Elbridge Colby believes that China is the only country on the planet that has the ambition, resources, and military might to knock the United States off its pedestal as the world’s leading superpower.

Most in President Donald Trump’s administration agree. But even by the standards of MAGA world, Colby is a divisive figure. And the Pentagon policy master’s prescription for how to counter China’s rise explains why. The only way to stop Beijing’s bid for global dominance, he has argued, is for the U.S. to pour everything it can into securing the western Pacific, even if doing so comes at the expense of combating Russia or maintaining U.S. influence in the Middle East.

That is, to remain superpowerful, the U.S. may need to temporarily stop superpowering.

Colby didn’t always think this way. During Trump’s first term, he wrote a strategy document that advocated continuing to try to do it all, as superpowers do. But his attitude has evolved, and along the way, he has amped up the ire among his enemies—including fellow Republicans and U.S. allies abroad.

Colby’s worldview was at the root of U.S. indecision this summer over whether to provide Ukraine with badly needed weapons. When the U.S. military canceled an expected shipment late last month, catching even the White House off guard, the blame—and the credit—went to Colby.

[Read: The Real Trouble With America’s Flip-Flop on Ukrainian Weapons]

It was an unlikely moment in the spotlight for a policy wonk whose stances had, until recently, been little-noticed beyond the world of Beltway think tanks. Some on the right, including hawkish GOP senators, seized upon the decision as evidence that Colby should be ousted, and began pushing the White House to act. Others in the MAGA movement cheered the suspension—Tucker Carlson is a longtime Colby fan—and described the move as evidence of a truly “America First” national-security strategy.

Both wings of the movement were ultimately disappointed: Within days of the pause, Trump not only reversed it, he went a step further in providing new support to Kyiv. And far from being fired, Colby appears secure in his position at the Pentagon, his influence undiminished.

In some ways, Colby personifies an ongoing shift within the Republican Party. Trump has moved away from positioning the U.S. as defender of the post–Cold War order and toward preserving its resources for threats that directly affect the U.S. homeland—with China at the top of the list.

During Trump’s first term, Colby led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy. The document concluded that the U.S. must be prepared to confront a wide range of threats beyond China, including from Russia, and also must be able to “counter rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran, defeat terrorist threats to the United States, and consolidate our gains in Iraq and Afghanistan while moving to a more resource-sustainable approach.”

More recently, Colby has come to the view that to meet the supreme challenge of China, other priorities will have to be sacrificed.

“We see with Colby’s recent comments a shift towards a military almost entirely focused on one region and one opponent,” Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, told us. “And the question is: What drove that change? The only thing that seems to have changed is the political zeitgeist within the Republican Party.”

During an October speech at Dartmouth, Colby argued that the threat from Beijing was paramount—and that the U.S. was ill-equipped to deal with it. The U.S., he told the audience, faces “the possibility of a World War III in the coming years. We’re not prepared.” America needs “to prioritize the potential for a conflict with China precisely in order to avoid it.”

The 45-year-old Yale and Harvard graduate—who goes by “Bridge,” speaks animatedly, and is known for his thick head of blond hair—comes to the role of Pentagon undersecretary with a pedigree as a consummate Washington institutionalist and foreign-policy intellectual. The grandson of former CIA Director William Colby, he spent part of his childhood in Japan and much of his adulthood cycling between government and think tanks, at times working across bipartisan lines on issues including nuclear-weapons policy and the Middle East. He wasn’t always a Trump supporter—but was never a Never Trumper. Now he has gone all in for Trump and the president’s norm-breaking approach to world affairs.

Over the past decade, China has developed a bigger navy, launched more sophisticated cyber warfare and missile systems, and expanded its global footprint, all while the U.S. has been divided over how to stop its advances. Under Colby’s strategy, the U.S. can both focus on China and deploy troops to protect the homeland. But it likely can’t do those missions and also sustain air-defense systems and naval ships in the Middle East, not to mention tens of thousands of troops in Europe. Those regions need to do more for themselves, Colby has said.

Since taking over the Pentagon’s No. 3 position in April, he has argued that support for allies such as Israel and Ukraine risks coming at the expense of U.S. interests in Asia. He has proposed moving Pentagon funding away from the Army toward the services that would spearhead the fight against Beijing—the Navy and the Air Force. That suggestion has forced the Army to scramble to prove its continued relevance. Colby advocates withdrawing forces from Europe and redistributing them around the Asia-Pacific region. The nation’s main geopolitical goal, he believes, should be deterring a Chinese attack on Taiwan—and defending the island if deterrence fails.

His critics have been unnevered by some of his early moves. After taking the post, Colby told his British counterparts that the Royal Navy should focus on threats from Russia and leave the U.S. Navy to lead in the western Pacific, defense officials told us. Colby also helped trigger a review of former President Joe Biden’s multibillion-dollar U.S.-U.K.-Australia submarine pact, out of concern that the Australians might not deploy U.S.-provided submarines during a U.S.-led campaign on Chinese forces in the event of an assault on Taiwan. (Lawmakers from both parties have urged the Pentagon to go ahead with the deal.)

Detractors charge that Colby wants to jettison an international-security approach that has held for the past 80 years and replace it with an overly simplistic alternative.

“His belief is that we can only accomplish one thing at a time and that we can’t maintain troops or defensive positions worldwide,” one Senate aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told us. “That is counter to what most national-security experts believe and what the U.S. has done since World War II.”

Threats from China and Russia are too intertwined to have a strategy for one nation but not the other, European officials told us. Russia’s war in Ukraine and China’s push in the South China Sea reflect their shared territorial ambitions. Allied diplomats bristle at the idea that they should leave such a massive part of the world to the Americans when Europe has its own economic and security interests in Asia that must be defended.

“We agree on the basic principle that we in Europe should lead our security. We also feel we have a role in the Asia-Pacific,” one European official told us.

Although Colby has not spoken extensively in public since taking up his new post, he has outlined parts of his approach on social media. Earlier this month, after the president’s announcement that aid to Ukraine would go ahead, Colby wrote: “Central to President Trump’s common sense, America First message is that our alliances have to be fair and equitable for them to be sustainable. This is eminently reasonable but was treated for many years as heresy.”

Colby narrowly secured the undersecretary job on a largely party-line confirmation vote. Opposition from within the GOP, such as it was, came from those who questioned whether he would be tough on other adversaries aside from China. Colby was at pains to insist he could be. He had previously said that if Iran obtained nuclear arms, the U.S. could contain it, but in his hearings he insisted that Washington must avoid that possibility at all costs. In response to questioning from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, he said using American tankers and bombers to go after Iran’s nuclear facilities were options that “I would raise for the consideration of the secretary and ultimately the president.”

Colby may not be well known among the general public, but he is considered highly influential within the Pentagon. As Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth focuses on his TV appearances and rooting out symptoms of a “woke” military, Colby has been working quietly in the background.

Colby has earned fans in the MAGA movement for his efforts to push U.S. allies to spend more on their own defense. His emphasis on China has won praise from within the administration and from key outside advisers including Steve Bannon. Supporters tout him as a future secretary of defense or state. But he’s also made enemies among more traditionally hawkish Republicans, who fear that focusing on China will let Russian President Vladimir Putin off the hook. Those concerns were magnified when, at his confirmation hearings, he repeatedly refused to say Putin had attacked Ukraine.

The suspension of military aid to Kyiv came at a particularly inopportune moment: just as a growing number of senators from both parties had signed onto a bill calling for more sanctions on Russia, reflecting their frustration with Moscow’s continued attacks on Ukraine.

Colby had in previous months led the development of a memorandum evaluating Ukrainian weapons requests and how they lined up (or didn’t) with America’s own needs. Officials said the framework, which was presented to Hegseth and other senior officials, was “outcome agnostic” and contained no recommendation to pause weapons shipments to Ukraine. But Colby’s critics blamed his memo for influencing the decision to suspend aid, noting that though it didn’t explicitly state a position, it made clear that providing Ukraine more weapons could put a strain on missions elsewhere, a position Hegseth ultimately adopted.

[Read: When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Tenure Started Going Sideways]

Senator Mitch McConnell, the former majority leader, who opposed Colby’s confirmation, complained to the White House about the pause. Other Republicans, including Cotton, have also expressed unhappiness, an administration official and another White House aide told us. “The strategic incoherence of underfunding our military and restricting lethal assistance to partners like Ukraine is measured in the avoidable erosion of American credibility with allies and the mounting deaths of innocents,” McConnell said in a statement at the time of the pause.

Since reversing the move, Trump has adopted a tougher approach to Russia—for now. No evidence suggests that Trump held Colby responsible for temporarily suspending the aid, and Colby’s allies in the administration were quick to absolve him of blame.

Although Colby declined to speak to us for this story, multiple administration allies and GOP senators sent us unsolicited quotes of support once we reached out to the White House for comment. “President Trump has an extremely knowledgeable and fiercely loyal advisor in Elbridge Colby,” Vice President J. D. Vance, who introduced Colby at his confirmation hearing, told us in a statement. “The commitment Bridge has demonstrated to President Trump’s foreign policy goals is unmatched throughout this administration, and we are incredibly grateful to have him as a part of our national security team.”

Christopher Landau, Marco Rubio’s deputy at the State Department, called Colby “a creative thinker in fields that haven’t seen a lot of creative thinking in decades.”

A White House official suggested that the flap over the Ukraine memo was shrugged off internally and was instead simply evidence of Colby—“a consummate policy guy,” the official told us—presenting a series of options in line with Trump’s views.

Trump-administration officials working on Asia are sometimes divided into three categories: “primacists,” who believe that the U.S. must lead the global response to threats around the world, a onetime Colby position; “restrainers,” who want a foreign policy based primarily on U.S. economic interests; and “prioritizers,” which Colby is frequently described as personifying. Prioritizers want Washington to focus above all on threats from China, and move away from concerns over Russia and Iran.

Those who have worked with Colby—who bears the name of his great-grandfather, an Army officer who served in China—describe his views as an amalgamation of the three approaches. He is not an isolationist, they say, but rather a proponent of a precise use of American assets with the goal of defending its economic and military interests across Asia. He believes that the U.S., more than any other nation, should lead the world effort to combat threats from China, which he sees as singular.

Colby’s defenders say that Trump likewise encapsulates all three tendencies, advocating the use of force in discreet ways and leveraging U.S. influence to get allies to take up more of the shared defense burden.

Colby’s advocacy of moving away from legacy American missions in the Middle East and Europe has an impact on U.S. policy in the Asia-Pacific region, opponents argue. They note that if the U.S. doesn’t support Ukraine and allows Russia to prevail, it will diminish American credibility with allies like Japan and South Korea, which are key to combating threats from China.

[Read: Why China Isn’t a Bigger Player in the Middle East]

Richard Fontaine, CEO of the Center for a New American Security, where Colby worked between Trump terms, told us there is broad agreement across the administration that the United States must devote greater resources to Asia and do more to prioritize the threat posed by China’s military rise.

But some—whom he put in the “Asia only” camp—would be more willing to accept risk or trade-offs in other areas, such as the Middle East and Europe. Those people, Fontaine told us, “seem to dismiss Europe as a distraction from the real game, which is in the Indo-Pacific.”

Of course, there may be another way to contain China while maintaining American commitments elsewhere. Colby’s approach, the Hudson Institute’s Clark explained, presumes that the U.S. can halt Beijing’s advances only through a large-scale deployment to the western Pacific. But less military power, he told us, could be equally effective: “The U.S. just has to be smarter about how it deploys and orchestrates its power.”

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In the beginning, there was the name. A prophet guided Errol Musk to bestow it on his eldest son, or so he claimed. The seer was Wernher von Braun, a German engineer and an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Though von Braun had built missiles for Hitler and used concentration-camp prisoners for manual labor, the U.S. government recruited him, and eventually brought him to a base in Alabama and tasked him with sending men into orbit, then to the moon.

Von Braun had always dreamed of venturing deeper into the galaxy. Back in 1949, before he emerged as the godfather of the American space program, he spilled his fantasies onto the page, in a novel titled Project Mars. He described how a new form of government would take hold on the red planet: a technocracy capable of the biggest and boldest things. At the helm of this Martian state would sit a supreme leader, known as the Elon.

Whatever the truth of this origin story, Elon Musk has seized on von Braun’s prophecy as his destiny. Since the founding of SpaceX in 2002, his business decisions and political calculations have been made with a transcendent goal in mind: the moment when he carries the human species to a new homeland, a planet millions of miles away, where colonists will be insulated from the ravages of nuclear war, climate change, malevolent AI, and all the unforeseen disasters that will inevitably crush life on Earth. Far away from the old, broken planet, a libertarian utopia will flourish, under the beneficent sway of the Elon.

This sense of destiny led Musk on October 5, 2024, to a Trump rally in western Pennsylvania. Wearing a gray T-shirt bearing the slogan OCCUPY MARS, Musk told the crowd that Trump “must win to preserve democracy in America.” Thanks to their alliance, Musk briefly achieved powers that few unelected Americans have ever possessed. As the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, he demolished large swaths of the federal government and began to remake the infrastructure of the state. For a few erratic months, he assumed the role of the terrestrial Elon.

Five months into Trump’s second term, Musk’s inflated sense of his place in history clashed with the ego of his benefactor, the relationship ruptured, and each man threatened to ruin the other. Musk vowed that his spaceships would no longer carry Americans, or the supplies that sustain them, to the International Space Station. Trump threatened SpaceX’s federal contracts, reportedly worth $22 billion. Weeks later, they were still bludgeoning each other. In July, Trump mused that he might deport the South African–born Musk, who in turn impishly announced that he would bankroll a new third party.

Both men are likely bluffing. Musk still needs the U.S. government to fund his grand designs. And the U.S. government very much needs Elon Musk.

Last year, 95 percent of the rockets launched in the United States were launched by SpaceX. NASA was a mere passenger. Musk has crowded low Earth orbit with satellites (nearly 8,000) that are becoming indispensable to the military’s capacity to communicate and the government’s surveillance of hostile powers. Even if Trump had pushed to dislodge Musk, he couldn’t. No rival could readily replace the services his companies provide.

