The Endangered Species Act always had a hole in it. It was intended to protect ecosystems as well as individual species—it says so right in the original 1973 text—but it has no provisions to do so directly. For decades, conservationists successfully plugged that hole by arguing in court that the ESA’s prohibition of harm to individual species includes destroying a species’ habitat. Now the Trump administration wants to negate that argument by asserting that to harm an endangered species means only to injure or kill it directly: to rip it out by the roots or blow it away with a shotgun.

Habitat destruction has been the most common threat to endangered species in the U.S. since 1975. If the administration succeeds in redefining harm to exclude it, the Endangered Species Act won’t be able to effectively protect most endangered species.

That much of the act’s power can be destroyed by tweaking its definition of one phrase reveals its central weakness. Preserving old-growth forest for a single owl species (to give a classic example) means the forest—and everything living there—suddenly loses protection if that owl goes extinct anyway (as the northern spotted owl very well could). And the law requires that the government undertake heroic and expensive measures to save the most imperiled species, rather than using habitat protection to shore up populations before they truly crash. “The act has no concept of preventive medicine,” the conservation advocate and author Suzanne Winckler wrote in these pages in 1992. “On the contrary, it attempts to save the hardest cases, the equivalent of the terminally ill and the brain-dead.”

Conservationists haven’t really wanted to talk about this, though, on the theory that opening debate about the law would risk losing it all. The ESA passed during a unique moment in the early 1970s, when a Republican president could talk about the nation’s “environmental awakening,” and for all its flaws, the act is still considered one of the strongest and most effective biodiversity-protection laws in the world. But the Trump administration has now opened that debate—forcing a conversation about how we protect species and ecosystems that some conservationists say is long overdue.

Many conservationists have a long-standing dream solution to the ESA’s circuitous mechanism for protecting places: What if we just protected ecosystems directly? Forty-one percent of terrestrial American ecosystems are at risk of collapse, according to a 2023 report by NatureServe, a nonprofit that collects and analyzes data on biodiversity. Most of them are largely unprotected.

Jay Odenbaugh, an environmental philosopher at Lewis & Clark College, in Portland, Oregon, told me that shifting to protecting ecosystems would obviate the need to “chase down every last little species.” It would be more efficient. “We can’t save everything,” Odenbaugh said. “What we are trying to do is protect larger structural features.”

Reed Noss, a conservationist based at the University of Florida and the Southeastern Grasslands Institute, does still want to try to save every species. But he argues that only a few—large carnivores that face persecution and orchids collected for illegal trading, for example—need special, individual protections. Meanwhile, Noss estimates that 85 percent of species could be saved by simply protecting a sufficiently large chunk of each type of American ecosystem. He has therefore been one of the most vocal advocates for what he calls a “native ecosystem–protection act” to supplement the ESA since the 1990s.

The U.S. already has multiple systems that categorize lands and fresh water into ecosystem types. The U.S. National Vegetation Classification, for instance, describes natural systems at a series of scales from very broad types, such as “Forest & Woodland,” to hyper-specific descriptors, such as “Eastern White Pine-Eastern Hemlock Lower New England-Northern Piedmont Forest.” An ecosystem-protection act would direct the government to choose (or develop) one such classification system, then ensure that each type of ecosystem had sufficient area protected.

Making that decision would surely involve ecologists arguing over how to categorize ecosystems. Philosophers might argue about whether ecosystems even exist—if they are more than the sum of the organisms that comprise them. But, for the purposes of policy, more important than arriving at essential truths would be creating categories that make sense to the public and describe the things the public cares about: old-growth forest, tallgrass prairie, the Everglades, Great Basin sagebrush steppe, the deciduous forests of the Northeast, and so on. Something like this was tried with Pacific Northwest old-growth forest in the 1990s; known as the Northwest Forest Plan, it is meant to protect not just the owl but old growth more broadly—but the plan, which is still in use, covers only one ecosystem type.

Part of the appeal of a system that directly protects ecosystems is that it recognizes that they’re dynamic. Species have always moved and evolved, shifting the composition and relationships within systems through time. And today, climate change is prompting many species to move. But Odenbaugh and Noss see ecosystems as entities that will remain coherent enough to protect. Florida, for instance, has sandhill ecosystems (sandy hills that support longleaf pine and oaks with wire grass) and wet flatwoods (which are seasonally inundated)—and “a sandhill and a flatwoods are going to remain a sandhill and a flatwoods even if their species composition changes due to climate change,” Noss told me. A robust network of many different kinds of ecosystems—especially one well connected by corridors so species can move—would support and protect most of America’s species without the government having to develop a separate plan for each flower and bee.

Many who fight on conservation’s front lines still hesitate to advocate for such a law. The Environmental Species Act, as it is, achieves similar purposes, they argue—and it could be pushed in the opposite direction that the Trump administration wants to pull it.

When I spoke with Kierán Suckling, executive director for the Center for Biological Diversity, which is dedicated to forcing the federal government to abide by its own environmental laws, he described his vision of a conservation-minded president who could, like Donald Trump, use executive power quickly and aggressively, only to conserve nature. “The secretary of the interior and the head of Fish and Wildlife, they have, already, the power under the ESA to do basically anything they want, as long as it is supported by the best available science,” he said. So, in theory, they could translocate species to help them survive climate change, or broaden the boundaries of “critical habitat,” which is protected from destruction by actions taken, permitted, or funded by the federal government (unless exceptions are granted).

Daniel Rohlf, a law professor at Lewis & Clark College who has studied the ESA for more than three decades, agrees that decisive leadership could do more to protect ecosystems by skillfully wielding the current ESA: “Critical habitat” could be treated as sacrosanct. Federal actions could be assessed not just for direct harm to species but for the harm they would cause via greenhouse-gas emissions. The “range” of a species could be defined as its historic or possible range, not just the scraps of territory it clings to in the present. “You could do all that tomorrow under the current version of the act,” Rohlf told me. And he believes that, unlike many of the actions Trump is taking, a lot of these stronger interpretations would likely hold up in court.

The political prospects for an entirely new ecosystem-protection act are low, even in a Democratic administration: Although 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters that “stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost,” these days politicians of all stripes seem to want to cut red tape and build stuff. And Suckling believes that his organization and others like it will be able to block or undo Trump’s proposed changes to the ESA’s definition of harm. “We overturned all his first-term ESA regulation changes and are confident we’ll overturn this one as well,” he said. The U.S. may well just keep conserving the way we have been, through the ESA, and often in court.

But an ecosystem-protection act could also be a unifying cause. Love for American landscapes is bipartisan, and protecting ecosystems would not necessarily mean outlawing all human use inside them. Ranching and recreation are compatible with many ecosystems. Tribal management could protect biodiversity and support traditional use. Caring for these ecosystems takes work, and that means jobs—physical, outdoor jobs, many of which can be filled by people without college degrees. Farmers and ranchers can also be compensated for tending to ecosystems in addition to growing food, buffering their income from the vagaries of extreme weather and trade wars.

The United States is an idea, but it is also a place, a beautiful quilt of ecosystems that are not valuable just because they contain “biodiversity” or even because they filter our water, produce fish and game, and store carbon. Our forests, prairies, mountains, coastlines, and swamps are knit into our sense of who we are, both individually and as a people. We love them, and we have the power to protect them, if we choose to.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Along the banks of the Rio Grande River lies Starr County, Texas, a key to understanding the political realignment that sent Donald Trump back to the White House. Both the most Hispanic county in the nation and one of the poorest, Starr was also once one of the most resoundingly Democratic; Barack Obama won it by 73 points in 2012. In 2020, the county swung harder rightward than any other county in the U.S., by 55 points. And in 2024, it voted Republican for the first time in 132 years: Trump was on top by 16 points.

Two years before, on the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, I decided to pay Starr County a visit. As someone who’s worked in professional politics for more than two decades, most recently as a pollster studying realignment, I expected to see a pitched two-party fight in this newly minted political battleground.

[Read: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

In Rio Grande City, the county seat, I instead found a politics more parochial than anywhere else I’ve visited in America: Elections for the school board capture the public’s attention far more than elections for governor or Congress. And this parochialism is a big part of the reason Starr County’s politics shifted so far so fast.

Politics throughout much of the country used to be like Starr County’s, a patchwork of localized traditions only tangentially connected to voters’ ideological leanings. In many cases defined by ethnicity and religion, these “ancestral” local party attachments produced quirky and random results—a Democratic West Virginia, a Republican Vermont. And although Hispanics had been a solidly Democratic group until recently, the one-party nature of Democratic rule along the Rio Grande Valley was an outlier—especially in relation to other Texas regions with large concentrations of Hispanic residents, who were always a competitive voting bloc.

The realignments of recent years—the midwestern white working class toward Trump’s GOP and the suburbs toward the Democrats—can be understood as the process of ideological and education sorting coming for groups that were the most out of place in the new political realm: rich suburban Republicans and culturally conservative working-class Democrats. In 2020 and 2024, this realignment came for the nonwhite voters once at the center of Barack Obama’s coalition, especially working-class Hispanics, and most especially those in the rural outskirts of the Rio Grande Valley.

Starr County’s tradition of machine politics, manifest in an unusually strong preoccupation with local elections, marked a place ripe for a sudden political shift. Not unlike the Democratic majorities in the big cities of mid-century, which continue at some level into the present day, political dominance in the region was built not through allegiance to liberal ideals but through political machines that delivered tangible benefits and shaped the political identity of new immigrant groups. This is evident in polling today showing that nonwhite Democrats are much more moderate and conservative than their white counterparts. For a time, ideological differences were subsumed to the work of advancing group interests through machine politics. But in an era of declining party organization and an emptying out of majority-minority cities in favor of more integrated suburbs, the tide of ideological voting could be held at bay for only so long. Once it poured in, America shifted into a new era of politics, from one forged by social connections at the neighborhood level to today’s cultural and ideological polarization, where you vote Republican if you have conservative cultural beliefs, regardless of race.

For Black voters, voting for Democrats as an act of group solidarity didn’t require urban machines like Tammany Hall. A Republican Party that was viewed as leading the backlash to civil rights was summarily dismissed—and those who strayed were subject to social sanction. In South Texas, the rationale revolved around class; the Democrats were viewed simply as the party that would do right by the poor.

As these old partisan ties begin to weaken, it’s worth remembering that something similar has happened before, when the white working class’s status as the bulwark of the old Democratic Party began to unravel in the 1960s. That was also a time of rapid social change, when a politics once focused on meeting the material needs of the working class instead started to revolve around questions more abstract: of war and peace, of race and sex. And on key points, the working class—meaning the white working class early on and a more diverse group today—was not on board with the Democrats’ growing cultural liberalism.

The realignment of the working class, which helped Trump win in 2016, would not stop with white voters. In 2020 and 2024, the realignment came for nonwhite voters. A basic tenet of the Democratic Party—that of being a group-interest-based coalition—was abandoned as the party’s ideologically moderate and conservative nonwhite adherents began to peel off in a mass re-sorting of the electorate. The Democratic analyst David Shor estimates that Democrats went from winning 81 percent of Hispanic moderates in 2016 to just 58 percent in 2024. And these voters were now voting exactly how you would expect them to, given their ideologies: conservatives for the party on the right, moderates split closer to either party.

This explanation for political realignment should concern Democrats deeply, because it can’t be fixed by better messaging or more concerted outreach. The voters moving away from the Democrats are ideologically moderate to conservative. Their loyalty to the Democratic Party was formed in a time of deep racial and inter-ethnic rivalry, when throwing in with one locally dominant political party could help a once-marginalized group secure political power. The system worked well when local politics was relatively insulated from ideological divides at the national level. But this wouldn’t last forever—and national polarization now rules everything around us.

[Rogé Karma: America’s class politics have turned upside down]

Starr County was one of the last holdouts from ideological sorting, and I could feel the tension between new and old-school politics when I visited. The early- voting centers I visited in the Rio Grande Valley’s urban areas were plastered with signs for congressional races that were competitive for the first time in generations. But the farther I ventured out into rural areas—places such as Starr County—the less voters seemed to care about national races. Here, the focus was close to home, and the smiling faces of school-board and county-office candidates covered nearly every available public surface.

From his office—a clubhouse on the main drag in Rio Grande City—Ross Barrera led the nascent county Republican organization. When we met, I asked him why local elections here seemed to garner such outsize attention.

His answer helped me solve a piece of the puzzle of Starr County’s sudden political shift.

Rio Grande City is run not so much by parties, Barrera explained, but by rival factions with a strong resemblance to the machines of old. School-board elections are officially nonpartisan, but the voting is organized around competing candidate slates. The slates are like parallel political parties, but able to endorse across party lines for partisan races. These factional operations are far more sophisticated than the formal party structures. Candidates for the statehouse in Austin will simply pay these slates to serve as their get-out-the-vote operation, forgoing traditional campaign activity.

Why do the slates matter so much? In many of the poorest counties in the nation, with little private industry, the No. 1 employer is the local school district. And whoever wins the school-board elections decides who gets the relatively well-paying patronage jobs that come with those seats. That means the school-board races are uniquely high-stakes; incumbents will go to extreme lengths to safeguard their power.

The area outside the county courthouse where people were already casting their ballots was abuzz with activity from the candidate slates. Each had its own tent where volunteers were cooking up chicken dishes for voters passing by. Which tent a voter went to and spent time at signaled their loyalty. Confrontations between the two camps were not uncommon.

In the Rio Grande Valley, whom you vote for is a secret, but the list of who voted is scrutinized by political bosses doling out jobs. The same goes for primary elections, when your choice to pull a Democratic or Republican ballot is public. In 2018, all but 13 voters countywide who participated in the primary pulled a Democratic ballot. One Republican told me he was once handed a Democratic ballot in the primary—and was refused a Republican ballot when he requested one. Because all of the local officials were Democrats and general elections were frequently uncontested, people saw no point voting in the Republican primary.

Elections in this part of the state had not been free in the fullest sense of the word, unfolding in an atmosphere of persistent surveillance. After the 2012 elections in the nearby town of Donna, several area campaign workers, known locally as politiqueras, pleaded guilty for bribing voters with cash and dime bags of cocaine. South Texas has a long history of this kind of activity, going back to the notorious political boss George Parr, who, in 1948, manufactured the votes that put Lyndon B. Johnson in the Senate.

Although national politics was something of an afterthought, the region’s default was enduring loyalty to a Democratic Party known simply as a tribune for the region’s poor. Republicans, meanwhile, were dismissed as the party of the white person and the rich, something Barrera called “our own form of racism.” As McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos, a Republican elected in 2021, explained it to me, at the dinner table growing up, he would hear about the necessity of voting for the Democrats as the “party of the poor.” His response: “We don’t have to be poor.”

Something seemed to break in 2020. That pandemic year, candidates had to improvise new ways to reach voters. Barrera recalls locals’ reactions when a “Trump train”—a caravan of cars and trucks flying Trump flags—one day drove down the main county highway. People emerged quietly from their homes to witness the spectacle. And then, much to Barrera’s surprise, they started applauding.

[From the September 2018 issue: The next populist revolution will be Latino]

This small display was an early warning of the political sea change that would take Trump from winning 19 percent of the county’s vote in 2016 to 58 percent in 2024. Although Trump made gains across the country with Hispanic voters, a shift of this magnitude signals something much bigger than changes in policy or positioning; it’s a preference cascade that comes about when social norms dictating group loyalty to a single party start to crumble. The Republican Party did not somehow persuade people to switch their votes with new policy positions. In areas where political machines long reigned supreme, like Starr County and the South Bronx, Republicans needed to switch votes by showing voters that their neighbors were switching as well. Two previous cycles of working-class shifts, combined with Trump campaigning in urban areas and in media popular with young nonwhite men, appeared to do the trick.

Beyond South Texas, the Democratic Party in America’s old industrial cities was built by political machines that delivered tangible benefits to working-class and immigrant voters, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood. One day in the life of George Washington Plunkitt, the famed Tammany Hall district leader in New York, revealed the work it took to secure votes: At 2 a.m., he aroused from sleep to bail out a saloon keeper; at 6 a.m., he awakened to the sound of fire trucks and rose to give assistance and arrange housing for those affected; at 8:30 a.m., he went to the courthouse and secured the release of several “drunks”; at 9 a.m., he paid the rent for a poor family about to be evicted; at 11 a.m., he met with four men seeking employment and “succeeded in each case”; at 3 p.m., he attended the funerals of constituents; at 7 p.m., he presided over a district meeting; at 8 p.m., he attended a church fair and took the men out for a drink after; at 9 p.m., he was back at the office, attending to various constituent matters; at 10:30 p.m., he attended a Jewish wedding.

Today, machine politics are not held in high esteem. But they did have a way of finding overlooked voting blocs and putting them under protection. Other such examples of political organization and advocacy are remembered more fondly, such as the migration of Black voters into the Democratic Party following the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which cemented a more than 9-to-1 Democratic advantage in many Black neighborhoods. But more recently, this political solidarity has been held together by social forces—the expectation by other Black Americans that their friends and neighbors will support Democrats—than by an ideological affinity for the party, as documented in the political scientists Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s book, Steadfast Democrats.

In an era of nationalized politics and growing polarization, the social basis for Democratic majorities is looking more and more tenuous. Yes, the particular appeal with which Trump was able to attract Hispanics and young Black men may last for only an election cycle or two, but the fact that those communities are realigning to a party that matches their views on issues, particularly on cultural issues such as gender, means that many are likely to stick around.

A populist shift in the form of Donald Trump’s larger-than-life persona was enough to make many nonwhite voters shed decades-long partisan loyalties. Absent a big change in how these voters perceive the Democratic Party, they aren’t going back.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

A civil war has broken out among the Democratic wonks. The casus belliisa new set of ideas known as the abundance agenda. Its supporters herald it as the key to prosperity for the American people and to enduring power for the liberal coalition. Its critics decry it as a scheme to infiltrate the Democratic Party by “corporate-aligned interests”; “a gambit by center-right think tank & its libertarian donors”; “an anti-government manifesto for the MAGA Right”; and the historical and moral equivalent of the “Rockefellers and Carnegies grinding workers into dust.”

The factional disputes that tear apart the left tend to involve wrenching, dramatic issues where the human stakes are clear: Gaza, policing, immigration. And so it is more than a little odd that progressive activists, columnists, and academics are now ripping one another to shreds over such seemingly arcane and technical matters as zoning rules, permitting, and the Paperwork Reduction Act.

The intensity of the argument suggests that the participants are debating not merely the mechanical details of policy, but the very nature and purpose of the Democratic Party. And in fact, if you look closely beneath the squabbling, that is exactly what they are fighting over.

The abundance agenda is a collection of policy reforms designed to make it easier to build housing and infrastructure and for government bureaucracy to work. Despite its cheerful name and earnest intention to find win-win solutions, the abundance agenda contains a radical critique of the past half century of American government. On top of that—and this is what has set off clanging alarms on the left—it is a direct attack on the constellation of activist organizations, often called “the groups,” that control progressive politics and have significant influence over the Democratic Party.

In recent years, the party’s internal divides have been defined almost entirely in relation to the issue positions taken by the groups. The most progressive Democrats have been the ones who advocated the groups’ positions most forcefully; moderate Democrats have been defined more by their relative lack of enthusiasm for the groups’ agenda than by any causes of their own. The Democratic Party’s flavors have been “progressive” and “progressive lite.” The abundance agenda promises to supply moderate Democrats with a positive identity, rather than merely a negative one.

That dynamic has only raised the stakes of the abundance agenda within the party. Its ideas are ambitious enough, but its political implications have set off a schismatic conflict not just over a collection of proposals and the Democratic Party’s direction—but over who should have the standing to direct it.

After percolating for years among policy wonks, the abundance agenda—a term coined by my colleague Derek Thompson in a 2022 essay—ascended suddenly in response to the deflating failure of the Biden administration’s policy program.

“We have to prove democracy still works,” Joe Biden said in his first speech to Congress. “That our government still works—and can deliver for the people.” That summer, after the Senate had approved a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, Biden declared the mission accomplished. “Today,” he announced at the White House, “we proved that democracy can still work.”

But in the months and years that followed, an unsettling realization began to creep in. A massive law had been enacted, yet Americans did not notice any difference, because indeed, very little had changed. Biden had anticipated, after quickly signing his infrastructure bill and then two more big laws pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into manufacturing and energy, that he would spend the rest of his presidency cutting ribbons at gleaming new bridges and plants. But only a fraction of the funds Biden had authorized were spent before he began his reelection campaign, and of those, hardly any yielded concrete results.

More than two years after signing the infrastructure law, Biden was “expressing deep frustration that he can’t show off physical construction of many projects that his signature legislative accomplishments will fund,” CNN reported. The nationwide network of electric-vehicle-charging stations amounted to just 58 new stations by the time Biden left office. The average completion date for road projects, according to the nonprofit news site NOTUS, was mid-2027. The effort to bring broadband access to rural America, a centerpiece of Biden’s plan to show that he would work to help the entire country and not just the parts that had voted for him, had connected zero customers.

