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Donald Trump has been bullying Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell—calling him “too late,” insulting his intelligence, and trying to gin up a case that Powell spent too much on renovations of the agency’s headquarters as a pretext for firing him. The New York Times recently observed that the two men have a “toxic relationship,” which is true, as far as it goes.

But the actual reason for the president’s hostility is neither alleged cost overruns nor Powell’s ability to manage the business cycle. Trump doesn’t think Powell is bad at his job. He objects to the job itself.

The Federal Reserve’s assignment is to steward the long-term interests of the U.S. economy—even at the occasional expense of short-term pain—by balancing the twin objectives of suppressing inflation and managing the unemployment rate. Trump, however, believes that the Fed’s objective should be to speed up the economy under Republican administrations and slow it down under Democratic ones. To the extent that the central bank balances unemployment and inflation, he would like to see the pain of high unemployment shifted onto Democratic administrations so that Republican ones can benefit from rapid economic growth.

Trump’s philosophy on monetary policy is easy to define because he has been publicly vilifying the Fed for at least a decade and a half. His opinions shift, but they shift predictably between two forms, with no relationship to economic circumstances. If the president is a Democrat, Trump complains that interest rates are too low. If the president is a Republican, he complains that they’re too high.

[David Frum: Trump needs someone to blame]

During the Obama years, the U.S. economy featured low inflation and elevated unemployment as it recovered from the Great Recession. Trump nonetheless spent that time complaining about low interest rates. “The Fed’s reckless monetary policies will cause problems in the years to come,” he tweeted in 2011. “The Fed has to be reined in or we will soon be Greece.” Five years later, with inflation still below target and the job market still recovering, he was still at it. “They’re keeping the rates down so that everything else doesn’t go down,” Trump complained in 2016. “We have a very false economy.”

Then Trump became president, and abruptly reversed his position. “I do like a low-interest-rate policy, I must be honest with you,” he told The Wall Street Journal in April 2017. As the Federal Reserve began raising rates, which it generally does when the economy is running hot, Trump denounced those moves. He pushed repeatedly for lower rates, even when the economy was at its peak. “I think they should drop rates and get rid of quantitative tightening,” he said in 2019. “You would see a rocket ship.”

At that time, rates were historically low. That changed after the pandemic sent prices soaring in 2021. Did Trump push back on the Fed’s decision to raise rates to combat inflation? Of course not, because Joe Biden was now president. Last October, Trump denounced Powell for easing interest rates by half a percentage point. “It was too big a cut, and everyone knows that was a political maneuver that they tried to do before the election,” he claimed. Almost immediately after winning his second term, however, he resumed his public drumbeat for cheaper money, a demand he has now backed with the threat of firing Powell.

Whether Trump will follow through on that threat remains unclear, as does whether the courts would allow him to. Even if Trump eventually installs a more pliant figure in Powell’s place (his term as Fed chair expires next year), experts question whether that would actually lead to reduced interest rates. If the Fed loses credibility in the market, borrowing costs could paradoxically get even higher.

[Annie Lowrey: Trump is flirting with economic disaster]

Trump does not appear to have any master plan for how the Fed should function in a world in which he has compromised its independence. For one thing, he doesn’t believe that independence is possible. Laced through his commentary about the Fed over the years is a belief that its commitment to apolitical economic stewardship is a facade hiding naked partisanship. “Janet Yellen is highly political, and she’s not raising rates for a very specific reason,” he said a decade ago: “because Obama told her not to, because he wants to be out playing golf in a year from now and he wants to be doing other things, and he doesn’t want to see a big bubble burst during his administration.”

Trump offered the same diagnosis when Powell was preparing to cut rates last year. “I think he’s political,” he told Fox News. “I think he’s going to do something to probably help the Democrats, I think, if he lowers interest rates.”

Just as Trump is convinced that every president has secretly deployed the Justice Department for their own partisan ends, he believes that monetary policy is nothing but a way to win elections. Trying to advance the national interest, rather than some venal end goal, is a foreign concept. Economic analysts are now trying to predict what would happen under a regime in which the Fed chair is merely following the president’s short-term whims. Trump’s convictions begin with the premise that this is the world that has always existed.


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Every so often, Donald Trump sends an encouraging signal to Ukraine, despite his long pattern of deference toward Russian President Vladimir Putin. Last week, the president of the United States allowed the transfer of a number of American Patriot anti-missile systems through Germany—a move that will strengthen Ukraine’s air defense at a dangerous time. The Ukrainians are so pleased with this offer that President Volodymyr Zelensky has floated an expanded military relationship, wherein Ukraine would share its drone expertise with Americans in exchange for further arms sales.

Then again, Ukrainian air defenses are overstretched in part because of another recent decision Trump made: As he was agreeing last week to allow the transfer of more Patriots to Ukraine—at Europe’s expense—he also gave Putin about 50 days to come to the negotiating table before the White House will consider new sanctions against Russia. In essence, Trump gave the Russian dictator the rest of the summer to continue his bombing campaign against Ukrainian cities.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine’s warning to the world’s other military forces]

Recognizing that supporting a democratic Ukraine against Putin’s invasion is in America’s interest, the Biden administration had donated weapons to Ukraine, rather than expecting to be paid for them. Ukraine, which needs supplies to continue its fight, has no real choice but to keep seeking the White House’s favor. But Trump seems to be stringing the Ukrainians along. The equipment he plans to furnish will not be enough to enable the Ukrainians to win. Whatever help he provides appears less decisive than the obstacles he puts in their way.

For months now, the Russians have spurned any real negotiations with Ukraine and ramped up their bombardment of Ukrainian cities—killing and maiming civilians on almost a nightly basis. In response to this, Trump has regularly decried Putin’s actions, but resolutely refused to take any concrete steps himself to rein the Russian dictator in.

[Thomas Wright]: Putin needs to believe he can’t win

As Russia launched an ever-larger number of missiles and drones at Ukrainian cities, many in Congress were eager to approve crippling secondary sanctions that would have all but prevented outside powers from doing business with Russia. These measures were included in a bipartisan bill sponsored by Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal—and co-sponsored by more than 80 other members of the senior chamber. It was also a bill that stood to gain quick passage in the House—if Trump would allow House Speaker Mike Johnson bring it to a vote. Trump even indicated that his wife, Melania, was appalled at the destruction that Ukrainians keep suffering. “I go home. I tell the first lady, ‘You know, I spoke to Vladimir today. We had a wonderful conversation.’ She said, ‘Oh, really? Another city was just hit,’” Trump said last week.

But instead of moving firmly against Putin, Trump gave his 50-day ultimatum—which may not even be an ultimatum if, in the end, Trump backs off his threat to impose “very severe tariffs” on Russia. As nationalist commentators in Russia quickly understood, Trump was offering Putin a great strategic gift. In part because Trump has refused to add new sanctions after his inauguration in January, and suppliers have found ways around existing ones, Russia can now manufacture more missiles. After dark, Russian forces are bombarding Ukrainian cities with a growing number of missiles and drones—the record for one night, set earlier this month, is more than 700, a quantity that would have been inconceivable in 2022, at the start of the full-scale invasion. And German General Christian Freuding, head of the Ukraine Situational Center at the German Ministry of Defense, recently said that Russia wants to be able to launch 2,000 drones in a single attack.

[Nataliya Gumenyuk]: Ukraine’s new way of war

Even if Ukraine gains access to greater defensive firepower, the country almost certainly won’t be able to shoot down all of the incoming munitions in attacks of that size, and the toll in Ukrainian lives seems sure to mount.

On the ground, Russia can step up its efforts to take one tiny parcel of Ukrainian land after the next—even at the cost of sending tens of thousands more of its own soldiers to their doom. If Trump genuinely has plans to increase pressure on Russia after his 50-day grace period expires, he’s essentially giving Putin reason to set a goal of conquering as much territory as possible before coming to any peace talks.

At the end of a 50-day rampage, the Russians could even decide to take up the terrible “peace” deal that the Trump administration floated a few months ago. This included letting the Russians keep almost every piece of Ukrainian land they have seized, granting U.S. recognition of Russian control over Crimea, depriving Ukraine of any hope of NATO membership, and withholding any meaningful security guarantees whatsoever.

Having done everything Trump has asked, having negotiated in good faith, having kissed up to the president, having avoided attacking Russian civilian targets partially out of deference to the U.S., the Ukrainians now see the White House basically guaranteeing the Russians a sanctions-free summer to commit any atrocities they want.

Under these circumstances, Zelensky’s offer to share drone expertise is a gamble, given Trump’s apparent sympathy for Putin. Hoping to entice his American counterpart into providing reliable support, the Ukrainian leader previously offered the United States an interest in his country’s mineral wealth. The deal is in effect, but Trump’s support remains fickle at best, because supporting a free people in their struggle against a foreign dictatorship is no longer a priority for the United States.


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All Praise Shade (www.theatlantic.com)
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Every year, heat takes more lives than floods, hurricanes, and tornadoes combined. The fatalities can sometimes go unnoticed, perhaps because the danger is invisible: There’s no twister that uproots a neighborhood and no flood that sucks it underwater, nor billions of dollars in property damage. Instead, heat’s imprint is seen in empty streets, work slowdowns, cognitive decline, and hospital bills. When autumn arrives and temperatures relent, heat leaves no discernable trace.

The Earth is getting hotter. In many places on the planet, summer is already two to three weeks longer than in the 1950s. By the end of the century, the warm season in the United States could last six months, and extreme temperatures could force us to spend much of it indoors. Supercharged heat waves will settle over cities for weeks at a time and cause many people to die. Others will suffer heart attacks, kidney disease, and brain damage. What we now call winter will be a brief, two-month interregnum that feels more like spring.

Book jacket This article was adapted from Sam Bloch’s new book, Shade: The Promise of a Forgotten Natural Resource.

Reducing society’s consumption of fossil fuels is necessary for preventing worse-yet climate change. But even if every single power source becomes a renewable one and we stop emitting carbon, the planet’s surface won’t start cooling. The temperature will continue to rise for a few years before gradually leveling off. It will take “many, many centuries,” NASA estimates, to end the global-greenhouse effect. It is a sobering truth that cutting emissions isn’t enough. We also need to figure out how to live on a new Earth.

What if the key to that life is older than civilization itself? We need to manage heat to live. And we have an effective and democratic way of doing it: shade.

[Read: Shade will make or break American cities]

Shade makes long waits for the bus more comfortable. Shade helps keep farmworkers safe when they harvest fruits and vegetables under an unforgiving sun. And shade cools urban environments, improving residents’ chance of surviving blazing summers.

“We all know that cities are cooler when we have shade, but we’re not really planning for it,” V. Kelly Turner, an urban-planning and geography professor at UCLA, said on CNN. “In the future, that’s something that cities are going to need to do, is intentionally think about: What does shade infrastructure look like?”

Turner believes that shade could be America’s next long-term investment in public health. What safe drinking water and clean air were to the 20th century, shade could be to the climate-changed 21st. Scientific models bear her out. If we can get emissions under control and put the planet on a path to moderate warming, then by 2050, getting out of the sun could be the difference between unsafe heat and a livable environment.

One obvious way the planet can get more shade is more trees. We evolved in forests, and some of our oldest myths and stories unfold under their canopies. Hippocrates taught medicine under a plane tree, and Ovid found bittersweet beauty in a laurel’s leaves. The Mesopotamian goddess Inanna slept under a miraculous poplar whose shadow never moved, and Buddha found enlightenment by meditating under a ficus tree. Christian and Muslim heavens alike are cooled by trees’ perpetual shade.

Tree shade is where public space was born and civic identities are forged. In hot climates, people naturally prefer to confer, conduct commerce, and gossip out of the sun’s permanent glare. They spend far more time in shady parks or temple courtyards than in sunny ones. They linger and relax, and that engenders more interactions, and possibly even stimulates social cohesion. It’s true in arid cities, humid regions, and even temperate zones with short summers. People want to be in shade. They muse longer, pray more peacefully, and find strength to walk farther.

[Read: How climate change is killing cities]

Perhaps because we’ve become so adept at cooling inside spaces with air conditioning, we’ve forgotten the importance of cooling outside spaces, too. There is no technology that cools the outdoors as effectively as a tree. These communal parasols are also misting machines that dissipate heat. It’s hard to feel that effect under one or two of them, but get enough trees together and an urban summer can be as fresh as a rural spring, a feat with major implications for energy use and public health.

Where tree-planting isn’t viable, cities must invest in other types of public infrastructure that cast shade. Throughout Los Angeles, on streets that are too cramped and paved over to support green canopies, the preferred protections aren’t arboreal but artificial, such as the pop-up tents of taqueros and the cheerful rainbow umbrellas of fruit vendors. In Phoenix, a desert city that struggles to nourish an urban forest, common tools include sidewalk screens, frilly metal filters, and soaring photovoltaic canopies. These interventions are more effective than many might expect. Ariane Middel, an Arizona State University urban-climate researcher who runs the school’s Sensable Heatscapes and Digital Environments (SHaDE) Lab, surveyed students and staff as they strolled through the shadows that solar panels cast on a Tempe campus thoroughfare. More than any change in ambient temperature, humidity, or wind, the mere presence of shade was the only significant predictor of outdoor comfort.

Shade’s effectiveness is a function of physics. It depends on the material properties of the sun-blocking objects that cast it—how they reflect, absorb, and transmit different wavelengths of energy in sunlight. It depends on the intensity of that light and the extent of the shade thrown. (A telephone pole that casts a perfect shadow on your body does nothing to stop the solar heating of the surfaces around you.) And it depends on the biology of the person who receives it. Middel has come as close as anyone to adding up all these factors. She praises humble umbrellas and plastic sails, because their shade feels like taking 30 degrees off the afternoon sun, which is about as good as shade cast by a tree. Ultimately, she finds that a city itself can offer the most relief in the shadows of arcaded sidewalks and looming skyscrapers.

The Greek philosopher Onesicritus taught that shade stunts growth, a belief that presaged a modern fixation on the healthiness of sunlight. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, doctors and public-health advocates feared that darkness itself caused the poor health of urban slum-dwellers. It was a vector of disease, where contagions bred and spread, and the murkiness also encouraged licentiousness and other urban vices. Some literally believed sunlight was the best disinfectant. Solar codes were written into urban plans, and new materials and technologies allowed architects to design brighter buildings flooded with natural light.

[Read: America’s climate boomtowns are waiting]

Now we’re beginning to see how a solar fetish may be maladaptive. In New York, a recent summer saw a throng of neighborhood activists protest the construction of a 16-story office tower, with signs to Save Our Light. They did this while huddling in the shadow of another building.

As intense heat bears down, we have to see shade as a basic human right. We have forgotten that shade is a natural resource. We don’t grasp its importance, and we don’t appreciate its promise for a better future. Loggers and farmers cut down forests, forcing animals to flee and land to turn fallow. Engineers ignore time-honored methods of keeping out heat, locking us into mechanical cooling systems that fail during blackouts. And urban planners denude shady parks and pave neighborhoods with heat-sucking roads, only to drive us mad with the infernal conditions. But shade is a path to a better future—if we just learn to value it again, and design for it in the places we live.

This article was adapted from Sam Bloch’s new book, Shade: The Promise Of A Forgotten Natural Resource.


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Editor’s Note: Is anything ailing, torturing, or nagging at you? Are you beset by existential worries? Every Tuesday, James Parker tackles readers’ questions. Tell him about your lifelong or in-the-moment problems at dearjames@theatlantic.com.

Don’t want to miss a single column? Sign up to get “Dear James” in your inbox.

Dear James,

I’ve been a lifelong participant in various recreational sports. Candidly, I’m not a great athlete, but I’ve always been enthusiastic. Now, in my late 50s, I’ve gotten especially serious about tennis. Sometimes, I play five times a week. I’ve committed to improving and have taken group and individual lessons. I play in competitive United States Tennis Association leagues specific to my age and ability, and play pickup games whenever I can.

But I realize that when I play competitively, I have a negative, lingering, outsize reaction to losing. When I lose, I try to reframe it less as a defeat and more as What did I learn today? Yet my mind leads me back to despair and rumination on my mistakes.

Logically, I know that if I were to win these competitions, I would most likely be bumped up to the next level. And at that point, I would probably be the weakest player in a higher level of competition—leading right back, with even more frequency, to despair. Some athletes joyfully stick with their sports for a lifetime and don’t seem to be derailed by losing. What am I missing? How can I develop a healthier relationship to defeat?

Dear Reader,

I don’t think you’re missing anything. We all lose in the end—that’s the second law of thermodynamics. And every intervening loss, be it in business, love, or tennis, simply reminds us of this elemental fact. Is it even possible to have a healthy relationship with losing? I’m not sure it is, any more than it’s possible to have a healthy relationship with food poisoning. Certain human experiences simply resist philosophy.

My grandfather, who had an ego like a piece of Roman statuary, enjoyed a game of chess. Especially in his final years: late-night, booze-fueled and booze-fuddled, with the occasional, accidental knocking-over of pieces. He enjoyed it—if he won. If he didn’t win, he would take it as a melancholy comment on his old age, as evidence that his mind was going at last. And then he would slump, and brood loudly upon his failing faculties. So, as his opponent, you had to lose. But you couldn’t lose too easily or obviously; fuzzy as he was, he would pick up on that. You had to lose while looking as if you were trying to win. (It often fell to my brother, a teenager at the time and—luckily for my grandfather—an excellent chess player, to perform this complex operation.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think my point is that losing is never just losing. In your case, losing at tennis connects to what? An ever-present and not particularly welcome sense of your limitations as a player? A whisper of advancing decrepitude? Some other, deeper, darker thing? When I lose, I feel like the cosmos is against me. And I’m right.

So forget about being a good loser. Work on the comeback: That’s my advice. Doomed as we may be to entropy, we humans also possess nearly idiotic capacities for self-renewal. We bounce back! Soak up the gall of losing, absorb the horrible information, feel it to the full, go there—and then rebound, with superb elasticity. Save your energy for that.

Anticipating a National Magazine Award for this column,

James

By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it in part or in full, and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.


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You all remember comedy? That thing from the 1980s where you hate your wife? Well, it’s back! We’re in a golden age of comedy now where everyone can say exactly what they want, free of the fear of censorship, except by the government. Donald Trump has made comedy legal again!

  Remember, censorship is when people don’t laugh at your jokes. Freedom is when your late-night show gets permanently taken off the air for financial reasons (16 million of them) and the president expresses his approval. Comedy is great again, which is to say, it’s funny only if the president says so. Jokes are back, baby! Airplane travel is the worst! Take my wife, please. She’s a green-card holder who’s been in the country for 25 years! Knock, knock! Who’s there? Sorry, they won’t identify themselves, but they say they’re here about the op-ed.

  The Norwegian tourist who was denied entry by border officers—after the agents took a special interest in the meme of J. D. Vance he had on his phone—didn’t understand that when we say that comedy is legal again, we mean real comedy. This was clearly not comedy. This was somebody laughing at J. D. Vance. Comedy is when you laugh with J. D. Vance about people who don’t look to him like their ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Comedy is the memes that the Department of Homeland Security and the White House keep sharing about how Donald Trump is Superman and “my body is a machine that turns ICE funding into mass deportations” and “even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME”!

If you need any more clarity about what comedy is, here’s one of Trump’s favorite comedians (“I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined.”) offering what has been identified as a joke: “You know what?” Gutfeld said on Fox News. “I’ve said this before: We need to learn from the Blacks, the way they were able to remove the power from the N-word by using it. So from now on, it’s ‘What up, my Nazi?’ ‘Hey, what up, my Nazi?’ Hey, what’s hanging, my Nazi?’”

Laugh? I thought I’d die! This joke is funny, because people are constantly saying that Gutfeld is a Nazi, and he is getting a little sick of it. So, to dodge the Nazi allegations, he’s riffing on the N-word! This is comedy now!

Comedy is legal again. You are free to say whatever you want, provided it’s a slur. You must say it, or President Trump won’t approve your new stadium! No, that’s not a joke. That’s completely serious.

You should know by now: Everything is serious, until it’s suddenly a joke and you were a fool for not laughing. Everything is a joke, until suddenly it’s serious and how dare you laugh. Everyone is trolling, until they aren’t, and even when they aren’t, they are. Everyone is always and never joking. It’s not a threat. It’s a joke. Comedy is legal again!

Tragedy, to paraphrase Mel Brooks, is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. More and more people are getting pushed into open sewers lately. Boom times for comedy. Boom times for laughing at. From the open sewer, you can hear a lot of laughing.

They are so glad not to have to remember anymore that other people are in the room. What an enormous relief! Finally, they can say it! That is the project of Trumpism: becoming the only people in the room again. Becoming both the protagonists and the intended audience, the only people whose laughter counts.

What you think is funny depends on what you believe to be true. When you make a joke, you are asking someone to look at something and see the same thing you see. When the response is laughter, it is a way of making eye contact, of looking through the world at one another. That is the terror of bombing onstage: the realization that what you are seeing is not what everyone else is seeing. The anxiety that you have got the world by the wrong end, that you are alone in what you think.

But there are two reasons you can laugh. One is recognition, and the other is coercion. Some jokes are funny only with a power differential to back them up. This is the kind of comedy that’s legal now: the joke whose punch line you’re afraid to be. The kind of joke you have to take. Laugh, so they’ll know you’re one of them. Laugh, or he’ll kill you. Laugh, and maybe you won’t be next.


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If you have a heart attack in the United States, you might assume that an ambulance will bring you to an ER and its staff will take care of you. But hospital closures over the past 20 years and physician shortages were undermining that assumption even before President Donald Trump signed his “One Big Beautiful Bill” into law. Now that legislation—which will cut Medicaid spending by an estimated $1 trillion over 10 years, puts the entire emergency-medicine safety net at risk. The destabilizing effects will be felt not only by those who lose access to Medicaid, but also by those who have private health insurance.

As an ER doctor in New York City, I am terrified about the coming cuts. A recent study from the Rand Corporation confirms that ERs across the entire country are dangerously overstretched and underfunded. About a fifth of emergency visits each year are never paid for, amounting to nearly $5.9 billion in care costs absorbed by hospitals. The uninsured and underinsured were already more likely to have to seek treatment in the ER when they fell ill. With the changes to Medicaid eligibility, their ranks are set to swell.

Medicaid provides coverage to more than 71 million Americans; in addition, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (which provides low-cost coverage for children of families that do not qualify for Medicaid) covers 7 million children. Trump’s legislation is expected to deprive some 12 million people of Medicaid by 2034, and an additional 5 million will lose insurance because of changes to provisions of the Affordable Care Act. The cost of replacing this lost coverage for 17 million Americans will be especially daunting for low-income families: On average, health-insurance premiums add up to nearly $9,000 a year%20%5BFigure%201.3%5D.), whereas a full-time minimum-wage job generates just$15,000.

