The Atlantic

Wrong Case, Right Verdict

2024-05-30T18:05:34-04:00

The wrong case for the wrong offense just reached the right verdict.

Donald Trump will not be held accountable before the 2024 presidential election for his violent attempt to overturn the previous election. He will not be held accountable before the election for absconding with classified government documents and showing them off at his pay-for-access vacation club. He will not be held accountable before the election for his elaborate conspiracy to manipulate state governments to install fake electors. But he is now a convicted felon all the same.

It says something dark about the American legal system that it cannot deal promptly and effectively with a coup d’état. But it says something bright and hopeful that even an ex-president must face justice for ordinary crimes under the laws of the state in which he chose to live and operate his business.

Over his long career as the most disreputable name in New York real estate, Trump committed many wrongs and frauds. Those wrongs and frauds are beginning to catch up with him, including his sexual assault upon the writer E. Jean Carroll, and then his defamation of her for reporting the assault. Today, the catch-up leaped the barrier from the civil justice system to the criminal justice system.

The verdict should come as a surprise to precisely nobody. Those who protest the verdict most fiercely know better than anyone how justified it is. The would-be Trump running mate Marco Rubio this afternoon shared a video on X, comparing American justice to a Castro show trial. The slur is all the more shameful because Rubio has himself forcefully condemned Trump. “He is a con artist,” Rubio said during the 2016 nomination contest. “He runs on this idea he is fighting for the little guy, but he has spent his entire career sticking it to the little guy—his entire career.” Rubio specifically cited the Trump University scheme as one of Trump’s cons. In 2018, Trump reached a $25 million settlement with people who had enrolled in the courses it offered.

Eight years later, Rubio has attacked a court, a jury, and the whole U.S. system of justice for proving the truth of his own words.

We’re seeing here the latest operation of a foundational rule of the Trump era: If you’re a Trump supporter, you will sooner or later be called to jettison any and every principle you ever purported to hold. Republicans in Donald Trump’s adopted state of Florida oppose voting by felons. They used their legislative power to gut a state referendum restoring the voting rights of persons convicted of a crime. But as fiercely as Florida Republicans oppose voting by felons, they feel entirely differently about voting for felons. That’s now apparently fine, provided the felon is Donald Trump.

What has been served here is not the justice that America required after Trump’s plot to overturn the 2020 election first by fraud, then by violence. It’s justice instead of an especially ironic sort, driving home to the voting public that before Trump was a constitutional criminal, he got his start as a squalid hush-money-paying, document-tampering, tabloid sleazeball.

If Trump does somehow return to the presidency, his highest priority will be smashing up the American legal system to punish it for holding him to some kind of account—and to prevent it from holding him to higher account for the yet-more-terrible charges pending before state and federal courts. The United States can have a second Trump presidency, or it can retain the rule of law, but not both. No matter how much spluttering and spin-doctoring and outright deception you may hear from the desperate co-partisans of the first Felon American to stand as the presumptive presidential nominee of a major U.S. political party—there is no denying that now.

Guilty on All Counts

2024-05-30T17:22:40-04:00

Updated at 6:12 p.m. ET on May 30, 2024

Donald Trump is a convicted felon.

The former president was found guilty on all counts in his trial in Manhattan today. The jury returned with a verdict, delivered just past 5 p.m., after less than 12 hours of deliberation.

The result is historic and stunning, if not entirely unexpected. Trump is the first current or former president to be tried for any serious crime, and now he is the first to be convicted. Not only that, but he was found guilty on all 34 felony counts against him. The very fact of a verdict against Trump is remarkable: He has developed a reputation among both his fans and detractors as “Teflon Don,” able to wriggle out of any jam, but he found no escape in this trial.

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Trump with falsifying business records in order to cover up a hush money payment Trump made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actor who alleges that she had sex with Trump in 2006. Bragg alleged that Trump had made the pay-off in order to improperly hide information from voters ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Under New York state law, that stacking of crimes elevated what would otherwise have been a misdemeanor to a felony.

The verdict is vindication for Bragg, who faced intense criticism even from Trump critics for the case, which they deemed small-bore and based on a tenuous legal theory. But Bragg has now gotten a guilty verdict in the first criminal case against Trump—and what could very well be the only case to yield any verdict at all before the November election, in which Trump is the presumptive Republican nominee.

As prosecutors explained, Trump agreed to pay $130,000 to Daniels to buy her silence, but rather than pay her himself, he asked that Michael Cohen, then an employee of the Trump Organization whose main portfolio was skulduggery, do so. Trump later reimbursed Cohen via checks. Trump denied any relationship with Daniels, and he insisted that the checks were payment to Cohen for legal services. Trump’s lawyers also argued he would not have been closely tracking the purpose of the payments, and thus had no intent to falsify records.

Prosecutors presented a methodical case over several weeks, including dramatic testimony from Daniels herself. But some of the most important testimony came from witnesses sympathetic to Trump (and whose lawyers were in some cases paid for by him), who testified that Trump was a micromanager who was highly attentive to expenses, blunting his claims of ignorance. They also testified that Trump was worried that if Daniels went public with her story, it would harm his campaign, which was reeling from the Access Hollywood tape at the time of the agreement.

Though much of the case hinged on documents, the crucial witness was Cohen himself, who testified that Trump had agreed to the plan as a cover-up. Trump’s lawyers mounted a furious attempt to erode Cohen’s credibility, accusing him of lying repeatedly on the stand, but they didn’t offer a compelling alternative narrative, and were evidently unable to persuade the jury.

One striking element of this case as well as a recent defamation verdict against Trump in a civil case is how fast juries have returned verdicts. Despite Trump arguing that the cases against him are flimsy or politically motivated or nonsense, jurors have moved swiftly against him—even in a case as complex as this one.

The verdict is only the end of one chapter in this case. No sentence will be decided until July, and Trump has said he will appeal the decision, which will likely delay any punishment. He is eligible to run for president and serve even if convicted—and indeed even if incarcerated.

Another important question is how voters will respond to it. Pollsters have sought to measure how a conviction or acquittal might affect the course of the election, but this is a situation without precedent. One peculiarity of the case is that though whether Trump might be convicted was in question, the central damning matter at its center—Trump paying hush money to a porn actor—was never in dispute. Trump and his allies have long since deemed this case a political prosecution, and he blasted out a fundraising appeal within minutes, calling himself a “political prisoner.” (He is not a prisoner.)

“This was a disgrace,” Trump said outside the courtroom this evening. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

But for anyone following the case closely, the claim is hard to take seriously. Even if Bragg had political motivation to bring the charges, he had to prove them in an adversarial system. Trump’s lawyers had every opportunity to cross-examine witnesses, call their own, and make the arguments Trump wanted to hear in court, even if legal analysts sometimes found them unwise. Ironically, Trump’s ability to complain so fiercely in and out of court about the unfairness of the proceeding was proof of its fairness.

Regardless of the verdict, the simple fact of a relatively smooth trial has been a victory for the criminal-justice system. This was the first experiment the United States has ever had in trying a current or former president for a crime—though it will probably not be the last—and it has been a heartening demonstration that no one is above the law, no matter how powerful.

An Island Community Displaced by Climate Change

2024-05-30T13:10:01-04:00

The Panamanian government recently presented keys to new houses to about 300 families from Cartí Sugtupu, a small and crowded Caribbean island that is threatened by rising sea levels and a lack of space. The Indigenous communities on Cartí Sugtupu and neighboring islands have faced increasing floods and damage from storms. Starting in 2015, the Panamanian Ministry of Housing began relocation plans, constructing a new mainland settlement called Nuevo Carti—completed at a cost of more than $12 million. Residents will begin to move into their new homes next week.

To receive an email notification every time a new photo story is published, sign up here.

The Slasher Movie Reaches Disturbing New Heights

2024-05-30T11:57:32-04:00

In a Violent Nature is a slasher film designed, as most slasher films are, to unsettle and distress. It follows a group of teenagers who unintentionally disturb a grave, awaken a monster, and then get hunted through the woods by this mute, superhuman creature. The plot is stubbornly formulaic. But its presentation is somewhat radical, to the extent that I feared I was settling in for the most terrifying movie experience of all: an empty genre exercise, one that’s more interested in style than in substance.

The writer-director Chris Nash runs the risk of seeming pretentiously self-aware in his feature debut, which is in theaters this week and is worth watching if you have a high enough tolerance for gore. In a Violent Nature is a horror film about the experience of watching a horror film; it prods the audience to consider the artificiality of genre classics such as Friday the 13th, which it is consciously aping and subverting. In almost every slasher, the camera tends to stick with the victims as they navigate frightening scenarios and are picked off by a mostly unseen villain. But In a Violent Nature is told from the point of view of the silent predator as he tromps around the Ontario wilderness in search of his next quarry.

The movie essentially raises the question: What is the killer doing for most of a slasher film’s running time? If you’re watching a Halloween or a Friday the 13th, in which the personality-free antagonist is more a force of nature than a scheming rogue, the murderer is on-screen for only a handful of minutes. Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees are nightmarish, but they’re not exactly leading men; the films they “star” in are always, by necessity, centered on the people they’re chasing. Nash starts things off differently, focusing on an old abandoned locket, the sort of detail many viewers might not notice. We then see a hand snatch the locket away, and it’s quickly clear that this action has disturbed a burial ground, because out of the earth pops a large, desiccated man named Johnny (played by Ry Barrett).

[Read: How Wes Craven redefined horror]

As in any such horror film, Johnny has plenty of overactive teenagers to stalk, and all seem to be wrapped up in the typical interpersonal dramas that define these stories. But the audience only overhears snippets of conversations, and has to guess at what flirtations or tensions might be motivating the campers to split off, go swimming, or do anything else that leaves them vulnerable. That’s because the viewer stays with Johnny, the camera usually hovering above his shoulder as he lurches through the trees. His movements seem almost aimless—until he crosses another teen’s path and we’re treated to a scene of involved and intense maiming.

The film most recalls Gus Van Sant’s meditative and upsetting 2003 film, Elephant, which presented a school shooting as an abstract visual exercise, following teenagers as they meander through hallways before the plot curdles into something deeply chilling. In Elephant, Van Sant was trying to unpack the mundanity of life, and how the routine can turn unthinkable in an instant. And although Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took a different formal approach (using static, surveillance-like cameras to track the action), that film was similarly intent on creating a banal backdrop for brutality. In a Violent Nature is not nearly so heady, and is steeped in the silliness of slashers, which is why I was worried it would be undermined by its winking nature.

But despite the film’s knowing edge, it’s still really scary to follow a hooded, hook-wielding butcher through the woods, anticipating whatever round of chaos he is about to unleash next. In a Violent Nature judiciously spreads out its kills, but when they arrive, they are extremely nasty, achieved with impressive practical effects and a methodical, straightforward presentation. There are no quick cuts here, no goofy ways of hiding gore from the audience: Nash wants the viewer to engage with the pure terror of what’s going on just as much as he wants them to sit in the tedium of it. The result is a film as worthy as its predecessors—and one of the most unsettling examples of the genre I’ve seen in years.

To Have or Not Have Children

2024-05-30T11:50:00-04:00

In December 1941, Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Amsterdam, found herself unexpectedly pregnant. Hers was not a wanted pregnancy; we know from her diaries that she had never desired children, and had even considered a hysterectomy “in a rash and pleasure-loving moment.” Hillesum wanted above all to be a writer. Like many women before (and after) her, Hillesum self-managed her abortion; she mentions swallowing “twenty quinine pills” and assaulting herself with “hot water and blood-curdling instruments.” She left behind an account not just of her methods, but of her reasoning. “All I want is to keep someone out of this miserable world. I shall leave you in a state of unbornness, rudimentary being that you are, and you ought to be grateful to me. I almost feel a little tenderness for you,” she wrote. Hillesum was aware of the dire political circumstances around her, but her rationale was entirely personal. As she explained to the entity growing within her, her “tainted family” was “riddled with hereditary disease.” She swore that “no such unhappy human being would ever spring from my womb.”

Eighty-three years later, the Dutch philosopher Mara van der Lugt looks to Hillesum in contemplating a central question she believes that everyone must attempt to answer for themselves: that of whether or not to have children. In her new book, Begetting: What Does It Mean to Create a Child?, van der Lugt locates in Hillesum’s words no less than “the beginning of an ethics of creation,” an earnest wrestling with the act of bringing a new person into the world. She argues that childbearing is too often framed as a matter of desire and capacity—wanting or not wanting children, being able or unable to have them—when it should be a moral one. Procreation, she proposes, is a “problem—a personal, ethical and philosophical problem, especially in a secular age.” Perhaps, she ventures, it is “the greatest philosophical problem of our time.”

Asking such a question in an era when two-thirds of the global population live in places with fertility rates below replacement level may seem counterintuitive (and to pronatalist policy makers, downright counterproductive). Clearly, many people of reproductive age have decided against parenthood, even though it is still the far more common path. (Decades after contraception was legalized for unmarried people in the U.S., more than 84 percent of women in their 40s had given birth.) But van der Lugt is less interested in the outcomes, and even in the reasons people give for having or not having children, than in the question itself. At the core of her argument are two facts: First, that a person cannot consent to being born, and second, that there is a high likelihood they will experience at least some suffering in their lifetime. As incontrovertible as these assertions are, I’ve rarely heard people outside of environmentalist circles talk about their hypothetical children in these terms.

These two facts, van der Lugt maintains, should be sufficient to trouble common assumptions about begetting—chief among them the notion that having children is inherently good. She wants her readers to reconsider the language people use about childbearing, which usually revolves around choice or preferences. Instead, she argues, begetting “should be seen as an act of creation, a cosmic intervention, something great, and wondrous—and terrible”: Hardly something one should undertake without pausing to examine why.

In her 20s, van der Lugt looked around her peer group and saw people becoming parents without what appeared to be much consideration, sometimes, “seemingly, just for fun.” One day, at a restaurant in Rotterdam, a friend she calls Sylvia tells her, “I actually believe having children is immoral.” Sylvia reasons that because “life always contains some suffering”—ordinary or severe mental or physical illness, emotional pain, and all sorts of other potential harms—bringing a child into the world inevitably adds to that misery. Van der Lugt is shocked, and unconvinced by Sylvia’s argument. The two begin an ongoing debate about the morality of childbearing, which is eventually joined by a third friend. These discussions spur van der Lugt to reexamine her long-held assumptions, a process that forms the basis of the book.

[Read: Why are women freezing their eggs? Look to the men.]

Van der Lugt draws on a wide and eclectic mix of sources as she builds her arguments. Among them: Lord Byron’s Cain: A Mystery, for its explicit connection of “the problem of suffering and evil” to procreation, and Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, in which one character asserts that being a friend is enough to make a meaningful existence. Insights from popular media such as The West Wing and The Hunger Games are put in conversation with the work of philosophers including Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Michael Sandel, and the early ecologist Peter Wessel Zapffe.

She begins by examining the ideas of several antinatalist philosophers. Antinatalists come in many stripes, ranging from those who believe that humans threaten the well-being of nonhuman animals and the environment to some who are simply misanthropic; the most worthwhile of these arguments, van der Lugt believes, are the ones that are grounded in concern for the welfare of fellow people. She engages extensively with the controversial South African philosopher David Benatar, who wrote in his 2006 book, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence, that “so long as a life contains even the smallest quantity of bad, coming into existence is a harm.” This idea carries with it, in Benatar’s view, an obligation not to procreate; the duty to avoid harm far outweighs the possibility of bestowing a benefit, especially on someone whose consent cannot be obtained. (The logical conclusion of this view is eventual human extinction.) Benatar dismisses the notion of life being good and worth living as the product of the human tendency to hold more tightly to our positive experiences than negative or painful ones. But surely, as van der Lugt counters, “we are an authority on this, the value of our own lives?”

Still, the possibility of suffering does make any act of procreation a gamble with someone else’s life, irrespective of how valuable, good, or even sacred we deem our own lives, or human life in general. So how do we apply this bleak calculus to our individual choices? One’s intuitive response might be “to distinguish mere possibility from probability.” Most people, van der Lugt continues, likely believe, at least in the abstract, that we shouldn’t create people “who will most probably lead miserable lives,” such as a child with a hereditary disease that will cause them immense physical pain and an early death. But they probably wouldn’t argue that we “have a duty to avoid creating people who might just possibly lead miserable lives.” She is careful to note that making such a judgment on behalf of others is a dicey prospect, one reason she is unconvinced by some people’s assertion that life is, on net, bad. The late disability-rights activist Harriet McBryde Johnson, for instance, asserted that the “presence or absence of a disability doesn’t predict quality of life,” in response to arguments like those of the philosopher Peter Singer, who has said that parents should have the option to euthanize disabled babies if they judge that their infant’s life will be “so miserable as not to be worth living.”

Of course, this question of possibility versus probability falls unevenly on the shoulders of different groups. “Any child you bring into existence could be assaulted, raped, tortured, or murdered,” writes Benatar. “It could be sent to war. It could be kidnapped, abducted, imprisoned, or executed.” Well, yes. But in a profoundly unequal society, some people are, statistically, far more likely to suffer the sorts of harms that Benatar mentions. We know that Black Americans are about five times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons than white Americans. We know that in the U.S., women are seven times more likely to be rape victims than men. We know that the children of poor parents are far more likely to end up poor themselves.

Van der Lugt’s book does not engage enough with how we might figure these realities into discussions on begetting, or what the implications of doing so would be. Although she is clear that moral debates about childbirth should be kept separate from legal or policy guidelines, we have long lived in a society that regulates birth—either through racist and classist messages about who should and shouldn’t reproduce, or through legislation, such as the current broad restrictions on abortion in the United States. The Buck v. Bell decision of 1927 authorized sterilization for “imbeciles,” and in 1983 the Milwaukee legislature passed a bill that made artificially inseminating welfare recipients medical malpractice. Then there’s our insurance regime, in which Medicaid beneficiaries can generally get contraception but not fertility care. “Insurers pay for the poor to get birth control and for the rich to get IVF,” the historian Laura Briggs has written, a system underpinned by reasoning she calls “precisely eugenic.” If the logical end point of certain antinatalist arguments is that groups bearing the burden of living in an unjust society must subject their family planning to additional moral scrutiny, perhaps something is wrong with the premise.

[Read: Why parents struggle so much in the world’s richest country]

Probability and possibility come into play again in van der Lugt’s treatment of the climate crisis, which has generated ambivalence about begetting; these hesitations have been perhaps most loudly voiced by people—white, middle-class, college-educated—whose reproduction has historically been encouraged. She acknowledges that the apparent inexorability of climate change makes the possibility of suffering far more of a certainty for many more people. “If there is anything we can be certain of, it is that the world is changing, and not for the better,” she writes. Yet to say that creating children is a uniquely vexed question today is to engage in what van der Lugt calls “temporal exceptionalism,” because life involves pain no matter what. Even if we were to solve climate change tomorrow, she points out, the concerns raised by the antinatalists—the potential harm and horror of human life—are still on the table. “When the question of climate has been answered, the question of begetting remains,” she writes.

Are there any good reasons to have children? Van der Lugt finds all of the most common ones wanting. Among the “worse reasons” she cites are “to remain ‘in-step’ with [one’s] peers,” to save a relationship, or out of fear of regret or missing out. Uncritically accepting “the Biological Narrative,” as she calls “the language of biology, of hormones, of physical urges,” demeans the procreative act. Giving little credence to the evolutionary drive to propagate the human species, she instead suggests that “we might do better to emphasise not the urge itself, but the ability consciously to act, or not to act, upon it.” Other stock answers on the “better” end of the spectrum, such as “happiness, fulfillment, meaningfulness,” are also deemed insufficient. In van der Lugt’s view, expecting a child to provide those things places too great a burden on the child. Even the most obvious reason, “love” (my instinctive answer), is dismissed as logically inadequate. “Even if it is possible to experience love for a non-existent child,” van der Lugt writes, “love alone cannot justify all things.” After all, she notes, when it comes to existing people, mere love (or what she says is more accurately termed “longing” in the case of a child one hasn’t yet met) is not an adequate reason to do anything to them without their consent.

If the question has no one simple answer, it is still, van der Lugt insists, vital to ask it, and to ask it in the correct way, using language that moves away from entitlement and desire (“having” or “wanting” children) and toward “a concept of fragility and accountability”—the idea that we are entrusted with children, responsible for them. Although many people speak of childbearing as “giving the gift of life,” van der Lugt argues that this unidirectional characterization is mistaken. “If life is ‘given’ at all, it is given both to the parents and to the child: neither is giver, but to both it is bestowed,” she writes.

Thus, perhaps, one possible approach to begetting is to begin with humility, combined with a deep appreciation for the fragility of existence. Van der Lugt’s model for this stance is once again Etty Hillesum. Writing in the Nazi transit camp of Westerbork, where she remained for several months before boarding a train to Poland, where she and her family were killed, Hillesum insists that “life is glorious and magnificent,” even as she bears witness to the misery around her. Her searching examination of her own existence left her full of gratitude, yet still did not compel her to give life to someone else, for how could she insist, or predict, that that person might face the adversity she experienced with the same extraordinary grace. As van der Lugt writes, “The principle of gratitude and acceptance, according to which life is worth living ‘despite everything,’ is one that she applies firmly to herself, but only hesitatingly to others.”