Rather than prove democracy still works, Biden’s experience proved the opposite.

The odd thing about this deflating record is that a very similar thing happened the previous time Democrats held the presidency. Barack Obama came into office facing a catastrophic recession that he believed he could resolve with a gigantic new program of public works. Obama harkened back to the New Deal, when millions of Americans had been employed constructing roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, but quickly learned that, as he bitterly put it, “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.” The lesson sat there, mostly unexamined, for a dozen years, inspiring no efforts to understand or change it, until Biden came into office. A Democratic president again hoped to follow FDR’s model, and again discovered it had somehow become impossible.

This time, the failure inspired a little more introspection. Policy wonks, mostly liberal ones, began to ask why public tasks that used to be doable no longer were. How could a government that once constructed miracles of engineering—the Hoover Dam, the Golden Gate Bridge—ahead of schedule and under budget now find itself incapable of executing routine functions? Why was Medicare available less than a year after the enabling legislation passed, when the Affordable Care Act’s individual-insurance exchange took nearly four years to come online (and had to survive a failed website)? And, more disturbing, why was everything slower, more expensive, and more dysfunctional in states and cities controlled by Democrats?

Finding answers to these questions began as a series of disparate inquiries into such neglected topics as restrictive zoning ordinances, federal and state permitting regulations, and the federal government’s administrative procedures. But many who pursued these separate lines of inquiry experienced similar epiphanies, as if a switch had suddenly been flipped in their heads. They concluded that the government has tied itself in knots, and that enormous amounts of prosperity could be unleashed by simply untying them.

The closest thing to an institutional home for the abundance agenda is the Niskanen Center, formerly a heterodox libertarian think tank, which became a haven for Never Trump Republicans before veering, in recent years, toward promoting abundance. Some journalists, including several at this magazine, have also championed these ideas. Three new books have expressed abundance-agenda themes: Abundance, by Thompson and Ezra Klein; Stuck, by my colleague Yoni Appelbaum; and Why Nothing Works, by the Brown University scholar Marc Dunkelman. The proliferation of such works is a sign of the excitement these ideas have generated. And the abundance libs are rapidly winning over Democratic politicians, especially moderate ones.

[From the March 2025 issue: How progressives froze the American dream]

The movement is still working out precisely what is, and is not, included in its program. But the canonical abundance agenda consists of three primary domains.

The first, and most familiar, is the need to expand the supply of housing by removing zoning rules and other legal barriers that prevent supply from meeting demand. Over the past 90 years or so, and especially since World War II, American cities have thrown up a series of restrictions on new housing. Some 40 percent of the existing structures in Manhattan, for instance, would be illegal to build today, and where the rules don’t ban new construction outright, they make it prohibitively time-consuming and costly. The same dynamic has strangled housing in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, and other places where people want to live but can’t afford to.

The second focus of abundance is to cut back the web of laws and regulations that turns any attempt to build public infrastructure into an expensive, agonizing nightmare. The cost of building a mile of interstate highway tripled in a generation. California approved a plan to build high-speed rail from Los Angeles to San Francisco 17 years ago and, despite having spent billions, still has no usable track. Permitting requirements, which have slowed the green-energy build-out to a crawl, are a special focus.

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The third domain, and the one that has received the least attention from commentators, is freeing up the government, especially the federal government, to be able to function. Policy wonks call this issue “state capacity.” The government itself is hamstrung by a thicket of rules that makes taking action difficult and makes tying up the government in lawsuits easy. The abundance agenda wants to deregulate the government itself, in order to enable it to do things.

Revealingly, when the government does act swiftly, it frequently does so by suspending or ignoring its standard procedures. In January 2020, researchers in Seattle spent weeks trying and failing to get government permission to test the flu samples they had gathered for coronavirus, which was spreading rapidly elsewhere. Eventually, the researchers just ignored the rules and ran the tests, creating the first measure of the spread of COVID in the U.S. Similarly, Operation Warp Speed, Trump’s greatest and arguably only triumph, involved an end run around normal vaccine-development protocol. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro got an overpass on I-95 rebuilt quickly and safely, but only by suspending normal highway-construction bureaucratic requirements. The fact that the government has to ignore its rules if it wants to do something important ought to raise the question of why those rules have to be followed the rest of the time.

All of these policies sound so obvious and unobjectionable that one might understandably grow a bit suspicious. Who would favor keeping a bunch of pointless rules? Why would anybody oppose abundance?

You might think Democrats, in particular, would uniformly embrace plans to allow Democratic-run states and cities to expand, to build more zero-carbon energy, and to restore the bureaucratic confidence of the New Deal heyday. But this turns out to be a highly controversial proposition, because the limitations on building and the government were largely imposed by the left itself. What’s more, these limits remain a core part of the interest-group politics that has dominated the Democratic Party for more than half a century.

In the years after World War II, the New Deal seemed to have permanently triumphed, and the legitimacy and power of government were beyond contestation. Many liberals now believed they could direct their energies in new directions. The task was to prevent the government machine, powered by its unstoppable alliance of Big Business and Big Labor, from subordinating the needs of the citizens. A new vision took hold, shared by writers and activists such as Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader. In his 2021 book, Public Citizens, the historian Paul Sabin describes this citizen-activist movement as “a legal attack, led by liberals, on the post–World War II administrative state.”

Unlike the Roosevelt generation that had preceded them, these liberals saw their task as restraining the power of government, rather than establishing it. “The fundamental wrong,” Carson said in a 1963 speech, “is the authoritarian control that has been vested in the agricultural agencies.”

This new, anti-statist form of liberalism had two hallmarks. One was its reliance on lawyers and lawsuits. This reflected the influence of Nader, who rocketed to fame as a consumer advocate and became the most admired man in America by articulating a distrust of the system that defined public sentiment in the age of Vietnam and Watergate. “We are creating a new professional citizen role,” he boasted to Time magazine. Those citizens were lawyers, or were represented by lawyers, who would devote their power to prying open the works of the state and holding it accountable.

The second was its faith in groups of citizens outside of government who could serve as a check on its power. The Port Huron Statement, the 1962 New Left manifesto by Students for a Democratic Society, envisioned a huge network of citizen-activist groups: “Private in nature, these should be organized around single issues (medical care, transportation systems reform, etc.), concrete interest (labor and minority group organizations), multiple issues or general issues.”

[Paul Sabin: The liberal attack on government]

These visionaries believed the future of activism would revolve around a collection of specialized citizen-activist groups. And they were correct. By 1971, The Washington Post reported that Nader had created a “bewildering network of organizations, all devoted to a staggering array of public issues” and bearing Nader’s imprint, many of which still operate today. They pushed for the passage of laws, then fought in court to expand their reach, creating tools to slow down or block government action.

They achieved some genuinely laudable results, including laws regulating pollution and consumer safety, and those protecting poor communities from being steamrolled by the likes of Robert Moses. But their emphasis on litigation and cumbersome legal requirements (what the law professor Nicholas Bagley calls “the procedure fetish”), combined with the empowerment of interest groups, has over time inverted Roosevelt’s preference for results over legalism. The Naderites sought to prevent the government from doing harm, but in too many cases, they ended up preventing it from doing anything at all.

The National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA, provides the clearest example. Passed in 1969, at the zenith of the environmental movement’s influence, the law required the government to undertake environmental-impact studies before authorizing major projects and created elaborate legal hurdles to navigate.

Activist groups such as the Environmental Defense Fund saw NEPA as a potent tool to stop Washington (and, through state-level copycat laws, state and local governments) from building harmful projects. They pursued an energetic legal strategy to expand the law’s reach, turning it into a suffocating weapon against development. Over time, the environmental-impact statements required to start a project have ballooned from about 10 pages to hundreds; the process now takes more than four years on average to complete.

Most perversely, NEPA and similar laws have become a way to stop efforts to address climate change. The environmental movement was created during an era when activists saw their highest priority as preserving nature by stopping construction. In the era of global warming, however, preserving nature requires building new infrastructure: green-energy sources, pipelines to transmit the energy, and new housing and transportation in cities where density allows for a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. But environmental groups have not, for the most part, altered their desire to stop building, nor have they reconsidered their support for laws that freeze the built environment in place.

Joe Biden learned this the hard way.

After the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, Democrats began to realize that, thanks to a maze of legal impediments, the hundreds of billions of dollars in green-energy infrastructure they had authorized would not materialize any time soon, if at all.

Democratic moderates, with support from the Biden administration, set out to negotiate a permitting-reform bill that would impose a two-year cap on environmental-review statements and allow the federal government to plan the transmission lines needed to connect the new green-energy sources. Many Republicans, suspicious of infringing on states’ rights, opposed it. More striking, so did hundreds of environmental groups. They objected to legislation that would, in the words of one letter to Democratic leadership, “truncate and hollow-out the environmental review process, weaken Tribal consultations, and make it far harder for frontline communities to have their voices heard.”

And because climate activists opposed the bill, many progressives did too. “This is a good day for the climate and the environment,” Senator Bernie Sanders said after the permitting-reform bill died in Congress. Two years later, in the waning days of the Biden administration, a second effort to pass permitting reform failed again, and while moderate Democrats expressed dismay, progressives celebrated. “Thanks to the hard-fought persistence and vocal opposition of environmental justice communities all across the country, the Dirty Deal has finally been laid to rest,” then–House Natural Resources Chair Raúl Grijalva boasted.

Last year, Biden prevailed upon Congress to suspend environmental review for new factories that would produce computer chips, under the bipartisan CHIPS Act. He did so by relying on a coalition of Republicans and moderate Democrats, over strident objections from environmental activists and progressive Democrats.

Progressives are not indifferent to building green-energy infrastructure or manufacturing computer chips, but they place greater value on defending the prerogatives of local activists. The New Left model of citizen-activist groups empowered by litigation remains the core of the progressive movement’s theory of change.

“Meaningful community engagement is the key to unlocking our clean-energy future,” Christy Goldfuss, the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said by way of explaining the group’s opposition to permitting reform. Some housing activists likewise oppose zoning reform because they see the key to housing justice as giving local activists the power to block new housing. The New York Times columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom has held up the tenant-union movement as a way to solve the housing crisis. “Its strongest political strategy at the moment,” she writes, “is pushing for local ordinances that give community members the authority to assess new housing developments that use city resources to determine whether they would displace residents or reduce a neighborhood’s affordability.”

The driving insight of the abundance agenda is that the organized citizen-activist groups descended from the Nader movement are not merely overly idealistic or ineffective, but often counterproductive. This is a diametric conflict: The progressive-activist network believes that local activists should have more legal power to block new housing and energy infrastructure. The abundance agenda is premised on taking that power away.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Not everyone should have a say]

This helps explain why much of the progressive left rejects the abundance agenda, not merely as insufficient or naive, but as directionally wrong. Anthony Rogers-Wright, then the director of environmental justice at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, told my colleague Jerusalem Demsas a few years ago that permitting reform means “taking away the ability for all communities, but especially environmental-justice communities, from self-determination and using the courts as a way to get relief if a project is found to be harmful.” A policy brief on solar power from the progressive Roosevelt Institute last year proposed that the government should provide subsidies for community groups fighting new solar plants.

The theory underlying this position is that Nader-style citizen engagement is an important component of democracy, and that building up activist groups engaging in these litigation strategies creates powerful constituencies for the left. David Dayen, the editor of the progressive magazine The American Prospect, wrote an essay in 2023 critiquing the abundance agenda as an attack on basic democratic rights. Dayen, approvingly quoting the economist Marshall Steinbaum, argued that the effort to sideline community activists “boils down to the idea that people can’t be trusted.” A better policy, Dayen proposed, was “a liberalism that builds power,” which means “the government actively supporting the very groups that have been left out of past economic transitions, building the necessary coalition for long-term transformation.”

Whether or not this strategy has actually built power—the evidence from Biden’s presidency is discouraging—it remains foundational to the party’s activist superstructure. The progressive movement seeks to maintain solidarity among its component groups, expecting each to endorse the positions taken by the others.

Much of the most vociferous opposition to the abundance agenda has zeroed in on its betrayal of this principle. The Roosevelt Institute’s Todd Tucker attacked Ezra Klein on X for his “survivor island approach to coalitions—first unions and Dems team up to vote enviros off the island, and then Dems turn on labor.” David Sirota, a left-wing journalist, complained, “Abundance Libs are insisting the big problem isn’t corporate power & oligarchs, it’s zoning laws & The Groups? Come on.” Austin Ahlman, a researcher at the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly advocacy organization, mused, “You have to wonder whether the Abundance faction stuff would have landed better if the proponents had not laid the groundwork for it by first broadsiding every other organized constituency in the democratic tent.”

This angry response is not merely a knee-jerk reaction to criticism, but the logical outgrowth of a well-developed belief system. Since the Obama era, many of the component groups in the progressive coalition have drifted further left on their core demands. (Single-issue lobbies are naturally incentivized to grow more extreme over time—what organization is going to decide its pet cause is too unpopular or costly to merit a strident defense?)

At the same time, they have grown more purposeful about their belief that each group must stand behind all the positions outlined by the others. That is why civil-rights groups will demand student-debt relief, abortion-rights groups endorse abolishing the police, or trans-rights groups insist that Palestine should be liberated. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, an heir to the Hunt oil fortune who became a full-time progressive organizer, and who has raised and donated millions to causes such as the Sunrise Movement, the Debt Collective, and Black Lives Matter, articulated the principle of cross-endorsements in her book, Solidarity. She argues for “the necessity of working in coalition with progressive social movements,” and of resisting the opposition’s efforts “to weaponize a movement’s fault lines.”

Such progressives are not wrong to see the abundance agenda as a broader attack on their movement. Their theory of American politics depends on empowering the very groups the abundance agenda identifies as the architects of failure and barriers to progress.

But that dynamic also explains why the abundance agenda is likely to become the tentpole of the party’s moderate wing, even for politicians who have mixed feelings about its particulars. As the Niskanen Center’s Steven Teles and Robert Saldin have pointed out, the factional division between group-aligned progressive Democrats and the abundance Democrats opposed to them is already playing out in several cities. (San Francisco, where the failures of progressive urban governance are most pronounced, has the most organized abundance faction.)

In the 2020 Democratic primary, candidates competed for the groups’ favor by endorsing their most far-reaching and politically toxic demands, such as decriminalizing illegal border crossings and abolishing private health insurance. Abundance may provide an escape from that dynamic in 2028. Democrats who reject the demand to maintain solidarity with the groups at all costs will find themselves free to endorse policies that the majority of the country supports.

The first fissures are already beginning to appear at the national level. Some elements of the abundance agenda have appeal to the left. (There are, in particular, left-wing YIMBYs.) But most of the elected officials who have identified with it come from the party’s mainstream and moderate wings, such as Pete Buttigieg; Governors Kathy Hochul, Wes Moore, and Josh Shapiro; and House members Jake Auchincloss, Scott Peters, George Whitesides, and Ritchie Torres. Torres offers the most instructive example: Having previously carved out an identity as a gleeful antagonist to the party’s left wing on Israel and other divisive issues, he announced in January, “I feel like the abundance agenda is the best framework that I’ve heard for reimagining Democratic governance.”

By contrast, the progressive icon Elizabeth Warren told The Bulwark in April that she hasn’t read Abundance and plans to steer clear of the debate around it—a strange decision for a proudly detail-oriented wonk, but one that makes sense given the divides the issue has opened up on the left.

The formation of ideological factions within political parties is a staple of American history. The divide over slavery ruptured the Whigs; the progressive movement began within both the Democratic and Republican Parties, before migrating entirely into the Democratic camp. A faction can reorganize a party’s priorities, generating new alliances and rivalries, and pull new constituencies into a party while driving others out. Many factions start among intellectuals and writers, eventually developing followings among politicians.

Because the abundance agenda has developed out of the work of policy wonks, rather than political operatives, it was not cooked up to help Democrats in elections. It is far from a complete response to the party’s dilemma. The abundance agenda says nothing about social issues; an abundance lib could be for or against Medicare for All, the participation of trans women in college sports, or any number of issues that split the party. It is not a theory of everything.

It does, however, meet several political needs of the moment. It addresses the lack of faith in public services, which plunged after COVID. It promises to bring down consumer costs, which remain the public’s top concern. It provides a direct response to Elon Musk’s assault on state capacity. And it offers a plausible route to improving living standards at a time when high inflation and elevated interest rates and debt make promising big new social benefits harder.

[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]

Perhaps most important, the abundance agenda supplies Democrats with a vision of the future that contrasts sharply and clearly with Donald Trump’s. The president has lectured the country about the need to make do with less in the service of his self-destructive tariff regime. He has attacked plans to build denser cities as an assault on suburbs, defunded scientific research, sought to shut down the green-energy transition, and paralyzed the bureaucracy with arbitrary restrictions. The abundance agenda creates a unified program to reverse all these retrograde ideas, along with a practical understanding of the impediments that must be overcome to do so.

What has drawn many Americans to Trump is his claim that the system is so broken that, as he promised, “I alone can fix it.” The last time they held power, Democrats did little to rebut that claim. Now they must decide if they will abandon their legalistic commitment to fragmentary proceduralism or allow Trump’s boast to be vindicated.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

“It almost feels like we’re trying to rebuild everything from scratch,” Michael Wieder told me.

The company he co-founded, Lalo, sells sleekly designed baby gear, much of it made in China. In his first weeks in office, Donald Trump increased the tariff rate on most of the company’s imported goods by  20 percentage points. In April, he jacked the rate up to 145 percent. Lalo had to stop bringing in products from overseas: Paying the tariff could have bankrupted the company. Trump dropped the rate down to 30 percent this month, but Wieder anticipates falling sales and a year of disruption.

Ask any corporate executive or entrepreneur about the past five months, and they will tell you a story like Wieder’s. Companies are struggling with unstable tariff rates, bond-market swings, canceled federal contracts, rising import costs, and visa challenges. They’re unsure about the economic outlook. They’re unsure about tax rates. They’re unsure about borrowing costs. Last week, Moody’s downgraded American debt, meaning it has less confidence in the country’s growth and capacity to manage its deficits.

This is a year of chaos, so dramatic in its upheaval that it sometimes obscures how weird things have been, and for how long. Over the past half decade, businesses have contended with a pandemic, a recession, an inflationary spiral, and a trade war. They have negotiated swift changes in consumer behavior and input prices and interest rates, as well as significant shifts in policy more broadly, from Joe Biden’s New Deal Lite to Donald Trump’s autarkic austerity. John Lettieri, the president of the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington-based think tank, calls it “the era of thrash.”

The American economy has weathered that chaos. Despite reams of studies indicating that uncertainty dampens investment and slows growth, today corporate profits are high, the jobless rate is low, productivity has climbed, and new businesses are blossoming. But that resilience may be wearing off, and we may have reached the end of our ability to withstand the disruptions.

Is this spell of uncertainty so unusual? Even after talking with a dozen business owners and experts in recent weeks, I came away unsure. A lot seemed to have happened since COVID. Then again, reciting five years of major events might feel like singing the lyrics to “We Didn’t Start the Fire” regardless of which five years you picked.

As it turns out, economists have ways of measuring uncertainty, by looking at newspaper coverage, stock-market gyrations, and corporate communications. Those measures show that, sure enough, the first half of the 2020s has proved remarkably unstable and destabilizing. “We’ve been through a period of elevated uncertainty,” Steven Davis, of the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, told me. Right now, we are in “a big surge, relative to what was already a higher-than-average base.”

Economists also have ways of measuring the impact of such periods on businesses and the economy writ large. Uncertainty about a country’s growth path reduces consumption and investment, depressing industrial production. Uncertainty about inflation reduces bank lending, cutting down on business expansion and formation. Uncertainty about tariffs weakens supply chains and limits the number of businesses joining a market. The economies of countries with stable policy environments tend to grow faster than those of unstable countries.

Given that research, you’d think that the past five years would have been dull ones for entrepreneurship and growth. The opposite is true. Americans are forming roughly a million more businesses a year now than they were before the pandemic, despite higher borrowing costs. Corporate profits are fatter than they were before the pandemic. Stock prices—a measure of investor optimism about future earnings—have been volatile, but are up 96 percent over the past five years.

“My biggest takeaway from the last five years of a one-after-another series of different kinds of shocks and uncertainties is an appreciation for the astonishing resilience of the U.S. economy,” Lettieri told me, a note of awe in his voice.

Business experts pointed to a few reasons that the chaos leading up to 2025 did not strangle investment or damage growth. For some firms, the coronavirus crisis provided an opportunity by disrupting stodgy markets and upending consumer behavior. Lalo, for instance, benefited from the surge in interest in ordering online, which let it compete with big-box stores that otherwise might have boxed it out. (Now chains such as Target carry the brand.) The pandemic “played to our benefit,” Wieder told me, and the company managed to navigate the surge in inflation and borrowing costs that followed it.