[Read: American spaceflight is now in Elon Musk’s hands]

That Musk has superseded NASA is a very American parable. A generation ago, NASA was the crown jewel of the U.S. government. It was created in 1958 to demonstrate the superiority of the American way of life, and it succeeded brilliantly. In the course of landing humans on the lunar surface, NASA became the symbol of America’s competence and swagger, of how it—alone among the nations of the Earth—inhabited the future. NASA’s astronauts were 20th-century cowboys, admired in corners of the world that usually abhorred Americans. The Apollo crews traveled to the heavens on behalf of “all mankind,” a phrase that appeared both in the act that created NASA and on the plaque left on the moon by Apollo 11. Even NASA’s engineers, with their skinny ties and rolled-up sleeves, became the stuff of Hollywood legend.

The rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. In his novel, Project Mars, he imagined humans traveling to the red planet. (Evening Standard / Getty)

NASA was born at the height of liberalism’s faith in government, and its demise tracks the decline of that faith. As the United States lost confidence in its ability to accomplish great things, it turned to Musk as a potential savior, and ultimately surrendered to him. This isn’t an instance of crony capitalism, but a tale about well-meaning administrations, of both parties, pursuing grandiose ambitions without the vision, competence, or funding to realize them.

If the highest goal of policy is efficiency, then all the money that the government has spent on SpaceX makes sense. Even the company’s most vituperative detractors acknowledge its engineering genius and applaud its success in driving down launch expenses (unlike many defense contractors, SpaceX largely eats the cost of its failures). But in the course of bolstering Musk, in privatizing a public good, the government has allowed one billionaire to hold excessive sway. With the flick of a switch, he now has the power to shut down constellations of satellites, to isolate a nation, to hobble the operations of an entire army.

Because of Musk’s indispensability, his values have come to dominate America’s aspirations in space, draining the lyricism from the old NASA mission. Space was once a realm of cooperation, beyond commercial interests and military pursuits. Now it is the site of military brinkmanship and a source of raw materials that nations hope to plunder. The humanistic pursuit of the mysteries of the universe has been replaced by an obsession with rocket power. Musk wants to use his influence to impose the improbable endeavor of Mars colonization on the nation, enriching him as it depletes its own coffers. In the vacuum left by a nation’s faded ambitions, Musk’s delusions of destiny have taken hold.

NASA’s golden age emerged from fiasco.

John F. Kennedy campaigned for president promising a “New Frontier,” but he didn’t really care about satellites or astronauts. Just before he launched his campaign, he confided to one scientist over drinks in Boston that he considered rockets a waste of money. A few years later, during a conversation recorded in the White House, he flatly admitted, “I’m not that interested in space.”

But by the third month of his presidency, Kennedy was drowning in humiliation. On April 12, 1961, the Soviets hurled the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—or Gaga, as the international press adoringly called him—into orbit for 108 minutes, the first human to journey into the beyond. The New York Times hailed it as evidence of “Soviet superiority.” The impression of American incompetence deepened five days later, when a CIA-backed army of exiles botched an invasion of Cuba, a misadventure immortalized as the Bay of Pigs.

In his desperation to redirect the narrative, Kennedy abruptly became an enthusiast for the most ambitious plan sitting on NASA’s shelf. On April 21, shortly after his proxy army surrendered to the Communists, Kennedy suffered a bruising press conference. In response to a question about the relative inferiority of the American space program, he riffed, “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.”

The Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on his way to becoming the first man to orbit the Earth (Bettmann / Getty)

A month later, Kennedy delivered an address to a joint session of Congress that more formally launched the Apollo program. Even then, he did so harboring private doubts about the price tag, perhaps stoked by the fact that his own father considered his promise to land an astronaut on the lunar surface by 1970 an appalling act of profligacy. Joe Kennedy fumed, “Damn it, I taught Jack better than that.”

When Kennedy voiced his ambitions, he stumbled into tautology: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” He charged the American government with executing an engineering task more difficult than any other in human history, for no higher reason than to prove that it could be done. That was the animating spirit of “New Frontier” liberalism.

From the vantage of the present—when public faith in government is threadbare—it is staggering to consider the heedless investment Americans allowed Washington to make in a project with little tangible payoff, beyond the pursuit of global prestige in its zero-sum contest with the Soviet Union. At its peak, Apollo employed a workforce of about 400,000. The lunar program cost an astonishing $28 billion, somewhere north of $300 billion in today’s dollars.

On Kennedy’s own terms, Apollo was a world-historic triumph. The legendary NASA chief James Webb and his deputies helped create a whole new philosophy for running immense organizations: systems management. NASA simultaneously micromanaged its engineers—knowing that an unwanted speck of dust could trigger catastrophe—while giving them wide latitude to innovate. Complex flowcharts helped coordinate the work of dozens of teams across academia, corporations, and government laboratories. Despite using untested technologies, NASA achieved a near-perfect safety record, marred only by the 1967 fire that killed three astronauts in their capsule as they prepared for the first crewed Apollo mission. Even then, NASA’s relentless culture kept pushing toward its goal.

Unlike the Soviets, who attempted to dictate public perceptions by manically managing the images of their exploits, NASA made the risky decision to allow its project to unfurl on live television. The Apollo voyages made for the most gripping viewing in the history of the medium. By one estimate, a fifth of the planet watched Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk live, an especially astonishing number given the limited global reach of television in 1969.

The space program then was a projection of prowess and self-confidence. “Space was the platform from which the social revolution of the 1960s was launched,” Lyndon B. Johnson wrote in his memoir. “If we could send a man to the moon, we knew we should be able to send a poor boy to school and to provide decent medical care for the aged.” Apollo was a model for planned social change and technocratic governance—the prototype for tomorrow.

The savviest bureaucrats are hitmakers. Years before Armstrong planted the American flag on the moon, NASA had begun prepping plans for a sequel to Apollo. Only after the enchanted moment of the lunar touchdown did the agency meet with Vice President Spiro Agnew to unveil the next phase of America’s future in space. On August 4, 1969, 15 days after Armstrong’s giant leap, NASA pitched the Nixon administration on its vision of sending humans to Mars.

To nail the presentation, NASA brought von Braun, its most celebrated engineer, to do the talking. After all, they were selling the vision he had sketched in his novel decades earlier. By 1982, NASA said, it hoped to land on Mars in two nuclear-powered planetary vehicles, each carrying six crew members.

But in NASA’s moment of glory, von Braun and his colleagues couldn’t restrain themselves. They added items to their wish list: a lunar base, a space station, and a shuttle that would transport humans. Pandering before the ego that NASA needed most in order to realize its request, von Braun said he wanted to send Richard Nixon into orbit as part of the nation’s celebration of its bicentennial, in 1976.

Agnew loved it. Nixon did not. He must have despised the thought of shoveling so much money into a program so closely associated with the blessed memory of his old nemesis John Kennedy. Besides, the moment of boundless technocracy was over, doomed by deficits and a sharp swerve in the public mood. During the unending debacle of Vietnam, the public had lost faith in grand ventures dreamed up by whiz kids. Meanwhile, civil-rights leaders railed against the diversion of major expenditures away from social programs. The sociologist Amitai Etzioni popularized a term that captured the rising sourness: moon-doggle.

At a moment when Nixon was hoping to retrench, NASA proposed a program with an annual cost that would eventually rise to $10 billion, carried out over more than a decade—an expense far greater than Apollo’s. Von Braun and his colleagues had badly misread the room.

President Richard Nixon and the Apollo 13 crewmen on April 18, 1970. Nixon took a dim view of funding a trip to Mars. (Heritage Images / Getty)

In the end, Nixon agreed to give NASA an annual budget of just over $3 billion, and he scythed away every component of the plan except for the space station and the space shuttle, which was a reusable system that promised to limit the costs of space travel. But a shuttle traveling where? As Apollo wrapped up its final missions—and even three of those were canceled—NASA no longer had a clear destination.

Many of the leaders who carried the agency through the space race, including von Braun, began to depart for the private sector. During Apollo, government engineers had been omnipresent, stationed in the factories of its contractors; they mastered details. That changed in the shuttle era, with its constricted budgets and diminished expectations. Instead of micromanaging contractors, NASA began to defer to them, giving aerospace corporations greater sway over vessel design. In fact, it allowed them to own the underlying intellectual property for the vehicles and their component parts.

Because the contractors understood the minutiae and they didn’t, NASA officials grew reluctant to push for innovations, paralyzed by the fear that they might be blamed for a contractor’s mistake. A bureaucratic mindset took hold, first slowly, and then more dramatically after the Challenger disaster, in 1986. Freeman Dyson, the visionary astrophysicist, drew a devastating distinction between the “paper NASA,” largely a figment of memory and pop culture, and the “real NASA,” the sclerotic organization that rose in its place. Those criticisms were both legitimate and somewhat unfair; in the shadow of crewed spaceflight, which garnered attention and prestige, NASA pursued advances in robotics and astrophysics, such as the Galileo mission to Jupiter. But without a human on board, those accomplishments lacked the romance of NASA’s golden age.

In the summer of 2001, Elon Musk sat in a Manhattan hotel room, fired up his laptop, and browsed NASA.gov. He had just returned from a party on Long Island. On the ride home, he’d told a friend, “I’ve always wanted to do something in space, but I don’t think there’s anything that an individual can do.”

Musk was plenty rich and plenty bored. After a short stint as the CEO of the company that became PayPal, he was ousted by its board, although he remained its largest shareholder. He had bought a Czechoslovakian military jet, which he’d spent hundreds of hours flying, but that hardly held his attention. He was in search of his next thing.

Musk grew up a fan of science fiction, steeped in the extraterrestrial fantasies of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. The reality of space exploration, however, wasn’t a subject that he’d studied closely, until he scanned NASA’s site and had a revelation.

He assumed that he would read about impending missions to Mars. “I figured it had to be soon, because we went to the moon in 1969, so we must be about to go to Mars,” he told the biographer Walter Isaacson. But no such plan existed, so he decided that it was his mission to push humanity forward.

The thought made Musk something of a cliché. Space is a magnet for rich dilettantes and—more than a sports car or yacht—the ultimate expression of wealth and power. Because space travel is ingrained in our culture as the hardest human endeavor, demanding immense resources, it commands cultural respect. For Musk—who had been bullied by both his schoolmates and his father—space offered the possibility of seizing the world by the lapels and announcing his greatness. A classic revenge fantasy.

Musk wasn’t wrong about the diminished state of NASA. Remarking on the grim persistence of the space-shuttle program, Neil deGrasse Tyson said that NASA’s flagship vessel “boldly went where man had gone hundreds of times before”—135 times, to be precise. These missions were essential to the construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station, but never ventured beyond the familiar confines of low Earth orbit. Even as Russia was losing the Cold War, it was winning the final chapters of the space race, fielding a program that was better conceived and more active. Indeed, when Musk first pondered launching rockets, he went to Russia in hope of buying used ones; this entailed sitting through vodka-drenched meals with apparatchiks hoping to bilk him. In the end, he concluded that it was cheaper to make his own. In 2002, he founded SpaceX.

Musk was a salesman, determined to make Washington turn its head—and sink cash into his start-up, housed in a suburban– Los Angeles warehouse, which was just beginning to cobble together its first rockets. In 2003, he trucked a seven-story rocket to D.C. and parked it outside the Air and Space Museum on the National Mall. Soon enough, the Air Force and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency gave him several million dollars to help grow SpaceX. In 2006, NASA awarded him $278 million for the first installment of a new program called Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. He received these grants even though SpaceX hadn’t successfully launched a rocket. (Musk and the company did not respond to a request for comment for this story.)

For years, NASA had leaned on the same old set of big contractors: Northrop Grumman, Rockwell, Boeing. These were stodgy firms, anchors in the military-industrial complex, codependent on the government, with their own bureaucracies. Their projects tended to swell in cost and underperform. NASA officials knew these organization’s failings and were desperate to reverse them. The shuttle program was scheduled for imminent retirement, but what would replace it? There was still a space station floating in low Earth orbit, with astronauts awaiting resupply.

At the dawn of the 21st century, disruption was the magic word, incanted by investors and fetishized in the media. It was only a matter of time before the government began chasing the same trendy idea, betting that a new group of entrepreneurs would arrive on the scene to create companies that would shatter all the old models.

In 2010, Barack Obama canceled Constellation, George W. Bush’s program for returning to the moon. NASA was getting out of the business of owning spaceships and rockets—instead, it would rent ones owned by private firms. When Obama visited the Kennedy Space Center to announce this change in direction, he viewed one of Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets, which was sitting on a launchpad. Photographers captured the young president and the budding billionaire strolling together, a passing of the torch to Musk.

Although he isn’t usually generous with sharing credit for his successes, even Musk admits that the Obama administration rescued SpaceX. Burning through cash and crashing test rockets, his company was nearing collapse. But the change in policy opened a reservoir of funds for him. At SpaceX’s bleakest moment, which Musk also describes as “the worst year of my life,” NASA awarded it a $1.6 billion contract to carry cargo to the International Space Station. In his state of relief and jubilation, Musk changed his computer password to “ilovenasa.”

Of all the emerging firms in the age of commercial spaceflight, SpaceX was the most deserving of success. Musk had an eye for engineering talent, and he preached an audacious vision, which attracted young idealists. Impatient, he questioned truisms and cut costs with unrelenting intensity, even if it meant buying a tool on eBay to align a rocket.

Despite its strengths, SpaceX couldn’t triumph in this new age, because the idea of commercialization was inherently flawed. There wasn’t a market for rocket launches, asteroid mining, or spacesuit design. For his very expensive product, there was one customer, with a limited budget: the U.S. government. That realization ultimately prodded Musk into another line of business. In 2015, he created Starlink. His rockets would launch satellites into orbit to supply Earth with internet service, a far more lucrative business.

Starlink turned SpaceX into a behemoth. Because SpaceX was constantly launching rockets—and not just for NASA—it kept gaining invaluable new data and insights, which allowed it to produce cheaper, better rockets. Because nothing is more exciting to an engineer than actually launching things, the company drained talent from its competition.

Musk’s goal wasn’t to achieve the banal status of monopolist. “The lens of getting to Mars has motivated every SpaceX decision,” Musk told Isaacson. When he created Starlink, he did so because it would supply him with the capital to build rockets powerful enough to carry humanity to Mars.

Musk, who describes himself as a “cultural Christian,” is not an especially religious person. But his imagination is fixed on the end of days—the possibility of an “extinction event”—because his childhood experiences push his adult anxieties in the direction of the catastrophic. In South Africa, he came of age amid the decaying of the apartheid state, which had once promised to safeguard his racial caste. His family, like his society, was fracturing. When he was 8, his parents divorced. He now recalls his father as a monstrous figure. “Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done,” Musk once told Rolling Stone. (Errol Musk told Rolling Stone that “he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone,” and later said that his son’s comments were about their political differences at the time.)

