The Atlantic
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SNL Needs a Break From Donald Trump Whether it’s an impression from a cast member or from its teeming roster of celebrity guests, Saturday Night Live’s political sketches often favor highlighting the absurd over making a point. That approach has only snowballed in our current era, when a growing swath of politicians practically write their own punch lines. James Austin Johnson’s eerily precise rendition of Donald Trump—a far cry from Alec Baldwin’s mumbly, squinty-eyed caricature—infuses the former president with such verisimilitude that sketches featuring him don’t require much, beyond leaning into the word salad.In the cold open of last night’s season finale, SNL took on the press conferences Trump has hosted during his hush-money trial in Manhattan. “I’m really enjoying this post-court press conference in this very weird and depressing hallway,” Johnson, as Trump, began. He went on to suggest why he might really be running for president a third time: “For me, much better to not win and say it was rigged and then get very rich raising money to stop the steal and you never have to do president again.” Even if that argument had some truth, a November win could possibly erase Trump’s legal troubles—something the sketch called out, as Johnson quipped, "If you’re tired about hearing all of my trials, all you gotta do is vote for me, and it’ll all go away." His trials might, but SNL’s drained coverage of him would not.As SNL wraps up its 49th season, and looks ahead to the celebration of its 50th this fall, the show seems exhausted by what it’s treating like yet another election. In cold opens such as this and many others this season, its Trump sketches have simply replicated what the former president has been up to in the news. The show’s political commentary had more bite on “Weekend Update,” whose format lends itself to incisive wisecracks that don’t need much of a setup—as when Michael Che joked about Trump’s request that he and Joe Biden stand during the two presidential debates they’ve agreed to this summer. “So that’s the status of our presidency,” Che said. “Standing is a feat of strength.”The show’s non-Trump sketches make clear that the writers and performers can still work up sharp, engaging takes on contemporary life—provided the subject isn’t something we’re forced to think about all the time. SNL’s satire exhibited more piquancy last night with the parody commercial for Xiemu, a thinly veiled take on the fast-fashion brand Shein and the online shopping hub Temu, both of which have been criticized for pushing low-quality goods with a negative environmental imprint.The idea was pretty straightforward: The ad featured models showing off $5 shoes and $3.99 tank tops, while a voice-over revealed the horrific labor conditions required to produce such cheap clothing, and the cascading problems resulting from those conditions. (Notably, a low level of lead in all of the clothing.) By SNL’s standards, the sketch was cutting, especially when the voice-over turned on consumers. “Be real, is this shady?” asked a model played by Ego Nwodim. “If it was, would you stop buying it?” the voice-over retorted.Compared with past commercial parodies, such as the CVS send-up about men who rush to the drugstore on Valentine’s Day to purchase a last-minute gift for their girlfriend, the Xiemu bit was certainly more loaded. While calling out the obvious fell flat during the Trump cold open, the “Fast Fashion Ad” sketch managed to take a scathing stance by doing the same with Temu and Shein. Weariness is antithetical to good comedy, and perhaps SNL’s writers feel the strain of finding humor in a political climate that feels closer to a heated reality-TV brawl.Ahead of its 50th season, which will surely arrive with no shortage of fanfare, SNL has the summer to recharge for the upcoming election. Its enthusiasm for taking on politics may have dulled since Baldwin first impersonated Trump, but you’d rather it not slog through the obvious. The election itself promises enough of that.theatlantic.com
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Meerkats Keep Dropping Dead From Heart Failure At the start of the spring of 2015, Jeffrey, a three-year-old meerkat, was happily eating, tussling with his brothers, and surveying zoo patrons from his usual perch, his forepaws gathered and his black-tipped snout aloft. But one day in April, his caretakers discovered him in his enclosure, so weak that he could barely lift his head. By the time he was brought to Eric Baitchman, the head vet at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, Jeffrey was losing consciousness. Baitchman nudged a tube down his patient’s straw-size throat to help him breathe; an ultrasound revealed a heart in failure.Eight days later, despite a strict regimen of meds, Jeffrey was dead. And within the next three years, both of Jeffrey’s brothers—two of the zoo’s remaining three meerkats—would die in similar ways.All three brothers were diagnosed with dilated cardiomyopathy, or DCM, a serious condition in which the muscles of the heart weaken and expand, compromising the organ’s ability to pump blood. Before Jeffrey, Baitchman had never seen the disease in a meerkat, and he wondered if the family at Stone Zoo had simply been a fluke. If it wasn’t, he thought, perhaps the disease had genetic roots. Finding them might be key to saving future generations of meerkats—or maybe even people with similarly faulty hearts.Baitchman, who is on the leadership team of Zoo New England, reached out to other zoos with families of meerkats—and quickly began to hear a chorus of “Yes, us too.” Michael Garner, a pathologist who examined Jeffrey’s heart, confirmed the same pattern: For years, vets from around the country had been sending him misshapen meerkat hearts, normally the diameter of a walnut but many now ballooned out to the size of a large apricot. According to an analysis Garner did in 2017, about a quarter of meerkat deaths in an American-zoo pathology database were linked to some sort of cardiac disease, among which DCM looked to be an especially common cause.Everything Baitchman has since learned about how this disease manifests in meerkats points to his original hunch: “It almost had to be hereditary,” he told me. In partnership with a team of genomics experts, he has spent the past several years collecting dozens of tissue samples from zoo meerkats across the U.S. for genetic analysis. The team is still in the process of analyzing the 86 genomes they’ve amassed, and haven’t yet pinpointed genes clearly linked to DCM. But one of Baitchman’s collaborators, Alexander Bick, a geneticist at Vanderbilt, told me that he is hopeful that one will show up, because the condition is so easily passed on. If just one meerkat parent has it, about half of their kids seem to get it, too.[Read: Something mysterious is killing captive gorillas]Bick is interested in meerkat hearts in part because DCM is one of the most common cardiomyopathies in humans, too, and a leading reason for heart transplants. The condition can be managed with medications and implants, but eventually, many people’s hearts still fail. And although genetics is thought to play a role in the majority of human DCM cases, only about a third of them have a mutation with a known connection to the disease, Bick told me. As families have shrunk in recent decades, common genetic mistakes have been harder to trace using the traditional method of mapping a disease’s presence in sprawling family trees; certain populations of wild meerkats, inbred for generations, seem to have almost the opposite issue. The meerkat population spread across American zoos also appears to be made up of all, roughly, half-cousins, based on scientists’ best estimates—“essentially all part of one enormous family tree,” Bick told me.In recent years, plumbing the genomes of other animals has proved remarkably useful for human medicine. Dog genomes have helped researchers better understand human airway diseases, pain disorders, cancers, birth defects, and sleep disorders; studies in rhesus macaques yielded insights into the genes that influence alcohol consumption and endometriosis. The next big treatment for the lethal neurological disease Tay-Sachs could come from genetic research into cats.There’s no guarantee that meerkat genetics will reveal anything about ours. The genomes of certain breeds of dogs, which develop DCM as well, have been thoroughly scoured for clues about the disease. But the genes that underlie DCM in canines have shown almost no overlap with those in people, Katie Nadolny, a veterinary cardiologist who has been studying DCM in meerkats, told me.And meerkats are much less well understood than dogs are. Researchers don’t have a strong sense of what healthy meerkat hearts look like in the wild, Rachel Johnston, a genomics expert at the Broad Institute and Zoo New England, who has been collaborating with Baitchman, told me. They’re also unsure how common DCM might be in nature, where many meerkats live in more diverse populations, eat more varied diets, and more often die from infectious disease, or predation, or simply because they’re “famously homicidal,” Jenny Tung, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology who is studying the genetics of wild meerkats, told me. Asking how different a captive population might be is a natural next step. Those questions might not yield benefits for humans, or even meerkats outside of zoos. But whatever answers researchers find could save meerkats like Jeffrey, before their hearts quietly fail.theatlantic.com
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How Drake Became White We’d gathered that day at the cafeteria’s “Black” table, cracking jokes and philosophizing during the free period that was our perk as upperclassmen. We came in different shades: bone white, tan and brownish, dark as a silhouette. One of my classmates, who fancied himself a lyricist, was insisting that Redman, a witty emcee from nearby Newark, New Jersey, was the greatest rapper ever. This was the late ’90s, and for my money, no one could compete with Jay-Z. I said so, and the debate, good-natured at first, soon escalated in intensity, touching on feelings and resentments that ran far deeper than diverging claims about artistic merit.“How can you even weigh in?” I still remember the kid fuming. “You ain’t even the pure breed!”With that, there was nothing left to say. Friends separated us, the bell rang, and I headed home. A short time later, I went off to college, where I would meet a wider assortment of Americans than I had realized existed. But over the years, I have been reminded of that boy’s slicing racism, the lazy habit of mind that required no white people to be present but would nonetheless please the most virulent white supremacist.Recently, two public controversies spirited me back to the suspicion and confusion of my high-school cafeteria. All spring long, an unusually nasty feud between the rappers Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been captivating audiences, both for the quality of the music it has engendered and for the personal and malicious dimensions of the attacks it has countenanced. Much has been written about the fight, in particular about the two men’s treatment of women, which I won’t rehash here except to point out that it’s a little funny that they both portray themselves as enlightened allies while also acting as if the ultimate disparagement is to call another man feminine. Less has been said about the potency of the racial dimension, which feels like a throwback to a time before Drake’s pop-culture dominance—indeed, to a time before the historic hybridity of the Obama era—and like a distillation of the skin-deep racialism of the current social-justice movement.Drake, who grew up in Toronto, is the son of a white Jewish mother from Canada and a Black father from Memphis. Since the release of his 2009 mixtape, So Far Gone, he has been not only the most successful visibly mixed-race rapper—and arguably pop star—but also the most visible Black male musician for some time now. Anyone at the top will attract criticism. But not even a white rapper like Eminem has been subject to the kind of racial derogation that has been hurled at Drake.Back in 2018, the rapper Pusha T released a diss track about him for which the cover art was an old photograph of Drake performing in a cartoonish blackface. The image makes you cringe, but—as Drake explained—that was the point. Drake began his career as an actor, and he wrote that the photograph was part of a “project that was about young black actors struggling to get roles, being stereotyped and typecast … The photos represented how African Americans were once wrongfully portrayed in entertainment.” But presented without context, it appeared to be a self-evident statement of inauthenticity.Another rapper, Rick Ross, calls Drake “white boy” again and again in his song “Champagne Moments,” released in April. In an op-ed for The Grio, the music