That was, in large part, because the broader governmental response to the pandemic proved to be such a boon for firms and individuals. The Federal Reserve pushed borrowing costs to close to zero. The Trump and Biden administrations spent roughly $4 trillion on support to families and companies, canceling student loans, sending out checks, covering payroll, supporting the parents of young children, and shoring up the coffers of state and local governments. Even as interest rates rose, the private-credit markets remained robust. “It’s easier to absorb an uncertainty shock when underlying economic conditions are strong than when they’re weak,” Davis said. From 2020 to 2024, the underlying economy proved notably strong.

Today’s uncertainty is far more intense and widespread than many businesses anticipated. Wieder and his co-founder had braced for some turbulence when Trump reclaimed the White House. They assumed tariffs on Chinese imports would rise, increasing costs on young families—even if goods like strollers and car seats were excluded from tariffs, as they were during Trump’s first term. They hoped to preempt consumer sticker shock by lowering prices in advance. “It was a really big bet for us,” Wieder said. “We were protecting our consumer and trying to get ahead of it.” But there was no getting ahead of what followed.

The economy is more vulnerable and less resilient than it was a couple of years ago. Interest rates are higher, personal-debt levels have climbed, job growth is slowing, and inflation remains an issue. “A lot of lending was made during a time of very easy credit,” Diane Swonk, the chief economist at the accounting firm KPMG, told me. “Now many of those businesses and consumers are being squeezed. Loans that were once renewed easily are now being denied or subjected to far stricter standards.”

The political instability of the country, whipsawing between two polarized parties, has also left businesses shaky. And now the White House is proactively destabilizing the policy environment, ignoring court orders and usurping Congress’s authority over spending. When it comes to tariffs, the Trump administration is making “arbitrary executive decisions that are in some cases probably unlawful, and perhaps even unconstitutional,” Davis noted. During the pandemic, the country had a democratic government that made reasonable choices in response to a horrific tragedy. Now it has a more and more despotic government making bad choices for no reason. The past five years didn’t prepare us for this.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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 Serena Dai, a senior editor who has written about the easiest way to keep your friends, the art of the restaurateur, and the endless hunt to make meaning of marriage.

Serena was surprised by how much she enjoyed The Rehearsal, the comedian Nathan Fielder’s latest pseudo-reality series. She’s also an avid romance-novel reader, a newly minted Jonas Brothers fan, and a longtime admirer of Kathryn Hahn’s work.

The Culture Survey: Serena Dai

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I’m a bit embarrassed to say that I could not bear to watch Nathan for You, a beloved show where the comedian Nathan Fielder suggests outlandish plans to help small businesses. Every person I trusted assured me that Fielder was a genius, and I got the sense that I must lack some sort of sophistication for not enjoying it. The entrepreneurs he was trying to “help” with suggestions such as poop-flavored frozen yogurt were real people; I felt too badly for them to find the show entertaining. So I was surprised to discover that I loved his new series, The Rehearsal—and now, a few episodes into the second season, I finally understand the “genius” moniker that my buddies have bequeathed him.

Similar to Nathan for You, the show pairs Fielder’s monotonous tone with outrageous conceits, but this time, the premise is staging “rehearsals” to help people prepare for difficult moments. Though he’s still cringey (and still allegedly misleading real people), he also poses questions about how comedy can effect real-life change, and reveals some insights about his own role in the entertainment industry’s worst impulses. His critiques feel organic instead of forced, something that is not easy. By the second episode of the new season, I found myself not only in awe of the lengths he would go for a bit but also laughing out loud at the results. [Related: Nathan Fielder is his own worst enemy.]

The upcoming entertainment event I’m most looking forward to: The return of Lena Dunham’s work to our TV screens, with her upcoming Netflix show, Too Much. I recently rewatched the first season of Girls, and seeing it in my 30s (long after the heated discourse about Millennials and nepo babies that surrounded the show’s debut), I had a deeper appreciation for Dunham’s talent for writing sharply drawn characters—ones who, even when they’re infuriating, you can’t help but love. When she hits, she hits! The new show, which debuts on July 10, stars one of my favorite internet personalities, the comedian Megan Stalter. She has an intensity in her facial expressions that makes me laugh before she even says a word, and I am eager to see how Dunham works with her talents. [Related: Eight perfect episodes of TV]

An actor I would watch in anything: Kathryn Hahn. She’s funny and moving in so much that she does, but I really fell for her in I Love Dick, an adaptation of the Chris Kraus novel where she excels at playing a woman who wants and wants and wants.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: This year, I finally did something that I’ve been thinking about for years: I started pulling up the Kindle app to read a book when I had the instinct to refresh my Instagram feed. I read an essay a long time ago recommending it as a way both to read more books and to make phone time feel less terrible, but I hadn’t done it. For years, I still felt that any extended time I spent on my phone meant something bad about me, and frankly, I was also just easily distracted. But I decided I didn’t need to read Proust, only stay off social media; as a result, I have probably tripled my intake of romance novels, which are breezy yet still require an attention span longer than 30 seconds. I recently dipped my toe into historical romance and have been loving the Ravenels series, by Lisa Kleypas, which you may also enjoy if you’re a fan of Bridgerton. I do still spend plenty of time on Instagram trying to remind myself to not pay too much attention to parenting or fitness influencers, but I promise it’s less. Much, much less.

An author I will read anything by: Jasmine Guillory. I love romance, I love love, and I love her characters.

An online creator whom I’m a fan of: I’ve been finding small ways to incorporate more Mandarin into my life because I’m trying to speak it more to my toddler, and a friend recommended following her Chinese teacher, Neruda Ling, on Instagram. He blends internet humor with Mandarin lessons, which is exactly what I need after a lifetime of associating the language with textbooks and long Sunday mornings in suburban community-college classrooms. Crucially, he also explains curse words and gay slang, something my immigrant mother would never have done in depth.

To be honest, I’m not sure if I remember any of the phrases he’s taught, and even if I did, I doubt that I would have the guts to deploy them in casual conversation. Mostly, these videos remind me that the language doesn’t have to feel inherently stiff like it did when I was growing up, and that Mandarin can, in fact, be a source of joy.

A good recommendation I recently received: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but have you heard the latest Jonas Brothers single? It’s called “Love Me to Heaven,” and my husband stopped everything in our apartment one busy Saturday to make me listen to it. If you, like me, had kind of written them off as Disney Channel heartthrobs or tabloid fodder or reality-show jokesters, you too might be delighted to hear this pop-rock bop. I want to drive a convertible to the beach with the roof down and blast this song the whole way there.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The vanishers: secrets of the world’s greatest privacy expertsThe mother who never stopped believing her son was still thereThe talented Mr. Vance

The Week Ahead

Karate Kid: Legends, an action movie starring Jackie Chan and Ralph Macchio (in theaters Friday)Season 3 of And Just Like That, a sequel to Sex and the City (premieres Thursday on Max)Never Flinch, a crime novel by Stephen King about a killer and a dangerous stalker (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty.

The Pedestrians Who Abetted a Hawk’s Deadly Attack

By Katherine J. Wu

In November of 2021, Vladimir Dinets was driving his daughter to school when he first noticed a hawk using a pedestrian crosswalk.

The bird—a young Cooper’s hawk, to be exact—wasn’t using the crosswalk, in the sense of treading on the painted white stripes to reach the other side of the road in West Orange, New Jersey. But it was using the crosswalk—more specifically, the pedestrian-crossing signal that people activate to keep traffic out of said crosswalk—to ambush prey.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The unbearable weight of Mission: ImpossibleTime for scary movies to make us laugh again.America’s Johnson & Johnson problemNo one is better at being looked at than Kim Kardashian.What is Alison Bechdel’s secret?

Catch Up on The Atlantic

The largest upward transfer of wealth in American historyThe decline and fall of Elon MuskThe anti-natalist’s revenge

Photo Album

A woman wearing a protective helmet poses outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires during a protest led by pensioners. (Luis Robayo / AFP / Getty)

Take a look at these photos of the week, showing a swannery in southern England, tornado damage in Kentucky, a rally race in a Chinese desert, and more.

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When Democrats reshaped the American health-insurance system in 2010, Republicans accused them of all manner of legislative foul play: Middle-of-the-night votes. Backroom deals. An enormous, partisan bill jammed through Congress before anyone could find out what was in it. “Have you read the bill? Hell no you haven’t!” an indignant then-House Minority Leader John Boehner thundered on the House floor.

The GOP’s claims were exaggerated. But as Republicans rushed President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” through the House this week, they committed just about every procedural misdeed they had ascribed to Democrats back then—and more. The final text of an 1,100-page bill that Speaker Mike Johnson described as “the most consequential legislation that any party has ever passed” became public just hours before Republicans approved it on a party-line vote. They scheduled a pivotal hearing to begin at 1 a.m. and waived their own rules meant to give lawmakers at least three days to review legislation before a vote. One Republican even missed the climactic roll call because, the speaker explained, he fell asleep.

[Jonathan Chait: The largest upward transfer of wealth in American history]

“If something is beautiful, you don’t do it after midnight,” a conservative critic of the bill, Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, scolded in a speech delivered shortly before 2 a.m. on Thursday.

To Democrats who chided them for their haste, Republicans replied with reminders of their own long-ago procedural end runs, as if to say, What goes around comes around. Hypocrisy abounds in both parties, and the path to passage for any major legislation is rarely smooth or pretty. But the GOP’s aggressive drive to force through Trump’s agenda fits a pattern that’s emerged in each of his presidential terms: Rather than avoid the transgressions they’ve alleged Democrats have committed, Republicans have instead used them as license to go even further.

In 2017, the GOP confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court only after it eliminated the Senate filibuster for nominees to the high court. As justification, Republicans cited the Democrats’ earlier move to scrap the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for lower-court and executive-branch nominees—a change Republicans had denounced at the time.

Earlier this year, as Trump was trying to freeze congressionally authorized funding and shut down federal agencies without approval from lawmakers, I asked Republicans whether there was a line the president could not cross. They responded by talking not about Trump but about Joe Biden. “Could the president do something totally unconstitutional, in violation of what Congress wants entirely?” Representative Mario Díaz-Balart of Florida asked, before quickly answering his own question: “You mean, like student loans?”

As Díaz-Balart and other Republicans saw it, Biden had defied first Congress and then the Supreme Court in his push to unilaterally forgive billions of dollars in college debt beginning in 2022. Democrats did provide the GOP some fodder for that argument: Then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi had said categorically that the president could not wipe out student debt on his own. “He does not have that power,” she told reporters in July 2021. “That has to be an act of Congress.” Then, after the Supreme Court struck down Biden’s $400 billion loan-cancellation program—while citing Pelosi’s statement—Biden responded defiantly. “The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt. But they didn’t stop me,” he said. “I’m going to keep going.”

Yet Biden also made clear that he would not defy the Court’s ruling but instead would pursue more limited debt-relief plans in ways his administration believed were “legally sound.” Now, instead of interpreting the Court’s rebuke of Biden as a limit on executive authority, Republicans are claiming it as an excuse for Trump to expand presidential power even more.

In the House this week, some Republicans were willing to call out their own party for trying to rush such a far-reaching bill through the chamber. “It’s step on the gas and jam it through, because that’s the way this place works,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas told reporters. “It is a mistake.” Roy was one of the final conservative holdouts, but like most of his GOP colleagues, he ended up voting for the bill despite his misgivings about the process. “And as with most major bills in Washington,” he acknowledged in a statement afterward, “this bill was rushed, mashed together, and crammed through the House without sufficient time to review every item carefully. We should do better.”

As recently as December, conservatives forced GOP leaders to abandon a 1,547-page spending bill negotiated with Democrats, largely at the behest of Elon Musk, who was then the incoming head of DOGE. This time, no such rebellion materialized.

Johnson’s Memorial Day deadline for passing Trump’s plan through the House was largely arbitrary. Congress must raise the nation’s debt limit by sometime this summer, and taxes for most Americans will go up if lawmakers don’t extend the president’s 2017 tax cuts by the end of the year. Conservatives had asked for another week or two to consider the bill, but Johnson and Trump succeeded in pressuring them to vote quickly so that the Senate could start working on it. Republicans want Trump to sign his second-term centerpiece, named the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, into law by July 4, and leaders of both parties have learned that lawmakers rarely compromise without the forcing mechanism of a tight deadline.

“The voters want results. They don’t want incessant debates,” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told me, defending the speed with which Republicans advanced Trump’s bill. “We could debate this thing for months and months and not get any results for people who are struggling, and that’s not going to help those families who gave us this mandate.”

[Read: Republicans still can’t say no to Trump]

Scalise was in his first full term in Congress when Democrats passed the Affordable Care Act. At the time, he joined Republicans in accusing them of rushing the bill through without sufficient transparency or debate. Yet Democrats spent many more months negotiating Obamacare than Republicans have spent on Trump’s legislation. When I asked Scalise how he’d respond to critics who say the GOP is doing exactly what they criticized Democrats for, he pointed out the many committees that had held public hearings on the “big, beautiful bill” in the past few weeks (the House held similar sessions in 2010) and blamed Democrats for trying to delay the measure. “If Democrats want to drag it on and on and on, and then complain that it’s going late at night, that’s a little hypocritical,” Scalise said. (In fact, it was the GOP that scheduled a key hearing in the Rules Committee to begin in the wee hours of the morning.)

Other Republicans offered a different excuse: They were too young to remember the ACA fight. Just 27 members of the GOP conference were serving in the House at the time. “I wasn’t there. I ain’t that old,” the 66-year-old Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona told me. He joined Congress in 2017 and was a state legislator in 2010. We were speaking on Tuesday, when the GOP bill was still in flux, and Biggs, a conservative, was still on the fence. “I always tell the speaker, if I don’t have time to read the bill, I’m probably a no,” Biggs said. Evidently, Biggs is a fast reader. When the House voted on the megabill less than 48 hours later—and about 10 hours after its final text was released—Biggs was a yes.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Donald Trump’s itinerary for his recent trip to the Middle East featured a glaring omission. The president visited Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, but not Israel, ostensibly America’s main ally in the region. When asked about the snub, he insisted that it wasn’t a snub at all: “This is good for Israel,” Trump said, referring to the alliances he’d be strengthening with countries that were, notably, not named Israel.

By passing over the country, Trump gave a clear signal that Israel’s concerns are not his top priority in the Middle East, and perhaps haven’t been for some time. Judging by his administration’s approach to the region, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. Trump has pursued policies that have repeatedly undermined the agenda of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—and show that divisions between the United States and Israel are widening.

Most Israelis welcomed Trump’s reelection: Almost two-thirds of them believed he would support their interests more than Kamala Harris would, and with good reason. In his first term, he’d moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, torn up America’s nuclear deal with Iran, recognized Israelis’ annexation of the Golan Heights, and helped normalize their relations with several Arab countries. Unlike Harris, their thinking went, Trump wouldn’t compromise with Iran or make them yield to Hamas. Four months into his administration, their faith is being tested.

[Read: Trump is crushing the Netanyahu myth]

Let’s start with Iran. For weeks, the U.S. has been negotiating with Israel’s archenemy over its nuclear program, raising the possibility that the Trump administration might relieve sanctions and soften its stance toward the regime. A deal isn’t inevitable, but the prospect alone is anathema to Netanyahu, who detested America’s previous nuclear agreement and has made opposition to Iran his signature foreign-policy mission.

Gaza, too, has become a source of disagreement, particularly this month, as Israel has ramped up missile strikes on the region. The renewed offensive not only disrupts Trump’s (ridiculous) plan to “take over” the region and rebuild it as the “Riviera of the Middle East”; it also highlights his failure to end the conflict, which he’d promised to do in short order. Netanyahu wants Hamas to be “totally defeated,” a goal he can’t achieve without substantially prolonging the war. But earlier this month, Trump called for a cease-fire, prompting fears in Israel that American support for its military campaign might not last. In another worrisome sign for Israel, the Trump administration recently negotiated the release of an Israeli American dual citizen, Edan Alexander, without the country’s involvement. This bolstered Netanyahu’s critics, who say he hasn’t done enough to free the remaining several dozen Israeli hostages, more than 20 of whom are believed to be alive.

Syria is another sore subject for Israel. During his trip to Saudi Arabia, Trump met with Ahmed al-Sharaa, Syria’s new head of state—the first time a U.S. president has met with a leader from the country in 25 years. Trump announced that he was lifting U.S. sanctions and called al-Sharaa “attractive” and “pretty amazing.” Those probably aren’t the words Netanyahu would use. Israel sees al-Sharaa as a threat, not least because of his former ties to al-Qaeda. In hopes of weakening his new regime, Israel has bombed Syria, built military bases along their shared border, and supported the Syrian Druze opposition. Israeli officials had asked the Trump administration to keep sanctions in place. Trump didn’t listen.

[Read: Can one man hold Syria together?]

The United States is also defying Israel’s interests in Yemen. After the October 7 massacre, the Houthis in Yemen began attacking American naval vessels and conducting missile strikes on Israel in solidarity with Hamas. The U.S. responded by attacking the Houthis, which Israel applauded. Then, earlier this month, the Trump administration negotiated a cease-fire with the Houthis. Israel was pointedly excluded from the deal and left to fend for itself: The agreement was announced only two days after a Houthi missile struck the country’s main airport, and additional strikes on Israel have followed the cease-fire.

More broadly—and perhaps most important in the long term—the Trump administration is less inclined to take on the assertive role that America has traditionally played in the Middle East, and which Israel has come to depend on. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. maintained a sizable military presence in the region and provided enormous support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, even as his administration pushed Israel to negotiate a cease-fire and work with moderate Palestinians. Trump, by contrast, is withdrawing some troops from Syria and has staffed his Cabinet with officials who share his skepticism of foreign intervention. America’s leadership in the Middle East has shaped the region in ways that have massively benefited Israel: deterring and coercing Iran, neutralizing the Islamic State and other terrorists, and conciliating moderate Arab states such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration won’t abandon those roles, but it is already pulling back from some of them.

None of this means, however, that the U.S.-Israel alliance is in crisis. Disagreements will continue to emerge, but Israelis have reason to believe that America’s support will generally remain strong. Most of Trump’s advisers still see themselves as backers of Israel, as do most congressional Republicans. Despite fears from some Israelis, Trump seems unlikely to withdraw support from their military operations in Gaza, in part because he has expressed so little concern for the humanitarian crisis afflicting Palestinians. And the president has continued to support militant Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and appointed an ambassador, Mike Huckabee, who has previously backed Israel’s campaign to annex the region. (Ironically, some of this support has made Netanyahu’s job harder by emboldening the far right of his coalition, whose calls for sweeping policy changes are getting more difficult for him to ignore.)

Nevertheless, Israel’s situation has fundamentally changed compared with only a few years ago. Relative to previous presidents, Trump is much more willing to ignore the country’s interests and pursue goals that openly subvert them. Israel isn’t likely to lose America as an ally. But that ally could soon make the Middle East look a lot more threatening.

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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.

People in a vegetative state may be far more aware than was once thought, Sarah Zhang reports in a recent feature. “In some extraordinary patients, the line between conscious and unconscious is more permeable than one might expect,” she writes. As scientists continue to try to comprehend the inner life of unresponsive patients, their work raises questions both for those living with these conditions and for the people who love them. Can these individuals hear us, and even understand us? What do we owe them? Today’s reading list explores the human mind, and what it feels like to love somebody who cannot communicate the way they once did.

On the Human Mind

The Mother Who Never Stopped Believing Her Son Was Still There

By Sarah Zhang

For decades, Eve Baer remained convinced that her son, unresponsive after a severe brain injury, was still conscious. Science eventually proved her right.

Read the article.

How People With Dementia Make Sense of the World

By Dasha Kiper

The human brain has a way of creating logic, even when it’s drifting from reality.

Read the article.

A Scientific Feud Breaks Out Into the Open

By Ross Andersen

I’m a pseudoscience? No, you’re a pseudoscience!

Read the article.

Still Curious?

The Texas county where “everybody has somebody in their family” with dementia: Risk factors for dementia usually come in clusters—and in Starr County, Texas, an almost entirely Hispanic community, they quickly stack up.How dementia locks people inside their pain: When a person feels pain but doesn’t understand it, they can end up silently suffering, Marion Renault wrote in 2021.

Other Diversions

What the show of the summer knows about intimacyHow to disappearThe beauty that moral courage creates

P.S.

Courtesy of Holly S.

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Holly S. sent this photo of Glacier National Park.

I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Isabel

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The last time President Donald Trump addressed Army cadets at West Point, he was locked in a dramatic conflict with America’s military establishment.

Two days before Trump spoke to the academy’s graduates in June 2020, Army General Mark Milley, the nation’s top military officer, had made an extraordinary televised apology for having appeared in uniform with the president outside the White House, after security personnel used force to clear peaceful protesters from the scene.