Those who do choose to beget might also adopt this same humility. Bidding someone forth, conjuring a new person from a couple of cells, is an act of tremendous magnitude, one whose meaning is perhaps too great and abstract to grasp or articulate with any precision. Before undertaking it, we should commit to the same unsparing self-examination. This, in the end, is van der Lugt’s request of us: to pose the question of begetting to ourselves, and to answer it for only ourselves.

Stop Wasting Your Fridge Space

2024-05-30T11:13:00-04:00

My refrigerator has a chronic real-estate problem. The issue isn’t leftovers; it’s condiments. Jars and bottles have filled the door and taken over the main shelves. There’s so little room between the chili crisp, maple syrup, oyster sauce, gochujang, spicy mustard, several kinds of hot sauce, and numerous other condiments that I’ve started stacking containers. Squeezing in new items is like simultaneously playing Tetris and Jenga. And it’s all because of three little words on their labels: Refrigerate after opening.

But a lot of the time, these instructions seem confusing, if not just unnecessary. Pickles are usually kept cold after opening, but the whole point of pickling is preservation. The same is true of fermented things, such as sauerkraut, kimchi, and certain hot sauces. Ketchup bottles are a fixture of diner counters, and vessels of chili oil and soy sauce sit out on the tables at Chinese restaurants. So why must they take up valuable fridge space at home?

Meanwhile, foods languish in the pantry when they would do better in the fridge. Nuts develop an off-taste after a few months; spices fade to dust in roughly the same time span. Recently, a bag of flaxseed I’d bought just a few weeks earlier went rancid and began to smell like paint thinner. A lot of commonly unrefrigerated foods could benefit from cold storage, Kasiviswanathan Muthukumarappan, a refrigeration expert at South Dakota State University, told me. Yet maddeningly, they aren’t labeled as such, whereas many shelf-stable foods are refrigerated by default. The conventions of food storage are full of inconsistencies, wasting not only precious refrigerator space but sometimes also food itself.

Judging by a trip to the grocery store, there are two kinds of foods: fridge foods and pantry foods. Pasta and granola bars, for example, are kept at room temperature, whereas fresh foods such as meat, dairy, and produce are kept cold. These types of highly perishable items are defined by the FDA as “temperature control for safety” foods, and keeping them below 40 degrees Fahrenheit slows the growth of many harmful microbes, which can cause food poisoning. Outside the fridge, pathogenic microbes grow rapidly: According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, these foods shouldn’t be left unrefrigerated for even just two hours.

But the binary—fridge foods and pantry foods—is too simplistic. Many condiments, for example, exist in a murky middle ground. Some mustards can sit out on a counter, whereas others are prone to mold, Karen Schaich, a food-science professor at Rutgers University, told me. Relishes, which are usually chopped pickled vegetables or fruits, can also develop mold or yeast fermentation if not refrigerated. In part, it comes down to their sugar content: Microbes don’t thrive in acidic conditions, but they generally do like some sugar. A broad rule of thumb is that “extremely tart or sour” condiments are usually safe to leave on the counter, as long as they aren’t also sweet, Schaich said.

Proper food storage just can’t be boiled down to a single question—to chill or not to chill?—because the effects of refrigeration are twofold. Beyond safety, the fridge helps maintain a food’s flavor. It does this in part by slowing the growth of spoilage microbes, which usually aren’t harmful but produce revolting flavors and odors. The fridge also slows natural processes that degrade quality. Once safety is controlled for, “chemistry takes over,” Schaich said, referring to reactions that cause food to develop weird or gross flavors over months or even years.

The big one is oxidation, which is responsible for many foul odors, tastes, and textures in food, such as stale Cheerios and oil that smells like Play-Doh. It’s caused by exposure to oxygen and accelerated by factors including time, moisture, bacteria, light, and, crucially, heat. Refrigeration keeps food tasting fresh by controlling for the latter. That’s why products such as Heinz ketchup and Kikkoman soy sauce have labels saying they should be stored in the fridge: not for safety, but for flavor. Put them in your pantry, and they’re unlikely to make you sick.

When it comes to maintaining flavor, one molecule is more consequential than others. “It’s the fat that matters,” Muthukumarappan said. Fatty foods—certain nuts such as pecans and walnuts, some kinds of oil—oxidize and go rancid, usually developing sour or bitter flavors and, sometimes, the tangy smell of meta l or the waxy one of crayons. It makes sense to refrigerate peanut butter, and nuts in general, Muthukumarappan said. Better yet, store them in the freezer if you plan on keeping them for years. Grains are likewise vulnerable to rancidity: Hemp seeds have a high oil content and can oxidize within months, and so can some types of flour, Schaich said—in particular, whole-grain flours such as rye and spelt. Storing them in the refrigerator is better than in the cupboard, she said, but vacuum-sealing them to remove oxygen, then putting them in the freezer, is best for long-term storage.

There are other reasons you might want to put things in the refrigerator. Spices don’t usually become rancid, but their potency fades. A milk-carton-size container of smoked paprika I ordered about a year ago is now basically red sawdust. Old cumin smells dull, like pencil shavings. The flavor and pungency of spices comes from volatile oils, which too are vulnerable to oxidation. Staleness, Muthukumarappan told me, is usually caused by repeated exposure to the air—as in, regularly opening and closing a spice jar. Keeping spices near heat and light can accelerate the process. The freezer is useful if you plan to store spices long term, provided that they’re kept in airtight containers. But if they’re going to be used frequently, it’s best for them to stay at room temperature. Keeping them cold risks condensation forming every time the container is opened, potentially leading to clumps, off-flavors, or even microbial growth, Luke LaBorde, a food-science professor at Penn State, told me.

In all my years of cooking, I can’t remember seeing a ketchup bottle that said it was okay to store at room temperature, just as I’ve never come across a spice jar that was meant to be kept in the freezer. Storage instructions on foods, or lack thereof, manifest a different reality, one where proper storage techniques aren’t general knowledge but insider information: There probably won’t be any refrigeration instructions on a bag of pine nuts, but if you know, you know. Expecting every product to have detailed instructions is unrealistic. A simpler storage system, if a more space-intensive one, might be to keep everything cold by default. That way, at least most foods would be safer, and presumably stay fresher. When I asked Muthukumarappan whether any foods would taste better if stored at room temperature, he said he couldn’t think of any. Yet there is still lively debate over whether tomatoes, bread, eggs, butter, and olive oil taste best at room temperature.

The fridge-pantry dichotomy will never fully encompass the murky science of food safety, and the experts don’t always agree. Even the rules for produce aren’t totally clear-cut: All sliced fruit, but not all whole fruit, should be kept cold—especially sliced melons. Unlike most fruits, melons aren’t very acidic, making them more hospitable to pathogenic microbes, LaBorde said. Garlic is safe for several months when kept at room temperature, but homemade garlic-in-oil carries the risk of botulism unless refrigerated.

There’s only one way to reclaim our fridge space and avoid rancid nuts, stale oats, and moldy jellies: thinking beyond the fridge-pantry binary. In particular, factor in how long and where you intend on storing food. It’s not always easy: Buy in bulk from Costco, where you can get a five-pound bag of walnuts and a gallon of mayonnaise, and food can easily linger—or be forgotten—in a humid pantry for months, even years. Still, if a bottle of ketchup is going to get used up in a week of summer barbecues, you can let it hang out on the counter. Went nuts when the walnuts went on sale? Freeze some for future you.

The science of food storage was widely known several generations ago because it was taught in American schools, Schaich told me. Now we’re on our own. Although we’re unlikely to ever grasp all of its complexities, understanding it just a little more has some advantages. Disregarding the recommendation to refrigerate an open jar of capers gave me a frisson of excitement—not just because it felt like breaking an imperfect rule, but because of the space it opened up in my fridge.

Harvard’s Golden Silence

2024-05-30T07:00:00-04:00

All sorts of events tempt a university to make a public statement of support or condemnation: a terrorist attack on New York City and Washington, D.C. A mass shooting at a nearby elementary school. Faculty and student enthusiasm for protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter. A social reckoning like #MeToo. Thugs storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the moment, the benefits of making a statement feel as though they outweigh the costs.

But the costs are real and cumulative, as Harvard has learned in the seven months since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. Alumni and students on both sides of the Gaza conflict have called on the school to condemn the atrocities of their enemies, or sympathize with their pain, or affirm their political positions, values, sentiments, or sense of morality. It could not please everyone, and its president, Claudine Gay, had to step down under pressure.

In a report released on Tuesday, Harvard has come to the wise conclusion that the institution should stop issuing “official statements about public matters that do not directly affect the university’s core function.”

[Robert P. George: Universities should not be ideological churches]

It will be interesting to see whether Harvard’s leaders can heed that advice and resist making statements through Election Day. Until then, other institutions would be wise to follow Harvard’s example and adopt their own policy of institutional neutrality. Universities have never possessed moral clarity. Knowledge creation requires rewarding dissent and epistemic modesty, qualities that are incompatible with institutional solidarity or real-time judgments about who is on “the right side of history.”

Institutional neutrality is most closely associated with the University of Chicago, where the Kalven report was adopted in 1967. It notes that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student,” not the head administrator or any entity that purports to express any collective view. “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic,” the report states.

Harvard’s new report follows a similar rationale. It says, “The integrity and credibility of the institution are compromised when the university speaks officially on matters outside its institutional area of expertise.” Its leaders, after all, are hired for “skill in leading an institution,” not “expertise in public affairs.” And when university leaders habitually release statements, they face pressure from competing sides of nearly every issue, distracting “from the university’s essential purpose.”

It also notes that choosing a side “can undermine the inclusivity of the university community. It may make it more difficult for some members of the community to express their views when they differ from the university’s official position.” The report advises against even statements of empathy pertaining to wars, natural disasters, and persecution, because “the university runs the risk of appearing to care more about some places and events than others” and “runs the risk of alienating some members of the community by expressing implicit solidarity with others.” And “anodyne official statements may cause further distress to the very groups they are meant to comfort.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The wrong way to fight anti-Semitism on campus]

The report closes by advising that when pressure builds to make an official statement, Harvard should refer to its new policy and clarify the reason for its silence: “the belief that the purpose of the university is best served by speaking only on matters directly relevant to its function and not by issuing declarations on other matters, however important.”

As university leaders pronounce less, faculty and students should feel more free to step up and speak up, not on behalf of any collective, but as individuals who prefer constructive discourse to groupthink. For those who crave pronouncements from the top, there is still religion.

Why It’s Nice to Know You

2024-05-30T07:00:00-04:00

Want to stay current with Arthur’s writing? Sign up to get an email every time a new column comes out.

My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I lov’d alone

These lines come from the American writer Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Alone,” written in 1829. The poem laments his intense, painful loneliness. This isolation was perhaps self-imposed; some evidence suggests to me that Poe may have lacked interest in others. According to one obituary, Poe “had very few friends, and he was the friend of very few—if any.” It’s not that no one was interested in him; it’s that he wasn’t interested in them, which made impossible the friendship that he—like all people—would have needed.

Do you feel a longing to be known that is not being met? If so, then—in that, at least—you are not alone. According to a survey conducted by the health services company Cigna and the market-research company Ipsos in 2018, more than half of U.S. adults said they always or sometimes felt that “no one knows them well.” If this includes you, you may be suffering from what we could call Poe syndrome, in which your inattention to others is at the root of the problem.

[Daniel Engber: Edgar Allan Poe’s other obsession]

A great deal of research has demonstrated that feeling known by others brings higher well-being. For example, one study in 2008 showed that when measuring life satisfaction on a one-to-seven scale, simply feeling “more understood” on a given day pushed up satisfaction by nearly half a point. The scholars also noticed significant gender differences: For instance, when women felt misunderstood, their life satisfaction fell by about three times more than men’s.

Neuroscientists have explored the effects of being known and understood. Using fMRI technology, they have found that feeling understood activates pleasure centers in the brain, such as the ventral striatum, while feeling misunderstood stimulates pain centers, such as the anterior insula. This finding makes evolutionary sense, insofar as we tend to succeed better in close communities when others know and understand us, and we are more under threat of rejection when we don’t have that understanding from others. So, even in modern times, when no one knows you well, or your partner seems not to understand you, your brain may send out an alarm that corresponds to the ancient warning that you might soon be wandering the savannah alone.

We tend to thrive more by being known than we do by knowing others. For example, scholars found that knowledge of one’s spouse improved adjustment to marriage, enhanced intimacy, and increased trust. However, being known by your spouse improved all three measures of marital happiness by about twice as much. Interestingly, research shows that for straight men and women, knowing that their partner is trying to understand them is even more important than that they actually succeed in doing so. And this perspective is more strongly tied to relationship satisfaction for women.

[Arthur C. Brooks: Jung’s five pillars of a good life]

The asymmetry between wanting to know others and being known by them presents an inherent problem, because relationships require reciprocity: If I don’t do the work to know you deeply, a relationship doesn’t form in which you will know me. This vicious cycle—Poe syndrome again—is made much worse when you are lonely to begin with; researchers have demonstrated that loneliness can lead to self-centeredness. In other words, if no one knows you well and you are thus lonely, that may make you more self-focused and less interested in others, making it much less likely for others to want to get to know you well.

To begin to be truly known by others involves breaking out of Poe syndrome by proactively knowing them. This is one of the great secrets of socially successful people, such as politicians. For example, former President Bill Clinton was famous for making whomever he was talking to feel completely seen and understood. As one observer put it, “He has the ability to connect with an audience and then turn around and make the person who was helping with the slideshow feel like they’re the most important person there.”

This trait does not come naturally to many of us, though, as the author David Brooks (who is a friend but no relation) notes in his recent book, How to Know a Person. He observes that a lot of people are “Diminishers,” self-involved to the point that others feel small and unseen. Such Diminishers do this by speaking primarily about themselves—something that, studies show, most people do often—and by failing to ask questions. Brooks contrasts Diminishers with “Illuminators,” who are persistently curious about others, ask questions, and listen to the answers.

Being curious about others and asking genuine questions have strongly positive effects. For example, as my Harvard colleague Alison Wood Brooks (also no relation—I’m not doing this on purpose) and her co-authors have shown, asking a lot of questions (as opposed to just a few) on a first date will make you 9 percent more likable. If you also ask follow-up questions—which demonstrate even deeper interest in the other person—the odds that you’ll get a second date improve.

[Listen: How to know your neighbors]

Follow-up questions demand actively listening to the other person, a practice essential to knowing them. In other words, you must pay attention to what they tell you, with an intent to learn from it. That contrasts with how we often listen during conversations, especially in academic settings: We’re waiting to talk. Real listening also requires being truly present and mindful when you are engaged with the other person—offering the gift of your whole self, undistracted by other matters or, God forbid, your devices. Research suggests that this combination of active listening and mindfulness is central to relationship quality.

So avoiding Poe syndrome in your life is remarkably simple. When you talk with others, remember this string of actions: Focus completely on the person, ask plenty of genuine questions about their life, listen carefully to their answers, ask thoughtful follow-up questions, and leave your phone in your pocket for the entire conversation. By showing genuine curiosity about a person in this way, you might get a second date, repair a frayed marriage, or start a good friendship. You will also be on your way to being truly known yourself—which is what your heart most desires.

[Read: What your favorite personality test says about you]

And who knows what other benefits this ethic of knowing and being known might bring you? For me, the answer is this column. “How to Build a Life” is based each week not on bright ideas that spontaneously pop into my head but on conversations I have with real people I meet—at my university, on an airplane, or anywhere else a conversation strikes up.

I ask people a lot of questions about their life and their happiness. Invariably, what they tell me only brings up more things I want answers to—an appetite I try to satisfy by going off to read a lot of research and writing about it all here. I’ll never be a creative genius like Edgar Allan Poe, but knowing others works for me, and I’m a happier person to boot.

Americans Are Thinking About Immigration All Wrong

2024-05-30T06:00:00-04:00

What’s the United States’ most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans’ concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they’re not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country’s biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.

Scolding Americans for their alarm is pointless. The state of U.S. immigration policy is objectively chaotic. When Joe Biden became president, he rolled back some Trump-era restrictions, at the same time that migrants began to take greater advantage of loopholes in asylum law to stay in the country longer. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in crime in parts of Central and South America, combined with the strong U.S. economy, created the conditions for migration to surge. In 2022, illegal crossings hit a record high of 2.2 million. As asylum seekers made their way north, cities struggled to house them. In New York City, so many hotel rooms are taken up by migrants that it has created a historic shortage of tourist lodging.

In a perfect world, the brokenness of America’s immigration system would inspire Congress to swiftly pass new legislation convincing voters that the U.S. controls whom we let in and keep out of the country. The basic contours of this grand bargain have been fairly clear for decades. In exchange for expanded opportunities for legal immigration—more visas, more green cards, and targeted policies to increase immigration in technology and science—liberals would agree to stricter enforcement and control at the border. But major immigration reform is stuck. Changing the law requires Congress, and in the latest example of feckless delay, Donald Trump has instructed congressional Republicans to sandbag negotiations with the White House, to avoid giving the Biden administration an election-year win. What we’re left with is the perception of immigration chaos, anger about the chaos, and dithering in the face of it.

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.

Immigration has for decades, even centuries, created a temporal paradox in American discourse: pride in the country’s history of immigration coming up against fears of its present and future. Benjamin Franklin, whose father was born in England, complained that migration from Central Europe would swarm the young nation’s Anglican culture with undue German influence. In the late 1800s, a more Germanic nation feared the influence of incoming Italians. A century later, a nation that had fully embraced Italian Americans bemoaned the influence of incoming Mexicans.

[Ari Berman: The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement]

Although this brisk history of nativism might seem to make light of today’s anti-immigrant sentiment, ignoring the fears that people have about a sudden influx of migrants is counterproductive. The border crisis is not just a news-media illusion, or a platform for empty grandstanding. It really has endangered thousands of migrants and drained city and state resources, causing a liberal backlash even in deep-blue places. Last September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York.” As tens of thousands of migrants moved into Chicago, the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars to provide them with housing and education, building resentment among Black residents. What’s more, papering over anxieties about competition from foreign-born workers is not helpful. The Harvard economist Gordon Hanson asked me to think about the experience of a barber in an American city. If immigrants moving into his area open barber shops, they might reduce his ability to retain customers, raise prices, or make rent. The logic of fear is understandable: More competition within a given industry means less income for its incumbents.

Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live.

But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”

Specialization of labor might sound drab and technical. But it’s a key part of why immigration can help even low-income workers earn more money over time. Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay. To take the example of the American barber, let’s imagine that his son decides to go to a trade school or college to increase his skills in response to intense competition for barbers. He might be better off, making a higher wage than he would have had he remained in the profession. Although such specialization can be difficult for some people who switch out of their parents’ fields, it can lead to a more dynamic economy with higher wages for all.

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda. The U.S. must contend with a national housing shortage that has contributed to record-high living costs and bone-dry inventory in some major metros. This is a story not merely about overregulation, zoning laws, and permitting requirements, but also about labor supply. The construction industry is short several hundred thousand jobs. In the largest states—such as California, Texas, and New York—two in five construction workers are foreign-born, according to estimates by the National Association of Home Builders. “The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing [is] that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” Brian Turmail, the vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, has said. If Americans want more houses, we might very well need more foreign-born workers to build them. Achieving clean-energy abundance requires immigrants too. One in six solar and photovoltaic installers is an immigrant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “23 percent of all green job workers are foreign born,” according to a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The debate over low-skill immigration and its effect on the economy can get a bit technical, if you’re an economist, and emotional, if you’re an anxious native worker. But even if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on the complex macroeconomics of letting less educated migrants enter the U.S. in higher numbers, we cannot let that disagreement hold hostage the obvious benefits of expanding our recruitment of foreign-born talents into the U.S.

Immigration-as-recruitment is a particularly useful framework as the U.S. embraces a new kind of industrial policy to build more chips and clean-energy tech domestically. As The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, America’s new economic strategy has three parts. The first is subsidies to build products in the U.S. that are crucial to our national security and energy independence, such as advanced semiconductor chips and electric vehicles. The second part is tariffs on cheap Chinese imports in these sectors. The third is explicit restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used to surveil or influence U.S. companies and people, such as Trump-era laws against Huawei equipment and the Biden-era law to force the sale of TikTok.

But this newly fashioned stool is missing an essential leg. If the U.S. is going to become more strategically selfish about protecting key industries such as computer-chip manufacturing from foreign competition, we need to revamp our high-skill-immigration policy too. In fact, the new American economic paradigm doesn’t make any sense otherwise. As a rich country, the U.S. will be at a disadvantage in semiconductor manufacturing because of our higher labor costs. If we can’t win on costs, we have to win on brains. That means staffing our semiconductor factories with the world’s most talented workers.

[Jack Herrera: Is Texas about to turn Latinos into single-issue voters?]

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a highly specialized workforce that is distributed around the world and concentrated in Asia. A large share of workers in advanced-chip manufacturing live in India and China. But green-card caps limit their ability to move to the U.S. As a result, we’re at risk of spending tens of billions of dollars on factories and products without a plan to staff them. “The talent shortage is the most critical issue confronting the semiconductor industry today,” Ajit Manocha, the president of the industry association for semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturers, said in 2022. This is a fixable problem. The Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank, has proposed a “Chipmaker’s Visa” that would annually authorize an accelerated path to a green card for 10,000 immigrants with specialized skills in semiconductor manufacturing.