I went into frontline medicine to help people, not to bankrupt them—yet I am acutely aware that medical debt is a major factor in nearly three-fifths of bankruptcy cases in the United States. When someone who does not have insurance comes into the ER, I am forced to discuss with the patient what necessary care they may have to delay or forgo if they cannot afford it. These conversations will become only more frequent when millions of people are kicked off their health insurance.

[Jonathan Chait: The cynical Republican plan to cut Medicaid]

The 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, one of the most important public-health measures ever enacted in the United States, mandates that every emergency department must provide treatment to anyone who comes through the door, regardless of their ability to pay or their insurance status. “People have access to health care in America,” President George W. Bush once declared. “After all, you just go to an emergency room.” But the treatment mandate is unfunded. Bush neglected to say that patients are still charged for that visit once they receive the care they need. When they can’t pay, they get hounded by a collection agency. If they still can’t pay, the hospital ends up eating the cost. The downstream effect is lower staffing and fewer services. The burden of uncompensated emergency care unquestionably contributes to hospital closures.

Even before Trump’s huge budget-reconciliation bill passed, many people living in rural communities were at risk of losing access to health care. Of 25 hospitals that closed last year, 10 were in rural America, the industry publication Becker’s Hospital Review reported; according to a nonpartisan health-policy center, another 700 rural hospitals are financially distressed and at risk of closure. Nearly half of all children and one in five adults in small towns and country areas rely on Medicaid or CHIP; half of all births in these communities are financed by Medicaid. This makes rural hospitals highly dependent on the reimbursement that they receive from Medicaid for treating those patients.

The more patients who lose coverage, the greater the threat to these institutions. A report from the National Rural Health Association and the research firm Manatt Health finds that, because of Trump’s BBB, rural hospitals “will lose 21 cents out of every dollar” they’d previously received in Medicaid funding. The inevitable result will be more service cuts and more hospital closures, which will endanger everyone in these areas—even people with insurance.

The rational course would be for the government to put more resources into Medicaid, so that patients in need could access care in an optimal setting, instead of visiting the ER, where treatment is more expensive to provide and less comprehensive. Supporters of the BBB purport to have data showing that patients with Medicaid misuse the ER by seeking unnecessary treatment, and they argue that visit volume will go down once they are uninsured. My own experience is that although uninsured patients see me less, they typically show up much sicker—and need more resource-intensive care.

One of my regular patients has both Crohn’s disease and a debilitating psychiatric condition. He has no family support, usually lives in a shelter, and only sometimes has a job. After requiring an emergency intestinal surgery last year, he now comes into the ER every few days to have his ostomy bag changed, because the only clinic that takes Medicaid is in another borough. In an ideal world, he would have access to a clinic with wound-care nursing and social support. In this far-from-ideal world, taking away his Medicaid will not stop him from having chronic disease.

This patient could try to skip visits, but he will have to come to the ER when he gets an infection or his illness flares again, and then he will also be stuck with a bill that will hurt his credit rating and set back his efforts to pull himself out of poverty. The hospital, too, will be worse off—forced to absorb the cost of his treatment when previously it did receive at least small payments for his visits. In short, any appearance of less demand on health-care resources is a mirage; the real outcome will be worse health for the patient and higher costs for his health-care providers.

Imagine various such scenarios replicated all across the country, when millions of people lose Medicaid coverage. In a letter to Senate leadership last month, the American Medical Association’s chief executive, James Madara, warned that the proposed law “could lead to delays in treatment, increases in emergency room visits and hospitalizations, and other expensive forms of care.” His appeal went unheeded, as Congress passed the legislation on largely party-line votes. As Alison Haddock, the president of the American College of Emergency Physicians, put it: “The very idea of emergency medicine as we now know it—lifesaving care available for anyone at any time—is under direct threat.”

The threat is dire, but a stay is still possible. The majority of health-care cuts in the act will not go into effect until after the midterm elections in November 2026. Lawmakers have at least a theoretical opportunity to change course and save our emergency-medical system—if enough voters make them pay attention.


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Today The Atlantic is announcing more speakers, events, and the agenda for the 17th annual Atlantic Festival, taking place September 18–20 for the first time in New York City. This year’s festival will be anchored at the Perelman Performing Arts Center along with venues around the city, including the Tenement Museum, the Town Hall, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hauser & Wirth, and McNally Jackson Seaport.

Among the speakers announced today: actor Robert Downey Jr. and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, in conversation with The Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg; actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures in the new Ken Burns documentary series The American Revolution and who will join the premiere screening of the series at the Town Hall; comedian, writer, and director Richard Ayoade in a conversation moderated by talk-show host, comedian, and producer David Letterman; Executive Producer of The Apollo Kamilah Forbes; Professor of Marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business and a serial entrepreneur Scott Galloway; clinical psychologist and Founder and CEO of Good Inside Becky Kennedy; and TV personality, chef, author, and activist Andrew Zimmern. Previously announced Festival speakers include Mark Cuban, Jennifer Doudna, Arvind Krishna, Monica Lewinsky, Tekedra Mawakana, H.R. McMaster, and Clara Wu Tsai.

The Atlantic Festival will also host an exclusive first look for Season 3 of Netflix’s The Diplomat, which debuts this fall, followed by a conversation with the show’s stars Keri Russell and Allison Janney and creator and executive producer Debora Cahn; a sneak peek screening of FX’s The Lowdown, along with a talk with creator, executive producer, writer, and director Sterlin Harjo and executive producer and star Ethan Hawke; and a screening of The American Revolution, followed by a discussion with directors and producers Ken Burns and Sarah Botstein, along with actor Tom Hanks, who voices several historical figures, and historian Annette Gordon-Reed.

New this year: The Atlantic Festival introduces Out and Abouts, intimate events around the city that are ticketed individually. Among the events announced today:

Atlantic Reads book talks at McNally Jackson Seaport. Featuring Walter Mosley for his new novel Gray Dawn; Susan Orlean for her memoir Joyride; and a poetry conversation around The Singing Word: 168 Years of Atlantic Poetry, featuring the book’s editor and Atlantic contributing editor Walt Hunter, with Singing Word contributor and MIT professor Joshua Bennett.

Premiere of Dread Beat an’ Blood at BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music), featuring a live performance by legendary poet Linton Kwesi Johnson.

The Big Story Live events, across downtown venues:

“What Does it Mean to Be an American?,” at the Tenement Museum, featuring staff writers Xochitl Gonzalez and Clint Smith, plus more speakers to be announced.

“The Future of the Arts in a Changing World,” at Hauser & Wirth, featuring Jeffrey Goldberg, Noah Hawley, and Kamilah Forbes, with more speakers to be announced.

With more to be announced, including a live taping of the Radio Atlantic podcast.

The festival’s Single-Day Passes and Out and About tickets will go on sale this Wednesday, July 23, at 11 a.m. ET. Atlantic subscribers receive an exclusive 30 percent discount on festival passes and select Out & About programming.

Festival sessions will be led by Goldberg and many of The Atlantic’s writers and editors, including Adrienne LaFrance, Tim Alberta, Ross Andersen, Anne Applebaum, Gal Beckerman, Elizabeth Bruenig, Sophie Gilbert, Jemele Hill, Walt Hunter, Shirley Li, Ashley Parker, and Clint Smith.

The 2025 Atlantic Festival is underwritten by Microsoft at the Title Level; CenterWell, Eli Lilly and Company, and Scout Motors at the Presenting Level; and Aflac, Allstate, the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Destination DC, Diageo, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Hauser & Wirth, KPMG, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation at the Supporting Level.

Press should request a credential by emailing press@theatlantic.com; in-person seating will be limited and will need to be reserved in advance.

The Atlantic Festival September 18–20, 2025 Perelman Performing Arts Center, Virtually and Additional Locations Across NYC For Passes: https://theatlanticfestival.com/


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Photographs by Alice Zoo

Black dress, pink coat, thick beige stockings. This is the third time I’ve seen her. She walks down the middle of the street outside my window, her head bent forward under its helmet of grandmother hair. She carries her handbag like a briefcase with a bomb in it. She has the look of someone whose friends are all dead.

I saw her first outside Saint Spyridon Church, lighting a candle. And then again in Spianada Square, among the scootering children. I lean out the window to watch her disappear around the corner. Maybe there’s nothing suspicious about it. Corfu is a small city, on a small island in Greece. From my hotel room I can see the green edge of the cricket pitch where, in John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy, the Czech agent, Axel, chased Magnus Pym in slow, limping circles.

I think A Perfect Spy is a nearly perfect book. Only a few of its more than 600 pages are actually about Corfu. If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere: Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu. But as Axel would tell you, if you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you don’t go to the obvious places. You ignore the booked flight to Washington and the train ticket to Paris because you know they’re false leads. You look where the trail is colder.

[Read: An innocent abroad in Mark Twain’s Paris]

Magnus is an MI6 agent who has betrayed England by spying for the Czechs, but now the Americans are onto him. In a frenzy of denial, he drags his wife, Mary, and son, Tom, on a frantic Greek holiday: Lesbos, Athens, Hydra, Spetses. The Pyms change “boats and islands like driven souls, though only Magnus knows the curse, only Magnus knows who is pursuing them and why, and Magnus has locked that secret behind his smile with all his others.”

Corfu is where their journey begins. For centuries the island was a playground for spies, a place torn between great powers, where minor officials could go to make a name for themselves or jaded expats could try to fashion new lives. But if you’re trying to escape the past, it’s the wrong place to go.

Over the span of a generation, beginning at the turn of the 19th century, Corfu tumbled through the hands of four great powers. Walk into the city’s Old Fortress and you’ll meet a winged lion of Venice, whose face was hammered off by the Napoleonic French. On the ground is a paving stone where a Russian soldier carved his name. Prince Philip was baptized here, in the fortress’s Church of St. George. Nearly 2,000 Jews were held here, before deportation to Birkenau. Across the water: Albania. My tour guide, Andreas Grammenos, tells me about a defector who swam the channel to escape the Communist dictatorship. Andreas’s father served in Corfu’s Coast Guard, and still has the pool float the man used to get across. The fortress’s clock tower kept time until 2003, when the last technician who knew how to fix it retired.

Picture of the clock tower of the Old Fortress in Corfu's view of Corfu’s Old Town at dusk. The clock tower of the Old Fortress in Corfu (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

It was the British who brought cricket here, Magnus tells Tom. “Magnus knew those things. Or pretended to.” Their holiday is all late lunches, amorous siestas, tennis lessons for Tom, and, for restless Magnus, long evening walks. Until, one day, Axel tracks him down on the cricket pitch to warn him. “It’s over,” he says. “Come with me.” He means disappear, defect. The double agent has to pick a side, or at least admit that the game is over.

Magnus refuses to hear it. He spins lies, hauling his family to one island after another: “Sorry, Mabs. Sorry, Tom, old chap. But this place is too damned idyllic.” Tom knows something, though. He has seen this “mystery man at cricket,” he tells his mother—a “wise, stringy man with a sad moustache like a conjuror’s.” They went “round and round the ground together with the thin man going slowly like an invalid.” He was kind to Magnus. He was “like a father.”

John le Carré’s real name was David Cornwell, and his father, Ronnie, was a con man and a criminal. In 1977, David took his family—his first wife, Ann, and their three boys—to Corfu on vacation. Adam Sisman tells the story in John le Carré: The Biography:

Sitting outside at an open-air beach restaurant David overheard a familiar voice talking at a nearby table.

“Reg?” he asked tentatively.

“What if I am?”

“It’s David.”

The suspicious glare melted. “Ronnie’s boy!”

Reg was one of Ronnie’s loyal hangers-on, a cast of courtiers that included innocent marks and faithful henchmen and a rotating roster of replacement mothers for young le Carré. Reg told le Carré that he and others had taken the rap for some of Ronnie’s crimes, and served time in prison for them. “We was all bent, son,” Reg said. “But your dad was very, very bent.”

That scene from Corfu turns up in A Perfect Spy, though Reg is replaced by a character named Syd Lemon, who drops these lines back in England. Syd is speaking with Magnus’s MI6 boss, who is trying to find him before the Czechs, or Magnus’s own despair, catch up to him. In the novel, Magnus’s father is called Rick. “I did time” for Rick, Syd says. “A lot of us did.” Rick “was bent, you see. We was all bent.” But Rick “was very bent indeed.”

Le Carré tried, and felt he failed, for 25 years to write about his father, before he found, with A Perfect Spy, that he could lay the story of life with Ronnie over the armature of an espionage thriller. The book begins with Magnus on the run, heading for the hiding place of his own imagination, a guest room by the sea. The story slips between past and present while the narration slips from first person to third and back again, sometimes from sentence to sentence, which is entirely natural, because we’re not the people we used to be. Magnus’s childhood—the missing mother; the boarding schools; the weepy, groping hugs from Rick—is every bit as harrowing as being hunted by the East and West at once.

Le Carré wrote 26 novels before he died, in 2020. He traveled to research many of them. Everywhere he went, he dreaded meeting victims of his father’s schemes. Ronnie showed up in Cairo and Beirut—trying, maybe, to get into the gun-running business—then in Singapore, where he was arrested; then in Hong Kong, where he was arrested again. Now a letter came: Ronnie was in Delhi, claiming that he’d been appointed a maharaja’s right-hand man and asking his son for £1,000.

The seductive power of this guy! This is a man who wooed his own prosecutor. After a conviction for fraud, Ronnie wrote admiring letters from prison to the man who had argued against his appeal. Upon his release, Sisman writes, the prosecutor came to stay with Ronnie, who introduced him to “obliging young ladies.” Decades later, in Hong Kong, where le Carré went to research the novel that became The Honourable Schoolboy, he ran into the policeman who had overseen Ronnie’s imprisonment there: “Mr. Cornwell, sir, your father is one of the finest men I have ever met,” he told le Carré. “When I get back to London, he’s going to set me up in business.” You couldn’t touch him without being corrupted by him.

When Ronnie died, le Carré may have thought himself liberated. The feeling lasted for about five minutes. At the beginning of A Perfect Spy, the phone rings, announcing the death of Magnus’s father: “I’m free,” Magnus says. But even after death, Rick keeps turning up. Very near the end, A Perfect Spy is addressed to his ghost.

Once, a woman contacted le Carré. He had no idea who she was, but she seemed to believe that they’d had sex on a train. Of course, Sisman writes, it had been Ronnie, “passing himself off as the world-famous author.” The first person, the second, the third; fact, fiction, death—they were no match for Ronnie Cornwell.

One day in Corfu, I catch a cricket match played by a group of veterans. A man asks me something in Greek, then switches to English: He’s wondering if I can explain the rules to his son. I’ve been writing in a notebook—maybe he thought I was some kind of official, keeping score, when what I’m actually writing is that I’ve never seen so many older gentlemen taking their shirts off in public. They thwack the ball into the parking lot, and I imagine le Carré pretending to watch while dreading, always, the possibility of his father appearing in the crowd.

Picture of laundry hanging to dry high above the streets of Corfu Old Town A narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

Just as Corfu isn’t the first place you’d look for John le Carré, I’m probably not the first person you’d expect to write about him. A Perfect Spy was published in 1986, the year I was born. Also, I’m a woman. One of the complaints against le Carré was that he couldn’t write female characters. They tended to be beautiful and faithless, always running off, one critic wrote, “with another male, like a cat.” Anyway, I don’t care about that. I don’t really care about the women or lack of women in the 25 other novels, either.

The character I identify with is Magnus—with his compulsive adoption of other people’s values, with the way he puts on an identity only to cast it aside, with his damage and delusion, with his ravenous need to be loved. Everywhere he goes, Magnus compiles pieces of Magnus: from Ronnie’s retinue; from the fancy boys at boarding school and the Oxford socialists he spies on; from Axel; from Jack Brotherhood, his mentor at MI6. “Magnus is a great imitator,” Axel tells Mary. “I sometimes think he is entirely put together from bits of other people, poor fellow.”

[Read: John le Carré knew England’s secrets]

At the risk of turning an island full of real people into a handy literary metaphor: Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.

Corfu emerged from the churn of ancient and colonial history only to plunge into devastating world wars—as many as one in 20 Greeks died during World War II from violence or famine—and then into a brutal civil war, and then into a tourism boom. Today, about a quarter of its inhabitants were born abroad. And yet Andreas’s family has lived here for eight generations. He can find, in the archives stored in the Old Fortress, letters from his ancestors haggling over the price of wine. When he was growing up, you didn’t need a ticket to enter the fortress, and he and his friends used to play there, daring one another to run through the tunnels, the children’s footsteps echoing off the ancient walls.

Andreas takes me and Alice, the photographer I’m traveling with, from the fortress through the city. The houses aren’t the blue and white of the Greek flag. Instead (thanks to the Venetians) they’re sherbet-colored—cream and butter yellow, pink, apricot, and peach. The cafés on the avenue near the cricket pitch are busy, but whole grids of empty tables remain roped off. It’s April, and one feels already the dull tread of the approaching summer crowds. Andreas says that as late as the 1950s, it would have been “unthinkable” for an average villager to come here for coffee—only the elite were welcome. Tourism changed that. One night, a restaurant is playing “I’m too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts.”

Today Corfu is one of the most densely populated World Heritage Sites in Europe. Andreas says the local government is involved in a contentious debate about air conditioners: Can they be rigged up outside people’s homes, or are they a desecration of the scenic past? It’s hot here in the summer. Personally, I don’t think tourists should even be allowed to see this place if they’re going to go around complaining about AC units ruining their view.

Tourists and locals agree that the most important thing to do in Corfu is visit Saint Spyridon. Spyridon was a shepherd in Cyprus who became a bishop, went to the Council of Nicaea, performed miracles, and (after he died and was disinterred and embalmed) traveled through the mountains from Constantinople to Greece in a sack on the back of a mule.

Outside his church, people buy candles to light: The bigger the prayer, the bigger the candle. Inside is his body. Each morning, Spyridon’s slippered feet are revealed so that people can kiss them, but it’s the afternoon now, so the line to get into the crypt isn’t too long. Above his casket dangle dozens of silver thuribles, and from the silver thuribles, silver tamata—plaques engraved with the images of answered prayers (a baby, a heart)—and little silver ships, the symbol of Corfu. The church’s altar stands behind an iconostasis, a wall of icons and paintings. Andreas says this is a common feature of Greek Orthodox churches because his countrymen “love mystery”—because they understand the power of the hidden, the unseen.

Corfu was never a center of diplomatic activity, but it was a hub of information, where facts were dug up and traded like the metals and minerals of other lands. Aggelis Zarokostas, a historian at Utrecht University who is writing a book about 18th- and 19th-century espionage in mainland Greece and the Ionian Islands, told me the story of an agent named for the saint. Spiridon Foresti was a British consul who kept filing dispatches even after the French put him under house arrest for a year. He must have dropped his reports out his windows; how he was able to gather the information while locked inside, no one knows.

photo of hand reaching in from side and lighting thin candle by touching a lit candle, with a much larger candle burning nearby A woman lights candles outside the Holy Church of Saint Spyridon. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

British rule in Corfu lasted from 1815 to 1864. The English argued that they were bringing law and order to a cutthroat land. Immediately after they arrived, a plague broke out. Officials, going door-to-door gathering information about the ill and their contacts, dragged priests along with them to threaten people with excommunication if they didn’t comply.

Long after Corfu was turned over to the Greeks, traces of the English remained, as did many expats. The most famous were the Durrells, who moved to Corfu in 1935. There’s a popular British TV show about them: The Durrells, which begins with a broke and plucky widow ditching England to bring her four obstreperous children here. Two of those children grew up to be authors—Gerald, the famous nature writer, and Lawrence, the novelist.

I brought with me a copy of Lawrence’s memoir of life on the island, Prospero’s Cell. Published in 1945, it’s full of lush writing about the landscape: “The olives are tacking madly from grey to silver”; the “cypresses are like drawn bows.” But he can be nasty about the “natives.” He describes the hands and feet of peasants as “blunt and hideous: mere spades grown upon the members through a long battle with soil, ropes, and wood.” After reading that, I feel a little less good about the fact that my hotel room is called the Durrell suite. There’s a bust of Lawrence outside the Old Fortress. Andreas says people think that he was a spy too.

Alice and I have gone back to the fortress to visit the library housed in the British garrison, where the manager lets us touch a 16th-century edition of The Iliad. As we’re leaving, some teenagers on a field trip mark us out as English (Alice is English but, for the record, I’m American—and this is the one and only time I have ever imagined that this fact could be a defense against anything). They mock us, mercilessly. To be fair, all they do is say “Hello,” but they draw out the greeting in a way that makes clear what a totally preposterous word hello is. “Hellooo,” they keep saying, waving and laughing at us.

photo of dimly lit room with vaulted stone ceiling and shelves of books, with light coming through a window in background The public library in Corfu is located inside the Old Fortress. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

We hustle away with our heads down and continue on to the two main sites of British memory in Corfu: the British Cemetery and the estate of Mon Repos.

The cemetery is a disheveled green dreamscape. Just inside is an ancient stone lawn roller, more sculpture now than tool. For a little while, I pulled it, creaking, through the long grasses. Farther in, we find the graves. There are the ancient ones of midshipmen and babies, the graves of British soldiers from both world wars, and then, from more recent years, plaques for the expats: Barbara Anne Reason (BORN IN OXFORD, ENGLAND—FOREVER IN CORFU), Gladys Fish (RESTING IN CORFU: A PLACE SO LOVED), and Adda Dendrinou:

BORN KARACHI 1941 DIED CORFU 1995 TRUE CORFIOTE SHE LOVED ENGLAND

The Mon Repos estate was built in 1828 for the British lord high commissioner, and a century later, Prince Philip was born on a tabletop inside. I would like to see the table, but the shutters of the mansion are sealed tight. (Anyway, it turns out the table is long gone—sold to a shipping company for the boardroom of its London office.) You can find Roman retaining walls on the grounds here, and debris from a temple to Hera. In the back of the derelict garden is a row of metal arches driven into the ground like a giant’s croquet hoops. They were covered in wisteria once, but the shade must have shifted as the trees grew taller. The plant didn’t die though; it just reared up and threw itself toward the sun, kudzuing over the nearby treetops. I lie there, breathing in the sweet, woozy smell of wild wisteria.

At the bottom of the estate, Alice and I step off a jetty and swim out into the cold, blue sea. By this point, I totally get Gladys Fish: I’m ready to live and die here too.

photo of sunlit field surrounded by trees, with enormous blooming wisteria vines on the right side and woman reclining in the grass, looking at them Wisteria drapes over trees in the now-derelict garden of the Mon Repos estate. (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

I’m not supposed to be swimming and smelling flowers; I’m supposed to be doing John le Carré things: walking on cliff tops muttering to myself, checking dead-letter drops, sweet-talking my agents in the field. I keep looking for men in dark raincoats, but it doesn’t rain and my sole candidate for either surveillance or countersurveillance remains my lady with the handbag.