Two weeks before Trump’s commencement address, Defense Secretary Mark Esper had made what turned out to be an irreparable break with the president when he pushed back on Trump’s desire to use active-duty troops to put down unrest triggered by the killing of George Floyd. Trump had mused about shooting protesters in the legs, according to Esper, who later wrote, “What transpired that day would leave me deeply troubled about the leader of our country and the decisions he was making.” Trump, who denied suggesting that protesters be shot, fired Esper five months later.

[From the November 2023 issue: The patriot]

Trump’s impulse to enlist the military to respond to nationwide protests generated an outcry from some retired officers, who denounced what they saw as presidential overreach. Most notably, James Mattis, who as Trump’s first defense secretary had tried to steer the president away from decisions he feared would endanger allies or undermine U.S. security, decried Trump’s effort to politicize the military and divide Americans.

That now feels like a different era.

As he returns to West Point to speak at the academy’s commencement today, Trump faces little resistance from the Defense Department. Instead, in selecting civilian leaders at the Pentagon, the president has prioritized perceived loyalty rather than experience. In doing so, he has brought the Defense Department much closer in line with his MAGA political agenda than it was in his first term, and raised questions about who, if anyone, will attempt to stop him if he tries to use the military in unconstitutional ways.

Unlike Mattis, Milley, and Esper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—a former Fox News host and National Guard soldier with little management background—has acted as an accelerant for Trump’s political priorities. He has moved swiftly to root out military diversity programs, overturned Joe Biden–era decisions on transgender troops and the COVID-19 vaccine, and altered combat standards in ways that might push women out of certain jobs.

Hegseth has also expanded U.S. forces’ involvement in repelling illegal migration, augmenting troops’ power to detain migrants at the southern border, ordering military deportation flights, and expanding camps to house migrants at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay. Although the military has long been one of the country’s most respected institutions, its standing has fallen dramatically in recent years, and pulling U.S. troops more deeply into polarizing activities such as policing the border could further erode Americans’ trust in the armed forces.

Like Trump himself, Hegseth has brought a combative, norm-busting approach to his leadership of the Pentagon, attacking enemies online, deriding the “fake news” media, and flouting government security rules. On Wednesday, he led a Christian prayer service in the Pentagon auditorium, a highly unusual move for the leader of a workforce comprising more than 3 million people who come from a wide range of backgrounds and faiths.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, was nominated by Trump after the president abruptly fired General Charles Q. Brown, the second Black officer to serve in that role, and other top officers in February. A respected former National Guard officer with less command experience than most previous JCS chairmen, Caine has maintained a low profile so far and has said little about his views. In his confirmation hearing, Caine—who denied a story Trump has told about him wearing a MAGA hat when they met on a military base in Iraq—said he would be willing to be fired for following the Constitution. (Other top brass, anticipating moves by Hegseth to slim down the military’s uppermost ranks, have sought to keep their head down and avoid contentious issues.)

[Tom Nichols: A Friday-night massacre at the Pentagon]

The service academies, including West Point and the Naval Academy, are now at the center of the administration’s push to remake military culture. In response to a White House order that bans the teaching of “divisive concepts” and references to racism in American history at the academies, leaders at the schools have removed books from library shelves and are altering curricula. Sometimes acting in anticipation of the administration’s preferences, they have also shut down student groups related to race, gender, and ethnicity, and canceled speakers and events they feared could violate the new rules.

It’s difficult to know how West Point cadets feel about all this. The academy has no independent student newspaper and few venues for students to voice their views on such issues. Cadets, like most service members, usually keep their political beliefs to themselves.

Kori Schake, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that Trump is undermining core tenets of U.S. military culture, including the institution’s apolitical nature and service members’ sworn allegiance to the Constitution rather than to any one person. While the checks from Trump’s first term are long gone, Schake said, “what I see as continuity from 2020 is President Trump trying to corrode the good order and discipline of the American military to establish a much more personalistic kind of loyalty.”

In his 2020 remarks at West Point, Trump largely stuck to a typical presidential script, congratulating troops on making it through the rigors of academy life and eulogizing Army leaders including Douglas MacArthur and George Patton. Perhaps his speech today will take a similar tone. If it does, it will mark a departure from his more recent appearances at troop events. When he addressed service members at Al Udeid Air Base, in Qatar, this month, Trump sounded like no other president has in a military setting. He criticized “fake generals” who fail to adhere to his worldview, belittled the role of allies such as France in winning World War II, and suggested that he might run for a third term.

Trump praised the service members assembled around him for “defending our interests, supporting our allies, securing our homeland.”

“And you know what? Making America great again,” he continued. “That’s what’s happened. It’s happened very fast.”

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The beach-read vibes are strong with Sirens, a Netflix miniseries set on a moneyed northeastern island compound that, at first glance, seems awfully familiar. The hydrangeas bloom with manicured abandon. The dramatic tension is stoked with top-shelf liquor and minor acts of class warfare. Absolutely everyone has secrets. The enigmatic trophy wife at the center, Michaela, is played not by Nicole Kidman—as is, at this point, stylistic tradition—but by Julianne Moore, effusing lavender mist and toxic insecurity. Michaela is planning an end-of-summer gala, assisted by her sharp-elbowed assistant, Simone (played by Milly Alcock), but things are thrown into chaos with the arrival of an unexpected guest: Simone’s down-at-heel, grimly judgmental sister, Devon (Meghann Fahy).

The theatricality of the setup—the disruptive stranger, the impending event that will inevitably go very wrong—isn’t happenstance. Sirens was originally a play by the writer Molly Smith Metzler (Maid, Orange Is the New Black), which premiered in 2011under the title Elemeno Pea. Fully Netflixed by Metzler into a five-episode adaptation, the final product is a triumph of the popular-novel-to-series genre: funny, caustic, absurd. The point of this kind of show, typically, is to marry coastal-mansion lifestyle porn with a little light mystery—a body swept onto shore, a metaphorical skeleton rattling its way out of the walk-in closet. On Netflix’s The Perfect Couple, for instance (a 2024 adaptation of Elin Hilderbrand’s novel of the same name), the question of who murdered a wedding guest is less gripping than Kidman’s high-diva turn as a matriarch with a perplexingly ambiguous accent who’s as stiff as a Barbie doll in pale-pink silk.

[Read: Nicole Kidman’s perpetual trick]

Sirens, though, has a more satirical bent, a whiff of White Lotus–esque eat-the-rich cynicism and some truly jarring insight into the bought intimacies of lonely 0.001-percenters. By focusing on the scruffy, foul-mouthed Devon—who waits tables in a falafel shop and has been single-handedly caring for her and Simone’s ailing father (Bill Camp)—the show sets up a collision based on class, an outsider’s dissection of this strange new world. In the first episode, Devon, enraged by an Edible Arrangement her sister has sent in lieu of actually responding to her texts or helping at home, furiously carts said fruit basket via bus, ferry, and a miles-long walk in order to throw lukewarm pieces of melon at Simone. “Don’t send me fruit, you stupid bitch,” Devon shrieks, adding, with confusion, “Who are you? No, seriously. You’re dressed like a doily.”

Fahy has played the sphinxlike wife of a compulsive cheater on The White Lotus, and the sassy sidekick of a bride-to-be on The Perfect Couple. Devon is darker, and much funnier—sour, sweaty, gulping water from a sprinkler by the side of the road in early scenes while an appalled dog walker watches. She’s desperate to liberate Simone from what she sees as a fundamentally toxic job, but Simone, a yapping blond lapdog in Lilly Pulitzer, has never felt more herself than she does under Michaela’s wing.And casting Moore is a fascinating stretch—she’s an actor better known for embodying wounded birds than temperamental alphas, and so her Michaela feels notably vulnerable from the get-go. Fittingly, Michaela’s quirk is that she’s turned her billionaire husband’s compound into a sanctuary for rescued raptors, tending to birds of prey so that they can be unleashed into the wild to kill things anew. Her other hobby, so to speak, is described by her acolytes as her “radical generosity”—spending astonishing amounts of money to help women from humble backgrounds ascend to the highest climbs of society. Devon, you sense, might be her greatest challenge yet.

As thrilling as Fahy is to watch, in some ways, the dynamic between Michaela and Simone is the least predictable part of Sirens: the controlled, high-strung society queen being endlessly fussed over by her enthralled attendant. In the first episode, Simone and Michaela check the state of each other’s breath before an event; when Simone’s fails to pass muster, Michaela gives her assistant her own chewed-up piece of gum, which Simone pops into her mouth without hesitation. Simone also helps Michaela sext her husband, a billionaire named Peter Kell (played irresistibly by Kevin Bacon), squeezing Michaela’s breasts together and drafting language that’s “dirty but not too dirty.” And maybe it’s the Careless People of it all, but I gasped out loud when a fragile Michaela climbed into bed for the night next to Simone, gazing into her assistant’s eyes and demanding secrets like an 8-year-old at a sleepover.

[Read: The awful secret of wealth privilege]

Metzler is clearly fascinated by money and class, particularly as they intersect with gender. Maid, which starred Margaret Qualley as a young mother who flees an abusive relationship and ends up balancing on a knife-edge of homelessness and badly paid domestic work cleaning rich people’s houses, took pains to communicate all the ways in which surviving poverty is its own full-time job. Sirens carefully contrasts the repetitive, arduous work done by Michaela’s staff with the #werk performed by Michaela and her devotees. Simone’s job skirts the two—she’s expected to fawn over her boss and to buttress her emotionally while also dealing with the unpleasant parts of managing a household that Michaela would rather outsource. But Sirens is also particularly thoughtful on the subject of power and how women often wield it, blurring lines between obligation and intimacy—and knowing, always, that the terms of unspecified relationships can change without warning.

Nevertheless, Sirens is a very fun show. In a requisite shopping scene, as Devon is made into a woman fit to attend Michaela’s gala, she wears a sulky sneer throughout that offsets the $22,000 spotted monstrosity her new companions dress her in. (“I look like Beetlejuice!”) Even while the series seems to sense that the dynamics between the three women are the reason we’re watching, it continually throws up haphazard potential mysteries: cult-like antics, reclusive former spouses, all those birds. I understand why, but they’re much less diverting than the relationships the show excavates, the loyalty and love you can buy but never fully count on.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has had a long love affair with junk science, and as secretary of Health and Human Services, he has embraced it once more, most brazenly to justify his false claims that vaccines cause autism. Last week, he brought yet another shoddily designed study to a different fight. In a Senate Committee hearing, he cited a report that few scientists would recognize as science in order to justify an FDA safety review of the drug mifepristone, which is used in the majority of abortions in the United States.

President Donald Trump had previously asked HHS to study the drug’s safety, and Kennedy emphasized at the hearing that a review of the drug would be a top FDA priority. The unusually high rate of adverse events identified in the report, he noted, “indicates that at very least, the label should be changed.” In other words, the top U.S. health official is prepared to rework—based at least in part on a poorly designed report that has not undergone scientific review—the government’s official guidance on a widely used drug.

The report that Kennedy cited was posted late last month to the website of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank focused on “pushing back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives,” according to its website. The study’s authors, Jamie Bryan Hall, EPPC’s director of data analysis, and Ryan Anderson, the organization's president, are not health experts, and neither seems to have a record of publishing scientific research through peer review. Their methods deviated wildly from what is standard in the world of health research, and so, predictably, did their conclusions: In sharp contrast to dozens of trials conducted around the globe over decades, the EPPC report determined that mifepristone is a danger to women.

The EPPC has written that its report “presents a careful and conservative assessment of abortion pill safety.” However, the study lacks basic transparency about how that assessment was made. The authors relied on data from an insurance database that, according to the report, included more than 800,000 mifepristone abortions from 2017 to 2023. But the authors don’t actually say which database they used, so “there’s no way for anybody to try to re-create their analysis to see if they receive the same results,” Sara Redd, of the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told me. (In an email, Hunter Estes, EPPC’s communications director, told me that the center’s contract with their data vendor prevents EPPC from sharing the name of the database or even of the vendor. But, he added, “this insurance data is available from approximately a dozen data brokers and is widely used by researchers and health professionals.”)

[Read: The other abortion pill]

The report also took some peculiar methodological steps to arrive at its conclusions. One of its key findings is that more than 10 percent of people who take mifepristone experience what the study refers to as “serious adverse events.” (A variety of studies put the rate of significant adverse events from medical abortions involving mifepristone at less than 0.3 percent, which makes the drug safer than Tylenol and Viagra.) But the EPPC study’s unusually wide-ranging criteria for defining those events raise a lot of questions. The researchers counted ectopic pregnancy as an adverse event, arguing that doctors should have ruled it out before prescribing mifepristone. (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists acknowledges that mifepristone can be dangerous in cases of ectopic pregnancy but says that ruling out the rare condition—a process that involves an ultrasound—is unnecessary for most women taking the drug.) The authors counted episodes in which a surgical procedure was required to complete the abortion after mifepristone—patients require additional treatment in about one in 20 cases, so the FDA considers this a recognized outcome rather than an adverse effect. They counted “other life-threatening adverse events,” including heart problems and mental-health concerns, that women in the study experienced in the weeks after the abortion—which may have had nothing to do with mifepristone.

They also counted “serious” events documented during emergency-room visits made within 45 days of a patient taking mifepristone. However, the report doesn’t fully explain how they knew that those events were connected with mifepristone, and to judge which ones counted as “serious,” they used a scale designed for cancer research, which has not been validated for use in studies of abortion care. Loosely counting emergency-room visits could artificially inflate the estimate of risk associated with getting an abortion, Ushma Upadhyay, an epidemiologist and a reproductive-health researcher at UC San Francisco, told me: In a study she led of abortion-related emergency-room visits from 2009 to 2013, half of patients had such mild symptoms that they did not need any treatment. She also said that the authors did not effectively distinguish between the outcomes of abortions and of miscarriages treated with mifepristone, or between normal amounts of post-abortion bleeding and severe hemorrhage.

In the weeks following the report’s publication, EPPC published two follow-up documents with more details about the study’s methodology, which experts told me are still not convincing. As the documents explained, the authors relied on diagnostic codes to separate miscarriages, which are often also treated with mifepristone, from abortions—a practice that may yield imprecise results. The report included only suicidal and homicidal ideation among mental-health diagnoses categorized as serious adverse events—but that still does not prove that those diagnoses were connected to an abortion, Redd told me. It used “only codes related to hemorrhage or serious bleeding (according to the FDA definition)”—which would still not be enough to distinguish between the normal amount of post-mifepristone bleeding and something more serious, Upadhyay said.

[Read: A possible substitute for mifepristone is already on pharmacy shelves]

According to EPPC, peer review of the report was not possible due to “extensive pro-abortion bias in the peer-review process,” but a group of data scientists, analysts, and engineers “conducted and validated” the project, with assistance from doctors. None of their names appears on the report. When I asked about that decision, the EPPC representative wrote, “It is routine for individuals with controversial opinions to be subjected to a range of personal and professional attacks, including threats of violence in their own homes.”

So far, the most prevalent attacks on the study have been about its substance. Alice Mark, an ob-gyn and the medical director of the National Abortion Federation, told me that “to call it a study dignifies it too much.” Some anti-abortion advocates, too, have cautioned against overstating the study’s rigor: Earlier this month, Politico reported that Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life OBGYNs, said on a private Zoom call with anti-abortion leaders that although the report contains credible data and should inspire further research, it is “not a study in the traditional sense” and “not conclusive proof of anything.”

Anti-abortion activists have long seen mifepristone as a problem. In the years since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to overturn the national right to abortion, abortions have increased in part due to a 2021 FDA decision that allowed mifepristone and misoprostol (a drug often used in parallel for abortion) to be prescribed via telehealth and mailed. According to reporting by Politico, questioning mifepristone’s safety is part of a larger strategy called “Rolling Thunder” that aims to cut off that access. High-quality data have failed to validate those questions, so second-rate research has often been used to make the case against mifepristone. In 2023, for example, a federal judge ruled that mifepristone should be taken off the market by citing low-quality studies that reported adverse effects from mifepristone. (The Supreme Court later threw out the lawsuit on procedural grounds.) Due to their “lack of scientific rigor,” two of the studies cited were ultimately retracted by the journal that had published them.

[Read: Anti-abortion conservatives’ first target if Trump returns]

When, in the past, the FDA has evaluated mifepristone’s safety—which it’s done several times since mifepristone’s initial approval, in 2000—it has expanded access to mifepristone rather than curtailed it. If the agency evaluates mifepristone again, and its staff are allowed to independently assess the science, the FDA could loosen its rules for mifepristone even more, Elizabeth Raymond, an ob-gyn and a researcher who specializes in mifepristone safety, told me. Plenty of data support using mifepristone later in pregnancy than is currently approved, for instance.

But Upadhyay told me she worries that FDA Chief Marty Makary—who has previously claimed that fetuses can “resist” the tools of abortion by 20 weeks of gestation—or Kennedy could put their thumb on the scale to restrict mifepristone access, regardless of what FDA staff recommend. “I don’t want them to do a review, because I don’t trust them to base any decisions they make on science,” Upadhyay said. (HHS and the FDA did not answer my questions about the FDA’s plans to review mifepristone safety on the basis of the EPPC report. In an email, an HHS spokesperson told me of the FDA, “The agency rigorously evaluates the latest scientific data, leveraging gold standard science to make informed decisions.”)

Although Kennedy has said that he reads scientific papers critically for a living, his approach to the medical literature most resembles “an extreme version of what lawyers do to defend a client: create a narrative and then find supporting evidence,” Robert Califf, who led the FDA under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, told me an email. The scientific method involves the opposite: constructing a hypothesis and trying to disprove it with an open mind. When different people conducting the same experiment come to the same conclusion, it’s not a sign of a shared ideology; it’s a sign of a shared reality.

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To understand how much the American right has changed, consider its journey from fiercely resisting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to expand executive power to surpassing them. A Supreme Court opinion yesterday gave Donald Trump a big win by allowing him to fire members of the so-called independent regulatory agencies. (At least, they used to be independent.)

The majority ruled that the president could remove these officials for now, with arguments to come later. The opinion is not conservative in any meaningful sense. It essentially overturns 90 years of precedent, and it does so using the Court’s “shadow docket,” which means an unsigned opinion delivered typically without oral arguments. Although couched in mild terms as a stay on lower-court rulings, this ruling—if it holds—will signal a radical shift that heralds a new era of big government.

These agencies—such as the Federal Communications Commission and the National Labor Relations Board—have a hybrid structure established by law. The president appoints members, and the Senate confirms them; they make their own decisions and are not directed by the White House. For the authors of Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s administration, they are a major problem. “What we’re trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” Russell Vought, the head of the Office of Management and Budget and an intellectual architect of Project 2025, told The New York Times in 2023. (I lay this out in detail in my recent book about Project 2025.)

In allowing the firings of members of these agencies, the right-wing majority would invalidate Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 Supreme Court ruling. At the time, Roosevelt was looking to seize power for the executive branch, and American conservatives were horrified. The Democrat had found that William Humphrey, a staunch small-government member of the Federal Trade Commission, was an impediment to his agenda, and fired him. Humphrey sued and ultimately triumphed—posthumously—with a 9–0 Supreme Court ruling agreeing that Roosevelt could not remove him.

The right has long resisted centralization of power in the presidency and viewed Roosevelt as a boogeyman. But the MAGA right has embraced his approach, if not his policies. Congress very clearly did not intend for these agencies to be under presidential control, but Vought and his circle believe that the structure is unconstitutional. “There are no independent agencies. Congress may have viewed them as such—SEC or the FCC, CFPB, the whole alphabet soup—but that is not something that the Constitution understands,” Vought told Tucker Carlson in November. A major goal of Project 2025 is to get the Supreme Court to overturn Humphrey’s, and now that goal is in sight.

The reasoning of yesterday’s opinion is sometimes bizarre. The Trump administration argues that because these agencies function to execute the law, they ought to be under the control of the executive—that is, the president. The majority wrote that it believes that the administration is likely to prove that the agencies do indeed “exercise considerable executive power.” Having accepted that argument, it concludes that “the Government faces greater risk of harm from an order allowing a removed officer to continue exercising the executive power than a wrongfully removed officer faces from being unable to perform her statutory duty.”

In other words, the majority argues that even though the existing system has been in place for 90 years, it is too dangerous to leave in place for a short time longer and must be set aside—even if the Court ultimately changes its mind and reinstates the members after oral arguments. This is not conservative: It neither takes a cautious approach toward change nor conforms to stare decisis, the idea that courts should defer to precedent. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in dissent, “Our emergency docket, while fit for some things, should not be used to overrule or revise existing law.”

The majority also excludes the Federal Reserve from its ruling, protecting Fed Chair Jerome Powell from Trump’s ire. This is probably a good thing for the nation’s economy, but as Kagan notes, the reasoning is flimsy. The carve-out simply reinforces the idea that the right-wing majority is functioning as politicians in robes, willing to assist Trump but wary of the economic impact of a Powell defenestration.

