, but continued: “I think there are anti-democratic tendencies across our political spectrum, or at least at both ends of it.” This was classic both-sides-ism. To me, Daniels in that moment exemplified the kind of passive Republican who is laying brick on the Trump highway to an autocracy.My resignation is about more than giving one valiant person an award. America is where it is today because of all the people and organizations that have committed small acts of cowardice like that of the Ford presidential foundation’s executive committee. I wanted to draw attention to those in the political center and on the right who know better, who have real power and influence, who rail against Trump behind closed doors, yet who appear in public with their lips zipped. They might think of themselves as patriots, but in fact they are allowing our country to be driven toward tyranny. Every now and then, you should listen to your heart and not the lawyers.Ultimately, the foundation has tarnished the image of its namesake. I was in the East Room of the White House 50 years ago on that hot day of August 9, 1974, when President Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.” It was a great moment for America, and a bold statement from the new president, acknowledging that Richard Nixon’s actions had threatened the Constitution. Ford could not have envisioned the threat to democracy that America now faces. But he would have been encouraged by a bright light named Liz Cheney—someone who is fighting hard, sometimes alone, for the Constitution that Ford defended just as courageously.

On a freezing day in December 2021, I arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, to visit Simon Gilroy’s lab. In one room of the lab sat a flat of young tobacco and Arabidopsis plants, each imbued with fluorescent proteins derived from jellyfish.Researchers led me into a small microscope room. One of them turned off the lights, and another handed me a pair of tweezers that had been dipped in a solution of glutamate—one of the most important neurotransmitters in our brains and, research has recently found, one that boosts plants’ signals too. “Be sure to cross the midrib,” Jessica Cisneros Fernandez, then a molecular biologist on Gilroy’s team, told me. She pointed to the thick vein running down the middle of a tiny leaf. This vein is the plant’s information superhighway. Injure the vein, and the pulse will move all over the plant in a wave. I pinched hard.On a screen attached to the microscope, I watched the plant light up, its veins blazing like a neon sign. As the green glow moved from the wound site outward in a fluorescent ripple, I was reminded of the branching pattern of human nerves. The plant was becoming aware, in its own way, of my touch.But what exactly does it mean for a plant to be aware ? Consciousness was once seen as belonging solely to humans and a short list of nonhuman animals that clearly act with intention. Yet seemingly everywhere researchers look, they are finding that there is more to the inner lives of animals than we ever thought possible. Scientists now talk regularly about animal cognition; they study the behaviors of individual animals, and occasionally ascribe personalities to them.Some scientists now posit that plants should likewise be considered intelligent. Plants have been found to show sensitivity to sound, store information to be accessed later, and communicate among their kind—and even, in a sense, with particular animals. We determine intelligence in ourselves and certain other species through inference—by observing how an organism behaves, not by looking for a psychological sign. If plants can do things that we consider indications of intelligence in animals, this camp of botanists argues, then why shouldn’t we use the language of intelligence to describe them too?[From the July/August 2021 issue: A better way to look at trees]It’s a daring question, currently being debated in labs and academic journals. Not so long ago, treading even lightly in this domain could upend a scientist’s career. And plenty of botanists still think that applying concepts such as consciousness to plants does a disservice to their essential plantness. Yet even many of these scientists are awed by what we are learning about plants’ capabilities.A single book nearly snuffed out the field of plant-behavior research for good. The Secret Life of Plants, published in 1973, was as popular as it was irresponsible; though it included real science, it also featured wildly unscientific projection. One chapter suggested that plants could feel and hear—and that they preferred Beethoven to rock and roll. Another suggested that a plant could respond to malevolent thoughts.Many scientists tried to reproduce the most tantalizing “research” presented in The Secret Life of Plants, to no avail. According to several researchers I spoke with, this caused the twin gatekeepers of science-funding boards and peer-review boards to become skittish about plant-behavior studies. Proposals with so much as a whiff of inquiry into the subject were turned down. Pioneers in the field changed course or left the sciences altogether.A decade after the book’s publication, a paper by David Rhoades, a zoologist and chemist at the University of Washington, reopened questions of plant communication. Rhoades had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.[Read: A glowing petunia could radicalize your view of plants]Still, the idea that a plant would defend itself in this way was heretical to the whole premise of how scientists thought plants worked. Plants were not supposed to be that active, or have such dramatic and strategic reactions. Rhoades presented his hypothesis at conferences, but mainstream scientific journals were reluctant to take the risk of publishing something so outlandish. The discovery ended up buried in an obscure volume, and Rhoades was ridiculed by peers in journals and at conferences.But Rhoades’s communication experiments, and others that came immediately after, helped establish new lines of inquiry. We now know that plants’ chemical signals are decipherable not just by other plants but in some cases by insects. Still, four decades on, the idea that plants might communicate intentionally with one another remains a controversial concept in botany.One key problem is that there is no agreed-upon definition of communication, not even in animals. Does a signal need to be sent purposefully? Does it need to provoke a response in the receiver? Much as consciousness and intelligence have no settled definition, communication slip-slides between the realms of philosophy and science, finding secure footing in neither. Intention poses the hardest of problems, because it cannot be directly determined.[From the March 2019 issue: A journey into the animal mind]The likely impossibility of establishing intentionality in plants, though, is no deterrent to Simon Gilroy’s sense of wonder at their liveliness. In the ’80s, Gilroy, who is British, studied at Edinburgh University under Anthony Trewavas, a renowned plant physiologist. Since then, Trewavas has begun using provocative language to talk about plants, aligning himself with a group of botanists and biologists who call themselves plant neurobiologists, and publishing papers and a book laying out scientific arguments in favor of plant intelligence and consciousness. Gilroy himself is more circumspect, unwilling to talk about either of those things, but he still works with Trewavas. Recently, the two have been developing a theory of agency for plants.Gilroy is quick to remind me that he is talking strictly about biological agency, not implying intention in a thoughts-and-feelings sense. But there’s no question that plants are engaged in the active pursuit of their own goals and, in the process, shape the very environment they find themselves rooted in. That, for him, is proof of plants’ agency. Still, the proof is found through inferring the meaning behind plants’ actions rather than understanding their mechanics.“When you get down to the machinery that allows those calculations to occur, we don’t have the luxury of going, Ah, it’s neurons in the brain,” Gilroy told me. His work is beginning to allow us to watch the information processing happen, “but at the moment, we don’t know how it works.”That is the essential question of plant intelligence: How does something without a brain coordinate a response to stimuli? How does information about the world get translated into action that benefits the plant? How can the plant sense its world without a centralized place to parse that information?A few years back, Gilroy and his colleague Masatsugu Toyota thought they’d have a go at those questions, which led them to the experiment I participated in at the lab. Their work has shown that those glowing-green signals move much faster than would be expected from simple diffusion. They move at the speed of some electrical signals, which they may be. Or, as new research suggests, they may be surprisingly fast chemical signals.Given what we know about the dynamics of sensing in creatures that have a brain, the lack of one should mean that any information generated from sensing ought to ripple meaninglessly through the plant body without producing more than a highly localized response. But it doesn’t. A tobacco plant touched in one place will experience that stimulus throughout its whole body.The system overall works a bit like an animal nervous system, and might even employ similar molecular players. Gilroy, for his part, does not want to call it a nervous system, but others have written that he and Toyota have found “nervous system–like signaling” in plants. The issue has even leaked out of plant science: Researchers from other disciplines are weighing in. Rodolfo Llinás, a neuroscientist at NYU, and Sergio Miguel Tomé, a colleague at the University of Salamanca, in Spain, have argued that it makes no sense to define a nervous system as something only animals can have rather than defining it as a physiological system that could be present in other organisms, if in a different form.Convergent evolution, they argue, wherein organisms separately evolve similar systems to deal with similar challenges, happens all the time; a classic example is wings. Flight evolved separately in birds, bats, and insects, but to comparable effect. Eyes are another example; the eye lens has evolved separately several times.The nervous system can reasonably be imagined as another case of convergent evolution, Llinás and Miguel Tomé say. If a variety of nervous systems exist in nature, then what plants have is clearly one. Why not call it a nervous system already?“What do you mean, the flower remembers?” I ask.It’s 2019, and I’m walking through the Berlin Botanic Garden with Tilo Henning, a plant researcher. Henning shakes his head and laughs. He doesn’t know. No one does. But yes, he says, he and his colleague Maximilian Weigend, the director of a botanical garden in Bonn, have observed the ability of Nasa poissoniana—a plant in the flowering Loasaceae family that grows in the Peruvian Andes—to store and recall information.The pair noticed that the multicolor starburst-shaped flowers were raising their stamen, or fertilizing organs, shortly before a pollinator arrived, as if they could predict the future. The researchers set up an experiment and found that the plant in fact seemed to be learning from experience. These flowers, Henning and Weigend found, could “remember” the time intervals between bee visits, and anticipate the time their next pollinator was likely to arrive. If the interval between bee visits changed, the plant might actually adjust the timing of its stamen display to line up with the new schedule.In a 2019 paper, Henning and Weigend call Nasa poissoniana’s behavior “intelligent,” the word still appearing in quotation marks. I want to know what Henning really thinks. Are plants intelligent? Does he see the flower’s apparent ability to remember as a hallmark of consciousness? Or does he think of the plant as an unconscious robot with a preprogrammed suite of responses?Henning shakes off my question the first two times I ask it. But the third time, he stops walking and turns to answer. The dissenting papers, he says, are all focused on the lack of brains—no brains, they claim, means no intelligence.“Plants don’t have these structures, obviously,” Henning says. “But look at what they do. I mean, they take information from the outside world. They process. They make decisions. And they perform. They take everything into account, and they transform it into a reaction. And this, to me, is the basic definition of intelligence. That’s not just automatism. There might be some automatic things, like going toward light. But this is not the case here. It’s not automatic.”Where Nasa poissoniana’s “memories” could possibly be stored is still a mystery. “Maybe we are just not able to see these structures,” Henning tells me. “Maybe they are so spread all over the body of the plant that there isn’t a single structure. Maybe that’s their trick. Maybe it’s the whole organism.”It’s humbling to remember that plants are a kingdom of life entirely their own, the product of riotous evolutionary innovation that took a turn away from our branch of life when we were both barely motile, single-celled creatures floating in the prehistoric ocean. We couldn’t be more biologically different. And yet plants’ patterns and rhythms have resonances with ours—just look at the information moving through Gilroy’s glowing specimens.Mysteries abide, of course. We are far from understanding the extent of “memory” in plants. We have a few clues and fewer answers, and so many more experiments still to try.This article was adapted from Zoë Schlanger’s new book, The Light Eaters: How the Unseen World of Plant Intelligence Offers a New Understanding of Life on Earth. It appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “The Mysteries of Plant ‘Intelligence.’”