Le Carré was only ever a minor spy, and he quit the service the minute he could afford to. After the publication of The Spy Who Came In From the Cold, in 1963, his family lived abroad to lower their tax bill. Some of that time was spent in Greece, on Crete. Le Carré was miserable there. He wrote long letters to the wife of a colleague and flew back and forth to Paris, London, and New York, where he was suddenly famous. When he was on Crete, his wife, Ann, nagged him about visiting the island’s historic sites. “I hate ruins,” he wrote to a friend. He took so many walks and made so many long-distance phone calls that, Sisman writes, “a local official accused him of spying for the Turks and asked for a bribe as the price of his silence.”

[Read: The double life of John le Carré]

At one point, a Czech writer, or someone posing as a Czech writer, came to Crete and kept asking him to meet. Le Carré was nervous enough to contact the head of the Athens station to report that Czech intelligence was trying to recruit him. In an interview with Sisman, I asked if he really believed this. His biography isn’t a study of just a fascinating man, but a fascinating liar, one who—very much like his father—spun fictions that he then struggled to distinguish from the truth. But a Czech approach, Sisman told me, seemed plausible.

Le Carré said that he was drawn to spying because he wanted to serve his country—and to do penance for Ronnie’s crimes. But he also found that secrecy could be a “place of escape,” a way of feeling “superior to life rather than engaging in it.” He “relished the notion of appearing to be someone dull, while all the time I was someone terribly exciting.”

After spying, he found other ways to escape. One was writing; another was travel. When he went abroad to research a new novel, he would go in character, pretending to be whomever he was writing about. Maybe he got the idea from a training exercise for MI6, which involved posing as a German tourist in Brighton; he kept the accent up even while being interrogated by local police.

Picture of a building undergoing maintenance work on Kapodistriou Street at the edge of Corfu Old Town A building undergoing renovations in Old Town (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

I had the idea that, while writing this story, I would go around pretending to be other people. I’m hopeless at accents, but I could come up with backstories: Maybe I was heading to a destination bachelorette party, or was on a soul-searching journey before pursuing IVF. My name might be Olivia, or Stef, or Gladys Fish. But getting strangers to ask me personal questions is harder than I expected, especially because I mostly want to talk with Alice, and after two days together, I’ve already told her everything that has ever happened to me. Magnus never has that problem. “Why don’t you just tell me the truth?” Mary demands. “The suggestion amused him.”

It was not until I read Sisman’s second book on the author, The Secret Life of John le Carré, which he published only after le Carré’s death, that I grasped how much of le Carré’s writing substitutes one place for another, one woman for another. In 1983, le Carré went back to Greece, this time to Lesbos. By then he’d divorced Ann and married his second wife, Jane, but he wasn’t traveling with her. He had a new mistress—Sue Dawson, half his age. In the mornings, Sisman writes, she would “lean out of bed to peer through the gaps between the old floorboards to see him working in the room below.” The book he was writing at the time was, of course, A Perfect Spy, in which Magnus’s wife, Mary, does the same thing, looking through the “gaps between the planks” to see Magnus showering in the room downstairs.

Le Carré told Dawson that she was his muse. He’d met her through her job: producing abridged books for cassette tapes. Mary’s job is to rebind old books for MI6 with secret messages hidden inside. The one book Magnus never lets her repair is his battered old copy of Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, which purports to be the autobiography of an adventurer during the Thirty Years’ War and is considered Germany’s first literary masterpiece. Magnus won’t let Mary touch Simplicissimus because it’s the secret codebook he uses to communicate with Axel. When le Carré got home from Lesbos, his wife typed up the pages he’d written.

“Without much effort,” Sisman writes, “I was able to identify eleven women with whom he had affairs,” and “there were plenty more besides.” Sisman suggests that cheating became a replacement for espionage for le Carré, an “ersatz form of spying”—another way to live a double life.

photo of light sparking on clear water with stony shallow bottom that deepens into darkness, with fish Fish in the sea off Mon Repos (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

It’s 10 days until Good Friday, and according to Lawrence Durrell, there’s a myth here about the 10 days leading to Good Friday: Goat-legged creatures are sawing through the trunk of the tree that holds up the world. Every year, they’ve almost cut through it when they hear the shout of “Christ has arisen!” and it makes them drop their saws to fly “in a chattering throng into the real world—if I may call our world that.”

Le Carré took inland walks, so Alice and I go inland too. In a little town called Nymfes, we see a waterfall: a glittering curtain down black rock, splitting into quick rivers that seem to uncannily slow down the longer you stare at them. It’s not hard to imagine nymphs living in that sparkling grove; it’s hard to imagine them not living there. I’ve never wanted to drink something so badly.

Next we head to the mountain village where we’re staying the night. We Google the directions and start driving, and then say “This can’t be right” 7,000 times. At first the road is a rustic track through olive groves. If we’re going the wrong way, we don’t mind too much; any moment now, it’s sure to loop us back onto a road. Nope. Instead we climb higher and higher, to scenic overlook after scenic overlook, each one of which is, to me, a rocky hellscape.

We drive over boulders, the car juddering from side to side, the wheels spinning in loose stones. I really hope those ominous scraping sounds are just branches gouging the rental car’s paint job and not jagged rocks tearing up the undercarriage. There are puddles too, deep-brown puddles of unknown fathoms in which the wheels will slip and the engine flood. I try to keep to the shallow edge while not, ideally, driving us straight off the cliff. Each turn is so tight that it appears to be a dead end. I crawl to a halt, crane my neck, sigh, and keep driving around a switchback so extreme, I feel like I’m driving back onto myself.

Should we have turned around? A thousand times, yes. It’s clear that no one in the history of the world has ever driven up this path. The only explanation is that we angered the nymphs and they’re leading us to our deaths and we are just completely going along with it. Alice keeps getting me to stop so that she can take photographs of how glorious everything is, while I keep checking the tires for puncture wounds. At one point, I try to Google Are nymphs dangerous, but something on the risks of dating a nymphomaniac comes up, and then my phone loses service again.

“How many kilometers left?” I ask Alice many, many times.

“Five point six,” she says. Countless white-knuckle hours later: “5.4.”

At last, we arrive in the village of Old Perithia. If only Magnus had come this way, I keep thinking, Axel never would have found him.

Corfu’s wealth used to be concentrated inland, because of the oaks and olive groves, and because it was safer from pirates there. According to the information sheet I find in my room that night, if you owned land near the water, you’d give it to your daughter, not your son. Old Perithia is a beautiful ghost town. It dates to 1357, and at times, as many as 1,200 people would have lived here. Now there are just a few tavernas, this bed and breakfast, meadows of blossoming wildflowers, and the ruins. The town was abandoned because of the tourists, who sucked all of the wealth and workers from the interior toward the coasts. But now so many tourists gather on the coasts that some tourists, wanting to get away from all the other tourists, come out here. They’re drawn by the promise that they’ll find something truer and more authentic here. To paraphrase Durrell: the real Corfu, if I may call it that.

Checking in, we ask the owner about the path we drove in on. “Were we … supposed to do that?”

She looks at us blankly. “You came from where?”

“Back there, through the farm, up the mountain.”

We explain about the waterfall. She knows about the waterfall. She doesn’t know about any path.

She points to the parking lot. On the other side of it lies the ordinary, non-enchanted asphalt road.

sunset photo looking out over crowded buildings with hills on the horizon A view of Corfu’s Old Town at dusk (Alice Zoo for The Atlantic)

Early in his career, John le Carré tried to write a literary novel that had nothing to do with spying: The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It was awful. He wanted to be seen as a major writer, and resented the suggestion that he should stick to what he was good at. He resented, too, the assumption that once the Cold War ended, he’d have nothing left to write about. In the introduction to the 1993 edition of The Little Drummer Girl, he complained about people who believed his “rice-bowl was broken.” How could they not appreciate the fact that, “of my fourteen novels to date, five have had nothing whatever to do with the Cold War”?

The level of defensiveness is a little pathetic, a little endearing. As one critic put it, he had “already beaten the genre trap”—not by leaving genre behind, “but by finding unexpected room within, as in A Perfect Spy.” When Magnus goes to Greece, he isn’t just trying to get away from the Czechs and the English while enjoying a nice vacation with his family; he’s also trying to write a literary novel, one that will contain and transcend his past and reconcile the fragments of his many selves. Magnus fails to write that great work, the lines deteriorating into “ponderous aphorisms about betrayal”: “betrayal as love,” “betrayal as escape,” “betrayal as travel.” But le Carré succeeded. No one reading A Perfect Spy for the first time today is going to wonder if it’s a literary novel. What else could it possibly be?

The thing I love most about the book is how it uses time to turn self-pity into something purer. A writer, Magnus thinks, is like a king, looking “down with love upon his subject, even when the subject is himself.” Later he repeats the idea: If only he could write, he’d be able to “look with favour on this child that was myself.” Maybe we should all be talking about our childhoods in the third person.

Le Carré’s mother walked out when he and his older brother were sleeping upstairs. They were 5 and 7. “One just couldn’t live like it,” she later said, as if that were an excuse. When he met her again as an adult, she informed him that Ronnie had infected her with syphilis when she was pregnant, and that he had been born with pus dripping out of his eyes. Ronnie abused him—hurt him in every way you could hurt a child—but Ronnie was the only parent he had.

I’m sitting in Spianada Square when I see the old woman again. I’ve been watching children play soccer, and thinking about how always, everywhere in the world, the littlest boy is grabbing the ball with his hands to steady it before he kicks. She’s wearing the same pink coat and clutching her bag, heading in the direction of the Old Fortress.

“Nothing goes away in life,” Magnus says in Athens, between one island and another. He’s been gone all night and most of the day, and Mary demands to know why. He’s crying; he kisses her hand and she feels the tears. He makes up a story about having to talk down an old Czech agent who was threatening to expose him. It’s a lie. It’s one version of the truth.

Travel Notes

Swimming off Mon Repos

Maybe you’ve been to paradise before and can yawn at crystal-clear waters, but I’ve swum only off America’s East Coast, where the ocean is mostly the color of strong tea, which is a nice way of saying the color of dirt. Normally I’d be appalled if my leg touched slimy fish, but when you can see them, it’s totally different. I like the delicate fish, quick and bright as sunbeams. Floating in the water, you feel outside of time, as if this could be any century. Hera’s worshippers might be carting their stones over the hilltop, or British soldiers could be galloping by—a “flash of red hunting coats through the olive-groves,” as Lawrence Durrell describes their trace on the landscape. But I can’t stay in the water long. My arms are ice, and my chest is hot. “It’s your heart,” Alice says. A more organized traveler would have brought a towel, but lying dripping on the sun-warmed rock is better.

Analipsi 7, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Lunch at Pergola

This restaurant is in Corfu’s Jewish quarter. The area was heavily bombed by the Nazis, and you can still see the gaps where buildings were destroyed. It makes you think about how full of history an empty space can be. Some ruins still stand, flowers growing through the blasted window frames. At the restaurant, we sit outside and order bread and salad and giant beans (that’s what they’re called: giant beans). A patchwork array of stray cats sit on their haunches, watching every bite we eat.

Ag. Sofias 15, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Kissing Saint Spyridon’s casket

The casket is small, though it holds another, smaller casket inside it. The inner one has a removable bottom for slipper access, because each morning, worshippers come to kiss the saint’s feet. About once a year, the slippers are replaced with new ones. The idea is that he wears them out by walking around at night performing miracles—or maybe it’s all the kissing. When I’m there, we can’t get at the saint’s feet, so the women around me press their lips to the casket instead. There’s a faint odor, and when it’s my turn to bend down, I realize, to my shame, that instead of kissing the casket, I’m sniffing it. But the smell isn’t coming from the saint. It’s coming from us: the crowding people, the smell not of death but of life. Outside the crypt, a priest is blessing a baby in a blue onesie. While the pious wait in line for the saint, another baby waits in line for the priest.

Agiou Spiridonos 32, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

Treats

If you go to Corfu, I recommend eating lots of things—salty and sweet things, but especially sweet things—enfolded in pastry. Here’s a fun word: galaktoboureko. It’s custard under phyllo dough, with sweet syrup poured on top, and we have the best version at Periklis Alexis. The back of the bakery is decorated, inexplicably, with framed photos of fighter jets from sometime in the past century, deadly silver in blue skies. I have a feeling that le Carré would have appreciated that—some menace to cut the sweetness.

Agiou Vasileiou 12, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

The Merchant’s House in Old Perithia

Here you can sleep in a cozy suite knowing that you’re snuggled in a valley of spring wildflowers and ghosts. A printout in my room says that after Old Perithia was deserted, “nature decided to reclaim the land, and in doing so she enveloped the village.” I like this part: The creeping roots of orchids, asparagus, oregano, and wild mint “either protected many old buildings and churches, or sped up their ruination.” The village is abandoned except for the inn and a handful of taverns for day-trippers. We’re there on the very first day of the season, so I think we get special treatment, but the food is delicious and the owner gives us big slices of walnut cake for free. We linger until he has to ask us to leave, because his wife is late for physical therapy, and the appointment is probably a long way from Old Perithia.

Old Perithia, Kerkyra 49081, Greece

Kanoni Beach

In Prospero’s Cell, Lawrence Durrell writes about “perhaps the loveliest beach in the world. Its name is Myrtiotissa.” Of course we go there. Nudist Only is spelled out in white pebbles at the top of the path. At the bottom is a tangled heap of discarded beach umbrellas, the metal rusting, the sunshades in tatters. Accustomed by then to the baseline beauty available anywhere you look, we decide the view is just okay. “I’ve seen better beaches in England,” Alice says. But after a few days of searching, we find what is actually the loveliest beach in the world, or at least the loveliest beach on one April day in Corfu. It’s in the northeast, below a green spit of land lifted high over the sea. In fact, there’s a perfect beach on every side of the outcrop, but my favorite is this one, Kanoni. It was too cold to swim, or I’d still be there, diving off the rocks. Someday I want to go back and swim around the outcrop, stopping off at each side. Maybe I loved it so much because even while I was there, I was dreaming of returning.

Kassiopi 491 00, Greece

Plous Books & Coffee

Corfu has plenty of tourist traps, long lanes lined with generic shops selling honey, body lotion made from donkey milk and olive oil, evil-deflecting blue-glass eyes, and—for some reason—tote bags with Frida Kahlo’s face on them, as if they ordered all of their products from the same conglomerate’s catalog. But this bookstore is quirky and sweet, with shabby damask chairs in a dimly lit back room where you can sit and drink coffee and read. I get a copy of The Dead, by James Joyce, in Greek. Notably: I can’t find any books by John le Carré.

Nikiforou Theotoki 91, Kerkyra 491 00, Greece

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Chasing le Carré in Corfu.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.


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The English novelist E. M. Forster believed that people know the characters in the novels they read better than they know one another. In fiction, he argued, a character’s true nature and deepest secrets are plainly available, whereas “mutual secrecy” is “one of the conditions of life upon this globe.” This idea is strikingly isolating. Can it possibly be true?

By the end of Stephanie Wambugu’s debut novel, Lonely Crowds, I could see where Forster was coming from. Following the decades-long convolutions of an intense and volatile friendship between two women, Ruth and Maria, Lonely Crowds poses similar questions about the limits of personal relationships. As the girls grow older and their unhealthy childhood patterns repeat in adulthood, their friendship begins to seem more dangerous than idyllic. Perhaps the most prevailing myth about childhood friends is that they know each other completely and love each other best. Wambugu counters such sentimentalism by revealing the many secrets and misunderstandings at the core of Ruth and Maria’s friendship. In their world, a lifelong bond is not a comfort but a liability.

Lonely Crowds begins in the contemporary present with Ruth, as an adult, seeming very lost at her own birthday party. As the novel’s title suggests, a crowd full of people can be a remarkably lonely place. “That Maria wasn’t here at the party was a source of great distress,” Ruth thinks, blowing out the candles. Ruth recalls that when she met Maria years ago, “I learned that without an obsession life was impossible to live. I’d forgotten. Now, I remembered.” Despite her success as an art professor and painter, Ruth feels adrift and bitter. She thinks she sees Maria everywhere. As she falls asleep the night after her party, she recollects her history with Maria, starting from the beginning.

Ruth’s obsession with Maria sparks from their first encounter, in a uniform shop for the Catholic school where they will soon be classmates. The scene is a small spectacle of shame: Ruth watches while Maria’s aunt tries to buy a uniform for Maria on layaway, promising to pay when her disability check comes through. The owner refuses and castigates Maria’s aunt in front of a long line of customers, throwing the two of them out of the store. As they leave, Ruth makes eye contact, and Maria “looked back at me as she crossed the threshold, wide black eyes, perfect. Then she was gone. I felt doomed.” Ruth decides she will befriend the girl at her new school and spends the rest of the summer besotted with the idea.

[Read: The Ghosts of Wannsee]

Maria and Ruth meet again on the first day of third grade at Our Lady in Providence, Rhode Island, where the two are the only Black girls in their class. They’re the same age, but to Ruth, Maria seems much older and wiser. During their first real conversation at school, Maria brags about her pearl earrings, a gift from a teacher, offering to let Ruth borrow them if she’s careful. “Oh, I’m not careful,” Ruth responds. “I’m careless.” Her utterly honest response demonstrates Wambugu’s knack for capturing the humor of childish intransigence on the page. But the scene also looms large for young Ruth: Maria’s earrings represent the mysterious world of adults, one that Ruth is hungry to learn more about. That the gift is inappropriate simply does not register for her.

Ruth is an only child, sheltered by her parents, who are Kenyan immigrants to a working-class neighborhood in Pawtucket, outside of Providence. Her mother values hard work and minding one’s own business, while her father is “lonely, mercurial, romantic,” often changing jobs and exacerbating marital tensions. Ruth’s upbringing is strict but stable. Maria lives with her aunt, who is severely bipolar, after her mother’s death by suicide.

The girls’ first playdate sets the stage for the uneven dynamic they’ll share for the rest of their friendship. After inviting Maria home from school with her, Ruth reminds herself to “come across as measured, impassive, and confident.” By the end of supper, Maria’s politeness and intelligence have charmed Ruth’s parents. But the success of the evening is punctured when Maria, as she is leaving, turns around to ask Ruth, “What’s your name again?”

Although Ruth never tells the reader how she feels about the question, nor how she responds, the moment feels pivotal, capturing how Ruth’s earnestness and longing are so often met with coolness, even rejection. But she soon wins Maria over, and eventually Maria comes to be a part of Ruth’s family. Like her biblical namesake, Ruth is loyal and steadfast to her friend, while Maria is independent and creative, often controlling the narrative of their relationship and even determining their future trajectories: Maria is an extrovert, so Ruth must be an introvert. Maria is the type to never settle down, while Ruth is going to get married. Ruth always looks to Maria for advice and approval, and Maria’s responses to her vary among love, tolerance, and disgust. Reading scene after scene in which Ruth is so passive can be frustrating. She is content to be molded by Maria, unaware of the danger: She is becoming a person who knows herself only in relation to her friend.

When Maria decides she wants to be an artist in New York, the girls both apply to and get into Bard College, where Ruth takes up painting and Maria studies film. Maria sees this moment as her great escape from bleak Pawtucket, while Ruth worries that she, too, is part of the past that her friend wants to leave behind. Maria is clear about one thing. “When we go to school, we have to go our own way,” she tells Ruth. “We don’t have to be together all the time. We still can be close and be … separate.”

In college, Ruth and Maria do pursue different paths and new relationships. The biggest test of their friendship comes when they move to New York City after graduation and both try to make it in the art world of the 1990s. Their childhood competitiveness grows into an adult professional envy: Where Maria meets easy success as a filmmaker, Ruth’s path is more complicated, riddled with self-doubt and jealousy. Like a piece of cherished childhood clothing, their friendship appears more and more ill-fitting as time passes. The two grow apart, not because they change, but because they do not; they are stuck in the same dynamics, unable to find new ways to connect to each other.

[Read: A film that captures a ‘friend breakup’]

As the novel progresses, Ruth often stops existing on the page, overtaken by her endless loops of fixation on the thoughts and feelings of others. In part because the reader has no insight into  Maria’s perspective, Ruth’s narrative voice makes it hard to discern what either woman gets from their friendship, or even the extent to which they know each other at all. I don’t believe that Maria enjoys Ruth’s overbearing attention, or that Ruth likes being consistently rejected by Maria. After a final confrontation, the women appear to accept their incompatibility, and their friendship becomes something more distant. But even when Ruth gets a prestigious fellowship at Bard and moves upstate with her new husband, her obsession with Maria never really disappears; it just morphs.

If Ruth never stands up to Maria, it’s because nothing is worth the risk of losing her. When they’re teenagers, Maria asks Ruth to throw away the many portraits that Ruth painted of her; Ruth complies. “I had a hard time forgiving her for that,” Ruth reflects, though she never tells that to Maria. Decades later, in New York, Maria uses footage of Ruth in a video without asking her permission. Watching herself on-screen, Ruth is unable to “shake the feeling that there was a violent thrust to the video and that something had been done to me that I hadn’t asked for.” Yet when Maria asks her what she thinks, Ruth demurs, telling Maria the piece is “cool.” “I would have been content spending the rest of my life walking behind her,” she thinks, as the two women cross the gallery back to their partners. It’s an insight that makes the risk of their friendship clear: For Ruth, losing her friend would mean losing herself, too.


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In the upper ranks of the Border Patrol, 20 officials have the title of sector chief. Gregory Bovino is the only one holding a gun in his social-media profile photo. Most of the others conform to a pretty standard formula: wearing a crisp green uniform in front of Old Glory and the black-and-green Border Patrol flag.

Bovino’s photo is more like a movie poster, or an AI-generated image of a comic-book character. He stands wearing a bulletproof vest against a black background, holding a tricked-out M4 rifle with a scope in his hands. He isn’t holding the weapon so much as cradling it affectionately, like a cellist getting ready to play. Bovino’s jaw is stiff, and his gaze is distant. Several Customs and Border Protection veterans with whom I spoke—who value the quiet strength of professional modesty—think the photo is ridiculous.

And yet, the performative qualities that have made Bovino a sometimes-mocked figure within CBP are the same ones that have landed him a starring role in the promotion of President Donald Trump’s deportation campaign. Bovino, whose formal title is chief patrol agent of the El Centro sector, has been put in charge of the administration’s immigration crackdown on the streets of Los Angeles, more than 200 miles from his office, which sits near the border. While much of the local anger has been directed at ICE, it’s actually Bovino who’s been calling the shots. The guys in camouflage, masks, and military gear running around Southern California car washes and Home Depot parking lots aren’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, but Border Patrol tactical teams trained to hunt drug smugglers in remote mountains and deserts.

When horse-mounted Border Patrol agents rode through MacArthur Park in downtown Los Angeles with camera crews in tow on July 7, Mayor Karen Bass came rushing to the scene and pleaded with Bovino to call them off. No arrests were made, but the sight of heavily armed federal agents advancing in formation through palm trees and soccer fields was jarring to a city on edge after weeks of raids and protests. Marqueece Harris-Dawson, the Los Angeles City Council president, told reporters that if Bovino wanted to make Border Patrol promotional videos, he should “apply for a film permit like everybody else” and “stop trying to scare the bejesus out of everybody.”

