Best of The Atlantic
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The 15 Films Worth Adding to Your Watchlist This Fall Many of this fall’s biggest films and buzziest awards contenders screened at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, which ended last weekend. On the ground, the excitement meant sold-out theaters, crowded sidewalks, and a queue for a 9:45 a.m. showing of The Brutalist—a nearly four-hour-long epic—that wound past several blocks and led to a screaming match when someone tried to cut the line. The highlights below aren’t just for passionate cinephiles, though. They’re simply the best films I saw in Toronto, ones likely to resonate outside of the festival with audiences and critics alike. Almost all will hit theaters this season or start streaming before 2024 ends.The Substance (now in theaters)With her debut feature, 2018’s Revenge, Coralie Fargeat proved she has a knack for making phantasmagoric horror about femininity. But if that film, about a woman going after men who assaulted her, was a tough watch for its hyper-saturated violence, her second is an even nastier exercise in grotesque filmmaking. The Substance follows Elisabeth Sparkle (played by a ferocious Demi Moore), a fading celebrity who injects her body with an elixir to give birth—in disgustingly squelchy fashion—to a younger copy of herself whom she calls Sue (Margaret Qualley). She can only be Sue for seven days at a time, however, so after each blissful week, Elisabeth returns to her aging physique to simmer in self-hatred and an overwhelming desire to abuse the titular drug. Acerbic, visceral, and deliriously excessive, Fargeat’s takedown of Hollywood’s endless cycle of discarding older women for ingenues is unsubtle, but that’s the point. Vanity may be skin-deep, but it inspires terribly potent feelings.Anora (in theaters October 18)Anora (Mikey Madison, terrific) seems to possess zero insecurities. A 23-year-old Uzbek American sex worker who goes by “Ani,” the protagonist of this year’s Palme d’Or winner knows what she wants and thinks she’s found it when she falls for Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a goofily charming client who turns out to be a Russian oligarch’s son. When Ivan proposes marriage, Ani is whisked into a fairy tale that she’s fiercely determined to make her reality. As he did with films such as Tangerine, Red Rocket, and The Florida Project, the writer-director Sean Baker unearths the humanity in the chaos that can reign over the seediest corners of the United States, while observing how the American dream can curdle. Fizzy, tender, and equal parts funny and heartbreaking, Anora is a study of the struggle to defend one’s worth, as confident as its heroine.Conclave (in theaters October 25)When the pope suddenly dies, the cardinals must vote on the next Holy Father—but the proceedings, dogged by furious debates and ego-driven power plays, cause the front-runner to step down from his candidacy. Sound familiar? Conclave may be a thinly veiled election-year allegory, but Edward Berger, the director of the 2023 Best Picture nominee All Quiet on the Western Front, has taken the backroom politicking of shows such as House of Cards and grafted it onto the halls of Vatican City. The result is a highly entertaining, highly blasphemous tale about the men who want the papacy. It helps, too, that the film boasts a sinfully great lineup of character actors—Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Isabella Rossellini—led by a fine-tuned Ralph Fiennes as the one cardinal trying to prevent the transition from turning into a full-blown soap opera. They make the melodrama divine.Emilia Pérez (in theaters November 1, streaming on Netflix November 13)A Mexican cartel boss seeking a gender-affirming operation may not sound like the basis of a musical, but Jacques Audiard’s operatic vision—along with a committed cast going for broke—makes Emilia Pérez an exhilarating watch. Karla Sofía Gascón leads the ensemble as the titular heroine who transitions in secret with the help of Rita (Zoe Saldaña), a lawyer seeking changes of her own after years spent defending the corrupt. But when Emilia hopes to reunite with her family—including her wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and her two sons—she must reconcile her newfound happiness with the profound pain of her criminal past. Darkly comic yet unabashedly sentimental, the film is a testament to risk-taking; despite threatening to veer off the rails at any moment, Emilia Pérez’s insistence upon the redeeming power of self-acceptance keeps it grounded.Bird (in theaters November 8)The writer-director Andrea Arnold’s latest entry into her menagerie of movies—including Fish Tank and Cow—injects a dose of fantasy into the raw reality of coming of age that she is so adept at capturing. Bailey (played by newcomer Nikiya Adams) is a 12-year-old being raised by a father (an electric Barry Keoghan) who’s barely an adult himself. In her angst, she spends her days wandering the marshy surroundings of the tenement in which they squat, losing herself in nature. When she encounters a man named Bird (Passages’ Franz Rogowski, wondrous) seeking his long-lost parents, the pair build an unusual friendship that offers Bailey the assurance she didn’t realize she needed. For those willing to go along with Arnold’s whimsical flourishes of magical realism, Bird is a rewarding watch, an earnest film that argues for the necessity of an untamed spirit in the routine of everyday life.Heretic (in theaters November 8)For a wildly different take on religion from the aforementioned Conclave, Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who co-wrote A Quiet Place with John Krasinski, have spun another taut horror-thriller out of a simple premise: When two Mormon missionaries (played by Yellowjackets’ Sophie Thatcher and The Fabelmans’ Chloe East) visit a man interested in learning about their church, they quickly learn that he has a sinister ulterior motive involving his personal theory of theology. As the women attempt to flee, he also can’t resist talking endlessly about his sacrilegious observations—and the only reason the monologues work is because the villain in question is played by Hugh Grant. The actor gleefully channels the charm that made him a rom-com hero into a performance that’s unnerving yet appealing, providing good-old-fashioned, scenery-chewing fun. In other words: Grant is just a man, standing in front of two women, asking them to indulge his devilish ideas.All We Imagine as Light (in theaters November 15)Not much happens in Payal Kapadia’s textured, naturalistic film tracking two Hindu women in Mumbai going about their daily life. But their subtle, emotional journeys carry immense weight. Prabha (Kani Kusruti) and Anu (Divya Prabha) are roommates working as nurses at a local hospital; while the former quietly longs for her estranged husband, the latter, who’s younger and more gregarious, is in a secret relationship with a Muslim man. The women’s bond is strengthened by their similar routines and tested by their contrasting ideas about female autonomy in a patriarchal country. Kapadia constructs striking images that linger long after the credits roll, evoking the hope of generations of women to come. Elegant, sensual, and richly told, All We Imagine as Light is a gem that rewards the patient viewer.Hard Truths (in theaters December 6)Pansy (played by Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is a tough woman to please, with far more grievances than the average person. She snaps at pretty much everything: dogs wearing coats (they already have fur!), pigeons in her yard (the grass is not for them!), charity workers seeking donations (why are they smiling!), the list goes on—and on, and on. But as funny as Hard Truths can be when capturing Pansy’s showdowns with strangers and loved ones alike, it’s not some caricature of a bitter woman. Written and directed by Mike Leigh—who last worked with Jean-Baptiste in 1996’s Secrets & Lies, a performance for which she nabbed an Oscar nomination—the film is a sensitive and empathetic look at a specific kind of heartbreak: the type that happens when life’s everyday trials have chipped away at a person’s innate joy for too long, leaving behind only resentment, anger, and fear. Jean-Baptiste is tremendous, taking a volatile character and revealing the human underneath.The Room Next Door (in theaters December 20)What would you do if a loved one asked you to be present for her death—albeit not at her bedside, just close enough so she doesn’t feel alone? In the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar’s first English-language film, a cancer patient, Martha (a commanding Tilda Swinton), has obtained a drug that will allow her to depart when she chooses; all she yearns for is someone in “the room next door.” That someone is Ingrid (Julianne Moore, conveying a measured sympathy), a writer who, despite being terrified of death, agrees to help her friend. With memorably peculiar dialogue, The Room Next Door contemplates the reckoning with mortality everyone faces someday, whether or not it’s their time