Yesterday afternoon, Columbia University’s campus felt like it would in the hours before a heat wave breaks. Student protesters, nearly all of whom had wrapped their faces in keffiyehs or surgical masks, ran back and forth across the hundred or so yards between their “liberated zone”—an encampment of about 80 tents—and Hamilton Hall, which they now claimed as their “liberated building.” At midnight yesterday morning, protesters had punched out door windows and barricaded themselves inside. As I walked around, four police helicopters and a drone hovered over the campus, the sound of the blades bathing the quad below in oppressive sound.And rhetoric grew ever angrier. Columbia University, a protester proclaimed during a talk, was “guilty of abetting genocide” and might face its own Nuremberg trials. President Minouche Shafik, another protester claimed, had licked the boots of university benefactors. Leaflets taped to benches stated: Palestine Rises; Columbia falls.[Will Creeley: Those who preach free speech need to practice it]As night fell, the thunderclap came in the form of the New York Police Department, which closed off Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue and filled the roads with trucks, vans, and squad cars. Many dozens of officers slipped on riot helmets and adjusted vests. On the campus, as the end loomed, a diminutive female student with a mighty voice stood before the locked university gates and led more than 100 protesters in chants.“No peace on stolen land,” she intoned. “We want all the land. We want all of it!”Hearing young people mouthing such merciless rhetoric is unsettling. The protester’s words go far beyond what the Palestinian Authority demands of Israel, which is a recognition that a two-state solution is possible—that two peoples have claims to the land between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It was striking to see protesters playfully tossing down ropes from the second floor to haul up baskets filled with pizza boxes and water, even as they faced the imminent risk of expulsion from the university for breaking into Hamilton.No one won here. Student protesters took pride in their collective revolutionary power, and yet appeared to have few leaders worthy of the term and made maximalist claims and unrealistic demands. Their call for Columbia to divest from Israel would appear to take in not just companies based in that country but any with ties to Israel, including Google and Amazon.The protesters confronted a university where leaders seemed alternately stern and panicked. Columbia left it to police to break a siege around 9 p.m. in a surge of force, arresting dozens of protesters and crashing their way into Hamilton Hall.The denouement was a tragedy that came accompanied by moments of low comedy, as when a student protester seemed to suggest yesterday that bloody, genocidal Columbia University must supply the students of the liberated zone and liberated building with food. “We’re saying they’re obligated to provide food for students who pay for a meal plan here,” she explained. But moments of true menace were evident, such as when some protesters decided to break into and occupy Hamilton Hall.[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]Rory Wilson, a senior majoring in history, had wandered over to the site early yesterday morning when he heard of the break-in. He and two friends were not fans of this protest, he told me, but they also understood the swirl of passions that led so many Arab and Muslim students to recoil at the terrible toll that Israeli bombings have inflicted on Gaza. To watch Hamilton Hall being smashed struck him as nihilistic. He and his friends stood in front of the doors.Hundreds of protesters, masked, many dressed in black, surged around them. “They’re Zionists,” a protester said. “Run a circle around these three and move them out!.”Dozens of masked students surrounded them and began to press and push. Were you scared?, I asked Wilson. No, he said. Then he thought about it a little more. “There was a moment when a man in a black mask grabbed my leg and tried to flip me over,” he said. “That scared me”One more fact was striking: As a mob of hundreds of chanting students smashed windows and built a barricade by tossing dozens of chairs against the doors and reinforcing them with bicycle locks, as fights threatened to break out that could seriously harm students on either side, Wilson couldn’t see any guards or police officers anywhere around him. Two other students told me they had a similar impression. “I don’t get it,” Wilson said. “There were some legitimately bad actors. Where was the security? Where was the university?” (Columbia officials did not respond to my requests for comment.)Less than 24 hours later university leaders would play their hand by bringing in police officers.For more than a decade now, we’ve lived amid a highly specific form of activism, one that began with Occupy Wall Street, continued with the protests and riots that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, and evolved into the “autonomous zones” that protesters subsequently carved out of Seattle and Portland, Oregon. Some of the protests against prejudice and civil-liberties violations have been moving, even inspired. But in this style of activism, the anger often comes with an air of presumption—an implication that one cannot challenge, much less debate, the protesters’ writ.[Michael Powell: The curious rise of ]settler colonialism and Turtle IslandYesterday in front of Hamilton Hall—which protesters had renamed Hind’s Hall in honor of a 6-year-old girl who had been killed in Gaza—organizers of the Columbia demonstration called a press conference. But when reporters stepped forward to ask questions, they were met with stony stares and silence. At the liberated tent zone, minders—some of whom were sympathetic faculty members—kept out those seen as insufficiently sympathetic, and outright blocked reporters for Israeli outlets and Fox News.All along, it has never been clear who speaks for the movement. Protesters claimed that those who took over Hamilton Hall were an “autonomous collective.” This elusiveness can all but neuter negotiations.By 11 p.m., much of the work was done. The police had cleared Hamilton Hall and carted off protesters for booking. At 113th Street and Broadway, a mass of protesters, whose shouts echoed in the night, and a group of about 30 police officers peered at each other across metal barriers. One female protester harangued the cops—at least half of whom appeared to be Black, Asian-American, or Latino—by likening them to the Ku Klux Klan. Then the chants fired up again. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” There was a pause, as if protesters were searching for something more cutting. “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Zionism has got to go.”As I left the area, I thought about how Rory Wilson responded earlier when I asked what life on campus has been like lately. The senior, who said he is Jewish on his mother’s side but not observant, had a take that was not despairing. In polarized times, he told me, having so many Jewish and Israeli students living and attending class on a campus with Arab and Muslim students was a privilege. “Some have lost families and loved ones,” he said. “I understand their anger and suffering.”After spending two days on the Columbia campuses during the protests, I was struck by how unusual that sentiment had become—how rarely I’d heard anyone talk of making an effort to understand the other. Maximal anger was all that lingered.

My father collects 100-year-old magazines about Palestine—Life, National Geographic, even The Illustrated London News, the world’s first graphic weekly news magazine. For years, he would talk about these mysterious documents but rarely show them to anyone. “I have proof,” he would say, “that Palestine exists.”His father, my paternal grandfather, whom I called Siddi, had a similar compulsion to prove his heritage, though it manifested differently. Siddi used to randomly recite his family tree to my father when he was a child. As if answering a question that had not been asked, he would recount those who came before him: “First there was Hassan,” he would say in his thick Arabic accent, “and then there was Simri.” Following fathers and sons down the line of paternity, in a rhythm much like that of a prayer, he told the story of 11 generations. Every generation until my father’s was born and raised in Ramallah, Palestine.After 1948, however, almost our entire family in Ramallah moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. Although my American-born father didn’t inherit Siddi’s habit of reciting his family tree, he did recite facts; he lectured me about Palestine ad nauseam in my youth, although he had not yet visited. Similar to his father’s, these speeches were unprompted. “Your Siddi only had one business partner his entire life,” he would say for the hundredth time. “And that business partner was a rabbi. Palestinians are getting pitted against the Jews because it’s convenient, but it’s not the truth.”His lectures were tedious, repetitive, and often fueled with so much passion that they overwhelmed me into silence. And yet they took up permanent residence in my brain, and I would reach for them when pressed to give political opinions after new acquaintances found out I was Palestinian. “So what do the Palestinians even want?” a co-worker’s husband once asked me as we waited in line for the bar at my company’s holiday party. I said what I imagined my father would have said in the face of such dismissiveness: “The right to live on their land in peace.”But sometime after the luster of young adulthood wore off, I found my piecemeal understanding of Palestinian history—what I’d gleaned from passively listening to my father—no longer sufficient when navigating these conversations. When a man I was on a date with learned where my olive skin and dark hair came from, he told me that Palestinians “were invented,” even though I was sitting right in front of him, sharing a bowl of guacamole. I left furious, mostly at myself. I had nothing thoughtful to say to prove otherwise.Like my father, I started collecting my own box of scraps about Palestine, although I couldn’t have said why. Perhaps I wanted to slice through a conversation just as others had sliced through my existence, but not even this was clear to me yet. Magazines, books, old posters, and stickers found a home in a corner of my bedroom. My collecting was an obsession. I’d buy books by Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti, not necessarily because I knew who these men were at the time, but because the word Palestine was right there, embossed on the cover.At first I didn’t dare open these books. They became an homage to my identity that I both eagerly honored and wanted to ignore. My eventual engagement with the material was slow, deliberate. I wanted to preserve a semblance of ease that I feared I would lose once I learned more about my people’s history. I bookmarked articles on Palestine in my browser, creating a haphazard folder of links that included infographics on Palestine’s olive-oil industry, news clippings about the latest Israeli laws that discriminated against Palestinians, and articles on JSTOR with provocative titles like “Myths About Palestinians.” I was building an archive as if I were putting together an earthquake kit—like the ones my parents kept in our basement in San Francisco—even though I didn’t know when this particular survival kit would be useful or necessary. But my father knew. His father knew. Our liberation may eventually hang on these various archives.Even more true: These archives validate Palestinians’ existence. In the 19th century, before a wave of European Jews settled in Palestine following the Holocaust, early Zionists leaned on the mythology that the land was empty and barren. The movement advocated for the return of Jews to their ancestral homeland. In 1901, the Zionist author Israel Zangwill wrote in the British monthly periodical The New Liberal Review that Palestine was “a country without people; the Jews are a people without a country.”In 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was quoted in The Sunday Times of London: “[There is] no such thing as Palestinians … It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” This idea has been similarly reused for more than a century, evolving very little. As recently as February 2024, Israeli Minister of Settlement and National Missions Orit Strock repeated the sentiment during a meeting of Israel’s Parliament, saying, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian people.”But this fiction of Palestinians’ nonexistence feels tired. It’s a distraction that not only invalidates us but also places Palestinians on the defensive while Israel’s government builds walls and expands illegal settlements that separate Israelis from their very real Palestinian neighbors.It feels especially absurd in the face of Israel’s latest military campaign in Gaza, launched in response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7. Since then, Israeli strikes have killed more than 34,000 people, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, although that number is incomplete. It does not include all of the civilians who have died from hunger, disease, or lack of medical treatment. If Palestinians don’t exist, then who is dying? I fear that Strock’s words may become true, that Palestinians soon will not exist, that slowly they will become extinct. It’s a cruel self-fulfilling prophecy—claim that Palestinians were never there, and do away with them when they continue to prove otherwise.While listening to my father’s monologues, I used to think about how exhausting it must be for him to keep reminding himself that the place where his father was born is real. At the time, I didn’t think about my place in this heartbreak. But I can’t ignore that heartbreak any longer.Since October, I’ve returned to my own little box on Palestine. I used to think that this haphazard archive lacked direction, but I see it differently now. This collection proves to me that the place where my great-grandfather owned orchards and grew oranges was real, that the land Siddi was forced to leave behind was a blooming desert before others claimed its harvest. It’s also a catalog of my own awakening, a coming to terms with a history that I didn’t want to know. My ignorance is shattered over and over again when I look through this box and think about all that we are losing today.Gaza is considered one of the oldest continuously inhabited areas in the world; some of its monuments date back to Byzantine, Greek, and Islamic times. Since the October 7 attacks, however, Israel’s air raids on Gaza have demolished or damaged