journalist Touré explains why the insult is so effective: “We know Drake is biracial. He’s never hidden that, but many of us think of him as Black or at least as a part of the culture … On this record, Ross is out to change that.” Touré calls this “hyperproblematic,” but his tone is approving—he admires the track. “We shouldn’t be excluding biracial people from the Black community, but in a rap beef where all is fair as a way of attacking someone and undermining their credibility and their identity, it’s a powerful message.”In a series of more high-profile records, Lamar has built on Ross’s theme, both implying and stating directly that racial categories are real, that behaviors and circumstances (like Drake’s suburban upbringing) correlate with race, and that the very mixedness of Drake’s background renders him suspect. It is an anachronistic line of ad hominem attack that is depressing to encounter a quarter of the way into the 21st century.Lamar’s most recent Drake diss is called “Not Like Us,” and reached No. 1 on Billboard Hot 100. It goes after Drake’s cultural affiliations with the American South. “No, you not a colleague,” Lamar taunts. “You a fucking colonizer!”It’s hard to hear that and not remember that Drake’s mother is Jewish, and that this is the same invective used to undermine Jews’ sense of belonging in Israel. Such racist habits of thought have become potent rhetorical weapons in the progressive arsenal.The second (if smaller) controversy followed an essay on language and protest published in The New Yorker earlier this month. The novelist Zadie Smith, who is of European and African descent, argued—carefully—that it is too simplistic to regard the world as sortable into categories of oppressor and oppressed. “Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them,” she writes, “a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.” This was an attempt to take seriously the tangible fate of Hamas’s victims on October 7, the broader implications of anti-Semitism that can at times be found in criticism of Israel’s response, and the ongoing tragic loss of Palestinian life.Despite praising the protests that have engulfed college campuses and describing a cease-fire in Gaza as “an ethical necessity,” Smith was derided on more than intellectual grounds. One widely shared tweet, accompanied by a photo of Smith, stated the criticism plainly: “I feel like Zadie Smith uses black aesthetics to conceal her deeply pedestrian white middle-class politics. People see the head wrap and the earrings made of kente cloth and confuse that for something more substantive.”This was not the first time Smith had been regarded as a racial interloper. The author Morgan Jerkins once wrote of the emotional “hurt” she felt reading another thoughtful essay Smith published in Harper’s asking “Who owns black pain?” Smith’s transgression here, according to Jerkins, was “intellectualizing blackness” from a distance instead of feeling it. “Do not be surprised,” Jerkins warned, “if a chunk of that essay is used in discussions as to why biracial people need to take a backseat in the movement.”The retrograde notion that thought and action necessarily flow from racial identities whose borders are definable and whose authority is heritable is both fictitious and counterproductive. “Something is afoot that is the business of every citizen who thought that the racist concepts of a century ago were gone—and good riddance!” Barbara and Karen Fields write in their 2012 masterpiece, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. “The continued vitality of those concepts stands as a reminder that, however important a historical watershed the election of an African-American president may be, America’s post-racial era has not been born.”Of course, the first African American president was, like our nation and culture, himself both Black and white. One of the most disappointing—and, I have come to realize—enduring reasons the “post-racial era” continues to elude us is that it is not only the avowed racists who would hold that biographical fact against him.theatlantic.com
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Great-Power Politics Is Ruining the Olympics In 2021, on the eve of the Tokyo Olympics, 23 top Chinese swimmers tested positive for the drug trimetazidine. In its proper clinical setting, the medication is used to treat angina. But for an athlete or a coach willing to cheat, it is a performance-enhancing drug, boosting the heart muscle’s functioning. Nonprescription use of trimetazidine, or TMZ is prohibited at all times, not just during competition; the default sanction for an athlete’s violation is a four-year ban.The testing that ensnared so many members of China’s swim team was conducted under the auspices of the national anti-doping agency, known as CHINADA. Each country in international competition has its own such agency—America’s is USADA, which I serve—and they all operate under the umbrella of the World Anti-Doping Agency. WADA is the ultimate authority, responsible for ensuring that national agencies enforce the rules. Yet shortly before the 2021 Games got under way, CHINADA vacated the 23 violations, giving a cock-and-bull story about accidental contamination in the kitchen where the athletes’ meals were prepared. And WADA simply accepted CHINADA’s obviously suspect ruling.WADA failed even to publish its decision. The world was alerted only last month by whistleblowers who pushed evidence of the scandal to the media. Prompted by the revelations to respond, WADA issued a statement citing its prior conclusion “that it was not in a position to disprove the possibility that contamination was the source of TMZ” and “that, given the specific circumstances of the asserted contamination, the athletes would be held to have no fault or negligence.”WADA’s failure of oversight and lack of transparency are corroding fair competition—and that has come to haunt clean athletes around the world. If WADA had properly upheld its mission, China would likely have lost 13 of its top swimmers chosen for the Olympic team at Tokyo. Instead, China won six medals, three of them gold, in the pool.USADA has the job of ensuring that American swimmers abide by the rules and compete clean; as a result of WADA’s inaction, several of them potentially lost podium places in Tokyo that they deserved. Worse, the world body’s enforcement failures have made national anti-doping agencies such as CHINADA hostage to bad regimes, turning the agencies and the athletes they oversee into pawns in a cynical geopolitical game of prestige and power.What we are seeing is a reinvention of the bad old days of the Cold War, when East Germany tried fraudulently to demonstrate the superiority of state socialism by systematically doping its athletes. Back then, no international anti-doping movement existed, and East Germany’s cheating went suspected but largely undetected until years later. By then, it was too late for justice; the harms done—both to the athletes’ health and to the credibility of the competition in that era—were permanent. Today, we have the World Anti-Doping Agency to police international sports—but enforcement works only if the watchdog itself is unbiased, conflict-free, and effective. At the Paris Games this summer, clean competition is very much in doubt.[Read: The Olympics have always been political]In 2008, I attended the Beijing Olympics as a member of WADA’s independent-observer team. As the newly appointed head of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, I was thrilled to be the WADA team’s vice chair and legal expert, and eager to play my part in upholding the integrity of sports. No doubt I was naive, but ever since that experience, a One World, One Dream framed picture from the Beijing Games has hung on my office wall.Back then, my high hopes for doping-free sports did not seem so naive. During Jacques Rogge’s tenure as the president of the International Olympic Committee, WADA was at the peak of its prowess in making the Olympics free from cheating. As a medical doctor, Rogge understood the value of keeping sports both fair and healthy for the athletes taking part—with results and records that the public could believe in. And he found willing partners in WADA’s leaders at the time, David Howman and John Fahey, who were determined to keep the anti-doping fight independent of politics.Sadly, that has changed. These days, I find I very much need that reminder on my wall of the Games’ sporting ideals. Those ideals look tarnished now: The Olympic movement is rife with examples of sports hijacked for national and political purposes. And the very agency charged with safeguarding clean competition, WADA, is implicated in the political theater.The scandal involving China is only the latest instance of WADA’s failure to uphold its mission. The erosion of its integrity and authority dates back to 2015, when Russia’s manipulations leading up to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi were exposed. Those Games were tainted by a state-sponsored doping program that involved Moscow’s apparatchiks interfering with the testing protocols to make adverse tests of its own doped athletes conveniently disappear from the system. It became obvious that sports were being recruited as a tool of realpolitik when Russia’s foreign minister complained about USADA’s “provocative anti-Russian demands” to then–Secretary of State John Kerry, who upheld my agency’s position that Russia had to comply with the WADA rules.[From the May 2018 issue: The man who brought down Lance Armstrong]The evidence of Russian cheating was irrefutable. My colleagues and I met with the whistleblowers, including the former director of Russia’s testing laboratory, Grigory Rodchenkov, who had fled the country and sought asylum in America. USADA echoed the calls from several athlete groups—including WADA’s own Athletes Committee, led by the Olympian Beckie Scott, and the IOC’s equivalent committee under the leadership of another Olympian, Claudia Bokel—not to close the Russia investigation but to expand it. Yet WADA, in a now-familiar pattern, refused to listen and declined to pursue the matter.Despite my personal plea to the agency’s director general in March 2016, WADA remained unmoved by the cries of clean athletes. To be clear, these athletes make enormous sacrifices and undergo years of hard training to participate in Olympic competition. But when anti-doping agencies fail, and even abet cheats, they make a mockery of the Olympic movement. The clean athletes’ dreams are shattered by the greed and deception of those entrusted with safeguarding the purity of the Games.In the Sochi case, WADA’s intransigence proved shortsighted. Just weeks after my appeal to WADA, in May 2016, 60 Minutes and The New York Times broke the story—and forced the agency’s hand, compelling action. Congress held hearings about WADA’s failures, as it was entitled to do because American taxpayer dollars support the international anti-doping infrastructure. In fact, ironically enough, WADA succeeded in leveraging its own dereliction into an argument for more funding.The agency made a pitch to its international backers that it needed new investigative powers, more personnel, and a 60 percent increase in its budget from 2018 through 2025. It got what it asked for, but the U.S. government also did its best to make WADA accountable. It insisted on a governing seat on the agency’s board, and made U.S. funding of WADA no longer mandatory but discretionary.[Read: A list of Russia’s responses to the doping scandal]In principle, WADA’s job as global regulator is not complicated: All it has to do is apply the rules to the facts without fear or favor. But the pursuit of global power-politics in sports is a systemic problem that overrules any notion of fair play, and WADA failed to deploy its new tools effectively. When WADA received notice of the Chinese swimmers’ positives in 2021, it should have sanctioned CHINADA for its mishandling of the violations.The postive-test findings occurred just months, in fact, before Beijing was to host the 2022 Winter Olympics. So had WADA applied the rules correctly, both China and the IOC itself would have faced grave embarrassment. Instead, WADA chose to give one country—a very powerful, rising country that had already been favored as host of the next Games—preferential treatment. Do we think for a second that WADA would have overlooked the burying of these tests if they had come from a small, poor country in Africa or South America instead of China?In 2019 and 2020, WADA received almost $2 million from the Chinese government above that country’s required dues to the agency. Then, in early 2023, WADA signed an undisclosed sponsorship agreement with the largest sporting-goods manufacturer in China, Anta—a company that also has a sponsorship deal with the Chinese Swimming Federation. Although no evidence of a quid pro quo has emerged, extra payments and confidential sponsorship arrangements—coinciding with the special treatment of doping violations—create a damaging appearance of conflicted interests for WADA.[Read: It’s almost impossible to be a running fan]The influence of money and politics within WADA erodes its credibility, casting doubt on its impartiality and independence. As nations vie for supremacy on the global stage, the risk is that sports success becomes—as the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said of war—“a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.” Russia and China are, unsurprisingly, the most conspicuous offenders, with the resources and capacity to bend the system to their will. But if they are allowed to have their way, other bad actors will imitate their example.Ultimately, WADA’s failures will damage the Olympic Games themselves. Who wants to watch unfair races or rigged events? The commercial machine that powers the Games—namely, the Olympic broadcaster, NBC, and multimillion-dollar sponsors such as Visa, Airbnb, and Coca-Cola—should be alarmed: The value of their investment sinks along with the competition’s integrity. The Olympics’ media and sponsorship partners ought to be acting as a powerful countervailing force on WADA to do its job properly and protect their interests.The very future of the Olympics—together with its ethos of amity, respect, and fair competition—is at stake. How many medals will be stolen from clean competitors by doped athletes—even under the noses of Western and other democratic leaders at this summer’s Games in Paris—before those who purport to back the Olympic movement take decisive action? If the Olympics are to be more than an arena for great-power games, world leaders need to act and resume their responsibility to back the world anti-doping effort. The soul of fair sports depends upon it.theatlantic.com