What’s true for chipmaking is also true for AI development. According to the Federation of American Scientists, more “top-tier” AI researchers are born in China than in any other country in the world. But two-thirds of these elite researchers work in the U.S. The number could probably be even higher if the U.S. had a smarter, future-looking immigration policy regime. The administration has already taken small steps forward. In October, Biden issued an executive order that asked existing authorities to streamline visa criteria for immigrants with expertise in AI. More could be done with congressional help.

If the U.S. is in the early stages of a new cold war with the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, and Iran, we can’t logically pursue an industrial policy without an equally purposeful immigration policy. Immigration policy is industrial policy, because immigrants have for decades been a linchpin in our technological growth. As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants. And yet, we’ve allowed waiting times for green cards to grow, while the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and left the U.S. entirely. This is madness. Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.

Immigration is central to America’s national security, industrial policy, abundance agenda, affordability crisis, and technological dominance. Without a higher number of foreign-born workers, the U.S. will have less of everything that makes us materially prosperous. But none of these advantages should distract immigration proponents from the fact that failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists. Border chaos is horrendous branding for the pro-immigration cause.

“Immigration is too important to be chaotic,” Hanson, the economist, told me. “Chaos leads to short-term policy fixes. But you don’t want a 10-month immigration policy for the U.S. You want a 100-year immigration policy.”

Taking that 100-year view leads to perhaps the most powerful case for expanding immigration. The Lancet recently published an analysis of global population trends through the end of the 21st century. By 2064, the worldwide human population will peak, researchers projected, at which point almost every rich country will have been shrinking for decades. Fertility is already below replacement level in almost every rich industrialized country in the world. In Japan and South Korea, there are already fewer working-age adults with every passing year. China’s birth rate has fallen by 50 percent in just the past decade. Within a few years, immigration will be the only dependable lever of population growth for every rich industrialized nation.

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

Is Sasha Velour in Danger?

2024-05-30T06:00:00-04:00

Since Sasha Velour won RuPaul’s Drag Race with her spectacular rose-petal lip sync, she has been thriving in Brooklyn with her partner, Johnny Velour, and her Italian greyhound, Vanya. She wrote and illustrated The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag, drew a New Yorker cover, and sells out almost every show of her New York revue, NightGowns. So why is she bothering to take her act down to Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Bartlesville, Oklahoma?

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to Velour about this season of her HBO reality show, We’re Here. In structure, the show works more or less like Queer Eye. Velour and a duo of queens travel to a small town to meet with locals who need their help. But the mood is less fairy dust and glitter and more dirt and danger. People yell “faggot” at them from cars and tell them they are sinners. One man compares them to Jeffrey Dahmer. When they coax the locals to be open and proud, it feels both redemptive and dangerous. (What will happen to these people after the cameras leave?)

We’re in a moment when drag is both beloved and reviled, a powerful cultural force and also a target. Velour, an amateur historian of drag, has seen this moment before. We talk about what she’s looking for in Murfreesboro, and she reveals the essential truth about drag, hidden in the show’s title.

Listen to the conversation here:

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.

I’ve watched RuPaul’s Drag Race since the beginning, when the set looked like cable-access TV and the queens’ costumes were very homespun. I still watch now, nearly 15 years later, and some of the costumes cost tens of thousands of dollars because they’re either made by famous designers or they are covered in Swarovski crystals.

The point is: I have this lazy impression that drag has made it not just to the mainstream, but to the cultural center. But actually, there’s this whole other universe in this country where that is definitely not true.

News montage: Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has just signed a bill that would restrict drag performances … Drag performances out in the open, like this one at National Pride last year, will now be illegal in Tennessee … It says, “It is an offense for a person to engage in an adult cabaret performance” … It’s the first state where this bill has now been signed and become law. It will be going into effect the 1st of April.

Rosin: That law was eventually struck down by a federal judge. But dozens of other states are introducing different varieties of laws that effectively ban drag.

So when I saw that Sasha Velour, who happens to be my favorite RuPaul winner—she won Season 9 with the most spectacular lip sync. Anyway, when I saw that Sasha and other former contestants were putting on a drag show for HBO in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, I thought, What are they doing there?

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Sasha Velour: In order to make a difference, it feels like we really have to stay, so one drag show is not enough.

Priyanka: Do you like drag queens?

Woman: No, not really.

Priyanka: No, not your thing?

Woman: Not my thing.

Priyanka: That’s totally fine.

Priyanka: Do you know what drag queens are?

Woman: Yes, I do.

Velour: Would you come to a drag show if we did one in town? Oh.

Woman: I’m sorry. Yeah, I parked down here.

[Music]

Rosin: Sasha Velour is an author, a cartoonist, a theater director, a scholar. And she’s also one of the co-hosts of We’re Here, which is now in its fourth season.

On the show, Sasha and her crew recruit and mentor local residents—who they refer to as their “drag daughters”—and they put on a drag show for the town. But this season feels very different because of what’s happening on the ground in places like Murfreesboro.

Velour: The slower you say it, the harder it is to say the name of the town. Murfreesboro. (Laughs.)

Rosin: A town where officials denied Pride permits after they determined that a past drag show constituted “illegal sexualization of kids.”

Velour: Yeah, it did not feel fun walking around the streets of Murfreesboro. It wasn’t fun until we connected with other queer people who lived there. But because the sense in the town—it was very, We do not want any visibility for queer people. So there we were with our bright outfits in and out of drag, waving rainbow flags, which is, you know, not something I actually really do in my real life, but—

Rosin: In Brooklyn, you don’t need to wave your rainbow flag?

Velour: No, no. I don’t know if I even own a rainbow flag, truth be told.

Rosin: (Laughs.)

Rosin: During the show, there are makeovers, there are tears, there are many things that are fabulous and iconic. But this season the reality show is giving a lot more reality.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

[Shouting]

Velour: Yes! Back at ya, gal.

Man: Faggot!

Velour: Oh.

Priyanka: Did he just say “fag”?

Velour: He did say “fag.” Thank you. I love that word.

Velour: The fact that, within 24 hours of being in Tennessee, we are called faggots, feels like a warning, like a reminder to stay in your place. They don’t want you there. They don’t want to see you.

Rosin: I know, intellectually, that you have cameramen there, and that you guys are protected, but the situations you are putting yourselves in are not—I mean, they seem fraught, genuinely fraught.

Velour: They were genuinely fraught. And there’s, of course, a moment when filming is wrapped that you’re like, Oh, I’m just here alone in a car by myself now. And, of course, we have many resources. And a privilege came with that—that the people we were talking to, the stories we were hearing, they don’t have a team of 10 people checking in on them.

Rosin: Right.

Velour: That would make it easier to be bolder. And so that’s why we felt we really had to be.

Rosin: Right, right. Okay. Now, when I watch shows like this, you know, you have fabulous queer people show up at a town and spread fairy dust—that’s a kind of show. That’s maybe the structure of the show, but the feeling of it, especially this season, is like watching a documentary.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Teen: I think the common argument is that, you know, We just want people to accept us for who we truly are. But I do accept you for who you are. You want me to accept you for your fairytale fantasy betrayal of yourself.

Velour: Do you believe that people are gay?

Teen: No. I do not believe that people are born gay.

Rosin: There’s someone who just yells in your face, You’re a man dressed as a woman, compares you to Jeffrey Dahmer.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Man: What she meant to say is she believes that people can choose to be gay. But we do not believe that Jeffrey Dahmer was born a murderer.

Velour: Totally unrelated.

Man: No. Morality is a choice.

Velour: There’s nothing immoral about loving someone.

Rosin: Why court this kind of conflict?

Velour: I don’t know that that particular voice needs to be platformed or shown. I think there was some hope that maybe, in conversation, there would be a give-and-take of questioning. But it really did just become us asking questions of these people, trying to unpack where they get the information for these lies and these myths about queer people, where they got this information for these lies and myths about straight people and cisgender people, too, because it was all so narrow, and claiming science defends their point of view when I think it’s actually just the opposite, in reality.

Rosin: Yeah.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Man: God created a man with a penis. God created woman with a vagina.

Velour: I don’t agree that that’s the truth.

Man: That’s okay. You don’t have to follow science.

Velour: No, the science says that there’s a lot of variety in terms of chromosomal gender and in terms of genitals, as well.

Man: Well, there’s XX and XY. Now, there are hermaphrodites, but all hermaphrodites are actually dominant male or female. There’s nobody that can procreate that can make a woman pregnant and get pregnant.

Velour: There’s a lot of people who are not fertile.

Man: That’s true. That’s absolutely true.

Velour: Are they not men or women?

Man: Well—

Rosin: That was the reality, I mean, especially because there was a child there and a father there. And I thought it was—again, it has a documentary feel, like you’re walking into a city council meeting, and you’re kind of in for it in all your regalia. And so you knew it was coming. I just—it was an interesting choice. It did display something that is real.

Velour: Maybe I assume too much good intentions from people, but I really hoped that some of those fears that they were expressing came from not having had the opportunity to speak to queer people, and that us being willing to talk to them was going to move the needle. But we really couldn’t find common ground.

But I want us to unify. I think queer people are allies to the straight community, as well, and that what we stand for should make the world a more free place for everyone, including that man and his daughter. It’s sad to be rejected by people who don’t know anything about you. But that is the reality that we’re trying to show.

Rosin: Yeah. That moment stuck out with me because it was painful. It wasn’t necessarily cathartic. In the Queer Eye template, you know, everyone’s supposed to be crying at the end of that interaction, and that definitely didn’t happen.

Velour: Right. I didn’t think about that. I guess it’s a success, then, to show that not everything has an easy resolution.

Rosin: Totally. Totally.

Velour: We very much found that. The people who are willing to grow, can grow exponentially. And those who can’t, you may just have to move on.

Rosin: You know, you are an incredibly multitalented artist, one of the most successful, creative drag queens of the RuPaul era. Why leave Brooklyn—

Velour: Still hustling to make it happen, in my mind. But it feels like nothing’s a guarantee, but I really appreciate that encouragement.

Rosin: And may you hustle forever because you are a font of just constant creativity. But why leave Brooklyn to put yourself in places where people effectively don’t believe in your right to exist, don’t speak your language? Why?

Velour: This stuff does happen in Brooklyn, too. I was just called a faggot not one week ago outside of my own house by someone passing on a bicycle. And even though there is such a warm reception for queer and trans people, for nonbinary expression on the streets of this city—and I feel safe here; I love it here—I wouldn’t be satisfied just staying in one place.

I love to travel and to get to spread the joy of drag all over the world. And this is the funny thing about being a drag artist: You go from having a thousand people scream your name—stand on their feet—and then 30 minutes later, you’re outside and someone is screaming at you for being visibly queer and could beat you up, or your life could be at risk.

And that dichotomy doesn’t always get shown. Sometimes it’s one or the other. But I think it’s the fact that it’s both at all times that is also part of why drag is the way it is, why we have this sense of humor but also this depth and darkness to what we put out there, why we feel like we have to be political—’cause we’re being politicized just by existing.

Rosin: Yeah. In addition to being a drag queen, I know you’re a historian of drag. So maybe we get into this dichotomy.

Velour: Amateur, amateur. (Laughs.)

Rosin: Amateur historian. Amateur historian. So I feel like what you’re describing—this duality—is so intense right now, that you can create a bubble in which you’re fabulous, successful, make a living, and then another bubble where you are hated and rejected. And both of those are intensifying at the same time.

Velour: It’s really true.

Rosin: Like, five–10 years ago, this is when magazine covers announced drag has arrived, and drag queens have power, cultural influence, and they can make a living. And then there’s a spate of drag bans. Do you think of that—looking back at the history of drag—as a common thing? Like, rise, backlash, rise, backlash?

Velour: Yes. Absolutely. The greater the visibility for drag, but also for trans people. And it’s interesting that, I think, the visibility and acceptance for both our queer-made art form and all of our identities that have been suppressed for a while—those have been uplifted at the same time over the past 10 years in a way we’ve been delighted by, that it seems like culture is shifting and making space for us.

Rosin: And yet.

Velour: And the backlash feels like the last gasp of a dying opinion. But, unfortunately, they’re very organized and extremely well-funded. It was interesting on We’re Here, seeing how much money is behind the repression of trans rights and the drag bans. And often those people aren’t from the places that they’re showing up, but they’re putting on a performance of, This town doesn’t stand for that. Which strikes me as a kind of—

Rosin: Drag.

Velour: —hideous mirror to drag, where they’re trying to shut down on people’s freedom. They’re performing the most tired, basic lies. They’re insisting on a return to normal that they actually are inventing through erasing the real truth of our existence throughout time.

Rosin: How do you know that? Like, how do you know that people weren’t from the town or that there is money in it? How did that come up? Because I don’t remember it coming up in the show as a conversation. How did you come to learn that?

Velour: We went to the website of Jesus Warriors, I believe, or God Warriors.

There’s a couple that have similar names. And you can see how they take in donations. I guess I don’t know how much they really are able to take in, but it’s clear that it’s an organized effort.

When the biggest attention comes to places like my drag daughter, Veronica, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee—a clip of her literally just talking about her fake breast that she was wearing at a Pride show, which fell to the ground, which is something many of us have experienced. And it’s hard not to comment on it when it happens. But a clip of that went viral and got circulated on Facebook.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Man: So I want you to watch this and tell me if you think this is appropriate for kids.

Veronica: Quit playing with my tits. Give them here. Oh, making me uncomfortable, talking about the weight of my boobs. They’re not even mine.

Norm: That two seconds was blown up to be this horrible example of indecency and inappropriateness. So that basically shut it down, right? There’s no Pride this year. It’s not gonna happen.

Velour: And that worked up people who don’t live in Tennessee to barrage the city council with requests to ban drag, which is why it ended up happening. And so it’s interesting seeing how these things are organized. And then in various places that have protesters, the people in the town say, We don’t know those people. A couple of them found out where they came from, and it was, like, two or three hours away.

Rosin: Interesting. Right, because Veronica talks about that and feels guilty about that, like it was her fault, somehow, that drag got banned from town because this thing happened to her.

Velour: Yeah, and it was something that, I think—they were looking for anything. And it’s just heartbreaking if someone feels responsible when they’ve done nothing wrong.

Rosin: Yeah.

[Clip from HBO’s We’re Here]

Norm: There’s guilt from that.

Velour: Do you feel responsible?

Norm: Oh, yeah.

Velour: No. It’s not you.

Norm: It is. If I had not run for mayor and been so loud, if I had not screamed about my titties from stage in front of children—

Velour: It would have been something else.

Norm: Would it? Because that’s when it all started.

Velour: And the logic is, Oh, you should have been quiet and censored yourself, and then we could exist. But we can’t exist if we have to live on those terms with all those conditions. We’ll never thrive.

Rosin: And the “we exist”—speaking of Veronica—the title We’re Here of the show, you know, the “we” could be, We, the fabulous queens, have arrived. We’re here. But watching the last season, I was thinking the “we” is actually the locals: We’ve always been here. We live here. We’re everywhere. We haven’t just arrived yesterday with some sort of wave of wokeness.

Is that some of the meaning? Is that why you—’cause it seems to raise up local queer people almost more than you guys, in a way.

Velour: That was my intention, at least. I never wanted it to be this sense of, The superheroes have arrived. That is not how I view drag.

Drag changes lives when it affects how you see yourself. And it’s not us changing the lives by showing up. We bring a stage that allows all these local heroes to activate their own powers to feel supported—which they so desperately need to really be bold—and to remind them to say exactly that, to remind them to say, We’re here, and stand up for themselves and for their community.

[Music]

Rosin: More with Sasha Velour after the break.

[Break]

Rosin: Are these worries—I don’t know if I should call them worries about the show, but I’m going to run them by you. Like, little things that come into my head when I watch.

Velour: I love to worry. So this is right up my alley.

Rosin: Okay. Excellent. We can worry together. So there’s a small part of me that resists this idea that the drag queens have to come to a town and put on a show, like that’s the only path to acceptance. I felt that in Oklahoma, like, Okay, we’re just going to go on the street corner and essentially busk and put on a show. Do you ever feel like that?

Velour: I mean, I love putting on a show, and it is my favorite thing in the world, so I never feel like I have to do that. I often am trying to get to perform, just because there’s something—we look for ways to disarm people who object to us. And entertaining is a classic way to do that. I resist it vehemently, but I’ve learned about the importance of comedy in softening people’s resistances.

And I think, ultimately, a show is definitely not enough to change minds. Like, a conversation and the human stories that I hope We’re Here really teases out alongside the performance is—that’s the whole picture. But sometimes a show is a good excuse for people to let down their walls and try something.

Rosin: Okay. All right. We’ve settled that one.

Another one: So you’re often going into these towns, and the push or the line is to be out and proud. I remember reading in your book that when you did your Fulbright in Russia, you talked about two camps: There was the out-and-proud camp, and they were protected and a little more privileged. And then you had understanding for people who didn’t want to be out and proud, or that wasn’t the right path for them.

And I wonder if you’ve thought about that in these towns, because you can see that the local queer people are struggling with that very concept. Like, Is it safe to be out and proud? Should I be out and proud? Can I be out and proud? Can I just live my life? And I wonder how that plays out in those relationships.

Velour: Yeah, there are some people for whom being out is not the best option based on where they live. And, in my experience, in Russia, that group of activists were mainly more working class and risked losing their jobs and their houses if they were out. And framed that way, I did begin to see exactly what they meant.

And they were still finding ways to have community and to be out with themselves. But they couldn’t safely be out on the streets protesting, be waving a rainbow flag. So it would be interesting if We’re Here kind of explored a story like that.

But fundamentally, you know, we want people to live, and whatever you need to do to do that is correct.

Rosin: Yeah. Maybe this is the big question. What does it matter if there’s drag in Murfreesboro? I feel like America’s dividing in so, so, so, so, so many ways that why can’t I just say, Oh, go to Nashville and do your drag there? Do you know what I mean? Like, what does it matter that we have it everywhere?

Velour: I mean, at its heart, it is everywhere already. They have drag shows happening. People who don’t have the resources to travel to Nashville, for various reasons, want to be able to do the drag they’ve been doing for decades. And these bars are getting shut down. People are yielding to pressure.

It’s like as people are finding out how much queerness exists around them, they’re suddenly shutting it down. And that is a cycle that’s happened before. But in those moments, people were dressing up in their homes and wishing the world was different. So it’s kind of like: It’s always gonna be there, so why can’t we make a space for it?

Rosin: There was an era when I believed more strongly, like, If we all just knew each other, or we all just talked to each other. I have to fight much harder now to find that space in people—I really, really do—and to pass through a thing that makes them uncomfortable.

And I don’t know. So when I watched your season, I guess I was trying to decide, Is this confirming my pessimism, or is this a small ray of hope? And I wonder if you—and I haven’t decided—and I wonder if you have that, if you’re on that balance when you film it or you’re just a happy, hopeful person, so you go with the hope.

Velour: I have my moments of being very optimistic. It’s definitely a cliché that, Oh, human stories change everything. I want that to be true. We encounter a lot of people who did not want to hear stories that did not confirm what they already believed. And I’ve noticed, increasingly, it feels like people aren’t comfortable admitting that they could currently be wrong about something, being genuinely curious to learn new things.

So will anyone who doesn’t want to see drag queens in the world watch this show? I sure hope so. But I don’t know what it’s going to take. I think the examples are stories about how it happens within families.

Rosin: Yeah.

Velour: And someone like Veronica’s mother, who threw her child out because of what her church was saying and what her community was saying about queer people and then realized that didn’t make sense to her. And they’ve slowly built their relationship back, and she’s grown to accept gay people and accept queer people on some level and certainly accept her child’s love of drag. So that gives me a lot of hope. That’s someone who’s changed their mind, and I think that if—it could be possible for anyone.

Rosin: You know, watching your show with a friend, I’m so used to RuPaul world. And watching so much RuPaul, you can easily forget that there are lots of places in this country and many countries around the world where it’s not like that. Like, there isn’t a cultural renaissance of drag queens. And I did have the thought, Wow, RuPaul has maybe saved hundreds of lives. I forget that this element of visibility— the out and proud—it does have a safety element to it.

Velour: Yeah, it does. And the show Drag Race has reached so many people and just normalizes the existence. And the fact that there’s been so many seasons, so many drag artists, all with different styles, that’s probably been the biggest shift in drag of all time. And for people, I was thinking about my drag daughter Jess, in Oklahoma, who said, It was the first time I had thought queer people are beautiful. And seeing that on television really did something profound for her.

Rosin: Yeah.

Velour: And I was like, Wow. I don’t know that that’s everyone’s take watching Drag Race, but maybe that is something. That is a new idea that we are helping to share.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid, fact-checked by Sam Fentress, and engineered by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you want more Sasha Velour, you can see her new play this summer. It’s called Velour: A Drag Spectacular.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

The Maternal-Mortality Crisis That Didn’t Happen

2024-05-30T06:00:00-04:00

In 2019, the United States recorded twice as many maternal deaths as in 1999. You may have seen articles under headlines such as “More Mothers Are Dying” that frame this situation as a crisis. The notion that the U.S. has fallen behind other highly developed nations in addressing rising maternal deaths has filtered from academia into activist circles, newsrooms, social media, and everyday conversation. The general public might conclude: In America, pregnancy is getting deadlier by the year.