roughly 200 historical sites, including libraries, hundreds of mosques, a harbor dating back to 800 B.C.E., and one of the oldest Christian monasteries in the world. In December, an Israeli strike destroyed the Omari Mosque, the oldest and largest mosque in Gaza City, which housed dozens of rare ancient manuscripts. Israeli strikes have endangered Gaza’s remaining Christian population, considered one of the oldest in the world, and have destroyed every university while killing more than 90 prominent academics.The destruction of cultural heritage is not new in the history of war. Perhaps that’s why when my father came across a tattered hardcover titled Village Life in Palestine, a detailed account of life in the Holy Land in the late 1800s, in a used-book store in Cork, Ireland, he immediately purchased it. He knew that books like these were sacred artifacts that hold a truth—a proof of existence outside political narratives. My father’s copy was printed by the London publishing company Longmans, Green, and Co. in 1905. The first few pages of the book contain a library record and a stamp that reads CANCELLED. Below is another stamp with the date: March 9, 1948. I’m not sure if that date—mere months before the creation of Israel—signifies when it was pulled out of circulation, or the last time it was checked out. But the word cancelled feels purposeful. It feels like another act of erasure, a link between my father’s collection and the growing list of historical sites in Gaza now destroyed. We are losing our history and, with that, the very record of those who came before us.After I started my own collection on Palestine, my father entrusted me with some of his scanned copies of Life that mention Palestine. He waited to show them to me, as if passing on an heirloom. Perhaps he wanted to be sure I was ready or that I could do something with them. One of the magazines dates back to May 10, 1948, four days before the creation of Israel. There’s a headline that reads, “The Captured Port of Haifa Is Key to the Jews’ Strategy.” The author goes on to write that the port “improved Jews’ strategic position in Palestine. It gave them complete control of a long coastal strip south to Tel Aviv … They could look forward to shipments of heavy military equipment from their busy supporters abroad.” Right next to this text is a picture of Palestinian refugees with the caption “Arab Refugees, crammed aboard a British lighter in the harbor at Haifa, wait to be ferried across the bay to the Arab-held city of Acre. They were permitted to take what possessions they could but were stripped of all weapons.”I can’t help but feel the echo of this history today. I think about President Joe Biden’s plans to build a temporary port in Gaza to allow humanitarian aid in, even though about 7,000 aid trucks stand ready in Egypt’s North Sinai province. Back in October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared to welcome the idea of letting help arrive by sea,which at first confused me because not only has he denied that Palestinians are starving, but his government has also been accused by the United Nations and other humanitarian groups of blocking aid trucks from entering Gaza (a claim that Israel denies). Nevertheless, the historical echo seems quite clear to me now as I look through my father’s magazine and see refugees leaving by port 75 years earlier.I believe my father didn’t want to be alone in his recordkeeping. Who would? It’s endlessly depressing to have to write yourself and your people into existence. But writing about Palestine no longer feels like a choice. It feels like a compulsion. It’s the same drive that I imagine led Siddi to recite his family tree over and over, a self-preservation method that reminded him, just as much as it reminded his young son, of where they came from. It’s the same compulsion that inspires my father to collect the rubble of history and build a library from it.This impulse is reactive, yes, a response to the repeated denial of Palestine’s existence, but it’s also an act of faith—faith that one day all of this work will be useful, will finally be put on display as part of a new archive that corrects a systematically denied history. Sometimes I hear my father say that his magazines and books will one day be in a museum about Palestine.“Your brother will open one, and these will be there,” he muses to himself.Just as the compulsion to archive is contagious, so is hope. Since I’ve started publishing articles and essays about Palestine, I’ve had close and distant relatives reach out to me and offer to share pieces from their own collections.They ship me large boxes of books and newspapers, packed up from the recesses of their parents’ homes. “Can you do something with these?” they ask. My answer is always yes. I’m realizing that this archiving is not only work I have to do, but something I get to do.In the middle of the night, my father sends me subjectless emails with links to articles or scanned copies of magazines about Palestine that he’s been waiting to show to someone, anyone, who will care. I save each email in a folder in my Gmail account labeled “Palestine”—a digital version of the box in my bedroom, an archive that I return to whenever I feel despair.“It’s all here,” my father writes. “We existed. We were there.”

The ongoing outbreak of H5N1 avian flu virus looks a lot like a public-health problem that the United States should be well prepared for.Although this version of flu is relatively new to the world, scientists have been tracking H5N1 for almost 30 years. Researchers know the basics of how flu spreads and who tends to be most at risk. They have experience with other flus that have jumped into us from animals. The U.S. also has antivirals and vaccines that should have at least some efficacy against this pathogen. And scientists have had the advantage of watching this particular variant of the virus spread and evolve in an assortment of animals—including, most recently, dairy cattle in the United States—without it transmitting in earnest among us. “It’s almost like having the opportunity to catch COVID-19 in the fall of 2019,” Nahid Bhadelia, the founding director of Boston University Center on Emerging Infectious Diseases, told me.Yet the U.S. is struggling to mount an appropriate response. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s alertness to infectious disease remains high. But both federal action and public attention are focusing on the wrong aspects of avian flu and other pressing infectious dangers, including outbreaks of measles within U.S. borders and epidemics of mosquito-borne pathogens abroad. To be fair, the United States (much like the rest of the world) was not terribly good at gauging such threats before COVID, but now “we have had our reactions thrown completely out of whack,” Bill Hanage, an infectious-disease epidemiologist and a co-director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics at Harvard’s School of Public Health, told me. Despite all that COVID put us through—perhaps because of it—our infectious-disease barometer is broken.H5N1 is undoubtedly concerning: No version of this virus has ever before spread this rampantly across this many mammal species, or so thoroughly infiltrated American livestock, Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told me. But she and other experts maintain that the likelihood of H5N1 becoming our next pandemic remains quite low. No evidence currently suggests that the virus can spread efficiently between people, and it would still likely have to accumulate several more mutations to do so.That’s been a difficult message for the public to internalize—especially with the continued detection of fragments of viral genetic material in milk. Every expert I asked maintained that pasteurized dairy products—which undergo a heat-treatment process designed to destroy a wide range of pathogens—are very unlikely to pose imminent infectious threat. Yet the fear that dairy could sicken the nation simply won’t die. “When I see people talking about milk, milk, milk, I think maybe we’ve lost the plot a little bit,” Anne Sosin, a public-health researcher at Dartmouth, told me. Experts are far more worried about still-unanswered questions: “How did it get into the milk?” Marrazzo said. “What does that say about the environment supporting that?”During this outbreak, experts have called for better testing and surveillance—first of avian and mammalian wildlife, now of livestock. But federal agencies have been slow to respond. Testing of dairy cows was voluntary until last week. Now groups of lactating dairy cows must be screened for the virus before they move across state lines, but by testing just 30 animals, often out of hundreds. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told me he would also like to see more testing of other livestock, especially pigs, which have previously served as mixing vessels for flu viruses that eventually jumped into humans. More sampling would give researchers a stronger sense of where the virus has been and how it’s spreading within and between species. And it could help reveal the genomic changes that the virus may be accumulating. The U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies could also stand to shift from “almost this paternalistic view of, ‘We’ll tell you if you need to know,’” Osterholm said, to greater data transparency. (The USDA did not respond to a request for comment.)Testing and other protections for people who work with cows have been lacking, too. Many farm workers in the U.S. are mobile, uninsured, and undocumented; some of their employers may also fear the practical and financial repercussions of testing workers. All of that means a virus could sicken farm workers without being detected—which is likely already the case—then spread to their networks. Regardless of whether this virus sparks a full-blown pandemic, “we are completely ignoring the public-health threat that is happening right now,” Jennifer Nuzzo, the director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. The fumbles of COVID’s early days should have taught the government how valuable proactive testing, reporting, and data sharing are. What’s more, the pandemic could have taught us to prioritize high-risk groups, Sosin told me. Instead, the United States is repeating its mistakes. In response to a request for comment, a CDC spokesperson pointed me to the agency’s published guidance on how farmworkers can shield themselves with masks and other personal protective equipment, and argued that the small number of people with relevant exposures who are displaying symptoms has been adequately monitored or tested.Other experts worry that the federal government hasn’t focused enough on what the U.S. will do if H5N1 does begin to rapidly spread among people. The country’s experience with major flu outbreaks is an advantage, especially over newer threats such as COVID, Luciana Borio, a former acting chief scientist at the FDA and former member of the National Security Council, told me. But she worries that leaders are using that notion “to comfort ourselves in a way that I find to be very delusional.” The national stockpile, for instance, includes only a limited supply of vaccines developed against H5 flu viruses. And they will probably require a two-dose regimen, and may not provide as much protection as some people hope, Borio said. Experience alone cannot solve those challenges. Nor do the nation’s leaders appear to be adequately preparing for the wave of skepticism that any new shots might meet. (The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.)In other ways, experts told me, the U.S. may have overlearned certain COVID lessons. Several researchers imagine that wastewater could again be a useful tool to track viral spread. But, Sosin pointed out, that sort of tracking won’t work as well for a virus that may currently be concentrated in rural areas, where private septic systems are common. Flu viruses, unlike SARS-CoV-2, also tend to be more severe for young children than adults. Should H5N1 start spreading in earnest among humans, closing schools “is probably one of the single most effective interventions that you could do,” Bill Hanage said. Yet many politicians and members of the public are now dead set on never barring kids from classrooms to control an outbreak again.These misalignments aren’t limited to H5N1. In recent years, as measles and polio vaccination rates have fallen among children, cases—even outbreaks—of the two dangerous illnesses have been reappearing in the United States. The measles numbers are now concerning and persistent enough that Nahid Bhadelia worries that the U.S. could lose its elimination status for the disease within the next couple of years, undoing decades of progress. And yet public concern is low, Helen Chu, an immunologist and respiratory-virus expert at the University of Washington, told me. Perhaps even less thought is going toward threats abroad—among them, the continued surge of dengue in South America and a rash of cholera outbreaks in Africa and southern Asia. “We’re taking our eye off the ball,” Anthony Fauci, NIAID’s former director, told me.That lack of interest feels especially disconcerting to public-health experts as public fears ignite over H5N1. “We don’t put nearly enough emphasis on what is it that really kills us and hurts us,” Osterholm told me. If anything, our experience with COVID may have taught people to further fixate on novelty. Even then, concern over newer threats, such as mpox, quickly ebbs if outbreaks become primarily restricted to other nations. Many people brush off measles outbreaks as a problem for the unvaccinated, or dismiss spikes in mpox as an issue mainly for men who have sex with men, Ajay Sethi, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. And they shrug off just about any epidemic that happens abroad.The intensity of living through the early years of COVID split Americans into two camps: one overly sensitized to infectious threats, and the other overly, perhaps even willfully, numbed. Many people fear that H5N1 will be “the next big one,” while others tend to roll their eyes, Hanage told me. Either way, public trust in health authorities has degraded. Now, “no matter what happens, you could be accused of not sounding the alarm, or saying, ‘Oh my God, here we go again,’” Jeanne Marrazzo told me. As long as infectious threats to humanity are growing, however, recalibrating our sense of infectious danger is imperative to keeping those perils in check. If a broken barometer fails to detect a storm and no one prepares for the impact, the damage might be greater, but the storm itself will still resolve as it otherwise would. But if the systems that warn us about infectious threats are on the fritz, our neglect may cause the problem to grow.