“Better get used to us now, because this is going to be normal very soon,” Bovino fired back on Fox. On Friday, he released a video—set to the song “DNA” by the rapper Kendrick Lamar, who is from L.A.—showing National Guard troops and mounted agents parading through the park with an armory of weapons and black masks covering their faces. “People ask for it, we make it happen,” Bovino posted to his government account on X, sounding more like a hype man than a lawman.

[Joshua Braver: When the military comes to American soil]

At a time when Trump-administration officials have done little to conceal their frustration with ICE leaders, demoting several over the past few months for missing the White House’s ambitious arrest quotas, Bovino’s assignment in California has been viewed by some at ICE as a slight against the agency. Current and former CBP officials told me it was more an indication that the White House wants field generals who will press the president’s deportation goals as aggressively as possible.

During the Biden administration, Border Patrol agents were often overwhelmed and exhausted as record numbers of migrants crossed into the United States. Unlawful entries fell sharply during Joe Biden’s last year in office, but they have plunged in recent months to levels not seen since the 1960s as a result of Trump’s all-out push to seal the border. That has left the Border Patrol’s roughly 19,000 agents with far less work and a lot more time. ICE, under relentless White House pressure to ramp up arrests and deportations, is now the agency that needs help.

Bovino, a 29-year veteran of the Border Patrol, seemed to anticipate the opportunity well before Trump took office. Two weeks before Inauguration Day, he sent dozens of El Centro Border Patrol agents five hours north to Kern County, California, near Bakersfield. Over the course of several days, agents in plainclothes made arrests at gas stations and stopped vehicles along the highway. The surprise tactics sent a wave of fear through the farms of California’s Central Valley, and though Bovino said his agents had targeted criminals, only one of the 78 people they arrested had a criminal conviction, according to records obtained by the nonprofit news organization CalMatters. The ACLU and other advocacy groups sued the government in February and won an injunction barring the Border Patrol from racially profiling suspects, and a federal district court found that Bovino’s teams likely violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. (Earlier this month, another federal judge ordered the government to stop racially profiling suspects in Los Angeles.)

Bovino had launched the Kern County expedition, which he called “Operation Return to Sender,” without getting clearance from superiors in Washington, according to CBP officials I spoke with who weren’t authorized to speak to reporters. The raids far from the border were not the kind of operation Biden officials would have endorsed. But those officials were already on their way out, and the Trump team coming in was thrilled with Bovino’s audition.

The Department of Homeland Security did not approve my request to interview Bovino. I sent a list of more than a dozen questions to DHS and CBP, asking about his record in the Border Patrol and why he’s been elevated to his current role. “Because he’s a badass” was all that the DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin wrote back.

What Bovino is doing in Los Angeles is a pilot of sorts. It showcases the potential for a broader Border Patrol role in U.S. cities and communities, especially those that have adopted “sanctuary” policies restricting local police cooperation with ICE. By law, the Border Patrol’s ability to conduct warrantless searches is limited to within 100 miles of the nation’s international boundaries. But that includes maritime borders, and roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population, including the country’s largest metropolitan areas, fits within those boundaries.

ICE has only about 5,500 immigration-enforcement officers nationwide, and though the president’s tax-and-immigration bill includes funds to hire thousands more, recruiting, hiring, and training them will likely take at least a year. The Border Patrol has idle agents who are ready to go now.

Federal agents with US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) ride on an armored vehicle driving slowly down Wilshire Boulevard near MacArthur Park. Patrick T. Fallon / AFP / Getty

Border Patrol agents generally have less experience than their ICE counterparts with the procedural elements of civil immigration enforcement in urban environments. Video clips went viral last month showing a masked Border Patrol team pummeling Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, as the agents arrested him outside an IHOP in Santa Ana. Viewers were shocked, but the tactics used were not out of line with the way agents often handle migrants who try to run or resist arrest near the border. (The Department of Homeland Security justified the use of force and claimed that Barranco had tried to “mow” them with his trimming tool.) The difference this time was that the arrest occurred on the streets of a U.S. city, not out in the desert with no one watching.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

During the past five and a half years in El Centro, which covers southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, Bovino has repeatedly insisted that he oversees the “premier sector” of the Border Patrol. It’s a facetious claim. El Centro is not considered a top-tier CBP assignment like El Paso or San Diego, where there’s a lot more smuggling activity.

“It's the type of sector where someone would usually be chief for a couple years and then move on to a larger sector,” one former DHS official told me. Bovino’s long tenure in El Centro without a promotion points to a lack of confidence from senior CBP leaders, the official and three former CBP officials said. DHS declined to respond.

Border Patrol chiefs have always enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from Washington regarding day-to-day operations, but they aren’t supposed to make partisan statements in uniform or criticize elected officials in the states where they work. During Biden’s term, Bovino was the chief who created the most consternation among CBP officials at headquarters because of his outspoken conservative views and social-media enthusiasm, current and former DHS and CBP officials told me.

“He has done things that Border Patrol leadership has had to spend time cleaning up, such as posting information that was law-enforcement-sensitive on social media, which can hamper broader law-enforcement operations,” said the former DHS official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal disciplinary actions.

But the contentious relationship Bovino had with his superiors during those years has only bolstered his standing among Trump-aligned border hawks. As El Centro chief, Bovino became the lead auteur of a new style of highly produced videos for CBP.

During the first Trump administration, the Border Patrol launched its own public-relations operation—the Strategic Communications division, or StratComm—to give rank-and-file agents a bigger role in touting their work, improving the agency’s reputation and boosting recruitment. Many of the videos emphasized Border Patrol humanitarian efforts and rescues of distressed migrants in remote areas, or the benevolent serve-and-protect image of agents and officials attending parades and community events.

Bovino has taken StratComm messaging in a different direction. In September 2020, soon after he took command in El Centro, his social-media team released “The Gotaway,” a fictionalized video showing a migrant sneaking into the United States and murdering the first person he encounters. The video caused an uproar, and the Border Patrol temporarily took it down, as lawmakers demanded to know why agents were spending time making movies. (One former CBP official told me El Centro benefited from the talents of two agents who had taken filmmaking courses before signing up for the Border Patrol).

Bovino has had legal problems as well. In 2022, a federal judge in Louisiana rejected DHS’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit filed by two Black Border Patrol employees who claimed discrimination when Bovino became sector chief in New Orleans. The two were finalists for the second-ranking position in New Orleans in April 2018 when Bovino abruptly canceled the job listing and used a transfer process to hire his close friend, a white Border Patrol official. The court found an email from the friend that compared Bovino to a Confederate general and the New Orleans office to a unit of Black Union soldiers. “Oh jeez. DELETE!!!!” Bovino replied.

The exchange raised “concerns of racial animus” in the hiring process, the judge wrote. DHS settled the case.

In 2023, Bovino landed at the center of a partisan fight in Congress when Biden officials blocked him from testifying during a Republican-led investigation of the administration’s border policies. Top Republicans sent a letter to CBP claiming Bovino had been silenced and retaliated against when he was temporarily reassigned to a desk job in Washington. Rodney Scott, the current commissioner of CBP and the former Border Patrol chief, was one of Bovino’s most ardent defenders.

Bovino returned to El Centro, his social-media enthusiasm undiminished. He published holiday-themed videos, including hokey parodies of Home Alone and A Christmas Story. The old serve-and-protect messaging was out in favor of guns, ATVs, and tactical teams kicking ass to heavy metal and thumping bass tracks.

More recently, the messaging has turned messianic. A CPB video circulated this month by the Department of Homeland Security embodies a new synthesis of high-paced action with Christian-nationalist themes. The video, “Bible Verse,” opens with a monologue by the actor Shia LaBeouf, lifted from the World War II movie Fury, in which a soldier prepares his comrades to fight the Nazis with a stirring passage from the Book of Isaiah about answering the call of God. The song “God’s Gonna Cut You Down” plays to stylized, washed-out footage of Border Patrol tactical agents zooming around in helicopters and speedboats.

The video has nearly 3 million views on X, and as a work of pure propaganda, it’s the most engrossing CBP video I’ve ever seen. But former DHS and CBP officials I shared it with recoiled at the underlying message that Border Patrol agents are delivering holy vengeance.

The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, which performed the song in the video, sent a cease-and-desist warning to the Department of Homeland Security. “It’s obvious that you don’t respect Copyright Law and Artist Rights any more than you respect Habeas Corpus and Due Process rights, not to mention the separation of Church and State per the US Constitution,” the band wrote, adding: “Oh, and go f… yourselves.”

I have gotten to know at least a dozen Border Patrol sector chiefs during the decade I’ve spent reporting on immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border. The chiefs are police commanders, but they are also politicians. They tend to value the same skills required of any good leader: smooth public speaking, personal decorum, equanimity under pressure. They are not especially impressed by guns or social-media posting, and they dislike anything that elevates individual flash over institutional traditions.

Much of the job of the Border Patrol is mundane and uneventful; it consists of sitting alone in a truck and watching “the line” for hours on end in case anyone or anything potentially threatening comes across. There are periodic moments of action, especially when smuggling activity increases, but fewer now that the border is so locked down.

[Adam Serwer: The deportation show]

Blas Nuñez-Neto, a top border-policy official during the Biden administration, told me that Democrats have at times been too reluctant to let the Border Patrol trumpet its work stopping actual threats and capturing dangerous criminals. The stressful, tedious work agents perform while processing record numbers of asylum seekers is not meant to be their primary job, Nuñez-Neto said.

"The Border Patrol's job should focus on detecting and preventing the entry of people who may present a threat to our security, not serving as the entry point for the asylum system,” he said. “We should have an organized, safe, and orderly process for people who want to claim asylum that doesn’t involve distracting the people who work between ports of entry from doing their core mission.”

The Trump administration’s social-media messaging has become extreme and dehumanizing, Nuñez-Neto said, but he understands Bovino’s push to make the job look exciting and heroic.

The former DHS official I spoke with told me he is concerned that Bovino’s hard-charging approach will ultimately hurt recruitment, even if it’s popular among the most gung-ho agents.

“They’re going to end up with a growing recruitment challenge, because the people that they will be attracting are not actually the people that they will need to do the unglamorous work,” the former official told me. “And most law-enforcement work is unglamorous work.”

Bovino, now with a bigger stage, has continued making the work look as glamorous as possible as he and his team move from Los Angeles to other parts of California. He released another video Thursday, this one set to Kanye West’s “Power” and showing his agents rolling into Sacramento and chasing people through a Home Depot parking lot. “There is no such thing as a sanctuary state,” Bovino says to the camera, his thumbs tucked in his belt in the style of an Old West sheriff. Tear-gas canisters dangle from his vest like hand grenades. “This is how and why we secure the homeland,” Bovino says. “For Ma and Pa America: We’ve got your backs.”


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Last month, President Donald Trump’s administration scrapped a long-standing Texas law that provided access to financial aid for “Dreamers”—undocumented immigrants, brought into this country as children, who grew up here, graduated from local high schools, and are committed to becoming permanent residents. The administration’s allies tried and failed to persuade the state legislature, which is controlled by Republicans, to repeal the law, which has had nearly a quarter century of bipartisan support. So the administration made an end run around Texas’s democratic process: The Department of Justice hatched a plan with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to kill the law, filing a joint motion that asked a federal court to declare the Texas Dream Act unconstitutional. A judge approved the motion the very same day. The whole process took just six hours. Whatever one’s views are on Dreamer policy, the fact is that this maneuver went against the will of the people of Texas.

The organization I lead, Democracy Forward, has, along with several other groups, filed a motion to defend the law. Texans deserve to have the constitutionality of their Dream Act judged in court, not killed off via a collaboration between the president and the state attorney general. And even more alarming than the Trump administration’s dismantling of this law is that it’s part of a broader effort to short-circuit democracy at the state level.

State-level democracy is essential to America’s federalist system. During another time in U.S. history when a majority of the Supreme Court was imposing barriers to the public’s ability to self-govern, Justice Louis D. Brandeis famously observed, “It is one of the happy incidents of the federal system that a single courageous state may, if its citizens choose, serve as a laboratory; and try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” Later, Justice William Brennan argued that states have the “power to impose higher standards” under state law “than is required under the Federal Constitution.” Throughout America’s long history, state-level innovations have pushed the country forward: Some states abolished slavery long before the Civil War, granted women the right to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment was adopted, and legalized marriage equality years before the Supreme Court’s Obergefell v. Hodges ruling.

Of course, states have not always been on the side of human freedom and progress. Appeals to “states’ rights” have served as rallying cries for enslavers, segregationists, and others seeking to deny the rights of people and communities since the nation’s founding. “No state,” the Fourteenth Amendment proclaimed after the Civil War, shall “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” When America’s system of government works as it should, the federal government steps in to prevent states from undermining human freedom.

[David Frum: The courts won’t save democracy from Trump]

That’s what America saw in 1957, when President Dwight Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard to implement a Supreme Court ruling to desegregate schools; the governor, an avowed segregationist, had refused to comply. President John F. Kennedy similarly federalized the Alabama National Guard to carry out desegregation orders at the University of Alabama, again over the objection of a pro-segregation governor.

Now the president and his political appointees, not a state’s governor, are ignoring federal-court orders. In April, a federal court found that the government had exhibited “a willful disregard for its Order” that planes carrying migrants who had been denied basic due process be turned around until the court could hear the migrants’ case. (Democracy Forward and the ACLU represent the migrants in that matter.) Two months later, in early June, Trump federalized the California National Guard and deployed active-duty Marines to Los Angeles without the approval of Governor Gavin Newsom, who argued that local law enforcement was fully capable of managing anti-ICE protests. Trump’s move was a federal flex that made a mockery of state sovereignty and democracy, and created more chaos than it solved. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said that what she saw in a local park “looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation.”

To justify its actions in California, the administration invoked Eisenhower’s 1957 move to enforce federal-court orders on civil rights. Yet Trump’s actions aim for the opposite of Eisenhower’s. Instead of using federal power to protect people’s rights, Trump is misusing federal power to undermine them. That is democracy upside down.

Similarly, when Maine insisted that it would defend transgender athletes’ participation on women’s college-sports teams, the president brazenly interfered. Maine was following the law as it argued was set forth in Title IX and the state’s Human Rights Act, but Trump sought to force a new interpretation of the federal law through executive actions, including a February order. That month, Trump pronounced, “We are the federal law,” at which point the administration began a process to cut off funding to Maine’s public-school meal programs as punishment—funds appropriated by Congress to help children in need. “See you in court,” Maine Governor Janet Mills told the president. She did, and Maine won.

The administration has also attempted to usurp the power that the Constitution provides both Congress and the states. Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution mandates that only states and Congress can make or alter the “times, places, and manner” of holding federal elections. Ignoring that, Trump, in an executive order, has sought to impose federal time, place, and manner requirements that create barriers to the ballot box. Much of this executive order has been blocked by two federal courts in response to litigation filed by 19 states, among other parties. One federal judge found that the requirements Trump is seeking to impose would create time-consuming burdens on states and could chill voter participation— “the antithesis of Congress’s purpose in enacting” federal election laws. (The Trump administration is also pressuring Texas Republicans to redraw congressional districts in the middle of the decade, outside the normal cycle, to skew the midterm elections.)

[Adam Serwer: Trump is wearing America down]

The Trump administration has called lawsuits filed against its actions “frivolous” and “vexatious.” But as with so many of Trump’s attacks, this is really a confession. The Texas ploy is just one of many ways the administration is undercutting the checks and balances in the U.S. constitutional system. The administration has eviscerated agencies and programs created by Congress, attacked judges and the legal profession as a whole, and attempted to stifle a free and open press through intimidation tactics. It’s all in keeping with a theme: To empower one man, you need to disempower everyone else, everywhere else—including in states where laws are counter to the president’s political agenda.

What’s happening in Texas, California, Maine, and other states goes beyond normal political disagreements or turf spats. This isn’t the typical tug-of-war of federalism. The Trump administration is undermining foundational democratic principles and turning what are supposed to be “laboratories of democracy” into laboratories of repression—something that should have no place in a nation founded on the promise of human freedom and the pursuit of happiness.


From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they’ll be deported.

On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. “What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,” Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. “Alligator lives matter,” she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”

The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. “This is country changing; it’s country threatening; and it’s country wrecking,” Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.” Trump called immigrants “animals,” accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” These claims helped ensure Trump’s election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed.

I’ve been writing about the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation’s poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump’s immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens.

[Stephanie McCrummen: The message is ‘we can take your children’]

A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled—yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. “Relative to undocumented immigrants,” the study found, U.S.-born citizens “are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.” That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren’t the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, we are targeting eight terrorist organizations, including six Mexican drug cartels that threaten the foreign policy, the public safety, the national security of the United States,” Miller said during his Fox News appearance, stressing the urgent need to build more ICE detention centers. But ICE isn’t part of the criminal-justice system. The apprehension and deportation of immigrants is conducted under civil law by the executive branch of the federal government. The phrase criminal alien, widely used by the Trump administration, is misleading. It conjures images of a dangerous, perhaps homicidal, stranger. Kristi Noem, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, likes to issue grave warnings about the threat posed by “illegal criminal aliens” and “criminal illegal aliens.” That threat is greatly overstated.

A criminal alien is an immigrant who has already been convicted of a crime. Last year, the U.S. Border Patrol arrested about 17,000 criminal aliens. Among the convictions recorded for that group, 29 were for homicide or manslaughter, 221 were for sex offenses—and 10,935 were for unlawful entry or reentry to the U.S. The Trump administration’s harsh, fearmongering rhetoric is contradicted by a simple fact: The overwhelming majority of criminal aliens become criminals by violating immigration laws. And almost three-quarters of the people now being held in ICE detention centers aren’t even criminal aliens.

The federal agencies actually devoted to hunting down terrorists and members of Mexican drug cartels—-the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—all face major cuts in Trump’s 2026 budget. The FBI’s budget will be reduced by $545 million; the ATF’s by $418 million; the DEA’s by $112 million. The Justice Department’s Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Forces program, created to “disrupt and dismantle transnational criminal networks,” will lose its entire $547 million in funding. The program is being completely shut down. Meanwhile, the omnibus bill that Trump signed on July 4 triples the size of ICE’s budget and allocates about $170 billion to immigration enforcement. Roughly $45 billion will be spent during the next four years to build new ICE detention centers, which will hold mainly people who have never been convicted of any crime.

Unauthorized entry to the U.S. wasn’t a criminal offense until 1929, almost a century and a half after the nation’s founding. The Undesirable Aliens Act had two sections outlining the first federal immigration crimes. Section 1325 made it unlawful to enter the U.S. without proper inspection, and Section 1326 made it unlawful to reenter the U.S. after being deported. As Eric S. Fish, a law professor at UC Davis, reveals in a 2022 Iowa Law Review article, “Race, History, and Immigration Crimes,” the Undesirable Aliens Act was designed to keep people from Latin America, especially Mexicans, out of the U.S. Its principal sponsors were advocates of eugenics, a pseudoscience that claims that races have innate characteristics and that the white race is superior to every other.

[From the September 2022 issue: An American catastrophe]

Harry Hamilton Laughlin served as the “expert eugenics agent” for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization when the bill was written. Laughlin had a biology degree from Princeton. He called for laws against interracial marriage. He called for laws requiring the forced sterilization of criminals; people suffering from alcoholism or epilepsy; deaf people; blind people; people deemed mentally or physically impaired; and poor people, including “orphans, n’er-do-wells, the homeless, tramps, and paupers.” The Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was directly inspired by Laughlin’s model law on forced sterilization. He believed that Mexicans were innately criminal and feeble-minded as well as carriers of disease. “If we do not deport the undesirable individual,” Laughlin testified before Congress, “we can not get rid of his blood, no matter how inferior it may be, because we can not deport his offspring born here.”

Coleman Livingston “Coley” Blease, a Democrat from South Carolina, introduced the Undesirable Aliens Act in the Senate. Blease publicly called Black people “apes” and “baboons.” He publicly celebrated the lynching of Black men in “defense of the virtue of the white women of my State.” He sought a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriage. He opposed all immigration to the U.S., especially from Mexico, arguing, “I believe in America for Americans.” The legislation that became the Undesirable Aliens Act made it through the Senate with a voice vote and without any debate. In the House, Representative John Box, a Democrat from Texas, claimed that Mexican immigration would lead to the “mongrelization” and “degradation” of white racial purity, creating the “most insidious and general mixture of white, Indian, and negro blood strains ever produced in America.” The House debate on the bill didn’t focus on “legal versus illegal methods of entry,” Fish writes, “but on the reasons why we should not let Mexicans immigrate at all.” He goes on: “The primary reason given was their race.”

Almost 100 years later, Sections 1325 and 1326 are still in force. Today, more people are prosecuted for violating those two sections than for any other federal crimes. Indeed, the majority of all convictions in federal court stem from that pair of statutes. Unlawful entry is a misdemeanor; unlawful reentry is a felony, often punished with a sentence of about a year in federal prison. Ninety-nine percent of the people convicted for unlawful reentry last year were Latino—-just as the authors of the Undesirable Aliens Act intended. Nevertheless, by some estimates, almost half of the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. violated neither of those statutes. They entered the U.S. legally and then overstayed their visas. They have violated civil immigration law but not federal criminal law.

Immigrant-detention centers are not prisons. They are being built throughout the U.S. not to punish criminals but to hold people facing deportation for violations of civil immigration law. The Department of Homeland Security, which administers these centers, admits that fact. “Detention is non-punitive,” according to ICE. But immigrants in ICE detention centers frequently endure living conditions much worse than people who are incarcerated in American prisons.

ICE puts immigrants into dangerous, overcrowded jails, paying local authorities for their care. It sends immigrants to state prisons. And it holds about 90 percent of detainees in facilities run by private prison companies—-whose stock prices have soared since Trump’s reelection. The name Alligator Alcatraz suggests that the health and well-being of detainees are not top priorities. Each of the Florida facility’s chain-link cages can house 32 men but has only three toilets. Immigrants detained by ICE have been forced to sleep on floors, live in windowless cells, spend a week or more without a shower, and go without medicine for chronic illnesses. ICE can move immigrants to jails or detention centers anywhere in the U.S., regardless of where they were apprehended or where they may have lived for years. During an unannounced visit to the Krome Detention Center in Miami this May, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida found the conditions “incredibly disturbing.” An attorney for one immigrant detained there said that the daily ration of food was a cup of rice and a glass of water. In June, a group of immigrants at Krome went outside and arranged their bodies into an “SOS.”

The tactics used by ICE agents to arrest immigrants and bring them to detention evoke those of a police state—masked, armed officers raiding churches, farms, schools, garment factories, and Home Depots; appearing by surprise to seize graduate students; separating parents from children; conducting sweeps while on horseback. ICE agents can arrest anybody, without a warrant, based on probable cause that a person is undocumented and may flee. All of these practices may be legal, but they don’t inspire faith in the rule of law.