If the ruling stands, the Supreme Court will have decreed a big shift of power from Congress to the White House. The opinion came the same day that the Government Accounting Office concluded that the administration is violating the Impoundment Control Act of 1974 by withholding funds appropriated by Congress for an electric-vehicle-charger program. This case may be coming to 1 First Street NE soon enough: Trump and Vought also want to get the Court to declare the ICA unconstitutional.

These changes may sound dry and academic, but giving new powers to the president will have direct and serious effects on the way Americans live their lives. We can already glimpse what post-Humphrey’s America might look like, because agency leaders appointed by Trump are already proceeding not as independent actors but as surrogates for the White House.

At the Federal Communications Commission, Chairman Brendan Carr (a Project 2025 author) has used his power to threaten the broadcast license of outlets that are critical of Trump and to bully CBS News over an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris. And just this week, the Federal Trade Commission reportedly sent the liberal watchdog group Media Matters a letter aligning with a lawsuit from Elon Musk’s X over a report it published about anti-Semitism on X. (Media Matters has denied wrongdoing.) If a Democratic administration took the same action against a similar conservative group, the shouts of “censorship” from the right would be deafening.

With the Supreme Court appearing ready to grant the president this new control, the only obstacle to growing authoritarian power is for Congress to defend its prerogatives—to write laws and create structures for agencies that function without White House interference. The current Congress doesn’t offer much reason for optimism.

Related:

Independent agencies never stood a chance under Trump.The Project 2025 presidency

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

RFK Jr.’s worst nightmareThe debt is about to matter again.The anti-natalist’s revenge

Today’s News

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s ban on Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students.The United Nations secretary-general said that “Palestinians in Gaza are enduring what may be the cruelest phase” of the Israel-Hamas war and that the entire population of Gaza is at risk of famine.Multiple people were stabbed by a woman at a train station in Hamburg, Germany, according to officials.

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The Books Briefing: The cartoonistAlison Bechdel is willing to let her main character be both her double and the butt of her joke, Emma Sarappo writes.

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Evening Read

Serwarah, a 21-year-old from Afghanistan, at Hogar Luisa, a Catholic Church reception center for refugees and migrants in Panama City (Tarina Rodriguez for The Atlantic)

“All They Want Is America. All They Have Is Panama.”

By Gisela Salim-Peyer

The Decapolis Hotel advertises “spacious suites & ocean views” in a business area in Panama City. The glass tower is also one of the few hotels in the city that can accommodate 299 people on short notice. When three planes carrying non-Panamanian deportees arrived in mid-February from the United States, the Decapolis redirected its guests to partner hotels and turned over its trendy lobby to armed security personnel, who ensured that no one could get in or out.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What are people still doing on X?It should not be controversial to plead for Gaza’s children.The long war that ended last weekA striking moment in American activismThe pedestrians who abetted a hawk’s deadly attack

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Watch. What started as the adventures of a brilliant spy morphed into the mythology of an exemplary human being. David Sims on the unbearable weight of Mission: Impossible, as felt in the franchise’s latest film (out now in theaters).

Read. Wages for Housework, a book by Emily Callaci, details the 1970s campaign that fought to get women paid for their work in the home, Lily Meyer writes.

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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, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

On a special edition of Washington Week With The Atlantic, CNN’s chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper and the Axios political correspondent Alex Thompson joined Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss Original Sin, their new book about when Joe Biden started showing signs of decline—and how some people behind the scenes questioned his fitness to serve as president.

In the four months since Biden left office, a consensus seems to have emerged that the former president’s bid for reelection all but guaranteed Donald Trump’s return to power. “There was the fine Joe Biden … and then there was the nonfunctioning Biden,” Tapper said last night. “And the nonfunctioning Biden would rear his head increasingly and more and more disturbingly as time went on.”

“Now the question is,” Tapper continued, “when did the nonfunctioning Biden emerge so often it was a real question as to whether he should serve for president?”

To see Tapper and Thompson discussing this and more with Goldberg, watch the full episode.

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Photographs by Evan Jenkins

A Wednesday morning in May is a strange time to be trick-or-treating—especially if you’re an adult wearing business casual. The Indiana Convention Center had just opened to visitors for the second day of Sweets & Snacks, the largest gathering of the candy and snack industry in North America. Along with nearly 15,000 other attendees, I went from booth to booth trying samples. By 10:40, I was sipping a complimentary blue-raspberry-watermelon Icee while a woman to my right took a selfie with Mr. Jelly Belly. At the Slim Jim booth a few feet away, a bunch of people in blazers gathered around a smorgasbord of meat sticks. The only thing that could get between attendees and their snacks was the occasional free beer or run-in with a mascot. At one point, the Jack Link’s sasquatch attempted to steal my Entenmann’s mini muffins.

I had come to Sweets & Snacks to taste the future of junk food. The annual conference is the industry’s most prominent venue to show off its new products. Judging by my three days in Indianapolis, the hot new trends are freeze-dried candy and anything that tastes vaguely East Asian: think “matcha latte” popcorn. But right now, that future looks shaky, particularly for confections. Candy embodies everything that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. believes is wrong with the American diet. It’s mainly sugar (which Kennedy has called “poison”), counts as an ultra-processed food (which Kennedy has called “poison”), and is often colored with synthetic food dyes (which Kennedy has called “poison”). Last month, RFK Jr. announced a goal of eliminating synthetic food dyes by the end of 2026, a major threat to an industry predicated on making bright, eye-catching treats. In an email, an HHS spokesperson said that “Secretary Kennedy has been clear: we must build a healthier future by making smarter choices about what goes into our food.” The spokesperson added that “the secretary is committed to working with industry to prioritize public health.”

Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic

At Sweets & Snacks, I did not encounter an industry that was gearing up for change. Instead, it was RFK Jr.’s worst nightmare: an unabashed celebration of all things sugary, artificial, and indulgent. On the convention floor, it was hard to find a single product—beyond the litany of meat sticks and the occasional mixed nut—that would get RFK Jr.’s stamp of approval. Even a finalist for the convention’s annual salty-snack award, Vlasic Pickle Balls, contained tartrazine, a synthetic yellow dye that Kennedy has specifically bashed. As I stuffed my face with sugary treats, I began to wonder: Was the industry delusional about Kennedy, or the other way around?

RFK Jr.’s presence was conspicuously absent from the moment I arrived in Candy Land. “Anywhere over here is fine,” I told my Lyft driver as we pulled up to a hulking red M&M. Candy companies have already been investing in healthier options: Mars bought snack-bar maker Kind in 2020 and proudly displayed the bars in a booth alongside their more traditional M&Ms, Skittles, and Starburst. But the only vague mention of the looming RFK Jr. threat on the convention floor was a billboard posted by the conference’s organizers, the National Confectioners Association (NCA). It reiterated the candy lobby’s longstanding message: Candy shouldn’t be lumped together with other ultra-processed foods, because it is an occasional indulgence.

It’s hardly surprising that candy companies aren’t abruptly changing their products in response to pressure, even when it’s coming from the country’s top health regulator. Americans bought $54 billion worth of these treats last year. In April, the health secretary boasted that the U.S. food industry had “voluntarily agreed” to remove synthetic dyes from their products, but judging from the items on display at Sweets & Snacks, the candy industry has little interest in fulfilling that promise anytime soon. When I asked Christopher Gindlesperger, NCA’s senior vice president of public affairs and communication, if the candy industry had an understanding with RFK Jr. to eliminate synthetic dyes voluntarily, his response was simple: “No.”

Some of the discussions around dyes are understandably frustrating for the industry. Federal regulators haven’t done the sort of thorough academic evaluation of these dyes that’s typically expected before trying to push them out of the food supply. (The state of California released its own evaluation in 2021 and found that “synthetic food dyes are associated with adverse neurobehavioral outcomes in some children.”) At the same time, the candy industry isn’t doing much to signal that it recognizes the growing concern over these ingredients. It’s hard to be sympathetic toward companies that purposefully market unhealthy products to children through the use of mascots and funky colors. I was taken aback when I stumbled upon a *Despicable Me–*branded coloring set that let kids color in a cookie with a marker filled with tartrazine.

Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic

The industry’s efforts to uphold the status quo are risky. If Kennedy is intent on enforcing an actual ban on synthetic food coloring, it could have a monumental impact. Making the switch to natural colors is not as simple as FDA Commissioner Marty Makary let on when he told food makers during a press conference last month to just start coloring their products with fruit and vegetable juices. Natural colors are typically more expensive, and they’re far more finicky than their synthetic alternatives. Moisture, pH, and even light can cause the dyes to degrade. A naturally colored M&M might be red when it leaves the factory, but if it sits in your pantry too long, it could take on a not-so-appetizing color. There’s a question, too, of whether there are even enough fruits and vegetables in the world to supply the food industry with enough natural dye to serve the massive U.S. market. “The amount of crops that go into some of these dyes is just so high that we don’t necessarily have these crops planted,” Renee Leber, a food scientist at the Institute of Food Technologists, told me.

Here’s yet another concern: Natural dyes may alter the taste of certain treats. The company behind Dum-Dums lollipops has suggested that replacing artificial red dye with beet juice could make its red lollipops taste like beets. (That doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Many companies already sell products in Europe without synthetic dyes. And Katjes, a German company sandwiched between Jack Link’s and Harvest Snaps, was giving away its rainbow unicorn gummies, which looked plenty eye-catching to me, despite being colored solely with fruit and vegetable juices.)

Food dyes are only one part of the RFK Jr. threat that the candy industry faces right now. Yesterday, the Trump administration’s “MAHA Commission” released a much-touted report on childhood health, calling out sugar and ultra-processed foods as a major contributor to the youth chronic-disease problem. When I spoke with Gindlesperger, he was quick to point out that candy is far from the biggest cause of America’s sugar problem. (Sweetened drinks are.) “People understand that chocolate and candy are treats, and consumers have carved out a special place for them in their lives,” he said. He cited an analysis of CDC survey data that received funding from the NCA, which showed that people in the United States eat roughly 40 calories a day of candy.

But that analysis doesn’t distinguish between kids and adults. Data are scant on children’s consumption of candy, though if you’ve walked with a kid down a candy aisle, you can probably tell that most haven’t fully grasped that gummy worms are meant to be an occasional indulgence. “It’s really difficult for a child who has access to candy to stop eating it,” Natalie Muth, a pediatrician and dietitian, told me. Candy consumption among kids, she added, is a “big problem.”

In a country where nearly 20 percent of children are obese, more needs to be done to protect people from the candy industry’s worst tendencies. But mandating any such changes will be incredibly difficult for RFK Jr. To ban tartrazine alone, the FDA would need to compile a docket of information demonstrating its harm, issue a draft regulation, take public comments, and then finalize the regulation. Gindlesperger said the candy industry is waiting for the FDA to formally review the safety of the dyes it takes issue with: “We support and would welcome that review.” Even after all those steps, the food industry can—and likely would—sue. There’s even less precedent for cracking down on sugar. Kennedy has acknowledged that a sugar ban is unlikely, and instead has argued for more education about the risks of having a sweet tooth.

If Kennedy succeeds in ushering in actual reform, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement won’t truly revolutionize the American diet until it figures out how to redefine our relationship with certain foods. Whether Kennedy likes it or not, candy is part of our national psyche. He can’t simply wave a wand and ban trick-or-treating or candy canes. Over the course of three days, I saw grown adults fill multiple shopping bags with free treats. Candy companies displayed bags of their products to show retailers what they’d look like in a store, and the bags literally had to be taped down to avoid getting swiped. (Some still were.) I learned that attendees commonly bring a second suitcase just to haul their loot home.

Evan Jenkins for The Atlantic

Nothing quite epitomized the affection for treats like the impromptu dance party that broke out near the close of the conference. Chester Cheetah, Ernie the Keebler Elf, the purple Nerd, the Lemonhead, Bazooka Joe, Clark Cheese Head, and Chewbie, the Hi-Chew mascot, all began to sway in unison to a marching band that was hired to entertain guests. Conference attendees clamored to get a video of the spectacle and snap a selfie with their favorite mascot. The moment was absurd, and funny, and more than a little embarrassing. Still, I couldn’t help but pull out my own phone and crack a smile. Perhaps it was nostalgia for bygone Halloween nights, or maybe all the sugar was just getting to my head.

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Imagine a child at home, crying. She is inconsolable, screaming for food. A neighbor tries to offer some bread; the door is blocked. A grocery store down the road has plenty of supplies; no one can get to it. The clock ticks down and the child starves, her baby fat melting to nothing.

Multiply that possibility by thousands. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian children are starving while food is sitting in trucks, just out of reach. Israel began a total blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza on March 2, the longest such stoppage since the current war began, putting the region at “critical risk of famine,” according to food-security experts. Israel finally agreed to ease the blockade on Sunday and said that 93 trucks had crossed the border on Tuesday and that an additional 107 had yesterday. Aid has begun to reach civilians after reported delays. But children continue to go hungry.

There is no question that the situation for children in Gaza is grave. The World Health Organization stated on May 13 that since Israel’s blockade had begun, 57 children had reportedly died from malnutrition, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. More than 14,000 children under 5 are at risk of “severe acute malnutrition” in Gaza over roughly the next year, according to a recent food-security report. Tom Fletcher, a United Nations official, in a widely shared misstatement of that statistic, warned on Tuesday that 14,000 babies could die within 48 hours unless aid was delivered to them. A former Israeli-government spokesperson told The Times of Israel that Fletcher had caused “a global media panic about something totally made up.” Getting the facts straight in dire situations such as this is crucial. But the truth remains that children are starving, needlessly, while aid struggles to reach them.

[Read: ‘In three months, half of them will be dead’]

In response to the developments in Gaza, the children’s entertainer Rachel Accurso, known to babies and toddlers the world over as “Ms. Rachel,” made an emotional plea in a video posted to her Instagram earlier this week. (The video, which referred to the inaccurate 14,000-babies stat, no longer appears on her page.) While holding her own round-cheeked baby daughter, she showed a disturbing photo of a gaunt Palestinian baby, whose each and every rib was visible under her skin. “Dear world leaders, please help this baby,” Accurso said. “Please, please look at her; just please look in her eyes for one minute.”

Accurso has been an outspoken advocate for Palestinian children, who have suffered at such a scale that in December 2023, UNICEF called Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” Her focus on children is apt: Nearly half of Gaza’s population is children—and children are especially vulnerable to malnutrition. Yet she has faced backlash for her statements; last month, a pro-Israel group called for the Department of Justice to investigate whether she was working for Hamas. (“This accusation is not only absurd, it’s patently false,” she told The New York Times.) Online commenters have accused her of focusing on Palestinians to the exclusion of Israeli children. (She has not ignored Israeli children—she has shared sympathetic posts about the effects of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on children. “I’m thinking not only of the Israeli children taken hostage,” she wrote recently, “but also those who witnessed horrific acts of violence that day—their innocence stolen in an instant.”) In an interview with the journalist Mehdi Hasan, Accurso said, “It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering.”

That a person whose job is to care about children should be criticized for caring about children is ludicrous. It should not need to be said, and it should not be controversial to say it, but: Starving children is wrong. If pointing that out lands you in hot water, that is a symptom of something deeply broken in our culture. Everyone should care if children are needlessly suffering, wherever they are suffering.

If or when the aid sitting in those trucks reaches the Palestinian people, it will go only a fraction of the way toward addressing widespread hunger. What the food-security report released earlier this month actually stated is that the entire population of Gaza is food insecure. It also estimated that from May to September of this year, nearly 470,000 people will experience “catastrophic food insecurity,” meaning that more than 1 in 5 will face starvation if the situation doesn’t change. Nearly 71,000 children under 5 and nearly 17,000 pregnant or breastfeeding women were projected to need treatment for “acute malnutrition” between April of this year and March 2026. (Of those 71,000 children, 14,100 cases—the figure that the UN official seems to have mis-cited—are projected to be “severe.”)

According to The New York Times, Israel has publicly claimed that its blockade in Gaza was not a threat to civilians. In a statement on Thursday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Israel had sent 92,000 aid trucks into Gaza since October 7, 2023. “More than enough food to feed everyone in Gaza,” he said. This claim contradicts statements from the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and multiple international aid organizations that hunger in the region is at crisis levels. And anonymous Israeli-military sources told the Times that, in private, some officials have admitted that food is running out. Israel has also said that it started the blockade in part because it believed Hamas was stealing aid and using it to fuel its fight—an accusation Hamas has denied. Netanyahu also asserted on Thursday that Israel had “devised a mechanism” with U.S. allies in which “American companies will distribute the food directly to Palestinian families,” in “safe zones secured” by the Israeli military. The UN has criticized the plan on the grounds that, among other things, it amounts to forced displacement, requiring Palestinians to relocate in order to access aid.

The grim reality that war is hell does not mean that anyone should accept mass starvation among children, anywhere, as inevitable. And we should certainly not accept it when available food is kept from children’s reach. (We should be just as alarmed that the United States is contributing to global malnutrition in its own way: By gutting agencies such as USAID, the country has disrupted the flow of assistance that previously went to malnourished children around the world, including the supply of a vital nutritional paste. According to the WHO, nearly half of all deaths among children under 5 globally are attributed to malnutrition.)

Even before Israel’s blockade of Gaza, getting lifesaving aid to starving children and their families in the Strip was difficult. The UN’s former emergency-relief coordinator has described the task as “in all practical terms, impossible.” Trucks carrying supplies have had limited points of entry, faced long waits at the border and looting, and been unable to be sure of safe passage if they do get into the region. Israeli fire has hit aid convoys on multiple occasions and killed many humanitarian workers. (Earlier this year, Israel disputed the UN’s figures on the rate at which aid was entering Gaza. But Israel’s own numbers fell far short of the amount of aid required to meet basic food needs, as estimated by the World Food Programme.)

[David A. Graham: A deadly strike in Gaza]

The trucks let in so far are addressing only a drop in the ocean of need—and the decision to allow them through cannot be described as a good-faith effort to prevent a potential famine. Rather, comments made by Netanyahu suggest that this was a concession made to retain the support of Israel’s allies, including the United States. The Washington Post recently reported that in a video of Netanyahu posted to social media, he said that “we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.” His professed concern seemed to be not that people are starving, but that allies had told him they “could not ‘handle pictures of mass starvation,’” the Post reported.

In her Instagram post, Accurso asked viewers to think of children they knew and loved. She said of Gaza’s children: “If you’re not going to stand up for them, you might as well come out and say you don’t see them like you see our kids.” Another icon of children’s TV, the late, great Mister Rogers, famously said that when we see scary things in the news, we should “look for the helpers.” In Gaza, we know where the helpers are. They’re right there at the gates, trying to get in.

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Something remarkable happened last week, though it didn’t get the attention it deserved: A long and brutal war came to an end.

For more than four decades, the Kurdish militant group known as the PKK waged an insurgency against the Turkish state that left some 40,000 people dead and reshaped the lives of millions. The PKK’s announcement on May 12 that it had “fulfilled its historical mission” and was ending the armed struggle it has waged since 1984 got little notice outside Turkey, partly because the world was distracted by Donald Trump’s flattery tour of the Persian Gulf monarchies. But that’s the way it often is with wars: magnetic at the start, ignored when the violence fades. “War makes rattling good history,” the novelist Thomas Hardy observed a century ago, “but peace makes poor reading.”

The PKK’s decision to disarm came two months after its imprisoned founder and leader, Abdullah Öcalan, issued a statement suggesting that the war had become obsolete. Öcalan had held secret meetings with the Turkish government for a year, but the content of those talks remains a mystery, and it is still far from clear what the PKK—or the Kurds more broadly—stands to gain from the group’s decision to forswear violence and instead focus on “building a democratic society,” as their announcement put it.

[Read: Erdoğan sets his sights on Israel]

The Turkish government now has an opportunity to consolidate the peace by offering some kind of amnesty to the PKK’s fighters, who have not yet handed over their abundant weapons, and by addressing the grievances that sparked the war in the first place: more cultural rights and respect for the Kurds, an ethnic group that makes up about 18 percent of Turkey’s population. The Kurds are also substantial minorities in Syria, Iraq, and Iran, where the PKK insurgency had important spillover effects.

If Turkey fails to seize the moment, the conflict could erupt again. That has happened before. I was there the last time peace talks between the state and the PKK broke down, in 2015, and I saw the consequences up close. Cities and towns across southeastern Turkey were bombed, more than 1,000 people were killed in the following months, and thousands of activists and members of pro-Kurdish parties were thrown in prison on trumped-up charges. Many remain there.

So far, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has described the PKK’s decision as a victory against terrorism. But the PKK is expecting political concessions from Turkey, including amnesty for its fighters and a broader recognition of Kurdish political and cultural rights. As one of the group’s leading figures, Murat Karayilan, said last week: “We believe the armed struggle must end—but unless the state makes legal changes, peace won’t be possible in practice.”