Given this turbulence—and the paucity of reliable authority in his early life—it’s hardly surprising that Musk would fear the worst. He found refuge from the world’s harsh realities in the pages of sci-fi novels. But visions of apocalypse are the genre’s elemental motif, and the fiction he devoured often magnified his dread.

Musk sought out works that offered both cause for despair and a vision of transcendence. Those Asimov novels featured hyperrational heroes, many of them engineers, who saved humanity by building space colonies where civilization could begin anew. Musk borrowed his self-conception from these protagonists.

From an early age, the colonization of Mars became Musk’s idée fixe. At various points, he has described his companies as contributing to that overarching mission. Tesla’s Cybertrucks are vehicles that could be adapted to traverse the Martian terrain; its solar panels, a potential energy source for a future colony. He has even reportedly claimed that his social-media platform, X, could serve as an experiment in decentralized governance—testing how a Martian outpost might use consensus as the basis for lawmaking, because he envisions a minimalist government on the red planet.

At SpaceX, Musk’s employees have begun sketching the contours of life on Mars. One team is designing housing and communal spaces; Musk has already named the first Martian city Terminus, after a planetary colony in Asimov’s novels. Other teams are developing spacesuits tailored to the planet’s harsh environment and exploring the feasibility of human reproduction there. (When The New York Times reported on these teams, Musk denied their existence.)

No engineering challenge in human history rivals the audacity of making Mars a place humans can call home. Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX’s president and chief operating officer, calls it a “fixer-upper” planet, a hilarious understatement. Mars’s atmosphere is 95 percent carbon dioxide and laced with nitrogen, among other elements and a smattering of toxins. Temperatures can plunge to –225 degrees Fahrenheit. My colleague Ross Andersen once memorably described what would happen to a human body on Mars: “If you were to stroll onto its surface without a spacesuit, your eyes and skin would peel away like sheets of burning paper, and your blood would turn to steam, killing you within 30 seconds.” Even with a suit, protection would be tenuous: Cosmic radiation would seep through, and Martian dust storms—filled with abrasive, electrically charged particles—could bypass seams and seals.

[Read: To get to Mars, NASA might finally need to hire explorers]

These impossible conditions are compounded by Mars’s distance from Earth. Launches are feasible only about once every 26 months, when the planets’ orbits align to minimize travel time and fuel requirements. Even then, it takes roughly eight months for a spacecraft to reach Mars, making it exceedingly difficult to resupply a colony or rescue its inhabitants.

When challenged about these mortal dangers, Musk is disarmingly relaxed, and has said that he himself would make the journey. “People will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States,” he told Isaacson. “But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.”

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in March 2025. (Manuel Mazzanti / NurPhoto / AP)

To warm the planet, he proposes detonating nuclear bombs over Mars’s poles, which he claims could induce a greenhouse effect—an idea he relishes, perhaps as a troll. SpaceX once sold T-shirts bearing the slogan Nuke Mars. According to a top scientist at the Russian space agency, Roscosmos, it would take more than 10,000 nuclear-tipped missiles to carry out Musk’s plan. Even Wernher von Braun’s fictional doppelgänger, Dr. Strangelove, might have winced at such breezy talk of thermonuclear explosions.

President Kennedy was also willing to take absurd risks in pursuit of cosmic ambition, invoking the Cold War imperative to “bear any burden.” But he did so to demonstrate national greatness. Musk is seeking to spend trillions—and risk human lives—to demonstrate his own. Because his reality emerges from fiction, Musk is untethered from any sense of earthly constraints. His sense of his own role in the plot emerges from his desire to leap into myth.

Musk’s fixation on Mars also functions as a kind of ancestor worship, echoing a family mythology of flight from decline. In 1950, his grandfather Joshua Haldeman left Canada for South Africa in search of a freer society—one he believed could withstand the collapse of Western civilization. Haldeman’s doomsday rhetoric railed against Jewish bankers and “hordes of Coloured people,” whom he claimed were being manipulated to destroy “White Christian Civilization.” In the rise of apartheid, he saw not repression but redemption, a last stand for the values he held sacred.

[Read: Elon Musk’s anti-Semitic, apartheid-loving grandfather]

Like his grandfather, Musk is obsessed with staving off civilizational collapse. He does not voice his fears in openly racist terms—instead framing them in the language of freedom and survival—but he is fixated on the notion of a gene pool with diminishing intelligence. “If each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad,” he told the biographer Ashlee Vance. His rhetoric is provocative, but slippery enough to avoid outright extremism.

Over years of statements, social-media posts, and interviews, however, a pattern has emerged: Musk sees Mars not merely as a lifeboat but as a laboratory—an opportunity to reengineer humanity. On a new planet, far from Earth’s chaos and constraint, he imagines a society remade in his own image.

This belief is rooted in a kind of technological social Darwinism, the idea that evolution can be steered, or even upgraded, by engineering. It’s how he describes an animating premise of Neuralink, the company he co-founded that is developing brain-computer interfaces that aim to merge human cognition with machines and effectively create a species of cyborgs.

The same spirit infuses Musk’s obsession with procreation, and he’s doing his part. He now has at least 14 children, by The Wall Street Journal’s count, with four biological mothers. In his worldview, apocalypse and salvation converge: Either we become a race of engineered brilliance, or we vanish, and Mars is the greatest opportunity for remaking humanity. In a sense, it follows a classic pattern of migration. The bold depart in search of opportunity, while those who remain face extinction. Survival becomes a test of worth. Those who stay behind will, by their inaction, mark themselves as unfit for the future.

Once settlers arrive on Mars, Musk has suggested that life forms—possibly including humans—might be bioengineered to survive the planet’s harsh environment. In one interview, he noted that humanity has long shaped organisms “by sort of selective breeding.” Humans, he intimated, could be bred like cows. He’s reportedly prepared to supply his own genetic material to the effort. Sources told the Times that Musk has offered to donate his sperm to help seed a Martian colony (which Musk later denied).

Using a concept borrowed from Asimov’s fiction, Musk says that Martian colonists will serve as “the light of consciousness.” They are humanity’s last hope, the counterweight to a dark age that could follow Earth’s destruction. But what’s dark is his vision of abandoning Earth and investing the species’ faith in a self-selected elite, one that mirrors Musk’s own values, and perhaps even his traits. The idea is megalomaniacal, and is the antithesis of the old NASA ideal: for all mankind.

In the earliest hours of a spring morning, I drove across a Florida causeway, through a nature reserve filled with alligators and wild boars, to hallowed ground: Launch Complex 39A, once a stage for NASA’s majesty.

More than half a century ago, Apollo 11 began its ascent to the moon here. During the space race, it was perhaps the most exciting place on the planet, poised between glory and disaster: 11 Apollo missions lifted off from here, followed by 82 space-shuttle launches. NASA framed 39A for the television era: an enormous American flag fluttering at one end of the horizon, a giant digital countdown clock at the other. Even now, a weathered CBS News sign hangs on a small cinder-block building with a perfect view of the site—the same spot where Walter Cronkite once narrated liftoffs in his authoritative baritone.

By 2013, the launchpad had become an expensive, unused relic, but because of its presence on the National Register of Historic Places, it couldn’t be torn down. Musk coveted the site, as did his longtime competitor, Jeff Bezos. But at the time, Bezos didn’t have a rocket capable of flying from 39A. SpaceX won the rights to lease the launchpad for the next 20 years. The old theater of American dreams now belonged to Musk.

I arrived at 39A to watch the launch of Falcon 9—SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, the height of a 20-story building—which would help deliver cargo to the International Space Station, circling in low Earth orbit. There’s no alternative to the Falcon 9, and there’s no rival to SpaceX. For the time being, the company is the only domestic entity, public or private, with the capacity to deliver crew and cargo to the space station.

Lyndon Johnson once said that “control of space means control of the world.” In his day, space was a way to project national strength to a global audience through displays of technical superiority. Today, it has become a domain of warfare, alongside land, sea, and air. Modern combat operations rely on space-based systems that guide munitions, coordinate communications, and spy on adversaries. Without dominance in orbit, terrestrial forces would be deaf, blind, and largely immobile. In 2019, then, the Pentagon created the Space Force as the sixth branch of the military.

If space is power, then Musk’s role is badly understated. It’s no longer accurate to call him merely the world’s richest earthling. The United States is now dependent on him in its quest to command space. Through its Starshield division, SpaceX provides space-based communication for the U.S. armed forces; its satellites can reportedly track hypersonic and ballistic missiles and extend the government’s surveillance reach to nearly every corner of the globe. In April, the Space Force awarded SpaceX a majority of its contracts for a batch of national-security missions over the coming years.

Some of this work involves agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office, placing it within the penumbra of classification. The true extent of the government’s reliance on SpaceX is largely obscured, rarely scrutinized, and only loosely regulated. Yet the dependency is undeniable. If Musk were to withhold support—out of principle, pique, or profit motive—the government could find itself stranded. None of SpaceX’s competitors yet possesses the capability to replace it. (A Space Force spokesperson said that it relies on “a number of industry partners,” including SpaceX, and continues to seek “to broaden the diversity of potential vendors,” adding that the Department of Defense “exercises rigorous oversight” of its contracts. The spokesperson also denied claims that SpaceX’s satellites track missiles.)

The war in Ukraine has offered a chilling glimpse of the risks posed by Musk’s role as interstellar gatekeeper. In the early days of the invasion, SpaceX rushed to supply Ukraine with Starlink terminals, helping to replace communications systems debilitated by Russian cyberattacks and advancing troops. It was a noble gesture and a strategic boon. Ukrainian forces, empowered by the new technology, coordinated scrappy, asymmetrical tactics that blunted Russian advances.

But Musk’s commitment soon wavered. In September 2022, SpaceX denied a Ukrainian request to extend Starlink coverage to Crimea, effectively blocking a planned strike on Russian naval forces in Sevastopol. (Starting that fall, Musk began speaking with Vladimir Putin at length, according to the Journal, troubling the U.S. intelligence community.) In the months that followed, the company imposed new geographic limits on Starlink’s use, restricting its application in areas where Ukraine might otherwise target Russia’s vulnerabilities. Musk framed the move as an act of prudent restraint that would help avert World War III. But it also exposed an unsettling reality: Ukraine’s battlefield operations were subject to the discretion of a single person. “My Starlink system is the backbone of the Ukrainian army,” he posted on X. “Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off.”

Musk’s preeminence marks a profound shift in the history of American political economy. During the Cold War, the military-industrial complex was driven by corporations that operated as handmaidens to the state. They had outsize influence, but remained largely bureaucratic, gray-flannel institutions—cogs in a sprawling, profitable machine. Musk is different. Years of hagiographic media coverage and his immense social-media reach birthed legions of fanboys and nurtured a cult of personality. His achievements command awe.

Photo-illustration by Fernando Pino1

In the damp Florida night, I stood on a sandbank and trained my eyes on Launch Complex 39A as the countdown clock ticked toward zero. And then, without the benefit of Cronkite’s narration, I watched the Falcon 9 violently part the darkness, with a payload bound for the space station. A few minutes later, a light appeared in the sky: The reusable rocket was returning home. Majestic and imperious, it cast a warm glow over the palm trees.

For a moment this spring, Musk’s grand ambitions seemed like they might buckle. In Washington, it had long been assumed that Musk and Trump would turn on each other. When it finally happened, the spark, fittingly, was NASA. Musk had pushed to install his friend Jared Isaacman as head of the agency—a move that stank of cronyism. In 2021, Isaacman, a tech entrepreneur, had paid SpaceX millions to chase a childhood dream of flying to space. That deal soon led to a friendship, and eventually, his company owning a stake in SpaceX itself.

[Read: MAGA goes to Mars]

When Trump soured on Musk, he struck where it hurt most. Annoyed after learning of Isaacman’s past donations to Democratic campaigns, the president withdrew the nomination on May 31. Musk received the move as one in a string of betrayals and erupted online, warning that the Jeffrey Epstein files would implicate Trump and that the president’s spending bill was a “disgusting abomination.” The clash soon shifted to space. Musk threatened to decommission the spacecraft resupplying the International Space Station; Trump blustered that he would order a review of SpaceX’s government contracts.

Yet for all the rancor, there is no sign that SpaceX has actually suffered. Trump and Musk have dismembered the federal bureaucracy, but its old tendencies are still prevailing; the apparatus clings to the vendors that have delivered results. Even as Trump raged, Washington’s dependence on Musk was growing. In June, a Space Force commander said that SpaceX will play a crucial part in the MILNET program, a new constellation of 480-plus satellites. Reportedly, the Pentagon will pay for it; the intelligence community will oversee it; Musk will run it.

In its proposed 2026 budget, the Trump administration moved to bankroll Musk’s deeper ambitions, albeit with a fraction of the gargantuan sum required. Trump has proposed spending $1 billion to accelerate a mission to Mars and fund the design of spacesuits, landing systems, and other technologies that would make a voyage feasible.

The money spent on human space exploration will be pried from NASA’s other programs, even as the agency’s total budget is set to shrink by nearly 25 percent and its workforce by one-third. To fulfill Musk’s cosmic destiny, the administration is gutting NASA’s broader scientific mission—the thing that NASA does best. (When asked about this shift, a NASA spokesperson described “leading the way in human exploration of our solar system” as the agency’s “core mission,” and added that it is “contributing to a competitive market that will increase commercial innovation.”) Human spaceflight has floundered for decades, haunted by its inability to replicate its greatest achievements and whipsawed by changing presidential priorities. And the importance of astronauts to the enterprise of exploration, which was always questionable, has further diminished as the quality of robots has improved.

At the same time, and without attracting the same kind of fanfare, NASA continues to display extraordinary acumen in science; its research initiatives are arguably the most profound ventures in all of government. They address the greatest mysteries in the universe: How did life begin? Are we alone in the cosmos?

The government—so often viewed as a soul-sapping bureaucracy—has helped supply answers to these most spiritual of questions. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the Cosmic Background Explorer provided empirical support for the Big Bang theory. In 2020, after the OSIRIS-REx probe reached the asteroid Bennu, it collected a sample from a type of primordial projectile thought to have delivered life’s building blocks to early Earth. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, NASA helped determine the age of the universe, affirmed the existence of dark energy, and extended humanity’s gaze into distant galaxies and black holes. By capturing light from galaxies as they existed more than 13 billion years ago, one of NASA’s telescopes has effectively peered into the universe’s distant past.