Photographs by Lila BarthOn August 23, 2000, after an extensive search and a months-long rumble of media speculation, a press conference was held in London. There, the actor who’d been chosen to play Harry Potter in the first movie adaptation of J. K. Rowling’s best-selling novels was unveiled, alongside the film’s other two child leads. According to the on-screen caption in the BBC’s coverage of the event, this 11-year-old’s name was “Daniel Radford.”Until the previous year, Daniel Radcliffe, as he was actually known, hadn’t had any acting experience whatsoever, aside from briefly playing a monkey in a school play when he was about 6. When he’d auditioned for a British TV adaptation of David Copperfield, it was less out of great hope or ambition than because he’d been having a rough time at school and his parents (his father was a literary agent; his mother, a casting agent) thought that the experience of auditioning might boost his confidence. For an hour or two, the idea went, he’d get to see a world that none of his classmates had seen. Instead, he found himself cast as the young Copperfield, acting opposite Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins. And now this.At the press conference, wearing the round glasses that his character needed but he did not, Radcliffe explained with evident nerves how he had cried when he’d heard the news. (He had been in the bath at the time.) The answer that seemed to charm everyone was when he allowed, hesitantly, “I think I’m a tiny, tiny bit like Harry because I’d like to have an owl.” Asked how he felt about becoming famous, he replied, “It’ll be cool.”If those words channeled the innocence of youth, a boy blessedly oblivious to all that would soon be projected upon him, such obliviousness wouldn’t last very long. Less than a day, in fact. The following morning, an article appeared in the Daily Mail : “Harry Potter Beware!” Its notional author was Jack Wild, a former child star who had played the teenage lead in the 1968 movie-musical Oliver before his life and career were derailed by alcoholism and financial mishaps. The article’s closing lines, addressed to Radcliffe, were: “And, above all, enjoy fame and fortune while they last, for they can be fickle. I know, I learned the hard way.”There would be plenty more like this. Radcliffe’s other professional role, between David Copperfield and the first Harry Potter film, had been a smallish part in a John Boorman movie, The Tailor of Panama. When Boorman was asked about what the young actor was now doing, his answer was at best unguarded. “I think it’s a terrible fate for a ten-year-old child,” he said. “He’s a very nice kid, I’m very fond of him … I was astonished that he was going to spend the next four years or so doing Harry Potter, it’s really saying farewell to your childhood isn’t it?” Boorman’s conclusion: “He’s always going to be Harry Potter, I mean what a prospect.”“I remember being a little upset about that,” Radcliffe says now. “Just the phrase terrible fate …” As his time playing Harry Potter progressed—as one film turned into two, then ultimately eight, and as four years stretched into 10—Radcliffe became accustomed to endless iterations of this narrative. “There was a constant kind of drumbeat,” he recalls, “of ‘Are you all going to be screwed up by this?’ ”From early on, Radcliffe was aware of two competing drumbeats—two inevitable destinies, usually somehow intertwined, that were being predicted for him: “ ‘You’re going to be fucked up’ and ‘You’re not going to have a career.’ ” He decided that he would do everything he possibly could to defy both.“Looking back,” Radcliffe says—and he is offering these words at the age of 34, backstage at the Broadway theater where he is co-starring in the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along—“I’m quite impressed with 13-, 14-year-old me’s reaction to those things. To really, actually use them. To internally be going: Fuck you, I’m going to prove that wrong.”When success comes so young, even the person at its center can wonder exactly what it is that they have for all this to happen. Radcliffe says he’s fascinated that, among the first four roles he played, three of them are orphans: David Copperfield, Harry Potter, and a boy called Maps, who lives in an orphanage in a 2007 Australian coming-of-age story called December Boys. Even now, Radcliffe is not sure why this might have been. “I’ve had, in many ways, the most stable home life a person can imagine,” he says. His actual parents are “an incredibly loving couple.” But no matter—when people looked at him through a camera lens, they apparently saw something. Something he wasn’t aware was there.Chris Columbus is the director who cast Radcliffe as Harry Potter. “I remember having long discussions with Jo Rowling,” Columbus told me, “and one of the words that continuously came up about who Harry should be was haunted. Harry had to have a haunted quality.” Columbus described how, quite by chance, he turned on the TV in his hotel room at the end of a long day’s preproduction and stumbled across David Copperfield. He saw Radcliffe for the first time, and there it was: “that haunted quality on-screen.” Columbus wanted to meet him.Radcliffe knows that this is the story. He says that he always had a good imagination, and that, as an only child, he spent plenty of time within it. “But the idea of me having this sort of haunted quality or this darkness inside, I definitely don’t think I did when I was a kid,” he says. He’s grateful, of course, that this is what people perceived, but he hypothesizes that it might all have been an auspicious quirk of biology. “I’ve always said, ‘I’ve just got big eyes,’ ” he tells me. “I think that’s a ton of the reason for my success.”Columbus insists otherwise. He points out that he saw 800 to 1,000 boys, in person or on video. After watching Radcliffe’s screen test—“This was a complex kid, even back then”—Columbus, Rowling, and the producer David Heyman believed they’d finally found the actor they needed. Problem was, the studio disagreed. “They were pushing for this other kid who I felt just was a typical sort of Hollywood kid, even though he was from the U.K.,” Columbus said. “And his acting wasn’t naturalistic or believable. We just fought and fought for Dan.” When I mentioned Radcliffe’s theory about his eyes, Columbus dismissed it out of hand. “Ironically, the kid with the bigger eyes was the one the studio was fighting for at the time,” he said. “This kid had big eyes, but he had absolutely zero complexity.” Left: Radcliffe as a child. Right: Radcliffe and the director Chris Columbus, who cast him as Harry Potter, in 2000. (Courtesy of Marcia Gresham; Hugo Philpott / AFP / Getty) Radcliffe’s original screen test is now online, and it makes for fascinating viewing. First he banters convincingly with Columbus, who is off camera, about dragon eggs, and then they transition to a much darker, heavier scene, in which Radcliffe must say things like “If you heard your mum screaming like that, just about to be killed, you wouldn’t forget in a hurry.” He manages all of it with a remarkable, unshowy, charming intensity. Radcliffe himself watched the audition for the first time a couple of years back, and even he noticed something in it. “I cringe whenever I watch any of my early acting,” he says. “But the thing I did see when I watched that was, Oh, I’m very good at being still.”In the early days of his new Harry Potter life, Radcliffe was largely sequestered from the public. The films would shoot through most of the year, and even before falling in love with acting, Radcliffe fell in love with being on a film set, and with the people he was surrounded by, particularly the crew. He’s often noted that one thing he’s grateful for, which he thinks may be specific to British film culture, is that, however central the young actors’ roles may have been, they were treated as kids, rather than as child stars.David Holmes, who was Radcliffe’s stunt double for nine years, became one of his closest friends and the accessory to all kinds of tomfoolery. “Just two kids having fun,” Holmes, who is five years older than Radcliffe, told me. “I’d let him do all the things an insurance company wouldn’t let him do: jumping on trampolines, swinging around swords, jumping off of the top of a Portakabin roof onto a crash mat.”Radcliffe lived at home with his parents and attended school as much as he could, though more and more of his education came from tutors between breaks in filming. Only intermittently would he find himself face-to-face with what all of this was coming to mean in the outside world, and how strange and uncomfortable it could be.“I remember really well the physical feeling of the first film’s premiere,” he says. “You can tell a kid as much as you like, ‘There’s going to be tons of people there,’ and they did tell us, but getting out and feeling it, and feeling that noise hit you, and the kind of knowledge of, Oh, something is expected of me now. I remember looking at my hands and they were very still, but inside my body, it was like I could feel my whole body vibrating. I don’t know if you’ve ever hyperventilated, but it’s a similar feeling. When you’re just about to pass out, but don’t.”The apogee of this sensation came when he flew to Japan in December 2002, to promote the second film. “I think there was something with privacy laws at that point,” he says, “where you could just phone up the airline and say, ‘Is Daniel Radcliffe on this flight?’ And they’d say yes.” Before he and his parents got off the plane, a flight attendant let them know that 100 security people were ready at the airport. That seemed a bit much. It wasn’t. “It was 100 security barely managing to hold back 5,000 people,” he says. Fans, and press too. “I remember there was a woman cleaning the floor, and she just got mowed down by this pack of photographers and journalists,” he says. Radcliffe mentions that he has long wanted to find footage of this melee. I wonder aloud how much the TV cameras would have been filming the surrounding chaos, and how much just him. “At a certain point,” he responds, “me and the chaos became inseparable.”Two snapshots from that day are stuck in Radcliffe’s mind. First, the moment, going through the crowd, when a toggle of his mother’s duffle coat got caught on the button loop of another woman’s jacket. “And they just stood there,” he says, “having to free themselves from one another for a second.” Next, when they finally got in the car, the way his parents reacted: how they started laughing and said, “Wasn’t that crazy?” Looking back, he thinks that it was how his parents, and the other adults around him, set a tone at times like that—“That was weird; let’s go to the hotel”—that helped make what might have been overwhelming into something that, for all its otherworldly strangeness, he could deal with.It was around the third Harry Potter film when Radcliffe realized that acting was what he wanted to do as a career. With that came more self-consciousness about his performances, and even though the films became more and more successful (cumulatively they would gross close to $8 billion), his satisfaction did not always grow in proportion.One period that stands out to him in particular was around the sixth film, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. He had some ideas about how his character might be shut down from the trauma he’d suffered—near the end of the fifth film, Harry witnesses the death of his godfather, Sirius Black, the closest figure in his life to a parent—but looking back, Radcliffe finds that what he did as a result is stiff and wooden. This was compounded by standard teenage awkwardness: “I didn’t want my face to do anything weird. Like, I used to hate smiling on camera, because I hated my smile.”At the end of January 2009, just before the seventh film was to begin shooting, his real world was shaken in a most brutal way. His stunt double, Holmes, and another friend had just visited Radcliffe in New York. Upon his return to England, Holmes started prepping for the forthcoming shoot. While rehearsing what is known as a “jerk back” stunt, in which Harry would be seen flying backwards after being attacked by a giant snake, something went wrong. Holmes’s body, propelled on pulley-rigged wires, rotated unexpectedly in midair, and when he hit a padded vertical wall as intended, he broke his neck. He was paralyzed from the waist down.To begin with, Radcliffe struggled to process what had happened. “Even when you see him in bed in the hospital with all the tubes and stuff coming out of him, looking like he looks, your brain still goes, Well, you’re going to get better—they can do anything nowadays.” “It’s coming to the understanding,” he adds, “that some things cannot be helped.”He and Holmes remain close—at one point Radcliffe tells me, “Dave’s story is kind of the biggest thing from Potter that has gone on having an effect in my life”—and a few years ago, Holmes finally agreed to Radcliffe’s suggestion that his story be told in a documentary. Radcliffe began shooting interviews with Holmes and others. Then he looked at what he had.