Recently, however, Saloni Dattani, a scholar with the research organization Our World in Data, reported definitively that measurement changes are largely to blame for the seemingly inexorable rise in maternal deaths. Things aren’t getting worse for women; we’re just getting better at tracking what’s going on.

That’s great news, of course—but the “crisis” argument might prove hard to shake, and that’s not great news. The persistent narrative that maternal deaths have been rising grows out of a counterproductive belief that doom and gloom is the only way to motivate change. Pregnancy is risky. The wealthiest country in the world could and should do more to prevent deaths and non-fatal harms, which are chronically ignored. Doing so will require being clear-eyed about what the evidence is telling us.

To address past concerns about underreporting maternal deaths, Dattani explains, states gradually updated their reporting standards to be more inclusive. The old definition of maternal mortality focused on deaths during childbirth or closely following birth; the new one expanded to include deaths during pregnancy or the first six weeks after the end of pregnancy. States also added a checkbox on death certificates indicating whether a woman had been pregnant at the time of death or within a year of her death. The reported maternal-mortality ratio on average doubled after the checkbox implementation. Because individual states changed their standards at different times over the course of a decade and a half, the national maternal-death count seemed to keep rising.

[Annie Lowrey: The case for spending way more on babies]

Medical professionals have always had to make subjective determinations about causes of death. The lack of objective standards became a familiar issue during the coronavirus pandemic: If a deceased patient had several comorbidities, without which they likely would have lived, was the cause of death the virus or their other underlying health conditions? It’s a tricky question.

In some cases, when a patient dies during or soon after pregnancy, the proximate cause of death is plainly related to childbirth. In others, causation is harder to establish; pregnancy may exacerbate an existing condition or have no clear connection at all. But the new checkbox lumps all of those cases together. And so, in trying to correct for underreporting maternal deaths, we may actually be overreporting them.

Although Dattani’s findings have prompted some pushback from other researchers, other peer-reviewed studies back her up. She cites research from as far back as 2017 about the effects of the checkbox. One skeptical ob-gyn turned blogger was throwing cold water on the crisis narrative in 2010. So why is it still so firmly rooted in the public discourse?

For many commentators, correcting the record on a delicate or emotionally fraught topic simply feels awkward. You risk sounding as if you’re trivializing pregnancy and the costs women shoulder to have children. In March, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology published a study arguing that the “recent changes in maternal mortality surveillance, such as maternal death identification based solely on pregnancy checkbox information on death certificates, have led to an overestimation of maternal mortality.”

Christopher M. Zahn, the interim CEO of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, wrote a lengthy statement in response, arguing that “reducing the U.S. maternal mortality crisis to ‘overestimation’” is “irresponsible and minimizes the many lives lost and the families that have been deeply affected.” Why? Because it “would be an unfortunate setback to see all the hard work of health care professionals, policy makers, patient advocates, and other stakeholders be undermined.” Rather than pointing out any major methodological flaw in the paper, Zahn’s statement expresses the concern that it could undermine the laudable goal of improving maternal health.

Similar arguments are rarely stated aloud but are highly influential behind the scenes: If you want to help people, you should show how they are in crisis. Anything that makes others more complacent about their problem is working against the victims.

This dynamic is evident well beyond the maternal mortality debate. A couple of years ago I reported on dire COVID-related economic predictions that didn’t pan out: Among them were the eviction tsunami, in which 30 million or more renters would be kicked out of their homes, and the “she-cession,” wherein women would drop out of the labor market en masse.

One problem, my article noted, is that experts and activists alike have policy preferences—such as a preference for greater housing assistance for people at risk of eviction—that influence what they observe: “Some advocates may have regarded the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to shoehorn in important social policies that they felt were long-justified, and, to a certain extent, they saw in the data what they wanted to see.” One sociologist told me that high estimates of potential evictions may have been useful “from a lobbying standpoint.” “It was helpful to the movement of activists who were pushing for relief measures to be put into place to cite some of these larger figures,” a housing analyst told me. At the time, my assertion that these predicted catastrophes had not come to pass prompted a significant backlash.

Still, many experts and journalists do push back on unwarranted crisis narratives. In a persuasive recent report headlined “The Child Care Cliff That Wasn’t,” Vox’s Rachel Cohen wisely argued that “advocates don’t need to rely on cataclysmic economic predictions to make the case for better and more humane family policy.”

For policy advocates, though, the problem with downplaying or ignoring evidence that things aren’t as bad as expected is threefold.

First, you lose credibility with elected officials if you’re always telling them that something is in crisis and then the facts show otherwise. If you’re not the one to update them when more encouraging evidence emerges, they’ll begin to write off advocacy organizations as hysterical and untrustworthy. Elected officials and their staff aren’t in the business of vetting your arguments; they’ll just tune you out.

Second, misinformation is destructive on its own terms. Democracy—and by extension the free press—is supposed to work by clarifying what is true to our best approximation. Muddying that goal because you fear that the truth will lead people astray is a mistake. It undermines trust in institutions and makes people think that scientific research and news reporting are motivated by activism more than truth.

[Emi Nietfeld: America’s IVF failure]

Finally, by drumming up a crisis where none exists, you may make people’s lives worse in concrete ways. I want kids. I have a lot of friends who want kids. We know that it’s risky, but the widespread discussion around the maternal-mortality rate has made me more fearful of pregnancy and childbirth than the numbers would indicate. The constant drumbeat that maternal mortality is “commonplace” and that pregnancy is “deadly” doesn’t empower me with information to make my own decisions. It just stresses me out.

I’m glad we now openly acknowledge the costs of pregnancy and childbirth. But reality is scary enough. We don’t need to rely on flawed data to make the case for change.

A Devil’s Bargain With OpenAI

2024-05-29T19:27:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Earlier today, The Atlantic’s CEO, Nicholas Thompson, announced in an internal email that the company has entered into a business partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT. (The news was made public via a press release shortly thereafter.) Editorial content from this publication will soon be directly referenced in response to queries in OpenAI products. In practice, this means that users of ChatGPT, say, might type in a question and receive an answer that briefly quotes an Atlantic story; according to Anna Bross, The Atlantic’s senior vice president of communications, it will be accompanied by a citation and a link to the original source. Other companies, such as Axel Springer, the publisher of Business Insider and Politico, have made similar arrangements.

It does all feel a bit like publishers are making a deal with—well, can I say it? The red guy with a pointy tail and two horns? Generative AI has not exactly felt like a friend to the news industry, given that it is trained on loads of material without permission from those who made it in the first place. It also enables the distribution of convincing fake media, not to mention AI-generated child-sexual-abuse material. The rapacious growth of the technology has also dovetailed with a profoundly bleak time for journalism, as several thousand people have lost their jobs in this industry over just the past year and a half. Meanwhile, OpenAI itself has behaved in an erratic, ethically questionable manner, seemingly casting caution aside in search of scale. To put it charitably, it’s an unlikely hero swooping in with bags of money. (Others see it as an outright villain: A number of newspapers, including The New York Times, have sued the company over alleged copyright infringement. Or, as Jessica Lessin, the CEO of The Information, put it in a recent essay for this magazine, publishers “should protect the value of their work, and their archives. They should have the integrity to say no.”)

[Read: ChatGPT is turning the internet into plumbing]

This has an inescapable sense of déjà vu. For media companies, the defining question of the digital era has simply been How do we reach people? There is much more competition than ever before—anyone with an internet connection can self-publish and distribute writing, photography, and videos, drastically reducing the power of gatekeepers. Publishers need to fight for their audiences tooth and nail. The clearest path forward has tended to be aggressively pursuing strategies based on the scope and power of tech platforms that have actively decided not to bother with the messy and expensive work of determining whether something is true before enabling its publication on a global scale. This dynamic has changed the nature of media—and in many cases degraded it. Certain types of headlines turned out to be more provocative to audiences on social media, thus “clickbait.” Google has filtered material according to many different factors over the years, resulting in spammy “search-engine optimized” content that strives to climb to the top of the results page.

At times, tech companies have put their thumb directly on the scale. You might remember when, in 2016, BuzzFeed used Facebook’s livestreaming platform to show staffers wrapping rubber bands around a watermelon until it exploded; BuzzFeed, like other publishers, was being paid by the social-media company to use this new video service. That same year, BuzzFeed was valued at $1.7 billion. Facebook eventually tired of these news partnerships and ended them. Today, BuzzFeed trades publicly and is worth about 6 percent of that 2016 valuation. Facebook, now Meta, has a market cap of about $1.2 trillion.

“The problem with Facebook Live is publishers that became wholly dependent on it and bet their businesses on it,” Thompson told me when I reached out to ask about this. “What are we going to do editorially that is different because we have a partnership with OpenAI? Nothing. We are going to publish the same stories, do the same things—we will just ideally, I hope, have more people read them.” (The Atlantic’s editorial team does not report to Thompson, and corporate partnerships have no influence on stories, including this one.) OpenAI did not respond to questions about the partnership.

[Read: It’s the end of the web as we know it]

The promise of working alongside AI companies is easy to grasp. Publishers will get some money—Thompson would not disclose the financial elements of the partnership—and perhaps even contribute to AI models that are higher-quality or more accurate. Moreover, The Atlantic’s Product team will develop its own AI tools using OpenAI’s technology through a new experimental website called Atlantic Labs. Visitors will have to opt in to using any applications developed there. (Vox is doing something similar through a separate partnership with the company.)

But it’s just as easy to see the potential problems. So far, generative AI has not resulted in a healthier internet. Arguably quite the opposite. Consider that in recent days, Google has aggressively pushed an “AI Overview” tool in its Search product, presenting answers written by generative AI atop the usual list of links. The bot has suggested that users eat rocks or put glue in their pizza sauce when prompted in certain ways. ChatGPT and other OpenAI products may perform better than Google’s, but relying on them is still a gamble. Generative-AI programs are known to “hallucinate.” They operate according to directions in black-box algorithms. And they work by making inferences based on huge data sets containing a mix of high-quality material and utter junk. Imagine a situation in which a chatbot falsely attributes made-up ideas to journalists. Will readers make the effort to check? Who could be harmed? For that matter, as generative AI advances, it may destroy the internet as we know it; there are already signs that this is happening. What does it mean for a journalism company to be complicit in that act?

[Read: OpenAI just gave away the entire game]

Given these problems, several publishers are making the bet that the best path forward is to forge a relationship with OpenAI and ostensibly work toward being part of a solution. “The partnership gives us a direct line and escalation process to OpenAI to communicate and address issues around hallucinations or inaccuracies,” Bross told me. “Additionally, having the link from ChatGPT (or similar products) to our site would let a reader navigate to source material to read the full article.” Asked about whether this arrangement might interfere with the magazine’s subscription model—by giving ChatGPT users access to information in articles that are otherwise paywalled, for example—Bross said, “This is not a syndication license. OpenAI does not have permission to reproduce The Atlantic’s articles or create substantially similar reproductions of whole articles or lengthy excerpts in ChatGPT (or similar products). Put differently, OpenAI’s display of our content cannot exceed their fair-use rights.”

I am no soothsayer. It is easy to pontificate and catastrophize. Generative AI could turn out to be fine—even helpful or interesting—in the long run. Advances such as retrieval-augmented generation—a technique that allows AI to adjust its responses based on specific outside sources—might relieve some of the most immediate concerns about accuracy. (You would be forgiven for not recently using Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which runs on OpenAI technology, but it’s become pretty good at summarizing and citing its sources.) Still, the large language models powering these products are, as the Financial Times wrote, “not search engines looking up facts; they are pattern-spotting engines that guess the next best option in a sequence.” Clear reasons exist not to trust their outputs. For this reason alone, the apparent path forward offered by this technology may well be a dead end.

The Jury Deliberates, and Trump Posts

2024-05-29T18:48:00-04:00

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.

As we wait for the jury’s verdict in Donald Trump’s hush-money case, let’s slow down a bit and ponder what the former president has told us over the past few days.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

A Week of Angry Posts

On Memorial Day, while the nation mourned its honored dead, Donald Trump took to Truth Social to denounce “the Human Scum” who are “working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country.”

In the post, Trump did not mention the fallen soldiers whom, in the past, he has referred to as “suckers” and “losers.” But he did take the occasion to lash out at “the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York” who had described what he did to E. Jean Carroll as “rape,” and the “N.Y. State Wacko Judge [Arthur Engoron] who fined me almost 500 Million Dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for DOING NOTHING WRONG.”

In a separate post the night before, Trump went after the “Radical, highly Conflicted Judge Juan Merchan,” who is presiding over the hush-money criminal trial in which the jury has begun deliberations. Trump also denounced “the Corrupt, Soros backed D.A., Alvin Bragg,” whom he accused of being “controlled by Crooked Joe Biden’s White House.” As I wrote last month, Trump’s broader strategy is to delegitimize the justice system as a whole—and to spread fear within the institutions tasked with holding him accountable.

Trump also took the time in his Memorial Day Truth Social post to resume his attacks on Carroll herself—the woman he has been found liable for sexually abusing, and then defaming, and then defaming again. He already owes her $91 million, but he felt the need, apparently, to once again accuse her of lying about his assault of her.

Amid all of the angry and unhinged rants, Trump’s attack on Carroll was particularly notable because it could prove even more expensive for the former president. Caroll’s attorney, Roberta Kaplan, has previously suggested that Carroll could file a third defamation suit against Trump for his continued comments about her. “We have said several times since the last jury verdict in January that all options were on the table,” Kaplan said in response to Monday’s post. “And that remains true today—all options are on the table.”

Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports that Trump is promising donors that he would deport pro-Palestinian protesters. As The Atlantic’s David Graham notes, protest is “an essential element of American freedom and is not itself against the law.” The threat, David writes, “is classic Trump: vindictive, nonsensical, disproportionate, and based on the assumption that deportation is the answer to America’s problems.” I could list other dangerous and nonsensical recent statements, but I’ll end with this one: Trump’s Memorial Day rant came just a little over 24 hours after he shared a video of a man furiously raving at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough—and liberals in general. The man declares that Trump will “get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blow-job liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide.”

The New Republic’s Greg Sargent noted that this apparent endorsement of the idea that “liberals” will be “done” if Trump wins “should be placed alongside Trump’s other recent threats, such as his vow that news organizations will be ‘thoroughly scrutinized’ if he wins, his promise to persecute his ‘vermin’-like political foes, and his threat to prosecute a range of enemies without cause.” Taken together, as Sargent points out, these threats paint a clear picture of how Trump intends to treat ideological adversaries once in office.

The gravity and volume of Trump’s concerning statements, and the ways that they interconnect, are not always reflected back by major media coverage. A November study by Media Matters for America found that major news outlets gave “dramatically less coverage” to Trump’s description of his enemies as “vermin” earlier that month than they devoted to Hillary Clinton’s remark about a “basket of deplorables” in 2016. Among other findings, the Media Matters review notes that the Big Three broadcast-TV networks “provided 18 times more coverage” of Clinton’s comment than of Trump’s.

I offer the above list as a reminder of what the man the Republican Party is set to coronate for the presidency this summer is telling us outside the courtroom. For the moment, Trump’s fate is in the hands of a New York jury. But ultimately, his fate will be up to the voters, won’t it? Millions of voters seem disengaged from this year’s campaign. A New York Times analysis of recent polling found that Trump’s current lead rests with voters “who aren’t paying close attention to politics, who don’t follow traditional news and who don’t regularly vote.” Young voters seem especially dismayed about the election and cynical about the stakes.

But Trump continues to tell us who he is and what he intends to do. We’ve been warned, and nobody—including that jury—is coming to save us before November.

Related:

Today’s News

Jurors in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial began deliberations. They asked to rehear parts of the testimony from Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, and David Pecker, the ex-publisher of the National Enquirer.
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito said in a letter to lawmakers that he would not recuse himself from two upcoming cases about the 2020 presidential election and the U.S. Capitol riot after recent news stories reported that two controversial flags flew at his homes.
Israel’s national security adviser said that the war in Gaza would last at least until the end of the year.

Dispatches

The Weekly Planet: Clouds are one of the greatest climate mysteries left, Zoë Schlanger writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

H. Armstrong Roberts / Getty

The Child-Nutrition Myth That Just Won’t Die

By Lauren Silverman

The fact that stealth cooking has remained so popular is amazing when you consider how much work it is. You might spend an extra hour cooking, say, chicken nuggets from scratch with pureed beets tucked inside—versus buying a bag of regular chicken nuggets from the supermarket. But if it helps your toddler get their recommended cup or cup and a half of vegetables each day, it’s worth it, right?

The nutrition experts I spoke with say it’s not.

Read the full article.

RFK Jr.’s Philosophy of Contradictions

2024-05-29T13:20:00-04:00

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. smiled, threw up a stilted wave, and made eye contact with nobody in particular. He was shuffling into Puckett’s restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, earlier this month for a plate of midday meatloaf. No advance team had peppered the room with stickers or buttons bearing his name. No one had tipped off the local media. Flanked by his press secretary and a couple of plainclothes security guards, Kennedy made his way toward a large table back near the kitchen, where he and I were scheduled to meet for an interview. The roughly two dozen lunch patrons didn’t appear to clock him, nor did the waiter.

Kennedy’s independent campaign for the White House has a loose, confounding energy to it. Most presidential candidates would glad-hand at a place like Puckett’s; Kennedy didn’t bother. Rather than run on a policy slogan—“Medicare for all,” “Build the wall”—Kennedy has opted for something closer to mysticism. He uses the word existential in nearly every speech. He spends an inordinate amount of time on podcasts.

“You know, so much of life, we see from the surface,” Kennedy told me that day. “It’s like the surface of the ocean. There’s a storm going on, there’s winds blowing, and we get preoccupied with ambitions, with fear, with, you know, trepidation. And then if you sink a few feet below the ocean, it’s calm there. And that, I think, is where we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible, in that place where it’s peaceful, where you understand everything is kind of an illusion. We’re walking through a dream, and our job is to be kind to people, to be open, to be tolerant.”

Despite this hazy rhetoric, establishment Democrats consider Kennedy to be a concrete danger to the future of democracy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called Kennedy “a living, breathing false-flag operation” whose “whole campaign is being run by right-wing political operatives who have one objective: try to take down President Joe Biden.”

When I first interviewed Kennedy last year, many people derided him as a distraction who would quickly fade into obscurity. Five months out from Election Day, Kennedy is polling in the double digits and fighting for nationwide ballot access. His team insists that voters will be able to pull the lever for him in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many political observers have argued that, like past third-party candidates who have hurt Democrats, he is poised to draw more votes from Biden than from former President Donald Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that Kennedy has particularly strong support among young voters and Latinos, two groups Biden needs more than Trump. Yet he’s also drawing support from Republicans and conservatives. Many of these voters are willing to look past his conspiratorial, anti-vaccination statements. Some may share his views.

[Read: The first MAGA democrat]

While Biden and Trump fight for first place, Kennedy is zigzagging around the country, talking about our need to reconnect with the Earth and rediscover our shared humanity. Born and raised an East Coast Catholic, he now resembles an aging California hippie preaching New Age mantras. He’s not running a winning operation so much as he’s on a public self-actualization journey. And America will have to live with the consequences.

Like with Biden and Trump, Kennedy’s mental state receives armchair diagnoses on a daily basis. But, unlike Biden and Trump, Kennedy says he once had a parasitic worm in his brain. I asked him if he would consent to undergoing a cognitive test. “The cognitive exam is called the debates. I would gladly take it,” he said. “I take a cognitive exam every time I do a podcast—I challenge the other candidates to take the cognitive test with me.” He added that he’d release his medical records if his chief opponents did the same.

Three nights before our lunch in Tennessee, I showed up at Kennedy’s rally in Austin, Texas. Outside the venue I spotted one attendee with colorful markers scribbling out a homemade sign: WORMS NOT WARS. The man, a 39-year-old named Steven Kinsey, told me he had spent his entire adult life supporting Democrats, including Biden. But several months ago he happened to hear Kennedy on Theo Von’s podcast when the episode came up on shuffle. “I was like, ‘Oh, isn’t that that crazy Kennedy?’” he said. “So I just left it on for entertainment purposes. And I was blown away. I was like, ‘This isn’t the same guy that everyone says is wacko.’”

[From the May 2024 issue: Is Theo Von the next Joe Rogan?]

Kennedy’s rhetoric—whether you believe it to be wacko or compelling—is full of contradictions. He views himself as a pacifist—an anti-war candidate who nonetheless falls to the right of many liberals on key issues of the moment, including Israel in its war with Hamas. Kennedy told me he is “very pro-Palestinian,” but like Biden, he is steadfastly supporting Israel. “I think, for Israel’s future, for Gaza’s future, Hamas has to be gotten rid of,” he said. “I don’t see what happens in a cease-fire. I don’t even understand what people, you know, expect out of it.”

Kennedy made headlines in early May for saying he supported abortion rights up until the moment of birth. But over lunch with me several days later, he explained why he had already modified his position, supporting abortion rights only to the point of fetal viability. “I’ve had 40 years that show that I’m pretty indifferent to a political cost of whatever issue,” he said. “If I’m wrong about something, if somebody shows me facts, I’m going to change my mind.” When I asked whether he’d enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, he was cagey. “Maybe an early—you know—before viability,” he said. “Listen, I don’t tell people I’m going to do something I don’t think can be done.”