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A Compelling Made-For-TV Reality Season This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Jinae West, a senior producer at The Atlantic who works on our Radio Atlantic and Good on Paper podcasts.Jinae has been catching up on Survivor to sate her voracious reality-show appetite; she’d watch Steven Yeun in anything, and she enjoys watching Shark Tank while doing laundry. (As she puts it: “This culture survey is a real win for network TV.”)First, here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic: The one place in airports people actually want to be The art of survival The Atlantic’s summer reading guide The Culture Survey: Jinae WestMy favorite way of wasting time on my phone: I take public transit to work, so I’m addicted to what I think of as commute-friendly games. My favorite, of course, is The New York Times’ Connections, where you group together words that have something in common. (My preferred playing order is: Connections > Strands > Wordle > Crossword.) If I don’t get all the groups right away, I revisit the game later, usually on the commute home. But then, if I don’t guess another group in a sufficient amount of time, I get self-conscious about the people sitting nearby, judging me for not knowing that loo, condo, haw, and hero are all one letter away from bird names. The reality is nobody cares, and I never think about loons.Sometimes I’ll do the mini crossword just to feel something. [Related: The New York Times’ new game is genius.]Something delightful introduced to me by a kid in my life: A few weeks ago, my niece and nephews made me play Ultimate Chicken Horse on Nintendo Switch. It’s a multiplayer game where you collectively build an obstacle course that’s full of both helpful things and perilous traps. If the whole group fails to finish a level, you respawn and get to pick another item to add.The result is generally a chaotic minefield of wrecking balls, flamethrowers, and black holes—and I’m pretty sure I got hit by a hockey puck? I lost every round and died within seconds. But Ultimate Chicken Horse is my favorite kind of game: low commitment, fun for all ages, and less about winning or losing than about making sure other people have a hard time.A good recommendation I recently received: A friend suggested a while ago that I watch the back catalog of Survivor to sate my reality-competition-show appetite. I am a glutton for it in every genre: cooking, baking, glassblowing, interior designing, dating. Survivor has more than 40 U.S. seasons—and had somehow been a big cultural blind spot for me—so it was right up my alley. Who knew that watching a person build a fire or give up the chance at immunity for a plate of nachos could make for such thrilling television? And the blindsides! Oh god, the blindsides.I started with Season 37: “David vs. Goliath,” or: “The One Where Mike White Probably Thought Up The White Lotus.” I quickly moved on to Season 28: “Cagayan—Brawn vs. Brains vs. Beauty.” Most recently, I finished Season 33: “Millennials vs. Gen X,” which was interesting to watch as a now-30-something Millennial (it aired in 2016). But as the season wore on, and the contestants shed their generational stereotypes, it became a much more compelling show for other reasons. By the time I watched the finale, I was surprised to find myself in tears. It’s a near-perfect made-for-TV season. [Related: Survivor is deceptive. That’s what makes it so real.]An actor I would watch in anything: Steven Yeun. He’s endlessly watchable. And he can sing! Toni Collette is another.A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: If Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do” is pure pop summer, Ultimate Painting’s cover of the song is its more muted slacker-surfer counterpart, and very much my vibe. It’s also part of a compilation album—Lagniappe Sessions, Vol. 1—that features another great cover song: Tashaki Miyaki’s version of the Flamingos’ “I Only Have Eyes for You” (which is itself an adaptation).Wet Leg’s “Angelica” is the loud song I have on rotation. It’s a track about a dull party, and it has a good beat and deadpan lyrics such as “Angelica, she brought lasagna to the party.”The television show I’m most enjoying right now: If I’m being very honest with myself, it’s Shark Tank. (This culture survey is a real win for network TV, I guess.) Once a show I only considered watching in a hotel if nothing else was on, it has now been upgraded to a show I watch in my everyday life while doing other things. The stakes are just high enough to keep me invested and just low enough for me to walk away from the deal (to go fold laundry or something).Is the show an overt celebration of capitalism? Yes. Is it a warped version of the American Dream? Sure. Is “Hello sharks” a mildly funny punch line to use on many occasions? You bet! Unlike, say, America’s Next Top Model or The Voice, the show actually does have a track record of investing in a few hits. I mean, once upon a time, Scrub Daddy was just a man with a sponge and a dream.My fiancé has bought at least one thing from Shark Tank: a little fast-food-ketchup holder for our car. We’ve used it maybe once? Twice? It was fine. The show is fine.Also: Baby Reindeer. Watch it with a friend. You’re going to want to talk that one out. [Related: The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable.]The Week Ahead Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, an action film starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the eponymous character trying to make her way home in a postapocalyptic world (in theaters Friday) Tires, a comedy series co-created by the comedian Shane Gillis about a crew working at a struggling auto shop (premieres Thursday on Netflix) Butcher, a novel by Joyce Carol Oates about a 19th-century doctor who experiments on the patients in a women’s asylum (out Tuesday) Essay Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty. The Dream of Streaming Is DeadBy Jacob Stern Remember when streaming was supposed to let us watch whatever we want, whenever we want, for a sliver of the cost of cable? Well, so much for that. In recent years, streaming has gotten confusing and expensive as more services than ever are vying for eyeballs. It has done the impossible: made people miss the good old-fashioned cable bundle. Now the bundles are back. Read the full article.More in Culture The Baby Reindeer mess was inevitable. Amy Winehouse was too big for a biopic. The cruel social experiment of reality TV What Alice Munro has left us The wild Blood dynasty Conan O’Brien keeps it old-school. Catch Up on The Atlantic The Israeli defense establishment revolts against Netanyahu. George T. Conway III: The New York Trump case is kind of perfect. Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves. Photo Album Gentoos, which are the fastest swimmers among penguins, surf a wave in the ocean. Levi Fitze / GDT Nature Photographer of the Year 2024 Check out the top images from the German Society for Nature Photography’s annual photo competition.Explore all of our newsletters.When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.theatlantic.com
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The General Intendant’s Daughter The girl’s expressive gifts surpass those of all the members of his company, even the aging starlet Klamt. That is something the General Intendant of the City Theater can no longer deny.Up to this point, he has done everything in his power to keep his daughter off the stage, for the General Intendant is intimately acquainted with the unscrupulousness of theater people and is well aware that if he casts her in a leading role, she will be subjected to the most malicious slander.And so will he.But in light of her expressive gifts, which have now achieved a perfection he once hardly thought possible, he must concede that withholding them from the city whose theatrical life he has sworn to cultivate (but which, under his supervision, has grown only more decadent) would be an intolerable abdication of his duty.The General Intendant therefore risks the opprobrium of the public, and the rage of the aging starlet Klamt, by commissioning a play for his daughter to star in, one especially suited to her expressive gifts, the action of which should include, he suggests to the dramatist, the following basic elements:The curtain should rise on a man in a straitjacket scrutinizing the large stained-glass window above the altar of the chapel of a psychiatric facility. The man, who for some time has existed in a perpetual present tense, suddenly remembers that he himself, in his prior life as a glassworker, created this stained-glass window, which depicts five female saints who were decapitated for their faith. He marvels at the fact that he, who now feels so far from the beautiful, was once capable of bringing such beauty into the world. As he studies the window, the man feels an urge he has not felt in a very long time: the urge to bring more beauty into the world. If he cannot bring more beauty into the world, through his mastery of the craft of glasswork, he would prefer to die. The man proclaims as much to a chapel that the audience has thus far taken for empty. But from the two wings two stout old nurses appear, brusquely tighten the arms of his straitjacket (which had already seemed as tight as possible), and inform the man that in this institution there is of course no opportunity to work with glass. As if they would let the inmates work with glass! The laughter of the nurses echoes in the chapel long after they have clacked away. But a glassworker who can never again work with glass is better off dead. He opts to die. The facility, however, has seen to it that he has no means of doing so. He despairs. Yet at the height of his despair, more memories return to him. He suffered his first fit of insanity while he was installing this stained-glass window—he remembers that now. From the time of that initial fit, he could foresee the fate that has since overtaken him—namely, that upon completion of the window, he would be committed to this very institution for the rest of his life. But while his insanity was still only intermittent, he could outwit fate by means of his craft. Yes, he recalls realizing that, too. He had then done something to the stained-glass window, or committed to memory some secret about it. He had secretly installed it in such a way that the stained-glass window would later enable him to escape through it. The clarity and force of this recollection makes the man reel. But when he tries to remember what the secret of the stained-glass window is, he cannot. Yet even this he must have foreseen, for in those first transient fits of insanity, his mind was stripped of its memories and left only with such things as are common to the species. He must have known that supplying himself with a means of escape would not be enough: He had to find a way to remind himself of the form it took and the secret of its use. He must have known that he could not entrust his memory with something as important as this; nor could he write it down, since a written message would be confiscated on admittance. He must have relied on another person. But in the whole world, as far as the man was concerned, there was