to go. It’s not only a vibrant movie but a tonal marvel: sweeping yet intimate, bold but thoughtful, serious and still absurd—and as sumptuous as life itself.The Brutalist (release date TBD)At three and a half hours long (with a 15-minute intermission), the Vox Lux director Brady Corbet’s latest film may as well be considered a brutalist structure itself. But The Brutalist is well worth its towering run time: It is a sprawling, decades-spanning epic that draws power from its emotional scope and scale. Adrien Brody stars as László Toth, a Hungarian Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor arriving in America hoping to build both a life and a means for his remaining family to join him stateside after World War II. As Toth works to design and erect a Christian community center in Pennsylvania for Harrison Lee Van Buren (Guy Pearce), a pompous, menacing industrialist, the story deconstructs many themes: the instability of modern American ideals, the foundational hardships of the immigrant experience, the need for preserving art and artists’ legacies. Though it contains perhaps one too many beats by the end, The Brutalist is a triumph of ambition, beyond deserving of its massive canvas.Honorable Mentions: Anchored by a pair of strong lead performances from Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield as a couple who contend with cancer, We Live in Time (in theaters October 11) is a warm and mature, if somewhat standard, relationship drama from the Brooklyn director John Crowley that’s sure to make parents cry. Family also takes center stage in The Seed of the Sacred Fig (in theaters November 27), shot in secret by the Iranian filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof. In it, a couple and their two daughters begin to distrust one another after political protests over the death of Mahsa Amini start in Tehran. Despite a shaky final act, the film offers a sharp examination of paranoia. Speaking of movies that could use a little more editing, Nightbitch (in theaters December 6) won’t win Amy Adams that elusive Oscar, and the writer-director Marielle Heller has produced far more cohesive work. But the adaptation of the popular novel contains a winsome shagginess as it tells the ludicrous story of a stay-at-home mom slowly losing her composure and, well, turning into a dog.I also admired a pair of feature-length debuts: Bring Them Down (release date TBD), written and directed by Christopher Andrews, stars Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan as members of competing shepherding families in a remote Irish town. It’s a tense and bleak but thoughtful thriller about the pull of violence, with some impressively staged sequences. Bonjour Tristesse (seeking distribution), meanwhile, is a lovely adaptation of the 1954 coming-of-age novel by Françoise Sagan that brings to mind Call Me by Your Name for its naive young protagonist and light-filled European setting. Written and directed by Durga Chew-Bose, the film features a mesmerizing performance from Chloë Sevigny as the enigmatic old friend of the teenage heroine’s father who ingratiates herself into their idyllic summer in the south of France. I found it to be a pleasant diversion at TIFF in particular: Fall may be about to begin, but it was nice to bask in just a little more sunshine.theatlantic.com
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How to Write About the Trump Years A new memoir shrewdly captures the upheavals of the past eight years.theatlantic.com
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These Women Knew Their Genes Were Betraying Them Deb Jenssen never wanted her children to suffer from the disease that killed her brother at 28. The illness, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, initially manifests in childhood as trouble with strength and walking, then worsens until the heart or the muscles controlling the lungs stop working. She decided to get pregnant using IVF so that she could select embryos without the mutation for the disorder. But when she ended up with just two viable embryos—one with the mutation—the clinic urged her to transfer both.The embryos were female, and Jenssen remembers the doctors assuring her that, because the Duchenne mutation is linked to the X chromosome, a girl who carried it would have a backup chromosome, with a working copy of the affected gene, and would be as healthy as Jenssen was. “I had 10 minutes to decide,” Jenssen told me; less than a year later, she had three babies. Both embryos had successfully implanted, then one split into two. Jenssen had a clue which embryo had divided when one of her toddlers stood up by spreading her feet out wide and walking her hands up her legs: She’d seen her brother do that same move, a hallmark of muscular dystrophy, as a child.Jenssen guessed then that two of her daughters, the twins, had a Duchenne mutation, and she knew in her heart that, for at least one of them, that genetic legacy was already developing into disease. But persuading doctors to test for it took about a year and a half. She said they kept telling her, “Girls don’t get Duchenne.”Of the hundreds of genetic diseases linked to the X chromosome, Duchenne is among the more common, along with certain forms of hemophilia. Other so-called X-linked disorders include Fabry disease, which can cause life-shortening kidney and heart problems, and types of Alport syndrome, another kidney-destroying disease. In the past, many doctors believed that these diseases affected only men and boys. But what seemed at first like isolated cases kept cropping up, in which women and girls showed symptoms, too. Parts of the medical community and many patients now argue that more women might be affected with symptoms of X-linked disorders than previously appreciated.Data about what these diseases look like in women and girls, or even how many women are affected, are scarce, in part because researchers are only now taking this problem seriously. For some women, the symptoms appear less severely than in men, but for others they are similarly devastating: Jenssen told me that, at 15, one of her two daughters with the mutation so far has only mild symptoms of Duchenne, but the one who first showed signs of the disease now uses a wheelchair. That they are affected at all, though, goes against what many women were told for years.Shellye Horowitz, now 51, told me that, throughout her childhood, her wounds never healed well or quickly, and her joints hurt so much that she limped. No one believed what she said about her constant pain. “The doctors told my parents that I was lazy and that I was faking it to get out of PE,” she said. Horowitz’s dad had hemophilia, a blood-clotting disorder that, in severe forms, can cause fatal bleeds if left untreated, but her doctors never took seriously the possibility that she did too. Still, long after she was done with PE, Horowitz suffered from swelling joints and other tissues, and wounds that wouldn’t heal. As an adult, she had a small mole removed, and bled through an entire roll of paper towels. Finally, the doctors gave her replacement clotting factor, a classic treatment for hemophilia, and the bleeding stopped. Only as she entered her 40s, after a series of medical procedures and follow-ups, did Horowitz learn that she makes just 10 to 20 percent of the amount of clotting factor the body needs. And she finally found a specialist who put her on preventative therapy for hemophilia.For years, many practicing doctors’ thinking about X-linked diseases has been simple. In their view, men and boys have one X chromosome in their cells and one Y, which carries only a paltry set of genes. So if a genetic error on the X chromosome disrupts production of important proteins in the body, male patients suffer the consequence. According to this traditional logic, women and girls have another copy of the genes in question on their second X chromosome—working genes that can make up for mutated ones. (Women might have two mutated X chromosomes, but that is statistically ultrarare.)The idea that those backup genes would always shield someone from an X-linked disease, however, has proved untrue, in part because of a special thing that happens with X chromosomes.In other pairs of chromosomes, those alternative genes can protect against some dangerous mutations. But beginning in the 1960s, scientists began to appreciate that, as female embryos develop, their cells undergo a process known as X-chromosome inactivation. The thinking goes roughly like this: Because cells do not need two of these particular chromosomes to function, they chemically silence one at random. If the X chromosome carrying a mutation for a disease is silenced as the embryo grows, then a woman carrying the disorder will be symptom-free. But if the healthy X chromosome is silenced early in development, then the mutated X chromosome can prevail in many of the body’s cells from that point on, and dominate as the girl grows.Still, “it is a rather common misconception that women are not affected by X-linked disorders,” Caroline Bergner, a neurologist in the Leukodystrophy Outpatient Clinic at the University