The PKK’s leaders see their latest move less as a surrender than as the advent of a new phase in their movement, which has long promoted an ideology—leftist, secular, environmentalist—that sits uncomfortably with Erdoğan’s Islamist authoritarianism. That was apparent in the video the group released last week, showing a group of its leaders in combat fatigues, chanting an oath to Öcalan. “I will fight against the dominant and state-worshipping system that dominates our civilization,” they said in unison. “I will keep alive all the values created by the PKK.”

Öcalan has been living in isolation on the prison island of Imrali, in the Sea of Marmara, since his capture in 1999. Now a white-haired 77-year-old, he maintains a cultish authority over the PKK; his portrait hangs everywhere, and he is known by the reverential moniker “Apo” (“Uncle”). About 20 years ago, he became a devotee of Murray Bookchin, the late Jewish eco-anarchist then living in Vermont, and integrated Bookchin’s thinking into the PKK’s doctrine.

The government has been extremely guarded in its comments about Öcalan and the PKK’s decision, but the viability of the new arrangement will depend on what it offers the group in exchange for relinquishing its weapons. “If they offer too little, that’s a problem for the PKK and its supporters,” Aliza Marcus, the author of Blood and Belief, a history of the movement, told me. If the government appears to be granting too much, that could anger Erdoğan’s right-wing-nationalist coalition partners, who tend to see Kurds as a threat to Turkish unity. That Öcalan will be released is very unlikely, for example, and his top deputies are expected to be given some kind of asylum in other countries. But many rank-and-file PKK members may be allowed to return to their old life.

One possible point of division lies in Syria, where an affiliate of the PKK has run a de facto statelet in that country’s northeast for the past decade, holding up Öcalan as its ideological leader. Erdoğan said the new announcement would apply to the Syrian affiliate, known as the Syrian Democratic Forces. But the leaders of the SDF have made clear that they will not be bound by it.

Within Turkey, whatever the outcome of the political give-and-take between Erdoğan and the PKK, this peace effort seems likelier to hold than its predecessors, in part because the PKK has lost some of its earlier advantages. The Turkish military has developed killer drones and other technologies that allow it to hold Kurdish leaders under siege even in remote strongholds in the Qandil mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan. And many Kurds have grown weary of the war, which has made their life miserable for decades.

The Kurds also have something to offer Erdoğan. He has hinted through proxies that he wants to change Turkey’s constitution so that he can remain in power after his second term as president ends in 2028—but that would be difficult without the support of the Kurdish political parties. The Kurds would also like to see a revised constitution: one that would modify the definition of Turkish nationality—now framed in ethnic terms that make them feel excluded—to a more civic model.

Erdoğan has never actually proposed this cynical quid pro quo, but comments by some of his allies suggest that it is at the core of the presumptive agreement with the PKK. If so, he is taking a risk. Changing the constitution would likely require a popular referendum, and polls suggest that most Turks oppose an amendment to allow the president a third term. Even the Kurds may balk.

[Read: We study repression in Turkey. Now we see it here.]

“If the constitution is not democratic, people won’t vote for it,” says Ceylan Akça, a parliamentarian who represents the city of Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, for the pro-Kurdish party known as DEM.

Many ordinary Kurds have high expectations, Akça told me. They hope to see Kurdish political prisoners released from jail, greater tolerance for their language and culture, and a revision to the country’s anti-terrorism law, which is now written in a way that appears to target Kurds. Above all, Akça said, they want a more inclusive understanding of what it means to be a Turkish citizen, whether that is reflected in the constitution or in government policies.

Akça traveled around Turkey in recent weeks, alongside other legislators, holding town-hall-style meetings to help ordinary Kurds make sense of the PKK’s decision to stop fighting. Many of the gatherings were emotionally wrenching, she told me; a lot of the participants had lost family members in the insurgency.

“I saw a lot of people crying as they watched the announcement,” Akça told me. “It’s the end of an era.” Her own message, she said, was to reassure people that a more peaceful and democratic day was coming.

“Now is the right time for the state to tell people they don’t need to be afraid,” she said.

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They chained the campus gates, occupied buildings, and burned effigies. They pounded on car hoods, waved hand-drawn signs, roared in rage. In the spring of 1988, students at Gallaudet University, a school for the Deaf in Washington, D.C., staged a week-long protest that drew international attention. That year, Gallaudet was on the cusp of finally appointing a Deaf president for the first time in its 104-year history, but the non-Deaf board of trustees balked, choosing a hearing person over two Deaf candidates. Though she later denied it, Jane Bassett Spilman, the board’s chair, reportedly said, “Deaf people are not ready to function in a hearing world.”

Incensed, the students revolted, demanding representation. Beyond lively protests, they also organized their messaging and communicated passionately to the press. What was at first written off as mere youthful rebellion, destined to fizzle out, ultimately yielded the appointment of a Deaf president, and helped galvanize the greater movement that led to the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act.

The new Apple TV+ documentary Deaf President Now! chronicles the students’ actions, which amounted to one of the most effective campus protests of the modern era. Co-directed by Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) and the Deaf activist, actor, and author Nyle DiMarco, the film unearths a particular period in American activism and a hinge point in Gallaudet’s history, but it also doubles as an argument for thinking differently about Deafness, and disability, in general. (Guggenheim’s production company, Concordia Studio, is funded by Laurene Powell Jobs and Emerson Collective, which also owns The Atlantic.) At a time when college campuses, corporations, and the U.S. government are diminishing—or even overturning—DEI initiatives, the movie’s message feels especially resonant.

Deaf President Now! is by no means scold-y or preachy, but it asks those who can hear to contemplate the many layers of life as a Deaf or disabled person. Layers, not Deaf, is the operative word in that sentence. The film compels viewers to reckon with what all people are owed, regardless of their bodily traits or circumstance. As its story illustrates, the disabled experience is far from cookie-cutter or one-dimensional. Deaf people want the same things that hearing people want: to be treated as full citizens, to be respected, to live their life with dignity, to have their needs understood by those in power. The week-long protest was so significant because, at its core, it demanded that hearing people see (and hear) Deaf people in an unmediated way.

“What’s the microphone for?”

It’s a simple, profound query that one of the protest leaders poses during the present-day interviews that are interspliced with archival footage. The question is valid, given that the former Gallaudet student organizers, now nearing retirement age, address the camera by using American Sign Language. They’re lively and expressive, signing with their whole body, retaining the fiery, opinionated vibe from their undergraduate days. Frequently in Hollywood, sign language is accompanied by captions, but the directors of Deaf President Now! opted to use voice-overs when the Deaf interviewees are on set. Some audience members might view this as a curious choice. A day after watching the film, I came to see it as a compelling inversion: ASL is its own language, and, for those who don’t understand it—likely the overwhelming percentage of hearing people—the directors had introduced an accommodation.

Watching the film, I was also struck by the sound design, which shrewdly oscillates between hearing and Deaf perspectives. There are, in the movie’s opening minutes, the sonic minutiae of daily life: police sirens, a plane landing, a subway car pulling into a station, the pfffft when popping open a bottle. At other points, you see leaves rustling on campus but don’t hear them scrape against the ground; when someone pulls a fire alarm, lights flash, but no sound is emitted. Crucially, though, the directors work to show that everyone inhabits the same world, just with different experiences.

[Read: A disability film unlike any other]

Deafness, like all disabilities, exists on a spectrum. Some people are born Deaf; others become Deaf later in life. Those who have diminished hearing may also consider themselves part of the Deaf community. Though this movie is not a history or topography of Deafness, it does examine the nuances of Deaf culture by showcasing the varied (and even contradictory) stories of how the student leaders came of age. Specifically, the film illustrates the battle between the medical and social models of disability. Under the former, Deafness would be considered an affliction to be “cured” or “fixed” with tools and interventions to enable a Deaf person to conform to the expectations of a hearing world. (One of the student activists, for example, recalls being pulled out of class as a kid to go to speech therapy, where he would place his hand on a teacher’s nose to understand a hearing person’s breath flow as they spoke certain words.) But under the social model, which has grown in prevalence in recent decades, disability is just another aspect of human existence, like someone’s hair or eye color. This tension in perspective primacy permeates the film; in 1988, it undergirded the Gallaudet board’s initial decision to select yet another hearing person as president. The person they chose, Elisabeth Zinser, did not know sign language.

In the end, the protest arguably reached its apex not on the grounds of the school but on national television. One of the student leaders, Greg Hlibok, appeared on ABC’s Nightline, opposite Zinser. Along with the Deaf actor Marlee Matlin, he made his case to the host, Ted Koppel, but also to the millions watching at home. Seeing Hlibok on-screen is especially affecting: He is young, inexperienced, and finding his way to his message in real time. He demands respect for himself and his classmates. He gets it. Zinser withdraws, and a Deaf member of the faculty, Irving King Jordan, is appointed.

In some ways, it may be hard to believe that Gallaudet went so long—well more than a century—without a Deaf president, a leader who could intrinsically understand the needs and lives of the students. Although other schools for the Deaf exist, Gallaudet is unique: It draws Deaf people from all over the world and is seen as an oasis where disabled people aren’t othered. I grew up several miles away from the campus, and I’m a hearing person, but I recall as a kid once having a Deaf counselor at basketball camp, someone who hooped at Gallaudet. He was smooth, fast, and confident on the court; I was young, and I remember wondering, sheepishly, how he could play the game at all if he couldn’t hear the whistle. It was a question that didn’t need asking; he managed just fine, and was better than other players his age.

That admittedly basic concept—that Deaf people don’t need hearing people worrying about or patronizing them—is one of the key themes of the film. DiMarco, the documentary’s Deaf co-director, told me over Zoom that, in his first conversation with Guggenheim, he made clear that he didn’t want this project “to be framed as a story of pity.” (DiMarco signed his answers and we communicated through an interpreter.) Guggenheim didn’t need convincing. He had taken a similar approach for his 2023 film Still, which follows Michael J. Fox’s journey with Parkinson’s disease. When making that movie, Fox told Guggenheim “no violins”—meaning no smarm, no Hallmark-channel vibes.

[Read: What Michael J. Fox figured out]

Though the ’88 protest happened before DiMarco was born, he knew its legacy as a child and went on to graduate from Gallaudet himself. In his adult years, he became somewhat of a familiar face after winning a season of America’s Next Top Model and competing on Dancing With the Stars. Growing up, DiMarco told me, none of the Deaf characters he saw on-screen resonated with him. “I often wondered why they couldn’t get it right,” he said. “I’ve really learned that the key to success in telling authentic stories is having Deaf people behind the camera.” He told me he has more than 25 extended family members who are Deaf and that no one in his family uses the term hearing impaired, which is often deemed ableist. “I’d say probably the most prevalent misconception is that Deaf people don’t carry any sense of pride,” he said. “I think a lot of hearing people are very shocked when I say I love being Deaf,” he continued. “I have culture, language, our community, our history. I think that’s a very, very big misconception that I’m working every day to correct.”

Beyond helping audiences understand some of the Deaf experience, DiMarco told me he hopes this film will resonate because of the civil disobedience at its center. Though he and Guggenheim started making the film six years ago, it’s being released amid a wave of attacks against DEI initiatives. The present environment is not lost on him. “I think today we’ve really forgotten how to protest,” he said. He acknowledged that he’s not sure if, were the same demonstration to occur today, it would have the same outcome. But that possibility doesn’t mean the fight for disabled dignity—the fight for dignity of all kinds—is any less salient.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

When a young man detonated a car bomb in the parking lot of a Palm Springs, California, fertility clinic last week, killing himself and injuring four others, I assumed the attack was related in some distorted way to pro-life politics. Despite the Trump administration’s recent embrace of in vitro fertilization, some pro-lifers, especially conservative Catholics, are opposed to the practice because it can lead to the disposal of embryos. That fact, coupled with the historical association between extreme anti-abortion sentiment and clinic bombings, led me to anticipate a news cycle concerning radical efforts to restrict abortion.

I was wrong. The bombing, carried out by a 25-year-old California native named Guy Edward Bartkus, was an attempt to prevent couples from accessing IVF, not because the process produces some embryos that wind up dead, but rather because it produces some embryos that wind up alive. Bartkus, who left behind an online screed titled “Fuck you pro-lifers!” complete with an index of links and an .mp3 file explaining his agenda, was an avowed “pro-mortalist”—someone who objects to the creation of new people because, the reasoning goes, no one can consent to being conceived, and that initial unfairness only exposes new consciousness to the suffering of life and the inevitability of death. This is the mind virus that Bartkus was hoping to spread with his attack and its explanation. For that reason alone, it deserves refuting: Life is good and worth defending.

Bartkus’s manifesto is arranged like a “frequently asked questions” section, in which he expresses his philosophy and addresses possible counterarguments. “Understand your death is already a guarantee, and you can thank your parents for that one,” he wrote. “All a promortalist is saying is let’s make it happen sooner rather than later (and preferably peaceful rather than some disease or accident), to prevent your future suffering, and, more importantly, the suffering your existence will cause to all the other sentient beings.” In Bartkus’s view, to have children is to act as “willing agents for a DNA molecule”—that is, to blindly submit to an animal urge to perpetuate one’s genes. None of this is novel, as Bartkus himself pointed out when he cited his philosophy’s kinship to negative utilitarianism, abolitionist veganism, and “efilism,” an evidently Reddit-based phenomenon that views humans as mere slaves to DNA. “Pro-mortalism” is a derivative riff on anti-natalism, a philosophy whose most learned proponent is the South African academic David Benatar. (Benatar has maintained a higher-brow version of the argument against reproduction for the past two decades.) But its most infamous proponent is Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, who sketched out an extremely dark version of the same morbid theory in his library of audio recordings and then enacted it.

[Marc Novicoff: The loneliness of the conservative pronatalist]

The FBI has classified Bartkus’s attack, which devastated the clinic’s offices, as terrorism, though he failed to actually destroy any embryos; the facility’s lab is located offsite. Perhaps the spectacle was intended more to provoke a response from the public than to prevent any particular embryos from developing—and his death surely will be marshaled by both sides of American politics to represent our current failings. To many on the left, the bombing may register as another episode in the country’s ongoing mental-health crisis, with Bartkus as the avatar of dangerously ill youth who could have benefited from early intervention to counter what appears to have been long-term suicidal ideation. For many on the right, the act may read as more overtly political—a sign of the anti-life left’s derangement. Bartkus did address his missive to pro-lifers, and his philosophy is directly contrary to the kind of anti-abortion politics the Trump administration is very deliberately cultivating.

Both analyses contain elements of truth. Bartkus described himself as having borderline personality disorder, and his manifesto is at times rambling and incoherent (as in a subsection where he declares his preference for Satan over God). Although he wasn’t clear about what kinds of suffering make life unworthy of living, he did provide an explanation of his timing by referring to the recent death of a long-distance friend, who he said had died after asking her boyfriend to shoot her in her sleep, which the boyfriend then did, multiple times. Bartkus also appears to have been under the influence of one of those toxic internet subcultures that acts like a transmissible mood disorder, imparting not only grim ideas but also a certain climate of mind. From that vantage, goodness and joy are rendered irrelevant, and all of life’s pain and suffering are read as justifications for their chosen resentments. But sickness and grief don’t negate the fact that the ideas behind Bartkus’s manifesto are serious, deranged responses to current politics, as acts of terrorism frequently are. Attacks like his aren’t representative of any mainstream tendency—but they do reveal what’s simmering below the surface of society: in this case, angst and uncertainty about whether perpetuating human life is an altogether good thing for humans or the planet.

It’s difficult to persuade someone convinced otherwise that human life is more of an affirmative good than a hazard. “Oh, what can you do with a man like that?” John Cheever once wrote. “How can you dissuade his eye in a crowd from seeking out the cheek with acne, the infirm hand; how can you teach him to respond to the inestimable greatness of the race, the harsh surface beauty of life; how can you put his finger for him on the obdurate truths before which fear and horror are powerless?”

You can’t, it seems. But for anyone on the fence, or who finds themselves somewhat tempted by Bartkus’s premises, I wish they could see that life is indeed good, even when it isn’t easy or pleasurable. Humanity is capable of unique greatness—not only via the spectacular achievements of artists, scientists, and philosophers in which all of us share by nature of kinship, but also in moral terms: the daily miracle of individuals encountering complicated and frustrating situations and choosing to do the right thing anyway. The world is full of such people, though they may be overlooked by those cynical toward humanity’s contributions to history. Their perseverance in goodness is sufficient argument for more of us, more human excellence, great and small. May the future always belong to humankind.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In the United States, as in many nations around the world, people are having fewer children. According to the CDC, the country’s birth rate is at a record low, a trend that may eventually threaten tax bases and strain social services as the population ages and the workforce shrinks. But some who are concerned with this trend line see the problem less in practical than in spiritual terms. Among right-wing “pronatalists” who view having children as a moral good, the declining birth rate betrays a growing reluctance on the part of American women to have babies in traditional family structures. President Donald Trump has responded to this anxiety by promising a “baby boom.” To that end, Republicans have proposed putting $1,000 in a “Trump account” for all newborns; the White House has also been considering an array of proposals that include giving mothers $5,000 for each birth, as well as awarding a medal to those with six or more. (As Mother Jones has noted, Stalin and Hitler handed out similar awards.) A goal for this ascendant strain of pronatalism is, as CNN recently put it, to “glorify motherhood.”

Of course, a medal is meaningless, and $5,000 is at best a few months of help, relative to the economic factors—a nationwide housing crisis, wildly expensive child care, debt—that cause many Americans not to have children or to have fewer than they might like. Glorifying motherhood, meanwhile, in practical terms, may only make mothers’ daily lives worse. Claudia Goldin, a Nobel Prize–winning economist, has found that contemporary birth rates are declining fastest in highly developed, patriarchal countries—places where women can have any career they like but where it’s assumed that they will do the bulk of child-care and household labor, such that motherhood and a fulfilling work life become incompatible. This is somewhat the case in the U.S.; a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center showed that though husbands and wives earn roughly equally in a growing share of heterosexual marriages, women in these households still spend more time on child care and chores. Encouraging childbearing by attaching prestige to motherhood without material support would surely make this disparity worse.

But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn’t have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement’s most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn’t consign them to a life without anything else.

Not even at the height of the Wages for Housework campaign was it mainstream, and, as can happen on the left, it suffered from a utopianism that kept it from achieving tangible victories, as the University of Wisconsin historian Emily Callaci shows in her new survey of the movement, Wages for Housework: The Feminist Fight Against Unpaid Labor. But the campaign’s ideas are worth another look. Wages for Housework was, in a sense, the opposite of $5,000 and a medal: Its activists dreamed of a society that would give women the economic freedom to do and be anything they wanted, not one that would narrowly incentivize motherhood. Callaci’s deeply researched book is a compelling guide to the world the movement wanted.

Callaci came to Wages for Housework through motherhood. After having children, she found that the dual demands of her professorship and her family life meant that she was doing some sort of task 18 hours a day. Caring for her sons was, she writes, “work that I knew I could never refuse,” but so was her job. Having grown up with the girl-power feminism of the 1990s and joined the workforce in the 2010s (the era of the girlboss), she’d absorbed the lesson that professional success “was the source of my liberation, autonomy, and sense of accomplishment.” Added to this tension was the day-care loop that many American parents of young children know well: Callaci and her husband “rely on paid childcare; to pay for childcare, we need to work; and this entire cycle relies on the fact that the extremely skilled women who care for our children are paid less money for their work than we are for ours.” This is unjust, Callaci argues, and also implicates parents in the devaluation of child care, which is their labor as well as that of their children’s nannies or day-care providers. She wanted another way.

In the contemporary United States, most families don’t have one. But in the writings and archives of the Wages for Housework activists Selma James, Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Wilmette Brown, and Margaret Prescod, Callaci found a pitch for a society in which care work isn’t unpaid or poorly paid—because, without it, everything else falls apart. Callaci explains that Wages for Housework began with a question prompted by the Italian philosophy of operaismo, or “workerism,” which wanted to change the workplace so that worker well-being was no longer a distant second to productivity. Dalla Costa, one of Wages for Housework’s co-founders, was a militant operaista, but she was also a feminist, and she wanted to understand how operaismo was relevant beyond job sites full of men. Callaci writes that Dalla Costa started by asking, “If factories were the places where exploitation happened, why didn’t women who stayed at home feel free?” From there, she “began to rethink the entire history of capitalism from the standpoint of the housewife.”