only one other person. The man suddenly recalls the existence of his beloved. He remembers teaching his beloved the words she should say to him after he went insane and was committed here: Your name is Gustav. You are a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is your own handiwork. You must simply … and come back to me. Simply what? The very words the man needs most have been expunged from his mind. He recalls rehearsing the lines again and again until his beloved could recite them without error. Yet his beloved has never been to visit him. Where is his beloved? What has happened to her? He confides in the chief physician about his beloved. Not about the message she was to deliver, only about her existence. But even this is a mistake, for the chief physician (to be played by the great actor and tenor Silberberg) lets it be known that he wants to hear nothing more about the beloved, in whose existence he plainly disbelieves. No one at the facility believes in the existence of the beloved—no one, that is, except the two stout old nurses, who until now have struck us as cruel and unfeeling crones (one to be played by the aging starlet Klamt). In the middle of the night, the nurses enter the man’s room and convey their belief in the existence of the beloved. They pledge to locate the beloved. Lo and behold, they do locate her. They bring the beloved to him. But can this be her? This is his beloved?! The man weeps. His beloved exists now in a lamentable state. She cannot walk. She cannot speak. Only her eyes move, to and fro. Yet the movement of her eyes, viewed even from the very last row of the balcony of the City Theater, is extraordinarily expressive. To the attentive theatergoer, this movement of the beloved’s eyes expresses everything that needs to be known about her relationship to the man. The one thing it cannot express, however, is the secret message she was supposed to impart to him. This secret message is locked within his quasi-vegetative beloved. He therefore sets out to do what not only the chief physician but even the nurses try to tell him is impossible: teach his beloved to speak again. He brings her to the chapel. Positions her cane-backed wheelchair before the altar. My name, he tells her, is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … and come back to you. Hour after hour, with remarkable tenderness and devotion, he says these words to his beloved, always pausing long enough at the ellipsis for her to leap in and impart with miraculously restored speech the secret of the stained-glass window. But she never leaps in. Her speech is never restored. Only her eyes move, to and fro, to and fro, in a manner that is exquisitely expressive, but not of the right thing. Now visiting hours are over. The clacking of the nurses gets louder and louder. They are coming to the chapel to take away his beloved. He knows that they will not bring her back. Not ever. He tries one last time: My name is Gustav. I am a glassworker. The beautiful window you see before you is my own handiwork. I must simply … He pauses. She says nothing. Yet this time—and it does seem to him a miracle, even if it is not the one he expected—he is able to whisper the missing words himself. I must simply smash my head hard through the glass and come back to you. Now the man shatters the glass by thrusting the crown of his head through the middlemost of the five female saints. As blood streams down his face, he kisses his beloved on the lips and then climbs through the opening where the window had been. He is now free to bring more beauty into the world. The nurses enter the chapel. Their clacking ceases. For a moment, the theater is absolutely silent. Then the beloved, her face streaked with blood, suddenly leaps to her feet and screams: Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The implication is that he—who is to be played by the City Theater’s most physically massive actor—is responsible for her condition and is now free to commit more crimes. But this is something the attentive theatergoer will have long since deduced from the movement to and fro of her eyes. The nurses, who do not remark on the shattered window and actually seem hardly to notice it, now wheel the beloved out of the chapel. As they do so, the General Intendant suggests, the curtain should fall. Of course, he leaves the particulars to the imagination of the dramatist.The malicious slander anticipated by the General Intendant begins as soon as the cast list of The Glassworker is pinned to the wall and Klamt discovers that instead of the beloved, she is to play one of the two stout sexagenarian nurses. And that the beloved is to be played by the daughter of the General Intendant.The gist of the slander, which can no doubt be traced back to Klamt, is that the infirmities and limitations of the beloved are also those of the General Intendant’s daughter. That the daughter cannot walk, that she cannot speak, that she expresses herself with her eyes only because she is unable to express herself by any other means. That The Glassworker has been contrived specifically to allow her father to cast her in it. That only a play in which the leading lady is absent from Act I and sits mute and motionless for nearly all of Act II is one that could even conceivably feature the General Intendant’s daughter at the top of the bill.This malicious slander pains the General Intendant. But it moves him to see how little it seems to pain his daughter. She could of course disprove it in an instant. She would only have to stand up or speak. One word would be sufficient. What gives this slander some purchase is her determination to do no such thing. To rehearse the role of the beloved completely in character. To have her father wheel her into the City Theater every morning and wheel her out again at night. To have him lift her onto the stage in his arms. To communicate with no one, not even with him, not even one word. A part of him even envies the degree to which her commitment to her art leaves her indifferent to the world and its scorn.The world is something to which he himself, both as a father and as an arts administrator, has for a long time not been in a position to be indifferent.Nor is he indifferent now. The General Intendant gathers his company. It is true that The Glassworker is contrived, he says: It is contrived to remind you how much an actor can express with even the smallest gesture. The simplest gesture. The Glassworker is indeed contrived—contrived to remind the public of the power of the theater, to remind us in the theater of the power of our art. A power we have all forgotten.The company murmurs.But given the daughter’s refusal to disprove the slander, it does not go away. It only intensifies. It is whispered, presumably first by Klamt, that anything expressed in her eyes is in fact without meaning or intent and bears only an accidental relation to the text of The Glassworker. That her baffled expression isn’t acting, it is actual bafflement. That her horrified expression is actual horror. That when the General Intendant (who receives special permission from the director to join each rehearsal as a kind of informal co-director) devotes all of his co-directing energy to directing his daughter, and in particular to directing, or co-directing, her eyes—which must convey to the last row of the balcony that that man is no glassworker, he’s a bricklayer, and what he’s brought into the world is a far cry from beauty—those hours and hours of rehearsal time are gone, simply gone.How, the General Intendant points out to his company, if you honestly believe the cruel things that you say, do you suppose she will be able to leap to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaim, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!The company murmurs. That’s true. But it is pointed out by Klamt in turn that the scene in which the beloved exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! is the one scene that is never rehearsed.Finally, and in front of the whole company, the General Intendant kneels before his daughter in her chair and begs her with tears in his eyes and his head in her lap to break character. Not for her sake, he knows she doesn’t care what they think, but for his! He is weak! He does care! But when she doesn’t break character even to decline what he begs of her, he tells the company that he is proud of his daughter and ashamed of himself. Only someone so committed to her role and so indifferent to the world is entitled to call herself an actor.After this, the malicious slander about her expressive gifts is repeated less often, and less gleefully.Not, however, by Klamt, who if anything only escalates her abuse.Klamt claims that the General Intendant does not even come from the world of drama. He comes from the world of dance. He impaired his wife with dance! Slew her with an undanceable dance! A dance no one could dance! So, first of all, they were taking their dramaturgical guidance from someone who has no formal training in theater! And who murdered his wife through choreography! This in the opinion of the finest physicians! But by his lights, she wasn’t dead! No, he took her home. Sustained her somehow, though not in a way anyone would wish to be sustained. Saw an opportunity in all this: a dance opportunity! An opportunity to “start from scratch,” dancewise! Didn’t have the decency to let her die, had to make her keep dancing instead! Of course, this dance didn’t pan out. At first, there was promise. Her movements struck him as entirely new. Or rather—old! Primordial! From a stage in the development of the human organism that preceded our fall into sociality and culture and the stink of the city! Never mind whether they could really be called “dance movements”! He was struck above all by one movement. At intervals, a finger shot to her now-bald brow and traced an arc across the side of her skull. A prehistoric gesture, he thought! The meaning of which was inscrutable to him! Must stem from the innate nature of man! Upon this one primeval movement an entire school of dance could be founded! But no. One day, he notices a painting of them on the eve of their wedding in which she is making the very same movement. Coquettishly tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. Now there is no hair on her head and possibly no essence to her person, but the fashionable world is still moving her muscles! There is no “preceding our fall into sociality”! No escape from “the stink of the city”! No “prehistory”! No “starting from scratch”! Not once you’ve walked even one city block! He decides to have another child by her. Doesn’t know if this is possible. Finds that it is! This one he raises properly! Pristinely! In the dark! In the midst of the city but sheltered from the gestural tyranny of the city! Food through a slot, water through a hole and into a shallow trough! Sheltered from a city that without our knowing it is always telling us how to move and how not to! Enters her room only when she is sleeping so as not to influence her with his movements! Wants nothing more than to embrace her tiny sleeping form but restrains himself in case upon waking she retains a memory of that motion! By a thousand such self-sacrifices ensures that hers is the first childhood free from violence! No movement possibilities are foreclosed to her! Everything is possible! She can move any which way! How his daughter chooses to move is for the first time in the history of man a genuine choice! Now he simply waits to see how she will choose to move! How she will choose to dance! But—she chooses not to move! She chooses not to dance! She chooses to sit! Or else (Klamt has heard it told both ways!) the way in which she chooses to move and dance obliges him to inhibit her movements by means of straps, for her own sake, after which, even once free again, she ceases to move! Whatever the case: After a certain point, there is no movement! No dancing! Yet he cannot quite disabuse himself of the notion that she is, for all that, a dancer! To admit that his daughter is no dancer is to admit that the way he raised her may not have been in her best interest! Only in time does he disabuse himself of the notion that she is a dancer! And only by means of another notion onto which he’s able to transfer the same psychological load: that she is an actor …Now Klamt has gone too far. The members of the company turn away from her in disgust. Imagine reacting so poorly to losing a role! And the stout old nurse is still a speaking part, that’s more than most of them got!Klamt herself becomes the subject of slander. In her increasingly baroque and frankly hysterical rumormongering, some in the company claim to detect not only the rancor of an ousted starlet but also the rage of a jilted lover, an innuendo that the General Intendant asks them to rise above but also does not explicitly dispel.Meanwhile, a consensus begins to form among the members of the company that the daughter’s performance is “powerful.”Rumors of her expressive gifts spread beyond the walls of the City Theater. Before the public has even seen her onstage, she becomes the recipient of an outpouring of adoration.And on the night of the premiere, she leaps to her feet at the climax of the play and exclaims, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! The company is willing to testify to that, the audience is willing to testify to that. She leaped to her feet and exclaimed, Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer!—the whole city is willing to testify to that, no one will deny it.No one, that is, apart from the aging starlet Klamt. Again and again she refuses—and loudly!—to admit it. Eventually, she is sent to Dr. Krakauer’s sanatorium. Here, Klamt is asked continually by Dr. Krakauer whether it is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said what everyone heard her say, and Klamt just missed it. She knows that admitting this possibility would be enough to get her discharged. She simply has to say the words It is possible that the General Intendant’s daughter said the words Your name is Bohuslav! You are a bricklayer! and that night she would sleep in her own bed. And privately, she will admit that of course it is possible, anything is possible. But Klamt, too, is committed to her role.This story has been excerpted from Adam Ehrlich Sachs’ forthcoming book, Gretel and the Great War.theatlantic.com