Hospital Leipzig, told me. Many doctors still learn that X-linked diseases are essentially restricted to boys and men, but “genetics is a lot more complicated than what we are taught in medical school,” Angela Weyand, a hematologist and professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, told me. The science of X inactivation might not be new, but in her experience, “most of it isn’t well known within the medical community outside of geneticists.” Even if a doctor does understand that a woman could be affected by X-linked disorders, they might think these scenarios are too rare to be applicable to their patients. But, Weyand said, “I don’t believe that people who truly understand the science can say that risks to carriers are negligible.”The variability of X inactivation likely helps explain why an X-linked disease’s effects on women who do have symptoms can vary widely. With Duchenne, a girl whose cells skew toward the mutated copy of the X chromosome “can develop symptoms that look very much like classical Duchenne muscular dystrophy in boys,” Sharon Hesterlee, the chief research officer at the Muscular Dystrophy Association, told me. But because X inactivation is random and exceedingly difficult to test for, women cannot readily know the pattern of chromosome inactivation in their body or predict the degree to which they will experience symptoms. For example, even though Horowitz’s body produces only 10 to 20 percent of the normal amount of clotting factor, she says her aunt with the same X mutation makes 80 percent of the normal amount, and does not need medication.When researchers have looked at how women are affected by certain X-linked diseases, they’ve found that symptoms are surprisingly common, though. For instance, a study of women with Duchenne mutations—in which Jenssen participated—found that half of them had evidence of tissue scarring in their heart. Jenssen was among those with signs of this cardiac damage. A study of adrenoleukodystrophy, an X-linked disease that can cause deadly hormonal and cerebral complications in boys and men, indicated that upwards of 80 percent of women with mutations for adrenoleukodystrophy show neurological dysfunction by age 60 or older. These women might not be at risk of death, but they can experience life-altering symptoms, including bowel and bladder issues and mobility issues that cause some to need a wheelchair.Taylor Kane has the mutation for adrenoleukodystrophy, which claimed the life of her father and his twin brother when she was a child. She has not yet had any clear signs of the disease, but her mutation inspired her to start Remember the Girls, an organization that pushes against the dogma that X-linked diseases rarely affect women. About 1,500 women who collectively represent 50 X-linked disorders have joined, including Jenssen and Horowitz. But many women with X-linked disorders are unaware that they even have an affected gene, Kane said. They might suffer symptoms and discover the cause only when they have a son born with the condition.Knowing that they’re a carrier of the disease doesn’t necessarily help women get treatment. Data might not exist to prove that a particular treatment works in symptomatic girls; if a treatment is sex-limited, then prescribing it for female patients is considered off-label and not always covered by insurance, says Eric Hoffman, a pharmaceutical-sciences professor at Binghamton University and the CEO of a company that has an approved Duchenne therapy and another that facilitates research on treatments for the disease. A doctor might also prescribe a treatment for a female patient’s symptoms without diagnosing the disease as the root cause, which could also cause an insurance company to balk. A company might also deny coverage because a patient’s record is missing the diagnostic code for an X-linked disease—which some hospital medical systems simply don’t have for girls and women.Jenssen has struggled to get her daughter treated for Duchenne even after a muscle biopsy confirmed the diagnosis. Being a girl disqualified her daughter from drug trials, even though a respected researcher who was enrolling boys in a gene-therapy trial once allowed that “gene therapy would be perfect for her,” Jenssen told me.One gene-therapy trial eventually produced the medication Elevidys, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in June. Jenssen’s family cheered when they saw that the agency hadn’t limited the drug to boys. Her daughter’s doctor prescribed the medication, with the hope that it would preserve the autonomy her daughter still has—lifting herself into bed from her wheelchair; dressing herself. The family’s insurance provider initially denied coverage of the treatment, a onetime infusion with a list price of $3.2 million. They appealed, and yesterday the company called Jenssen to tell her that the original decision had been overturned. “I feel like it’s unreal,” Jenssen told me. The data on the treatment have been promising but not definitive (and is lacking for girls in particular). Still, Jenssen had hope in her voice when she talked about getting her daughter’s identical twin—the one with more mild symptoms—the medication as well, before her prognosis has a chance to get worse: “She could maybe be cured.”theatlantic.com
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The Racism Is Elon Musk’s Fault He’s not just enabling trolls; he’s personally endorsing their posts.theatlantic.com
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The Rooneyverse Comes of Age A few pages into Intermezzo, Peter, a 32-year-old Dublin lawyer, is lying in bed with his 23-year-old girlfriend, Naomi, touching her underarm and thinking about how she “hardly ever shaves anywhere except her legs, below the knee.” He doesn’t mind—he likes it, actually; there’s “something sensual in her carelessness.” But her grooming practices are notable as a marker of the couple’s nearly decade-wide age gap: “He told her once that back in his day, the girls in college used to get bikini waxes. That made her laugh.” Naomi herself, “the image of youth and beauty,” is still in college. “Those Celtic Tiger years must have been wild,” she tells Peter in response, a reference to Ireland’s pre-2008 economic boom—which she is too young to remember.From the start, Intermezzo—the fourth novel by the Irish author Sally Rooney, who’s known for chronicling love and friendship among a certain bookish, vaguely political cohort of Millennials—is preoccupied with questions of age and age difference; questions cosmetic, practical, ethical, and existential. Writing in the close third person, Rooney tells a story of grief, guilt, and love in chapters that alternate between following Peter and his brother, Ivan. Ivan, 10 years younger than Peter (around Naomi’s age), is a former chess prodigy who worries that his best playing years are behind him. Gen Z has officially entered the Rooneyverse—and they’re making the Millennials feel old.Peter and Ivan, whose father has just died of cancer, have a strained relationship that turns adversarial as the novel proceeds. Peter thinks Ivan is “a complete oddball,” “kind of autistic.” Ivan, well aware of his own social shortcomings—he’s “often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts,” berating himself for his difficulty reading other people—thinks Peter is aloof and self-important. The one thing they can agree on is that they love Sylvia, Peter’s ex-girlfriend, who has become a kind of older-sister figure to Ivan and an intermediary between the brothers. (That Peter still loves Sylvia is, naturally, an obstacle in his relationship with Naomi.)Both brothers regularly attribute their mutual antipathy to the age gap. But that doesn’t deter Ivan from embarking on an unlikely romance (his first ever) with Margaret, a woman some 14 years his senior who is separated from her alcoholic husband. “We’re at very different stages in our lives,” Margaret warns Ivan. “It can’t go on forever.” Or can it?What does it mean to love someone whose experience of the world has been fundamentally dissimilar to one’s own? Are sexual relationships by nature exploitative? If so, who’s exploiting whom? Can two people ever really understand each other? Rooney has repeatedly explored these puzzles in her fiction by spinning a web of interconnected characters—friends, family members, lovers, ex-lovers. Frances, the 21-year-old narrator of her debut novel, Conversations With Friends (2017), has an affair with a married 30-something male actor. The two protagonists of Normal People (2018), Marianne and Connell, partake in a years-long will-they-or-won’t-they dance made all the more dicey by their starkly opposite class backgrounds. (Marianne also contends with a cruel older brother.) Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) has two primary romantic pairs, each complicated by divergent pasts and trajectories.Intermezzo features a laundry list of other signature Rooney ingredients as well: Catholicism; socialist politics; dysfunctional families; chronic illness; intense friendships marked by love, envy, and mutual caretaking. There’s a reason Sally Rooney has become shorthand for, in the words of the actor and Gen Z favorite Ayo Edebiri, “emotionally stunted Irish ppl going thru it.”But something big has shifted here. The main players in Rooney’s first two novels were college-age, busy wondering when their real life would start; even the protagonists of Beautiful World, approaching 30, asked earnestly what kind of person they wanted to be. Rooney’s latest characters, newly alert to the weight of years, are as attuned to regret as to anticipation; they’re preoccupied with what kind of person they have already been. Looking more warily in the mirror, they don’t always like what they see.[Read: The hazards of writing while female]Since she arrived on the Anglophone cultural scene at 26, Rooney, now 33, has been hailed—and disparaged, in some corners—as a generational portraitist, and Intermezzo’s emphasis on aging reads in part as a reflection of the evolving Millennial group-consciousness. Boomers said that 40 was the new 30; Millennials, we’re told, act as though 30 is the new 70. “Hark, the Millennial Death Wail,” a New York Times headline announced earlier this year: Could it be a shtick? Remember, millennials are the first generation who learned to mine their lives for social media content, and “aging” may be a category that is too robust to leave on the shelf. In tapping into 30-somethings’ self-serious cries of mortality, Rooney is examining that impulse to wail—and gently mocking it. She has also set out to probe something deeper and more enduring, more universally human: grief itself. On this larger canvas, Rooney’s characters aren’t the only ones who can’t decide how dark or hopeful to feel. Neither, a reader might conclude, can their author.In novels, as in chess, openings are crucial. Here are some things we learn right away in Intermezzo: At their father’s funeral, Peter gave the eulogy and was offended by the “resplendent ugliness” of Ivan’s suit. Ivan, who still wears braces, feels that he was closer with their father than Peter was, and regrets not having given the eulogy himself. Peter neglected to tell Naomi about the death; he didn’t want her coming to the funeral, didn’t want to have to explain to anyone why the younger woman was there. Instead, he invited Sylvia.Readers can discern a lot about the Peter-Ivan, Peter-Naomi, Peter-Sylvia relationships from this fact pattern. The opening also contains hints that, though the death has occurred offstage, it may well be the central event around which everything else orbits, the point from which there is no return. Where to next? How to make meaning of one’s life, of life itself and the evanescence of memories, in the midst of pain and suffering?Time haunts the novel. Peter realizes that he is half the age his father was when he died, “already middle-aged by that calculation. Frightening how quickly it all falls away.” “Trapped in claustrophobic solitude,” drinking too much and swallowing pills in order to sleep, he googles things like “panic attack or am I dying how to tell.” Ivan, who has been singularly focused on his chess career, thinks “maybe I’ve really wasted a lot of my life” (and he’s only 22!). His thoughts, too, are obsessive, a cesspool of “debilitating dark regret and misery.” The brothers can’t help but take it out on each other. ’Round and ’round they go.Sylvia, beloved and trusted by both, is a deft emissary but can do only so much for them, self-possessed and empathetic though she is. The end of her youth came swiftly: A terrible traffic accident when she was 25 left her in chronic pain. She broke up with Peter, we learn, not wanting him to feel burdened—or to be, herself, the cause of that burden. She carries on, stoic almost to the point of martyrdom.At least, that’s how it looks from the outside. Rooney carefully guards Sylvia’s perspective, along with Naomi’s. Everything we learn about them is filtered through Peter’s wounded-child inner monologue, which has a way of reducing them to pawns he plays off against each other—Naomi, the manic pixie dream girl who makes Peter self-conscious about his age even as she makes him laugh; Sylvia, the tragic friendly ghost who represents all that’s been lost.[Read: The small rebellions of Sally Rooney’s Normal People]If the women’s opacity can be frustrating (clearly they’re a lot more complicated than he seems to recognize), Peter’s yearning, his anguish, can sometimes feel over the top, verging on what we Millennials might call “emo.” Here is Peter buying a bottle of vodka after a fight with Sylvia, fantasizing about what he’d like to tell the young store clerk: I too was twenty-five once, and even younger, though I readily concede that for you at this moment it must be hard to imagine. Life, which is now the most painful ordeal conceivable, was happy then, the same life. A cruel kind of joke, you’ll agree. Anyway, you’re young, make the most of it. Enjoy every second. And on your twenty-fifth birthday, if you want my advice, jump off a fucking bridge. But the melodrama is perhaps the point—grief, Rooney recognizes, rarely unspools at anything like a measured pace or intensity. Elsewhere, Peter’s jittery existentialism is almost modernist in its expressive sparseness: “The man helps Sylvia into her coat as Peter looks on. Calmer now. Attuned to the quieter feelings. Under what conditions is life endurable? She ought to know. Ask her. Don’t.”For Ivan’s grief, Rooney finds a register of raw earnestness that proves unexpectedly affecting. “Nothing will ever bring his father back from the realm of memory into the realm of material fact, tangible and specific fact,” he thinks, “and how, how is it possible to accept this, or even to understand what it means?”Rooney’s proposition in Intermezzo that love is the surest antidote to disorienting loss won’t surprise her readers. She has often been read as a kind of Millennial Jane Austen; though she’s by no means confined to the conventional marriage plot, she has been loyal to a less traditional happily-ever-after ethos. Her first two novels end on hopeful notes, with much-desired reunions between bruised lovers, for the time being at least. To have implied any certainty of lifelong monogamous bliss for her 20-somethings would have rung false. In Beautiful World, which also ends with a reunion, Rooney upped the ante by zooming ahead to a tidy domestic scene—marriage and babies on the horizon—that left many readers (me among them) afraid that she’d lost her edge.What the chorus of complaints about that ending missed, though, is the fundamental continuity in her fiction so far: Sally Rooney loves love, romantic and otherwise, and she is endlessly drawn to stories that scope out different ways of redeeming it. In Intermezzo, as she surely intends, I found myself rooting most fervently for the pairing—Ivan and Margaret—that seemed to most defy the odds. Margaret (the one woman in the book whose interiority we do gain access to) has known a dark side of marriage, and Ivan stands to benefit from her clear-eyed resilience. At one point, he tells her that he wishes he were her age. “With painful fondness she replies: Ivan, that’s your life. Don’t wish it away.”Once again, in this novel, Rooney seems prepared to grant her characters a slightly off-kilter yet still harmonious ending, this time against a backdrop of personal grief and family strife.That she has managed, mostly, to have it both ways in her fiction—her Millennials may feel adrift, but they can count on a hefty share of good luck—is precisely what irks her fiercest critics. It’s also surely a very conscious choice, and the way she supplies tidy closure, even as she subverts it, is a testament to her skill as a novelist.In the context of a book so concerned with matters of aging, death, and despair, this habitual ambiguity takes on new meaning. How hopeful should a person be? One line from Ivan toward the end of the novel encapsulates Rooney’s own apparent ambivalence. “We’re both young, in reality,” he tells Margaret. Then he adds, “Anything is possible. Life can change a lot.” His observation is romantic, sentimental even, intended to reassure her that their bond can last. Yet Ivan’s words are also bracing in their realism, a reminder that nothing is guaranteed. If his Millennial elders can figure out a way to sustain hope in the face of acute doubt, they might find that they’re not just aging; they’re growing up.theatlantic.com
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Why Trump Is All-In on IVF The former president is signaling to swing voters—particularly women—that his populist instincts are still in play.theatlantic.com