[Read: The devaluation of care work is by design]

Dalla Costa’s questions led her to the idea that women who don’t work outside the home produce “the single most valuable thing, without which capitalism could not exist: labor power itself.” Mothers create workers, and especially in Italy in the ’70s, mothers and wives more often than not fed those workers, clothed them, did their laundry, made the beds in which they slept at night. Dalla Costa shared her ideas with other feminists, including Selma James, who lived in London and had been married to the eminent cultural historian and Pan-Africanist C. L. R. James. Having grown up working-class in New York and come to politics partly through Black liberation, Selma James espoused a more inclusive and more intuitive feminism than that of many of her white, middle-class peers. She saw money for housewives as not just fair pay for labor but also a source of liberation from men. At the same time, she wanted the feminists she knew to identify themselves more closely with waged workers and their struggles, because, as Callaci puts it, “women were working all the time, even if their work conditions varied.” When James added this concept to Dalla Costa’s reframing of labor power, Wages for Housework was born.

Dalla Costa and James spread their ideas from Europe to James’s hometown of New York, where they caught on with a young Italian graduate student named Silvia Federici—perhaps the most well-known of the movement’s members today. As more famous American feminists concentrated on the Equal Rights Amendment and on equity in white-collar workplaces—a focus on achievement outside the home that would later appear, in glossier form, as girlboss feminism—Federici and her Wages for Housework committee advocated instead to get cash to all women, but especially those not presently earning money for their labor. In their estimation, only economic power could lead to freedom. For instance, when various states began to recognize rape within marriage as a crime, Federici pointed out—though no legislators or more prominent feminists listened—that this recognition “gives women the right not to be raped; but only money would give them the power to actually leave a violent relationship.”

Federici’s committee acknowledged that, in a sense, welfare served as the wage they wanted—but it was both restrictive and stigmatized. Margaret Prescod, who was part of Federici’s committee before co-founding Black Women for Wages for Housework with Wilmette Brown, spearheaded the only material victory Callaci describes by standing up to one of welfare’s constraints. She led an activist group at Queens College that, along with Black Women for Wages for Housework, got a bill passed in the state of New York that enabled welfare recipients, whom the local press described as “savvy scammers,” to get educational grants and loans without having that money counted against their benefits.

Prescod seems to have been Wages for Housework’s most practical member by far. Brown, in contrast, was an expansive, systems-level thinker who saw housework as including the effort of repairing society’s damage, mitigating the harm that racism or gentrification or environmental devastation have done. Dalla Costa, James, and Federici land somewhere between them, but none of the three ever seem to have lowered their gaze from the campaign’s lofty overall agenda to smaller proposals for which they could have fought one by one. Callaci quotes the English feminist Lynne Segal, who wrote in her 2023 memoir that Wages for Housework’s activists, when asked to consider issues less grand than or different from their own, gave responses that were “vanguardist” and “hectoring.”

[Read: The pro-family policy this nation actually needs]

As a result of this attraction to the revolutionary over the practical, the campaign alienated many women who found its aims simply implausible. Callaci interviewed Alisa del Re, a feminist operaista who, rather than joining Wages for Housework, campaigned for improved public schools and day cares—one of Wages for Housework’s many stated goals, but not one that its members seem to have actively worked toward. When Callaci asked del Re why she’d made this choice, the latter said that she was a mother, and “maybe it was not revolutionary, but I had to put the babies somewhere!”

It is this point that many of today’s pronatalist advocates seem not to get. When you have babies, you have to put them somewhere: in a home you can pay for, in a safe day care where they can learn. $5,000 per child cannot do that; a living wage for housework would. Even if the Wages for Housework campaign was too radical to make real headway toward the conditions its members wanted—too busy explaining the need for universal, free day care to help del Re get a place to “put the babies”—its members undeniably understood the gravity of mothers’ need. In Wages for Housework, Callaci argues convincingly that the campaign’s comprehension of women’s reality is important to keep in view today, when the horizons of what governments offer families are shrinking. Wages for Housework may not have been a practical movement, but a government that acted on its ideas of what wives and mothers need would be more likely to stimulate a baby boom than one offering a single check for each birth.

But Callaci thinks the campaign’s revolutionary tendency matters too. Researching the Wages for Housework campaign, she writes, awakened “something in my imagination, connecting my daily efforts to lives and labors beyond the four walls of my house.” This sense of connection makes Wages for Housework a relevant rebuttal to those who would like women to devote themselves to having and raising children. Wages for Housework’s activists, as Callaci shows, linked seemingly disparate lives and struggles, extending a fundamental empathy for anyone who is exploited or overworked and cannot live in the way they wish to. The campaign, which began with the premise that cleaning and cooking are labor at least as vital as assembling commodities on a factory line, ultimately wanted all women to have access to the lives they desired. For some women, that might mean being able to afford to have six children and stay home with them; for others, that might mean never marrying or reproducing, and devoting their lives entirely to art. I, for one, would like to live in a country where that vision has—or might yet—come to pass.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

American Masters, an award-winning documentary series in its 39th season on PBS, promises to tell “compelling, unvarnished stories” about the nation’s most important cultural figures. The program’s most recent story, though—Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse, about the cartoonist-author of Maus, the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel depicting the Holocaust, and a self-described “poster boy for books being censored”—seemed to need a bit more varnish on its approach to Donald Trump. In April, two weeks before it aired on PBS stations, a 90-second segment of the film in which Spiegelman referred to the president’s “smug and ugly mug” was cut from the film at the behest of public-media executives. (The details of this incident were first reported by Anthony Kaufman for Documentary magazine.)

PBS has been under attack by the Trump administration since January. By the time Disaster Is My Muse was aired in shortened form, the network was already under investigation by the Federal Communications Commission, and the White House had a plan to claw back $1.1 billion in federal funds from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which passes money on to PBS. “Their attempt at preemptively staying out of the line of fire was absurd; it wasn’t going to happen,” Spiegelman told me this week. “It seems like it would be better to go out with dignity.”

Alicia Sams, who co-produced the film, told me that she received a call from the executive producer of American Masters, Michael Kantor, at the beginning of April. It was less than a week after a contentious congressional hearing in which the network was accused of being a “radical left-wing echo chamber” that is “brainwashing and trans-ing children.” According to Sams, Kantor said that Disaster Is My Muse would need one further edit before it could be shown: The filmmakers had to remove a short sequence where Spiegelman reads aloud from the one of the few comic strips about Trump that he’s ever published, in a zine associated with the Women’s March in 2017. There was no opportunity for negotiation, Sams said. The filmmakers knew that if they refused, they would be in breach of contract and would have to repay the movie’s license fee. “It was not coming from Michael,” she told me. “It was very clear: It was coming from PBS in D.C.”

[Read: PBS pulled a film for political reasons, then changed its mind]

Kantor deferred all questions to Lindsey Horvitz, the director of content marketing at WNET, the producer of American Masters and parent company of New York’s flagship PBS station. (Sams told me that in her understanding, WNET leadership had agreed with PBS about the cut.)  Horvitz provided The Atlantic with this statement: “One section of the film was edited from the theatrical version as it was no longer in context today. The change was made to maintain the integrity and appropriateness of the content for broadcast at this time.” A PBS spokesperson said, “We have not changed our long-standing editorial guidelines or practices this year.” (The Atlantic has a partnership with WETA, which receives funding from PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.)

Molly Bernstein, who co-directed Disaster Is My Muse with Philip Dolin, said this was “absurd.” She told me that the team had already been through discussions with PBS over how to make the film compliant with broadcast standards and practices. A few profanities are spoken in the film, and some images from Spiegelman’s cartoons raised concerns, but the network said that these could stand as long as the film aired after 10 p.m., when laxer FCC rules apply. “We were delighted that was an option,” Bernstein said. A bleeped-and-blurred version of the film would not have worked. “It’s about underground comics. It’s about transgressive artwork.”

The team did make one other change to the film, several months before its broadcast: Some material featuring Spiegelman’s fellow comic-book artist Neil Gaiman was removed in January after a series of sexual-assault allegations against Gaiman were detailed in a cover story for New York magazine. (Gaiman denies that he “engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone.”) The filmmakers say they did this on their own, to avoid distractions from the subject of the film. But they also said that Kantor told them PBS would likely have had that inclination too.

In any case, to say the snipped-out material about Trump was “no longer in context today” is simply false. Spiegelman’s commitment to free speech is central to the film. So are his repeated warnings about incipient fascism in America. (“That’s what I see everywhere I look now,” he says at one point.) They’re also clearly relevant to the forced edit of the broadcast. Indeed, the censored clip was taken from an event involving Spiegelman in June 2022 called “Forbidden Images Now,” which was presented in association with an exhibit of Philip Guston paintings that had itself been postponed for political reasons after George Floyd’s murder, presumably on account of Guston’s having made a motif of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen.

[Read: Don’t look away from Philip Guston’s cartoonish paintings of Klansmen]

Just a few months before that lecture, Spiegelman learned that Maus had been removed from the eighth-grade curriculum in McMinn County, Tennessee, on account of its rough language and a single panel showing the naked corpse of his mother following her suicide. “The tendencies brought up by this frantic need to control children’s thoughts,” Spiegelman told MSNBC’s Art Velshi in 2023, are “an echo of the book burnings of the 1930s in Germany.”

The filmmakers told me that Spiegelman’s free-speech run-in with the county school board was instrumental in persuading WNET to back Disaster Is My Muse. “When Maus was banned, interest in Art and the relevance of his story increased,” Sams said. Only then did American Masters pledge its full support, licensing the film before it had even been completed, and supplying half its budget. In the lead-up to its broadcast, PBS also chose to highlight Spiegelman’s focus on the First Amendment in its promotional materials. The network’s webpage for Disaster Is My Muse describes him as “a pioneer of comic arts, whose thought-provoking work reflects his ardent defense of free speech.” (Neither PBS nor WNET would explain how a decision had been made to censor footage from a documentary film that is in no small part about censorship.)

A broader “context” for the edit can be found in PBS’s other recent efforts to adjust its programming in deference to political considerations. As previously reported in The Atlantic, not long before Kantor’s call with Sams, PBS quietly shelved a different documentary film, Break the Game, that was set to air on April 7, apparently because it had a trans protagonist. The film, which is not political, was abruptly placed back on the schedule within two hours of my reaching out to PBS for comment. (The network did not respond to questions about why Break the Game’s original airdate had been canceled.)

If these efforts were meant to forestall pressure from the White House, they have roundly failed. Two weeks after Disaster Is My Muse aired—with its reference to Trump removed—the president attempted to dismiss three of five board members at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A few days after that, he issued an executive order directing the board to terminate all funding, both direct and indirect, to NPR and PBS. (Both moves are being challenged.) But just imagine how much harder the administration would be going after PBS if Trump had seen the clip about his “smug and ugly mug”!

“This seems like volunteering to pull the trigger on the firing-squad gun,” Spiegelman told me. The end of Disaster Is My Muse includes some footage from a 2017 free-speech protest on the steps of the New York Public Library, where Spiegelman read out the lyrics of a Frank Zappa song: “And I’m telling you, it can’t happen here. Oh, darling, it’s important that you believe me. Bop bop bop bop.” The political climate has only gotten worse since then, he said. “There’s no checks and balances on this. This is severe bullying and control, and it’s only going to get worse.”

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

This has been a banner month for X. Last week, the social network’s built-in chatbot, Grok, became strangely obsessed with false claims about “white genocide” in South Africa—allegedly because someone made an “unauthorized modification” to its code at 3:15 in the morning. The week prior, Ye (formerly Kanye West) released a single called “Heil Hitler” on the platform. The chorus includes the line “Heil Hitler, they don’t understand the things I say on Twitter.” West has frequently posted anti-Semitic rants on the platform and, at one point back in February, said he identified as a Nazi. (Yesterday on X, West said he was “done with antisemitism,” though he has made such apologies before; in any case, the single has already been viewed tens of millions of times on X.)

These incidents feel all too natural for Elon Musk’s social network. Even without knowing the precise technical reason Grok decided to do its best Alex Jones impression, the fact that it became monomaniacally obsessed with a white-supremacist talking point says something about what the platform has become since Musk took over in October 2022. Specifically, it validates that X has become a political weapon in his far-right activism. (To be clear, white farmers have been murdered in South Africa, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates, according to Reuters. But there is no indication of a genocide. In 2024, eight of the 26,232 murders nationwide were committed against farmers. Most murder victims there are Black.)

[Read: The day Grok told everyone about ‘white genocide’]

This has been obvious to anyone using the site or paying attention to Musk’s managerial decisions. He’s reinstated thousands of banned accounts (QAnon supporters and conspiracy theorists, and at least one bona fide neo-Nazi), and the platform is engorged with low-rent outrage porn, bigoted memes, MAGA AI slop, and, well, a lot of people proudly using racial slurs, frequently to attack other people. The platform’s defenders would likely argue that X is an experiment in free-speech maximalism and that it is one of the only truly neutral zones on social media. Musk and his sycophants have constantly cited his takeover as an attempt to “solve free speech”; Joe Rogan has suggested that Musk has done just that. (This isn’t quite accurate, as X has complied with government takedown requests, temporarily suspended journalist accounts, amplified accounts that promote Musk’s worldview, and tried to censor words its owner doesn’t like: Last year, it briefly warned users who attempted to use the word cisgender in posts, after Musk said he considers it a “slur.”)

But Grok’s white-genocide Wednesday is a major indication that the platform is not neutral. Either X has a natural bias, based on the site’s architecture and user base—that is, the chatbot, which is able to search tweets in real time, acts on an attitude that is endemic to the platform—or X is being directly manipulated to emphasize a certain viewpoint. In other words: Either way, X is racist. The only thing up for debate is whether this is a feature or a bug for those in charge.

Twitter always had an outsize cultural influence, and X—despite its marked decline under Musk—does as well. Yet mainstream culture is no longer dominant there: The media outlets and public figures are now punch lines for the site’s main characters, Musk and his MAGA acolytes. Platform events such as the Grok rampage and Ye’s “Heil Hitler” offer a window into the ways that X has become an accelerator for a broader, more durable culture of hate. It’s not only that some of this vile discourse seeps out into the physical world (memes about immigrants eating cats and dogs leading to harassment in Ohio, Trump bringing up conspiracy theories about white genocide during an Oval Office meeting with the South African president)—it’s that the worst of the internet is no longer relegated to the shadows. Instead, it is elevated, perhaps even at times normalized, by its proximity to everyone else’s content.

Last Wednesday, as I watched Grok bring up white genocide in response to an anodyne query about the Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Max Scherzer’s career earnings, I couldn’t shake the question: Why are people still using this website? The same thought had also occurred to me around the time that Ye released “Heil Hitler” and I toggled over to X’s algorithmic “For You” feed. It showed a smattering of the platform’s least savory commentators posting about how the anti-Semitic anthem was “the song of the year” and how it had become popular in Thailand. What happened next is pretty standard: By clicking on a few posts about the song, I’d expressed enough interest in it that the platform fed me a steady stream of “Heil Hitler” content: AI-generated remixes of the song, covers, dozens of memes about how the song was secretly popular. I saw a video of a white couple singing the song in their car, throwing up Nazi salutes. Not long after that, I saw a link to a crowdfunding campaign for that same couple, who were asking for money to “relocate” after their video went viral and they were doxxed and “threatened.” The couple set their funding goal at $88,000—a reference, almost assuredly, to “88,” a neo-Nazi code for “Heil Hitler.” This Russian nesting doll of irony-poisoned, loud-and-proud racism is a common experience in the algorithmic fever swamps of X.

It’s worth noting that Ye’s song was banned by other major streaming platforms and social networks. Writing about X, The New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh said, “West has given the platform a kind of exclusive hit single—a song that can be heard almost nowhere else.” Neo-Nazis and trolls expressed a palpable delight that all of this was happening on an ostensibly mainstream platform—wanton hatred not on 4chan or Stormfront, but on the same network where Barack Obama posted a condolence message about Joe Biden’s cancer diagnosis. “Heil Hitler” is almost assuredly not the global phenomenon that the fascists on the platform think it is, but its prevalence on X is not nothing either. As Sanneh wrote last week, “We now live in an era when a top musician can distribute a song called ‘Heil Hitler,’ and there’s no way to stop him. That is the true message of this song, which has spread and thrived beyond the reach of boycotts or shaming campaigns: no one is in charge.”

In July 2020, the Twitter user Michael B. Tager shared an anecdote that went viral. Tager was at “a shitty crustpunk bar” when the gruff bartender kicked out a patron in a “punk uniform”—not because the customer was making a scene, but because he was wearing Nazi paraphernalia. “You have to nip it in the bud immediately,” Tager recounted the bartender as saying. “These guys come in and it’s always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don’t want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend.” Soon enough, you’re running a Nazi bar.

The Nazi bar is an apt analogy, yet it doesn’t fully capture the weirdness of a social network and of the strange, modern power of algorithms to sort and segregate experiences. Many people use X merely to post about sports, follow news, or look at dumb memes, and they’re probably having a mostly normal online experience; I don’t have any wish to judge them. To torture the metaphor, though, they’re sitting at a table outside the Nazi bar; their friends are there, they’re having a good time, maybe they hear a slur emanate from the window from time to time. Others fully recognize that they’re at a Nazi bar, but this was their bar first and they don’t want to cede the territory; they’re hanging around to debate, never mind that the bar’s owner is palling around with the new customers.

Of course, with a broadcast social network like X, everyone is both a patron and an owner of sorts. Followers can feel like a kind of currency, built up over years: Some people don’t leave the bar, because they’re invested and don’t want to dump their shares. Other people don’t leave, because the alternative hangouts aren’t enticing enough. Some simply don’t want to give the Nazis the satisfaction of successfully driving them out. There is plenty of commentary, even among users of other platforms, about how Threads is bloodless (and owned by Mark Zuckerberg), Mastodon is inscrutable, and Bluesky is humorless.

These quibbles make some sense in the brain-rot context of social media, where people have been conditioned to think it’s normal to have interactions with millions of strangers at the same time, but this is not really tenable or healthy. Nor is it something most people would tolerate in the physical world. If a billionaire bought one of your local haunts, renamed it, humiliated the employees, brought back many of the people who’d been banned for harassing other regulars, eliminated basic rules of decency, started having town halls with Republicans and a leader of the AfD, taking your business elsewhere would be perfectly rational. This is essentially what’s happened on X, only the reality is wildly, at times comically, more extreme. A critical mass of the nation’s politicians, news outlets, and major brands regularly post content for free to the exclusive streaming platform for the Ye song “Heil Hitler.” This platform is owned by the world’s richest man, a conspiracy theorizing GOP mega-donor who still holds a position in the Trump administration. Even if he winds down his official role, X will remain an instrument for Musk’s politics. Let’s pause to sit with the absurdity of these facts.

Acknowledging the role X plays in mainstreaming the worst constituencies makes for awkward conversations with those who continue to use it. These discussions grow exhausting, fast. There’s a definite purity-politics flavor to any suggestion that people should take a moral stand and leave a social network, but also a pretty airtight case to be made for boycotting it. There is no ethical consumption under tech oligarchy, etc. You’re not a Nazi simply because you use X—but also, what exactly are you doing there?

You may not have any interest in participating in a culture war. The problem is that on X, everything is a culture war. Culture war is the very point of the MAGA AI slop the platform traffics in and the viscerally cruel White House X account. Culture war is behind Tucker Carlson’s choice to debut his post-Fox show on X and why Alex Jones livestreams on the platform every day. West’s nihilistic neo-Nazi single is an act of culture war: Its message isn’t just that X has energized his ideas, but that the platform renders people like Ye unignorable. Only Musk could shut this machine down, but plenty of others lend it their credibility and happily turn the cranks, ensuring that the culture war grinds on and on.

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Dykes to Watch Out For, the long-running lesbian comic strip that launched Alison Bechdel’s career, is full of kitchen-table drama and dry humor, but its title is also more literal than those elements might suggest. Watch out, strip after strip said: Here comes Mo, the main character and author-avatar, spinning her way onto the page like a flustered Tasmanian devil of ’90s-lefty anxiety. Look out for Mo, going hoarse over the rise of Pat Buchanan or chiding her circle for not thinking enough about genocide in Bosnia. There’s Mo, nose in a newspaper, ignoring her friends’ new baby to stress about the latest mainstream co-optation of radical activism.

This might sound like a drag, but it’s actually one of the funniest running bits in Bechdel’s work. For decades, the author has allowed herself—or her stand-in self—to be loudly annoying, and often wrong, on the page. When Mo’s a bummer, her friends snap back at her; when she talks or worries her way out of an opportunity to get laid, they poke fun at her. Mo is frequently uptight about other people’s choices (to take Prozac, for instance, or to transition), but her diatribes usually end with her being dressed down or hurting someone she cares about. I’ve always been charmed by how much Bechdel is willing to let Mo be both her double and the butt of her joke. In her new book, Spent, Bechdel blurs the writer-character line even further, Hanna Rosin writes this week, and the result is even more gratifying.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s books desk:

Return of the shamanShutting down Salman Rushdie is not going to helpAmerica’s Johnson & Johnson problemAn awkward truth about American work

Spent is not a memoir, but neither is it wholly fictional. Instead, it’s a graphic novel about a character named Alison Bechdel, who looks just like Alison Bechdel, the book’s author—and also an older Mo. Novel-Alison, like real Alison, lives in Vermont with her partner, Holly, and has made a lot of unexpected money off a television adaptation of her memoir. (Bechdel’s memoir Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award–winning musical.) Alison and Holly’s closest friends in Vermont are old standbys from DTWOF: Sparrow, Stuart, and their child, J.R.; Ginger; and Lois, who all live in a group house. They’re busy with their own various crises and hookups, while Alison finds that more money means more problems. “There’s no avoiding it. She is complicit to the craw with the capitalist crisis,” a box of omniscient narration says in one panel. Alison, sitting at her desk doing her taxes, says aloud: “Someone should write a book about this.”