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850 Bryant Repatriate yourself! he laughed. Make yourself at home,feel comfortable. I come from a family that laughs aboutconjugal visits. They’re our origin story. My father, keeperof the broken bells and county jails, moved stacks of min-imum sentencing laws over so I could have a seat. Whenhe turned I saw the hump in his back, the bruises fromall the books thrown. When I leave this place, he said,the walls are gonna fall down. He’d been used to keep thelights on. In our imagination it would all turn to dustwhen it was his time to go back out through the revolv-ing door. The dust began to get to me. I heard himcough and felt it in my own chest rattling. I hated to bre-ak it to him that he hadn’t been the only one holding upthe wall. I saw the empty spot in his mouth where a toothhad been. Hope was starting to grow stupidly in its place(as it does in all gaping openings), unfurling and bloomingshamelessly. I turned my face away. He could smell ourlives on us through the plexiglass. He asked me again todescribe how the city looked now from the other sideof Bryant Street. If it looked any different going the op-posite way home.theatlantic.com
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The Political Dysfunction Facing Congress Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings or watch full episodes here. Ahead of next week’s closing arguments for Donald Trump’s hush-money trial, the former president’s allies took turns appearing outside the Manhattan courthouse. Speaker Mike Johnson, Senator J. D. Vance, and Representative Matt Gaetz were among those who made appearances. This public-facing show of support from Republicans comes as speculation over Trump’s choice for vice president continues to unfold.Meanwhile, in Congress, an exchange among Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jasmine Crockett, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez left a House committee in chaos. The spat, which began during a meeting held to consider a motion to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress for refusing to release audio from President Joe Biden’s interview with Special Counsel Robert Hur, more broadly represents how political behavior could be mediated going forward. “We have a ways to go in our national devolution,” Susan Glasser said last night. “Institutions are unraveling, not just the institution of the U.S. Congress.”Joining the Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barrón-López, a White House correspondent for PBS NewsHour; Eugene Daniels, a White House correspondent for Politico; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition.theatlantic.com
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How Hollywood Fell Short for the Fall Guys On-screen, during an early scene in The Fall Guy, the stunt driver Logan Holladay pulls off a move that looks utterly chaotic. He steers an SUV that soars across a beach, parts of it breaking off as it tumbles over and over until landing upside down, in a mess of smoke and debris. But Holladay could feel, even before he was told, that he’d completed the stunt as planned. He’d spent months helping design and rehearse the sequence—called a “cannon roll”—in which he hits a high speed, deliberately triggering a device underneath the car that propels it into the air. During one attempt, he’d sent the car flying too high; during another, the car over-rotated and rolled vertically, end over end. This time, everything felt right. “I 100 percent will not throw myself into a situation that I don’t know every detail about,” Holladay told me. “I’m not going to just go for it and see what happens.”The Fall Guy, which is now in theaters, is about that careful work. The film, loosely based on the campy 1980s television series about a stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter, is an action comedy with an endearing love story at its center—but it’s also a not-so-stealthy celebration of the stunt community. Directed by David Leitch, a former stunt performer himself, the film takes place on the set of a big-budget production, underlining just how much these professionals contribute to action filmmaking beyond their physical exploits.Stunt performers exist in a uniquely tough position in today’s franchise-heavy Hollywood: They’re not household names, but the stunts they do have become a primary selling point for many action-thriller sequels. Their work is often flashy, which has contributed over time to the misconception of them as daredevils, making it hard for them to be taken seriously. And they’re often in the spotlight only when something goes wrong. They’re otherwise supposed to remain invisible—a goal seemingly at odds with long-running efforts to seek industry recognition at the Oscars, which doesn’t have a category awarding stunt work. “It’s our job as stunt performers to be in the shadows, and it’s our job to uphold the illusion of one character … I think we all want to keep that illusion alive for the audience,” Leitch told me. “We’re supposed to be hidden, so how do we celebrate?”Making that campaign part of a mainstream, feel-good summer movie is one way. The Fall Guy, starring Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt, is the most visible and notable push in the stunt community’s decades-long effort to be included at the Academy Awards. In February, the Academy announced that casting directors would be honored starting in 2026, the first time a new category has been added since 2001. In March, the ceremony itself aired a montage about stunt work. To many stunt performers I spoke with over the past month, these moves hinted at a turning point and provided far more encouragement than many of them have been used to.[Read: The Hollywood pros finally getting their due]Jack Gill, who has worked in stunts since the 1970s and was the coordinator behind several Fast and Furious films, began the campaign for Oscar inclusion in 1991. Since then, he told me, he’s been given a litany of reasons stunts can’t be a part of the show: the ceremony is already too long, an award might pressure stunt performers to strive for extra-dangerous acts, and, most of all, stunt work isn’t a creative endeavor. “Just trying to get even one award has been daunting,” he said, adding that when he began his campaign, he was told the process would take five years at most to complete. “I fought three to five years thinking, This is going to happen. And here we are, 30 years later.”When the stunt coordinator Chris O’Hara tells people what he does for a living, he’s usually asked one of three questions: Have you ever been hurt? What movies have you been in? What’s the biggest stunt you’ve ever done?They’re harmless questions, and O’Hara has answered them plenty of times, but they also convey a narrow understanding of what he does. His work isn’t really about getting hurt, or about being in movies, or about taking part in the biggest set pieces possible. The job is, he told me, “to create the illusion of danger by minimizing the risks.” In other words, his work requires intense, careful planning and rehearsing to get right.The Fall Guy shows off the labor that goes into building a stunt by staging several giddy, over-the-top sequences that, one of the film’s producers, Kelly McCormick, told me, “were making dreams come true” for the team. The stunt performers broke personal and world records; Holladay told me that his eight and a half cannon rolls, which set a Guinness World Record, “still doesn’t even feel like it’s a real thing.” But their scenes dazzled not only because of, say, the height of a free fall or the length of a car jump; they also displayed how even minor adjustments to a stunt can deepen the story being told, making them an essential—and, yes, creative—part of the process.Consider a climactic chase scene in The Fall Guy, when Gosling’s protagonist, Colt Seavers, executes a boat jump that ends in an explosion. The stunt involves steering a boat fast enough onto a ramp so that it’ll soar in midair before landing back in the water. In Colt’s case, however, he directs his boat toward explosives so he can attempt an escape. Shortly before filming the scene, Gosling received a vintage jacket promoting the Miami Vice live-stunt show—an actual tourist attraction, involving stunt performances inspired by the series, that ran in the 1980s and ’90s at the Universal Studios theme park.The gift gave him the idea to incorporate one of the show’s tricks into his character’s extensive résumé. Gosling suggested that Colt steer the boat while facing backwards, with his hands tied behind his back, barely maneuvering the wheel. Leitch liked the idea; Colt’s narrative arc explores how, in his quest to impress his ex (Blunt) and prove his worth, he regains the self-confidence he lost after an on-set injury. Making the stunt appear just a little harder—a hidden stunt driver inside the boat meant Gosling’s double wasn’t actually driving it blind—fulfilled the actor’s creative inclinations and underscored the film’s themes. “It could have just been a boat jump, but now we’re defining this character moment for Colt,” Leitch explained.A good stunt doesn’t have to be elaborate. Wade Eastwood, the stunt coordinator for several Mission: Impossible films, told me that work can start years before a film goes into production, and involve simply noting throughout a script where action might be required. If a story, he explained, has an ensemble traveling from one continent to another but little detail about how, he’ll design and pitch sequences to keep the audience’s adrenaline pumping. For instance, if the characters are in Buenos Aires but head to London, he said, “I will then write how they get to London. That’s a car chase into a motorbike chase into a skydive sequence into an aerial sequence … All that creativity is not the writer or the director. That’s actually the stunt coordinator.”[Read: The sincerity and absurdity of Hollywood’s best action franchise]For all of the stunt performers I spoke with, the work has been rewarding, even if Oscar trophies haven’t come along yet. Eastwood in particular emphasized how much he’d rather do his job than attend a single award show. He said he’s been told that he deserves an Oscar for what he’s done for the Mission: Impossible franchise, but he bristles at the idea. “I’m not thinking about if I’m going to get an award for the last Mission,” he said. “I’m thinking, What the hell am I going to do for the next Mission?”Even so, stunt performers being overlooked by the most prestigious industry award has only gotten more baffling as their work has become more multifaceted, the sophistication of the action seen on-screen proving the complexity of their jobs. “Back in the day, it was a bit of a live rodeo … You would just show up and have your bag of pads and athletic ability and willingness to do whatever it is that was asked of you,” said Melissa Stubbs, a stunt coordinator who has doubled for actors such as Margot Robbie and Angelina Jolie, referring to when her career began in the 1980s. “Now we are action designers.” An Oscar category honoring the head of a stunt department would signal that the craft is seen as equal in importance to every other creative element of production. “It’s not to say that our egos need to be stroked,” Jack Gill said. “It’s just that, around your peers, you’d like to be able to say, ‘I did something special.’”After all, stunt performers typically downplay their work on set. Throughout The Fall Guy, Colt gives a thumbs-up at the end of his stunts, a gesture often used to underline how such performers are “stoics,” as McCormick put it: “They give the thumbs-up because a lot of times they can’t speak, let alone barely breathe, but they don’t want to stop production, because they know they’ll eventually be okay.”Perhaps The Fall Guy will too. The film’s earnings underperformed at the box office compared with its reported $130 million budget, marking a muted start to the summer movie season, but its release has been meaningful for the stunt community. At the Los Angeles premiere of The Fall Guy, Stubbs, who had been invited to see the film along with many other members of the tight-knit stunt community, saw a colleague cry as the film played. Stunt workers are as emotionally invested in a movie as anyone else who made it. “Hopefully,” O’Hara said, “people will see us as more than those three questions.”theatlantic.com