In the early 2000s, Kennedy helped popularize the idea that vaccines cause autism, a theory that remains scientifically unproven. Last summer, he falsely claimed that the coronavirus pandemic may have been “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, and that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” are most immune from the virus. Nevertheless, he rejects the anti-vax label. “First of all, virtually everything that the press has written about my opinion of vaccines is wrong,” he told me. He said he believes that his position on vaccines is “aligned with what 99 percent of Americans feel.” In a bit of revisionist history, he said his stance boils down to “If people want vaccines they should be able to get ’em. I’m not going to do anything to interfere with that.” He told me that he wants people to have “the best science” on risk and efficacy. “And that’s all I’ve been saying for years. And that the people who are injured by vaccines, there’s a certain amount of people who are injured, and that we ought to be listening to them, not telling them that they’re fine and gaslighting them.”

Kennedy has practically zero chance of winning the White House and turning these policy positions into laws. As of now, he won’t participate in the first presidential debate in June. During our lunch, I asked him which state he most believes he’ll win, or, more generally, if he has a viable path to 270 electoral votes. He mentioned a few spots where he’s gaining traction, but couldn’t answer either question definitively. “I’m only peripherally involved in that part of the campaign,” he said of state-level plans—he was saying, in other words, that he’s not involved in the part of the campaign that’s concerned with trying to win the election. He deferred my nuts-and-bolts queries to his campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law.

“You know, there’s a mathematical answer,” she told me by phone last night. “But there’s also an answer that really has continued to transcend math all the way through.” She referred to this as “the America that almost was and what could be,” paraphrasing the author Charles Eisenstein. “Part of what I think a lot of observers, at least at this stage in the cycle, get wrong, is looking at national races rather than looking at individual states and how together they deliver a new leader to the White House,” she said.

I asked her which individual states her campaign will win.

“Well, you know, John, I would love to tell you that list,” she said. “One of the aspects to our electoral map that’s extremely important is not signaling where we’re going to be focused, ensuring advertising rates and attention and so forth are affordable and achievable there. So I can’t share the states with you except to say that Bobby is speaking to all Americans, and most especially to Americans who’ve been completely ignored by the map of the two-party system for decades and decades and are ready to have a say in the system.”

I asked her again. She eventually said that her team has a list of 29 states, but refused to share any of them, raising the possibility that Kennedy’s opponents may try to infiltrate their campaign. “Where we see the strongest numbers right now is, you know, the matter of a lot of internal polling. I’m sure the other campaigns are doing their own internal polling. But in the balance of resources, it wouldn’t be wise for us to spend a lot of hours on polling and then share them publicly.”

Though Kennedy will almost certainly lose the election, he could still affect its outcome by being a spoiler. The Democrats sense this. The DNC recently hired the veteran operative Lis Smith to lead a team focused on attacking third-party candidates, Kennedy in particular. Outside Kennedy’s rally in Austin, a black box truck drove laps around the venue. Among the rotating messages on its exterior about Kennedy and his running mate: WHY IS TRUMP’S TOP DONOR SPENDING $20 MILLION TO PROP UP RFK JR. AND NICOLE SHANAHAN? Beneath Photoshopped images of the two candidates in MAGA hats was a disclaimer: PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

The Democratic pollster and strategist Ben Tulchin has recently been looking closely at two swing states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Arizona, in particular, Tulchin’s data indicate that Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden than he is to Trump, especially among young people and Latinos. “I’ve been raising the alarm with the Democratic Party and anyone who will hear me in the Biden campaign,” Tulchin told me.

At the national level, though, a clear picture has yet to emerge. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me in an email, “There is no evidence in the current polls that conclusively points to RFK pulling more support from either side.” He continued, “The problem is, of course, with expected close outcomes in a few key Electoral College states, any small spoiler effect that’s hidden in the polling margins can have major consequences. Sample polling may not be precise enough to find it, unless you can interview every voter. That type of polling is called an election.”

Kennedy keeps steadily attracting not just independents but a mix of Democrats and Republicans alike. This aligns with what I’ve noticed at his events—a diverse generational cross section: crypto bros, cowboys, crunchy hippies. Kennedy looks out from the stage and sees it, too—all the wide-eyed voters looking back.

To stiff-arm the spoiler characterization, Kennedy refers to his own polling that shows he’d defeat either Biden or Trump in head-to-head matchups. “I’m not a spoiler, because I can win,” he told me flatly.

Trump rallies brim with a dystopian, campy Americana. Biden rallies barely exist. Kennedy rallies, meanwhile, tend to feel like giant house parties. Opening acts usually include cover bands, and many attendees mingle while sipping drinks. Inside the downtown-Austin venue, nearly 1,000 people milled about multiple bars and listened to a band cycle through crowd favorites: Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” and, in an ironic twist, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”

One of the first speakers that night was the regenerative-farming influencer Ryland Engelhart. He quoted the mystic poet Rumi and affectionately likened the RFK Jr. campaign to Noah’s Ark—“a big foolish project.” Engelhart told the crowd that he had been sitting on the toilet scrolling through his phone when he first discovered Kennedy and his message. He spoke wistfully about a recent fundraiser that ended with Kennedy joining his donors in a sweat lodge. He paraphrased another Rumi line at the end of his speech: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Then offered a 2024 addendum: “There is a president beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I will meet you there.”

[Read: The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus]

Shanahan made a rare public appearance that night. A Silicon Valley businesswoman and reported billionaire, she has no political experience and is not a natural public speaker. Most of her message was not about the election, but about topics such as healthy soil and the danger of forever chemicals in food. “A lot of our most innovative solutions come from outside conventional politics—they are in the realm of what’s been called ‘alternative,’” she said. “Yes, I know that sounds so radical. It shouldn’t. I have seen the power of these little alternative ways of thinking in my own life. I have used alternative health practices to restore my health, my fertility … I know what is possible when you think with an alternative, creative mindset.”

When Kennedy took the stage, he told the crowd, “Every time I see her speak, I fall a little bit more in love with her.” He went on, “Most of the presidential candidates we have today, they sound like they’re doing a satire of Veep. And that’s not what you hear from Nicole—you hear a lecture about soil!” He warned that the more Americans spend on medicine, the unhealthier we get. “What is it that is causing us not to see that?” he asked. “What is it that is causing us to constantly feed this beast that is making us more and more sick all the time? It’s the corrupt political system. It’s the subversion of our democracy.” His message built toward a call-and-response finale. “If Nicole and I get into office, everything is going to change,” Kennedy said.

“Don’t you want everything to change?”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted.

“Is there anything that you want to keep the same?”

“No!”

Some of the people most concerned about Kennedy’s impact on the election are members of his own family. Last year, a few Kennedys began speaking out against what they saw as the dangers of his campaign. His brother Christopher Kennedy recently characterized RFK as “unreachable,” a “true believer” with “fringe thinking,” “crackpot ideas,” and “unsound judgment.” On St. Patrick’s Day this year, dozens of Kennedys gathered at the White House and took a family photo with Biden—an unsubtle message to RFK.

I asked Kennedy what had gone through his mind when he saw that photo. He stared off at a refrigerator along the wall separating the restaurant’s dining room from its kitchen. He wiped his eye. He leaned forward with both elbows on the table. All told, it took him 34 seconds to formulate his answer. Kennedy acknowledged that he has family members who are “not enthused” about his candidacy, and some who are supporting him. “I don’t harbor resentments anymore,” he said. “I just don’t. I think they’re corrosive. They’re like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.”

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

He told me that he had expected to be polling well among his fellow Baby Boomers, because they were the ones with the most nostalgia for his father and uncle—the Camelot era. But so far, he said, younger people were his strongest bloc of support, people who likely didn’t think much about that history. I asked if he felt primarily like a Kennedy, someone carrying on a family legacy, or if he saw himself as just Bobby.

“Where do we get our sense of self?” he asked. “It comes from the principles which are the boundaries of that entity. The principles, the places where we say to ourselves, ‘I would never do that.’ And it comes from, you know, feelings that are the product of our history and our culture and our genes. You know, I grew up in this family. That lucky event, for me, has been one of the formative features and forces of my life. And has crafted everything I believe in as a person. It’d be hard for me to separate myself from my family.”

He characterized the past year of campaigning as “a very intense lesson on all the things that you’re supposed to learn in the course of your life.” Running for president, he said, teaches you how to process antipathy. “You got a lot of hatred coming in, and anger, and then, you know, the opposite of that, too.” The goal he chases is to treat “everything as an imposter,” even the adulation. But he seems to have a harder time with that last part.

“I think one of the inspiring things for me is how many people have put hopes in me for change. And I’m sure if you interview some of these people who are following me, it’s extraordinary to me that so many people show up,” he said. “A lot of them come to me crying and just voice their hopes. And it feels like a big responsibility.” He told me that this has changed him in a “fundamental” way. “It’s made me try to be the person that, you know, people hope I am.”

It’s hard to know who that person is, or what he stands for. Kennedy told me that he believes the worst things Trump did as president were instituting lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic and walking away from a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. He referred to Biden’s border policy as “a catastrophe.” He wants voters to distrust the government, yet he also wants to run the government. Kennedy remains a magnet for the disillusioned. His philosophy isn’t profound, but his supporters seem to know that he’s saying something, and that it’s a little dangerous and alluring. In an election with two deeply unpopular major-party candidates, that message—even if it doesn’t add up to much—is resonating.

The Atlantic announces product and content partnership with OpenAI

2024-05-29T10:31:00-04:00

Today The Atlantic is announcing a strategic content and product partnership with OpenAI, which positions The Atlantic as a premium news source within OpenAI. The Atlantic’s articles will be discoverable within OpenAI’s products, including ChatGPT, and as a partner, The Atlantic will help to shape how news is surfaced and presented in future real-time discovery products. Queries that surface The Atlantic will include attribution and a link to read the full article on theatlantic.com.

As part of this agreement, The Atlantic and OpenAI are also collaborating on product and tech: The Atlantic’s product team will have privileged access to OpenAI tech, give feedback, and share use-cases to shape and improve future news experiences in ChatGPT and other OpenAI products. The Atlantic is currently developing an experimental microsite, called Atlantic Labs, to figure out how AI can help in the development of new products and features to better serve its journalism and readers––and will pilot OpenAI’s and other emerging tech in this work. (The Labs site will not involve the editorial team; it is a sandbox for our product and technology team. Additionally, AI is not being used to create The Atlantic’s journalism.)

“We believe that people searching with AI models will be one of the fundamental ways that people navigate the web in the future,” said Nicholas Thompson, The Atlantic’s CEO. “We’re delighted to partner with OpenAI, to make The Atlantic’s reporting and stories more discoverable to their millions of users, and to have a voice in shaping how news is surfaced on their platforms.”

“Enabling access to The Atlantic’s reporting in our products will allow users to more deeply interact with thought-provoking news. We are dedicated to supporting high-quality journalism and the publishing ecosystem,” said Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO.

The Atlantic is maximizing ambition as it continues to pair journalistic excellence with growth across the company––building on the recently announced milestones of surpassing 1 million subscriptions and reaching profitability. It is pursuing partnerships, like that with OpenAI, that recognize the enormous value of The Atlantic’s independent journalism and storytelling, and that responsibly pursue new reader growth and discoverability. In April, for the third consecutive year, The Atlantic was awarded the top honor of General Excellence at the 2024 National Magazine Awards, the most prestigious category in the annual honors from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and won three separate reporting awards. The magazine earned its first Pulitzer Prizes in 2021, 2022, and 2023 for stories that exemplify the depth and range of its journalism.

Press Contact:
Anna Bross, SVP of Communications
press@theatlantic.com

The Child-Nutrition Myth That Just Won’t Die

2024-05-29T07:15:00-04:00

When my 2-year-old began favoring string cheese and croutons over peas and cauliflower, I tried to get creative. First, I mimicked the artsy approach to vegetables I remembered from childhood, starting with the classic ants on a log and then advancing to cucumber caterpillars and hummus monsters with carrot teeth. My toddler was only mildly amused. Next I turned to persuasion, repeating just how delicious bok choy is and how strong spinach would make her. On most days, I was lucky to get a single bite of something green within an inch of her mouth.

So I turned to Instagram and TikTok, where I quickly noticed that one veggie trick triumphed above all others: Hide the vegetables your child dislikes in the dishes they love. Does your kid like pancakes? Mix a little powdered spinach into those. Mac and cheese? That distinct orange color could come from carrots. You can even disguise cauliflower and broccoli in pizza sauce.

The sneak-it-in strategy predates social media. Authors of parenting cookbooks, such as Deceptively Delicious and The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids’ Favorite Meals, made the rounds on TV programs like The Oprah Winfrey Show and the Today show back in the late aughts. The fact that stealth cooking has remained so popular is amazing when you consider how much work it is. You might spend an extra hour cooking, say, chicken nuggets from scratch with pureed beets tucked inside—versus buying a bag of regular chicken nuggets from the supermarket. But if it helps your toddler get their recommended cup or cup and a half of vegetables each day, it’s worth it, right?

The nutrition experts I spoke with say it’s not. “Children by and large don’t need us to go to those lengths to get vegetables into them,” Laura Thomas, a nutritionist who directs the London Centre for Intuitive Eating, told me.

[Read: The ominous rise of toddler milk]

Vegetables, of course, have many health benefits. Some studies have linked eating vegetables to a decreased risk of several chronic diseases, including heart disease. But these studies look at veggie consumption across many years, not strictly what you eat as a toddler. And even though many children in the U.S. aren’t meeting dietary guidelines on vegetables, Thomas said that doesn’t necessarily mean they are undernourished. A large national study published in 2018 found that toddlers, despite their reputation for veggie-hatred, on average consume enough calcium, vitamin A, and iron. They tend to be low on potassium and fiber, but children (and adults, for that matter) can absorb such crucial nutrients from meat, nuts, beans, whole grains, and other nongreen foods. “There is almost nothing inherent to a vegetable that you can’t get in other foods,” Thomas said.

Disregarding vegetables isn’t an ideal long-term solution, because many of the foods that we tend to eat in their place are high in calories and low in fiber. But in the short term, accepting alternatives can help your toddler survive their pickiest stages without getting scurvy. And crucially, hiding veggies in bread- or meat- or sugar-heavy foods still means your kid is eating a lot of bread or meat or sugar. No amount of vegetables can counteract the detrimental effects of excess sugar.

Prominent nutritionists and child-development specialists alike have been telling parents for years to stop pressuring and tricking kids into eating vegetables. Yet health-conscious parents just can’t seem to put down the blender—which might say less about picky kids and more about the years of health messaging and fad diets their elders have endured. “All of these Millennials who grew up with ‘clean eating’ haven’t really thrown off that baggage,” Thomas said. Ellyn Satter, who for decades has been an expert on feeding and raising healthy kids, puts it more bluntly: “The belief is that if you hide vegetables in your child’s food, they won’t get fat and they’re going to live forever.”

[Read: The latest diet trend is not dieting]

Covertly shredding beets into meatballs and sneaking pureed veggies into our children’s mouths with whipped-cream chasers isn’t just pointless, Satter and other nutritionists say. The approach can even be counterproductive. “The goal of child nutrition is not to get children to eat everything they’re supposed to today. It is to help them to learn to enjoy a variety of healthy food for a lifetime,” Satter told me. And everything scientists know about how to do that stands in contrast to grinding vegetables into an indistinguishable pulp and masking them with other flavors.

Experts told me that if you consistently prepare and eat meals with your kids that contain a variety of foods—including disliked vegetables—without pressuring them to taste or swallow anything, they’ll eventually learn to eat most of what’s offered. Satter originally outlined this approach back in the 1980s, and told me that it works primarily because it creates trust between parent and child. “The child needs to trust their parents to let them determine what to eat or not eat from what the parents offer,” she said. If your child discovers that you’ve been hiding cauliflower in their tater tots or telling them tiny pieces of broccoli are actually green sprinkles, Satter said, you could rupture that trust, and your child may become more wary of the foods you serve or develop negative associations with vegetables.

Nearly 40 years after Satter outlined her feeding method, pediatric nutritionists continue to be wary of the trust-destroying potential of veggie-sneaking. Rafael Pérez-Escamilla, a public-health professor at Yale, told me that even if your child is going through a mac-and-cheese phase (as his son did for many years in the ’90s), he would never advise hiding vegetables in other foods. “Surround your child with healthy foods, but let the kid decide. Let the kid touch the food, smell the food; let the kid learn to eat when he or she is hungry and stop eating when he or she knows he is full,” he said. “It’s easier said than done, but it works.”

[Read: Putting kids on diets won’t solve anything]

The hands-off approach certainly takes less physical work, but Pérez-Escamilla is right that it can be a real emotional struggle. As a parent, I’m still tempted to soothe my anxiety by sneaking kale into a smoothie, and reluctant to cook creamed spinach for my toddler over and over only to be rejected each time. But I have learned to find some comfort in acting as a role model instead of a micromanager.

Over the past few months, I’ve quit slipping broccoli into pasta sauce and started offering it as part of dinner. Sometimes my toddler takes a nibble; sometimes she doesn’t. I’ve noticed that the less I show I care, the more she experiments on her own.

You’ll Become a Fan of These Fierce, Strange Girls

2024-05-29T07:00:00-04:00

Many sports, by nature, require you to push your body to the limit—beyond it, even. For young athletes, in particular, we’ve seen the consequences of equating physical pain with elite performance and self-worth, in the form of broken bodies and silent suffering. The less athletically inclined might wonder whether the costs of competitive sport are too high for its rewards. Fights to the death, judged by the turn of an emperor’s thumb, were once popular entertainment. But we’d now think of them as barbaric.

In her debut novel, Rita Bullwinkel confronts the damage and injury of physical competition but offers an insight into why athletes might want to battle on. Headshot dives into the bloody, sweaty, achy world of girls for whom pain is not a side effect but a direct result of the sport they’ve chosen. The book follows eight teenagers as they pummel each other for the right to be named the best under-18 female boxer in America. They have traveled from around the country to a dusty gym in Reno, Nevada, to find out who can best dodge, withstand, and dole out punches. In the process, the novel asks: Why? What makes these girls dedicate their bodies to the ring?

Boxing is a sport in which fists themselves can break, but the name of the tournament these teens are participating in—the Women’s 18 & Under Daughters of America Cup—smacks of pageants and cotillions. It conjures white gloves, not boxing mitts. The awkward juxtaposition seems intentional; although each of the contestants is strange and fierce in her own way, the competition seems absurd. We know from very early on that the tournament matters to almost no one other than the girls fighting in it. There is no audience for women’s boxing. “Even if they were to go and box professionally, hit some women in bikinis in the basement of a casino in Las Vegas,” the novel’s omniscient narrator confides in the reader, “they wouldn’t impress the people who they encounter in their lives outside of boxing.”

The narrator is our entry into the girls’ minds, telling us what they’re thinking but also zooming into the future to offer up facts they are unaware of. At times, the narrator dispenses a cruel-seeming but ultimately matter-of-fact judgment—for instance, calling two of the contestants “delusional” for their dedication to the tournament, but then describing how those delusions are useful and allow them to fight with more focus. Other times, the narration dips closer to the girls’ inner monologues. We learn that one girl has been through enough hardship to understand “that this shit is meaningless”—an awareness that swallows not only the tournament but also all of life’s mysterious losses and victories. Yet she, too, wants to win, to be “the best of the best of the nation.” That repeated best seems like it belongs to her; we are looking not at her but through her at the world.

[Read: When good pain turns into bad pain]

These athletes have no real fans. The audience is minimal, mostly just a few coaches, the other girls, and an occasional relative. Family support is varied: One fighter comes to the tournament matches with her grandmother, who has almost no grasp of boxing, while another attends completely alone. One girl wishes that her siblings would come, but they usually don’t. Whether or not the girls have kin with them, they each seem as alone in life as they are in the ring—different though they are from one another, not one of them seems understood. Even two cousins who are both competing are strangely at odds: The younger longs to bond with her relative, while the older feels encroached upon. Boxing is not a team sport. You win alone, and you lose alone.

The contestants’ isolation is accentuated by the fact that all the judges and coaches are men, a dynamic the girls are very aware of. (The verisimilitude with real life—the majority of coaches for women’s college sports are men—will not be lost on most readers.) Often, we see these authority figures through the girls’ eyes; one girl thinks of them as “the men referees, and the men coaches and the men judges and their sad paunches.” These are not mentors. Whereas the girls have devoted a huge percentage of their lives to this sport, the judges, for instance, have less interest than mere hobbyists:

The judges work at Safeway and at Amazon fulfillment factories and inside the casinos with the alcoholic grenades. The white they all wear is not a uniform, but just a color specification … to make sure that they all look the part they are being paid to play. Some of the judges don’t even like boxing. It was from YouTube videos, and a one sheet that [the gym owner] sent, that they learned about the game.

These men know far less than the girls, and yet they are in charge. It is one thing to be under the thumb of the powerful; it’s a harsher kind of injustice to be judged by those with no respect for the game.