For all of Musk’s mockery of NASA’s supposed lack of ambition, the agency had already mounted a daring campaign to explore Mars—albeit with robots, not settlers. Over the decades, it sent a fleet of rovers (Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, Perseverance) to wander the plains of the red planet, drilling into rock and searching for ancient traces of water and life.

NASA’s lenses point inward as well as outward. Its satellites have documented the melting of the polar ice caps and the destruction of forests, alerting humanity to the planet’s precarity. Unlike the technological spin-offs NASA often touts to Congress to justify its existence, these discoveries aren’t fleeting breakthroughs in applied engineering. They are the path to humanity’s self-knowledge—discoveries that private firms will never pursue, because their value can’t be monetized.

Put differently, Trump’s budget is a cultural document. It reflects a shift in public values. Not so long ago, the astronomer Carl Sagan shaped how Americans thought about space. He did so through elegant books and his television series, Cosmos, which reached an estimated 500 million viewers worldwide. At its core, his project was to extol the virtues of the scientific method, which requires and promotes skepticism and humility—a way of thinking that could help society resist the lure of authoritarianism. He exuded wonder, a value he hoped to cultivate in Americans, and harkened back to the humanism of the Enlightenment, which was unfussy about the boundaries between philosophy and science.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Last week, the Trump administration made its latest and most comically desperate attempt to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, when Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that she had unearthed bombshell proof of a Barack Obama–era plot to invent the conclusion that Russia had intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Soon after, Trump’s Truth Social account circulated an AI video depicting Obama being led off to prison. The message to his followers was that this scandal, not the other scandal involving a certain wealthy sex offender, was the one to focus on.

This message contains multiple levels of dishonesty. On the surface, the effort to draw attention away from Epstein is glaring. Below that lies the wild claim that Obama or his top officials might somehow be charged with crimes. And the fantasy of prosecutions rests on yet another ludicrous claim: that Russia did not attempt to help Trump win in 2016. The president has managed to open a debate over whether the intelligence community’s conclusion that Russia helped Trump was a crime, when in reality it was not even a mistake.

Last Wednesday, Gabbard claimed that she’d found “irrefutable evidence” that Obama and his aides had concocted a “contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win.” Trump has insisted for nine years that Russia did not intervene on his behalf, and through sheer force of repetition has turned this into something close to official Republican Party dogma.

The Obama administration and the CIA adamantly deny any political motive behind their conclusion that Russia was trying to help Trump win. “We definitely had the intel to show with high probability that the specific goal of the Russians was to get Trump elected,” Susan Miller, who helped lead the CIA’s analysis at the time, recently told NBC.

[Jonathan Chait: Trump’s Epstein answers are getting worse]

Of course, if you think Obama and the CIA were secretly plotting to besmirch Trump’s election victory, you probably don’t put much stock in their denials. But the Senate Intelligence Committee similarly concluded in 2020 that Russia’s goal was, as the panel’s bipartisan report put it, “to damage the Clinton Campaign and tarnish what it expected might be a Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and generally undermine the U.S. democratic process.” Trump has not explained how a “contrived” analysis could have won the endorsement of all eight Republican committee members, including Marco Rubio, Trump’s current secretary of state.

The committee based this conclusion on “a variety of information, including raw intelligence reporting.” (Subsequent reporting revealed that the United States had a high-level human source close to the Kremlin.) But the conclusion that Russia tried to help Trump doesn’t have to rely on the authority of the bipartisan committee that investigated the question, or on the still-confidential intelligence that helped support the conclusion. It’s obvious from the public fact pattern.

In 2016, Russian television—as well as RT, the network Russia uses to propagandize abroad—was relentlessly propagandizing on Trump’s behalf. Discerning which candidate Moscow favored in the race is about as hard as guessing which candidate the owner of Fox News supports.

Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election included using trolls and bots to seed social-media messages attacking Hillary Clinton and praising Trump. The content reflected the same themes Putin was pushing in his overt propaganda. Far more consequential was an operation to steal and disseminate Democratic Party emails, thousands of which were released in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing recording of Trump boasting about sexually assaulting women. Russia wasn’t trying to make the American political system look bad; it was trying to make Clinton look bad and Trump look good.

[Kaitlyn Tiffany: Conspiracy theorists are turning on the president]

Putin’s Russia has a long-standing habit of intervening in foreign elections to bolster nationalist candidates who criticize Western alliances. Frequently, those interventions involve covert payments to the parties or their candidates. Not least because prominent Trump operatives refused to cooperate, the Robert Mueller investigation never definitively established the extent to which the Trump campaign worked with Russia. But even the known elements closely track with the pattern of how Russia behaves when it is trying to help a friendly candidate win.

Trump’s strategy of promiscuous dissembling often allows his smaller lies to be injected into the country’s political bloodstream as his more extravagant lies draw attention. In this case, his main intention is to change the subject from Epstein to literally anything else. That he is simultaneously managing to inscribe his revisionist history of the 2016 election into the public record is a secondary victory Trump does not deserve.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

For the first time in the nearly three-decade history of U.S. professional women’s basketball, its star players have become household names. What would it take for them to get paid accordingly?

While warming up recently for the WNBA All-Star Game, players wore T-shirts that read Pay Us What You Owe Us, in reference to the ongoing collective-bargaining negotiations between the players and the league. Until that point, there had not been much buzz about the WNBA’s negotiations, but the shirts had their intended result, taking the players’ labor fight mainstream. As the WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert presented the All-Star Game MVP award to Napheesa Collier, fans inside Indianapolis’s Gainbridge Fieldhouse booed Engelbert and chanted, “Pay them!”

Outside the arena, however, the reaction was more mixed. As the WNBA became a trending topic on X and national pundits began to weigh in, many turned out to not share the perspective of the fans at the game. Dan Hollaway, a co-host of the podcast Drinkin’ Bros, posted on X that the players should actually be paying back the team owners, given the league’s unprofitability: “Ladies, you owe, not the other way around.” Another post critical of the players’ efforts was viewed nearly 40 million times. “Imagine being an employee at a company that has NEVER turned a profit and showing up to work in these shirts,” Jason Howerton wrote.

Many critics cited a New York Post article from last October reporting that, despite the WNBA’s explosive growth in 2024—which was punctuated by the arrival of the Indiana Fever sensation Caitlin Clark—the league was expected to lose $40 million that year. A source close to the situation told the Post that the NBA, which owns a large share of the women’s league, was antsy about the WNBA’s unprofitability.

The timing of the Post’s report was interesting. It came three days before the WNBA players’ union announced that it was opting out of the current collective-bargaining agreement. To some degree, this is part of the gamesmanship that takes place whenever there is labor tension between players and owners. During the 2011 NBA lockout, owners claimed that they were on track to lose $300 million that season and had suffered similar losses since 2005. Further analysis showed that this wasn’t true, and that the league was in fact profitable.

[Jemele Hill: The one downside of gender equality in sports]

To be fair, claims that the WNBA has been unable to turn a profit during its 28 years of existence are more credible. Over that time frame, NBA owners have indeed spent a considerable amount of money to keep the league afloat. But that spending wasn’t charity; it was an investment. And the investment is very clearly about to pay off.

The 30 NBA team owners own 42 percent of the WNBA; another 42 percent is controlled by private WNBA ownership, and the remaining 16 percent belongs to an investment group that stimulated a $75 million capital infusion in 2022. Among the notable names in that investment group are former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, The Boston Globe CEO Linda Henry, and Michael and Susan Dell.

The capital raise was so big because investors could see what was coming. The WNBA’s profile had already been growing steadily. Then came Clark, whose presence—and rivalry with fellow rising star Angel Reese, of the Chicago Sky—is poised to financially elevate the WNBA beyond anyone’s expectations.

Last year set popularity records for the WNBA across the board, and the growth shows no signs of slowing. In 2024, ESPN, the league’s primary television partner, saw a 170 percent boost in viewership. Overall ratings are up by 23 percent this year. Ticket sales are up 26 percent, and merchandise sales have increased by 40 percent.

The most important figure is $2.2 billion. That’s the value of the 11-year media-rights deal that the WNBA secured last year, which starts in 2026. It includes partnerships with Disney (ESPN’s parent company), Prime Video, and NBC Universal. The league also signed a separate deal with Ion Television to air games on Friday nights. Terms weren’t disclosed, but reports speculated that between the two deals, the WNBA has a media package worth close to $3 billion over the next decade.

This colossal source of revenue helps explain the immense valuations of WNBA franchises.

The WNBA will add five expansion teams by 2030. Owners in the three cities that have so far been awarded a franchise—Detroit, Philadelphia, and Cleveland—paid a fee of $250 million each to join the league. Ten of the existing 13 WNBA teams are valued at $200 million or more. The Golden State Valkyries top the list, at an estimated $500 million. The Valkyries, which in 2023 became the WNBA’s first expansion team in 17 years, are the first women’s professional sports team to ever be valued that high. They also lead the league in attendance—a sign that the sport’s popularity doesn’t depend on Clark.

[Alex Kirshner: Caitlin Clark is just the beginning]

With such outsize growth happening across the league, the fact that WNBA players currently receive a mere 9.3 percent of the league’s total revenue is embarrassing. (That works out to about $78,000 for Clark and a bit less for Reese, who are still on their rookie contracts, and just over $249,000 for the league’s highest-paid veterans.) By comparison, players in the NBA, the NHL, and the NFL all receive about half of their league’s sports-related income. Even in the Ultimate Fighting Championship—which has a nasty history of underpaying its fighters—the athletes receive 16 to 20 percent of the revenue. The WNBA isn’t yet as big as those leagues, and its players have never said they should be paid as much as Patrick Mahomes or LeBron James. Their argument is only that they deserve a similar proportion of the revenue generated by their labor.

Every professional sports league has experienced financial ups and downs, but that has never stopped the players from demanding and receiving more. The NBA was in such bad shape in the late 1960s and early ’70s that teams had to pool together money to subsidize the salaries of the league’s top players, including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Elvin Hayes. Heading into the early ’80s, the league’s future was precarious because of rampant drug problems among players and low television ratings. The arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird helped change all of that.

In every sports league, players have had to fight for their worth. At 28 years old, the WNBA is arguably in better shape than the NBA was at the same juncture. As the league grows, the players’ salaries should be growing right along with it.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

On April 29, 1999, precision-guided NATO bombs tore through the brick facades of two defense-ministry buildings in Belgrade, the capital of the rump state of Yugoslavia. The targets were chosen more for symbolic reasons than operational ones: The American-led coalition wanted to send the country’s authoritarian government, at that time engaged in a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, a clear message that human rights weren’t just words. They were backed by weapons.

For decades, the ruins of the buildings, on either side of a major artery through central Belgrade, were left largely untouched. Tangled concrete and twisted rebar stuck out of pancaked floors. Serbian architects fought to preserve the destroyed buildings; the government has treated them as a war memorial.

At the time of the 1999 NATO bombings, Aleksandar Vučić, Serbia’s minister of information, was tasked with denouncing the West and backing his country’s despot, Slobodan Milošević. Today, Vučić has risen in the ranks to become Serbia’s president—an apologist for Russia who attacks the press, has been accused of nurturing close ties to organized crime, and is rapidly dragging his country toward authoritarianism.

Vučić is not Milošević—he has not led his country into genocidal wars or faced judgment for war crimes at The Hague—but until recently, he might have expected that his authoritarian style would make relations with Washington rocky. That time is past. Instead of harshly condemning Serbia’s abuses, America’s president, Donald Trump, will build a Trump Tower Belgrade on top of the defense buildings’ ruins. “Belgrade welcomes a Global Icon,” the slick website for Trump Belgrade proclaims. “TRUMP. Unrivaled Luxury.” The contract for the project has been signed with Affinity Partners, Jared Kushner’s investment firm, which is largely funded with billions of dollars in cash from Saudi Arabia.

[Read: The US is switching sides]

This story is the material expression of the second Trump administration’s turn against a long-standing tradition of Western democracy promotion—and of an embrace of conflicts of interest from which the world’s despots can only take inspiration. The authoritarians who govern small countries such as Serbia no longer need to fear the condemnation, much less the bombs, of the American president when they crack down on their opponents, enrich themselves, or tighten their grip on power. On the contrary—the American flirtation with similar practices emboldens them. With Trump’s unapologetic foreign policy in his second term, American democracy promotion is effectively dead.

Prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse, Western diplomats cared far more about whether a dictator was an ally or adversary to the Soviets than about the quality of a country’s elections or its respect for human rights. If diplomats from Washington or London pushed too hard for democracy, there was a credible risk that a Western ally could defect and become a friend to Moscow. Once the Soviet Union ceased to exist, the world’s despots no longer had so much cover; Western diplomats could now push harder. New norms developed, which led to a rapid surge in the number of competitive, multiparty elections. Human rights were no longer just an aspirational buzzword. Some countries lost foreign aid or were shunned by the international community if their government committed atrocities.

This pressure to adopt democracy and protect human rights was never applied equally. Powerful countries, such as a rising China, became largely immune to Western cajoling. And strategically important countries, such as Saudi Arabia, in many cases got a free pass, facing little more than rhetorical condemnation while presidents and prime ministers continued to shake hands and ink major arms deals. Meanwhile, in smaller countries, such as Togo, Madagascar, or the former Yugoslavia, the post–Cold War push for democracy and human rights often came not just with lip service, but also with teeth. After all, the White House could afford to lose the goodwill of Madagascar in a dispute over values; its geopolitical priorities would suffer little downside. Moreover, weak countries such as Madagascar depended on foreign aid, such that Western governments wielded far more leverage in them than they did in larger, more self-sufficient countries. For a while, then, small-time despots faced a credible threat: Go too far, rights defenders could hope to warn strongmen, and a Western ambassador could soon be knocking on the palace door.

None of this is to say that Western powers were always on the side of the angels. During the Cold War, Western governments made lofty speeches about democracy and human rights while funding coups and arming politically convenient rebels. The CIA played a role in overthrowing popularly legitimate governments, such as those of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran, Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, and Salvador Allende in Chile. Even after the Cold War, Western governments have cozied up to plenty of friendly dictatorships, in countries such as Saudi Arabia and Equatorial Guinea.