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Free Trade Is Dead Democrats and Republicans don’t agree on much, but for a long time, they agreed on this: the more free trade, the better. Now they agree on the opposite: Free trade has gone too far.On Tuesday, President Joe Biden announced plans to impose steep new tariffs on certain products made in China, including a 100 percent tariff on electric cars. With that, he escalated a policy begun during the Trump administration, and marked the decisive rejection of an economic orthodoxy that had dominated American policy making for nearly half a century. The leaders of both major parties have now turned away from unfettered free trade, a fact that would have been unimaginable less than a decade ago.Since the 1980s, American economic policy has largely been guided by the belief that allowing money and goods to flow with as little friction as possible would make everyone better off. So overwhelming was the agreement on this point that it became known, along with a few other free-market dogmas, as the “Washington Consensus.” (You may know the Washington Consensus by its other names, including neoliberalism and Reaganomics.) According to this way of thinking, free trade wouldn’t just make countries rich; it would also make the world more peaceful, as nations linked by a shared economic fate wouldn’t dare wage war against one another. The world would become more democratic, too, as economic liberalization would lead to political freedom. That thinking guided the trade deals struck during the 1990s and 2000s, including the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 and the decision to allow China into the World Trade Organization in 2001.A few voices on both the left and the right had long criticized these theories, but they were outside the mainstream. The first major rupture took place in 2016, when Donald Trump ascended to the presidency in part by railing against NAFTA and attacking America’s leaders for shipping jobs overseas. The same year, a landmark paper was published showing that free trade with China had cost more than 1 million American manufacturing workers their jobs and plunged factory towns across the country into ruin—a phenomenon known as the “China shock.” The coronavirus pandemic further undermined the Washington Consensus as the United States, after decades of letting manufacturing capacity move overseas, found itself almost entirely dependent on other countries for supplies as basic as face masks and as crucial as semiconductors.[Michael Schuman: China has gotten the trade war it deserves]These shifts strengthened the position of critics of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism. The Biden administration, stocked with Elizabeth Warren disciples, entered office eager to challenge the free-market consensus in certain areas, notably antitrust. But on trade, the administration’s soul remained divided. In the early years of the Biden presidency, trade skeptics such as U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai frequently clashed with trade enthusiasts like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Biden quietly kept in place the tariffs Trump had imposed on China (which Biden himself had denounced on the campaign trail), but he focused his economic agenda primarily on boosting the domestic clean-energy industry.Then China’s aggressive push into clean energy forced Biden’s hand. As recently as 2019, China barely built electric vehicles, let alone exported them. Today it is the world’s top producer of EVs, churning out millions of high-quality, super-cheap cars every year. An influx of Chinese EVs into the U.S. might seem like welcome news for an administration fighting to lower both inflation and emissions. But it could also devastate the American auto industry, destroying a vital source of well-paying jobs concentrated in key swing states. A glut of discounted solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, meanwhile—China currently produces the majority of the world’s supply of each—would undermine emerging American industries before they could even be built.To the administration, this presented a nightmare scenario. Already struggling parts of the country would experience a second China shock. The U.S. would become dependent on its biggest rival for some of the most important technologies in the world. Republicans would seize on the issue to win elections and potentially roll back the Biden administration’s progress on climate change. (Trump has made the threat of Chinese EVs central to his 2024 campaign, talking about the “bloodbath” that would ensue if they were allowed into the country.)Economics, political science, geopolitics, electoral math: Many of the administration’s incentives seemed to point in the same direction. Which brings us to the tariffs imposed this week. In addition to the 100 percent EV duty, the U.S. will apply 25 to 50 percent tariffs to a handful of “strategic sectors,” in the words of a White House fact sheet: solar cells, batteries, semiconductors, medical supplies, cranes, and certain steel and aluminum products.A president announcing a new policy does not mean that the political consensus has shifted. The proof that we are living in a new era comes instead from the reaction in Washington. Congressional Democrats, many of whom vocally opposed Trump’s tariffs, have been almost universally supportive of the increases, while Republicans have been largely silent about them. Rather than attacking the tariffs, Trump claimed credit for them, telling a crowd in New Jersey that “Biden finally listened to me,” and declaring that he, Trump, would raise tariffs to 200 percent. Most of the criticism from either side of the aisle has come from those arguing that Biden either took too long to raise tariffs or didn’t go far enough. What was recently considered beyond the pale is suddenly conventional wisdom.The old Washington Consensus was built on the premise that if leaders got the economics right, then politics would follow. Cheap consumer goods would keep voters happy at home, trade ties between nations would destroy the incentive to wage war, and the desire to compete in global markets would encourage authoritarian regimes to liberalize. Reality has not been kind to those predictions. Free trade upended American politics, helping to elect a spiteful kleptocrat initially opposed by his own party. The immense wealth Russia amassed by selling oil and gas to Europe may have actually emboldened it to invade Ukraine. Access to global markets didn’t stop China from doubling down on its authoritarian political model.The new consensus on trade taps into a much older understanding of economics, sometimes referred to as “political economy.” The basic idea is that economic policy can’t just be a matter of numbers on a spreadsheet; it must take political realities into account. Free trade does bring broadly shared benefits, but it also inflicts extremely concentrated costs in the form of closed factories, lost livelihoods, and destroyed communities. A political-economic approach to free trade recognizes that those two forces aren’t symmetrical: Concentrated economic loss can create the kind of simmering resentment that can be exploited by demagogues, as Trump long ago intuited. “Back in 2000, when cheap steel from China began to flood the market, U.S. steel towns across Pennsylvania and Ohio were hit hard,” Biden said in his speech announcing the new policy, pointing out that nearly 20,000 steelworkers lost their jobs in those two states alone. “I’m not going to let that happen again.”[Franklin Foer: Biden declares war on the cult of efficiency]A more cynical way to put this is that Biden’s tariffs are a form of pandering to a bloc of swing-state voters. There’s truth to that, but it isn’t the whole story. The political-economic approach also acknowledges that foreign adversaries behave in ways that bear little resemblance to the rational economic self-interest presupposed by mathematical models. They pursue their own geopolitical agendas, market forces be damned—and so America must do the same. China’s dominance in clean-energy technologies is not a product of free markets at work; it was carefully engineered by Beijing, which for decades has poured trillions of dollars of state money into building up industries that it sees as vital to its national strength. To simply accept cheap Chinese exports under the banner of free trade would solidify that dominance, giving Beijing effective control over the energy system of the future.The shift on trade is part of a broader realignment that Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has aspirationally called the “new Washington consensus.” What unites Biden’s tariffs with the other core elements of his agenda, including massive investments in manufacturing and increased antitrust enforcement, is the notion that the American government should no longer passively defer to market forces; instead, it should shape markets to achieve politically and socially beneficial goals. This view has taken hold most thoroughly among Democrats, but it is making inroads among Republicans too—especially when it comes to trade.The details of this new consensus, however, are still being worked out. Trump favors a blunt approach; he has proposed a 60 percent tariff on all Chinese goods and a 10 percent tariff on foreign goods from any country, including allies. Biden argues that Trump’s plan would sharply raise prices for American consumers without much benefit. His administration instead favors what officials call a “small yard and high fence”: major restrictions on a handful of essential technologies from particular countries.These are the terms on which the debate is now being waged: not whether to restrict free trade, but where, how, and how much. That is a very big change from the world we were living in not long ago. The precise consequences of that change will take years to reveal themselves. But they’re sure to be just as big.theatlantic.com
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A Raunchy Comedy About … Pregnancy? Preparing a birth plan requires considering the many things that could go wrong during childbirth—or, in the best-case scenario of everything proceeding as normal, how you might attempt to mitigate earth-shattering pain. In Babes, a new comedy about two best friends navigating pregnancy and the delirium of postpartum life, one woman is determined to approach her birth plan differently. Early in her pregnancy, Eden (played by Ilana Glazer) announces that she’d like to bring a little joy into a process that’s otherwise unsettling and clinical. Wanting the day of delivery to feel more like a costume party, she decides to call it “Eden’s Prom Birth Extravaganza.”This scene, one of many that take place in her obstetrician’s office, captures the most compelling part of Babes: its attention to, and irreverence toward, the unglamorous specifics of pregnancy. The film throws the horrors, confusion, and wonders of pregnancy into a raunchy comedy that revels in gross-out bodily humor. There are no graphic Dead Ringers–like visuals, but discussions leave little to the imagination: At the start of the film, Eden’s best friend, Dawn (Michelle Buteau), is close to the end of her second pregnancy. Dawn asks Eden to check if she’s started dilating. Crouching to take a look under her friend’s dress, a wide-eyed Eden informs her, “Your vagina looks like it’s yawning.”Babes, which was directed by Pamela Adlon, is the product of an all-star team: Adlon co-created and starred in Better Things, a remarkable, offbeat FX series about a single mother trying to make it in Hollywood. The film’s screenplay comes from television heavyweights too—it was co-written by Glazer, who co-created Broad City, and Josh Rabinowitz, a consulting producer on that series who also worked on The Carmichael Show and Ramy. And Buteau, a comedian, recently starred in Survival of the Thickest, an endearing coming-of-age series she co-created. In theory, a pregnancy raunch-com coming from this crew should’ve been a riotous but poignant romp. Babes doesn’t quite get there. The film tries to balance its lighter fare with weightier themes—aging out of friendships once children come into play, the guilt