Again and again, Bullwinkel emphasizes the indignity of the contest. Reno is a city whose “drag looked like Las Vegas had shrunk its own glowing strip architecture and handed it down.” The physical prize itself, the Daughters of America Cup trophy, is shoddily constructed and would never hold water, having “a slit in the cup where the plastic mold came together”—it’s a worthless symbol of how little even the winner will be valued. Meanwhile, the cost of the girls’ participation is potentially astronomical; one girl has damaged her hand so badly that when she is “sixty she won’t be able to hold a cup of tea.” The knowledge that fighting will someday steal this simple pleasure from her dampens any anticipation of her possible win. It’s a strange move for a novelist to center an entire plot on a competition that barely seems worth it.

Yet this is also Headshot’s greatest strength. The story becomes less about who will win than about what drives each girl toward a battle with no obvious reward. Bullwinkel makes us into fans. The tournament structure—which the book closely mimics—gives Bullwinkel the space to explore different ways of being a teenage girl. Most chapters depict matches, though they’re less preoccupied by muscle movements than by the girls’ pains, fears, and coping mechanisms. One fighter wears a raccoon hat because she figures that looking deranged will throw off her enemies; another is a “people pleaser” who, even as she loses, clings to the “form” she’s been taught; another, whose hair is in “the archetype of a ponytail,” wants to beat her older sisters’ past boxing glory. Yet another was once locked in a shed for 12 hours by bullying classmates. Two of the girls are haunted by memories of dead bodies, and they think of those deaths as they fight. These psychological portraits allow the reader to understand that the girls are not fools or naive, that each has picked boxing because of her own demons.

Underdogs are the fodder of sports fiction from Rocky to Ted Lasso; one of the mythological origins of the Olympic Games is Zeus wrestling his dad. In much fiction, being an underdog is a character’s golden ticket—impoverished boy finds a magic bean and beats a giant is a more satisfying story than poor boy is swindled out of his cow and then his family starves. But here’s the thing: Bullwinkel has written a novel with eight underdogs, and seven of them must lose. Each of the girls walks into the tournament already wounded by life; the indignities they face aren’t limited to those of the contest. Even the girl whose sisters are former boxers—the closest thing to a Goliath that this competition has—is vulnerable in the outside world; her family lives “in a double-mortgaged house in an undesirable suburb” and, lacking status, is “close to no one.” Perhaps the greatest evidence that these girls are all underdogs is that they are competing for this smallest scrap of glory in the first place.

[Read: Nine books every sports lover should read]

Reading this novel reminded me of an argument I once got into with a sports fan. I found it hard to get invested in any sport as a viewer. No matter who won, the whole cycle would begin again; there was always another competition. He, knowing well my preferred form of leisure activity—reading—retorted that there is always another novel, another cycle of character-versus-the-world or character-versus-themselves. I couldn’t say much to that. Many audiences are happy to ignore these cycles in order to indulge in their chosen entertainment. Bullwinkel won’t let her readers forget. There is a moment, about two-thirds through the novel, when the question of who will win feels deeply irrelevant. Each of the girls has a compelling reason to be there. Their desires seem to cancel one another’s out. Bullwinkel frequently skips ahead to show us their post-sport futures, which emphasize the longer stretch of their lives, beyond the intense confines of the tournament. One will become a grocery-store manager; another will work in university admissions; another will become an actor. The majority of their lives will take place outside the bounds of this competition. The novel seems to be reminding us that these girls are much more than their places on the leaderboard.

But at the last minute, Headshot offers us something else. The final match arrives, the fight where the branches of the competition all meet. Bullwinkel describes triumph this way: “Today” the victor “need not dream of winning.” It’s a simple sentence that ends the chapter. And it turns Headshot, despite all its subversions, into a brilliant sports novel rather than just an excellent set of character studies. These girls will gain nothing material for their efforts—no fame, no wealth. But for one day, one girl is able to think of herself as a winner. What she receives is the simple fact that on that day, “out of all girls in the country,” she is “the best boxer.” The girl who wins is not the underdog, but she is an underdog, and her triumph is pure. This is sport for sport’s sake. Life is messy, full of death, bullies, and longing, but for the fighters, boxing grants the hope of complete, if momentary, fulfillment.

Following these battling girls through the tournament, we might wish for better conditions, for better treatment of their injuries, for judges who actually care about the sport they’re adjudicating. But futility and indignity don’t diminish the contestants’ bravery. And they are not fools. In a run-down gym, against all odds, they have found a way to taste glory. Bullwinkel’s epilogue is a terrifying fast-forward into the future, past the death of nations and through interstellar travel. In it, she imagines that girls will still be punching. The never-ending cycle of competitive sport becomes less like a futile act and more like a song that is passed down through the generations, growing more powerful in its repetition.

‘La Niña Really Can’t Come Soon Enough’

2024-05-29T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET on May 29, 2024

There are still a few days left, but this month is on track to be the warmest May ever documented. In fact, every month since last June has broken worldwide temperature records. The world’s oceans, which were too hot last year, are still mostly too hot now. The combination of manmade global warming, an unnatural climate phenomenon, and El Niño, a natural one, has inflated temperatures around the globe over the past year; the current El Niño event, which emerged in the middle of 2023, has been among the strongest on record. This El Niño, at least, is nearly done—but its end likely won’t save the Northern Hemisphere from another sweltering summer.

El Niño episodes last only about nine to 12 months at a time, and forecasters predict that its cooler opposite, La Niña, will settle in sometime between this summer and early fall. La Niña should eventually lower the planetary thermostat, Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the twin phenomena, told me. But a worrying amount of climate chaos still awaits us as La Niña asserts itself in the next several months, and the relief it may bring will be only temporary in the grand scheme of our warming world.

The transition to La Niña is not a flipped switch; the excess heat of El Niño conditions takes time to dissipate. As a result, “there’s a high likelihood that 2024 will be even warmer than 2023 because of this delayed effect,” McPhaden said. “La Niña may bring some relief, if not this year, then perhaps in 2025.”

For many people, though, 2025 is too far away. Right now, Southeast Asia is suffering from extreme heat. Europe is set to experience another brutally hot summer. In parts of the United States, heat-related health emergencies reached historic levels last summer, and we may experience a repeat this year. Some parts of Florida have already registered heat indexes—the “what it actually feels like” measure, combining air temperatures and relative humidity—well above the danger threshold this year, and it’s still spring.

[Read: We’re gambling with the only good oceans in the universe]

The extreme heat in Florida isn’t limited to land. Along its coasts, a marine heat wave caused massive coral bleaching last year, and marine scientists are not hopeful about this year either. Historically, such events were limited to August. But “last year, it all started in early July, and now this year, we’re seeing temperatures hit August levels in the middle of May,” Derek Manzello, a coral biologist and the coordinator of NOAA Coral Reef Watch, told me. “La Niña really can’t come soon enough,” he said, because “it should basically stop the bleeding.”

But for Florida especially, the transition to La Niña is its own kind of danger. During La Niña, high-altitude winds that might tear apart hurricanes in El Niño years weaken instead. So more storms spin into existence and strengthen on their way to land. To make matters worse, hurricanes intensify by feeding off warm seawater—and plenty of that is available in the Atlantic right now. The combination of La Niña and abnormally hot oceans is expected to produce a perilously strong hurricane season for the Eastern Seaboard, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean.

Both El Niño and La Niña deliver grief to some regions of the world—heavy rains, intense storms, droughts, wildfires—and a reprieve to others. In Canada, “we want to move from El Niño to La Niña,” Hossein Bonakdari, a University of Ottawa professor who specializes in the effects of climate change on civil-engineering infrastructure, told me. That’s because Canada experienced a staggeringly destructive wildfire season last year, and La Niña likely will bring much-needed rainfall that can reduce the risk of blazes. Meanwhile, “California loves El Niño because that rescued us last year from the drought,” Alexa Fredston, a quantitative ecologist at UC Santa Cruz, told me.

[Read: The oceans we knew are already gone]

And human-caused climate change is amplifying the effects of both phenomena. “In a warmer world, the atmosphere can hold more moisture,” McPhaden said, so El Niño– or La Niña–caused rainfall that might once have been severe instead becomes extreme. A warmer atmosphere also increases the rate of evaporation of water on land, so severe droughts turn into extreme droughts, too.

Climate change also risks dampening the relief that La Niña has historically brought to regions warmed by El Niño. Manzello worries that La Niña won’t be enough to keep corals from bleaching this time, even moving into next year. “How much help is it really going to bring now that the global ocean is just so darn hot?” he said. Historically, La Niña’s cooler temperatures have curbed the formation of harmful algal blooms, which can be toxic to people, animals, and aquatic ecosystems, Julian Merder, a postdoctoral researcher at the Carnegie Institution for Science, told me. But what happens if global warming nudges temperatures into algae’s preferred zone even during the cool phase? Such blooms thrive in warm temperatures and on nutrients flushed from land by heavy rains and runoff. In a warmer world, heavy snowpack from a La Niña winter in some areas could melt during springtime into hotter conditions, making trapped nutrients available to algae. In those regions, “it might even be the case that La Niña is getting us more harmful algal blooms than El Niño would,” Merder said.

The La Niña that perspiring Americans might long for now is not what it used to be. “La Niña years now are warmer overall on the planet than big El Niño years were 25 years ago,” McPhaden said. Both climate phenomena have always been powerful. But in the 21st century, the cool phase is only a temporary antidote to the symptoms of climate change, and a fainter one at that. If greenhouse gases continue to warm our world, La Niña’s reprieve will only grow weaker.

This article has been updated to clarify La Niña's effects on algal blooms.

The Real ‘Deep State’

2024-05-29T07:00:00-04:00

On March 18, news broke that Donald Trump intended to restore the disgraced lobbyist Paul Manafort to the ranks of his campaign advisers. In any other moral universe, this would have been an unimaginable rehabilitation. Back in 2016, as revelations about Manafort’s work on behalf of pro-Kremlin politicians in Ukraine began appearing in the press, even Trump considered him a figure so toxic that he forced him to resign as chair of his campaign. Two years later, Manafort was locked up in federal prison on charges of tax evasion and money laundering, among other transgressions. His was one of the most precipitous falls in the history of Washington.

But at this stage in that history, it’s not remotely shocking to learn that the revolving door continues to turn. By the end of Trump’s term, Manafort had already won a presidential pardon. His unwillingness to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation had earned him Trump’s unstinting admiration: “Such respect for a brave man,” he tweeted. Now it seemed that Manafort’s loyalty would be rewarded with the lobbyist’s most valuable tool: the perception of access, at an opportune moment.

In early May, under growing media scrutiny for international consulting work that he’d reportedly been involved in after his pardon, Manafort said that he would “stick to the sidelines,” playing a less visible role in supporting Trump. (He’d recently been in Milwaukee, part of meetings about this summer’s Republican National Convention programming.) But if Trump wins the election, Manafort won’t need 2024 campaign work officially on his résumé to convince corporations and foreign regimes that he can bend U.S. policy on their behalf—and he and his ilk will be able to follow through on such pledges with unimpeded ease. A second Trump term would mark the culmination of the story chronicled by the brothers Luke and Brody Mullins, a pair of energetic reporters, in their absorbing new book, The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government.

[From the March 2018 issue: Franklin Foer on the origins of Paul Manafort]

As Trump dreams about governing a second time, he and his inner circle have declared their intention to purge what they call the “deep state”: the civil service that they regard as one of the greatest obstacles to the realization of Trump’s agenda. What they don’t say is that the definition of the deep state—an entrenched force that wields power regardless of the administration in the White House—now fits the business of lobbying better than it does the faceless bureaucracy. This is the deep state, should Trump emerge the victor in the fall, that stands to achieve near-total domination of public power.

Lobbying, like Hollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially American industry. The sector took root along the K Street corridor of gleaming glass-and-steel buildings in downtown D.C. during the 1970s. Though accurately capturing the scale of its growth is hard, a study by George Mason University’s Stephen S. Fuller Institute reported that, in 2016, the “advocacy cluster” employed more than 117,000 workers in metropolitan Washington (that’s more than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire). In theory, lobbying is a constitutionally protected form of redressing grievances. Businesses have every right to argue their case in front of government officials whose policies affect their industries. In practice, lobbying has become a pernicious force in national life, courtesy of corporate America, which hugely outspends other constituencies—labor unions, consumer and environmental groups—on an enterprise now dedicated to honing ever more sophisticated methods of shaping public opinion in service of its own ends.

The forerunners of the modern lobbyist were Tommy “The Cork” Corcoran, a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s brain trust, and Clark Clifford, who ran President Harry Truman’s poker games. Both men left jobs in government to become freelance fixers, working on behalf of corporate behemoths (the United Fruit Company, for example, and General Electric). Mystique was essential to their method. Corcoran kept his name out of the phone book and off his office door. If a company was bothered by a nettlesome bureaucrat—or wanted help overthrowing a hostile Central American government—they were the men ready to pick up the phone and make it so.

But Corcoran and Clifford were anomalous figures. In the late ’60s, only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in Washington. Most businesses, during the decades of postwar prosperity, didn’t see the point in hiring that sort of help. Management was at peace with labor. Corporations paid their taxes, while reaping ample profits. Then along came Ralph Nader, a young Harvard Law School graduate who ignited the modern consumer movement. By dint of his fervent advocacy, he managed to rally Congress to pass the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act in 1966, which led automakers to install headrests and shatter-resistant windshields. Nader, a scrappy upstart, single-handedly outmaneuvered the great General Motors.

[From the October 1966 issue: Elizabeth Drew on the politics of automobile safety]

Slow to register an emerging threat, corporate America sat complacently on the sidelines while an expansive new regulatory state emerged, posing a potential obstacle to business imperatives: The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970, followed by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration the next year, and the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1972. Meanwhile, in 1971, a lawyer in Richmond, Virginia, named Lewis Powell urged a counterrevolution, writing a memo that called on the corporate world to build the infrastructure that would cultivate pro-business intellectuals and amass political power to defend the free market. Later that year, Richard Nixon named him to the Supreme Court.

A figure from outside the conservative orbit became the ground commander of the corporate cause in the capital. Tommy Boggs was the son of the legendary Hale Boggs, a Democratic congressman from Louisiana. The Great Society was, in no small measure, Hale’s legislative handiwork, and Washington was in Tommy’s blood. (As a boy, he ran House Speaker Sam Rayburn’s private elevator in the Capitol.) He saw how he could become a successor to Corcoran and Clifford, but on a far grander scale. After a failed run for Congress in 1970, he devoted himself to expanding the lobbying firm Patton Boggs.

Boggs mobilized a grand corporate alliance (including television networks, advertising agencies, and food conglomerates) to roll back the liberal state—and then ferociously used his connections on his clients’ behalf. M&M’s and Milky Way (he was working for the Mars candy company) were among the beneficiaries of a major victory. Jimmy Carter’s Federal Trade Commission had threatened to regulate the advertising of candy and sugar-heavy cereals directed at kids. Boggs sent the deputy editor of The Washington Post’s editorial page, Meg Greenfield, material about the horrors of this regulation. The newspaper then published an editorial with the memorable headline “The FTC as National Nanny.” Senators thundered against the absurdity of the new vigilance. The FTC abandoned its plans.

Boggs ignited not just a revolution in American government, but a cultural transformation of Washington. Before his ascent, patricians with boarding-school pedigrees sat atop the city’s social hierarchy, disdainful of pecuniary interests and the ostentatious flaunting of wealth. Boggs, very highly paid to work his wonders, rubbed his success in Washington’s face. He would cruise around town in one of the firm’s fleet of luxury cars with a brick-size mobile phone plastered to his face, a cigar dangling from his mouth.

The story that unfolds in The Wolves of K Street features an ironic twist: Liberal activists figured out how to mobilize the public to care about important issues and how to inspire them to become democratically engaged. K Street fixers saw this success, then adapted the tactics to serve the interests of corporations. In the Mullinses’ narrative, this evolution found its embodiment in Tony Podesta. An activist who came of age during the anti-war movement of the 1960s and a veteran of George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, Podesta made his name running the TV producer Norman Lear’s group People for the American Way, a progressive counterweight to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. In 1987, Podesta helped rally the left to sink Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan’s Supreme Court nominee.

Not long after, Podesta left the world of public-interest advocacy and began to sell his expertise—at first primarily to liberal groups, then almost exclusively to businesses. Using the techniques he learned while working with Lear, he specialized in deploying celebrity figures to influence public attitudes, counting on citizen sentiment to in turn sway politicians. To block the FDA from regulating vitamins in 1993 (his client was a group of dietary-supplement manufacturers), he cut an ad with the actor Mel Gibson that depicted a SWAT team busting him at home for possessing vitamin C. “Call the U.S. Senate and tell them that you want to take your vitamins in peace,” Gibson said in a voice-over.

With stunning speed, Podesta—a bon vivant who went on to amass one of Washington’s most impressive private collections of contemporary art—had gone from excelling in impassioned advocacy to becoming promiscuous in his choice of client. To fund his lifestyle, the Mullinses write, he helped Lockheed Martin win approval of the sale of F-16s to Pakistan, even though the Indian government, another client of the Podesta Group, opposed the deal. He represented the tire manufacturer Michelin and its competitor Pirelli. Over the objections of his staff, he joined forces with Paul Manafort to polish the image of Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt pro-Kremlin politician who ruled Ukraine until a revolution ousted him in 2014.

As K Street boomed, the Mullinses show, its denizens remade American life well beyond Washington culture. They report that the firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, also a central player in their book, aided the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch in overcoming regulatory obstacles and extending his corrosive media empire in the United States. In the ’80s, the firm became masters at deregulating industries and securing tax breaks for the powerful—$130 million for Bethlehem Steel, $58 million for Chrysler, $38 million for Johnson & Johnson—helping to usher in an age of corporate impunity and gaping inequality.

The Wolves of K Street is full of cautionary tales about the normalization of corruption. Revolving-door practices—leaving government jobs and parlaying insider connections into lucrative lobbying work—became part of the system. Meanwhile, the culture fueled fraudulent self-aggrandizing of the sort on lurid display in the sad case of a relatively fringe figure named Evan Morris. A kid from Queens who first arrived in town as a college intern in the Clinton White House, he quickly grasped that K Street represented the city’s best path to power and wealth. He scored a coveted job at Tommy Boggs’s firm while in law school, arriving just as lobbyists became essential cogs in a whole new realm: the machinery of electioneering.

The McCain-Feingold Act of 2002—campaign-finance legislation intended to wean the political system off big donors—prevented corporations and individuals from writing massive checks to political parties. Unable to rely as heavily on big donors, campaigns were happy to outsource to lobbyists the arduous job of rounding up smaller contributions from the wealthy: Lobbyists became “bundlers,” in fundraising parlance. As a 20-something, Morris proved to be one of the Democratic Party’s most exuberant solicitors, promising donors VIP access to events that he couldn’t provide, or intimating that he was asking on behalf of Boggs himself, which he wasn’t. Despite his relative inexperience, he managed to schmooze with the likes of Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton.

He went on to work for Roche, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, and hatched a kind of campaign that he described as “black ops.” Amid the bird-flu outbreak of 2005, the Mullinses write, he began urging the government to stockpile the antiviral medication that Roche produced. He hired consultants to promote news stories that stoked public panic about the bird flu. He compiled studies touting the benefits of the drug, including some written by people who had at one point received money from Roche. The government bought more than $1 billion worth of the antiviral.

Morris’s job was to bend perception—and he also tried to bend the way that Washington perceived him. In 2009, he was hired to head the Washington office of Genentech, a Roche subsidiary. He became relentlessly acquisitive: three Porsches, multiple Cartiers and Rolexes, humidors filled with the finest cigars. Apparently, many of Morris’s extravagant purchases were bought with Genentech’s money, including a condo in San Francisco and a GMC Yukon.

Such a brazen scheme didn’t escape his superiors’ notice. While being presented by investigators with damning evidence of his malfeasance, Morris left the room to take a bathroom break and never returned. That afternoon, he went to the Robert Trent Jones Golf Club in Gainesville, Virginia, which he had paid a $150,000 initiation fee to join. That night, he retreated to a quiet corner of the club grounds and shot himself with a Smith & Wesson revolver. He was 38.

Yet such downfall narratives feel strangely dissonant. Although a handful of lobbyists may suffer a dramatic tumble from grace, the industry itself does nothing but boom. Each time a new reform surfaces, aimed at curtailing K Street’s power, influence peddlers figure out how to exploit the rules for greater influence and profit. Although Trump promised to drain this swamp, the swamp flourished. From 2016 to 2018, spending on K Street increased 9 percent, rising to $3.5 billion.

Washington lobbying firms have ballooned into conglomerates, resembling the multinational corporations that hire them. K Street currently consists of data analysts, pollsters, social-media mavens, crisis managers, grassroots organizers. Lobbying firms are one-stop shops for manipulating opinion—and are experts at image management, including their own: Their employees’ business cards identify them as “consultants” and “strategists,” now that everyone associates lobbying with sleaze.

Lobbying has disguised itself so well that it is often barely visible even to savvy Washington insiders. The Mullinses tell the story of Jim Courtovich, the head of a boutique public-relations firm and a close collaborator of Evan Morris’s. Courtovich’s business plan featured splashy parties that attracted top journalists and other prominent figures with whom he hoped to trade favors. Mingling with the media, the Mullinses write, Courtovich encouraged stories that might help his clients; in one case they cite, the goal was to damage a Saudi client’s rival. Starting in the fall of 2015, many such gatherings were hosted at a house his firm owned on Capitol Hill; presumably, the reporters who attended them had no idea that Saudi investors had financed the purchase of the building. In 2016, the authors note, Courtovich began working for the Saudi-government official who would later allegedly orchestrate the murder of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, a colleague of the journalists he assiduously cultivated.