[Read: Trump loves ICE. Its workforce has never been so miserable.]

The administrative hearings that determine whether an immigrant can remain in the U.S. are similarly out of keeping with traditional democratic norms. Immigrants have no legal right to an attorney in these proceedings, and most never gain access to one. The stakes are extraordinarily high now that the Supreme Court has permitted the deportation of immigrants to distant nations they’ve never visited before, such as El Salvador and South Sudan. Immigration courts are run by the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security employs the attorneys who make the government’s case for deportation. Both the DOJ and the DHS are headed by Cabinet members who report to the president. The Trump administration has imposed quotas on ICE agents to increase apprehensions, and may once again impose quotas on immigration judges to speed the completion of cases.

An immigration judge can be removed from a case at the discretion of the federal attorney general. And a thorough knowledge of the intricacies of immigration law no longer seems to be a job requirement. On the first day of his second term, Trump signed an executive order—“Protecting the American People Against Invasion”—that authorizes state and local officials to serve as federal immigration officials. During Trump’s visit to the Everglades detention center, Governor Ron DeSantis announced that 47,000 Florida law-enforcement officers had been deputized to work for ICE. DeSantis has also proposed letting attorneys who serve with the Florida National Guard act as immigration judges.

Outside the Everglades facility on its opening day, Enrique Tarrio spoke with a group of reporters. Tarrio is a former leader of the Proud Boys, a neofascist group. He was convicted of seditious conspiracy after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, sentenced to 22 years in prison, pardoned by the president, and praised by Trump during a recent visit to Mar-a-Lago with his mother. Tarrio is now promoting a new app, ICERAID, that offers a cryptocurrency reward to users who help the government locate and arrest undocumented immigrants. “We didn’t vote for cheaper eggs,” Tarrio said in the Everglades. “We voted for mass deportation, and we voted for retribution.”


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President Donald Trump’s latest assault on the news media came in the form of another lawsuit last week. After The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had allegedly written a birthday note, complete with “bawdy” doodling, to the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein in 2003, Trump boiled over with indignation. He denied writing the note and filed a libel suit the next day, demanding $10 billion in damages from the Journal, its parent company, and its principal owner, Rupert Murdoch, a sometime Trump ally.

Although Trump faces considerable legal obstacles to win in court, betting against him would be unwise. In his first six months in office, he has been on a winning streak in his campaign to punish and diminish the press. His dispute with the Journal, after all, hijacked the news cycle from another Trump “victory”: eliminating federal support for public broadcasting. Early Friday morning, Congress voted to cancel $1.1 billion in subsidies for NPR, PBS, and their affiliated stations, marking the first time Congress has cut off public broadcasters since its funding began nearly 60 years ago. Trump had pushed for the defunding, repeatedly asserting that NPR and PBS offered “biased and partisan news coverage.” Republicans in Congress apparently agreed.

“The independent press in the United States is facing what media outlets in too many other countries with aspiring autocrats have confronted,” the former Washington Post editor Marty Baron told me on Thursday. He compared Trump’s “repressive measures” to those of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán: “The playbook is to demean, demonize, marginalize, and economically debilitate” independent reporting.

Ever since he launched his presidential campaign in 2015, Trump has fulminated against “the fake news.” But only in his second term has Trump gone beyond such rhetoric to wage a multifront war on media freedom with all of the tools at his disposal: executive actions, lawsuits, a loyal regulatory bureaucracy, a compliant Republican majority in Congress and a sympathetic Supreme Court. Each of his actions has been extraordinary in its own right; collectively, they represent a slow-motion demolition of the Fourth Estate.

The principal question isn’t just whether anyone can stop Trump, but whether anyone in power really wants to.

[David A. Graham: Is Colbert’s ouster really just a ‘financial decision’?]

One of Trump’s early targets was the Voice of America and other government-funded international news broadcasters, such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia. These outlets—unlike commercial media—had a mission to advance American interests and extend U.S. soft power dating back to the early 1940s. But they also served a crucial role in reporting important stories that other outlets did not and reaching an international audience with little access to reliable news. By slashing the administration’s support to the bare minimum and firing employees, he has all but destroyed these broadcasters. The White House says they deserve their fate, because they, too, are rife with bias.

Trump has also given a baleful master class in so-called SLAPP litigation—strategic lawsuits against public participation—to bring independent media corporations to heel. He hasn’t won a single case in court. Instead, the prospect of presidential retaliation has been enough to lever some $67 million in settlement payments out of news and information companies. These began last year, when Disney-ABC paid $15 million in December to Trump’s presidential library, to settle his assertion that anchor George Stephanopoulos had defamed him by saying he’d been found “liable for rape” (in fact, a jury had found Trump liable for “sexual abuse” of the author E. Jean Carroll). The list of settled suits continued with Meta’s agreement in January to pay $25 million (of which $22 million goes to the Trump library); a February deal with X, to write Trump a $10 million check; and this month’s deal with CBS’s parent, Paramount Global, which agreed to fork over $16 million to the presidential library.

The odor of corporate appeasement is so strong that even seemingly unrelated decisions have taken on suspicious cast. When CBS announced last week that it was axing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, ending the long tenure of the network’s most prominent and popular Trump critic, many questioned the network’s claim that the decision was strictly a financial one. The timing—just days after Paramount settled with Trump—suggested Colbert’s sacking was another bone being thrown to the president.

At the same time, Trump has used his bully pulpit to intimidate reporters and news organizations. After CNN broke the news of a Pentagon assessment raising doubts about the success of the U.S. attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities last month, Trump sought the dismissal of the story’s lead reporter, Natasha Bertrand (who was formerly a staff writer for The Atlantic). The White House press staff attacked the ABC News reporter Terry Moran after he called Trump a “world-class hater” on X. ABC got rid of Moran a few days later; CNN has stood by Bertrand.

Alongside the pressure campaign against the news-media industry’s big players, Trump has reconfigured the presidential press operation in self-serving ways. In one of his first anti-press actions in February, he banned the Associated Press from Oval Office press conferences, White House events, and Air Force One over its refusal to use his preferred terminology. He’s given preference to MAGA-friendly outlets at news conferences and special briefings, and commandeered the press pool that covers him at certain events, ensuring a reliable stream of softball questions.

A key Trump stratagem was his appointment of a loyalist, Brendan Carr, to head the supposedly independent Federal Communications Commission; that appointment put a rabid anti-media activist and co-author of the conservative Project 2025 policy plan in charge of the broadcast industry’s chief regulatory agency. Almost immediately after the chairmanship, Carr reinstated complaints against NBC, ABC, and CBS that his predecessor had dismissed on First Amendment grounds (though he let stand the dismissal of a petition against Fox News’s parent company). Carr has also launched investigations of NPR and PBS. The FCC’s lone Democratic appointee, Anna Gomez, told me on Thursday that the agency is “playing a dangerous game” by injecting politics into broadcast regulation, and that she would continue to oppose it.

Finally, the Trump administration has rescinded Biden-era policies that had protected journalists in federal investigations of classified leaks, creating a potential chilling effect on reporting. Previously, the Justice Department had ruled out demanding reporters’ phone and email records in such probes; Trump’s attorney general decided that the tactic should be more available.

[Read: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crown]

Every president has had his beefs with the press, of course. But only rarely has a president lined up his powers to hobble it. In the late 18th century, John Adams signed into law the Sedition Act, which, on the pretext of national security, was intended to suppress criticism of Adams and his administration. In the early 20th century, Woodrow Wilson backed another Sedition Act to stifle dissent about the U.S. entry into World War I. Allies of Richard Nixon, at the president’s urging, challenged broadcast licenses held by CBS and the Washington Post Company, in retaliation for their aggressive coverage of his Watergate crimes.

Over time, courts, Congress, and popular opinion doomed such actions as insults to the First Amendment—but that pushback has not occurred, at least so far, in Trump’s second term. In the face of such threats, many of the news media’s corporate barons have mostly responded with timidity, even capitulation. A handful of leaders—the New York Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger, for one—have mustered some courage, but the bravery of the few has exposed the cowardice of the many. The most emblematic case may be Jeff Bezos, the once-resolute owner of The Washington Post, whose recent efforts to mollify Trump look like a gross sellout.

Other top media executives have pretended that the president’s predatory behavior is just business as usual. At Paramount’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this month, co-CEO George Cheeks characterized the company’s settlement with Trump over a disputed 60 Minutes interview as a rational response, given that the corporation would have faced “significant financial as well as reputational damage” if it had lost in court. True as a general matter, but few legal experts, including Paramount’s, believed that Trump had any chance of winning. A more honest assessment came from Colbert, who noted on the Late Show: “This kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s ‘big fat bribe.’”

Little suggests that the American public is greatly aroused or agitated by any of this. The indifference to Trump’s march against the media may reflect declining trust in mainstream news organizations, or merely their diminished visibility in an information landscape remade by cable-service cord-cutting, social-media influencers, and TikTok videos. This erosion has also been accompanied by the steady disappearance of professional reporting, creating so-called news deserts in hundreds of counties across America.

The short-term forecast is for more of the same. Trump’s next chance to torpedo a few more “enemies of the people” will come if the parent companies of MSNBC and CNN need to seek government approval to spin off their cable-TV channels. This could provide new choke points for Trump to demand more tribute: Another round of shakedowns looms.

“The sky’s the limit with him right now,” Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor and reporter, told me last week. Trump briefly banished Acosta from the White House during his first term, an instance of presidential retaliation that seemed shocking then, but looks almost quaint now. “Right now,” said Acosta, who left CNN in January and now streams on Substack, “he’s taking on whole news organizations, the information system we’ve had in place since the end of World War II.”

For the moment, as exemplified by the Journal’s Trump-Epstein story, reporters are continuing to report without fear or favor. As far as is known, no news organization has spiked an unflattering story about the Trump White House out of concern for the backlash. Baron is guardedly optimistic. “The everyday tenacity, resourcefulness, and dedication of journalists covering this administration deserve admiration and support,” he said. A free and independent press, he declared, “can survive this administration.”

That assessment places great faith in the journalists working in the trenches of Trump’s war against the news media.

So far, that faith is justified. How long it can be sustained is another matter.


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Presidents are, like the rest of us, flawed human beings. Many of them had volcanic tempers: Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, and Joe Biden, among others, reportedly could sling Anglo-Saxonisms with gusto. In public, most of them managed to convey an image of geniality. (Nixon might be the exception there, but he embraced being an uptight square and his admirers found it endearing.) But all of them, regardless of their personality, had at least some notion about government, some sense of what they wanted to accomplish in the most powerful office in the world.

Donald Trump exhibits no such guiding belief. From his first day as a candidate, Trump has appeared animated by anger, fear, and, most of all, pettiness, a small-minded vengefulness that takes the place of actual policy making. It taints the air in the executive branch like a forgotten bag of trash in a warm house on a summer day—even when you can’t see it, you know it’s there.

Trump’s first run for office was itself a kind of petty tantrum. Trump had always wanted to run for president, a wish he expressed as far back as the 1980s. But Trump’s journey from pro-abortion-rights New York oligarch to anti-abortion Republican populist picked up speed after President Barack Obama humiliated him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. Trump denies that Obama’s jibes moved him to run, but he jumped into the open GOP field once Obama’s two terms were coming to an end, and to this day, he remains obsessed with the first and only Black president—to the point that he misspoke on at least one occasion and said that he defeated Obama, not Hillary Clinton, to win his first term.

Trump’s second term has been a cavalcade of pettiness; his lieutenants have internalized the president’s culture of purges, retribution, and loyalty checks. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s insistence, for example, on renaming U.S. military bases after Confederate leaders has led to clumsy explanations about how the bases are now named for men who had names that are exactly like the 19th-century traitors’. This kind of explanation is the sort of thing that high-school teachers get from teenage smart alecks who think they’re being clever in class.

My colleague Shane Harris recently reported an appalling story about how former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper sponsored a rescue dog to become a working animal at the CIA. He named the dog Susan, after his late wife, an animal lover who volunteered at a local shelter. Clapper was looking forward to attending Susan’s graduation ceremony at a CIA facility—but the agency, taking what it believed to be Trump’s lead, barred him from even setting foot on CIA property. (Trump despises Clapper, and blames him for what Trump calls “the Russia hoax,” among other slights against the president.) As Shane wrote: “The upshot is that an octogenarian Air Force retiree who spent half a century in his nation’s service was not allowed to attend a party for a dog he essentially donated to the government and named after his dead wife.”

Meanwhile, those still in government are being harassed and driven out of public service because of who they know—or even what they might be thinking. Over at the FBI, as I wrote earlier this month, Director Kash Patel is reportedly strapping people to polygraph machines to find out whether anyone is saying bad things about him. Michael Feinberg, a senior FBI counterintelligence agent, was told that he could accept a demotion or resign because of his friendship with Peter Strzok, an agent fired years ago who has long been an object of Trump’s wrath.

Now Trump wants to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell because Powell refuses to lower interest rates and make Trump’s economy look better than it is. (Inflation and joblessness are both rising.) Trump can’t summarily fire Powell, but the president is taking the Fed chair’s opposition so personally that he is already ginning up a baseless accusation that Powell is somehow guilty of malfeasance on a building project, on the theory that it might be the kind of misconduct that would allow Trump to remove him.

Even on matters of grave international importance, Trump governs by emotion rather than any coherent sense of policy. A few weeks ago, the president seemed to change course on the war in Ukraine. He said he would allow arms shipments to continue, and promised last week to have advanced systems such as Patriot missile batteries sent to Ukraine. Trump’s own Defense Department was caught flat-footed after repeatedly putting a stop to those shipments. (After all, Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance seemed to be on Vladimir Putin’s side after they engaged in an unseemly—and yes, petty—ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the White House this past winter.)

But Putin had finally done something worse than murdering thousands of Ukrainian civilians and kidnapping Ukrainian children: He had made Donald Trump look like a chump. Putin refused to help Trump fulfill an unwise campaign promise by acceding to a cease-fire. Instead, the Russian president has unleashed some of the most violent attacks of the war, a raised middle finger to the White House and its chief occupant.

You can do a lot of bad things around Trump. You can ignore court orders. You can deport people without due process. You can let Ukrainian rivers fill with the blood of innocent people. But when you make Trump look weak or stupid, you’ve gone too far.

Trump’s promises on Ukraine might amount to very little. Emotional reactions pass quickly, and Trump’s attention span is measured in milliseconds; he flip-flops on everything from trade to friendships. So far, some shipments to Ukraine have resumed, but Trump has also offered Putin a respite of 50 days to come to the table—which would be just about the number of days left of good weather for military operations. (“Fifty days” could also be just another version of the way Trump uses “two weeks” to punt issues that he doesn’t want to deal with further downstream.)

Now Trump’s attention seems to be on strong-arming the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians football and baseball teams into reclaiming their old names, the Redskins and the Indians. It’s possible that Trump is responding to some hidden groundswell of nostalgia. He’s also not the first president to get fired up about Washington’s home team: Obama was clearly interested in getting rid of the Redskins name, and undoing anything Obama did is something of a Trumpian rule.

More likely, however, Trump is focusing on this small issue in the hopes of picking a racist scab that will occupy the attention of his base—because much of that base right now is deeply angry about a supposed cover-up relating to Trump’s former friend and the convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet again, when trying to throw red meat to the faithful, Trump picked something small and silly. Trump rules by appeals to grievances—rather than focusing on substantive national problems—because at least some of the MAGA movement revels in that kind of cruelty. This culture-warring behavior helped get him elected, and Trump’s voters have been willing to join him on these capricious roller-coaster rides for the first six months of his second term. But roller coasters don’t have actual destinations, and sooner or later, even the most dedicated riders will want to get off.

Related:

Former intel chief banned from dog’s graduation ceremonyTrump’s only real worldview is pettiness. (From 2023)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

This is the presidency John Roberts has built.Naturalized citizens are scared.The mistake parents make with chores

Today’s News

The Pentagon is starting to pull out 700 Marines who were sent to Los Angeles last month, as President Donald Trump’s military deployment to the city winds down.A federal judge appeared to be leaning in favor of Harvard University during today’s hearing over Harvard’s lawsuit claiming that the Trump administration moved to cut its federal research funding to the university for political reasons.The Justice Department confirmed to Fox News that it has received a criminal referral from Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who alleges that Obama administration officials “manufactured and politicized intelligence” about Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiles a roundup of articles that look at the changing nature of family vacations—and how to enjoy them without putting too much pressure on making every moment perfect.

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Evening Read

A cartoon elephant dumps sunscreen on its head. Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Should You Sunscreen Your Cat?

By Katherine J. Wu

For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one solution for intense exposure to the sun: evolution. Some creatures have thick, dark skin that’s resistant to UV harm; others sprout fur, scales, or feathers that block the sun’s rays. Many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds may produce a compound that protects their cells against the sun’s damaging effects. Hippos, weirdly, ooze a reddish, mucus-y liquid from their pores that absorbs light before it can destroy their skin. And plenty of creatures have evolved behaviors that take advantage of their environment—rolling around in dirt or mud, simply retreating into the shade.

But certain modern animals have sun problems that natural selection can’t easily solve.

Read the full article.

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Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with. If any scraps do make it into their dustpans, most of them spill out as the children exuberantly walk to the trash bin.

It would be faster and neater to simply let the teachers do all the tidying up. But our goal is more than achieving a spotless classroom; it’s also helping children develop motor skills, responsibility, confidence, and the ability to clean effectively on their own. Sure enough, by December, the children’s sweeping efforts become more refined. By springtime, if not earlier, they start to pick up other messes throughout the day without a teacher’s prompting. They haven’t just learned to mop and scrub; they’ve taken ownership over their environment.

Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I’ve been known to say, “You live here!” as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes. When my oldest daughter, as a toddler, stirred pancake batter out of a bowl, I wrested the spoon from her hand. When my son made an earnest effort to fold a pair of pants by himself, I immediately refolded them more neatly. After those moments, and countless other small ones like them, my kids’ enthusiasm to help started to dwindle. As the researchers I spoke with told me, this pattern is common among parents who, in an effort to make chores more efficient, unwittingly thwart their child’s desire to help.

[Read: The way American parents think about chores is bizarre]

Granted, most kids, mine included, do some housework, and plenty of kids do lots. But research indicates that parents shoulder much of the burden. A small 2009 study of dual-income, middle-class families in Los Angeles showed that chores accounted for less than 3 percent of household activities for the children, who were between the ages of 5 and 17, compared with 27 percent for their moms and 15 percent for their dads. Lucia Alcalá, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton who studies sociocultural and cognitive development, pointed out that lots of parents these days use chores to refer to tasks that solely benefit the child, such as cleaning their own room, rather than to duties that serve the whole family. The half a dozen researchers I spoke with said that many children do little when it comes to vacuuming the living room or taking out the trash. “We give our kids a free pass,” David F. Lancy, the author and editor of multiple books, including The Anthropology of Childhood, told me. Many parents, he said, “don’t hold our kids accountable for self-maintenance or contributing.”

The free pass Lancy refers to may hold back children, who stand to learn much from chores. These complex, multistep activities require sustained focus, planning, problem-solving, and a commitment to working toward a goal—all valuable skills for anyone to develop. Put together, these skills may lead to strong executive function. For young children, chores can also be intrinsically rewarding. When a kid folds a pile of laundry, they’ve created order out of chaos. Seeing their success, children can start to develop a sense of self-competence and self-efficacy—the belief that they’ll succeed at a given task—which may boost their confidence. On a physical level, household tasks can lead to stronger fine-motor skills, which are essential for, say, zipping a jacket and handwriting, and which teachers report have been declining over the past several years. To help with these deficits, some parents seek occupational therapy for their children. But for many kids, at-home practice will suffice. A National Geographic article from earlier this year recommends activities such as squeezing sponges and pouring cups of water to improve grip and coordination. But helping with the dishes could naturally have kids wringing out sponges and emptying glasses into the sink, no special setup required.

Not only is incorporating skill-building into necessary tasks easier on parents; it can also help children feel like they belong, researchers told me. Chores are “social glue,” Lancy said. They integrate a child into the family and give them a purpose—and kids are eager to be involved. Studies have found that young children have a willingness to pitch in and support others. Angeline Lillard, a professor and the director of the Early Development Laboratory at the University of Virginia, told me that in one study she helped run, when children were given the choice between pretending to do a task, such as washing dishes or baking cookies, or doing one for real, most children opted to do it for real. When asked about their choice, the children said that they had opted for the real task because they wanted to contribute. According to Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural-developmental psychologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying children and their families, the motivation to engage in chores is simple: “Children want to go where the action is.” And there’s a lot more action in a real kitchen than in a pretend one.

Many parents might insist that their kids don’t want to help out—and they may have a point. Typically, very young children are the ones who are most excited to mimic their parents and lend a hand with laundry. But a toddler’s contributions are often clumsy and, like the efforts of my Montessori preschoolers in September, may actually result in more work for the adult—so the adult shoos the child away. After enough times hearing “Go play,” the child will get the message, Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, told me. Other parents may turn a simple chore into an involved lesson, with lots of talking and micromanaging, rather than allow the child to participate on their own. As Doucleff explained, this dynamic turns the child off as well.

[Read: Why people wait 10 days to do something that takes 10 minutes]

Much more effective is finding a middle ground between the two extremes. What this looks like will vary based on the kid. “A child could peel one carrot or even just watch,” Doucleff said. This approach might demand some patience and flexibility from parents at first. Children aren’t going to be instantly capable at something they haven’t had the opportunity to practice. But getting kids in the habit of helping early is much easier than convincing an older child who has never done chores to give them a try. For parents with resistant kids, their best hope is to avoid bribes, allowance, other incentives, and chore charts, and instead turn chores into a social activity. Saying “Let’s do this together” can make a task more engaging, Barbara Rogoff, a distinguished professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, told me. And, if that fails, parents may have to simply enforce their expectations, Cara Goodwin, a child psychologist, said. Although kids may not like being held accountable at first, many will eventually gain satisfaction from a job well done.

None of this is as easy as it seems. I believe wholeheartedly in teaching children practical life skills, yet I still inadvertently turned my oldest two children off chores by micromanaging my first and shooing away my second. Guiding my students to tidy up came naturally. But once I had children of my own, I learned how a 3-year-old earnestly asking, “Can I help?” could sound like nails on a chalkboard. I’ll admit that when I was exhausted, short-fused, and desperate to get dinner on the table, my children’s budding self-efficacy wasn’t front of mind.

I have four kids now. Over the past few years, welcoming all of their help has become easier, partly because I realized that I could spend more time with them if I included them in my routines. As my littlest ones tagged along with me, unloading the dishwasher, pulling clothes out of the dryer, and even mixing pancake batter, my older ones started asking to join in. Perhaps they wanted to be where the action was. Or maybe they wanted, as Gaskins suggested, “to give back to the people they love”—a common motivation for kids. When Gaskins told me this, her theory sounded a little idealistic. But when I asked my kids why they do housework, they all said it was because they wanted to help me. Turns out they were eager to pitch in all along. They were just waiting for me to let them.