Spent is that book. Bechdel the author is “astute enough to know that famous people lamenting the burdens of fame are insufferable,” Rosin writes. So here, “she’s created an Alison whose dilemma parodies contemporary celebrity culture, while also parodying herself, the author.” And, thank goodness, it’s still funny. Alison keeps putting her foot in her mouth on social issues, especially in front of the radical recent college dropout J.R. and their companion, Badger. The young adults—furious with the world for going about business as usual during a 21st-century “polycrisis” (the name of a podcast they host)—resemble in many ways a younger Mo. Meanwhile, Alison wonders where her fighting spirit has gone, growing concerned that luxury and age have dulled her into complacency.

When Sparrow suggests that the kids cool it, Bechdel isn’t mocking their idealism. And she’s not suggesting that Alison’s become a coldhearted reactionary—just that she has more to manage, and perhaps more to lose, than she did years before. After all, in DTWOF, Mo’s all-consuming neuroticism prevented her from living a fulfilling life, driving away friends and lovers. As in previous books, Bechdel seems to hint that a middle path is the only way forward: Giving in to mega-corporations and nihilistically welcoming climate apocalypse, she suggests, is an abdication of our responsibilities to one another. But her characters have to learn, again and again, that sticking to your principles doesn’t have to mean ruining every meal shared with your loved ones.

Courtesy of Mariner Books*

What Is Alison Bechdel’s Secret?

By Hanna Rosin

The cartoonist has spent a lifetime worrying. In a new graphic novel, she finds something like solace.

Read the full article.

What to Read

Moderation, by Elaine Castillo

Girlie Delmundo—not her real name; she adopted it for her high-stress job—is a content moderator at a massive tech firm. Her work involves filtering through a carousel of online horrors so crushing that there are typically three or four suicide attempts among her co-workers each year. Girlie, however, is sardonic and no-nonsense by nature: She’s an eldest daughter shaped by the 2008 recession, when her immigrant family lost everything. The job can’t break her. But her life transforms when she gets a cushy position as an elite moderator for a virtual-reality firm. Suddenly, Girlie is enjoying perks such as regular VR therapy sessions, in which she experiences rare moments of bliss—swimming through cool water, touching the bark of a tree. The new gig is great, at least for a while. (All may not be as it seems there.) Her new boss, William, also happens to be a total stud, and his presence transforms Castillo’s flinty satire of the tech industry into a sultry romance novel. As we watch Girlie’s defenses melt, the book shows a woman slowly surrendering to human experiences that can’t be controlled.  — Valerie Trapp

From our list: The 2025 summer reading guide

Out Next Week

📚 Autocorrect, by Etgar Keret

📚 When It All Burns, by Jordan Thomas

📚 The South, by Tash Aw

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Jacquie Ursula Caldwell / Library of Congress; Getty.

The World That ‘Wages for Housework’ Wanted

By Lily Meyer

But creating social conditions that are conducive to motherhood doesn’t have to be part of a reactionary agenda. Indeed, one of the feminist movement’s most radical and idealistic intellectual branches, a 1970s campaign called Wages for Housework, advocated for policies that, if ever implemented, genuinely might set off a baby boom. Its central goal was straightforward: government pay for anybody who does the currently unremunerated labor of caring for their own home and family. On top of that, the movement envisioned communal social structures and facilities including high-quality public laundromats and day cares that would get women out of their homes and give them their own time, such that paying them to do housework wouldn’t consign them to a life without anything else.

Read the full article.

* Lead image: Excerpted from the book Spent*, provided courtesy of Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. © 2025 by Alison Bechdel. Reprinted by permission.*

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Ethan Hunt, Tom Cruise’s most enduring role, was rarely much more than a name. That’s the point of him; as the Mission: Impossible franchise’s secret agent extraordinaire, Hunt can pretend to be anyone, accomplish basically any physical task, and uncover conspiracies with aplomb. He’s a cross between James Bond and a vaudeville performer. But personality was not part of that package, and a backstory was entirely superfluous. After the third Mission film tried to give Hunt a wife and burgeoning family, the subsequent sequel rejected that subplot, instead asserting that for him, experiencing a normal life was impossible.

So it was to my possibly foolish surprise to learn that Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the saga’s latest (and rumored to be last) film, is a nearly three-hour salute to Hunt. It’s a remarkable, lore-filled pivot from what we’d been made to believe about our hero for the past two decades. Over time, he’s gone from cipher to human being, from an excellent showman in the art of espionage to a model of the ideal man. This sense of self-importance, however, is one that the series can’t quite sustain.

The Final Reckoning, marking Christopher McQuarrie’s fourth time in the director’s chair, has all of the required elements for a solid Mission: Impossible outing. It includes globe-trotting location shooting, wild and miraculous action stunts, and a reliable ensemble of character actors around Cruise—who, in his early 60s, retains his boyish energy despite finally sporting a few wrinkles. But the film also makes a sometimes-dutiful effort to bring cohesion to Hunt’s decades-long collection of missions. Flashbacks to the first film, from 1996, introduce revelations that newer characters are related to those who died off in the original installment; monologue after monologue from heroes and villains alike details just how uniquely special a figure Hunt has become.

[Read: The sincerity and absurdity of Hollywood’s best action franchise]

As a grand valediction to a long-running storyline, the self-reflexiveness makes some sense. But it does leave the film feeling a little too encumbered. There’s less time for balletic set pieces if it has to keep slowing down to explain how important everything is—partly because it’s so intent on catching the audience up on the minutiae of Dead Reckoning, the previous entry. But even when the plot kicks into a higher gear, The Final Reckoning never quite settles into the cheerfully goofy groove that propelled the franchise toward its peaks.

The Hunt-heaviness stems from the creative decision that actuallysaved Mission: Impossible long ago: The writers decided to start creating lasting consequences for their protagonist’s actions. The first Mission: Impossible, directed by Brian De Palma, is a swerving, absurd folly; it introduces a team around Hunt and immediately kills most of them off, thus putting him on the run and throwing a maze of sexy triple-crosses his way. Its sequel, directed by John Woo, was geared toward that director’s aesthetic: It’s long, operatic, and unfortunately a little light on humor. For the third film, Cruise (who acts as a lead producer and has always played a major part in picking the directors) brought in the TV maven J. J. Abrams, who focused the story on Hunt getting engaged and trying to maintain a healthy work-life balance. Mission: Impossible III slightly underperformed expectations; coupled with the intense tabloid scrutiny that Cruise began to face in the mid-2000s, it seemed plausible that the entire enterprise might draw to a close.

But Cruise and Paramount, the studio behind the franchise, managed to turn things around—after a five-year break. For the fourth film, Ghost Protocol, the director Brad Bird (who had previously worked only in animation) helped produce the most epic stunts the series had seen and filmed them with IMAX cameras, still a novelty at the time. The initial plans to treat that chapter as something of a torch pass—with Cruise retiring and the lead role perhaps jumping to his co-star Jeremy Renner—were also scrapped. The screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie came on late in preproduction to help with rewrites, and he reportedly derided the idea; Hunt couldn’t just retire and go off into the sunset with his erstwhile fiancée. His life’s workwas accomplishing unbelievable feats of espionage. Switching the emphasis back toward the stalwart hero and away from his potential protégé was a brilliant storytelling gambit, grafting the actor’s public reputation for mega-intensity onto Hunt’s growing addiction to death-defying behavior.

[Read: What Mission: Impossible understands about Tom Cruise]

Cruise then brought McQuarrie on to direct the next movie, Rogue Nation, and he’s remained in the role since. Under him, Mission: Impossible brought Cruise’s love of pushing his body beyond its reasonable limits to the forefront: He’d tie himself to a plane for Rogue Nation, jump out of a plane from above the clouds for Fallout, and take a header off a mountain while riding a motorcycle in Dead Reckoning. Beneath that dizzying madness, McQuarrie introduced a progressively more labyrinthine mythology, knitting the installments together in ways plausible and not, and expanding Hunt from impressive spy to a more elemental force. “He’s the living manifestation of destiny,” the director of the CIA, played by Alec Baldwin, hoarsely cries in Rogue Nation; by Dead Reckoning, Hunt has become the only potential impediment to world annihilation by an AI system called the Entity.

This choice of villain was a topical one—AI fears are cresting only higher and higher in the news. But the Entity also helped reiterate how important Hunt had become to the Mission: Impossible brand. After all, even if the situation appears to be insurmountable—whether he’s thwarting an assassin or a hyperintelligent machine—Hunt knows he can find a way to pull it off. So by The Final Reckoning, his nigh godhood is at hand. In fighting the Entity, he’s sticking up for the rest of humanity, yes; but as the only person that the world can trust to do so, he’s also being heralded as the most capable of them all.

I love the Mission: Impossible movies, and I was still compelled by The Final Reckoning, even with its sludgier opening pace and patronizing reliance on exposition. A sequence that sees Hunt diving into an abandoned submarine is one of the spookiest and most atmospheric in the series; another, where he hops from biplane to biplane while in battle with another major foe, is one of the most spectacular. But the film’s triumphalism about Hunt the man left me, to my surprise, a little cold. What was most entertaining about Mission: Impossible was never the overarching plot; Hunt’s heroism was more a dazzling bout of flamboyance from one of Hollywood’s last stars than the result of some meaningful backstory. The Final Reckoning gives him enough concluding flourishes to make the send-off just about succeed, but it nearly drowns that endeavor out with a constant stream of thundering applause.

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In 2019, Lawrence Summers and Jason Furman, two of America’s most influential economists, published an essay titled “Who’s Afraid of Budget Deficits?” In it, they argued that Washington’s long-standing worries about the national debt had been overblown. Other prominent experts, including the former head economist of the International Monetary Fund, an institution known for imposing harsh fiscal austerity on developing countries, came to similar conclusions. The reason: Deficit hawks had been fixated on the wrong number.

The debt, according to these economists, still mattered. But whether it would become a serious problem, they observed, depended not on how big and scary the number was (about $28 trillion at the time, and today closer to $36 trillion), but instead on a simple formula involving the variables r and g. As long as a country’s economic growth rate (g) is higher than the interest rate (r) it pays on its national debt, then the cost of servicing that debt will remain stable, allowing the government to roll it over indefinitely without much worry. Given that interest rates had been close to zero for a decade, Furman and Summers concluded that the “economics of deficits have changed” and called on Washington to “put away its debt obsession and focus on bigger things.”

[Annie Lowrey: The Republican’s budget makes no sense]

But what was true then is true no longer. The combination of Donald Trump’s growth-inhibiting tariff crusade and the GOP’s deficit-exploding tax bill is likely to push the relationship between r and g into extremely dangerous territory. “In a short amount of time, the fiscal picture has gone from comfortably in the green-light region to the red-light region,” Summers recently told me. In other words, now would be a very good time for Washington to bring back its debt obsession.

The “debt doesn’t matter” consensus had a strong start. During the coronavirus pandemic, Congress spent trillions of dollars to keep the economy on life support without worrying about paying for it. The U.S. debt load reached new heights, but interest rates continued to fall. No bond vigilantes or debt spirals were to be seen.

In the years to follow, however, the Fed raised interest rates dramatically in an effort to tame inflation. As a result, government payments on debt interest soared to $881 billion in 2024, more than the United States spent on either Medicaid or national defense. The same economists who had helped usher in the new debt consensus, including Summers and Furman, began warning that America’s fiscal picture had become concerning. Even so, the situation was far from a crisis. A post-pandemic economic boom had kept the relationship between g and r on a stable trajectory, and in the fall of 2024, with inflation waning, the Fed began to lower interest rates.

Then Donald Trump took office and threw the world economy into chaos.

The interest rate on government debt is ultimately determined by investors’ confidence that the U.S. will eventually pay it back. (When fewer people want to buy your debt because they view it as excessively risky, you have to offer a higher return.) The mere possibility of a global trade war and a huge, unpaid-for tax cut has shaken that confidence. Last week, Moody’s, one of the world’s major credit agencies, downgraded America’s credit rating from its premium Triple-A status, causing interest rates on long-term government bonds to rise to near their highest point in two decades (above even the “yippy” level that prompted Trump to recall his “Liberation Day” tariffs). Rates surged again yesterday morning, when House Republicans narrowly passed a version of their tax bill that would add more than $3 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. If Trump signs that bill into law while expanding his global trade war, then investors may choose to dump their U.S. Treasury holdings en masse, causing interest rates to spike even higher. “For years, we lived in a world where there was basically zero risk premium on U.S. debt,” Jared Bernstein, the former head of Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, told me. “In four short months, Team Trump has squandered that advantage.”

[David A. Graham: Congressional Republicans vs. reality]

Rising interest rates might not be such a big issue if Trump’s policies were simultaneously supercharging America’s economic growth, so that g stayed ahead of r. Instead, almost every credible growth forecast this year has fallen significantly in response to those policies. With Trump proposing new tariffs seemingly at random—including, just this morning, a 50 percent tariff on the European Union and a 25 percent tariff on all imported Apple products—businesses face paralyzing levels of uncertainty, a fact will likely drag down growth even further. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans claim that the massive tax cuts promised in their budget reconciliation bill will spur an economic boom, but several independent analyses have found that they will hardly affect growth at all, let alone enough to overcome the negative impact of tariffs. In fact, many economists warn that the U.S. economy could be headed for something akin to 1970s-style stagflation.

In normal times, the Federal Reserve could step in and mitigate both of these problems by cutting interest rates to boost growth or buying up Treasuries to quell financial-market panic. That is highly unlikely, however, when the central bank is also worried about the possibility that both the tax bill and Trump’s tariffs could set off an inflationary spiral. In the past week, multiple members of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting body have signaled that it is unlikely to lower interest rates for the time being.

This confluence of rising interest rates and slowing growth is the exact set of circumstances capable of turning America’s national debt into a genuine crisis. When r remains higher than g for a sustained period of time, a vicious cycle emerges. Rising debt-servicing costs force the government to borrow more money to make its payments; investors, in turn, demand even higher interest rates, which pushes debt-servicing costs even higher, and so on.

In the best-case scenario, this process unfolds gradually, and the consequences are painful but not catastrophic. As more and more of the government budget is diverted to finance ever-growing debt-servicing costs, less room will be left to fund key social programs and productive investments; higher interest rates will mean less business investment and slower growth; and the government will be less capable of responding to a future economic crisis that requires heavy spending.

If, however, the debt snowball were to gather momentum quickly, the damage could be far worse. Investors might conclude that U.S. debt is no longer a safe investment, causing the equivalent of a bank run on the Treasury market as investors rush to sell their bonds for cash. Once that kind of psychological panic sets in, anything can happen. “This scenario is more serious than 2008,” Adam Tooze, an economic historian who wrote the definitive history of the financial crisis that triggered the Great Recession, argued recently on his Substack. “At some point, everything just goes parabolic,” Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. “That’s when parts of the financial system might start to break.”

A version of this happened in the United Kingdom in 2022, when then–Prime Minister Liz Truss unveiled a tax-cut proposal that would have blown up the country’s budget deficit. Bond markets freaked out, long-term interest rates soared, the pound plunged, and the entire British financial system appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The crisis ended only when the budget was scrapped and Truss was removed to restore confidence.

Until recently, the prospect of something so dramatic happening in the United States seemed exceedingly remote. Then, on April 9, Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs went into effect and the American bond market nearly melted down, stabilizing only after Trump paused most of the tariffs. If something similar happened again—say, in response to the final passage of the Republican tax bill—averting a sustained panic might not be so easy. The U.S. would be left with terrible choices: Impose painful austerity measures to reassure the market, default on the debt (which would likely trigger a severe, possibly global economic crisis), or print money to pay it off (which would trigger rampant inflation).

None of these possibilities appears to concern Trump and his allies in Congress, who are barreling forward with their agenda, warnings be damned. Perhaps they are betting that economists, who for so long predicted debt crises that never materialized, will be wrong one more time. That is a very high-stakes gamble indeed.

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Luis Robayo / AFP / GettyA woman wearing a protective helmet poses outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 21, 2025, during a protest called by pensioners against the economic measures of President Javier Milei’s government and demanding an increase in their pensions.Agoes Rudianto / Anadolu / GettyA transformation unfolded in a hillside neighborhood in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia, where 347 homes were painted in a bright spectrum of colors, in an effort to revitalize the area known as Rainbow Village. 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About 700 animals, including elephants, crocodiles, lions, and tigers, have been moved from a sanctuary in northwest Mexico to a ranch on the coast because of threats and violence from criminal gangs, refuge administrators said.Oli Scarff / AFP / GettyA competitor takes part in the Bog Commander endurance event near Ashbourne, in the Peak District moorlands, in northern England, on May 17, 2025. The Bog Commander is a six-kilometer muddy obstacle race that began in 2014.Omer Urer / Anadolu / GettyA pilot competes in the 34th traditional Off-Road Festival organized by the Düzce Safari Off-Road Club, in Düzce, Turkey, on May 17, 2025.Rodrigo Abd / APPrefectural police officers spray tear gas at protesters during a weekly demonstration demanding better pensions for retirees, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 21, 2025.Richard Heathcote / GettyPhat Sam takes a slap from Marti Barnes during SlapFight UK 5, presented by BritSlap, at Boxpark Liverpool on May 17, 2025, in Liverpool, England.Fabrice Coffrini / AFP / GettyThe Austrian singer Johannes Pietsch, known as JJ, represents Austria with the song “Wasted Love,” performed during the grand finale of the Eurovision Song Contest 2025, at St. Jakobshalle arena in Basel, Switzerland, on May 17, 2025.Daniel Cole / ReutersA skateboarder rides at Venice Skatepark with a baby doll in a stroller for a social-media video in Los Angeles, on May 19, 2025.Zhe Ji / GettyDazhi Li and co-driver Tao Yang navigate through dunes during Stage 2 of the Taklimakan Rally 2025, between Aksu and Alaer, on May 22, 2025, in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, China.Joe Raedle / GettyAn aerial view of dry, cracked soil caused by a lack of rainfall, as Big Cypress National Preserve and the Everglades are experiencing a severe drought, seen in Florida on May 19, 2025. The state is experiencing its worst drought in 13 years, with parts of the Everglades drying up completely.Alberto Pizzoli / AFP / GettyPriests attend a Mass for the beginning of the Pontificate of Pope Leo XIV, in St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City, on May 18, 2025.Jonathan Ernst / ReutersA soldier from the U.S. Army 3rd Infantry Regiment, known as the “Old Guard,” participates in the annual “Flags In” event, where U.S. flags are placed at service members’ gravesites, in advance of Memorial Day at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, on May 22, 2025.Anatolii Stepanov / ReutersAnti-tank fortifications, named “dragon’s teeth,” sit near the front-line town of Pokrovsk in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, during Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, seen on May 21, 2025.Bayram Ayhan / Anadolu / GettyA herd of wild horses roams freely across the high plateaus of Yama Mountain, in central Turkey, on May 20, 2025.Manu Fernandez / APSandra Hernandez rides her horse at sunset on Atxabiribil beach in the Peñon de Sopelana, northern Spain, on May 20, 2025.Arnold Welianto / AFP / GettyMount Lewotobi Laki-Laki erupts, seen from Pululera village in East Flores, in Nobo, eastern Indonesia, on May 19, 2025.Jean Carniel / ReutersPeople walk on a street before the opening ceremony of the Witches and Wizards Convention, in Paranapiacaba village, in Santo André, Brazil, on May 16, 2025.Zhang Xiaoliang / VCG / GettyTourists riding camels visit Mingsha Mountain and Crescent Spring scenic spot on May 17, 2025, in Dunhuang, Gansu province, China.Carolyn Kaster / APHailee Allen carries a family picture saved from a house after a tornado tore through a neighborhood in London, Kentucky, on May 17, 2025.Jeenah Moon / ReutersGraduating students pose with the Roar-ee the Lion mascot on the day of Columbia University’s commencement ceremony, on its main campus in Manhattan, on May 21, 2025.Finnbarr Webster / GettyMute-swan cygnets swim at the Abbotsbury Swannery on May 19, 2025, in Abbotsbury, Dorset, England. The arrival of mute-swan cygnets is traditionally seen as the start of summer.

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