As lobbying has matured, it has grown ever more adept at turning government into a profit center for its clients. Even Big Tech, which once treated Washington with disdainful detachment, seems to have felt the irresistible, lobbyist-enabled pull of chunky contracts with the feds. Such possibilities were part of the pitch to Amazon, for example, to erect a second corporate headquarters in Crystal City, Virginia, enticed by the prospect of pursuing multibillion-dollar contracts with the likes of the CIA and the Pentagon. (Amazon has said that political considerations played no part in the company’s decision.)

For eager beneficiaries of government largesse—not to mention for their equally wolfish facilitators—a second Trump administration would represent a bonanza, unprecedented in the history of K Street. Trump’s plan to overturn a bureaucratic ethos that has prevailed since the late 19th century—according to which good government requires disinterested experts, more loyal to the principles of public stewardship than to any politician—opens the way to installing cronies who will serve as handmaidens of K Street. The civil service, however beleaguered, has acted as an imperfect bulwark against the assault of corporate interests. Its replacement would be something close to the opposite. The hacks recruited to populate government departments will be primed to fulfill the desires of campaign donors and those who pay tribute to the president; they will trade favors with lobbyists who dangle the prospect of future employment in front of them. This new coterie of bureaucrats would wreck the competence of the administrative state—and the wolves of K Street will feast on the carcass of responsible governance.

This article appears in the July/August 2024 print edition with the headline “The Industry That Ate America.”

A Chilling Effect of Louisiana’s Abortion Law

2024-05-28T18:46:00-04:00

Louisiana just became the first state to reclassify abortion pills as controlled dangerous substances. The law may signal a new strategy to curb reproductive-health-care access in post-Roe America.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

All Eyes on Louisiana

Late last week, the governor of Louisiana signed into law a bill that marks a first in the battle over reproductive rights in America: The state will categorize mifepristone and misoprostol, medication commonly used in abortions, as controlled dangerous substances. Possessing the drugs without a valid prescription will be a criminal offense that could carry up to 10 years in prison. Abortion pills in Louisiana are now in the same category as drugs such as opioids and Xanax—medicines that are thought to be at risk of abuse—even though the medical community and the FDA widely consider mifepristone and misoprostol to be safe.

The original version of the bill, introduced by Republican State Senator Thomas Pressly in March, focused on criminalizing coerced abortion. Pressly has said that he was moved to act when his sister discovered in 2022 that her then-husband had mixed misoprostol in her drinks without her knowledge. After that version of the bill had passed unanimously in the state Senate, Pressly proposed a controversial amendment that would reclassify abortion pills as controlled substances, saying in an interview with KSLA News that he wanted to “make sure they’re not put in the hands of bad actors and criminals.” The amended version of the bill received pushback but ultimately passed.

In Louisiana, where abortions have been banned in most cases since 2022, the use of mifepristone and misoprostol to induce abortions is already highly restricted—so the new legislation will largely disrupt other medical treatments. Mifepristone and misoprostol have routine medical uses, such as inducing childbirth, stopping postpartum hemorrhages, and treating miscarriages. Under the new law, doctors must have a specific license to prescribe the drugs, and the pills would need to be stored in special facilities that rural clinics may find difficult to access. Experts predict that confusion about the law and fear of prosecution will have a chilling effect on patients and health-care providers.

Medical professionals have raised alarms, with more than 200 doctors in the state reportedly signing a letter warning that Louisiana’s legislation would cause confusion and present barriers to effective care. Because physicians haven’t been prescribing the pills for abortions in Louisiana, the law will “likely have minuscule impacts on abortion and more significant impacts on miscarriage and obstetric care,” Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has written for The Atlantic, explained to me in an email. (She also noted that the legislation won’t affect people who currently receive abortion pills in the mail from organizations operating legally under shield laws, and that pregnant patients who obtain the drugs for their own use won’t be penalized.)

“Health professionals who need to prescribe the medication for any reason—even the many uses of the drug that are not termination of pregnancy—will now have to jump through many hurdles,” Melissa Goodman, the executive director of UCLA Law’s Center on Reproductive Health, Law and Policy, told me in an email. “Delays are likely.” She noted that the new restrictions may drive health-care providers to leave Louisiana—a state that already has bleak maternal-health outcomes—and that this law could set a precedent for activist groups that may try to make medications such as contraceptives and mental-health treatments illegal for ideological reasons.

Mifepristone and misoprostol have become a flash point in the fight over abortion access. Last year, there were more than 640,000 medication abortions in the United States—more than 60 percent of abortions in the formal health-care system, according to the Guttmacher Institute. That was up from 53 percent in 2020, before the fall of Roe v. Wade. But these drugs have faced legal challenges across the country. Texas effectively banned mifepristone in 2023 when a judge suspended FDA approval of the drug (though an appeals court ruled to preserve access again soon after). Twenty-nine states have either outlawed abortion or have restrictions on abortion medication, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and Arizona bans the mailing of abortion pills. Currently, the Supreme Court is considering a case that would make mifepristone much harder to access, though the justices signaled in March that they would not limit access to the drug. (Some of them voiced concerns about the implications of enacting nationwide restrictions or reversing the FDA’s judgments.)

Louisiana may prove to be a bellwether, experts told me, inspiring other states to further restrict access to mifepristone and misoprostol. But Donley noted that the consequences for general health care may make the law unappealing for other states to adopt. Still, the legislation is a striking example of the lengths lawmakers may go in their attempt to curb the use of abortion pills across the country.

Related:

Today’s News

The prosecution and the defense presented their closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial.
Georgia’s Parliament overrode a presidential veto of a controversial bill that addresses foreign influence in media, nongovernmental organizations, and other nonprofit groups. Critics have compared the measure to Russian legislation that has been used to crack down on opposition and dissent.
Ryan Salame, the former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He is the first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s executive team to receive prison time.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Exploring what therapy is capable of—and what it can’t actually solve—may help patients better understand what they’re seeking, Isabel Fattal writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

No One Really Understands Clouds

By Zoë Schlanger

In the tropics, along the band of sky near the equator, clouds and wind run the show. These are juicy clouds that aggregate and disaggregate in agglomerations and that can live a long time, as far as clouds go. In the summer, when the ocean is especially hot, they can pile up high, breeding hurricanes; at all times of year, the behavior of tropical cloud systems drives global atmospheric circulation, helping determine the weather all over the world. And still, clouds remain one of the least understood—or least reliably predictable—factors in our climate models. “They are among the biggest uncertainties in predicting future climate change,” Da Yang, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Chicago, told me.

Read the full article.

The 2024 Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling Race

2024-05-28T12:13:25-04:00

Crowds gathered at Cooper’s Hill, on a farm near Gloucester, England, once again yesterday, cheering as racers took part in the annual Cooper’s Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake. Continuing a tradition that dates back at least 200 years, participants chased a nine-pound wheel of Double Gloucester cheese, running in a chaotic scramble down a very steep and uneven grassy hill, with the winner taking home the cheese.

This photo essay originally misspelled Abby Lampe’s name.

To receive an email notification every time new photo stories are published, sign up here.

Trump Has a New Plan to Deal With Campus Protests

2024-05-28T11:51:57-04:00

Speaking to donors earlier this month, former President Donald Trump laid out his plan for dealing with campus protests: Just deport the protesters.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” the presumptive Republican nominee for president said on May 14, according to The Washington Post.

The threat is classic Trump: vindictive, nonsensical, disproportionate, and based on the assumption that deportation is the answer to America’s problems. Protest is an essential element of American freedom and is not itself against the law. (Some protesters have been charged with crimes.) One would think it goes without saying that U.S. citizens cannot be deported for it. Although some of those protesting the war in Gaza and American support for it are international students, no evidence indicates that most or even a large minority of those protesting on campuses are non-U.S. citizens. (Foreign nationals can lose their student visa if they are suspended from school for any reason, political or otherwise.) In short, Trump is proposing a heavy-handed plan that wouldn’t solve the problem.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness]

Trump’s remarks about protesters follow a pattern seen elsewhere, in which he takes an idea already circulating in conservative circles and ratchets it up a notch. “I think the students, if they’re foreign students on visas, their visas should be canceled and they should be sent home,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last month. “For those international students who defied university orders, and police instruction, in favor of acting on pro-terrorist views, this should result in immediate expulsion from their host institution and our generous country,” Senator Marco Rubio wrote in a letter to administration officials in May. “No questions asked.”

Asked about the demand at the time, Biden White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “I would just tell you that you don’t have to agree with every sentiment that is expressed in a free country like this to stand by the First Amendment and the idea of peaceful protest.”

Calling DeSantis’s and Rubio’s statements nuanced would be incorrect, but Trump’s version is even more sweeping—no surprise from someone who has in the past reportedly suggested shooting protesters. He conflates all the protesters with international students, and proposes a penalty, deportation, not permitted for citizens. Americans can lose citizenship for treason, and naturalized citizens can be denaturalized for a small range of offenses, but protesting U.S. foreign policy is not one—which is good, because that would mean criminalizing dissent. But Trump has shown that although he fiercely resists even minor constraints on himself, he has no problem violating, or suggesting violating, the basic civil rights guaranteed for other people by the Constitution.

Is America Ready for ‘Degrowth Communism’?

2024-05-28T09:46:00-04:00

Kohei Saito knows he sounds like a madman. That’s kind of the point, the Japanese philosopher told me during a recent visit to New York City. “Maybe, then, people get shocked,” he said. “What’s this crazy guy saying?”

The crazy idea is “degrowth communism,” a combination of two concepts that are contentious on their own. Degrowth holds that there will always be a correlation between economic output and carbon emissions, so the best way to fight climate change is for wealthy nations to cut back on consumption and reduce the “material throughput” that creates demand for energy and drives GDP.

The degrowth movement has swelled in recent years, particularly in Europe and in academic circles. The theory has dramatic implications. Instead of finding carbon-neutral ways to power our luxurious modern lifestyles, degrowth would require us to surrender some material comforts. One leading proponent suggests imposing a hard cap on total national energy use, which would ratchet down every year. Energy-intensive activities might be banned outright or taxed to near oblivion. (Say goodbye, perhaps, to hamburgers, SUVs, and your annual cross-country flight home for the holidays.) You’d probably be prohibited from setting the thermostat too cold in summer or too warm in winter. To keep frivolous spending down, the government might decide which products are “wasteful” and ban advertising for them. Slower growth would require less labor, so the government would shorten the workweek and guarantee a job for every person.

Saito did not invent degrowth, but he has put his own spin on it by adding the C word.

As for what kind of “communism” we’re talking about, Saito tends to emphasize workers’ cooperatives and generous social-welfare policies rather than top-down Leninist state control of the economy. He says he wants democratic change rather than revolution—though he’s fuzzy on how exactly you get people to vote for shrinkage.

This message has found an enthusiastic audience. Saito’s 2020 book, Capital in the Anthropocene, sold half a million copies. He took a job at the prestigious University of Tokyo and became a regular commentator on Japanese TV—one of the few far-left talking heads in that country’s conservative media sphere. When we met up in April, he was touring the northeastern U.S. to promote the new English translation of the book, titled Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, and planning to appear on a series of panels at Georgetown University to discuss his ideas. One day during his New York stint, we visited the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where a young protester named Tianle Zhang spotted him and waved him over, telling Saito he’s the reason he’s applying to graduate school. They took a selfie together, and Saito posted it on X.

Saito’s haters are just as passionate as his admirers. The right-wing podcaster James Lindsay recently dedicated a three-hour episode to what he called Saito’s “death cult.” Liberals who favor renewable energy and other technologies say Saito’s ideas would lead to stagnation. On the pro-labor left, Jacobin magazine published multiple articles criticizing degrowth in general and Saito in particular, calling his vision a “political disaster” that would hurt the working class. And don’t get the Marxist textualists started; they accuse Saito of distorting the great man’s words in order to portray Marx as the OG degrowth communist.

It’s understandable that Saito provokes so much ire: He rejects the mainstream political consensus that the best way to fight climate change is through innovation, which requires growth. But no matter how many times opponents swat it down, the idea of degrowth refuses to die. Perhaps it survives these detailed, technical refutations because its very implausibility is central to its appeal.

Economic growth, the French economist Daniel Cohen has written, is the religion of the modern world. Growth is the closest thing to an unalloyed good that exists in politics or economics. It’s good for the rich, and it’s good for the poor. It’s good if you believe inequality is too high, and if you think inequality doesn’t matter. Deciding how to distribute wealth is complicated, but in theory it gets easier when there’s more wealth to distribute. Growth is the source of legitimacy for governments across the political spectrum: Keep us in power, and we’ll make your life better.

Japan has worshipped as devoutly as anyone. After the country’s defeat in World War II, GDP replaced military might as a source of national pride. Japan’s economy grew at a rate of nearly 10 percent annually until the 1970s and remained strong through the ’80s as its automotive and electronics industries boomed. So when the Asian financial bubble burst and the Japanese economy collapsed in the early ’90s, the country faced not just an economic crisis, but a crisis of meaning. If Japan wasn’t growing, what was it?

[Read: Does the economy really need to stop growing quite so much?]

Saito was born in 1987, just before the crash, and he grew up in a time of stagnation. As a student at a private all-boys secondary school, his politics were moderate, he says. He thought of problems like inequality and consumerism in terms of individual moral failings rather than as the consequences of policy choices. But the war in Iraq got him reading Noam Chomsky, college introduced him to Marx, and the 2008 financial crisis spurred him to question the capitalist system. Saito briefly enrolled at the University of Tokyo, but transferred to Wesleyan University, which he found insufficiently radical, on a scholarship. He graduated in 2009.

The 2011 earthquake and nuclear disaster at Fukushima pushed Saito to reconsider humanity’s relationship with nature. “Fukushima caused me to question whether technology and the increase of productive forces create a better society,” he said. “The answer was no.”

Saito moved to Berlin and got his Ph.D. at Humboldt University, where he studied Marx’s views on ecology. In 2016, he published an academic treatise on Marx’s “ecosocialism,” the English translation of which won the prestigious Deutscher Memorial Prize for books in the Marxist tradition.

Around that time, the idea of degrowth, which had been kicking around environmentalist circles for decades, was gaining steam in Europe. Saito started reading thinkers such as Tim Jackson, Giorgos Kallis, and Kate Raworth, all of whom argued that there are planetary boundaries we can’t exceed without causing mayhem. Thinkers since Thomas Malthus had been talking about limits to humanity’s expansion—sometimes with disturbing implications, as in Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller, The Population Bomb, which described with disgust a teeming Delhi slum. But degrowthers identified the pursuit of GDP as the culprit, arguing that it fails to account for all kinds of human flourishing. Greta Thunberg amplified the degrowth message further when she mocked capitalist society’s “fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

Japan was a ripe target for these ideas. For decades, the country had been mired in low and sometimes even negative growth. The problem was no longer new, and the government’s proposed solutions—negative interest rates; trying to boost worker productivity—were losing their appeal. “A lot of young people feel like, I don’t want to work endless overtime and give up my family life and all my hobbies just to serve a corporation until I die,” says Nick Kapur, an associate professor at Rutgers University at Camden who studies modern Japanese history. “For what? Just to grow our GDP?”

Saito saw an opening: to connect degrowth with the Marxist ideas that he had been studying closely for years. Degrowth on its own had bad branding, he told me between bites of Beyond Burger at Tom’s Restaurant in Morningside Heights. The solution, he said with a grin, was to add “another very negative term: communism.”

When we met, Saito had traded his usual blazer and clean-cut look for an oversize denim jacket and a boy-band tousle. He has a disarming sense of humor: When he signs a book, he stamps it with a cartoon image of himself alongside Marx. But he’s serious about the need to embrace degrowth communism. He argues, not unreasonably, that degrowth is incompatible with capitalism, which encourages individuals to act selfishly and grow their riches. “Many people criticize neoliberalism,” Saito said. “But they don’t criticize capitalism. So that’s why we have ethical capitalism, sustainable capitalism, green capitalism.” Degrowth communism instead targets what Saito says is the root cause of our climate woes—capitalism itself—rather than just the symptoms, and prioritizes the public good over profit.

While degrowthers and Marxists have plenty of intellectual overlap, the match has always been an awkward one. Marx is generally considered pro-growth: He wanted to leverage the productive tools of capitalism to bring about a socialist future in which the fruits of that production would be fairly distributed. Saito, however, rejects that “Promethean” characterization of Marx. In Capital in the Anthropocene, he instead argues that Marx converted late in life from productivism to, yes, degrowth communism. To make his case, Saito cites some of Marx’s lesser-known writings, including a draft of his 1881 letter to the Russian revolutionary writer Vera Zasulich and Critique of the Gotha Programme, which was published after Marx’s death.

Saito’s book is a mishmash of political polemic, cultural criticism, and obscure Marxist exegesis. He calls individual actions like using a thermos instead of plastic water bottles “meaningless,” and mocks the UN Sustainable Development Goals, dismissing them and other market-friendly solutions as “the opiate of the masses.” Instead of relying on technology alone to save humanity, he argues, wealthy countries need to give up their consumerist lifestyles and redistribute their resources to poor countries to help them navigate the transition to a slower global economy. He advocates transitioning away from capitalism toward a “sharing economy,” and offers a mix of solutions both modest and bold. Workers should own their businesses. Citizens should control local energy production. Also: “What if Uber were publicly owned, turning its platform into a commons?” Saito argues that this arrangement would produce not scarcity but “radical abundance” as we freed ourselves from the obligation to generate ever-higher profits: “There will be more opportunities to do sports, go hiking, take up gardening, and get back in touch with nature. We will have time once again to play guitar, paint pictures, read … Compared to cramming ourselves into crowded subways every morning and eating our deli lunches in front of our computers as we work nonstop for hours and hours every day, this is clearly a richer lifestyle.”

On a superficial level, Saito put a fresh young face on old environmentalist ideas. Well spoken and self-deprecating, he didn’t have the off-putting self-seriousness of many ideologues. After years of ineffective stimulus and grind culture, Saito’s ideas may have intrigued Japanese audiences looking for “the opposite of the status quo,” Nick Kapur told me. Saito’s analysis also offered a kind of tonic for Japan’s national neurosis around slow growth: What if this is good, actually?

Kohei Saito (Shiho Fukada/The New York Times/Redux)

On a recent Saturday, Saito sat onstage at the People’s Forum, a community center in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, along with three other panelists: a historian, a geographer, and a journalist from The New Republic. It was a friendly crowd, but each of the panelists cast gentle doubt on Saito’s pitch. The historian said he’d like to see more modeling of the impact of degrowth policies; the geographer wondered how a degrowth agenda would ever expand beyond small, local experiments; and the journalist, Kate Aronoff, suggested that degrowth had a branding problem.

Saito had just begun his U.S. tour, and he was already encountering more resistance than he’d expected. “One thing surprising about American culture is they’re really anti-degrowth,” Saito told me after the event, as we walked along a chaotic stretch of 9th Avenue. When an American writer recently laced into him online, Saito’s European friends came to his defense. But here he was more isolated.

The simplest case against degrowth is that it’s not necessary. The prospect of boosting GDP while reducing emissions—known as “decoupling”—used to look like a moon shot. But now it’s happening. In more than 30 countries, including the United States and much of Europe, emissions are declining while GDP climbs, even when you factor in the “consumption-based emissions” generated in places that manufacture goods for rich countries. Solar and wind are cheaper in the U.S. than fossil fuels. Electric vehicles, for all their struggles, will make up half of global car sales by 2035, according to one recent estimate. Decoupling still isn’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, but green-growthers argue that we can speed up the process with enough investment. “It’s easy to say we need a socialist revolution to solve the climate crisis, but that’s not going to happen in the timescale,” says Robert Pollin, a progressive economist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst who co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky on the Green New Deal.

Other detractors say that degrowth would be actively harmful. It’s one thing to ask billionaires to cut back, but what about everyone else? Are they supposed to abandon hope of raising their standard of living? Saito includes working-class Americans in his indictment of the “imperial mode of living” that he blames for carbon emissions. This was too much for Matt Huber, a professor of geography at Syracuse University, and the left-leaning climate journalist Leigh Phillips, who co-wrote an article for Jacobin accusing Saito of doing “capital’s work” by “dividing the international working class against itself.”

Perhaps the most vicious reads of Saito target his interpretation of Marx. In the eyes of his critics, his reliance on a handful of passages in order to prove that Marx embraced degrowth communism amounts to a kind of fan fiction. One otherwise-sympathetic scholar wrote in a Marxist journal that the evidence Saito marshals is “simply not very convincing.” Huber and Phillips describe various claims about Marx’s views made by Saito as “wild,” “remarkable,” and “unsubstantiated.” Even John Bellamy Foster, the University of Oregon sociology professor who pioneered Marxist ecological studies in the 1990s and published Saito’s first book, told an interviewer that “no concrete evidence could be found of Marx actually advocating what could reasonably be called degrowth” and called Saito’s analysis “profoundly ahistorical.” (Saito responded in an email that Huber and Phillips “never read Marx’s notebooks that I investigate. Thus, they are not in a position to judge whether my claims are unsubstantiated because I am rereading Marx’s texts based on new materials.” As for Foster’s criticism, Saito wrote: “Marx never used the terms like degrowth, sustainability, and ecology. It is an attempt to push beyond Marx’s thought because there is no necessity to dogmatize Marx and he did not complete his work.”)