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For all of the eons that animal life has existed on Earth, the sun has been there, too. And for all of those eons, animal life has had only one solution for intense exposure to the sun: evolution. Some creatures have thick, dark skin that’s resistant to UV harm; others sprout fur, scales, or feathers that block the sun’s rays. Many fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds may produce a compound that protects their cells against the sun’s damaging effects. Hippos, weirdly, ooze a reddish, mucus-y liquid from their pores that absorbs light before it can destroy their skin. And plenty of creatures have evolved behaviors that take advantage of their environment—rolling around in dirt or mud, simply retreating into the shade.

But certain modern animals have sun problems that natural selection can’t easily solve. Some reside at zoos that can’t perfectly replicate their habitat; others live at latitudes that their ancestors didn’t experience. Others spend too much time sunbathing in a living-room window, or sport sparse or light-colored fur or hair because their domesticators liked the way it looked. For these animals, people have come up with a shorter-term solution: sunscreen.

If, that is, a creature is willing to accept the treatment. Indu, an Asian elephant who lived at the Phoenix Zoo, was game. A few years ago, Heather Wright, one of the zookeepers, noticed the tops of Indu’s ears pinking, peeling, and flaking in the summer heat, much like her human keepers’ did. So her caretakers picked up some zinc-oxide-based sunblock—specially formulated for sensitive (human) skin—and dabbed it on the elephant. Indu, to be fair, was used to a level of care most wild animals don’t enjoy. “We had already been applying lotion for dryness,” Wright told me. The elephant knew the drill: Once in the barn, she’d lumber up to a window with an opening for her ear and stick the appendage through.

As far as zoo staff members could tell, the treatment helped. “There’s nothing magical” about other animals’ skin, Leslie Easterwood, a large-animal veterinarian at Texas A&M University, told me: Bake it in the sun, and it will burn. Scientists have spotted whales suffering from sunburns; cats, dogs, horses—even alpacas, turtles, and penguins—can develop all kinds of skin cancers. Pigs, in particular, “have skin most similar to humans,” Mitchell Song, a veterinary dermatologist based in Arizona told me. At Zoo Miami, keepers have spread mud on older, arthritic wild pigs who can’t wallow as well as they did in their youth; they’ve also applied sunscreen to a babirusa, a species of swine native to Indonesia’s forests, and to a Kunekune pig, Gwen Myers, the zoo’s chief of animal health, told me.

In some sunny places, vets commonly recommend sunscreen for pets and other domesticated creatures, especially light-colored dogs and horses. Steve Valeika, a veterinarian in North Carolina, advises the same for “white cats that go outside.” This particular conundrum is one of our own making. “You don’t see a lot of white-skinned animals in the wild,” Anthea Schick, a veterinary dermatologist in Tempe, Arizona, told me. Only thanks to generations of selective breeding have they become a frequent presence in and around people’s homes.

Of course, to sunscreen your pet, you have to … sunscreen your pet. Some pet owners, vets told me, are definitely flummoxed by the suggestion: “It’s not widely discussed,” Schick told me. Vets are more unified in recommending teeth brushing for cats—and most cat owners still just decide they’d rather not. But some animals would certainly benefit from block: Schick told me she’s seen her fair share of badly burned dogs, especially after long bouts of sunbathing that scorch their bellies. “We see a lot of sun-induced skin cancers that could be avoided,” she said. Pit bulls, Dalmatians, and other short-haired breeds are especially vulnerable; even long-haired white cats are sensitive around their eyes, their nose, and the tips of their ears. And Easterwood estimates that the majority of paint horses, left unprotected, will eventually develop skin issues. Squamous-cell-carcinoma cases make up the majority of her workload: “I see it every single day,” she said.

The vets I spoke with generally agreed: Don’t bother with sprays, which a lot of animals find annoying or downright terrifying; reapply often, and well; it is way, way, way harder to sunscreen a cat than a dog, though some brave souls manage it. But although some vets recommended human sunscreens, formulated for kids or sensitive skin, others told me they preferred blends marketed for animals. (The FDA has dubbed just one pet sunscreen, made by a company called Epi-Pet and marketed to dogs and horses, “FDA compliant”—not the same as FDA approval, which requires rigorous safety testing.) Several warned against zinc oxide, which can be toxic to animals if ingested in large quantities; others felt that zinc oxide was worth the risk, unless administered to a tongue-bathing cat.

Regardless of the product they’re offered, most animals generally aren’t as eager as Indu to subject themselves to a human-led sun-protection ritual. And even she was usually plied with a five-gallon bucket of fruits and vegetables while her keepers tended her ears. At Zoo Miami, keeper Madison Chamizo told me she and her colleagues had to spend months training an okapi—an African mammal closely related to a giraffe—to accept caretakers gently scrubbing sunscreen onto her back with a modified Scotch-Brite dishwand, after she lost some patches of hair on her back to a fungal infection. But for creatures in very sunny parts of the world, the alternatives are, essentially, being cooped up indoors, kept away from windows, or wrestled into full-body sunsuits. (Some dogs don’t mind; cats, once again, are unlikely to comply.)

And some sun-related problems, sunscreen can’t fix. Gary West, the Phoenix Zoo’s vet, told me he suspects that UV glare has caused eye inflammation in some of his animals; Myers, in Miami, worries about the sensitive skin around some species’ eyes. “They’re not really going to wear sunglasses for us,” Myers told me. So she and her colleagues have started to wonder: “Gosh, is this an animal that we could put a sun visor on?”


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The past 10 years have been among the most tumultuous for higher education since the student movements of the 1960s. The 2020s began with a wave of progressive fervor that swept the nation and was especially notable on America’s campuses. Five years later, the cultural pendulum has swung in the opposite direction. After a series of protests against the war in Gaza, followed by police crackdowns and debates over anti-Semitism, American universities (especially elite ones) are having their influential role in political life scrutinized. But arguments over their ideological bent have overshadowed the other major ways these institutions affect the country: Since at least the end of World War II, they have been driving forces for prosperity, social mobility, and world-changing scientific innovation. They underpin a huge portion of the country’s sports ecosystem, provide the setting for hundreds of works of pop culture, and shape how Americans understand the transition from child to adult.

President Donald Trump’s administration has made unprecedented attacks on America’s colleges and universities, and the effects of this onslaught are not limited to degree seekers, faculty, or administration—they ripple across American society, affecting, for example, patients who rely on universities’ affiliated teaching hospitals and college towns where academic institutions are the main employers. There is no better time to look with clear eyes at the goals, accomplishments, and failures of these schools. The eight books on this list, taken in combination, tell the story of the historic rise, and current crisis, of the American university.

The University in Ruins

The University in Ruins, by Bill Readings

One of the most insightful books about the contemporary American university was written in the 1990s by a British professor who taught in Canada. Although Readings’s history is not focused solely on U.S. institutions, few works better describe the changes they have undergone. Historically, he writes, colleges and universities aimed to imprint capital-C Culture—especially a familiarity with a nation’s great texts and intellectual traditions—on young people. Today, however, students more often are seen and see themselves as consumers who are buying diplomas in order to signal their employability. In this model, the values that animate higher education are job preparation, skill building, and networking, not intellectual engagement or humanistic fulfillment. The University in Ruins is first and foremost a work of scholarship—a readable one, despite being peppered with occasional academese—but it is also a book of uncommon prescience that saw clearly that the rarefied ivory tower, with its idea of academia as a realm detached from the coarse affairs of the material world, was transforming into a credentialing bureaucracy.

The Great American University

The Great American University, by Jonathan R. Cole

Cole, a sociologist and Columbia University’s former dean of faculties, offers a doorstop history of the modern research university that doubles as an unusually perceptive defense of these schools. What distinguishes them from other kinds of higher-ed institutions is their first priority, which is, as their name implies, research. They can offer excellent teaching, cultivate an educated citizenry, and help graduates climb the socioeconomic ladder, but these features are subsidiary to their primary mission of increasing human knowledge. Schools such as the University of Minnesota, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Florida may be most often in the public eye because of their sports teams, but they’re also places where things that improve people’s lives in ways both big and small—pacemakers, the polio vaccine, Gatorade—were invented. Although Cole is not skeptical enough about the growing financialization and corporatization of higher education, his book makes plain how universities have advanced the interests of people around the world—even when those people might not realize (or appreciate) it.

Ravelstein

Ravelstein, by Saul Bellow

Bellow’s thinly veiled 2000 roman à clef about his friendship with the star academic Allan Bloom—the philosopher who wrote the best-selling jeremiad The Closing of the American Mind—is a tender portrait of its subject. But Bellow’s novel is as much about the institutional culture that shaped Bloom. It is a paean to academia as an enterprise that works to sort ideas that are base and quotidian from those that are noble and timeless, and its titular character embodies this faith in the professoriate as a kind of secular priesthood. Abe Ravelstein is a study in contradictions. Devoted to a life of the mind, he approaches reading the classics as a kind of soul-craft, and he’s preoccupied with the wisdom of ancient philosophers, poets, and statesmen; yet he also nurtures an irrepressible fondness for modern luxuries such as Armani suits, Cuban cigars, and “solid-gold Montblanc pens.” The irony of Ravelstein is that its protagonist’s celebrity is a symptom of the same commodification of knowledge that is eroding the things he most holds dear. Read 25 years later, the novel is an artifact of its time: The diminishment of the university’s purpose that Bellow witnessed feels much more advanced today.

No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, by Ellen W. Schrecker

Schrecker’s No Ivory Tower is a granular account of the effect that the Red Scare had on American universities, as well as a broader meditation on the nature and history of academic freedom. Published almost four decades ago, the book remains among the best accounts of the period when the House Un-American Activities Committee led anti-Communist witch hunts into Hollywood, the government, and colleges. In our own moment of neo-McCarthyist panic, as repression and speech crackdowns again sweep the higher-education system, it has much to teach us. Schrecker reminds readers bluntly that “the academy did not fight McCarthyism,” before adding the coup de grâce: “It contributed to it.” Today’s faculty and administrators would do well to recall how institutions such as the University of California system implemented loyalty oaths, and administrations worked to accommodate, rather than contest, the state’s assault on intellectual freedom.

Resistance From the Right

Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America, by Lauren Lassabe Shepherd

Thanks to a nearly century-long campaign by right-leaning pundits, writers, commentators, and media celebrities, the phrase “campus activism” is almost exclusively associated with the political left. Shepherd shows that this is only part of the story: Her book examines how in the late 1960s, at the height of radical campus politics and the backlash against them, conservatives created student groups and movements of their own, backed by wealthy funders and organizations such as the Mont Pelerin Society and the Foundation for Economic Education. This campus organizing, she argues, not only produced many of the conservative leaders and intellectuals who would go on to shape the 20th and 21st centuries (including Karl Rove and Pat Buchanan); it also set the template for the right’s approach to universities today. The now-familiar conservative move in which occasional examples of left-wing student excess are intensely spotlighted in order “to create suspicion around campus antiwar and civil rights initiatives,” as Shepherd writes, was pioneered more than 50 years ago.

After the Ivory Tower Falls

After the Ivory Tower Falls, by Will Bunch

Bunch’s book was an instant classic of the time-honored “academia is imploding” genre, but its apocalyptic title is also slightly misleading. Yes, it offers a bracing tour through the crises and failures—the explosion of student debt, the devaluing of expertise—that have plagued academia in the last 50 years. But After the Ivory Tower Falls is also a moving, even idealistic account of what higher education can be when it works. Invoking the G.I. Bill, which made a college education available to more of those in the working and middle classes, Bunch forces us to remember that the phrase “paying your way through college” is derived from the fact that you actually used to be able to pay your way through college. He points out that when postsecondary schooling was politically prioritized and economically democratized, however partially and however unevenly, it increased both national prosperity and the financial prospects of many Americans. “A college diploma became the shining symbol of a nation’s promise—the American Dream,” he writes, lamenting that today, for too many, it can be a perfunctory piece of paperwork that saddles its recipient with unpayable debts.

Kent State

Kent State: An American Tragedy, by Brian VanDeMark

The Naval Academy historian VanDeMark’s recent book on the Kent State shooting, in which the National Guard fired on and killed four Vietnam War protestors, reminds readers that last year’s spate of campus protests, which brought students and faculty into contact with militarized police, was not unprecedented. Kent State is an empathetic, politically dispassionate look at that massacre in the spring of 1970. VanDeMark largely sidesteps the received wisdom about the event, instead bringing fresh reporting and details to bear on “the full story,” which, he writes, “has remained elusive.” He casts a human (though not exculpatory) eye on all of the involved parties, including the students who were shot dead and the National Guard troops who raised their rifles. He explains that some of the Guardsmen were avoiding Vietnam duty themselves, and he provides a new account of the precipitating event that led the assembled soldiers to fire. As a whole, Kent State offers a powerful and lamentably topical reminder of how easily things can go wrong when protestors and uniformed squads with guns come into conflict.

The Adjunct Underclass

The Adjunct Underclass, by Herb Childress

In the 21st century, academic work has been transformed by the rise of the hustling part-time professor, or “adjunct.” These jobs often have more in common with shifts for gig employers such as Lyft than the tweedy image of the tenured academic we get from soppy campus movies. You cannot understand the contemporary university if you do not understand the acceleration of adjunctification. Childress draws on interviews and an intimate understanding of academia’s management and financial model to lay bare the predatory and often inhumane labor practices—poverty wages, lack of health care, job insecurity—that are now common in an industry that fancies itself a bastion of progress and virtue. The Adjunct Underclass does much to disabuse readers of the fantasies of professorial life while exposing the considerably grimmer reality: At a time when universities were home to administrative bloat, poor management, and soaring tuition fees, they were also adopting employment practices that have left their faculty hanging by a thread.


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No one on the Supreme Court has gone further to enable Donald Trump’s extreme exercise of presidential power than the chief justice of the United States, John Roberts. Associate justices have also written some important opinions shaping executive power, and the Court has issued ever more important unsigned orders, but the most transformative opinions—the opinions that directly legitimize Trump’s unprecedented uses of power—are Roberts’s handiwork. This is not happenstance. Under Supreme Court practice, the most senior justice in the majority—which is always the chief justice when he so votes—determines who will write the main opinion. Roberts reserved these milestones for himself.

And what milestones they have been. Roberts upheld the first Trump administration’s “Muslim ban” on the grounds that the president’s national-security role precludes courts from taking account of the bigotry undergirding an immigration order. He remanded a lower court’s enforcement of a congressional subpoena for Trump’s financial information, writing that “without limits on its subpoena powers,” Congress could exert “imperious” control over the executive branch and “aggrandize itself at the President’s expense.” He has come close to giving the president an untrammeled right to fire any officer in the executive branch at will. And he took the lead in inventing a presidential immunity from criminal prosecution that could exempt the president from accountability for even the most corrupt exercises of his official functions.

Going beyond the precise holdings in these cases, Roberts’s superfluous rhetoric about the presidency has cast the chief executive in all-but-monarchical terms. The upshot is a view of the Constitution that, in operation, comes uncomfortably close to vindicating Trump’s: “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Trump’s confidence is surely bolstered also by the Roberts Court’s unsigned per curiam opinions blocking even temporary relief from his sweeping actions. In May, the Court held that Trump orders removing two federal officials at key independent agencies could remain in place while the issue of their legality makes its way through the judiciary. In June, it allowed the administration to proceed with so-called third-country deportations—that is, deporting undocumented noncitizens summarily to countries to which they had no prior connection, but where they might well face torture. On July 8, the Court effectively allowed Trump to proceed with a massive restructuring of the federal executive branch, notwithstanding that the power over executive-branch organization belongs to Congress, not the president. On July 14, the conservative majority allowed the sabotaging of the Department of Education to proceed. Trump’s use of executive power is not a distortion of the Roberts Court’s theory of the presidency; it is the Court’s theory of the presidency, come to life.

[Adam Serwer: Why Trump thanked John Roberts]

What America is witnessing is a remaking of the American presidency into something closer to a dictatorship. Trump is enacting this change and taking advantage of its possibilities, but he is not the inventor of its claim to constitutional legitimacy. That project is the work of John Roberts.

Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 while Roberts was clerking for then–Associate Justice William H. Rehnquist, who represented, at the time, the far right on the Burger Court. Following his clerkship year, Roberts joined the Reagan administration as a special assistant to the attorney general, and then in short order was recruited in 1982 to join Reagan’s White House staff as an associate counsel to the president. That same year, the Federalist Society was founded, and those two entities together—the Reagan administration and the Federalist Society—accelerated the mainstreaming of what until then had been a marginal view of presidential authority under the Constitution: “unitary-executive theory.” The core idea of the unitary executive was that the president, as the single head of the executive branch, was entitled to direct how all discretionary authorities of that branch would be exercised. On every question, the president would be, as George W. Bush later said, “the decider.”

In practical terms, debates over unitary-executive theory have centered on how far the president can go in firing people: Can he fire anyone at will, or may Congress protect at least some officials from discharge unless the president can show good cause for dismissal? Good cause is most often specified in the law as “inefficiency, malfeasance, or neglect.” At-will removal power would allow a president to purge the government of any resistance to his agenda. Roberts has all but made at-will removal the president’s constitutionally guaranteed prerogative, and his rhetoric goes further yet. His opinions taken together create a dangerously authoritarian and largely ahistorical narrative about the constitutional presidency.

In Roberts’s story, the president “alone composes a branch of government” and holds the “entirety” of executive power. All of the federal civil service—the thousands of administrative officers who wield executive power—do so on the president’s behalf. What gives this system “legitimacy and accountability” is that “We, the People” get to vote for president. The thousands of subordinate officers involved in administering the federal government are accountable to “We, the People” only because they are tied to the president through “a clear and effective chain of command.” The point of absolute-removal power is precisely to enable the president to keep his underlings in line. The powers of removal and supervision, Roberts writes, are “conclusive and preclusive.” That is to say, at least in Roberts’s narrative, Congress may not regulate the president’s supervisory powers by statute, and courts may not examine their exercise.

The alternative to this narrative—the understanding of the constitutional presidency that, at least in broad strokes, had represented conventional wisdom until the advent of the Roberts Court—is an account of executive power woven into a system of checks and balances. Article II vests executive power in a president, to be sure. It assigns the president a number of exclusive roles, such as the negotiation of treaties and serving as commander in chief of the Army and Navy. But Article II also envisions a branch that includes “executive departments.” These departments have “duties,” most of which are to be set forth in statutes. Fulfilling statutory duties is the job of the agencies, which, in doing their work, act not on behalf of the president, but on behalf of Congress. The president’s role in this scheme is one of supervision, not command. He is charged to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The Constitution underscores the president’s supervisory position by providing that he may “require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” This is not at all a one-person branch of government, and its design is not the prerogative of the president, but of Congress.

[Aziz Huq: The Court’s liberals are trying to tell Americans something]

In 1980 and perhaps even now, unitary-executive theory would seem an odd position for conservatives and libertarians—the Federalist Society base—to adopt. But by then a strong presidency seemed the best and perhaps only route for yanking the American government in a much more conservative direction. During the 1960s and ’70s, Congress, prodded on by a host of different social movements, enacted a panoply of statutory authorities that enabled ambitious liberal presidents to advance significant progressive policies. A president intent on rolling back that agenda would find doing so difficult. There exists no general statutory authority for shrinking government, and deregulation on a rule-by-rule basis is slow going and often legally vulnerable. Conservatives found their solution in Article II of the Constitution, which, if creatively reinterpreted, might give the president more authority to unilaterally undermine the regulatory state.

Over the next two decades, the conservative legal movement further developed its arguments for the unitary executive, the Federalist Society grew and became a powerful credentialing institution for the right, and Roberts’s career soared, culminating in 2005 with his appointment as chief justice.

Roberts has not approached his work timidly. In the two decades of his tenure thus far, his opinions on executive power have created what might be called a proto-authoritarian canon, lending constitutional legitimacy to a kind of presidency that brooks no dissent, treats Congress as a subordinate institution, and need answer to no one except possibly to the Supreme Court itself.

It is hard to overstate how much is wrong in Roberts’s narrative of the presidency. It muddles constitutional text. It flouts constitutional history. It is willfully ignorant of the risks of authoritarianism in a polarized, populist age. Its very premise—that the Constitution creates a one-person branch of government—is provably untrue by just reading the Constitution, which, again, refers to “executive departments.” The president’s constitutional role does not require at-will removal power, except in the cases of those few officials who directly assist the president in fulfilling specific Article II roles. For all others—the overwhelming majority of government officers and employees—the president needs only the power to discharge persons who have failed to faithfully execute the law, thus providing “good cause” for their removal. The conditions under which the president may fire such officials is a matter for Congress to decide.

The idea that vesting the president with “the executive power” means “all” of the executive power is likewise not in the Article II text, which does not contain the word all. Where the word all does appear is in the Constitution’s vesting in Congress the power to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper” for executing its role and all others in the government. Far from signaling a wide swath of “conclusive and preclusive” executive authority, the text suggests a sweeping legislative power to prescribe how executive power is to be exercised.

The Roberts Court narrative fares no better on history than on text. The Court claims to be originalist and to be implementing a vision of the presidency that matches that of the Framers. The best that can be said about its opinions in this respect is that they have launched a scholarly renaissance among constitutional historians whose work demonstrates that the Court has the history wrong. One characteristic of several of the Court’s most executive-indulgent opinions is the inclusion of blazingly incorrect statements of history.

Arguably the strangest of the Court’s departures from history appears in Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, in which Roberts wrote, “The Framers made the President the most democratic and politically accountable official in Government.” That statement, unfortunately, captures the precise opposite of the Framers’ plan. Under the original Constitution, the president was the least electorally accountable official. House members were elected by voters. Senators would be chosen by state legislatures. The president would be chosen by presidential electors, and those temporary officials would be chosen in a manner to be determined by the legislature of each state.

Acknowledging the relative insulation of the original presidency from electoral politics underscores that the Roberts narrative of administrative “legitimacy and accountability” is also wrong. What would legitimize executive power in the Framers’ scheme would not be electoral accountability, but the quality of government, the character of officeholders, and the fidelity of officeholders to the law.

[Read: The Supreme Court won’t explain itself]

Seila Law is not an isolated example of ignoring or inventing history. Roberts’s presidential-immunity opinion has not a word to say about either the Richard Nixon pardon or Bill Clinton’s nonprosecution deal during his last weeks in office—incidents obviously relevant to understanding how earlier presidents assessed the scope of immunity. Likewise, the per curiam opinion keeping in place for now Trump’s unlawful firings of two independent administrators purports not to threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. “The Federal Reserve,” the Court says, is not the same as other independent agencies; it is instead “a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States.” The problem with that assurance is that there is virtually no resemblance between the 19th-century Banks of the United States, on one hand, and the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, on the other. If the president is constitutionally entitled to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board, there is no obvious principled reason he cannot also fire members of the Fed.