“I don’t know why I thought that I would be able to direct a documentary,” he says. The biggest issue, he says, “was how shit I was at being the interviewer.” He realized that when it came to speaking with Holmes or anyone else he was close to, “I found asking the really hard questions virtually impossible.” He stepped back, and their filmmaker friend Dan Hartley, who’d worked as a video operator for the Harry Potter movies, took over. (The powerful result, David Holmes: The Boy Who Lived, came out last fall.)When I mentioned to Holmes what Radcliffe told me—about Radcliffe’s difficulties in discussing the hardest stuff—Holmes at first seemed to agree. But then he corrected himself.“Actually, no,” he said. “In the lockdown, we had a Zoom call once or twice a week. At the time, I was losing neurological function on this arm”—Holmes indicated his right side—“and my pain levels were going through the roof.” Because of COVID, Holmes said, the usual hospital resources weren’t available to him. He realized that Radcliffe “was one of the only people where I was like, ‘How does a quadriplegic without arms or legs kill himself without putting another person in some sort of trauma?’ That’s a hard conversation to have. It’s not an easy thing to hear a human being say, but it’s a reality.” Radcliffe was someone he could discuss this with: “Logical, emotionally intelligent enough, and also had enough of a sense of ‘I get it, Dave.’ ” Radcliffe at the Hudson Theatre, in New York (Lila Barth for The Atlantic) “Me and Dave go to very heavy places,” Radcliffe says. “Also, and there’s no way of reading this and not some people getting the wrong impression, but also there’s a huge amount of humor in those conversations where he’s devising essentially some kind of Rube Goldberg machine so that he can still be the person who does it.”Radcliffe offers another example. “I remember one of the funniest voice messages I ever received was from him on safari in Africa, talking about what a brilliant time he was having. And also, how wonderful would it be to die at the horn of a rhinoceros. He went into very graphic detail. So yeah, it’s dark, it’s weird, but these are the conversations you have with friends in really specific situations. Knowing Dave, it forces you to think about a lot of stuff.”When Radcliffe emerged from the Harry Potter chrysalis, he did not want to stop working. He knew that some things were immutable—“Harry Potter is going to be the first line of my obituary”—but if that was the context in which his life would now continue, it needn’t limit it. “I wanted to try as many different things under my belt,” he says, “knowing that it was going to be the accumulation of all of those things, rather than one thing, that would actually sort of transition me in people’s minds.”A key moment he identifies in his evolution was Kill Your Darlings, a movie he made in 2012, the year after the final Harry Potter film was released, in which he plays a young Allen Ginsberg. It was directed by John Krokidas, who gave him an education in ways to think about a script and his performance—one that Radcliffe, in his former life as a cog in a relentlessly focused franchise, had never had before. “I’d always just been: I learn my lines and I come to set and I follow my instincts.”When Krokidas asked him, “What’s your process?,” Radcliffe had to explain that he didn’t have one. So the director taught him. “Incredibly basic stuff,” Radcliffe says. These were techniques that most actors would consider “Acting 101,” but it was all new to him: “It was just, like, breaking down a script by wants. So rather than thinking, I am going to try and effect this emotion, thinking, What am I trying to do to the other person in the scene?” In the film they made together, Radcliffe portrays the young poet in a persuasively natural way. If this was a product of what he had just learned, the lessons stuck quickly and well.There were also other, more specific ways in which Krokidas’s direction was different from what Radcliffe was used to. During a scene where Ginsberg is picked up in a bar and sleeps with a man for the first time—just a passing moment in the movie, although predictably it would later become a disproportionate part of the film’s public profile in a “Harry Potter has gay sex” kind of way—Radcliffe has recalled that Krokidas shouted at one point: “No! Kiss him! Fucking sex kissing!” As Radcliffe explained in an interview ahead of the film’s release, “The things that directors have shouted to me in the past usually involve which way I have to look to see the dragon.”That film holds additional significance for Radcliffe. In an earlier scene, Ginsberg meets a librarian at Columbia—they disappear into the stacks, where she kneels down and fellates him. When Radcliffe’s infant son is older, Radcliffe acknowledges, “he’s going to find that film an awkward watch”; this scene is from the first few days when Radcliffe was getting to know his future partner, Erin Darke. Krokidas made Radcliffe and Darke do an acting exercise in which they stood “a foot from each other, and made eye contact and said things that we found attractive about each other or said things that we liked about each other. And I was so immediately aware that I was going red because I was like, Oh God, there’s no way for this girl not to find out that I really like her in this moment.”For a decade, he and Darke have kept a low profile. They have appeared on red carpets together only a handful of times. “I have learned so much from her about my own boundaries,” he says. “Very occasionally, people will come up to me in the street and be very weird or rude or something like that. And she has given me a sense over the years of: You don’t have to just be nice to everyone when they’re weird with you. She’s given me some sense of my own autonomy, I guess.”I mention to him that I heard his and Darke’s rare joint appearance in 2021 on Love to See It With Emma and Claire, a podcast about reality dating shows. The couple keenly engage in a 100-minute discussion of the most recent Bachelor in Paradise episodes.Radcliffe has a long-held affection for various strands of reality TV. He proceeds to explain the strange impromptu role he has occasionally played on the edges of that world. His friend Emma Gray, who co-hosts the podcast, has an annual Christmas party, where Radcliffe sometimes runs into cast members from the Bachelor universe: “I always find them fascinating to talk to. I say I always want to do fame counseling with them, because I’m just like, ‘I’ve had a lot of practice at this now—you guys have just been shot out of a fucking cannon.’” He repeatedly finds himself wanting to ask them, “How are you? Are you okay?”Backstage at New York’s Hudson Theatre, Radcliffe leads me into his small dressing room just up a metal gangway, stage left. As he does so, he politely offers a preemptive apology. “I might conduct a little of this interview with my trousers around my ankles, I’m afraid,” he says.For the past four months, Radcliffe has been playing one of the three leads in Merrily We Roll Along, the famous Stephen Sondheim flop that is belatedly enjoying its first successful Broadway run. (In April, the role will earn him his first Tony nomination.) As he takes a seat, he lets his trousers fall. This afternoon, when he stood up to leave the home he shares with Darke and their son, he realized that he’d somehow tweaked his knee. That’s why he is now in his underwear, pressing an ice pack to it. Radcliffe at New York’s Hudson Theatre (Lila Barth for The Atlantic) Radcliffe has been doing theater for half his life now, and onstage was where he made his first bold break from expectations. When he was 17, between the release of the fourth and fifth Harry Potter movies, it was announced that he would be appearing in London’s West End as the lead in a revival of the 1970s play Equus, playing a disturbed teenager with a predilection for mutilating horses by blinding them—a role that, among its many other tests, required him to be fully naked onstage for several minutes.He wasn’t trying to shock; he was just trying to stretch the boundaries of who he might become. He’d been taking voice lessons for 18 months in preparation for the challenge of appearing onstage. When the reviews came in, their surprise showed. “Daniel Radcliffe brilliantly succeeds in throwing off the mantle of Harry Potter, announcing himself as a thrilling stage actor of unexpected range and depth,” The Daily Telegraph assessed.Since then, other theater roles have followed, including in Martin McDonagh’s The Cripple of Inishmaan and Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, along with 10 months as the lead in a Broadway revival of the musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. And now Merrily, Sondheim’s told-backwards tale of three friends.For Radcliffe, the role seems a natural fit. Although interviews he gave in his Harry Potter years tended to be punctuated with overexuberant declarations about ’70s punk albums and his latest indie-rock discoveries, another world of song has always run through him. His parents, who met doing musical theater, used to play Sondheim productions while they were driving. It took Radcliffe years to understand that not all childhoods were like his in this respect. “I thought everyone listened to show tunes in the car,” he recently said. “I thought that was road-trip music.”As he performs, you can see two kinds of delight—in sinking into the unshowy togetherness of an ensemble, and, now and again, in stepping forward and commanding all eyes in the theater to follow his every move and breath.Two days a week, Radcliffe has both a matinee and an evening show. One afternoon, following a matinee, I find him in his dressing room chewing some beef jerky. He says that somebody asked him the other day what he does between shows: “I said, ‘I eat jerky and I sleep.’ ”Even outside the demands of a two-show day, his diet is somewhat unconventional. He mostly doesn’t eat during the day and has one huge meal at night. “I find there’s, like, a switch in my brain that if I start doing something, I can’t turn it off.” If he starts eating anything, he says, he’ll keep craving more. He is, he acknowledges, prone to such habitual behaviors. “I’ve got a very addictive personality.”Emerging from his teens, Radcliffe did quietly skate a little too close to one part of the prophesized tragic-child-star narrative he’d been hell-bent on avoiding. He started to drink, because it was something he thought he should become good at. “I had a really romanticized idea of all these old actors who were always on the piss, and there were all these stories about them and they were really funny,” he explains. Committed intoxication was also part of the British-movie-set world he loved. “I was like, I’ve got to be able to keep up with all these hardened film crews,” he says.He took to it well enough, but that’s not to say he was good at it. He would black out all the time. “There’s so much dread that comes with that,” he says, “because life is a constant sense of What have I done? Who am I about to hear from? I’d say it’s in the last few years that I’ve stopped getting some sense of internal panic whenever my phone rings.”I ask him about something that had belatedly struck me: The sixth Harry Potter movie, the one in which he’d said he doesn’t like his acting, was filmed around this period. (It was released when he was 19.) Is that a coincidence? Not entirely, he says. “I can’t watch that film without being like, to myself, I look a bit, like, dead behind the eyes,” he says. “And I’m sure that’s a consequence of drinking.”After a time, he realized that he needed to stop. Partly, he didn’t like the sense that he was fulfilling a trope expected of him—“I was like, Oh God, I’ve become a real cliché of something here”—but mostly he wanted “to stop getting in trouble and feeling fear.”He also received some stern encouragement. “As a friend, I realized that he wasn’t really taking care of himself,” David Holmes told me. “One day when he came and visited the hospital, he just looked tired—bags under his eyes, skin wasn’t too good. And I’m lying there in a bed with a neck brace on with a feeding tube up my nose. Of course, Harry Potter’s on the ward, so we’ve got loads of attention, but we put the bed curtain around and I just said to him, ‘Look, mate, you’ve got to look after yourself with this. I’m not lying here the way I am watching you piss this away. So please know, if I could get up right now and give you a hiding, I fucking would.’ ” Radcliffe with Jonathan Groff and Lindsay Mendez, his co-stars in Merrily We Roll Along on Broadway, 2023 (Matthew Murphy) Somehow, Radcliffe’s drinking had slipped under the radar of the British press, but after he first cleaned up—he later wobbled for a while, though he’s now been sober for more than a decade—he decided to share in an interview a little of what had been going on. Part of his rationale was inoculation—“something might come out about it anyway, so I wanted to try and get ahead of that”—but he also had a notion that closing the gap between reality and the perception of his life “would make me happier or feel less ill at ease in the world.” That didn’t work as he’d hoped. “I learned that the more information you give,” he says, “it just raises more questions for people.” In the celebrity universe, the truth doesn’t always set you free. Sometimes it just feeds a relentless hunger for even more truth.Radcliffe moves through many of our conversations like a whirlwind—“I know I talk at a million miles an hour and go off on weird tangents or whatever,” he’ll note while doing exactly that—but on one particular subject, everything slows down. There are long pauses and pained sighs. He sees the sense in the questions, but it feels as though, deep down, he has little faith in the worth of answering them.First, some context. Radcliffe has long been a public advocate for the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ suicide-prevention hotline and crisis-intervention resource he was introduced to back in 2009, while performing in Equus. He explains that, having grown up in his parents’ world, surrounded by their gay friends, it was baffling to discover the wider world’s prejudice; here, he saw a specific opportunity to help. “If there was any value in a famous straight young actor who was from this film series that could be useful in the fight against people killing themselves, then I was just very keen to be a part of that,” he says. Along the way, he became aware of a particular symbiosis that he hadn’t anticipated: “I did have a realization of a connection to Harry Potter and this stuff. A lot of people found some solace in those books and films who were dealing with feeling closeted or rejected by their family or living with a secret.”Then, in June 2020, J. K. Rowling wrote a series of tweets that set off a media hullabaloo. She began by sarcastically commenting on an article that used the term people who menstruate, before doubling down in ways that many criticized as anti-trans.A few days later, Radcliffe issued a personal statement through the Trevor Project. “I realize that certain press outlets will probably want to paint this as in-fighting between J. K. Rowling and myself, but that is really not what this is about, nor is it what’s important right now,” he began, before moving on to say: “Transgender women are women. Any statement to the contrary erases the identity and dignity of transgender people and goes against all advice given by professional health care associations who have far more expertise on this subject matter than either Jo or I.”He expressed hope that readers’ experiences with the Harry Potter books needn’t be tarnished by this, and argued that what people may have found within those books—for instance, “if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups”—remains between readers and the books, “and it is sacred.”“I’d worked with the Trevor Project for 12 years and it would have seemed like, I don’t know, immense cowardice to me to not say something,” Radcliffe says when I raise this subject. “I wanted to try and help people that had been negatively affected by the comments,” he tells me. “And to say that if those are Jo’s views, then they are not the views of everybody associated with the Potter franchise.”Since those June 2020 tweets, Rowling has proclaimed, again and again, her belief in the importance of biological sex, and that the trans-rights movement seeks to undermine women as a protected class. Radcliffe says he had no direct contact with Rowling throughout any of this. “It makes me really sad, ultimately,” he says, “because I do look at the person that I met, the times that we met, and the books that she wrote, and the world that she created, and all of that is to me so deeply empathic.”During the blowback, he was often thrown in together with his Harry Potter co-stars Emma Watson and Rupert Grint, who both also expressed their support for the trans community in response to Rowling’s comments. In the British press particularly, he says, “There’s a version of ‘Are these three kids ungrateful brats?’ that people have always wanted to write, and they were finally able to. So, good for them, I guess.” Never mind that he found the premise simply wrongheaded. “Jo, obviously Harry Potter would not have happened without her, so nothing in my life would have probably happened the way it is without that person. But that doesn’t mean that you owe the things you truly believe to someone else for your entire life.”Radcliffe offered these carefully weighted reflections in the early months of this year, before Rowling (who declined to comment for this article) newly personalized their disagreements. In the second week of April, Rowling wrote a series of posts on X in response to the publication of a British-government-funded report that notes, as just one of a wide-ranging series of findings, that “for the majority of young people, a medical pathway may not be the best way” to help young people “presenting with gender incongruence or distress”; Rowling touted this as vindication of her views. When one of her supporters replied on X that they were “just waiting for Dan and Emma to give you a very public apology,” further suggesting that Radcliffe and Watson would be safe in the knowledge that Rowling would forgive them, she leaped in: “Not safe, I’m afraid,” she wrote, and characterized them as “celebs who cosied up to a movement intent on eroding women’s hard-won rights.” In response, Radcliffe told me: “I will continue to support the rights of all LGBTQ people, and have no further comment than that.”Radcliffe has long had a passion for word-crammed, tongue-twisting songs. Sometimes these have been rap songs—he says that he has mastered four or five Eminem songs (“when ‘Rap God’ came out I was like, This is my Everest ”), and in 2014, he improbably appeared on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show to perform Blackalicious’s “Alphabet Aerobics” with the Roots. But at a young age, through his parents’ influence, he also picked up a sustained, much less fashionable passion for the works of Tom Lehrer. In 2010, on the British talk show The Graham Norton Show, sitting on a sofa next to Colin Farrell and Rihanna, Radcliffe performed Lehrer’s “The Elements,” in which the periodic table is rhythmically recited at great speed, for no obvious reason other than that he wanted to, and could.A while afterward, a fellow Lehrer aficionado came across the clip on YouTube. “I just thought at the time that was the nerdiest possible thing a person could do,” Al Yankovic told me. “That’s such an alpha-nerd thing to do. I thought we would get along very well.” Later, when Yankovic was looking for someone to play him in the 2022 movie Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, his thoughts returned to Radcliffe. “We needed to cast somebody that really understood comedy and appreciated comedy, but also who could pull off the part without winking. We wanted somebody that would treat this like it was a very serious Oscar-bait drama.” Radcliffe as “Weird Al” Yankovic in Weird, 2022 (The Roku Channel / Everett Collection) That is one part of the backstory to Weird, Radcliffe’s most recent movie, which masquerades as a Yankovic biopic but is actually a savagely pinpoint parody of every other musical biopic, particularly in the ways it unscrupulously and ludicrously reshapes history into a series of vainglorious fables about our hero. It was also an unlikely triumph, and Radcliffe, who committed to a sincerity unruffled by all that surrounds it, was nominated for an Emmy.Although Radcliffe makes clear that, post–Harry Potter, he’s not averse to big, mass-market movies—he recently played the villain in the action-adventure movie The Lost City, with Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum, which made nearly $200 million—his filmography is scattered with fascinatingly eclectic choices.Some of them are the kind of challenges you might expect an ambitious actor to take on—an FBI agent as an undercover white supremacist (Imperium), a South African political prisoner (Escape From Pretoria)—and some of them are … stranger. In Horns, he plays a man with a murdered girlfriend who grows real horns. In Guns Akimbo, he wakes up to find that he has had guns surgically attached to both hands. By now, word has clearly spread that if you have a good role of compelling oddity, Daniel Radcliffe might consider it.The finest example of this is the 2016 movie Swiss Army Man, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, better known as the Daniels. When the Daniels approached Radcliffe, long before the success of their 2022 movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once, they were two pop-music-video makers who had never done a full-length film, and the movie they proposed was a surreal, absurdist story about a suicidally lonely man who befriends a flatulent corpse. They wanted Radcliffe to play the corpse.Scheinert took me through the thought process that led to their approach: “We wanted someone who could sing, because it’s a little bit of a musical; someone with a weird sense of humor, because it’s a weird movie; and someone who didn’t feel like they needed to look beautiful all the time. Weirdly, there’s a lot of actors who are concerned with their image.”Much later, when Radcliffe was promoting the film—a movie he would himself refer to, perhaps both in acknowledgment and parody of some people’s reactions, as “the Daniel Radcliffe farting boner corpse movie”—he would be routinely asked how on earth the Daniels had persuaded him to get involved. But that was never an issue. From the moment he turned the script’s first few pages—in which Hank, played by Paul Dano, is distracted from killing himself by the sight of a corpse washing up onto his desert island, expelling air from its rear, and soon is riding the corpse across the ocean like a Jet Ski, propelled by the corpse’s farts—he was in. (The “boner” part, by the way, comes later, when Hank learns that the corpse’s erections function as a compass.)For a movie with such a high-wire premise, Swiss Army Man does an impressive job of finding, within its absurdities and grotesqueness, something more. The film plays out in a zone somewhere between reality and the hallucinations of broken, lonely people with good hearts. “I’ve realized over the years,” Radcliffe says, “that if there’s a sweet spot to be found between deeply fucking weird and strange and almost unsettling, and kind of wholesome and earnest and very sincere, then that’s the stuff I really love doing.” Anything, he tells me, “that says something kind of lovely about human beings in spite of ourselves, in spite of how bad the world is.” Left: Radcliffe and Paul Dano in Swiss Army Man, 2016. Right: Radcliffe in The Lost City, 2022. (A24 / Everett Collection; Paramount Pictures / Everett Collection) Radcliffe recognizes that, in making career decisions, he now faces an unusual predicament. From the Harry Potter films, he has banked more money than most actors will ever see in their lifetime, and there are no signs that he has been frittering it away.“I’m in a weird position where I don’t have to work,” he tells me. “Not to sound like an asshole about it—I’m sure people reading this will be like, ‘For fuck’s sake.’ ” His point is just that it’s difficult to explain how he decides what he does and doesn’t do without acknowledging that one of the usual impetuses is absent. “I go to work,” he says, “because I love what I do.”“I think he’s one of those special cases where he started as a child and it actually is what he wanted to do and it’s how he’s wanted to spend his life,” Jonathan Groff, his Merrily co-star, told me.Merrily We Roll Along runs until July. After that, Radcliffe initially tells me, he is looking forward to appearing alongside Ethan Hawke in a film called Batso, about a true-life mountain-climbing feat in Yosemite in the 1970s: “Any acting job where there’s some physical thing that goes alongside it, I tend to really enjoy, just because I think it takes away self-consciousness.”But then in April, several weeks after Batso is publicly announced, the project is put on hold. Radcliffe seems to take this, too, in his stride. He’d been planning a long break anyway, and now the chance will come sooner. “We’re just going to be a family for a bit,” he says, “and I’m very, very excited about that, to be honest.”When the Potter movies ended, Radcliffe says, “I got to feeling like people were watching to see if we just flamed out or actually managed to go on to do something. And I didn’t know the answer at that moment, and not knowing the answer to that question made me feel like a bit of a fraud, I guess. I think I just carried that all around with me in a way that was just very present in my day-to-day life and thinking. In a way that it’s thankfully not as much now.”This article appears in the June 2024 print edition with the headline “After Potter.”