The question of whether Marx was a degrowther is academic—and so is degrowth itself, unless it can find a viable political path. Right now, that path is murky at best. The next politician to win reelection by urging voters to accept a lower standard of living will be the first. In the U.S., policies like a carbon tax and a national cap-and-trade program are dead on arrival. Even in Europe, farmers are protesting environmental regulations that they say erode their livelihood. In today’s politics, proposing sacrifice seems like an obvious form of political suicide that would only empower politicians who don’t care about climate change.

Saito nonetheless insists that degrowth is politically possible. It starts small, he says, with workers’ cooperatives and citizens’ assemblies, and then spreads from city to city. Europe is already taking the lead, he says: Amsterdam recently banned building new hotels, while Paris restricted parking for SUVs. (One could fairly ask whether these are degrowth policies or just traditional forms of regulation.) The Spanish government has piloted a four-day workweek, Barcelona has introduced car-free “superblocks,” and the Spanish city of Girona has begun to explore how to implement “post-growth policies.” Saito says success is simply a matter of persuading a critical mass of citizens to push for degrowth. He cites the statistic popularized by the Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth that it takes only 3.5 percent of the population protesting to enact change.

Isn’t expecting rich countries to act against their own interests a little optimistic? “Oh, yeah,” Saito said. “But the capitalist alternative is much more optimistic.” For Saito, the long-term alternative to degrowth communism is not green growth but “climate fascism,” in which countries lock down, hoard their resources, and disregard the collective good. Faced with that prospect, humanity will make the right choice. “As a philosopher,” he said, “I want to believe in the universality of reason.”

Saito does propose a few concrete fixes: Ban private jets. Get rid of advertising for harmful goods and services, such as cosmetic surgery. Enact a four-day workweek. Encourage people to own one car, instead of two or three. Require shopping malls to close on Sundays, to cut down on the time available for excessive consumption. “These things won’t necessarily dismantle capitalism,” he said. “But it’s something we can do over the long term to transform our values and culture.”

Of course, transforming values might be the heaviest lift of all. “Changing people’s preferences is really hard,” Dietrich Vollrath, an economist at the University of Houston who studies growth, told me. “You don’t need to change people’s preferences if you just make solar really cheap.” The Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman, who wrote The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, says that people fundamentally care about raising their material living standards and always will. “Trying to reform humanity is not a project of much interest to economists,” he told me. “We talk about what to do, not how to wish for another form of human being.”

Saito admits that he might be overshooting. He isn’t expecting countries to scale down in the next decade, but maybe after that. He’s not opposed to green-energy subsidies; he just wants degrowth to be part of the conversation. He emphasized that his ideas aren’t designed with realism in mind. “I’m not an activist,” he said. “I’m a scholar.” His job is to provide the theory behind the change. Making it work is up to others.

Degrowthers like Saito seem to be caught in a double dilemma. They bristle at the suggestion that degrowth would take us back to premodern standards of living—yet in trying to dispel that notion, they narrow their vision so far that it resembles business-as-usual left-of-center politics. A typical rundown of degrowth policies looks like a wish list from the Democratic Socialists of America: health care for all, universal basic income, a smaller military, mutual aid, better public transportation, decolonization, and so on. Adherents reject the view that degrowth would require some authoritarian power to impose it, but have yet to articulate a political plan besides changing one mind at a time.

“At bottom it’s not actually an evidence-based agenda,” Ted Nordhaus, the founder and executive director of the Breakthrough Institute and self-described “eco-modernist,” told me. “It’s sort of a worldview and a vibe.”

And yet, for many, the vibe hits. Degrowth captures a core truth of the fight against climate change: What we’re doing is not enough and might even be making things worse. Degrowth might fail too, but in the eyes of its supporters, at least it’s directionally correct. It’s the protest vote of climate activism.

While in D.C., Saito co-headlined a workshop with a few dozen students at Georgetown, where they discussed degrowth. The group was mostly in favor, according to two students who attended. Fiona Naughton, a rising sophomore who studies international labor policy, told me she and many of her peers find Saito’s ideas inspiring. “A lot of us have felt such immense climate anxiety and considered whether or not we should have children,” she said. “Degrowth gives us hope for a future that we haven’t felt in a long, long time.”

I also followed up with Tianle Zhang, the protester who’d taken a selfie with Saito at the Columbia rally, and asked him how he’d discovered Saito’s work. Zhang said that as a kid in Indiana, he’d watched the news in horror as oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico for months after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. In college, he’d sensed a gap between the immensity of the problem of climate change and the attempts to address it. Saito was one of the few scholars he found who was trying to connect thinking about the environment with a broader theoretical critique of capitalism and society.

Zhang said he was also deeply influenced by Paul Schrader’s 2017 film, First Reformed. The film stars Ethan Hawke as a troubled priest who descends so far into climate despair that he considers committing an act of terrorism. “For me, it was showing the failures of conventional morality to handle the issue of climate,” Zhang said.

[From the January/February 2023 issue: Why the age of American progress ended]

Degrowth’s appeal might be similar: not political, not even economic, but moral. In the climactic final scene of First Reformed, Hawke’s character wraps himself in barbed wire as he prepares to possibly do something horrifying and futile. This seems like a fitting metaphor for not only Saito’s proposals—Saito acknowledges that degrowth would require pain—but also their psychological appeal. We have been bad, and we must atone.

Beyond its stark moral claims, the very fact of degrowth’s unreasonableness gives it weight. Degrowth advocates have called it a “missile word,” designed to provoke. There’s a reason we’re talking about degrowth and not the “steady-state economy,” which environmentalists have been pushing for decades. As the prominent degrowth thinker Jason Hickel has written, the term itself upends conventional wisdom: “It is only negative if we start from the assumption that more growth is good and desirable.” To this way of thinking, the inconceivability of degrowth only highlights how trapped we are in the growth-fetishist mindset.

At the end of our dinner, Saito told me he’s working on his next book, about the role of government when it comes to implementing degrowth. “The state has to intervene, but how can we make a democratic transition?” he asked rhetorically. I asked if he had an answer. He said, “Not yet.”

Sweater-Eating Moths Are an Unbeatable Enemy

2024-05-28T09:43:54-04:00

Every year, beginning around the end of March, my household starts planning a massacre. Our targets are our home’s clothes moths: My spouse and I lay pheromone-laced traps in the closets, living room, and bedrooms; we—and our two cats—go on alert for any stray speckle of brown on a cream-colored wall. The moment we spy an insect, we’ll do whatever we can to crush it. After killing dozens upon dozens, my husband and I can now snatch moths straight out of the air.

None of this has been enough to eliminate the moths. These particular moths—webbing clothes moths—are simply too well adapted to modern human life; as a species, “they don’t really live outside anymore,” Isabel Novick, a biologist at Boston University, told me. Clothes moths have evolved into a perfect nuisance, so capable of subsisting on the contents of our homes that permanently purging them may be impossible.

Adult clothes moths, at least, are easy game. Their bodies, the size of fennel seeds, are fragile. And although they have wings, they’re poor flyers—females prefer to walk—and when they do force themselves aloft, manage only weak lurches and lilts. The adults, though, aren’t the problem; they don’t even have mouths. The larvae are the ones that post up in our closets and chew their way through hundreds of dollars of woolen sweaters and cashmere cardigans.

These moths belong to a group of insects—Lepidoptera, the order that includes butterflies and moths—that’s been around for hundreds of millions of years, well predating us, much less our taste for luxe outerwear. What the larvae are after, though, is not sweater-specific; they’re hungry for keratin, a hardy protein found in fur, feathers, horns, claws, hooves, and other animal adornments. Keratin is tough enough that most animals find it quite hard to digest, and leave it alone.

Clothes moths and their relatives, though, managed to evolve a way to capitalize on that opportunity, as Novick and other researchers have found. In their larval state, the moths manufacture enzymes and digestive juices that may help them break down keratin; they also appear to host gut microbes that dissolve substances that animal bodies cannot. For some species, that means feeding on horns, hooves, or tortoiseshells. Others, though, including the two clothes-moth species most commonly found in human homes, are far less picky about where their keratin comes from. Which is unfortunate for us, because the average home is full of the protein, Dong-Hwan Choe, an entomologist at UC Riverside, told me.

Woolen clothing makes for an especially convenient meal. But clothes-moth larvae will also happily eat carpets and rugs woven with animal hair—as well as upholstered furniture, wool insulation, the downy stuffing in couches and pillows, and the woolen felt pads sometimes found in pianos. Pushed to its limit, webbing clothes moths may also turn to nylon stockings, cotton blends, soybean meal, or household dust. The moths are considered a scourge in museums, where they’ll eat their way through taxidermy and precious artifacts; researchers have uncovered clothes moths subsisting on mummified human remains. Starve the pests of clothes, and “they can still live in your house,” Novick told me.

In mine, part of our strategy is defensive: We clean our woolens frequently, not wanting to attract the moths with the parfum of BO, and seal away our most precious clothes in airtight containers. But trying to keep any home keratin-free is a pointless exercise. The substance is in our fingernails, our hair, the outermost layer of our skin. And although our cats, Calvin and Hobbes, are adept moth-hunters, their fur—which accumulates in corners, on furniture, and on brushes—seems to be keeping the pest population in our home alive and well. Novick, who shares her apartment with a cat named Valentine, is in a similar bind. She also points out that, in her particular living situation, even a more drastic measure, like hiring professionals to fumigate her unit, would likely be futile. The moths would probably come creeping back from elsewhere in the building.

Realistically, many clothes-moth invasions end in something “more like management than eradication,” Choe told me, requiring frequent bouts of vacuuming, trap-laying, scrubbing, and laundering or dry cleaning (or freezing, or even baking) clothes to keep the pests at bay. It’s a huge time investment, and potentially a steep financial one, too. (Chemical interventions, such as mothballs and pesticides, can help, but may not be great options for people with pets, small kids, or certain medical conditions; cedar chests, unfortunately, seem to be dubious solutions at best.) Choe told me that, although he’s frequently consulted by people with infestations, he can’t say for sure whether any of those individuals have successfully trounced the pests.

And few solutions can solve for all of the moths’ evolutionary tricks. Clothes moths have a high tolerance for inbreeding, according to Novick. They can safely swallow mercury and lead and are quite cold resistant. Their eggs can withstand freezing for several days; when temperatures are cool, larvae can persist in their immature state for more than two years. Heat, meanwhile, bumps up their reproductive potential—and Novick worries that, as climate change raises average temperatures, clothes-moth infestations, like many other indoor pest problems, could rise in frequency.

Novick has tried to make the best of her own clothes-moth infestation: She started her lab colony from individuals she captured in her own home. It’s a kind of admission that coexistence is the only path forward, in the same way that people accept fruit flies as an inevitability of compost piles, and cockroaches as a tax of urban living. Perhaps these moths should be added to the pantheon of pests to which we’ve been forced to concede a degree of defeat—or, at the very least, grudging respect, for how scrappy their brittle, brilliantly well adapted bodies are.

Amazon Returns Have Gone to Hell

2024-05-28T08:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on May 30, 2024

After ordering two packs of 11-inch, rope-woven storage cubes from Amazon.com recently, I found that the resulting cubes were, in fact, 11-by-10.5-by-10.5 inches. Alas, they weren’t what I expected. I elected to return both sets.

Thus began the latest of my ill-fated journeys through logistics at what strives to be “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” The system promised to be easy: First I’d set up the return within the Amazon app, then scan the QR code it gave me at a self-serve kiosk in my local (Amazon-owned) Whole Foods Market store. After that, I’d simply load my items into a proffered poly bag, print off a mailing label, and drop the package in a chute that the kiosk would unlock for me.

If only life could be so simple. Upon arrival at the Whole Foods, I discovered that I couldn’t fit both of the items I wanted to return into a single poly bag. With a line forming behind me, I panicked and decided to regroup at home, where I would begin the process over again, this time as two returns, one for each pack of not-quite-cubes. When I went back to the kiosk a few days later, I couldn’t fit even a single pack of storage cubes into a poly bag. Luckily, the cubes were still in their plasticized wrapper, so I applied the labels directly to the packaging. But then I accidentally used the same QR code for both items—a fatal error, it turned out. Didn’t this used to be much easier?

[Read: The free-returns party is over]

According to the National Retail Federation, one-seventh of the $5 trillion worth of retail goods sold in the United States in 2023 were returned. Online retail, which now accounts for about one-quarter of all sales, grew, in part, on this foundation. If you can’t see and touch goods that you’re about to buy, then you don’t ever really know what you’re going to get, and you might be disappointed. Free shipping and returns have helped consumers hedge that risk. But free for you doesn’t mean free for the retailers, which lose a lot of money on restocking and refurbishment. As Amanda Mull wrote for The Atlantic last year, the standard way of selling things online—with the blanket promise You can always send it back!—has become unsustainable.

“For the first time, companies are making return reductions a priority,” Jacob Feldman, an associate professor of supply chain, operations, and technology at Washington University in St. Louis, told me. Amidst their efforts to accomplish that reduction, some have tweaked their free returns to make them slightly less-than-free; others have been warning customers away from suspect purchases, or clamping down on fraud. And according to experts I spoke with, the biggest online retailers have, over time, revised, modified, and amended the logistics processes that they’re using for returns. All those small changes have started to compound. What used to be a simple system for consumers is getting more complex. And customers like me have begun to notice.

Amazon has sometimes treated its returns as losses, offloading rejected items or bundling them for sale at auction instead of returning them to stock. But over the past year or so, and for the first time I can remember, I’ve been getting frequent notices checking in on my returns. “This is a reminder to return the item below,” the emails say. One such item was an HDMI coupler—a home-theater-cable doodad—that I’d bought from Amazon, and then sent back successfully (I thought) for an automated refund. Now the company was telling me that the coupler was unaccounted for. Send the item back, it warned, or you’ll be charged for it again. I’ve had this same experience—where Amazon insists that it never got an item I really have sent back—many times now. In some cases, I did end up getting charged, and had to talk with customer service to unwind the matter. Sometimes it took several separate calls or chats to resolve.

[Read: This is what happens to all the stuff you don’t want]

In the supply-chain industry, providing for returns is known as “reverse logistics.” For a huge e-commerce business like Amazon’s, this system is necessarily involved. Whenever you make a purchase, your items may be shipped to you from a number of different locations, packaged all together in a single box or spread across a handful, and arriving on the same or different days from either Amazon or its “Marketplace” of third-party sellers. Then, if you want to return an item, all those elements must be unwound. According to Zachary S. Rogers, an associate professor of supply-chain management at Colorado State University, Amazon is better adapted to this problem than other online retailers. “They have understood for a long time that returns are a necessary evil,” he told me. The company also makes lots of money from Prime memberships, which come with fast, free shipping and returns.

“The name of the game now is mitigation: How do we mitigate this crazy number of returns?” Rogers said. “One of the things you could do is put a little more friction in it. They’ll never say returns are going to cost money or not be allowed. But if it’s a little more inconvenient, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.” In other words, if a return process put customers off just enough to dissuade some returns, but without upsetting the precious idea of free returns, that would be a net benefit for retailers. Rogers, who used to work in logistics for an Amazon subsidiary, couldn’t say for sure whether this was going on at Amazon or any other online retail company. And Amazon itself, through its spokesperson, told me it would be “patently false and misguided” to assert that any of its return practices are meant to discourage returns. “Customers usually get a product they love, but in case they don’t, we welcome returns and invest heavily in technology, infrastructure, and staff to make them fast, convenient, and easy for customers,” the spokesperson said.

[Read: The nasty logistics of returning your too-small pants]

Still, Rogers told me that he’s seen other retailers add rules and limits to their returns practices. A company might not let you return a television that you bought the day before the Super Bowl, for example. But sellers have to be careful. “You can put some subtle frictions in the system, but you can’t go overboard,” he said.

I’ve certainly dealt with some form of friction using Amazon. The company may unexpectedly split up a group of items into separate returns, for example. That experience can be disorienting. In principle, you might order three of the same hand towel, discover the color isn’t to your liking, and then be forced by the website’s software to return two of them in one batch and the other in a second. And although Amazon still advertises free returns for many of its products, what that means in practice may vary by customer. You could be directed, as I was, to a self-service return kiosk at your local Whole Foods. Or you could be sent to Kohl’s, or Staples, or perhaps the UPS Store.

The spokesperson for Amazon told me that the company presents customers with return options “based on product attributes” and that “the options for return locations may vary.” But that’s not the whole story. “Behind the scenes, Amazon is figuring out the cheapest return option for them, today,” Rogers suggested. The best way for Amazon to route an item might vary with factors such as geography (in rural areas, USPS pickup might be cheapest, for example) or current shipping volumes (a UPS Store might provide for more or less efficiency than Kohl’s on any given day). “I think they cherry-pick the things that make sense for them economically,” Rogers told me. When presented with this assertion, Amazon’s spokesperson did not offer a response.

Consumers have no view into this back-office murk, and the confusion it engenders may effectively be limiting returns. I couldn’t help but wonder if this explained my problems with “unreceived” items that I’d definitely sent back to Amazon. Perhaps my returns had veered off-course amidst the convoluted steps of grouping items with their proper labels, determining whether each one goes into a return-shipping box, and then understanding where and how they ought to be dropped off.

The company rejected the idea that my befuddlement about the system of returns was the norm. “A lot of this is based on your experience,” the spokesperson told me. Out of curiosity, I asked Amazon corporate to look into my account. What had gone wrong with my return of the HDMI dongle, or of the box of stainless-steel washers, both of which I’d sent back to Amazon in January? And what had happened to the pack of nail-in cable clips that I’d returned in April? The spokesperson said that I’d packed the first two items together in one bag when it should have been two. That’s possible, I suppose. It’s true that I was flustered at the drop-off. The barcodes all looked the same, and the item thumbnail on my phone screen, which I had to reference at the kiosk, was hard to see, and I didn’t have enough hands to do everything.

When summarizing the review of my orders, Amazon’s spokesperson told me: “You didn’t follow the instructions properly.” Again, this may be true—but I’d been trying to follow instructions, and still things didn’t go my way. Amazon eventually conceded that one of the unreceived-return notices I’d gotten, for the cable clips, had been sent in error, because the item was incorrectly scanned at the fulfillment center. The company also told me that the kiosk had allowed me to use the same barcode twice for the storage cubes because “when not all of the items fit into one bag, the kiosk allows customers to print multiple labels.” The whole experience seemed riddled with arbitrary, hidden rules.

I’ve been feeling less inclined, these days, to make returns. Others seem to feel the same. “If I even think there is a .1% chance I may have to return an item, I am not buying it from Amazon,” one frustrated customer posted on Reddit a few weeks ago. Others have alleged that Amazon is taking longer to issue refunds than it used to. The company maintains that the system is working very well for its customers. It says that 90 percent of eligible refunds are issued within five hours. The spokesperson told me that kiosk returns are completed on average in 60 seconds, that “hundreds of thousands of customers use these kiosks weekly” and that those customers “provide highly positive feedback on the experience.” Amazon also stressed that its system for processing returns—which I’d come to see as a sprawling bureaucracy—is actually designed for convenience, offering customers one or more free return options at 8,000 locations across the U.S., the spokesperson said. But from his perspective as a logistics expert, Rogers thinks that’s not a totally straightforward answer. “Everyone I’ve talked to, almost universally, feels that there needs to be some control of the crazy cost of returns,” he said of the retail sector overall. “But you have to do it in a way that’s subtle.”

Indeed, the whole returns situation seems equivocal. I’ve noticed returns getting harder recently, but Amazon contends that it only ever strives to improve its processes. Is it possible that we’re both right? “They might want it to seem like they’re making returns easier, when it’s actually harder,” Feldman, the WashU professor, said. “That’s probably exactly what they want.” (Amazon had told me that this is not, in fact, what it wants.) Feldman added that it might be difficult for the company to know exactly what makes returns “easier,” anyway. Different options may appeal to one customer but not another. “There’s no silver bullet.”

Faced with that reality, Amazon has tried to do it all: In the absence of a silver bullet for returns, it now provides an ammunition store of options (though it may be the case that only one of them is free). But this creates its own problems, Rogers told me. “As you increase optionality, you add complication,” he said. “From the consumer’s side, it’s not just one consistent process every time.” Inconsistency isn’t only maddening for people with some storage cubes that they don’t want. It may also lead to more mistakes in processing their returns, and more anger over missing refunds.

Late in the process of writing this story, I created yet another free Amazon return, but did not get the option of making a poly-bagged, Whole Foods drop-off like before. Instead, I was instructed to seal all four of my items into a single shipping box (I’d already recycled mine!) and take the package down to the UPS Store. I did not feel like I’d been graced with any greater freedom by this new directive. The choice of where to go had been made on my behalf. That might be more efficient in the end, but it makes me feel like a cog in a reverse-logistics machine I can never hope to understand, but which I also cannot seem to give up.