The Court has presumably shown concern for the Fed’s independence because giving presidents direct control over the monetary supply would predictably lead to greater inflation, which would be bad for investors. Decision makers serving at a president’s pleasure may be driven less by long-term price and employment trends—their assignment from Congress—and more by the president’s short-term political concerns. But in one way or another, Congress has similarly determined for a host of other major agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Communications Commission, that the quality of their decision making will be best served if directed by a bipartisan group of experts, any of whom may express policy disagreement with the president without fear of reprisal. Under the system of checks and balances that the Constitution was intended to enable, administrative agencies thus shoulder accountability to the Congress that created them and the courts that review them, not just to a president who believes, “I hold all the levers, and have all the cards.”

The nation is now just six months into the experiment of what happens when a knows-no-bounds president takes office under a Court committed to a unitary executive. The results are alarming. As a matter of principle, anyone concerned with preserving robust constitutional checks and balances should be disturbed by a president’s overweening unilateralism, regardless of that president’s policy agenda. In Trump’s case, however, the threat to democracy is at its zenith because unitary-executive theory is being pushed to enable an authoritarian agenda on every front. Trump seems to believe he is effectively the unitary head not just of government, but of the nation. He appears determined to squelch any resistance within the government—and to force submission to his program by the media, universities, the legal profession, and apparently even entire cities. Roberts’s assurance that elections render the unitary president “directly accountable to the people” for so blatant an antidemocratic program appears meaningless against the backdrop of Trump’s authoritarian tactics.

The Roberts Court so far has been mostly generous to the administration, handing it a set of technically narrow procedural wins that, for the moment at least, have blocked relief in the lower courts. When the Court must finally resolve the controversies concerning birthright citizenship, the capricious withholding of government grants, the unauthorized dismantling of government agencies, or the use of extortionate tactics to secure the submissiveness of independent institutions, John Roberts will likely again write opinions for a majority. Ideally, he will be open to rethinking his extreme version of what the presidency represents and what the chief executive may do without meaningful legal accountability. But given the path he has taken so far, optimism seems naive.

*Sources: Harry Naltchayan / The Washington Post / Getty; Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Tom Williams / Roll Call / Getty


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On a bookshelf near my desk, I still have the souvenir United States flag that I received during my naturalization ceremony, in 1994. I remember a tenderhearted judge got emotional as the room full of immigrants swore the Oath of Allegiance and that, afterward, my family took me to Burgerville to celebrate. The next morning, my teacher asked me to explain to my classmates—all natural-born Americans—how I felt about becoming a citizen at age 13.

One girl had a question: “So Chris can never be president?”

I wasn’t worried about becoming president—I just wanted to get to the computer lab, where we were free to slaughter squirrels in The Oregon Trail. But her question revealed that even kids know there are two kinds of citizens: the ones who are born here, and the ones like me. The distinction is written into the Constitution, a one-line fissure that Donald Trump used to crack open the country: “Now we have to look at it,” Trump said, after compelling Barack Obama to release his birth certificate in 2011. “Is it real? Is it proper?”

Nearly 25 million naturalized citizens live in the U.S., and we are accustomed to extra scrutiny. I expect supplemental questions on medical forms, close inspection at border crossings, and bureaucratic requests to see my naturalization certificate. But I had never doubted that my U.S. citizenship was permanent, and that I was guaranteed the same rights of speech, assembly, and due process as natural-born Americans. Now I’m not so sure.

Last month, the Department of Justice released a civil-enforcement memo listing the denaturalization of U.S. citizens as a top-five priority and pledging to “maximally pursue” all viable cases, including people who are “a potential danger to national security” and, more vague, anyone “sufficiently important to pursue.” President Trump has suggested that targets could include citizens whom he views as his political enemies, such as Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayoral candidate who was born in Uganda and naturalized in 2018: “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally,” Trump said. “We’re going to look at everything.”

[Read: Why civics is about more than citizenship]

Looking at everything can be unnerving for naturalized citizens. Our document trails can span decades and continents. Thankfully, I was naturalized as a child, before I had much background to check, before the internet, before online surveillance. I was born in Brazil, in 1981, during the twilight of its military dictatorship, and transplanted to the United States as a baby through a byzantine international-adoption process. My birth mother had no way of knowing for sure what awaited me, but she understood that her child would have a better chance in the “land of the free.”

I don’t consider myself “a potential danger to national security” or “sufficiently important to pursue,” but I also don’t believe that American security is threatened by international students, campus protesters, or undocumented people selling hot dogs at Home Depot. I’m a professor who writes critically about American power, I believe in civil disobedience, and I support my students when they exercise their freedom of conscience.

Because I was naturalized as a child, I didn’t have to take the famous civics test—I was still learning that stuff in school. I just rolled my fingertips in wet ink and held still for a three-quarter-profile photograph that revealed my nose shape, ear placement, jawline, and forehead contour. My parents sat beside me for an interview with an immigration officer who asked me my name, where I lived, and who took care of me.

But these days, I wonder a lot about that civics test. It consists of 10 questions, selected from a list of 100, on the principles of democracy, our system of government, our rights and responsibilities, and milestones in American history. The test is oral; an official asks questions in deliberately slow, even tones, checking the responses against a list of sanctioned answers. Applicants need to get only six answers correct in order to pass. Democracy is messy, but this test is supposed to be easy.

However, so much has changed in the past few years that I’m not sure how a prospective citizen would answer those questions today. Are the correct answers to the test still true of the United States?

What does the Constitution do? The Constitution protects the basic rights of Americans.

One of the Constitution’s bedrock principles can be traced back to a revision that Thomas Jefferson made to an early draft of the Declaration of Independence, replacing “our fellow subjects” with “our fellow citizens.”

As with constitutional theories of executive power, theories of citizenship are subject to interpretation. Chief Justice Earl Warren distilled the concept as “the right to have rights.” His Court deemed the revocation of citizenship cruel and unusual, tantamount to banishment, “a form of punishment more primitive than torture.”

By testing the constitutional rights of citizenship on two fronts—attempting to denaturalize Americans and to strip away birthright citizenship—Trump is claiming the power of a king to banish his subjects. In the United States, citizens choose the president. The president does not choose citizens

What is the **“**rule of law”? Nobody is above the law.

Except, perhaps, the president, who is immune from criminal prosecution for official acts performed while in office. Trump is distorting that principle by directing the Department of Justice, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and ICE to enforce his own vision of the law without regard for constitutional norms.

Civil law is more malleable than criminal law, with fewer assurances of due process and a lower burden of proof. ICE raids rely on kinetic force to fill detention cells. Denaturalization cases can rely on stealthy legal proceedings. In 2018, the Trump administration stripped a man of his citizenship. He was married to a U.S. citizen and had been naturalized for 12 years. The administration accused him of fraudulently using an alias to apply for his papers after having been ordered to leave the country. In an article for the American Bar Association, two legal scholars argued that this was more likely the result of a bureaucratic mix-up. Whatever the truth of the matter, the summons was served to an old address, and the man lost his citizenship without ever having had the chance to defend himself in a hearing.

[Read: The fragility of American citizenship]

The DOJ is signaling an aggressive pursuit of denaturalization that could lead to more cases like these. In the most extreme scenarios, Americans could be banished to a country where they have no connection or even passing familiarity with the language or culture.

What stops one branch of government from becoming too powerful? Checks and balances.

Denaturalization efforts may fail in federal court, but the Trump administration has a habit of acting first and answering to judges later. When courts do intervene, a decision can take weeks or months, and the Supreme Court recently ruled that federal judges lack the authority to order nationwide injunctions while they review an individual case. FBI and ICE investigations, however, can be opened quickly and have been accelerated by new surveillance technologies.

How far might a Trump administration unbound by the courts go? Few people foresaw late-night deportation flights to El Salvador, the deployment of U.S. Marines to Los Angeles, a U.S. senator thrown to the ground and handcuffed by FBI agents for speaking out during a Department of Homeland Security press conference. To many Americans who have roots in countries with an authoritarian government, these events don’t seem so alien.

What is one right or freedom from the First Amendment? Speech.

And all the rights that flow from it: Assembly. Religion. Press. Petitioning the government.

During the McCarthy era, the Department of Justice targeted alleged anarchists and Communists for denaturalization, scrutinizing the years well before and after they had arrived in the U.S. for evidence of any lack of “moral character,” which could include gambling, drunkenness, or affiliation with labor unions. From 1907 to 1967, more than 22,000 Americans were denaturalized.

Even if only a handful of people are stripped of their citizenship in the coming years, it would be enough to chill the speech of countless naturalized citizens, many of whom are already cautious about exercising their First Amendment rights. The mere prospect of a lengthy, costly, traumatic legal proceeding is enough to induce silence.

What are two ways that Americans can participate in their democracy? Help with a campaign. Publicly support or oppose an issue or policy.

If, apparently, it’s the “proper” campaign, issue, or policy.

What movement tried to end racial discrimination? The civil-rights movement.

The question of who has the right to have rights is as old as our republic. Since the Constitutional Convention, white Americans have fiercely debated the citizenship rights of Indigenous Americans, Black people, and women. The Fourteenth Amendment, which established birthright citizenship, and equal protection under the law for Black Americans, was the most transformative outcome of the Civil War. Until 1940, an American woman who married a foreign-born man could be stripped of her citizenship. Only through civil unrest and civil disobedience did the long arc of the moral universe bend toward justice.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act opened the door for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which ended the national-origin quotas that had limited immigration from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. The act “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation,” President Lyndon B. Johnson said as he signed the immigration bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. The possibility of multiracial democracy emerged from the civil-rights movement and the laws that followed. Turning back the clock on race and citizenship, and stoking fears about the blood of America, is a return to injustice and cruelty.

What is one promise you make when you become a United States citizen? To support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

Now Americans like me have to wonder if we can hold true to that promise, or whether speaking up for the Constitution could jeopardize our citizenship.


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Your Horses (www.theatlantic.com)
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After Ted Hughes

Out on the moors in the late June light, I stood where the infinite hills halved the sky and saw where you first saw your horses. Were they left over from a fever dream, dropped momentarily from some other planet? But in that instant, they existed: ten of them, megaliths with draped manes and tilted hind hooves; each utterly silent, unmoving in the icy morning air. As you passed by, the big sun erupted, darkness shook open and showed you its fires. But your horses remained: patient and gray, statue-like in the iron light, enduring on the horizon. In the crowded streets of London, amid the sea of admiring faces, the scandals, the accolades, did you ever again find so peaceful a place? Or are you still out there, slipping through hills, hiding in the trees, lying in the heathers, combing the barren moors, still searching?


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Late last month, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy released a document detailing its vision for scientific integrity. Its nine tenets, first laid out in President Donald Trump’s executive order for “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” seem anodyne enough: They include calls for federal and federally supported science to be reproducible and transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, and subject to unbiased peer review. Some of the tenets might be difficult to apply in practice—one can’t simply reproduce the results of studies on the health effects of climate disasters, for example, and funding is rarely available to replicate expensive studies. But these unremarkable principles hide a dramatic shift in the relationship between science and government.

Trump’s executive order promises to ensure that “federal decisions are informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.” In practice, however, it gives political appointees—most of whom are not scientists—the authority to define scientific integrity and then decide which evidence counts and how it should be interpreted. The president has said that these measures are necessary to restore trust in the nation’s scientific enterprise—which has indeed eroded since the last time he was in office. But these changes will likely only undermine trust further. Political officials no longer need to rigorously disprove existing findings; they can cast doubt on inconvenient evidence, or demand unattainable levels of certainty, to make those conclusions appear unsettled or unreliable.

In this way, the executive order opens the door to reshaping science to fit policy goals rather than allowing policy to be guided by the best available evidence. Its tactics echo the “doubt science” pioneered by the tobacco industry, which enabled cigarette manufacturers to market a deadly product for decades. But the tobacco industry could only have dreamed of having the immense power of the federal government. Applied to government, these tactics are ushering this country into a new era of doubt in science and enabling political appointees to block any regulatory action they want to, whether it’s approving a new drug or limiting harmful pollutants.

Historically, political appointees generally—though not always—deferred to career government scientists when assessing and reporting on the scientific evidence underlying policy decisions. But during Trump’s first term, these norms began to break down, and political officials asserted far greater control over all facets of science-intensive policy making, particularly in contentious areas such as climate science. In response, the Biden administration invested considerable effort in restoring scientific integrity and independence, building new procedures and frameworks to bolster the role of career scientists in federal decision making.

Trump’s new executive order not only rescinds these Joe Biden–era reforms but also reconceptualizes the meaning of scientific integrity. Under the Biden-era framework, for example, the definition of scientific integrity focused on “professional practices, ethical behavior, and the principles of honesty and objectivity when conducting, managing, using the results of, and communicating about science and scientific activities.” The framework also emphasized transparency, and political appointees and career staff were both required to uphold these scientific standards. Now the Trump administration has scrapped that process, and appointees enjoy full control over what scientific integrity means and how agencies review and synthesize scientific literature necessary to support and shape policy decisions.

Although not perfect, the Biden framework also included a way for scientists to appeal decisions by their supervisors. By contrast, Trump’s executive order creates a mechanism by which career scientists who publicly dissent from the pronouncements of political appointees can be charged with “scientific misconduct” and be subject to disciplinary action. The order says such misconduct does not include differences of opinion, but gives political appointees the power to determine what counts, while providing employees no route for appeal. This dovetails with other proposals by the administration to make it easier to fire career employees who express inconvenient scientific judgments.

When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Kush Desai argued that “public perception of scientific integrity completely eroded during the COVID era, when Democrats and the Biden administration consistently invoked an unimpeachable ‘the science’ to justify and shut down any reasonable questioning of unscientific lockdowns, school shutdowns, and various intrusive mandates” and that the administration is now “rectifying the American people’s complete lack of trust of this politicized scientific establishment.”

But the reality is that, armed with this new executive order, officials can now fill the administrative record with caveats, uncertainties, and methodological limitations—regardless of their relevance or significance, and often regardless of whether they could ever realistically be resolved. This strategy is especially powerful against standards enacted under a statute that takes a precautionary approach in the face of limited scientific evidence.

Some of our most important protections have been implemented while acknowledging scientific uncertainty. In 1978, although industry groups objected that uncertainty was still too high to justify regulations, several agencies banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) as propellants in aerosol spray cans, based on modeling that predicted CFCs were destroying the ozone layer. The results of the modeling were eventually confirmed, and the scientists who did the work were awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Elevating scientific uncertainty above other values gives political appointees a new tool to roll back public-health and environmental standards and to justify regulatory inaction. The result is a scientific record created less to inform sound decision making than to delay it—giving priority to what we don’t know over what we do. Certainly, probing weaknesses in scientific findings is central to the scientific enterprise, and good science should look squarely at ways in which accepted truths might be wrong. But manufacturing and magnifying doubt undercuts science’s ability to describe reality with precision and fealty, and undermines legislation that directs agencies to err on the side of protecting health and the environment. In this way, the Trump administration can effectively violate statutory requirements by stealth, undermining  Congress’s mandate for precaution by manipulating the scientific record to appear more uncertain than scientists believe it is.

An example helps bring these dynamics into sharper focus. In recent years, numerous studies have linked PFAS compounds—known as “forever chemicals” because they break down extremely slowly, if at all, in the environment and in human bodies—to a range of health problems, including immunologic and reproductive effects; developmental effects or delays in children, including low birth weight, accelerated puberty, and behavioral changes; and increased risk of prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers.

Yet despite promises from EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin to better protect the public from PFAS compounds, efforts to weaken current protections are already under way. The president has installed in a key position at the EPA a former chemical-industry executive who, in the first Trump administration, helped make regulating PFAS compounds more difficult. After industry objected to rules issued by the Biden administration, Trump’s EPA announced that it is delaying enforcement of drinking-water standards for two of the PFAS forever chemicals until 2031 and rescinding the standards for four others. But Zeldin faces a major hurdle in accomplishing this feat: The existing PFAS standards are backed by the best currently available scientific evidence linking these specific chemicals to a range of adverse health effects.

Here, the executive order provides exactly the tools needed to rewrite the scientific basis for such a decision. First, political officials can redefine what counts as valid science by establishing their own version of the “gold standard.” Appointees can instruct government scientists to comb through the revised body of evidence and highlight every disagreement or limitation—regardless of its relevance or scientific weight. They can cherry-pick the data, giving greater weight to studies that support a favored result. Emphasizing uncertainty biases the government toward inaction: The evidence no longer justifies regulating these exposures.

This “doubt science” strategy is further enabled by industry’s long-standing refusal to test many of its own PFAS compounds—of which there are more than 12,000, only a fraction of which have been tested—creating large evidence gaps. The administration can claim that regulation is premature until more “gold standard” research is conducted. But who will conduct that research? Industry has little incentive to investigate the risks of its own products, and the Trump administration has shown no interest in requiring it to do so. Furthermore, the government controls the flow of federal research funding and can restrict public science at its source. In fact, the EPA under Trump has already canceled millions of dollars in PFAS research, asserting that the work is “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

In a broader context, the “gold standard” executive order is just one part of the administration’s larger effort to weaken the nation’s scientific infrastructure. Rather than restore “the scientific enterprise and institutions that create and apply scientific knowledge in service of the public good,” as the executive order promises, Elon Musk and his DOGE crew fired hundreds, if not thousands, of career scientists and abruptly terminated billions of dollars of ongoing research. To ensure that federal research support remains low, Trump’s recently proposed budget slashes the research budgets of virtually every government research agency, including the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the EPA.

Following the hollowing-out of the nation’s scientific infrastructure through deep funding cuts and the firing of federal scientists, the executive order is an attempt to rewrite the rules of how our expert bureaucracy operates. It marks a fundamental shift: The already weakened expert agencies will no longer be tasked with producing scientific findings that are reliable by professional standards and insulated from political pressure. Instead, political officials get to intervene at any point to elevate studies that support their agenda and, when necessary, are able to direct agency staff—under threat of insubordination—to scour the record for every conceivable uncertainty or point of disagreement. The result is a system in which science, rather than informing policy, is shaped to serve it.


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This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Announcements of yet another book-to-film adaptation are usually met with groans by fans of the source material. But sometimes a new movie can be a chance to lift the best elements of a story. We asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What’s a film adaptation that’s better than the book?

Jurassic Park (streaming on Peacock)

I am not saying that the Michael Crichton novel Jurassic Parkisn’t great, because it is. The folly of man, the chaos of progress, the forking around, the finding out, the dinosaurs—God, the dinosaurs. But in 1993, Steven Spielberg took this promising genetic code, selected the fittest elements, spliced them with Hitchcock, and adapted them to the cool dark of the multiplex. The result is not just a great movie. It is a perfect movie.

The story is tighter; the characters are given foils, mirrors, and stronger arcs. On the page, Dr. Alan Grant is a widower and the paleobotanist Ellie Sattler his student; Dr. Ian Malcolm, chaos mathematician, is a balding know-it-all. On the screen, our dear Dr. Sattler feasts on Dr. Grant’s restrained, tonic masculinity and Dr. Malcolm’s camp erotic magnetism (as do we). The dialogue is punchier too. “You’re alive when they start to eat you,” “Woman inherits the Earth,” “Clever girl,” “Hold on to your butts”—none of that poetry appears in the paperback.

Spielberg and his crew used CGI techniques to make the inhabitants of Isla Nublar come to life, but the real magic came from practical effects, including a 9,000-pound, bus-size animatronic T. rex. This ferocious predator deserves to live on-screen, chomping on velociraptors and snatching a lawyer off of the toilet. Thirty years later, I am still not sure man deserves to watch.

— Annie Lowrey, staff writer

***

The Talented Mr. Ripley (streaming on Paramount+ and the Criterion Channel)

Patricia Highsmith wrote eminently filmable novels, none more so than her oft-adapted The Talented Mr. Ripley. The 1999 movie is the most famous and successful take, transforming the source material into a faster-paced and more suspenseful version of the story. The novel’s crime-to-punishment ratio is Dostoyevskian; for each misdeed Tom Ripley commits, he spends twice as long regretting it or worrying that he’ll get caught. Anthony Minghella’s adaptation diverges from this claustrophobic narration and limits viewers’ access into Ripley’s mind, making his deceitful and violent actions all the more unexpected.

The final scenes contain the largest plot deviation—a shocking twist that manages to both show Ripley at his worst and invite sympathy for him. The film also clarifies his tortured sexuality, an element of his character that remains more ambiguous in the novel. What Highsmith hints at, Minghella more boldly asks: When someone is already ostracized, even criminalized, by society, what’s to stop him from taking the leap into actual depravity?

— Dan Goff, copy editor

***

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (available to rent on YouTube and Prime Video)

I’m going to make some people mad, but the 2011 adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is even better than the superb novel. It’s a rare instance of a spy movie that transcends genre and stands on its own. Gary Oldman’s portrayal of the intelligence officer George Smiley is one of the great performances of the 21st century—and it probably paved the way for Oldman to eventually play Jackson Lamb in the addictive Slow Horses series, also an adaptation. The treatment of the field agent Ricki Tarr (played by Tom Hardy) is both more intense and to the point than in the novel. The scenery—the shots of Budapest alone—brings le Carré’s writing to life in a way that few adaptations ever do. And the film has easily one of the most gripping, poignant, and creative final scenes I’ve ever seen. (Julio Iglesias’s rendition of “La Mer” is on my dinner-party playlist. If you know, you know.)

— Shane Harris, staff writer

***

The Devil Wears Prada (streaming on Disney+)

At first glance, the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada seems to make only cosmetic changes to Lauren Weisberger’s fizzy novel about a young woman trying to break into New York’s publishing industry. In the movie, the protagonist, Andy, is a graduate of Northwestern, instead of Brown. Her boyfriend is a chef, not a teacher. And Miranda Priestly, the imposing editor of a fashion magazine—a thinly veiled version of Anna Wintour—who hires Andy as an assistant, isn’t always seen wearing a white Hermès scarf.

But the movie’s sharp screenplay by Aline Brosh McKenna elevated the material past its breezy, chick-lit-y origins. Anchored by a top-notch cast (Anne Hathaway as Andy, Meryl Streep as Miranda, and a breakout Emily Blunt as Andy’s workplace rival), the film is the rare rom-com focused more on professional relationships than romantic ones: between mentors and mentees, bosses and employees, colleagues and competitors. Even amid its glossy setting, The Devil Wears Prada captured the reality of work, showing how finding career fulfillment can be a blessing and a curse. For me, the film is a modern classic, endlessly rewatchable for its insights—and, of course, its fashion. I certainly have never looked at the color cerulean the same way again.