[Read: Biden’s democracy-defense credo does not serve US interests]

And yet, particularly in the last 30 years, Western pressure and foreign aid have been significant forces for global democratization. Dictators and despots knew that the world was paying attention, which gave them pause before they turned their guns on their own people. Foreign aid became tied to the verdicts of election monitors, which drastically expanded operations after the end of the Cold War. With funding from the United States and other Western governments, opposition parties, journalists, and civil-society organizations received training on how to bolster democracy. And when political transitions toward democracy took place, as in Tunisia after the Arab Spring, billions of dollars in support flowed in. Partly because of these shifting international norms, the expansion of political freedom was so abrupt after the end of the Cold War that many believed democracy, having won the ideological battle against rival models of governance such as fascism and communism, had become an inexorable force.

But the democracy boom under Bill Clinton gave way to failed wars under George W. Bush and inaction under Barack Obama. Bush, who justified wars in Afghanistan and Iraq partly under the guise of a democracy-and-freedom agenda, inadvertently discredited the notion of values-based “nation building.” A widespread perception among American adversaries took root that democracy promotion was just a code word for “regime change carried out by American troops.” This gave dictators political cover to boot out international NGOs hoping to bolster democracy and human rights, branding them as mere precursors for a heavy-handed invasion. Obama, picking up the pieces of that failed foreign policy, downplayed the grand vision of a more democratic world as a guiding principle of American diplomacy, even as countries across the globe began to pivot toward authoritarian rule.

Now the world is steadily becoming less democratic. According to data from Freedom House, the world has become more authoritarian every year since 2006. Trump’s second term may provide the most potent autocratic accelerant yet. In his first term, Trump routinely praised dictators, including in a memorable moment when he boasted about exchanging “beautiful letters” with North Korea’s tyrant. President Joe Biden, with his much-touted Summit for Democracy, tried to recenter democracy as a core principle of the State Department, but that effort was overtaken by successive geopolitical emergencies in Ukraine and Gaza. Now, with his return to power, Trump has gone further than before to fully uproot democracy promotion from American foreign policy.

The list of dismantled initiatives is long. In the first months of the second Trump administration, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency not only slashed America’s foreign-aid machinery, effectively destroying USAID, but also targeted the National Endowment for Democracy: a bipartisan grant-making organization established under Ronald Reagan to strengthen democratic values abroad. The Trump administration has effectively kneecapped Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, outlets that have aimed to provide news and information to those living under oppressive regimes. Once viewed as bulwarks against authoritarian censorship, these platforms are now overseen by Trump acolyte Kari Lake. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently announced an overhaul of the State Department that effectively eliminates programs that work toward peace building and democracy.

As an extra gift to the world’s despots, on July 16, Rubio signaled that America will no longer stand in the way of election rigging: Washington will condemn autocrats who use sham election-style events to stay in power only if a major American foreign-policy interest is at stake, the secretary made clear, and from now on, American comments on foreign elections will be “brief, focused on congratulating the winning candidate and, when appropriate, noting shared foreign policy interests.”

The world’s worst dictators can rest assured that the next American diplomat to come knocking on their palace doors is more likely to be looking for property rights than human rights. Countries such as Saudi Arabia, which always have had a free pass, might not notice the difference. But brutal regimes in less-noticed parts of the world have now gotten the memo that the Trump White House is indifferent to democracy and human rights, and they are acting accordingly. Cambodia has cracked down on journalists while courting American military officials. Tanzania’s leader recently arrested his main rival and charged him with treason. Indonesia’s president has begun changing laws, militarizing the country, and undermining the principle of civilian rule. Nigeria’s president made a power grab that critics say was blatantly illegal. And El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, who had faced international criticisms for egregious human-rights abuses, isn’t just absolved from American pressure—he’s become a much-celebrated friend of the White House, lauded because of his gulags.

[Read: El Salvador’s exceptional prison state]

Already, in regions such as Southeast Asia, brave pro-democracy reformers find themselves newly vulnerable and isolated. In Myanmar, pro-democracy forces fighting the country’s military dictatorship long benefitted from American aid. The DOGE cuts put an end to that—and gave the repressive junta an enormous boost. In Thailand, a human-rights organization that once sheltered dissidents fleeing Cambodia and Laos has been forced to close its safehouses, allowing those regimes to more easily hunt down and even kill their opponents. These funding streams had accounted for a tiny proportion of the U.S. government’s budget, but their elimination sends a strong signal to the world’s autocrats: that virtually no one will now interfere with their designs.

Admittedly, the United States is less powerful than it once was, and other countries have always had their own domestic agendas, regardless of what Washington has said or done. But that a growing number of the world’s despots no longer have to weigh economic costs or diplomatic consequences for crushing their opponents has already made a difference. Thomas Carothers and Oliver Stuenkel of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace highlighted the fact that shortly after Musk referred to USAID as a “criminal organization,” autocrats in Hungary, Serbia, and Slovakia began targeting pro-democracy NGOs that had received money from the agency.

President Reagan once celebrated the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” a “beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom, for all the pilgrims from all the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness, toward home.” That is apparently no longer the aspiration of the American government, which now sends its foreign pilgrims to a dehumanizing prison in El Salvador, arrests judges, and suggests that following the country’s Constitution may be optional.

For democracy to flourish, citizens must yearn for it—and demand it of their governments. At the moment, few can be looking with admiration to the United States as a model. Already in 2024, according to a 34-country survey conducted by Pew Research, the most common perception of American democracy was that the United States “used to be a good example, but has not been in recent years.” The first months of the second Trump administration can hardly have improved that impression.

Nonetheless, democracy—which provides citizens with a meaningful say over how their lives are governed—still has mass appeal across the globe. Brave, principled activists continue to stand up to despots, even though they do so at much greater peril today than even just a few months ago.

In Serbia, for example, pro-democracy, anti-corruption protests have persisted for months. Students and workers are demanding immediate reforms and calling on Vučić to resign. In years past, precisely this kind of movement would have provoked White House press releases, diplomatic visits, and barbed statements from the Oval Office. In April, at long last, came a high-profile visit to Serbia from someone closely linked to the Trump administration. But instead of offering support for the pro-democracy demonstrators, this American emissary condemned the protests and implied that they were the sinister work of American left-wingers and USAID.

That visitor was none other than Donald Trump Jr., who had arrived in Belgrade to fawn over Vučić in an exclusive interview for his Triggered with Don Jr. podcast, in the months before the newest Trump Tower opens for presales.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In the 1980s, the world’s largest producer of shoes was the Communist Soviet Union. In his 1994 book, Dismantling Utopia, Scott Shane reported that the U.S.S.R. “was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year—twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.”

And yet, despite this colossal output of Soviet-socialist footwear, queues formed around the block at the mere rumor that a shop might have foreign shoes for sale: “The comfort, the fit, the design, and the size mix of Soviet shoes were so out of sync with what people needed and wanted that they were willing to stand in line for hours to buy the occasional pair, usually imported, that they liked,” Shane continued.

The Soviet economic system put millions of people to work converting useful raw materials into unwanted final products. When released from the factory or the office, those workers then consumed their leisure hours scavenging for the few available non-useless goods. The whole system represented a colossal cycle of waste.

For a younger generation of Americans, the concept of “socialism” is an empty box into which all manner of hopes and dreams may be placed. But once upon a time, some humans took very seriously the project to build an economy without private property and without such market rewards as profits. What they got instead was unwearable shoes. But memories fade; hopes and dreams endure.

[Read: Start budgeting now]

Growing numbers of Americans feel that the economy does not work for them. Donald Trump’s stewardship of the economy has blatantly favored insiders and cronies. And so, in the 2020s, Americans find themselves debating ideas that once seemed dead and dusty, and in some cases, electing politicians who champion them. The new socialism addresses the problems that wrecked the old socialism only by denying or ignoring them. But if socialism is to be beaten back, and if market economics are to uphold themselves in democratic competition, exposing the unworkability of proposed alternatives won’t be enough. It will be necessary to reform and cleanse the market economics indispensable to sustaining Americans’ standard of living.

During socialism’s heyday, the world’s leading minds hailed the superior potential of a planned socialist economy. Albert Einstein wrote in 1949:

The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals … A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.

In 1960, the Harvard economist Abram Bergson predicted that the Soviet economy was on a trajectory to overtake the U.S. economy. Bergson’s was not a crank opinion at all. Similar estimates underlay CIA analysis of the Soviet economy well into the ’60s. Americans might reject socialism for themselves as oppressive but, the theory held, as unlovely as Soviet socialism was, it could produce positive results.

The same overestimation of the U.S.S.R.’s productive capacity was also applied to Communist China. On the U.S. Senate floor in 1959, the future president John F. Kennedy gave a speech in which he accepted almost completely at face value China’s claims of a “Great Leap Forward”: “The mobilization of the unemployed mass of Chinese rural workers through economic communes, cottage industry, small pig-iron schemes, and all the rest is an achievement whose political and intellectual impact in less developed areas is bound to be immense.”

In actuality, the Great Leap Forward amounted to perhaps the deadliest self-inflicted calamity in human history. Mao Zedong’s forced industrialization program caused a famine that killed at least 23 million people, and perhaps as many as 55 million.

The Soviet economic statistics that so impressed the CIA were faked or meaningless. It did not matter how many pairs of shoes a Soviet factory made if nobody wanted to wear them. To escape Soviet sclerosis, Communist China began, in 1978, to open up first its farm economy, then its industry, to private management, market competition, and foreign investment. Communist Vietnam and other formerly closed and controlled economies followed the Chinese example.

Across the democratic West, socialist ideas went into eclipse. In 1995, under the new leadership of Tony Blair, the British Labour Party amended its party constitution to delete venerable language pledging “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” In Germany in the early 2000s, Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic coalition government introduced the most dramatic reductions in decades to social benefits to push the long-term unemployed back to work. In the United States, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared in 1996, “The era of big government is over.”

The seeming triumph of market economics was not welcomed by all, of course. Those disgruntled by the seeming triumph rejected Margaret Thatcher’s taunt that “there is no alternative,” yet they could not articulate in any concise or coherent way what that alternative might be.

The anti-corporate activist Ralph Nader ran for president in part to challenge the Clinton-era pro-market consensus. In his 2000 campaign as the nominee of the Green Party, Nader assembled an array of grievances: over-lengthy commutes to work; unhealthy meals at fast-food chains; excessive CEO pay; young people getting too much screen time; the criminalization of narcotics; the demise of urban electric-trolley systems. He could not have been more specific about what he opposed. But what was he for? Nader could not say.

And so it went for one project after another to imagine an anti-capitalist future. Some who belonged to the era’s left glumly quoted a saying attributed to the American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Over the quarter century from early 1983 to late 2007, the United States suffered just two brief, mild recessions: one in 1990–91, and a second that lasted only from spring to fall of 2001. From the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second administration to the end of George W. Bush’s first, the U.S. unemployment rate never once reached 8 percent. Over that same period, inflation was low and interest rates steadily declined.

[Read: The world economy is on the brink of epochal change]

Economists call this era “the Great Moderation.” The moderating influence was felt on politics too. For nearly 50 years, Gallup has surveyed Americans’ mood with a consistent series of questions about the general condition of the country. From 1983 to 2007, the proportion of Americans satisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” reached peaks of about 70 percent, and was often above 50 percent.

Then the long period of stability abruptly ended. Over the 15 years from 2007 to 2022, the U.S. economy suffered the Great Recession, the coronavirus pandemic, and post-pandemic inflation: a sequence of bewildering shocks.

You can see the effects in the Gallup polling. Over this period, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as generally satisfied rarely exceeded one-third and often hovered at about a quarter.

The era of moderation yielded to a time of radicalism: Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement, “birtherism,” the wave of militant ideology that acquired the shorthand “woke.” In 2015, in the throes of this radicalism, Hillary Clinton announced her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In a stump speech some weeks later, she listed categories that described the American electorate as she saw it, offering a fascinating portrait of the politics of the 1990s meeting the realities of the 2010s. She dedicated her candidacy equally to “the successful and the struggling,” to “innovators and inventors” as well as “factory workers and food servers.” In other words, she addressed herself to Americans for whom the world was working more or less well, and to familiar and long-established blue-collar categories. She made no specific mention of gig workers, downwardly mobile credentialed professionals, or any of the other restless social categories that multiplied after the shock of 2008–09.

A few weeks after Clinton’s announcement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont declared his campaign for the same Democratic nomination. Sanders was an odd messiah. He had spent a lifetime in politics with little to show for it. No major piece of legislation bore his name, and precious few minor pieces either. An independent socialist, he had stayed aloof from the Democratic Party without building a movement of his own. Few had considered him an inspiring personality or a compelling orator. Yet amid this new radical temper, he quickly gathered a cultlike following—and won 13 million votes, to carry 23 caucuses and primaries. When he ultimately lost to Clinton, the defeat left many of his supporters with resentments that divided leftists from liberals in ways that may have helped Donald Trump win the Electoral College in the general election in November 2016.

In 2002, toward the end of her public career, Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement. “Tony Blair and New Labour,” she replied. “We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

Sanders might say the same about Trump and his Republican Party. Goodbye to Reagan-era enthusiasm for markets and trade: Trump vowed much more aggressive and intrusive government action to protect American businesses and workers from global competition. He also offered a bleak diagnosis of America’s condition, for which the only way forward was to return to the past.

At the same time, Trump’s persona vindicated every critique Sanders might advance about the decadence of late capitalism. Here was a putative billionaire whose business methods involved cheating customers and bilking suppliers. His private life was one scandal after another, and he spent his money on garish and gimcrack displays. He staffed his administration with plutocrats who were flagrantly disdainful of the travails of ordinary people, and with grifters who liked to live high on public expense.

Then, beginning in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic intensified the anti-market feeling. The economic effects enriched those who possessed assets, especially real estate: The median house price in the U.S. had jumped from $317,000 in the spring of 2020 to $443,000 by the end of 2022. The federal pandemic response could also be gamed by business owners; the U.S. government estimates that as much as $200 billion of COVID-relief funds may have been fraudulently pocketed. But if you were a person who rented his or her home and lived on wages, you were almost certainly worse off in 2022 than you had been in 2019. Your wages bought less; your rent cost more.

The outlook was especially bleak for young college graduates. The average new graduate owes more than $28,000 a year in student debt. Hopes of repaying that debt were dimmed by the weak post-COVID job market for new graduates. Joe Biden’s presidential administration did relieve some student debt, but its most ambitious plans to help new graduates were struck down by the Supreme Court as exceeding executive authority.