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America’s First True Dictator Listen and subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Pocket CastsDonald Trump has vowed to eliminate hundreds of workers across federal agencies if he becomes president again. Consolidating power and placing friends in key roles are textbook autocratic maneuvers, but they also are not new in the United States. This episode revisits the story of Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who sought to take over the apparatus of government in his state, just as illiberal leaders have done in other countries.This is the third episode of Autocracy in America, a new five-part series about authoritarian tactics already at work in the United States and where to look for them.The following is a transcript of the episode:Pomerantsev: Anne, one of the main features that I experienced when I lived under authoritarian regimes is this sense that the institutions of the state, the police, the tax services, the bureaucracy—they’re essentially these dangerous animals that are not working for you but working in the interests of the powerful.Applebaum: Right. As though they could come after you if you get in the way.Pomerantsev: So you have all these institutions, which in a democracy are meant to serve you, the people, but in an authoritarian regime, they are, well—they’re captured.Applebaum: In fact, “state capture” is the term that political scientists use to describe this, and I watched it happen in Poland between 2015 and last year. An autocratic, populist party won a legitimate election but then began to act like they owned everything. They fired civil servants. They replaced them with people’s friends and party loyalists. They allegedly arranged for state institutions to give money to foundations, which eventually wound up enriching party members or else funding their election campaigns—that’s being investigated right now.They used the tax office and the prosecutor’s office to investigate their enemies, their political rivals— including me. My husband and I had to hire lawyers and spend a lot of time going through documents in order to counter false accusations. And it was not amusing. It was a form of state-backed political harassment. Now, I guess it’s the kind of thing Americans can’t imagine they would ever have to deal with, because, I don’t know, Our tradition of checks and balances is too long. Americans would never stand for that. We would protest and struggle. No way.Pomerantsev: Yes way is what I found out. (Laughs.) There is the pervasive sense in America that it’s exceptional. And, obviously, America is very, very special. But since I started researching this show, I’ve found that maybe America isn’t quite as exceptional as sometimes people feel, because a leader did rise to power here and manipulate the levers of power to his desires.[Music] Richard D. White Jr.: Huey Long did more good for any American state than any politician in history. The paradox is that Huey Long did more harm than any politician in any state in American history. Applebaum: I’m Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic.Pomerantsev: I’m Peter Pomerantsev, a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.Applebaum: This is Autocracy in America.Pomerantsev: In this podcast,we are not talking about some distant, dystopian totalitarian state.Applebaum: This is not a show about the future of America. There are authoritarian tactics already at work here.Pomerantsev: And we’re going to show you where.Applebaum: Psychological corruption, widening apathy, perhaps the birth of kleptocracy.Pomerantsev: And in this episode: the takeover. Huey P. Long: How many men ever went to a BBQ and would let one man take off the table what’s intended for nine-tenths of the people to eat? The only way you will ever be able to feed the balance of the people is to make that man come back and bring back some of that grub he ain’t got no business with. [Crowd applause] White: Huey liked to brag that he grew up barefoot and hungry, but really, he didn’t. He grew up in a large, middle-class family, a two-story frame house. They had electricity. They had water. Pomerantsev: Richard White is the author of Kingfish, a biography of Huey Long. White: When he was up north Louisiana, he would brag to the audience that when he was a kid, he’d hook up the horse and buggy and take his grandmother to a Baptist church on Sunday. When he was down south, he would brag to the audience that on Sunday, he would hook up in a horse and buggy and take his grandmother to Catholic mass. A local politician said, you know, Huey, how can you tell those lies? And he said, Hell, we didn’t even have a horse. Pomerantsev: White has chronicled how Long basically invented a playbook for how one man could take over the institutions of a place—in this case, Louisiana—for his own private gain. White: It was a state that was split, and either you were absolutely for Huey Long or violently against him. There was very little in between. Pomerantsev: Anne, what I find so fascinating about Huey Long is that, in a way, he became a classic and very recognizable autocrat but at the same time a really, really American one.Applebaum: In what way?Pomerantsev: Well, look—he was an entertainer and a salesman, literally. You know, one of his early jobs was as a salesman going around Louisiana, and he always continued being an entertainer and a salesman, even as he took away people’s rights.Applebaum: Hmm.Pomerantsev: He had a very dramatic story. He died unexpectedly. He was killed in the Louisiana state capitol. He was assassinated by the son-in-law of a political rival. Though, again, it’s a confusing story. There was some question about whether that man merely punched him, and then Long was shot by a deflected bullet when his own security detail opened fire. What’s for sure is that he was cut down at the peak of his powers. But his life in politics actually started with a loss.[Music] White: In 1924, he ran for governor. He didn’t do well. He ran in third, but as soon as he lost in 1924, he never stopped campaigning. And for the next four years, he did nothing but campaign for governor. Pomerantsev: What was Louisiana like at that time? White: At that time, the country was going through the Depression. Everyone was looking for an answer, and every extreme group you can come up with, whether it be far right or far left, was very active during that time. Pomerantsev: What was his pitch to the voters? What made him unique? White: Oh, he promised them everything. Pomerantsev: (Chuckles.) White: And I don’t think they really cared whether he was truthful or not. He was the only one giving them any hope, whether it be false or not. Applebaum: How many times have we heard that before—I will solve all your problems; only I can do it—from someone who craves power?Pomerantsev: Right, Anne. And often they promise things to people who have very little, and then they don’t deliver. But actually, in the beginning, when Long was finally elected, he did deliver on some of his big goals. Louisiana was one of the poorest states in the U.S.A., and there was a lot to improve. White: He built thousands of miles of new roads. He brought Louisiana out of the horse-and-buggy days. He gave the farmers a homestead exemption. He gave the schoolchildren free schoolbooks so they could finally go to school. Pomerantsev: So, Anne, these were popular policies, but they weren’t cheap. Long, first as governor and later as a U.S. senator from Louisiana, dove headfirst into spending. One of the things he wanted to do was impose a tax on the giant oil companies in Louisiana to raise funds. Some legislators pushed back, so Long kind of went at them. He would smear them with fake stories, for example. White: Crazy, crazy stuff. He was very creative. Pomerantsev: He accused a war hero of having syphilis. Others he just called names. White: One of his opponents had a beard, and he was “Old Feather Duster,” for example. Pomerantsev: A block of legislators opened up an impeachment against Long for 19 charges, which included corruption, favoritism, oppression in office, gross misconduct, and just general incompetence. White: It came down to the last minute. He bought off a couple of senators. He gave them money and women and anything he could, and finally he survived impeachment. After that, he was a different person. There were two Hueys: the Huey before the impeachment, who did all those good things, and the Huey after the impeachment, where he became vengeful. He wanted to crush every one of his enemies, and he did. [Music]Pomerantsev: In Louisiana in the 1930s, the governor of the state, Huey Long, became, in the words of a contemporary, “the first true dictator out of the soil of America.”He put in place a playbook that showed how a wannabe American dictator can capture the state, can overcome checks and balances, can make the powerful unaccountable to the truth.Step one: capture the legislature so it succumbs to your every whim. White: He started with the legislature. He would buy off the sheriff, buy off the big wheels. One by one, he conquered the legislature. He would walk onto the house floor, and off the top of his head, he would dictate law after law after law. He would gerrymander political divisions. He would change election dates. He would change the length of office. He would choose the people who counted the votes. In one election, for example, in St. Bernard Parish, you go to the records, and you’ll see that the voters of that election voted in alphabetical order. Can you figure that out? Pomerantsev: That’s pretty sloppy cheating. White: No, it’s not sloppy. It’s blatant. They