that can accompany postpartum depression, the insularity of the nuclear family. That’s a tall order, and Babes never really reconciles the gravity of Dawn and Eden’s growing distance from each other with the comedic territory where its two stars are clearly more comfortable.The film’s surplus of toilet humor is admittedly not for me. (Neither was the much-discussed food-poisoning debacle in Bridesmaids.) Still, there’s something charming about how Babes exaggerates the indignity of losing control over one’s body: When Dawn is upset about being unable to produce milk after her daughter is born, she calls in a lactation consultant who ends up hawking “Her Majesty,” a terrifying contraption that looks disturbingly similar to an HVAC machine. There are mushroom trips, a gag involving Eden trying out multiple pregnancy tests, and a dreamlike sequence featuring projectile breast milk—and in these wacky scenes, Glazer and Buteau are a truly dynamic duo, leaning into the film’s over-the-top physical comedy without hesitation. [Read: American motherhood]Where Babes falters is the comedown. Eden’s pregnancy is the result of a one-night stand, and the father, for reasons I won’t spoil, isn’t in the picture. Faced with the prospect of raising a child alone in her fourth-floor walk-up, Eden chooses to go through with her pregnancy. This is a screwball comedy set in a version of New York City where she can afford a massive, light-filled apartment without family support, so maybe not everything needs to make sense. But Eden is notably flighty, and visibly horrified by the messiness of Dawn’s childbirth; still, she pitches headfirst into having a child without much thought. The unexplained decision ends up somehow feeling even less earned than the unplanned pregnancies of the Judd Apatow cinematic universe.Dawn, for her part, seems baffled by—and later resentful of—Eden’s decision, an early indication that the pregnancy will challenge the women’s already-changing relationship. Sustaining close friendships in adulthood, especially as a parent, can be incredibly challenging—and because the strain of motherhood doesn’t end with labor, Babes brings the reality of raising children in the United States into sharp focus. Through a series of calamitous events that unfold in Dawn’s household, the film portrays the effects of policy decisions that have made the U.S. a needlessly difficult place to have kids. Child-care woes keep Dawn away from work, and from the doctor’s appointments where Eden desperately wants her support. Nothing she does—for herself or for her family—ever feels like enough. “Exhausted actually doesn’t even cover it,” Dawn says in a fight with Eden, before comparing raising two youg children to “an endless loop of other people’s needs.” Through these bittersweet observations, Glazer and Buteau still bring plenty of charm. The actors are a playful pairing, building on each other’s comedic inclinations in a way that sometimes makes Babes feel like a more grown-up Broad City. Watching the moment when Dawn seems perplexed by Eden’s decision to go through with the pregnancy, I was immediately reminded of the classic Broad City scene in which Glazer’s 27-year-old character reacts to the idea of getting married by saying, “What am I, a child bride?” Dawn isn’t there to witness some of the shocking things that Eden later learns about pregnancy—like the size of the needle used in an amniocentesis, or the fact that some pregnancies stretch past the 40-week mark. But when the time finally comes for Eden’s Prom Birth Extravaganza, it’s Dawn who commiserates with her about the injustice of having to push her placenta out too: “They don’t tell you about this part.” It’s true—that detail tends to get left out of the storybook ending in which no one needs stitches. Babes isn’t perfect, but its refreshing candor still feels like an R-rated public service.theatlantic.com
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A Rat Purge Saved This Island This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005.Rats had lived on the island for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species, including hundreds of thousands of frigate birds, terns, and boobies, before the rodents arrived. But, like on countless other islands around the world, the rats ate their way through those birds’ eggs, eventually decimating the populations. By 2005, when researchers and French authorities finally began eradicating the rodents, only two bird species were left: a few hundred pairs of masked and red-footed boobies.Today, nearly two decades after authorities banished the rats, Tromelin Island is once again a thriving seabird paradise, home to thousands of breeding pairs belonging to seven different species. Even more encouraging, the island is one of a growing number of cases where seabirds have returned on their own once invasive predators were successfully eliminated.[Read: The mystery of the disappearing seabird]“In terms of conservation, it’s a wonderful success,” says Le Corre, one of the authors of a recent study documenting the recovery.Ridding a landscape of invaders is one of the main challenges to reestablishing seabird colonies worldwide. On big islands with complex terrain—or even those with numerous buildings and abundant food, like New York’s Manhattan island—it can be virtually impossible. Some rat-removal campaigns have involved spending many years and millions of dollars to eliminate every last rodent. But as a whole, exterminators have gotten pretty efficient. “We have the technology, and we’ve been doing this since 1950,” says Holly Jones, an ecologist at Northern Illinois University who was not involved with the new paper. According to a 2022 review, 88 percent of efforts to eliminate invasive vertebrates from islands succeeded from 1900 to 2020.On Tromelin Island, which is just one square kilometer and uninhabited save for a small scientific-research station, French authorities eradicated Norway rats in a month using poisoned bait.After the predators are gone, researchers may need to help seabird communities on some islands recover, including by restoring vegetation, placing life-size models of birds on the island, or playing recorded calls to lure birds in. But Le Corre says no such efforts have been made on Tromelin Island.As it turns out, the seabirds there didn’t need the help. By 2013, populations of both red-footed and masked boobies had more than doubled. Soon after, white terns, brown noddies, sooty terns, wedge-tailed shearwaters, and lesser noddies showed up in rapid succession. The terns and noddies hadn’t been documented breeding on Tromelin Island since 1856, and there were no records of wedge-tailed shearwaters reproducing there.Impressive as it was, the recovery didn’t surprise Jones. “We know that seabirds, in general, are going to do better once invasive mammals aren’t around,” she says.[Read: Give invasive species a job]Seabirds in other locations have bounced back independently in similar ways. On Burgess Island, New Zealand, for example, common diving petrels and little shearwaters returned within two decades after rats were removed.But not all colonies will recover in 20 or even 30 years, Jones notes. On remote islands, far from other thriving seabird populations, recovery can take much longer, because few birds are likely to fly past and decide to stay. Seabirds tend to return faster to islands close to existing colonies, yet even in the case of remote Tromelin Island, birds can eventually find their way back.Tromelin Island’s recovery was relatively quick, in part because the seabird community is mostly dominated by species, such as terns, that regularly disperse to new homes. But some species are particularly slow to bounce back. Albatrosses, petrels, and other seabirds that remain loyal to one breeding spot rarely try new locations, even if birds from the same species have lived there before. Communities of those seabirds might need coaxing to return.Despite the promising start, Tromelin Island’s seabirds still face the same threats that imperil seabirds worldwide: They can be caught accidentally in commercial fisheries, and overfishing and changing ocean conditions rob them of food. But small as it is, Tromelin Island shows that seabirds are resilient. If people can get rid of invasive predators, island restoration can work—sometimes stunningly.theatlantic.com
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The Power of Hearing Family Stories This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.As I watch my friends grow older and enter new phases of life, I’ve noticed a common thread: Year after year, many of us happen upon questions we wish we’d asked the loved ones who are no longer with us. Some of these questions are capacious: What kind of friend were they in their youth? Others focus on the everyday: What was the one song they couldn’t live without? And what, exactly, was that famous chocolate-cake recipe?It’s not realistic, of course, to ask every single question while we can. But sometimes our loved ones need a nudge to share a bit more than they might’ve otherwise: “You may be surprised by how much your parents and grandparents haven’t told you, perhaps because they thought you wouldn’t be interested, or they weren’t sure how you’d judge them,” Elizabeth Keating wrote in 2022. Opening that door can lead to insight you never knew existed.On Oral HistoryThe Questions We Don’t Ask Our Families but ShouldBy Elizabeth KeatingMany people don’t know very much about their older relatives. But if we don’t ask, we risk never knowing our own history.Read the article.The Underestimated Reliability of Oral HistoriesBy Stephen E. Nash and SapiensNot only written narratives have stood the test of time.Read the article.What Ordinary Family Photos Teach Us About OurselvesBy Syreeta McFaddenA new book honors unsung figures who have for generations captured the most delicate moments of Black life. (From 2023)Read the article.Still Curious? Learn your family’s history: Ordinary photos and stories can connect you with your roots, Kate Cray wrote in 2023. What kids learn from hearing family stories: Reading to children has education benefits, of course—but so does sharing tales from the past, Elaine Reese wrote in 2013. Other Diversions The strange ritual of commencement speeches Six books that explore what’s out there The godfather of American comedy P.S. Courtesy of Antoine A. I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Antoine A., 28, from Versailles, France, sent a photo of Solalex, “a small hamlet in Switzerland, at the foot of the Diablerets mountains.”I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks. If you’d like to share, reply to this email with a photo and a short description so we can share your wonder with fellow readers in a future edition of this newsletter or on our website. Please include your name (initials are okay), age, and location. By doing so, you agree that The Atlantic has permission to publish your photo and publicly attribute the response to you, including your first name and last initial, age, and/or location that you share with your submission.— Isabeltheatlantic.com