In some respects, people born since 1990 are more conservative than their elders. Academic surveys find that Americans, male and female, who attended high school in the 2010s express more traditional views about gender roles than those who attended high school in the 1990s. But on economic questions specifically, an observable shift of attitude against markets and capitalism has occurred. Only 40 percent of adults younger than 30 expressed a positive view of capitalism in a 2022 Pew survey, a drop from 52 percent pre-pandemic. Older groups lost faith too, but not so steeply: Among over 65s, a positive view of capitalism dipped from 76 percent pre-pandemic to 73 percent post-pandemic.

This disillusionment has opened the door to self-described socialists in the 2020s. The most recent and most spectacular of this new cohort is Zohran Mamdani, who earlier this month won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City in an upset election.

Mamdani campaigned on promises to raise taxes on New York’s richest inhabitants to finance a bold new program of state enterprise: free bus service, government-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze for the 1 million apartments under city jurisdiction, and a vow to build 200,000 affordable-housing units over the next decade. After the tallies were boosted by New York’s ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote. He now tops polls for the general election in November. His agenda already is influencing Democrats nationwide.

Few if any of the Americans who use the term socialist would today defend Communist central planning. But as they criticize the many failings of contemporary American society, they tend to shirk the obvious counter-question: If not central planning, then what do they want? Liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton proposed to let markets create wealth, which governments would then tax to support social programs. If that’s out of style, if something more radical is sought, then what might that something be? Merely Clintonism with higher taxes? Or a genuine alternative? How can a society that aspires to socialism produce the wealth it wants to redistribute if not by the same old capitalist methods of property, prices, and profits?

The socialists of a century ago promised both a new way to create wealth and a new way to share it. The preeminent American socialist of the early 20th century, Eugene V. Debs, outlined that new system in speeches such as the one he delivered in Girard, Kansas, in 1908:

We Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity shall produce, not for profit but in abundance to satisfy human wants … Every man and woman will then be economically free. They can, without let or hindrance, apply their labor, with the best machinery that can be devised, to all the natural resources, do the work of society and produce for all; and then receive in exchange a certificate of value equivalent to that of their production. Then society will improve its institutions in proportion to the progress of invention. Whether in the city or on the farm, all things productive will be carried forward on a gigantic scale.

As soon as it was attempted, this breathtaking utopian vision bumped into a daunting challenge: Without market prices, how can any of those gigantic socialist enterprises know what to make or how to commit their resources? And without market institutions, including the profit motive, how can we have market prices? Socialist enterprises would blunder about in the dark, unable to communicate with one another, unable to respond to changing circumstances, because they severed the lines of communication that connect economic actors.

Much brainpower was invested over many decades to solve this riddle. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty makes improbably poignant literature out of the desperate hopes of Soviet economists that the new technology of the computer might somehow rescue socialism from its own impossibility.

But there was no escape. There is no socialist way to create wealth. There is only a socialist way to spend wealth. The socialist revival of the past half decade no longer even pretends to worry about wealth production. It exists purely as a new set of claims on existing modes of production: socialist apartments funded in effect by taxes on nonsocialist apartments, socialist grocery stores that do not have to pay the taxes or rent paid by nonsocialist grocery stores.

The beneficiaries of these claims will not necessarily be society’s poorest. New York City distributes affordable-housing units through a process that begins with a lottery but rapidly transforms into a test of skill, savvy, and connections. In the first place, New York favors applicants who work for the city, in itself a step that advantages middle-class people over the truly needy. Then, once the lucky lottery winners get their good news, they must assemble a mass of documents to prove their desirability as tenants—pay stubs, lease records, birth certificates. As an expert on the process explained to a real-estate website: “Once you’ve been selected, it’s all about being organized and efficient.” The people most at risk of homelessness are those least likely to navigate New York’s system of nonmarket and submarket rents.

In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams—elected as a Democrat, though now running for reelection as an independent—cut the ribbon on a $120 million project in Far Rockaway. This outer-borough development offered studios starting at $522 a month, two-bedroom apartments for $809 a month. But the building contained only 224 units. For all the excitement of the lucky beneficiaries, this is the faintest replica of a housing solution—as well as a reality check to Mamdani’s grandiose vision of government-led housing abundance.

Given this disappointing record, why are so many New Yorkers signing up for more and bigger? The short answer is that the debate about socialism is scarcely about socialism at all. Socialism’s catastrophes are today obscure, relegated to a poorly remembered past. Dissatisfaction with the present-day economic system is felt urgently in the here and now.

[Read: Zohran Mamdani’s lesson for the left]

The progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz recently remarked, “Trumponomics is ersatz capitalism.” The president and those around him are accumulating huge fortunes by unashamedly preying on the credulity of their followers. Trump insiders have used political power to harass regulatory agencies and cripple tax enforcement. Trump’s big policy moves are accompanied by an avalanche of suspicious trades. “Of the stock and stock fund sales administration officials reported between Jan. 20 and April 30, 90% fell within 10 days of the tariff announcements,” USA Today reported last week. The New York Times suggested in April that if Trump seems to care little about crashing the stock market but a lot about the bond market, that may be explained by his own holdings: few stocks, many bonds. (Unlike most past presidents, Trump has not put his holdings in a blind trust.)

While Trump’s behavior discredits markets, his rhetoric vilifies markets. In April, the Trump administration imposed the most crushing tariffs on international commerce since the Smoot-Hawley Act’s regime of 1930. The Trump adviser Stephen Miller explained to Fox News the administration’s reasons: “Our leaders allowed foreign countries to rig the rules of the game, to cheat, to steal, to rob, to plunder,” he said. “That has cost America trillions of dollars in wealth.” Echoing his boss’s grievance-laden language, he said, “They’ve stolen our industries.” It’s not always phrased so vituperatively, but the message is consistent: free exchange is an illusion; there is nothing but exploitation. The only way to protect Americans from this exploitation is for the nation’s political leaders to subject more and more of the U.S. economy to state control. If this way of thinking is true, then the severest critics of capitalism are right.

Happily, this way of thinking is not true. Free exchange is a system of cooperation and mutual benefit, the most effective that humanity has yet discovered. But who in the Trump-led United States is arguing the case for free exchange? The most influential intellectuals of the left reject markets as too inequitable; those on the right reject them as too cosmopolitan. On one side, the professional politicians are intimidated by their most radical supporters; on the other, the politicians are under the sway of crooks and con artists, whose idea of capitalism is unregulated permission to bilk and defraud.

Marxists condemn capitalism as “organized robbery.” They could not be more wrong. But who will refute them when the government of the world’s largest capitalist democracy is in the hands of organized robbers?

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Volodymyr Zelensky built a mythic reputation as a lonely bulwark against global tyranny. On Tuesday, the president of Ukraine signed that reputation away, enacting a law that gutted the independence of his country’s anti-corruption agencies just as they closed in on his closest political allies, reportedly including one of his longtime business partners and a former deputy prime minister. To justify the decision, he cloaked it in an invented conspiracy, insinuating that Russian moles had implanted themselves in the machinery of justice. This is a scoundrel’s playbook.

Despite the ongoing war, Ukrainians swamped the streets of Kyiv in protest of their president’s betrayal of democracy, forcing Zelensky to introduce new legislation reversing the bill he had just signed into law. It was a concession of error—and possibly an empty gesture, because the new bill is hardly a lock to pass the legislature. That Zelensky brazenly weakened Ukraine’s anti-corruption guardrails in the first place shouldn’t come as a shock. They were erected only under sustained pressure from the Obama administration as part of an explicit bargain: In exchange for military and financial support, Ukraine would rein in its oligarchs and reform its public institutions. Over time, the country drifted, however unevenly, toward a system that was more transparent, less captive to hidden hands.

But in the Trump era, the United States has grown proudly tolerant of global corruption. In fact, it actively encourages its proliferation. Beyond the president’s own venal example, this is deliberate policy. Brick by brick, Donald Trump has dismantled the apparatus that his predecessors built to constrain global kleptocracy, and leaders around the world have absorbed the fact that the pressure for open, democratic governance is off.

[Anne Applebaum: Kleptocracy, Inc.]

Three weeks into his current term, Trump paused enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act—loudly declaring that the United States wasn’t going to police foreign bribery. Weeks later, America skipped a meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s anti-bribery working group for the first time since its founding 30 years ago. As the head of the anti-corruption group Transparency International warned, Trump was sending “a dangerous signal that bribery is back on the table.”

For decades, the U.S.did more than prosecute bribery cases; it tried to cultivate civil-society organizations that helped emerging democracies combat corruption themselves. But upon returning to the presidency, Trump destroyed USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the U.S. Institute of Peace, dismantling the constellation of government agencies that had quietly tutored investigative journalists, trained judges, and funded watchdogs.

These groups weren’t incidental casualties in DOGE’s seemingly scattershot demolition of the American state. Trump long loathed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which he described as a “horrible law,” an animus stoked by the fact that some of his closest associates have been accused of murky dealings abroad. Crushing programs and organizations that fight kleptocracy meshed with the “America First” instincts of his base; the likes of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon abhor the export of liberal values to the world.

From the wreckage of these institutions, a Trump Doctrine has taken shape, one that uses American economic and political power to shield corrupt autocrats from accountability. Benjamin Netanyahu, on trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, has been a prime beneficiary. Just as he was preparing to testify under oath, Trump denounced the prosecution as a “political witch hunt” and threatened to withhold U.S. aid if the trial moved forward. Given Israel’s reliance on American support, the threat had bite. Not long after Trump’s outburst, the court postponed Netanyahu’s testimony, citing national-security concerns.

Trump acts as if justice for strongmen is a moral imperative. No retaliatory measure is apparently off limits. To defend his populist ally in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, who faces charges related to an attempted coup, Trump revoked the visa of Alexandre de Moraes, the Supreme Court justice overseeing the case. Last month, Trump threatened to impose 50 percent tariffs on Brazilian steel, aluminum, and agricultural exports to punish the country for Bolsonaro’s prosecution.

This is hard-nosed realism, not just ideological kinship. To protect himself, Trump must defend the rights of populist kleptocrats everywhere. He must discredit the sort of prosecution that he might someday face. That requires recasting malfeasance as perfectly acceptable statesmanship.

[Listen: The kleptocracy club]

By stripping anti-corruption from the moral vocabulary of American foreign policy, Trump is reengineering the global order. He’s laying the foundation for a new world in which kleptocracy flourishes unfettered, because there’s no longer a superpower that, even rhetorically, aspires to purge the world of corruption. Of course, the United States has never pushed as hard as it could, and ill-gotten gains have been smuggled into its bank accounts, cloaked in shell companies. Still, oligarchs were forced to disguise their thievery, because there was at least the threat of legal consequence. In the world that Trump is building, there’s no need for disguise—corruption is a credential, not a liability.

Zelensky is evidence of the new paradigm. Although his initial campaign for president in 2019 was backed by an oligarch, he could never be confused for Bolsonaro or Netanyahu. He didn’t  enrich himself by plundering the state. But now that Trump has given the world permission to turn away from the ideals of good governance, even the sainted Zelensky has seized the opportunity to protect the illicit profiteering of his friends and allies.

Yet there’s a legacy of the old system that Trump hasn’t wholly eliminated: the institutions and civil societies that the United States spent a generation helping build. In Ukraine, those organizations and activists have refused to accept a retreat into oligarchy, and they might still preserve their governmental guardians against corruption. For now, they are all that remain between the world and a new golden age of impunity.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Can’t lick the witch wind that carries rumors over shining aurora-lit prairies:

horror of what comes to light at the dawn of the mind. Will you permit me to rise

from my sinkhole, to draw in the dirt the garnet ring my grandmother sold for gas

just to survive? Arrive anonymous, starved on hardtack and shame,

in this place where she was erased? How will you animate this forgotten history?

Pepper the disarray with white-hooded prairie schooners filled with calico-clothed

divas gathering their brood alongside militant fathers donning wide-brimmed hats?

It’s natural to want to lie when you look in the mirror, see you are naked

down to the crimes. Let me tell you, honey, truth is the harmony your song has been

missing. Set down a soapbox and let me step up and sing out about the naked

and the dead. The ghosts we’ve not yet seen clothe the woods of your stories. Let your candy

apple cowboys die in their own desert until my grandmother’s name is spoken

like the emergency it has become.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

About a year and a half ago, I was scheduled to play a concert in Vermont when word came that the gig would be canceled due to an approaching nor’easter. I checked out of the hotel early, lobbed my suitcase into the rental car, and hightailed it to New York as menacing clouds darkened the rearview mirror. Brooklyn had been home for the better part of two decades, but after a move to the Pacific Northwest, I was returning as a tourist, and the show’s cancellation augured a rare free evening in the city. There was just one problem: How was I going to figure out what to do with my night on the town?

This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark’s Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman’s mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case’s bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she’d recorded them.

But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: “New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus” reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month.

[From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves.

As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today’s critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise “discovery,” they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we’re missing.

The listings were my lodestar. And that star’s orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith.

Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He’d gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation.

Time Out “was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,” Smith told me*.* “Nobody said, ‘Oh, that obscure thing that’s happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that’s too weird.’ I was basically told, ‘List what’s interesting; list what people will want to know about.’” A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic’s pick. “I had the privilege,” he said, “of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.”

One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith.

These listings weren’t just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: “Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.”

In its heyday, the Voice’s newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance.

Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile.

The demise of listings is “tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,” the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that “the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out” to see a gig: “The immediate danger is that artists play and people don’t know about it.”

Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it’s harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great.

The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward “poptimism,” a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough!

But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism*.* In the 21 years since Sanneh’s essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today’s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down—501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it’s easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices.

Indeed, much of today’s cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people’s contributions to the common good solely by “the market value of the goods or services they sell.” In other words, covering what’s popular doesn’t just serve journalism’s economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it’s no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities.

A reader might object: Aren’t you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can’t hack it in today’s algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles’ White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen’s tape music, no Rosalía’s Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support.

To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith’s great gifts as an editor. “He crafted listings,” Giovetti told me, “in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.” You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire’s founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and you’ve probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018.

The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. “On any given day,” Chinen told me, “there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe’s Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That’s the garden. That’s the plant mix that existed.” How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life?

In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. “The phone has stopped ringing,” he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it’s important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too.

Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context.

[Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]

What’s to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren’t left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders.

The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can’t be readily calculated on a balance sheet.

For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He’s now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, “I never really stopped.”

Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.

Hell of a city, no?

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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, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Luis Parrales, an assistant editor who has written about what the border-hawk Catholics get wrong and why the papacy is no ordinary succession.