let him do it! Pomerantsev: So, Anne, so much of this stuff is familiar to me from Eastern Europe. When an autocrat like Putin fakes an election, he wants everyone to know that he’s faked the election, in order to show his power.It’s not about kidding people. It’s not like, A ha ha, I cheated on the election. It’s more like saying, I’m cheating on the election, and there’s nothing you can do about it.Applebaum: Yes, because sometimes when you lie, the point isn’t to convince people. It’s to show how powerful you are.Pomerantsev: Right. And in order to wield that power, there is a second step Long took. So first he got the legislature under his thumb. Second, supposedly independent bodies were dominated by Huey Long too. White: He would choose all the boards and commissions. Every schoolteacher had to get permission from Baton Rouge for their job. And if they were from a family that opposed him, they lost their job. Pomerantsev: Long continued with his playbook, including steps three and four: You capture the courts and intimidate the media. White: He packed the courts. He got rid of the few judges who opposed him. And once you have the courts and the legislature, and you’ve already got the executive, you have all three branches of government, including passing a gag law on newspapers that prohibit them from criticizing him. So that’s the fourth branch, be it may. Pomerantsev: So basically censorship. White: Yes. Absolutely. [Music]Pomerantsev: And finally step five: violence. White: During an election, when people would get kidnapped and disappear for a while, Huey was doing it. I mean, his people were doing it. He used both the state police force and the National Guard as his own personal police force. He would arrest his enemies. He set up machine gun nests around the capitol. He declared martial law in several towns that opposed him. There was nothing off the books for Huey. Pomerantsev: If I were to arrive to Louisiana in, I don’t know, 1933, would I realize that I was in a quasi dictatorship, or would it look like any other American state? White: Well, you would recognize right from the beginning you either had to be for Huey or against him. Huey Long was not a politician. He was a demagogue. [Music]Pomerantsev: So there you have Long’s playbook for state capture: Capture the legislature, take over independent institutions, intimidate the media, and then employ violence. And the whole is made possible with a propaganda that strategically divides the state, where you have blind loyalty from your voters, who will always support you for anything—and I mean anything—you want to do.Applebaum: And you have to ask, what was the long-term effect of all that? His tenure didn’t lay out a system designed tokeepthe state out of hard times indefinitely. And fast-forward to today: It’s still an incredibly poor place.Pomerantsev: It’s still near the bottom of the list for poverty, life expectancy, literacy, overall health.Applebaum: The most amazing thing that I have learned recently about Louisiana is that this kind of politics continues to this day. There are still attempts to capture Louisiana’s institutions. Just this summer, the governor of Louisiana, Jeff Landry, made a move that Huey Long himself might have been impressed with.[Music]Applebaum: He called for a constitutional convention, making it possible, in theory, to rewrite the entire Louisiana state constitution, with all of its checks and balances, changing all of the rules without any public consultation in the space of a couple of weeks. Governor Jeff Landry: It’s kind of like maybe cleaning up your yard in springtime, right? Raking the leaves, taking some of the weeds out of the landscape, making the place beautiful and more attractive. [Music] Ashley Kennedy Shelton: This was absolutely about, you know, creating a scenario where there’s absolute power. Applebaum: Ashley Kennedy Shelton is the founder, president, and CEO of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, a voter-engagement organization in Louisiana. Shelton: Jeff Landry ran on wanting to have a constitutional convention. This is a, you know, conservative governor with a conservative house and senate. He’s not been clear with anybody exactly why he wants to open the constitution. Once you open it, it is open, and they can do whatever they want. Pomerantsev: So, Anne, why is this a big deal? Does this never happen in the U.S.? Applebaum: To be clear, a constitutional convention in and of itself, though rare these days, is not unheard of. The last one to take place in Louisiana was back in the 1970s. But that one took place with some really different arrangements. Shelton: So in 1974, when we had the last constitutional convention, you know, it was a process to actually begin planning the constitutional convention years prior. The citizens of the state actually voted on delegates to participate in the constitutional convention and created a real process through which they would evaluate and address, you know, the issues within the constitution that they felt were critical and important. Applebaum: But this time around, things were approached differently. Shelton: We’re trying to do one in two weeks, which doesn’t make any sense. And nobody’s disagreeing that our constitution probably needs to be tidied up. But what doesn’t make sense is that there’s absolutely no citizen input and that there’s this two-week period. Applebaum: And the tradition of autocracy—how does this fit into that? Shelton: You know, I think when you look at Louisiana historically, we’ve had so many lively characters, right? From Huey P. Long to Edwin Edwards to our current governor, Jeff Landry. You know, like, everybody puts their spin on it. Applebaum: Peter, I can see the skeptics sort of turning away from this story, shrugging this off as a local quirk.Pomerantsev: It does feel pretty enticing to chalk this up to some sort of Louisiana tradition.Applebaum: Right, except that you and I know from studying how democracies diminish that this could be a sign of something bigger. And I asked Ashley Kennedy Shelton what she thought about that idea. Applebaum: Are you seeing this happening in other places? You think this is a national plan? Shelton: (Chuckles.) Much like most bad policy, it gets seeded in the Deep South— Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama—and then kind of sent wholesale to the rest of the country. We have talked to our folks in Alabama. You know, it’s happened there recently. It’s been maybe a year. But I think that this constitutional convention was about normalizing this idea of opening up state constitutions, with the ultimate goal of opening the United States Constitution. [Music]Pomerantsev: So, Anne, what happened in the end?Applebaum: Essentially, time ran out. The Louisiana legislators didn’t take up the governor’s request. Shelton and others organized a kind of statewide campaign against it. They put everybody on high alert that this could be dangerous, this could undermine rights, this could undermine other kinds of institutions. But it doesn’t mean the idea won’t come back.Pomerantsev: But so how likely is this at the federal level?Applebaum: We’ll get to that after the break.[Break]Pomerantsev: Anne, hearing you talk with Ashley Kennedy Shelton and thinking back to the story of Huey Long, it sort of makes me wonder: If this could happen in Louisiana, could a takeover by one person really happen at the national level?Applebaum: Well, theoretically, it’s not supposed to be able to happen in the U.S., because of our system of checks and balances. In other words, if we had an executive who overreached, then he would be blocked by the courts or blocked by Congress.If Congress became too greedy for power, then the other institutions would check them too. That’s the nature of the system. It’s supposed to make exactly this kind of state capture impossible.Pomerantsev: Right. But recently I’ve learned that the systems of government meant to protect the U.S. are more malleable and spongy than I thought. I talked to Amanda Carpenter. She’s the former communications director for a Republican senator, Ted Cruz, and now she works at Protect Democracy. That’s an NGO that brings court cases to defend democratic values and rights. Carpenter: Modern-day authoritarians do not come into power by brute force. Modern-day authoritarians typically come to power competing in and winning democratic elections, but then once they get into power, tilting the levers of government, tilting all the levers of power in their favor. Pomerantsev: The levers of power she’s talking about—turns out they can have a big impact when it comes to how federal agencies are run.