On a Wednesday morning last December, Bruno Landier slung his gun and handcuffs around his waist and stepped into the mouth of a cave. Inside the sprawling network of limestone cavities, which sit in a cliffside that towers above the tiny town of Marboué, in north-central France, Landier crouched under hanging vines. He stepped over rusted pipes, remnants from when the caves housed a mushroom farm. He picked his way through gravel and mud as he scanned the shadowy ecru walls with his flashlight, taking care not to miss any signs.Landier was not gathering evidence for a murder case or tailing a criminal on the run. He was searching for bats—and anything that might disturb their winter slumber. “Aha,” Landier whispered as his flashlight illuminated a jumble of amber-colored beer bottles strewn across the floor. Someone had been there, threatening to awaken the hundreds of bats hibernating within.Landier is an inspector in the French Biodiversity Agency (OFB), an entity that was given sweeping powers to enforce environmental laws when it was founded, in 2020. Its nationwide police force, the only one of its kind in Europe, has 3,000 agents charged with protecting French species in order to revive declining biodiversity in the country and its territories. Damaging the habitat of protected animals such as bats—much less killing a protected animal—is a misdemeanor that can carry a penalty of 150,000 euros and three years in prison. It’s a uniquely draconian, uniquely French approach to environmentalism.The environmental police watch over all of France’s protected species, including hedgehogs, squirrels, black salamanders, lynxes, and venomous asp vipers. Bats are a frequent charge: Of the 54 protected mammal species on French soil, 34 are bats. The Marboué caves patrolled by Landier are home to approximately 12 different species.[Read: How long should a species stay on life support?]When Landier visits each morning, he sometimes must crouch to avoid walking face-first into clusters of sleeping notch-eared bats, which he can identify by their coffin-shaped back and “badly combed” off-white belly. They hibernate in groups of five, 10, or even 50, dangling from the ceiling like so many living umbrellas for as long as seven months each year. If roused before spring—by a loud conversation or even prolonged heat from a flashlight—the bats will flee toward almost-certain death in the cold temperatures outside the cave.Bats, of course, aren’t the only nocturnal creatures attracted to caves. Landier has spent more than 20 years patrolling this site, beginning when he was a hunting warden for the French government. In that time, he has encountered ravers, drug traffickers, squatters, geocachers, looters, local teens looking for a place to party. When he comes across evidence such as the beer bottles, he’ll sometimes return on the weekend to stake out the entrance. First offenders might receive a verbal warning, but Landier told me he’s ready to pursue legal action if necessary. (So far, he hasn’t had to.) “I’m very nice. But I won’t be taken for a fool,” he said. In the neighboring department of Cher, several people were convicted of using bats as target practice for paintball, Landier told me. A fine of an undisclosed amount was levied against the culprits. (France prevents details of petty crimes from being released to the public.)[From the June 1958 issue: Is France being Americanized?]Across France, many of the caverns and architecture that bats call home are themselves cherished or protected. Landier told me that relics found in his caves date back to the Gallo-Roman period, nearly 2,000 years ago; on the ceiling, his flashlight caught the glitter of what he said were fossils and sea urchins from the Ice Age. The floor is crisscrossed with long wires trailed by past explorers so they could find their way back out.In nearby Châteaudun castle, built in the 15th century, several dozen bats live in the basement and behind the tapestries. At Chartres Cathedral, to the north, a colony of pipistrelle bats dwells inside the rafters of a medieval wooden gate. Bats flock to the abbey on Mont Saint-Michel, in Normandy, and to historic châteaus such as Chambord, in the Loire Valley, and Kerjean, in Brittany. In Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery, they chase insects from the graves of Molière, Édith Piaf, and Colette.France is fiercely protective of its landmarks, and that sense of patrimoine extends to less tangible treasures too. For more than a century, French law has prohibited any sparkling-wine producer worldwide to call its product “champagne” unless it comes from the Champagne region of France. As part of the French naturalization process, I had to learn to match cheeses to their region (Brie to Meaux, Camembert to Normandy). Their craftsmanship, too, is included in the cultural imagination: In 2019, the French government asked UNESCO to recognize the work of Paris’s zinc roofers as part of world heritage (the jury is still out).[Ta-Nehisi Coates: Acting French]In recent years, even animals have begun to be incorporated into this notion of cultural heritage. When two neighbors ended up in court in 2019 over the early-morning cries of a rooster—embraced for centuries as France’s national animal—the judge ruled in favor of Maurice the rooster. Inspired by Maurice, France then passed a law protecting the “sensory heritage of the countryside.” In the immediate aftermath of the Notre-Dame fire, a beekeeper was allowed access to care for the bees that have been living on the rooftop for years. The Ministry of Culture insists on provisions for biodiversity on all work done on cultural monuments.Bats, despite receiving centuries of bad press, are a fitting mascot for biological patrimony. They are such ferocious insectivores—a single bat can eat thousands of bugs a night—that farmers in bat-heavy areas can use fewer pesticides on grapes, grains, and other agricultural products. On Enclos de la Croix, a family-owned vineyard in Southern France that has partnered with the OFB, insectivorous bats are the only form of pesticide used. Agathe Frezouls, a co-owner of the vineyard, told me that biodiversity is both a form of “cultural heritage” and a viable economic model.Not all farmers have the same high regard for biodiversity—or for the OFB. Earlier this year, 100 farmers mounted on tractors dumped manure and hay in front of an OFB office to protest the agency’s power to inspect farms for environmental compliance. The farmers say that it’s an infringement on their private property and that complying with the strict environmental rules is too costly. Compliance is a major concern for OFB, especially when it comes to bats. If someone destroys a beaver dam, for instance, that crime would be easily visible to the OFB. But bats and their habitats tend to be hidden away, so the police must rely on citizens to report bats on their property or near businesses.Agriculture is part of the reason bats need protection at all. The Marboué caves’ walls are dotted with inlays from the 19th century, when candles lit the passageways for the many employees of the mushroom farm. Until the farm closed, in the 1990s, the cave network was home to tractors and treated heavily with pesticides; their sickly sweet smell lingers in the deepest chambers. The pesticides are what drove off or killed most of the bats living here in the 20th century, Landier told me—when he first visited this site, in 1998, only about 10 bats remained. Today, it’s home to more than 450.[Read: Biodiversity is life’s safety net]After several hours inspecting the cave, Landier and I ambled back toward the entrance, passing under the vines into the harsh winter light. In the next few weeks, the bats will follow our path, leaving the relative safety of the cave to mate.With summer coming on, the slate roofs ubiquitous throughout rural France will soon become gentle furnaces, making attics the perfect place for bats to reproduce. Homeowners reshingling roofs sometimes discover a colony of bats, and Landier is the one to inform them that they must leave their roof unfinished until the end of the breeding season. Most people let the bats be, even when it’s a nuisance. Perhaps they’re beginning to see them as part of the “sensory heritage of the countryside” too.Support for this article was provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Kari Howard Fund for Narrative Journalism

Donald Trump has made his contempt for the court clear throughout his criminal trial in Manhattan, and now a judge has made it official. Juan Merchan ruled today that the former president had violated a gag order designed to protect the integrity of the trial and fined him $9,000.The order is a window into Merchan’s approach to controlling the unruly defendant, who is on trial in his courtroom for falsifying business records. Merchan found that nine violations alleged by prosecutors were clear violations, but deemed a tenth too ambiguous to warrant punishment. He declined to levy the most serious punishment available to him—namely, tossing Trump in jail—but also had scathing words for Trump’s excuses for violating the order. Merchan used his ruling to defend his gag order as narrow and careful, but also warned that potential witnesses (looking at you, Michael Cohen) should not use the order “as a sword instead of a shield.”Merchan is the third judge in recent months to reckon with the challenge of Trump, a defendant who not only is furious that he’s being called to account for his actions and is openly disdainful of the rule of law, but also sees political advantage in attempting to provoke sanctions on himself. Give Trump too much latitude and he undermines the standing of the criminal-justice system; act too forcefully and it could reward his worst behavior.[Read: Is Trump daring a judge to jail him?]Lewis Kaplan, the federal judge who handled civil suits brought by E. Jean Carroll, scolded Trump for his behavior from the bench but went no further. Justice Arthur Engoron, who oversaw a civil fraud case, repeatedly fined Trump and chided him, but also allowed him to hector the court in closing arguments. Merchan, like them, seems to be trying to control Trump without being drawn into hand-to-hand combat.Trump has tested the bounds of Merchan’s gag order from the start. Ahead of the hearing last Wednesday to discuss the alleged violations, Trump sent histrionic emails to supporters. “ALL HELL BREAKS LOOSE IN 24 HOURS!” he wrote. “Friend, in 24 hours, the hearing on my GAG ORDER will begin. I COULD BE THROWN IN JAIL AT THAT VERY MOMENT!” In another, he wrote, “MY FAREWELL MESSAGE—I HOPE THIS ISN’T GOODBYE!” During the hearing, prosecutors specifically said they were not seeking jail time at this point and accused Trump of “angling” for it.Merchan today lamented that the law permits him to fine a defendant only $1,000 per violation, which, he wrote, “unfortunately will not achieve the desired result in those instances where the contemnor can easily afford such a fine.” He also warned that if Trump continued to violate the order, the court “will impose an incarceratory punishment.”[David A. Graham: ‘Control your client’]Perhaps more interesting than the money is Merchan’s analysis. Trump’s lawyers raised a couple of defenses during last week’s contempt hearing. First, they argued that several of the instances cited by prosecutors were simply reposting other content on Truth Social. Second, they argued that Trump had to be allowed some leeway to engage in political speech.Merchan made clear at the time that he had little patience for these claims. When the defense attorney Todd Blanche said that Trump had a right to complain about “two systems of justice,” Merchan sharply objected: “There’s two systems of justice in this courtroom? That’s what you’re saying?” At another moment, he warned Blanche, “You’re losing all credibility with the court.”With some room to elaborate in his ruling, Merchan found that contra the old Twitter saw, retweets do equal endorsements. “This Court finds that a repost, whether with or without commentary by the Defendant, is in fact a statement of the Defendant,” he wrote. Although he allowed that reposts might not always be deemed a statement of the poster, Merchan added, “It is counterintuitive and indeed absurd, to read the Expanded Order to not proscribe statements that Defendant intentionally selected and published to maximize exposure.”[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]As for the argument that Trump should be permitted political statements, Merchan wrote that “to allow such attacks upon protected witnesses with blanket assertions that they are all responses to ‘political attacks’ would be an exception that swallowed the rule.” But he defended his gag order as carefully written to deal with competing interests and took an opportunity to rebut charges of political bias against himself. He had “narrowly tailored” the order because “it is critically important that Defendant’s legitimate free speech rights not be curtailed,” he wrote, “and that he be able to respond and defend himself against political attacks.”Trump has complained that Cohen, his former fixer and the expected star witness in this trial, can attack him without consequence. Merchan appears to be sympathetic to that complaint, saying that the goal is to protect witnesses from attacks but not to enable them.Already, a second hearing on further allegations of contempt is scheduled for tomorrow in court. And as the judge noted, the paltry fines involved here are unlikely to deter Trump. Merchan clearly wants to avoid a long and intense fight with Trump, but the former president may give him no choice.