Luis is a new fan of the author Mario Vargas Llosa and a longtime listener of the singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. His other recommendations include “Femininomenon,” by Chappell Roan; The Bear; and anything by Conan O’Brien—whom he deems “the king of American comedy.”

The Culture Survey: Luis Parrales

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark—The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I’ve ever encountered. That’s both because Vargas Llosa’s crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience.

I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven’t already, read David Brooks’s reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump’s appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I’ve read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight,” by Courtney Barnett. Loud: “Femininomenon,” by Chappell Roan.

Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX’s exquisite The Bear.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O’Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he’s always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn’t have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a “mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.” I’ve been keeping up with O’Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night’s episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it’s a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans.

The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass’s version of the hymn “This Is My Song.” These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism:

This is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine; but other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn’t super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he’s pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Two in the Campagna,” by Robert Browning:

Only I discern— Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The first survivors of CECOT tell their stories.The one book everyone should readChasing le Carré in Corfu

The Week Ahead

The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday)Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock)Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday)

Essay

Eero Jarnefelt / Heritage Images / Getty

The Mistake Parents Make With Chores

By Christine Carrig

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 …

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.

Read the full article.

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Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar kiss during their wedding in the flooded Barasoain Church, in the Philippines. (Aaron Favila / AP)

Despite flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains in the Philippines, Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar decided to stick to their planned wedding date.

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All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload.

She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job.

To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.

In poll after poll since Donald Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she’s become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a “low-IQ” individual; she has dubbed him a “buffoon” and “Putin’s hoe.” Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett’s fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as “B6”—and started selling T-shirts.

At the time, I wrote that the episode was embarrassing for everyone involved. But clearly it resonated. Crockett has become a national figure. Last year, she gave a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention and was a national co-chair of Kamala Harris’s campaign. This year, she has been a fixture on cable news and talk shows as well as a top party fundraiser; she was in Atlanta, in part, for a meet and greet with local donors. At an anti-Trump protest on the National Mall in April, I saw several demonstrators wearing B6 shirts. Others carried signs with Crockett’s face on them.

Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”

Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. In the same week that Democratic leadership had instructed members to focus on Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires, Crockett referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” (Crockett claimed that she was referring to Abbott’s busing of migrants.) In an interview with Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, Crockett said that Hispanic Trump supporters had “almost like a slave mentality.” She later told a CNN host that she was tired of “white tears” and the “mediocre white boys” who are upset by DEI.

Unsurprisingly, Trump himself seems eager to elevate Crockett. “They say she’s the face of the party,” the president told my Atlantic colleagues recently. “If she’s what they have to offer, they don’t have a chance.” Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair.

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shit.”

This spring, I watched Crockett test her theory of politics in a series of public appearances. At the Webbys, most of her fellow award winners were celebrities and influencers, but only Crockett received a standing ovation. A week later, Crockett flamed Republicans and the Trump administration during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 15-minute clip of her upbraiding ICE agents—“These people are out of control!”—has racked up more than 797,000 views on YouTube; I know this because she told me. On TikTok and Instagram, Crockett has one of the highest follower counts of any House member, and she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio. She is highly conscious, too, of her self-presentation. During many of our conversations, Crockett wore acrylic nails painted with the word RESIST, and a set of heavy lashes over her brown eyes. The lock screen on her phone is a headshot of herself.

Representative Jasmine Crockett rides in a vehicle after attending events in the Atlanta area last month. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Behind the scenes, the congresswoman speaks casually. At the Waldorf, I watched her deliver a quick Oversight-campaign pitch via Zoom. It was a virtual meeting of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, she’d explained to me beforehand. But then, after the call, she wasn’t sure. “CAPAC is the Asian caucus, right?” she asked. “Yes,” the aide confirmed. “That would’ve been bad,” Crockett said with a laugh. She can also be brusque. During our interview at the Waldorf, she dialed up a staffer in D.C. in front of me and scolded him for an unclear note on her schedule. Another time, in the car, after an aide brought Crockett a paper bag full of food from a fundraiser, she peered inside, scrunched her nose, and said, “This looks like crap.”

Still, Crockett is often more thoughtful in person than she might appear in clips. Once, after a hearing, I watched as she responded to a request for comment with a tight 90-second answer about faith and service. Another time, a reporter who was filming her tried to provoke her by asking what she would say to people who think she is “mentally ill.” “They can think whatever they want to, because as of now, we live in a democracy,” Crockett answered calmly, before taking another question. “I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that this is someone with a very fine, legally trained mind,” Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a mentor of Crockett’s, told me.

Crockett’s Republican critics like to say that she’s a private-school girl playing a plainspoken Texas brawler for social-media clout. They’re not wrong about her background. Crockett grew up an only child in St. Louis, not Dallas, and attended private high school before enrolling at Rhodes College, a small liberal-arts school in Tennessee. When Crockett was young, her father was a life-insurance salesman and a teacher, she told me, and she has talked often about his work as a preacher; her mother, she said, still works for the IRS. Crockett’s stage presence precedes her political career. At Rhodes, from which she graduated in 2003, she was recruited to the mock-trial program after a team leader watched her enthusiastic performance as the narrator Ronnette in Little Shop of Horrors, her former coach, Marcus Pohlmann, told me. She won a national award during her first and only year in the program.

As Crockett tells it, she became interested in the law after she and a few other Black students at Rhodes received anonymous letters containing racist threats. The school hired a Black female attorney from the Cochran Firm, a national personal-injury-law group, to handle the case, Crockett told me. The attorney became Crockett’s “shero,” she said, and inspired her to attend law school herself. When I asked for the name of her shero so that I could interview her, Crockett told me that she did not remember. I reached out to a former Cochran Firm attorney in Tennessee who fit Crockett’s description; she remembered the incident in broad terms but was not sure if she had worked on the case or with Crockett. Although Rhodes College had no specific records of the incident, two people who worked at the college at the time told me that they recalled it.

Crockett worked for a few years as a public defender in deep-red Bowie County, Texas, before starting her own law firm, where she drew attention for defending Black Lives Matter demonstrators. She was sworn in to the Texas state House in 2021 and became the body’s third-most progressive member, according to the Texas Tribune, authoring dozens of bills, with an emphasis on criminal-justice reform. (None of the legislation for which she was the main author ever passed the Republican-dominated legislature.) “Most freshmen come, they are just trying to learn where the restrooms are,” but Crockett “came with a fight in her,” Texas Representative Toni Rose, a former Democratic colleague of Crockett’s, told me.

[Read: The real problem with Democrats’ ground game]

Having defeated an incumbent Democrat to win her seat, Crockett was already viewed as an agitator by some of her new colleagues. Then, in 2021, she became the unofficial spokesperson for a group of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. in a high-profile effort to stall Republican legislation. Her dealings with the press built up “real resentment” with Democratic leaders, one Texas-based party strategist, who was familiar with caucus actions at the time, told me. (This person, like some others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.) “When they broke quorum and it was important that everything be secret, she was on the phone to the press talking about what they were getting ready to do,” the strategist said. Both Crockett and her chief of staff at the time, Karrol Rimal, denied this version of events and told me that she had not given an interview before arriving in D.C. Rimal said that Crockett had agreed to do press only if the story would not be published until the Texas lawmakers crossed state lines. He added that state Democrats were sometimes jealous because Crockett “outshined them.”

Crockett attends a conference at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, in June. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were “in the shitter to me!” Trump critics  praised her as an “absolute star” and their “new favorite Congresswoman.”

Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman congresswoman was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. “I don’t think it was a secret” that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, “she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,” the Texas-based Democratic strategist said. Crockett strongly denied this characterization and said that she had never heard it from those close to Johnson. I reached out to Johnson’s son for his view, but he didn’t respond.

The race to replace the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, the late Representative Gerry Connolly, presented a multipurpose opportunity. Democrats could preview their resistance strategy for a second Trump administration. And Crockett, who’d run an unsuccessful, last-minute bid for a leadership position the previous year, could test her own viability as a party leader.

In late May, Crockett brought me along to a private meeting in the green-walled office of a freshman member—Maxine Dexter of Oregon—where she made her pitch: The Democrats have a communication problem, Crockett said. “The biggest issue” with Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t “that he wasn’t a great president,” she explained. “It was that no one knew what the fuck he did.” (Crockett acknowledged to Dexter that the former president is “old as shit,” but said, “He’s an old man that gets shit done.”) Crockett highlighted her own emphasis on social media, and the hundreds of thousands of views she had received on a recent YouTube video. “The base is thirsty. The base right now is not very happy with us,” Crockett continued, and if any lawmaker could make them feel heard, “it’s me.”

Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that “these motherfuckers”—Republicans—are all “complicit” in Trump’s wrongdoing. She wasn’t worried about her own reelection. “I guess it’s my fearlessness,” she told Dexter.

Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to “burn it down” and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it “kind of makes people be like, Oh, it’s about them, right? Instead of the team.” (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.)

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”

The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”

Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. “People don’t necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,” Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. “I’m thrilled she’s doing it, because we need it all.” Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is “one of the strongest fighters we have,” and that, “as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.” But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn’t respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett’s colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. “She likes to talk,” one of the staffers said. “Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.”

Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she “was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.” As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.”

Crockett does not have supporters so much as she has admirers. Everywhere she goes, young people ask for selfies, and groups of her red-clad Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters pop up to cheer her on. A few days before she dropped out of the Oversight race, a congregation outside of Atlanta full of middle-aged Black Georgians was giddy to host her: Here was Jasmine Crockett, recounting her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“She thought she could play with me,” Crockett told Pastor Jamal Bryant, the leader of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and a progressive activist. There were a few “oh no”s in the crowd. “The average, maybe, person in my party potentially would have just let it go,” Crockett went on. “I wasn’t the one.” There were claps and whoops. “I was steaming, and I was ready,” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, two wrongs gonna make a right today, baby, cause I ain’t gonna let it go!’” The righteous anger in Crockett’s voice was audible; people applauded for it, probably because it sounded a lot like their own.

Audience members react to Crockett during a live recording of Pastor Jamal Bryant’s podcast at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Crockett’s fans are rooting for her to go bigger. And when I asked if she was considering running for Senate in the future—John Cornyn is up for reelection next year—Crockett didn’t wave me off. “My philosophy is: Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready,” she said. Crockett imagines a world in which Democrats are associated with lofty ideals and monosyllabic slogans, like Barack Obama once was. When I asked her what the party should stand for beyond being against Trump, and what she stands for, she explained, “For me, I always just say ‘the people,’” adding that her campaigns have always been associated with “fire.”

[Read: Where is Obama?]

Plenty of other Democrats believe that Crockett’s approach comes dangerously close to arson. Her critics argue that it’s easy to be outspoken in a safe Democratic seat; they might also point out that Crockett received 7,000 fewer votes in 2024 than Johnson, her predecessor, had in 2020. You can see James Carville coming from a mile away. “I don’t think we need a Marjorie Taylor Greene,” the longtime Democratic consultant told me. Crockett is “passionate. She has an instinct for making headlines. But does that help us at the end of the day?” he said. “You’re trying to win the election. That’s the overall goal.”

Crockett is not Marjorie Taylor Greene; for one, she is not peddling space-laser, weather-control conspiracy theories. Yet Crockett’s combative style could be a misreading of the moment, Lakshya Jain, an analyst at the political-forecasting site Split Ticket, told me. “People think the brand issue that Democrats have is they don’t fight enough and that they’re not mean enough,” Jain said, but “those are all just proxies for saying that they can’t get stuff done for people.” In Congress, Crockett has championed progressive causes and introduced plenty of legislation, but none of the bills she’s been the lead sponsor of has become law.

Clearly, though, lots of real-life voters want Jasmine Crockett. At the church outside Atlanta, Pastor Bryant triggered a standing ovation when he declared, “Jasmine Crockett for president” and “2028 is coming, y’all!” Outside, in the parking lot, someone shouted at Crockett, “First Black-woman president!” June was a disheartening month for Crockett. She was soundly rejected by her own colleagues and shut out of a chance at institutional power. But when we talked in her hotel room in Atlanta, she’d framed the situation differently: If Americans on the outside could vote, she’d insisted, “I absolutely feel like I know where it would go.”

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Editor’s Note: Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.

Lingering questions over the Epstein case are consuming the White House and paralyzing Congress. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how a once-fringe conspiracy theory became a spiraling controversy.

One of the reasons Donald Trump cannot manage to deny or deflect attention over the Epstein investigation is that the case centers on “what the MAGA base is about, which is powerful people doing things behind closed doors,” Eugene Daniels, a senior Washington correspondent at MSNBC, argued last night.

The president tends to talk to his base about “how the lowly man and woman are losing out to these interests in Washington,” Daniels continued. “But now they are seeing Donald Trump seemingly being one of the people doing the defending and the protecting of the powerful people,” and “that’s why I think he can’t shake it.”

Joining the Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Eugene Daniels, a co-host of The Weekend at MSNBC; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News.

Watch the full episode here.

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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

“Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long,” Bekah Waalkes wrote this past spring. “As a child, when nice weather came around, I was told to put down my book and go play outside.” But why can’t reading a book be a form of outdoor play? Reading outside can also be a practice in sustained attention, Waalkes writes: The act of focus can actually sharpen “one’s perception of the trees, the soil, the friends chattering at the next table in the beer garden.”

Today’s newsletter offers a guide to reading outdoors—how to make the most of it, and which books to take with you on your adventure.

Six Books You’ll Want to Read Outdoors

By Bekah Waalkes

Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long.

Read the article.

24 Books to Get Lost in This Summer

By The Atlantic Culture Desk

The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods.

Read the article.

The One Book Everyone Should Read

By The Atlantic Culture Desk

The Atlantic’s staffers on the books they share—again and again

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Take your book outside: Reading al fresco isn’t always idyllic, but it can be sublime, Emma Sarappo writes.The unbearable smugness of walking: Literary walking has long been celebrated, Michael LaPointe writes. Is it really worth the hype?

Other Diversions

How Justin Bieber finally gave us the song of the summerAlexandra Petri: “How I came to be in the Epstein files”The psychological secret to longevity

P.S.

Courtesy of Tim Tumlin

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparked their sense of awe in the world. “I had awakened early on this morning in July 2016 and tiptoed out of the hikers' dorms at Rifugio Lagazuoi, which is perched at 9,000 feet in the Italian Dolomites,” Tim Tumlin, 74, in Darien, Illinois, writes. “As I hoped, the silent overwhelming beauty made the climb the day before more than worthwhile.”