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God’s Doctors Nearly 20 million people gained health-insurance coverage between 2010 and 2016 under the Affordable Care Act. But about half of insured adults worry about affording their monthly premiums, while roughly the same number worry about affording their deductibles. At least six states don’t include dental coverage in Medicaid, and 10 still refuse to expand Medicaid to low-income adults under the ACA. Many people with addiction never get treatment.Religious groups have stepped in to offer help—food, community support, medical and dental care—to the desperate.Over nine months last year, the photographer Matt Eich documented the efforts of five such organizations in his home state of Virginia. These groups operate out of trailers and formerly abandoned buildings; they are led by pastors, nuns, reverends and imams. In many cases, they are the most trusted members of their communities, and they fill care gaps others can’t or won’t. —Bryce CovertThe Health WagonWise, Virginia A doctor visits with a patient at the Health Wagon in Wise, Virginia. March 14, 2023. The Health Wagon is the oldest mobile free clinic in the country. It was founded in 1980 by Sister Bernie Kenny, a Catholic nun and nurse practitioner, who first offered care out of a Volkswagen Beetle. Today it has four mobile units that operate out of RVs, plus two buildings that offer medical and dental care. It plans to soon open the first nonprofit pharmacy in the region.This is Appalachia—the western tip of the state, near the Kentucky border. The place has been hit hard by the opioid crisis, and residents suffer from high rates of cardiovascular disease, mental-health problems, diabetes, asthma, and cancer. “We’re the Lung Belt, we’re the Heart Belt, we’re the Kidney-Stone Belt,” Teresa Owens Tyson, who has been with the clinic since its early days and is now its CEO, told me. Most of the people the Health Wagon serves either don’t have insurance or have such high copays and deductibles that they can’t afford to use their policies. Tyson said she’s seen lines of people 1,600 deep waiting at the clinic at 6 a.m. Dental services are in particularly high demand: A 12-year-old recently came in whose teeth were so decayed, the child already needed dentures. Dr. Robert Kilgore takes a dental impression for dentures. March 14, 2023. A conference room at the Health Wagon. March 14, 2023. The RecLuray, Virginia Audre King, Director of The REC in Luray, Virginia on Friday, June 16, 2023. Reverend Audre King grew up in Luray. He went away to college, got married, and was living hours away in Northern Virginia when he says God told him in a dream to go back home and begin a ministry there. He tried to buy a long-abandoned building on his childhood block, but no bank would give him a loan. Finally, the owner agreed to sell it to him for cheap if he used it to serve the community. Digging out all of the dirt and dead animals and hooking the place up to electricity and water took months, but in 2017, the Rec was up and running.It now serves hundreds of hot meals in area where many people live in motels without kitchens. It also provides mental-health programming, kids’ activities, a computer lab, and fitness classes. “Our goal is that anything, for whatever reason, the town or county can’t or won’t be able to fund—a resource they won’t provide—we want to be that help,” King told me.All of its services are provided almost entirely by volunteers; the only person who gets paid is a bus driver who transports kids from their schools and homes to the Rec and back. King doesn’t take a salary for either the Rec or at the Eternal Restoration Church of God in Christ, where he serves as minister; he works for a gas company.When he preaches at the church, he’s teaching the Gospel, he told me; but at the Rec, he’s “living the Gospel.” He pointed to Matthew 25:35–40: “For I was hungry and you gave me food … I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me.” Audre King guides kids across Main Street before a group outing to a playground on Friday, June 16, 2023. Audre King and Damon Mendez play basketball with participants from the REC. June 16, 2023 Left: Lunch time at the REC. Right: Damon Mendez carries a speaker into the REC. June 16, 2023 CrossOver Healthcare MinistryRichmond, Virginia Marilyn Metzler, a registered nurse who has volunteered for 27 years, speaks with Father Markorieos Ava Mina at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry in Richmond, Virginia. June 1, 2023. Last fiscal year, CrossOver treated more than 6,700 patients, over half of whom came from other countries as immigrants and refugees. Most undocumented immigrants can’t access Medicaid; those who can may still struggle to navigate the complex health-care system, especially if English isn’t their first language. The interdenominational group runs two free clinics offering primary care as well as cardiology and pulmonology, OB-GYN care, dental and vision care, behavioral-health services, pediatric care for children over 3, and a low-cost pharmacy. CrossOver relies on more than 400 volunteers to see patients, and still can’t open up enough appointments for everyone who comes seeking care: “We turn away about 30 to 35 people a week,” Julie Bilodeau, the group’s CEO, told me. Scenes from CrossOver Healthcare Ministry. June 1, 2023. Maria Santiago Morente receives an ultrasound from Laurel Wallace, D.O., a volunteer at CrossOver Healthcare Ministry on Thursday, June 1, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare NetworkChantilly, VirginiaAbout 10 years ago, Yahya Alvi applied for a job at the Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network, half an hour from Washington, D.C. The organization’s president told him that his dream was to open a free clinic. “That is my passion,” Alvi responded. He started by securing empty space at a nearby mosque and taking free equipment from a clinic that was giving it away. At the beginning, he employed only one doctor and himself, and the clinic was open just one day a week.Today, it operates six days a week and has two paid nurse practitioners in addition to the two doctors. The clinic was founded by Muslims, but it accepts anyone without insurance or the money to pay for medical care, from anywhere in the country and practicing any religion. “Our religion says that all human beings are created by God almighty,” Alvi told me. “And all deserve equal treatment.” ADAMS Compassionate Healthcare Network in Chantilly, Virginia. November 13, 2023. A patient receives an eye examination from a volunteer doctor at Adams. August 12, 2023. Left: Tori Finney, a volunteer, measures a patient at Adams. August 12, 2023. Right: Dr. Fathiya Warsame helps a patient at Adams. November 13, 2023. Dr. Sadia Ali Aden, the executive director of Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Adams Compassionate Healthcare Network. November 13, 2023. Madam Russell United MethodistSaltville, Virginia Pastor Lisa Bryant at Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church in Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023. One day in 2021, Steve Hunt was on the side of the road, trying to hitchhike to a grocery store about seven miles from his home in Saltville, Virginia. Hunt had lost his sight a few years earlier, after an infection in his leg went septic and he fell and knocked his retinas loose. Lisa Bryant saw him when she pulled up at a stop sign. She’s a pastor, and she had just finished a service at one church and had to be at another in an hour. She was in a hurry. But just the week before, she had preached about Jesus calling his followers to bring the blind and suffering to him. She gave Hunt a ride. The interaction came at a crucial time for Hunt. “I was at bottom at that point,” he told me. His house was strewn with glass shards because he kept breaking things. He was struggling with addiction. “Everything was falling down around me, mentally and emotionally,” he said. “I was asking God to kill me that day she picked me up.”Instead, Hunt started going to the new 12-step program Bryant had started at her main church, Madam Russell United Methodist. “They just kind of pulled around me, supported me,” he said of the congregation. He’s helped Bryant expand that program, the only one in a town where opioid use is rife but all the addiction-recovery programs are oversubscribed. Bryant has also set up community-service opportunities at her church for people convicted of drug offenses, and is working to secure transitional housing for people dealing with addiction. Bryant doesn’t think the point of being a Christian is just to get to heaven after death, but to see the kingdom of heaven on Earth, too. She’s realized that “giving these people a new community, a healthy community, is one of the best things we can do for them,” she said. “We all need each other. That’s just how we’re created.” People gather before a meeting of the Saltville 12 Step Recovery Group in the basement of Madam Russell Memorial United Methodist Church. March 13, 2023. Saltville, Virginia. March 13, 2023. Support for this story was provided by the Magnum Foundation, in partnership with the Commonwealth Fund.theatlantic.com
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Taylor Swift Is a Skeleton Key to the Internet It is nighttime in Paris. We are more than a year into Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour, and tonight, her fans are once again trying to figure out what her clothes mean.The star is in a glittering yellow-and-red two-piece set, a possible reference to the colors of the Kansas City Chiefs, the football team Swift’s boyfriend, Travis Kelce, plays on. This is also the 87th performance in the tour, and—aha!—Kelce wears jersey number 87. The hundreds of thousands of fans watching along through bootlegged livestreams on TikTok and YouTube have solved another mystery.This is the beginning of the European leg of Eras, which will stretch on and on until Swift returns to North America this fall and plays the final show of the tour on December 8 (that is, assuming she doesn’t extend it, as she has multiple times already). You’d think people would have lost interest by now. But Taylor Swift has kept fans’ attention by tapping into an algorithmic machine unlike anyone has before her.Swift is savvy, and leverages social-media culture to her advantage. Over her 18-year career, she has trained her fandom to inspect everything she does for Easter eggs; she knows that even a small reveal can send people into a frenzy. She likes to leave clues about upcoming music in her outfits, in music videos, even in commercials she films with brands. She knows people are interested in her personal life—her romances, her feuds—and capitalizes on that, leaving them hints in her liner notes or in song titles.In response, fans analyze dates and look for numbers that add up to 13, her favorite number. They create spreadsheets of every single outfit she’s worn on tour, methodically tracking each surprise song she’s played. They chat nonstop across platforms, swapping elaborate theories to try to decode when the next album is coming or whom each song is about. For more than half a decade, they’ve been convinced that there’s a lost album called Karma, which was shelved in the mid-2010s amid Swift’s feud with Kanye West (now known as Ye) and Kim Kardashian. According to one theory, the orange outfits she’s been wearing in Paris are a sign that she’ll release music from Karma. It’s like QAnon, if QAnon involved a lot of DIY rhinestone boots.[Read: The real Taylor Swift would never]Swifties don’t storm the Capitol, but they will flood Kardashian’s Instagram with snake emoji in response to Swift talking about the pain their fight brought her, just as they will fight Ticketmaster when the company botches her concert-ticket rollout. Their thinking is often conspiratorial. In one recent TikTok, a fan argued that Swift would be releasing something on May 3, according to this logic: A recent screenshot of a music-video still posted to Swift’s team’s Instagram included the letter-and-number combination 14.3V—Swift’s latest music video was for “Fortnight,” and a fortnight is two weeks; two weeks is 14 days. One plus four equals five. The three rounds it out: Something’s happening on the 3rd. The V is actually the Roman numeral for five. (May 3 came and went without a release.)Extreme cliques might be one side effect of our digital culture. “Our algorithms and media are designed to produce fandoms around consumption goods,” Petter Törnberg, a professor of computational social science at the University of Amsterdam, told me over email. “There is hence a fundamental similarity between Swifties, Apple-fans and MAGA Republicans: our current era has the tendency of turning our preferences into identities, and shaping a form of postmodern tribes around both consumption goods and political leaders.” (See also: fans of Beyoncé and BTS.)In other words: Social platforms can have a radicalizing effect on fandoms. When we study algorithmic radicalization, we tend to do so in the context of politics, but the same systems might also calcify our beliefs about cultural products. Yet we still have a fairly limited understanding of how all of this works. “The very best studies we have are still really struggling to detect effects, because there’s so many challenges when you try to study this stuff,” Chris Bail, the founding director of the Polarization Lab at Duke University, told me.No one single algorithm powers this fandom. It operates across platforms; in a single day, a Swift fan might stream her music on Spotify, watch her music videos on YouTube, and consume posts about her on TikTok. All of these sites have distinct recommendation systems. Companies also tend to keep these systems a secret, making them hard to research.But we can say this: Algorithms tend to reinforce what’s already popular, because attention attracts more attention. Growth begets growth, as Törnberg put it. In this way, Swift also demonstrates how platforms that supposedly target content based on an individual’s interests can, in fact, end up clustering around one monolithic force. “It just seems like, Oh, that’s sort of weird, I thought everybody was supposed to have their own algorithmic niche now,” Nick Seaver, the author of Computing Taste: Algorithms and the Makers of Music Recommendation, told me. “And instead—I mean, maybe in addition to that—we also all have Taylor Swift.”[Read: Nobody knows what’s happening online anymore]Our modern Swiftocracy is a reminder that we are still subject to strange algorithmic forces, even as the web is supposedly fractured. Yet the consequences of this can be as hard to decode as an Easter egg dropped by Swift. On her final show in Paris, she opted for a “berry”-red dress for the Folklore section of her set. It may be a sign of something to come. Or not.theatlantic.com