We had to correct her, and we knew how to do it by now. We would not sit quietly in our white-bodied privilege, nor would our corrections be given apologetically or packaged with niceties. There I was, one of about 30 people attending a four-day-long Zoom seminar called “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness,” hosted by the group Education for Racial Equity.An older white woman whom I’ll call Stacy had confessed to the group that she was ashamed of being white, and that she hoped in her next life she wouldn’t be white anymore. This provided us with a major learning moment. One participant began by amping herself up, intoning the concepts we’d been taught over the past two days: “Grounding, rooting, removing Bubble Wrap.” Then she got into it. “What I heard you say about wanting to come back as a dark-skinned person in your next life was racist, because as white people we don’t have the luxury of trying on aspects of people of color.”“Notice how challenging that was,” our facilitator, Carlin Quinn, said. “That’s what getting your reps in looks like.”Another woman went next, explaining that Stacy seemed to see people of color as better or more desirable, that her statement was “an othering.” Quinn prompted her to sum it up in one sentence: “When you said that you wish you would come back in your next life as a dark-skinned person, I experienced that as racist because …”“That was racist because it exoticized Black people.”“Great,” Quinn said. She pushed for more from everyone, and more came. Stacy’s statement was romanticizing. It was extractive. It was erasing. Stacy sat very still. Eventually we finished. Stacy thanked everyone, her voice thin.The seminar would culminate with a talk from Robin DiAngelo, the most prominent anti-racist educator working in America. I had signed up because I was curious about her teachings, which had suddenly become so popular. DiAngelo’s 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, had been a best seller for years by the time I joined the toxic whiteness group in May 2021. But during the heat of the Black Lives Matter protests, her influence boomed. She was brought in to advise Democratic members of the House of Representatives. Coca-Cola, Disney, and Lockheed Martin sent their employees through DiAngelo-inspired diversity trainings; even the defense company Raytheon launched an anti-racism DEI program.In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts. All white people are racist, because racism is structural. To fix one’s inherent racism requires constant work, and it requires white people to talk about their whiteness. Seminars like hers exploded as anti-racism was shifted from a project of changing laws and fighting systems into a more psychological movement: something you did within yourself. It was therapeutic. It wasn’t about elevating others so much as about deconstructing yourself in hopes of eventually deconstructing the systems around you.[Read: Abolish DEI statements]Anti-racism courses are less popular today. This may in part be because more people have become willing to question the efficacy of corporate DEI programs, but it’s surely also because their lessons now show up everywhere. In March at UCLA Medical School, during a required course, a guest speaker had the first-year medical students kneel and pray to “Mama Earth” before saying that medicine was “white science,” as first reported by The Washington Free Beacon. The course I took was just a preview of what’s come to be expected in workplaces and schools all over the country. DiAngelo and her fellow thinkers are right in many ways. The economic fallout of structural racism persists in this country—fallout from rules, for example, about where Black people could buy property, laws that for generations have influenced who is rich and who is poor. The laws may be gone, but plenty of racists are left. And the modern anti-racist movement is right that we all probably do have some racism and xenophobia in us. The battle of modernity and liberalism is fighting against our tribal natures and animal selves.I went into the workshop skeptical that contemporary anti-racist ideology was helpful in that fight. I left exhausted and emotional and, honestly, moved. I left as the teachers would want me to leave: thinking a lot about race and my whiteness, the weight of my skin. But telling white people to think about how deeply white they are, telling them that their sense of objectivity and individualism are white, that they need to stop trying to change the world and focus more on changing themselves … well, I’m not sure that has the psychological impact the teachers are hoping it will, let alone that it will lead to any tangible improvement in the lives of people who aren’t white.Much of what I learned in “The Toxic Trends of Whiteness” concerned language. We are “white bodies,” Quinn explained, but everyone else is a “body of culture.” This is because white bodies don’t know a lot about themselves, whereas “bodies of culture know their history. Black bodies know.”The course began with easy questions (names, what we do, what we love), and an icebreaker: What are you struggling with or grappling with related to your whiteness? We were told that our answers should be “as close to the bone as possible, as naked, as emotionally revealing.” We needed to feel uncomfortable.One woman loved gardening. Another loved the sea. People said they felt exhausted by constantly trying to fight their white supremacy. A woman with a biracial child said she was scared that her whiteness could harm her child. Some expressed frustration. It was hard, one participant said, that after fighting the patriarchy for so long, white women were now “sort of being told to step aside.” She wanted to know how to do that without feeling resentment. The woman who loved gardening was afraid of “being a middle-aged white woman and being called a Karen.”A woman who worked in nonprofits admitted that she was struggling to overcome her own skepticism. Quinn picked up on that: How did that skepticism show up? “Wanting to say, ‘Prove it.’ Are we sure that racism is the explanation for everything?”[John McWhorter: The dehumanizing condescension of White Fragility]She was nervous, and that was good, Quinn said: “It’s really an important gauge, an edginess of honesty and vulnerability—like where it kind of makes you want to throw up.”One participant was a diversity, equity, and inclusion manager at a consulting firm, and she was struggling with how to help people of color while not taking up space as a white person. It was hard to center and decenter whiteness at the same time.A woman from San Francisco had started crying before she even began speaking. “I’m here because I’m a racist. I’m here because my body has a trauma response to my own whiteness and other people’s whiteness.” A woman who loved her cats was struggling with “how to understand all the atrocities of being a white body.” Knowing that her very existence perpetuated whiteness made her feel like a drag on society. “The darkest place I go is thinking it would be better if I weren’t here. It would at least be one less person perpetuating these things.”The next day we heard from DiAngelo herself. Quinn introduced her as “transformative for white-bodied people across the world.” DiAngelo is quite pretty, and wore a mock turtleneck and black rectangular glasses. She started by telling us that she would use the term people of color, but also that some people of color found the term upsetting. She would therefore vary the terms she used, rotating through imperfect language. Sometimes people of color, other times racialized, to indicate that race is not innate and rather is something that has been done to someone. Sometimes she would use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color), but she would then make a conscious grammatical mistake: “If I say ‘BIPOC,’ I find that’s a kind of harsh acronym. I usually add people at the end to humanize it a bit, even though grammatically that’s not correct,” she said.Language is a tricky thing for the movement. The idea is that you should be open and raw when you speak, but you can get so much wrong. It’s no wonder that even Robin DiAngelo herself is worried. (At one point she recommended a book by Reni Eddo-Lodge—“a Black Brit,” DiAngelo said. For a moment she looked scared. “I hope that’s not an offensive term.” Quinn chimed in to say she thought it was okay, but DiAngelo looked introspective. “It sounds harsh. The Brit part sounded harsh.”)DiAngelo wanted to remind us that she is white. She emphasized the wh—, giving the word a lushness and intensity. “I’m very clear today that I am white, that I have a white worldview. I have a white frame of reference. I move through the world with a white experience.”She introduced some challenges. First was white people’s “lack of humility”: “If you are white and you have not devoted years, years—not that you read some books last summer—to sustained study, struggle, and work and practice and mistake making and relationship building, your opinions while you have them are necessarily uninformed and superficial.”“Challenge No. 2 is the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special.”She prepared us for what would come next: “I will be generalizing about white people.” She was sharing her screen and showed us an image of middle-aged white women: “This is the classic board of a nonprofit.” She threw up a picture of high-school students in a local paper with the headline “Outstanding Freshmen Join Innovative Teacher-Education Program.” Almost all the teenagers were white. “This education program was not and could not have been innovative. Our educational system is probably one of the most efficient, effective mechanisms for the reproduction of racial inequality.” Lingering on the picture, she asked, “Do you feel the weight of that whiteness?”[From the September 2021 issue: Robin DiAngelo and the problem with anti-racist self-help]Another image. It was a white man. “I don’t know who that is,” she said. “I just Googled white guy, but most white people live segregated lives.”When someone calls a white person out as racist, she told us, the white person will typically deny it. “Denying, arguing, withdrawing, crying. ‘I don’t understand.’ Seeking forgiveness. ‘I feel so bad, I feel so bad. Tell me you still love me.’” She paused. “Emotions are political. We need to build our stamina to endure some shame, some guilt,” she said. Quinn broke in to say that intentions are the province of the privileged. But consequences are the province of the subjugated.Someone who has integrated an anti-racist perspective, DiAngelo told us, should be able to say: “I hold awareness of my whiteness in all settings, and it guides how I engage. I raise issues about racism over and over, both in public and in private … You want to go watch a movie with me? You’re going to get my analysis of how racism played in that movie. I have personal relationships and know the private lives of a range of people of color, including Black people. And there are also people of color in my life who I specifically ask to coach me, and I pay them for their time.”I was surprised by this idea that I should pay Black friends and acquaintances by the hour to tutor me—it sounded a little offensive. But then I considered that if someone wanted me to come to their house and talk with them about their latent feelings of homophobia, I wouldn’t mind being Venmoed afterward.When DiAngelo was done, Quinn asked if we had questions. Very few people did, and that was disappointing—the fact that white bodies had nothing to say about a profound presentation. Silence and self-consciousness were part of the problem. “People’s lives are on the line. This is life or death for bodies of culture.” We needed to work on handling criticism. If it made you shake, that was good.One of the few men in the group said he felt uncomfortable being told to identify as a racist. Here he’d just been talking with all of his friends about not being racist. Now he was going to “say that I might have been wrong here.” He noticed he felt “resistance to saying ‘I’m racist.’”Quinn understood; that was normal. He just needed to try again, say “I am a racist” and believe it. The man said: “I am racist.” What did he feel? He said he was trying not to fight it. Say it again. “I am racist.”“Do you feel sadness or grief?”“Sadness and grief feel true,” he said.“That’s beautiful,” Quinn said.Some members of the group were having a breakthrough. Stacy said she was “seeing them finally … Like, wow, are there moments when this white body chooses to see a body of culture when it isn’t dangerous for them?” One woman realized she was “a walking, talking node of white supremacy.” Another finally saw how vast whiteness was: “So vast and so, so big.”For a while, a dinner series called Race to Dinner for white women to talk about their racism was very popular, though now it seems a little try-hard. The hosts—Saira Rao and Regina Jackson—encourage women who have paid up to $625 a head to abandon any notion that they are not racist. At one point Rao, who is Indian American, and Jackson, who is Black, publicized the dinners with a simple message: “Dear white women: You cause immeasurable pain and damage to Black, Indigenous and brown women. We are here to sit down with you to candidly discuss how *exactly* you cause this pain and damage.”One could also attend a workshop called “What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege Over Lunch,” hosted by the authors of What’s Up With White Women? Unpacking Sexism and White Privilege in Pursuit of Racial Justice (the authors are two white women). Or you could go to “Finding Freedom: White Women Taking On Our Own White Supremacy,” hosted by We Are Finding Freedom (a for-profit run by two white women). The National Association of Social Workers’ New York City chapter advertised a workshop called “Building White Women’s Capacity to Do Anti-racism Work” (hosted by the founder of U Power Change, who is a white woman).So many of the workshops have been run by and aimed at white women. White women specifically seem very interested in these courses, perhaps because self-flagellation is seen as a classic female virtue. The hated archetype of the anti-racist movement is the Karen. No real equivalent exists for men. Maybe the heavily armed prepper comes close, but he’s not quite the same, in that a Karen is someone you’ll run into in a coffee shop, and a Karen is also someone who is disgusted with herself. Where another generation of white women worked to hate their bodies, my generation hates its “whiteness” (and I don’t mean skin color, necessarily, as this can also be your internalized whiteness). People are always demanding that women apologize for something and women seem to love doing it. Women will pay for the opportunity. We’ll thank you for it.[Tyler Austin Harper: I’m a black professor. You don’t need to bring that up.]After DiAngelo, I went to another course, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism.” That one was more about what my white flesh itself means and how to physically manifest anti-racism—“embodying anti-racism.” Those sessions were co-led by Resmaa Menakem, a therapist and the author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.Menakem stressed how important it was not to do his exercises with people of color, because it would wound them: “Do not have bodies of culture in a group of white bodies. White bodies with white bodies and bodies of culture with bodies of culture.”The harm caused by processing your whiteness with a person of color had also been stressed in the previous course—the book DiAngelo had recommended by Reni Eddo-Lodge was called Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. But at the same time, Quinn had said that we should talk with people of different races about our journey and let them guide us. It all seemed a bit contradictory.One participant had a question for Menakem about community building. She was concerned because she had a mixed-race group of friends, and she wanted to be sure she wasn’t harming her Black friends by talking about this work.“There’s no way you’re going to be able to keep Black women safe,” Menakem said. “If you’re talking about race, if race is part of the discussion, those Black women are going to get injured in the process.”“That’s my worry,” she said. The problem was that she and her friends were actually already in “like, an anti-racism study group.” Menakem was definitive: “Don’t do that,” he said. “I don’t want white folks gazing at that process.”A few years have passed since I was in these workshops, and I wonder if the other participants are “better” white people now. What would that even mean, exactly? Getting outside their ethnic tribe—or the opposite?At one point Menakem intoned, “All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture. Everybody say it. ‘All white bodies cause racialized stress and wounding to bodies of culture.’” We said it, over and over again. I collapsed into it, thinking: I am careless; I am selfish; I do cause harm. The more we said it, the more it started to feel like a release. It felt so sad. But it also—and this seemed like a problem—felt good.What if fighting for justice could just be a years-long confessional process and didn’t require doing anything tangible at all? What if I could defeat white supremacy from my lovely living room, over tea, with other white people? Personally I don’t think that’s how it works. I’m not sold. But maybe my whiteness has blinded me. The course wrapped up, and Menakem invited us all to an upcoming two-day workshop.This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History.