[Music] Donald Trump: Here’s my plan to dismantle the deep state and reclaim our democracy from Washington corruption once and for all. Carpenter: Donald Trump has said explicitly: On day one of his presidency, he’s going to implement an order known as Schedule F. Trump: —restoring the president’s authority to remove rogue bureaucrats. And I will wield that power very aggressively. Carpenter: That would provide the basis for him to purge up to tens of thousands of career civil servants, then creating openings in which he can replace those positions with loyalists. Trump: We will clean out all of the corrupt actors in our national-security and intelligence apparatus, and there are plenty of them. The departments and agencies that have been weaponized will be completely overhauled so that faceless bureaucrats will never again be able to target and persecute conservatives, Christians, or the left’s political enemies, which they’re doing now at a level that nobody can believe. Applebaum: Peter, every U.S. president regularly chooses thousands of people to work for them: agency heads and cabinet members. But what is being described here is a bit more serious than that.Pomerantsev: Yes. The threat is to fire experts—get rid of people who have worked in their job for years, people who understand how to make the system work for the public. To me, it definitely sounds like Huey Long.Applebaum: It’s exactly the kind of thing that the Polish far right or the Venezuelan left or the Hungarian government has tried to do in order to capture the state—to use that term again—take it over, and stuff it with loyalists. Carpenter: In the years that Donald Trump has been out of power, his allies have been closely studying the government and creating a sort of intellectual framework that would allow Donald Trump to act on all his authoritarian impulses. A lot of it centers on the idea that there’s no such thing as any independent government agency. You know, here in America, we do sort of operate under the norm that the Department of Justice, the FCC, the EPA, all these government agencies operate with some amount of independence, meaning that the president cannot directly interfere with their day-to-day activities. That is a norm. Applebaum: And a norm is not a law. A norm is a convention. It’s a thing that we all agree about, but it’s not written down anywhere. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s not in any other kind of law. If it’s broken, there isn’t a legal way to fix it.Pomerantsev: Right, and it’s not hard to imagine, is it—how this might play out with an agency that’s linked to an industry that a wannabe autocrat openly despises?[Music]Pomerantsev: So take the Federal Communications Commission. That’s the one that regulates media. Once you have loyalists all throughout an agency like that, the agenda of a leader with autocratic tendencies could be more efficiently pursued. Carpenter: Should Donald Trump be successful in implementing his ideas to take away many of these career civil servants and replace them with his loyalists, what’s to stop him from withholding the FCC license from certain broadcast outlets? What’s to stop him from tripling the postage rates to punish Jeff Bezos? There are so many tools available in our government if there is someone who actively seeks out to abuse those powers, and that is something that authoritarians explicitly do. Pomerantsev: It turns out that just like Long used the tax authorities to attack his enemies in Louisiana, a wannabe authoritarian at the federal level can weaponize the IRS. Carpenter: The IRS is certainly a vector for abuse of power. I think President Nixon targeted political enemies. And then even in the first Trump administration, you’ve had his former chief of staff, John Kelly, tell the press President Trump wanted to use the IRS to harass former FBI Director James Comey. Applebaum: Amanda Carpenter makes it all sound pretty easy. One could follow in Long’s footsteps and capture the courts, the bureaucracy, the tax authorities; attack media and nobody would stop you.Pomerantsev: Yeah, but look—attacking the media is one level of menace, but Long used violence as well, and he employed the security services for his own gain. Amanda Carpenter thinks even that kind of direct violence could be, well, pretty possible. Carpenter: One scary way that this sort of comes into focus is President Trump, during his first term—and this is well reported—has asked his security officials, Well, how come you can’t just shoot immigrants coming over the border? How come we can’t just shoot protesters? And the answer is: Because that is a violation of the law. I mean, Not only is it immoral, but we will not do this for you. The idea of stamping out independence at these agencies is so that no one actually tells the president no. President Trump has said many times, in true authoritarian fashion, I have Article II power to do whatever I want. [Music] Nichols: We’ve been lucky. I shouldn’t say lucky. We’ve had a good system of civil-military relations. Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Tom Nichols. He’s your colleague at The Atlantic, but he’s also a professor emeritus at the Naval War College. Nichols: We have imbued our men and women in uniform with the idea that interfering in politics is repulsive to them, that it violates their sense of their own identity. Pomerantsev: We’ve been talking about a whole variety of levers of power and types of control, but I wanted to talk with Nichols about the military.Applebaum: The vision of those boots on the ground is very hard to shake, but, at the same time, it seems super far-fetched.Pomerantsev: Well, this is what I thought, too. But in talking with Nichols, I became increasingly and alarmingly aware of how much more within reach it might be. Nichols: Everything in this country operates on the functional equivalent of a handshake. And that’s good. Let me just be really clear: That’s good. I had a wonderful philosophy professor in college who was trying to explain to, you know, a bunch of unmarried kids how you don’t want to have a law and a contract for everything, right? If you’re married, and you have a contract that says, “I will take out the garbage. You will do the dishes. I will tell you once a day that I love you. You agree at least once a day to hug our children,” and so on, then you don’t have a marriage. You know, marriage, like a lot of social relationships, functions on trust and cooperation and love, and democracies function on trust. Countries that have, like, really long, detailed constitutions tend to have problems (Chuckles.) because they felt the need— Pomerantsev: (Laughs.) Nichols: —you know, they felt the need to write every single thing down that you could possibly do wrong. Pomerantsev: It’s like a very bad marriage. We’re going to put everything into a list now, yeah? Nichols: Right. It’s like having a 57-page prenup. Pomerantsev: (Laughs.) Nichols: You know, maybe if you have to have a hundred pages of a prenup, maybe this marriage wasn’t a great idea to begin with, you know. Pomerantsev: (Laughs.) Pomerantsev: So, Anne, Tom Nichols laid out for me a somewhat frightening—okay, actually, a very frightening scenario about how an aspiring autocrat could capture the military. It starts with appointing “yes men” and “yes women” in the top spots. And when you’re unable to do that, you just leave the office empty. Nichols: Let’s look at what happened at the end of the Trump presidency, where, as one of my friends in the military—a retired military officer—said to me, The two most common names on doors at the Pentagon were vacant and acting. If you don’t care about Senate confirmation, if you don’t care about the guardrails, if you don’t care about the norms and the laws that govern these institutions, then you can just say, You know, the president has the power to just fire people. Applebaum: And of course, the idea that you have acting heads of departments or temporary people in charge contributes to the idea that there’s something plastic and fake and empty about government, that it’s just not working anymore, that we don’t have real people in real jobs.Pomerantsev: As I was talking to Tom, I was kind of still left wondering: Practically, what would a wannabe autocrat do when they controlled the military at home? What would they do with them domestically? How would it impact democracy here? Nichols: If you have a governor, for example, or political allies, you could have the military show up to their events in uniform and make it clear that you support them. You know, putting National Guard units working with Homeland Security or SWAT teams—there’s all kinds of mischief that you could do that really could just be a way of flexing muscle and trying to intimidate the civilian population, especially if you’re about to do something pretty shaky, constitutionally. If Donald Trump wins, he’s talked about mass deportations. We don’t have a big enough Army to deport 11 million people but, you know, that could get into an ugly situation. There was this kind of harebrained scheme that seems funny in retrospect, but less funny now, where the idea was to seize voting machines to be, you know—and I’m making little air quotes here—to be “examined” for fraud. And then, there was even one step further, where there was some talk about, Let’s rerun the presidential election under the watchful eyes of the military, so there could be no fraud. You’re not betraying the Constitution; you’re saving it by protecting the sanctity of our elections, by going in and being the armed guards around polling machines. Pomerantsev: The Russians like to do this in places they’ve occupied. Like, you know, Eastern Ukraine, they’ll have military soldiers come around to—I’ve seen the videos, you know—the military will come around and knock on people’s doors. There’ll be some granny who opens the door, and they’re like, Hello. We’re here to get your vote. And there’s, like, a guy with a Kalashnikov and a balaclava. Nichols: Which I think most Americans would find scary and many others would find—and I’m one of them—would find deeply objectionable and un-American. That’s functionally a military coup. [Music] Pomerantsev: Okay, Tom, we now have a scenario to get the military to protect an election. How many of your guys would you need in the system? What’s the level of penetration that you need? Nichols: It depends on where they are in the chain of command. I mean, if you have a couple of people—if you have a handful, five, six in the right positions, and then they can deftly use the chain of command to issue orders that are not obviously illegal, or at least illegal on their face, you could get tens of thousands of people who are obeying three or four or five people. Applebaum: Three, four, five people.Pomerantsev: Mm-hmm.Applebaum: Five people is not very many.