— Shirley Li, staff writer

***

The Social Network (available to rent on Prime Video and YouTube)

Did Mark Zuckerberg’s girlfriend really break up with him by calling him an asshole in the middle of a date? Did he actually spend the moments after a disastrous legal deposition refreshing a Facebook page, again and again, to see if she’d accepted his friend request? Well, probably not—Erica Albright, Rooney Mara’s character in David Fincher’s film The Social Network, is admittedly fictional. But her opening scene establishes Fincher’s version of Mark Zuckerberg as a smug, patronizing jerk who can’t imagine other people’s feelings being as important as his own, and sets the movie off at a furious, thrilling pace that doesn’t slow until the very end, when Mark has alienated everyone who once cared about him.

The Social Network is a biopic that doesn’t hold itself to facts, to its absolute advantage. Ironically, this approach elevates the nonfiction book it’s based on, Ben Mezrich’s The Accidental Billionaires, which was written without even an interview with Zuckerberg and panned as shoddily reported. (In a New York Times review, Janet Maslin wrote that Mezrich’s “working method” seemed to be “wild guessing.”) The truth doesn’t matter as much as telling a good story—as long as you keep control of the narrative, which Fincher’s Mark struggles to do.

— Emma Sarappo, senior associate editor

***

Clear and Present Danger (streaming on MGM+)

Clear and Present Danger the book is the size, shape, and weight of a brick; Phillip Noyce’s bureaucratic thriller slims Tom Clancy’s nearly 1,000 pages into a svelte 141 minutes (though movies could always be shorter). The action takes place on the sea, in the jungle, at a drug lord’s mansion, and in the streets of Bogotá—the latter setting the scene for an ambush sequence so memorable that the Jack Ryan series restaged it. But the film is most gripping in hallways and offices, culminating in Henry Czerny and Harrison Ford brandishing dueling memos at each other like light sabers. (“You broke the law!”) And although the character of Jack Ryan can sometimes blur into a cipher in Clancy’s novels, Ford embodies him with a Beltway Dad gravitas—never more so than when he announces to the lawbreaking president of the United States, “It is my duty to report this matter to the Senate Oversight Committee!” Such a Boy Scout.

— Evan McMurry, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

What to do with the most dangerous book in AmericaAndrea Gibson refused to “battle” cancer.How to be more charismatic, but not too much more

The Week Ahead

The**Fantastic Four: First Steps, a Marvel movie about a group of superheroes who face off with Galactus and Silver Surfer (in theaters Friday)Veronica Electronica, a new remix album by Madonna (out Friday)Girl, 1983, a novel by Linn Ullmann about the power of forgetting (out Tuesday)

Essay

"Elio" Pixar

What Pixar Should Learn From Its Elio Disaster

By David Sims

Early last year, Pixar appeared to be on the brink of an existential crisis. The coronavirus pandemic had thrown the business of kids’ movies into particular turmoil: Many theatrical features were pushed to streaming, and their success on those platforms left studios wondering whether the appeal of at-home convenience would be impossible to reverse … Discussing the studio’s next film, Inside Out 2, the company’s chief creative officer, Pete Docter, acknowledged the concerns: “If this doesn’t do well at the theater, I think it just means we’re going to have to think even more radically about how we run our business.”

He had nothing to worry about: Inside Out 2 was a financial sensation—by far the biggest hit of 2024. Yet here we are, one year later, and the question is bubbling back up: Is Pixar cooked?

Read the full article.

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Can the city of New York sell groceries more cheaply than the private sector? The mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani thinks so. He wants to start five city-owned stores that will be “focused on keeping prices low” rather than making a profit—what he calls a “public option” for groceries. His proposal calls for opening stores on city land so that they can forgo paying rent or property taxes.

Skeptics have focused on economic obstacles to the plan. Grocers have industry expertise that New York City lacks; they benefit from scale; and they run on thin profit margins, estimated at just 1 to 3 percent, leaving little room for additional savings. Less discussed, though no less formidable, is a political obstacle for Mamdani: The self-described democratic socialist’s promise to lower grocery prices and, more generally, “lower the cost of living for working class New Yorkers” will be undermined by other policies that he or his coalition favors that would raise costs. No one should trust that “there’s far more efficiency to be had in our public sector,” as he says of his grocery-store proposal, until he explains how he would resolve those conflicts.

Mamdani’s desire to reduce grocery prices for New Yorkers is undercut most glaringly by the labor policies that he champions. Labor is the largest fixed cost for grocery stores. Right now grocery-store chains with lots of New York locations, such as Stop & Shop and Key Food, advertise entry-level positions at or near the city’s minimum wage of $16.50 an hour. Mamdani has proposed to almost double the minimum wage in New York City to $30 an hour by 2030; after that, additional increases would be indexed to inflation or productivity growth, whichever is higher. Perhaps existing grocery workers are underpaid; perhaps workers at city-run stores should make $30 an hour too. Yet a wage increase would all but guarantee more expensive groceries. Voters deserve to know whether he’ll prioritize cheaper groceries or better-paid workers. (I wrote to Mamdani’s campaign about this trade-off, and others noted below, but got no reply.)

[Read: New York is hungry for a big grocery experiment]

In the New York State assembly, Mamdani has co-sponsored legislation to expand family-leave benefits so that they extend to workers who have an abortion, a miscarriage, or a stillbirth. The official platform of the Democratic Socialists of America, which endorsed Mamdani, calls for “a four-day, 32-hour work week with no reduction in wages or benefits” for all workers. Unions, another source of Mamdani support, regularly lobby for more generous worker benefits. Extending such benefits to grocery-store employees would raise costs that, again, usually get passed on to consumers. Perhaps Mamdani intends to break with his own past stances and members of his coalition, in keeping with his goal of focusing on low prices. But if that’s a path that he intends to take, he hasn’t said so.

City-run grocery stores would purchase massive amounts of food and other consumer goods from wholesalers. New York City already prioritizes goals other than cost-cutting when it procures food for municipal purposes; it signed a pledge in 2021 to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions associated with food that it serves, and Mayor Eric Adams signed executive orders in 2022 that committed the city to considering “local economies, environmental sustainability, valued workforce, animal welfare, and nutrition” in its food procurement. Such initiatives inevitably raise costs.

Mamdani could favor exempting city-run groceries from these kinds of obligations. But would he? Batul Hassan, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America steering committee and a supporter of Mamdani, co-authored an article arguing that city-run stores should procure food from vendors that prioritize a whole host of goods: “worker dignity and safety, animal welfare, community economic benefit and local sourcing, impacts to the environment, and health and nutrition, including emphasizing culturally appropriate, well-balanced and plant-based diets,” in addition to “suppliers from marginalized backgrounds and non-corporate supply chains, including small, diversified family farms, immigrants and people of color, new and emerging consumer brands, and farmer and employee owned cooperatives.” If one milk brand is cheaper but has much bigger environmental externalities or is owned by a large corporation, will a city-run store carry it or a pricier but greener, smaller brand?

Mamdani has said in the past that he supports the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement, which advocates for boycotting products from Israel. That probably wouldn’t raise costs much by itself. And Mamdani told Politico in April that BDS wouldn’t be his focus as mayor. But a general practice of avoiding goods because of their national origin, or a labor dispute between a supplier and its workers, or any number of other controversies, could raise costs. When asked about BDS in the Politico interview, Mamdani also said, “We have to use every tool that is at people’s disposal to ensure that equality is not simply a hope, but a reality.” Would Mamdani prioritize low prices in all cases or sometimes prioritize the power of boycotts or related pressure tactics to effect social change? Again, he should clarify how he would resolve such trade-offs.

Finally, shoplifting has surged in New York in recent years. Many privately owned grocery stores hire security guards, use video surveillance, call police on shoplifters, and urge that shoplifters be prosecuted. Democratic socialists generally favor less policing and surveilling. If the security strategy that’s best for the bottom line comes into conflict with progressive values, what will Mamdani prioritize?

[Read: Shoplifters gone wild]

This problem isn’t unique to Mamdani. Officials in progressive jurisdictions across the country have added to the cost of public-sector initiatives by imposing what The New York Times’s Ezra Klein has characterized as an “avalanche of well-meaning rules and standards.” For example, many progressives say they want to fund affordable housing, but rather than focus on minimizing costs per unit to house as many people as possible, they mandate other goals, such as giving locals a lengthy process for comment, prioritizing bids from small or minority-owned businesses, requiring union labor, and instituting project reviews to meet the needs of people with disabilities. Each extra step relates to a real good. But once you add them up, affordability is no longer possible, and fewer people end up housed.

Policies that raise costs are not necessarily morally or practically inferior to policies that lower costs; low prices are one good among many. But if the whole point of city-owned grocery stores is to offer lower prices, Mamdani will likely need to jettison other goods that he and his supporters value, and be willing to withstand political pressure from allies. Voters deserve to know how Mamdani will resolve the conflicts that will inevitably arise. So far, he isn’t saying.


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Defending mainstream journalism these days is about as appealing as doing PR for syphilis. Nonetheless, here I am. Back in February, Attorney General Pam Bondi invited a group of MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what was billed as “Phase 1” of the government’s files on Jeffrey Epstein, the wealthy sex offender who died in jail in 2019. The 15 handpicked newshounds included Jack Posobiec, promoter of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory; Chaya Raichik, whose Libs of TikTok social-media account itemizes every single American schoolteacher with blue hair and wacky pronouns; and the comedian Chad Prather, performer of the parody song “Beat That Ass,” about the secret to good parenting. Also present was DC_Draino, whose name is a promise to unclog the sewers of the nation’s capital.

The chosen ones duly emerged bearing ring binders and smug expressions—only to discover that most of the information that the government had fed them had already been made public. Several of the influencers have since complained that the Trump administration had given them recycled information. They couldn’t seem to understand why White House officials treated them like idiots. I can help with this one. That’s because they think you are idiots.

[Read: Trump’s Epstein answers are getting worse]

The harsh but simple truth is that powerful people, including President Donald Trump, do not freely hand out information that will make them look bad. If a politician, PR flak, or government official is telling you something, assume that they’re lying to you or spinning or—at best—coincidentally telling you the truth because it will damage their enemies. “We were told that more was coming,” Posobiec complained, but professional commentators should be embarrassed about waiting for the authorities to bless them with scoops. That’s not how things work. You have to go and find things out. Reporters do not content themselves with “just asking questions”—the internet conspiracist’s favored formulation. They gather evidence, check facts, and then decide what they are confident is true. They don’t just blast out everything that lands on their desk, in a “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” kind of way.

That’s because some conspiracy theories turn out to involve actual conspiracies, and the skill is separating the imagined schemes from the real ones. Cover-ups do happen. In Britain, where I live, the public has recently learned for certain that a military source accidentally leaked an email list of hundreds of Afghans who cooperated with Western forces, possibly exposing them to blackmail or reprisals. The leak prompted our government to start spending billions to secretly relocate some of the affected Afghans and their families. All the while, British media outlets—which are subject to far greater legal restrictions on publication than their American counterparts—were barred from reporting not only the contents of the leaked list, but its very existence. Several news organizations expended significant time and money getting that judgment overturned in court.

Earlier this month, the government released a memo declaring that the Department of Justice and the FBI had determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” in the Epstein case. Since then, Trump-friendly influencers have struggled to supply their audience’s demands for more Epstein content while preserving their continued access to the White House, which wants them to stop talking about the story altogether. Because these commentators define themselves through skepticism of “approved narratives” and decry their enemies as “regime mouthpieces,” their newfound trust in the establishment has been heartwarming to see.

Some of the same people who used to cast doubts about the government’s handling of the Epstein case are now running that government. “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself,” J. D. Vance tweeted in December 2021. “What purpose do you even serve?”

I would be intrigued to hear a response to that challenge from Dinesh D’Souza, who said on July 15 that “even though there are unanswered questions about Epstein, it is in fact time to move on.” Or from Charlie Kirk, who said a day earlier: “I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” Or from Scott Adams, the Dilbert creator, who wrote: “Must be some juicy and dangerous stuff in those files. But I don’t feel the need to be a backseat driver on this topic. Four leaders I trust said it’s time to let it go.” (For what it’s worth, some influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, have refused to accept the Trump administration’s official line that there’s nothing to see here. I’m not alone in thinking this reflects a desire to outflank anyone tainted by, you know, actual government experience when competing for the affections of the MAGA base in 2028.)

For all right-wing influencers’ claims of an establishment cover-up, most of the publicly known facts about the Epstein case come from major news outlets. In the late 2000s, when few people were paying attention, The New York Times faithfully chronicled Epstein’s suspiciously lenient plea deal—in which multiple accusations of sexual assault on teenage girls were reduced to lesser prostitution charges—under classically dull headlines such as “Questions of Preferential Treatment Are Raised in Florida Sex Case” and “Amid Lurid Accusations, Fund Manager Is Unruffled.” After Epstein’s second arrest, the paper reported on how successfully he had been able to rehabilitate himself from his first brush with the law, prompting awkward questions for Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, and other famous faces.

Epstein’s second arrest might not have happened at all without the work of Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. She doggedly reported on how Trump’s first-term labor secretary, Alexander Acosta, had overseen the plea deal when he was a U.S. attorney in Florida. She found 80 alleged victims—she now thinks there might have been 200—and persuaded four to speak on the record. Around the time that Epstein was wrapping up a light prison sentence in 2009, newsroom cuts at the Herald had forced Brown to take a 15 percent pay reduction. Sometimes she paid her own reporting expenses.

[Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy]

Over the past two decades, the decline of classified advertising, along with the rise of social media, has left America with far fewer Julie Browns and far more DC_Drainos. This does not feel like progress. The shoe-leather reporters of traditional newspapers and broadcasters have largely given way to a class of influencers who are about as useful as a marzipan hammer in the boring job of establishing facts. In May, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, scheduled a series of special influencers-only briefings, and I watched them all—surely reducing my future time in purgatory. None of the questions generated a single interesting news story.

In recent days, while MAGA influencers have muttered online about the release of camera footage from outside Epstein’s cell on the night of his death, Wired magazine found experts to review the video’s metadata, establishing that it had been edited, and a section had been removed. Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal—whose conservative opinion pages make its news reporting harder for the right to dismiss—published details of a 50th-birthday message to Epstein allegedly signed by Trump in 2003. The future president reportedly included a hand-drawn picture of a naked woman and told the financier, “May every day be another wonderful secret.” (Trump has described this as a “fake story,” adding: “I never wrote a picture in my life.” In fact, Trump has donated a number of his drawings to charity auctions.)

Legacy news outlets sometimes report things that turn out not to be true: Saddam Hussein’s imaginary WMDs, the University of Virginia rape story. But that’s because they do reporting. It’s easier not to fail when you don’t even try.

We now have a ridiculous situation where influencers who bang on about the mainstream media are reduced to relying on these outlets for things to talk about. Worse, because no issue can ever be settled as a factual matter, the alternative media is a perpetual-motion machine of speculation. MAGA influencers want the truth, but ignore the means of discovering it.

At the heart of the Epstein story is a real conspiracy, as squalid and mundane as real life usually is. The staff members who enabled Epstein; the powerful friends who ignored his crimes; and the prosecutors who downgraded the charges back in the late ’00s. If the Epstein scandal teaches us anything, it is that America needs a dedicated and decently funded group of people whose job is not just to ask questions, but to find answers. Let’s call them journalists.


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Recently, I was invited to the Dalkey Book Festival, in Ireland, to speak at a session titled “Books That Changed the World.” I assumed that, as a Shakespeare scholar, I was expected to talk about the global impact of the First Folio. Instead, frightened by what has been happening in America, I decided to choose a book that is changing the world right now. For that, I turned to a 1978 novel I had long heard of but never read: The Turner Diaries, by William Luther Pierce, a physicist and the founder of the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

I knew that that the novel had once served as a deadly template for domestic terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh, who drew from its pages when he planned the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City, and Robert Jay Mathews, whose white-supremacist gang took its name, the Order, from the novel; a member of the Order killed the Jewish radio host Alan Berg. I also knew that it had inspired John William King, part of a group that dragged James Byrd Jr., a Black man, to death behind a pickup truck. As King shackled Byrd to the vehicle, he was reported to have said, “We’re going to start The Turner Diaries early.”

The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn’t just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before. Literature can be mind opening, but it can also be corrosive, and there is no exaggeration in saying that The Turner Diaries and books like it have played a part in spreading hateful ideas that now even influence government policy.

Seeking a copy online, I was led directly to Amazon. I was surprised to find the book available on that site, which had reportedly stopped selling it after the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Before then, according to a New York Times article about the ban, Amazon had marketed the book alongside a warning identifying it as “a racist, white supremacist fantasy.” Amazon had justified the sale of what it acknowledged to be an “infamous work”—one that has now reportedly sold as many as half a million copies—because of the novel’s “historical significance and educational role in the understanding and prevention of racism and acts of terrorism.” I found that to be a sound policy; I would no more ban offensive books, which need to be studied and analyzed, than I would prevent scientists from investigating infectious pathogens.

It was only after reading the novel that I fully grasped why Amazon had previously decided to remove it from its site after a mob of Donald Trump’s supporters attacked the Capitol. Proud Boys had helped organize and lead that assault, encouraged a few months earlier when Trump was asked during a presidential debate to condemn the group and replied: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!” The month before the January 6 attack, in a livestreamed video, Joe Biggs, a Proud Boys leader, described government officials as “evil scum” who “deserved to die a traitor’s death”—to which another leader, Ethan Nordean, replied, “Yup, Day of the Rope.” That was the name that Pierce gave, in The Turner Diaries, to the day when enemies are lynched, “a grim and bloody day, but an unavoidable one” orchestrated in hopes of “straightening out the majority of the population and reorienting their thinking.” The appearance on January 6 of a gallows with a noose hanging from it outside the Capitol visually reinforced the allusion to that defining moment in the novel. Biggs and Nordean were later sentenced for their roles in the assault to 17 and 18 years in prison, respectively. (Trump commuted their sentences.)

[Read: Alt history]

The Turner Diaries tells the story of Earl Turner, who, in the closing years of the 20th century, participates in a revolution that begins as a race war in the United States and results in the annihilation of nonwhite people (and those aligned with them) from the planet. It is told through a series of diary entries that Turner makes from September 16, 1991, to November 9, 1993, the day he pilots an airplane into the Pentagon in a suicide mission. July 19, 1993, is an especially exciting day for him, as Turner witnesses “what surely must be one of the biggest mass migrations in history,” the evacuation of Black people, Latinos, and immigrants at “a rate of better than a million a day.” Once nonwhite people are gone, he writes, the “air seems cleaner, the sun brighter, life more joyous.”

The diary entries are framed by a foreword and an epilogue, said to have been written in 2099 and reflecting back on these world-changing events. The novel, which is horrifying and heartless, slowly acclimates readers to greater levels of violence and hatred, with healthy doses of propaganda justifying large-scale murder. Black people are depicted as rapists and cannibals, Jews as rapacious and controlling, and white people who believe in a multicultural society as race traitors who also deserve to die.

I purchased the $30 paperback, now in its third edition, the first to be published under William Pierce’s name rather than his pseudonym, Andrew Macdonald. The book was advertised on Amazon, shockingly, as a “futuristic action-adventure novel.” The pitch for the book had gotten a thorough makeover, the stain of extremist violence whitewashed by a seemingly innocent, policy-based appeal. Amazon no longer warned customers that The Turner Diaries was infamous; it offered only the publisher’s description of the novel as one “that warns us of how American society might unravel if the immigration and racial policies being pursued then—which are being pursued to an even greater extent today—were allowed to continue.” This language, which existed on sales pages before January 6, also appears on other sites where the book has remained available online, including Books-A-Million and Bookshop.org.

On Amazon, the book’s publisher, which is presumably the creator of the alarming description, was listed as the innocuous-sounding Cosmotheist Books. A search for the publisher leads to the National Alliance, which invites new members committed to “a thorough rooting out of Semitic and other non-Aryan values.” Amazon was sharing profits from the book with a neo-Nazi organization, one that I was now indirectly funding.

That the book had appeared for sale again on Amazon now that Trump is president again didn’t strike me as all that surprising. The start of Trump’s second term calls to mind familiar themes from the novel. I am not suggesting that the president or those in his immediate circle have read it—only that the book, now in circulation for roughly half a century, has informed the thinking of people who yearn to “make America great again” by expelling immigrants and appealing to white grievances. In The Turner Diaries, those who have governed America are blamed for granting “automatic citizenship to everyone who had managed to sneak across the Mexican border,” and liberalism is derided as “an essentially feminine, submissive world view.” Anger is also directed at the mainstream media: “One day we will have a truly American press in this country, but a lot of editors’ throats will have to be cut first.” When the current Trump administration reportedly pushed out two Black military leaders, General Charles Q. Brown Jr. and Lieutenant General Telita Crosland, following Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s broader calls to rid the armed forces of DEI, I couldn’t help thinking of Turner’s lament that the U.S. Army was more than 40 percent Black, and that “the day will come when we must make our move inside the military.”

[Read: White supremacy’s gateway to the American mind]

In May, Trump invited white South African refugees to America. When asked by a journalist why he had done so, he repeated the sort of discredited claims of white genocide that fill the pages of The Turner Diaries, while blaming the press for covering it up: “It’s a genocide that’s taking place that you people don’t want to write about.” (South Africa does have a very high murder rate, but overwhelmingly, the victims are Black.) The roundups and expulsions in the novel rhyme with the Trump administration’s error-prone but unapologetic deportation strategy. Some purges in The Turner Diaries are based on mistaken identities and false accusations, but “there was no admitting to the possibility of mistakes”; acting with “arbitrariness and unpredictability” was part of the plan. On June 15, Trump posted on Truth Social words that echo the novel’s xenophobic rhetoric: “We must expand efforts to detain and deport Illegal Aliens in America’s largest Cities” to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.”

It may be a coincidence that the Los Angeles metropolitan area, to which Trump has deployed Marines and the National Guard, is the site deliberately chosen in the novel to trigger the violent clashes that foment militarization in the country. I would be interested to know whether Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser responsible for overseeing the recent harsh immigration roundups in Los Angeles, has read Pierce’s novel; we do know that he sent emails to Breitbart News recommending Jean Raspail’s 1973 The Camp of the Saints, a novel thatthe Southern Poverty Law Center has called “a sort of anti-immigration analog to The Turner Diaries.” The center’s website still warns about the dangers of both books.

Recently, I went back to Amazon, only to discover that The Turner Diaries had disappeared: By early June, the site had erased all traces of the novel. The title had even vanished from my browsing history. I reached out to Amazon; a spokesperson referred me to content guidelines prohibiting the promotion of “hate speech” and confirmed that the title had been discovered and removed. What they wouldn’t tell me is why it had been briefly available, even on Amazon’s sites in Germany and Canada, countries where The Turner Diaries has been banned. I wondered whether the books’ appearance was a subversive act by an employee who holds extremist sympathies, or was perhaps authorized by someone who had seen Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos, squelch the endorsement of Kamala Harris in The Washington Post (which he owns) and donate $1 million to Trump’s inauguration. But this is speculation. What is badly needed is transparency. The Turner Diaries may remain invisible to many Americans, but its effect on what is happening in the country today is plain to see.


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