[Music]Pomerantsev: Autocracy in America is hosted by Anne Applebaum and me, Peter Pomerantsev. It’s produced by Natalie Brennan and Jocelyn Frank, edited by Dave Shaw, mixed by Rob Smierciak, fact-checked by Yvonne Kim. Our managing producer is Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.Autocracy in America is a podcast from The Atlantic. It’s made possible with support from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, an academic and public forum dedicated to strengthening global democracy through powerful civic engagement and informed, inclusive dialogue.[Music]Applebaum: Next time on Autocracy in America:Applebaum: The U.S. is the leader of an international democratic alliance, but there is another network of nations who work together, too. Leopoldo López: We are fighting a global fight. We are fighting, really, against Maduro but also against Putin, against Xi Jinping, against the mullahs from Iran, because they are the lifeline of Maduro. Applebaum: We’ll be back with more on that next week.theatlantic.com
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Football Won’t Save Tua Tagovailoa From Himself It was a terrifying but sadly familiar scene: Tua Tagovailoa, the star quarterback for the Miami Dolphins, lying on the field, apparently disoriented, after suffering another concussion. The injury, sustained in a game last week against the Buffalo Bills, was Tagovailoa’s fourth diagnosed concussion since 2019 and his third since becoming an NFL player, in 2020. It seemed like the ultimate sign that Tagovailoa should end his promising NFL career, only two games into his fifth season.That appears to be the prevailing sentiment even among the NFL brotherhood. Dez Bryant, a former wide receiver for the Dallas Cowboys, posted on X: “That’s it … NFL go ahead and do the right thing. Tua has had entirely way too many concussions. He need to retire for his longevity health concerns.” Antonio Pierce, the Las Vegas Raiders head coach and a former NFL linebacker, told reporters that if he were in a position to influence the quarterback’s thinking, “I would tell him to retire—it’s not worth it.”The fact that so many voices within football are calling for Tagovailoa to quit is a small sign of progress. Players finally seem willing to buck the old hyper-macho culture of playing through any injury.But no mechanism exists for the league or anyone else to decide how many concussions are too many, and there’s no guarantee that Tagovailoa will choose to retire. Football players eagerly sign up to play a violent game despite having a much fuller understanding of its risks than their predecessors did. And if you think the sight of Tagovailoa writhing on the ground is enough to turn fans off in any sort of meaningful way, then you underestimate the power of a sport that remains firmly entrenched as the national obsession.Tagovailoa will have time to think about his future. On Tuesday, the Dolphins placed him on injured reserve, which means he will miss at least the next four games before he is eligible to return to NFL action. Because of Miami’s scheduled bye week, the earliest Tagovailoa could return is on October 27, against the Arizona Cardinals. The break should allow Tagovailoa not only to recover from the injury and go through the league’s concussion protocol, but to discuss his options with outside neurologists and, presumably, his family.[Read: The standard advice for concussions is wrong]Whatever he decides, concussions and the risk of long-term brain damage clearly remain a part of football. The NFL’s efforts to address the problem have ranged from incomplete to untrustworthy.Nearly a decade has passed since the NFL agreed to settle a massive lawsuit brought by 4,500 players who accused the league of hiding the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE —the degenerative disease that can affect people who suffer repeated concussions and traumatic brain injuries. The NFL has since implemented a host of rule changes in an effort to make the game safer, but head injuries remain an all too common part of the game. That hasn’t stopped NFL ratings from continuing to rise. The players, for their part, appear to have mostly accepted the danger. Tagovailoa’s concussion last week came after he crashed headfirst into the chest of the Bills safety Damar Hamlin, whose heart stopped on the field last season after he suffered a severe blow to the chest. Hamlin had to be administered CPR after that injury and came very close to dying on the field. Now he’s back out there, delivering hits of his own.The NFL has shown that it can’t be relied on to prioritize the well-being of its players. The league and the Dolphins drew widespread criticism for their handling of Tagovailoa’s multiple concussions throughout the 2022 season. During another game against the Bills, the back of Tagovailoa’s head slammed into the turf at the end of a play. After getting up, the quarterback stumbled and fell on his way back to the sideline, visibly shaken up. And yet the team’s medical staff allowed him to return to the game, and the Dolphins announced, implausibly, that he had suffered a back injury. A mere four days later, in a game against the Cincinnati Bengals, Tagovailoa took a brutal hit to the head. He was diagnosed with a concussion, prompting speculation that he had already suffered one against the Bills.[Nate Jackson: I saw horrific things when I played in the NFL]The NFL and the NFL Players Association launched an investigation into why Tagovailoa continued to play against the Bills, which led to the NFL changing its concussion protocol to include “abnormality of balance/stability, motor coordination or dysfunctional speech” as symptoms that would prohibit a player from returning to the game. This was a positive step, but clearly not enough. A few months later, Tagovailoa suffered his second NFL concussion—or third, depending on your opinion about that Bills game. While playing the Green Bay Packers, Tagovailoa again hit his head on the ground. But he wasn’t evaluated immediately for a concussion, and therefore was never removed from that game. The diagnosis came the next day.The NFL has paid out more than $1 billion to nearly 2,000 former players and their families as part of its concussion settlement. But an investigation by the Washington Post reporter Will Hobson found that the league was still failing to meet its promise to compensate former players who suffered from CTE and other brain diseases linked to concussions. After reviewing 15,000 pages of documents and interviewing more than 100 people involved with the settlement, Hobson found that the “settlement routinely fails to deliver money and medical care to former players suffering from dementia and CTE.” In 2020, the NFL had been accused of using “race norming” to determine concussion settlements: assuming Black people have lower baseline cognitive ability, therefore making it harder for Black players to prove that they were suffering mental decline because of football. The league agreed to end the practice in 2021.Football isn’t going to save Tagovailoa from himself. The quarterback worked hard after the 2022 season to learn how to better avoid injury. He did jiu-jitsu training to learn how to fall safely. He gained weight to make himself sturdier. For one year, his efforts appeared to pay off: He didn’t miss a single game during the 2023 season and became the first Miami Dolphins quarterback to be selected for the Pro Bowl since Dan Marino in 1995. This past summer, the Dolphins, evidently feeling more confident in their quarterback’s ability to stay healthy, rewarded Tagovailoa with a four-year, $212 million contract extension.Tagovailoa would forfeit most of that money were he to decide to walk away from the game. No one should pretend that it’s an easy choice to make. And no one can make it but Tagovailoa himself.theatlantic.com