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

— Isabel

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Can this really be the song of the summer? For seven weeks now, the most popular tune in the country has been Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—a solemn ballad that has all of the warm-weather appropriateness of a fur coat. Ideally, the song of the summer is a buoyant one, giving you a beat to bob a flamingo floatie to. “Ordinary,” instead, is made for stomping, moping, and forgetting.

The top reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 have otherwise mostly been stale and flukey, filled with songs that were popular last summer (Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control”), replacement-level efforts by the streaming behemoths Drake and Morgan Wallen, and tie-ins from the Netflix cartoon show KPop Demon Hunters. Then, just last week, a welcome bit of warmth and novelty emerged at No. 2—“Daisies” by Justin Bieber, the unlikely emblem of our obviously fragile national mood.

Perhaps you aren’t inclined to check out new music by a formerly chirpy child star who lately has been best known for his surreal interactions with paparazzi. But earlier this month, the 31-year-old Bieber suddenly released a new album, Swag, that made headlines for being rather good. Not “good for Bieber”; good for a modern pop release. Swag filled a void in the summer-listening landscape by meeting listeners where they so clearly seem to be—less in need of a party-fueling energy drink than a soothing slather of aloe.

The album is Bieber’s first since parting ways with manager Scooter Braun, the record-business kingpin who recently seemed to suffer a catastrophic collapse in support from the celebrity class. The music departs from the pert poppiness of Bieber’s past to indulge the singer’s well-documented fascination with hip-hop and R&B. In one interlude, the comedian Druski tells Bieber “your soul is Black”; the assertion is cringey, but the album’s music is significantly more subtle than that. Bieber never really raps. Rather, he uses his ever-yearning, creamy-soft voice to do what great rappers and R&B singers often do: find a pocket within a beat, and then let emotions be his guide.

What’s really fascinating about the album, though, is that it sounds like it’s wrapped in gauze. The production is aqueous and rippling, rather than shiny and laminated as one might expect from Bieber. Swag is heavily influenced by the indie producer-artists Dijon (who collaborated on a few of the album’s songs) and Mk.gee (a producer on “Daisies”). They have risen to prominence by swirling bygone rock and pop signifiers into a comforting yet complex stew of sound. Swag’s songs similarly hit the listener with a sense of gentle intrigue, like a minor recovered memory.

The instant hit “Daisies” exemplifies the approach. Its twanging guitars and pounding drums scan as countrified classic rock, but every element seems muffled, as if emanating from an iPhone lost in a couch. The verses steadily build energy and excitement—but then disperse in a gentle puff of feeling. In a lullaby whisper, Bieber sings of pining for his girl and sticking with her through good times and bad. “Hold on, hold on,” goes one refrain: a statement of desire for safety and stability, not passion and heat.

But my personal song-of-the-summer nomination would be Swag’s opening track, “All I Can Take.” It opens in a tenor of pure cheese, with keyboard tones that were last fashionable when Steve Winwood and Boyz II Men were soundtracking school dances. A lightly pumping beat comes to the fore, setting the stage for a parade of different-sounding Biebers to perform. In one moment, he’s a panting Michael Jackson impersonator. In another, he’s an electronically distorted hyperpop sprite. The song is serene, and pretty, and ever so sad—yet it’s also wiggling with details that suggest there’s more to the story than initially meets the ear. The lyrics thread together sex talk with hints of stresses that must be escaped; “It’s all I can take in this moment,” Bieber sings, hinting at a burnout whose cause the listener is left to imagine.

Swag’s approach—downtempo yet bustling, melancholic yet awake—is on trend emotionally as much as it is musically. Though the year has brought no shortage of bright, upbeat pop albums from the likes of Lady Gaga and Kesha, the music that’s sticking around has a reserved, simmering quality. The biggest Wallen song of the moment is “What I Want,” a collaboration with the whisper-singing diva Tate McRae; it builds suspense for a full minute before any percussion enters. One rising hit, Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not,” has a neo-soul arrangement that fidgets enough to keep the ear occupied without demanding active attention.

A dreary technological reason probably explains why this kind of music is popular: Streaming rewards background fare more than it rewards jolting dynamism. But even looking at my own recent playlists, downtempo seems in. The best song by Addison Rae, the TikTok phenom turned pop mastermind, is “Headphones On,” a chill-out track laden with tolling bells and jazz keyboards. I have kept returning to the album Choke Enough by Oklou, a French singer who makes electronic pop that’s so skeletal and frail-seeming, you worry you’re despoiling the songs merely by listening to them. Other recent highlights: the mumbled and dreamy indie rock of Alex G’s Headlights, the depressive easy listening of Haim’s I quit, and “Shapeshifter,” the wintry-sounding standout from Lorde’s Virgin.

It’s hard to avoid psychoanalyzing this season’s musical offerings and concluding that the culture is suffering from malaise, or at least a hangover. After all, just a year ago we had “Brat summer,” named for the hedonistic Charli XCX album. The songs of that summer were irrepressible: Sabrina Carpenter’s sarcastic “Espresso,” Kendrick Lamar’s taunting “Not Like Us,” and Shaboozey’s thumping “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” But this year, Charli XCX’s biggest song is “Party 4 U”—a pandemic-doldrums ballad released in 2020 that recently blew up thanks to a TikTok trend of people sharing emo stories about their lives. The track captures a bleary feeling of trying to have fun but getting pulled into melancholy.

That’s a feeling lots of Americans surely can relate to. Every era brings its own reasons to fret about the state of the world, but the headline-news topics of late—wars, deportations, layoffs—are upending lives in profound ways at mass scale. Swag isn’t about any of that, but great pop always works to make small and personal emotions echo broad, communal ones.

Bieber’s highly publicized experiences navigating mental health, drug use, and physical maladies have long served up a cautionary tale about life in the internet era. In the months leading up to Swag’s release, he posted angry, inscrutable messages online and confronted reporters on the streets. Pundits have taken to asking Is he okay? The cooling, noncommittal, lightly distressed sound of Swag is an answer of sorts. Like many of us, he’s doing as well as can be, given the circumstances.

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Aufort Jerome / GettyAn aerial view of Guédelon Castle in Treigny, France, in 2023Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersStonecutters work at the construction site of the Chateau de Guédelon on June 25, 2005.Xavier Rossi / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA person in medieval-style clothing observes the building site of Guédelon Castle in June 2002.Thierry Perrin / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA blacksmith in period attire works at the Guédelon Castle site on April 12, 2018.Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyTwo people walk inside the “squirrel cage,” a medieval treadwheel crane, to lift material at the construction site in 2011.Aufort Jerome / GettyA view of the castle, under construction, as seen in 2023.Philippe Desmazes / AFP / GettyA person prepares a medieval dish for tourists visiting the construction site of Guédelon Castle on July 15, 2014.Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersOn June 25, 2005, a carpenter prepares a log to be used for the construction of the castle.Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersA stoneworker pours water onto stones and mortar being placed on September 13, 2016.Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyTimbers support the roof of the Great Hall inside of Guédelon Castle.Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersA woman plays with geese at the construction site on September 13, 2016.Arnaud Finistre / AFP / GettyA visitor enters the castle from the courtyard on June 23, 2025.Xavier Rossi / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA carpenter works on support timbers for a rounded roof in June 2002.Albert Ceolan / De Agostini / GettyYoung women work on a shingled roof at the castle construction site in 2019.Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyA close view of stonework and an arched opening in the castle wall.Arnaud Finistre / AFP / GettyVisitors tour the construction site of Guédelon Castle on June 23, 2025.Stephane Mouchmouche / Hans Lucas / ReutersChildren and adults attend a construction workshop led by a worker at the castle on April 29, 2023.Arnaud Finistre / AFP via GettyA school group tours the Guédelon construction site in Treigny, France, on June 23, 2025.

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Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, the author Arthur Miller described urbanites’ Depression-era coping mechanisms: People caught the breeze on open-air trolleys, climbed onto the back of ice trucks, and flocked to the beach. In the evenings, they slept in parks or dragged their mattresses onto fire escapes.

But since air conditioning went mainstream, in the 1960s, the easiest way to beat the heat has been by staying indoors—at home, the office, the mall—where cool air is a constant and blinds are often drawn to prevent homes from overheating (and electric bills from skyrocketing). For this convenience, Americans sacrifice the benefits of sunshine and the opportunities for fun it creates. As climate change turns up the temperature, summers in America are coming down to a choice between enduring the heat and avoiding it—both of which might, in their own ways, be making people sick.

In cities across the country, summers are, on average, 2.6 degrees hotter than they were some 50 years ago. In Phoenix, where a 95-degree day is a relief, schedules are arranged around the darkness; Jeffrey Gibson, an accountant who works from home, takes his eight-month-old daughter out for walks before 6:30 a.m.; after that, it’s so hot that she flushes bright red if they venture outside. He spends the rest of his day indoors unless leaving is absolutely necessary. It’s like this from April to October. Gibson recently told his wife, “Man, I think I’m a little depressed.”

Josef A. Von Isser, a therapist in Tucson, Arizona, told me that feeling low in the summer comes up a lot with his clients. Some feel that the heat affects them directly; others struggle with its indirect effects, such as fewer opportunities to socialize and be somewhere other than home or the office. All of them, he suspects, might be experiencing seasonal affective disorder.

The DSM-5 categorizes SAD as a type of major depression with a seasonal pattern, with symptoms such as sadness, feelings of worthlessness, and low energy. Usually, it presents in the winter, though scientists don’t agree on why. Some suspect that it’s because a lack of sun exposure may contribute to decreased levels of serotonin, a hormone that regulates mood, as well as vitamin D, which helps stimulate serotonin activity. Another theory links low exposure to sunlight with unusually high levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep.

[Read: The surprising truth about seasonal depression]

Summer SAD is generally accepted as a variety of the disorder, but it’s much rarer than the winter form; one study from earlier this year puts its prevalence at about 0.6 percent. That makes summer SAD especially hard to study. “It’s clearly a different kind of illness,” Paul Desan, a psychiatry professor at Yale, told me, but “it’s not in their imagination.” Unlike the winter form, which comes with a tendency to overeat, oversleep, and withdraw from society, summer SAD involves reduced appetite, insomnia, and restlessness—all of which can also be effects of heat. The scientific literature shows that heat is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, aggression, and reduced cognitive abilities. Uncomfortably hot nights, longer periods of daylight, and extended stretches of time spent indoors all disrupt sleep, which can in turn fuel mood disorders, Amruta Nori-Sarma, an environmental-health professor at Harvard, told me. Extreme heat can also be an obstacle to exercising, spending time in nature, and socializing, all of which can make people feel good and also double as important coping mechanisms for emotional distress.

Taking comfort in air conditioning when it’s too hot out is a natural human response. But air-conditioned spaces can be stifling in their own way. Staying home where it’s cool also means socializing less; some offices and homes hardly let in a wink of sunlight all day. It’s plausible that in the summer, people experience SAD symptoms not only from excessive heat but also because they spend all of their time avoiding the sun, Kim Meidenbauer, a psychology professor at Washington State University, told me. “It does make sense to me that you’d have, potentially, an analogous pattern of effects” to winter SAD, she said. The link between indoor time and summer SAD hasn’t been studied, but plenty of Americans, even if they don’t meet the DSM-5 criteria, are noticing that summer is starting to feel a lot like winter. Reddit abounds with users who lament that being forced indoors by the heat gives them “summer depression.”

America’s summer quandary—suffer inside or out?—will become only more persistent as climate change intensifies. In the United States, heat waves have grown more frequent and intense every decade since the 1960s. During a single heat wave last month, people in 29 states were warned to stay inside to avoid dangerously high temperatures. All of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the impacts of escalating heat on mental health. “I am not optimistic,” Ayman Fanous, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona, told me, noting that heat also has a well-established link with suicide risk and can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Many Americans don’t have access to air conditioning, or they work jobs that require them to be outside in the heat. Those who can stay cool inside may avoid the most severe consequences but still end up miserable for half of the year.

[Read: Earth’s new gilded era]

As long as summer SAD remains poorly understood, the options for addressing it will be limited. Treatment for winter SAD usually involves exposure to light boxes that mimic sunlight, but these aren’t recommended for summer SAD, because it might have a different neurobiological basis, Fanous said. For now, the first-line treatments are SSRIs such as Prozac—which can make people even more sensitive to heat.

For those with the means, the best strategy for beating summer SAD might be to move somewhere cooler. After eight years in Phoenix, Gibson has had enough of hiding from the heat for six months at a time and is ready to leave behind what he believes is his own summer SAD. Later this year, he plans to move his family to Colorado, where he hopes to be able to bring his daughter out during daylight hours. Yet Colorado summers, too, are becoming uncomfortably hot—and the same goes around the country. Last month, Alaska issued its first-ever heat advisory. As summer temperatures continue to rise, perhaps Americans will start to look back with envy on the ways our forebears beat the heat. The hotter summer nights get, the more sleeping on the fire escape starts to sound like a luxury.

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Black cool is one of America’s great innovations, right up there with basketball, blue jeans, and the internet. It blends several forms—music, sports, fashion, speech, ways of cutting through space—into a wholly distinctive, globally influential aesthetic. There are French fashion houses in thrall to silhouettes first spotted in Harlem, Japanese men who have devoted their lives to spinning jazz records in Shibuya, and lavish murals of Tupac Shakur as far apart as Sydney and Sierra Leone.

Sean Combs, the disgraced record mogul, certainly did not invent Black cool. But like Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan before him—and like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and many others who followed—for a flicker of time he was its most formidable ambassador.

That moment coincided with my adolescence, which is why the revelation of Combs’s extravagant cruelties—the depravity with which he used all that he’d gained—has left my childhood friends and me feeling so betrayed. We had looked up to Diddy, whom I will always think of as Puff Daddy or Puffy. When we were at our most impressionable, he taught us what to want and gave us a model for how to behave and succeed. Seeing him fall apart in our middle age feels like a kind of heartbreak. The verve and swagger he injected into our childhood dreams have curdled into something rancid.

[Read: The disturbing implications of the Diddy verdict]

Certain photographs of Puffy are permanently etched into my memory. In 1995, dipped in a flowing black-and-gold Versace Barocco silk chemise, liberally unbuttoned to flex a thick Cuban link anchored by a diamond-encrusted Jesus piece—the definitive signifier of inner-city affluence. September ’96, on the cover of Vibe magazine: head peering from behind his greatest protégé, the Notorious B.I.G.; signature blackout shades; a perfect S-curl relaxing the weft of his fade. The cool he exuded in these moments was inspirational, even masterful. My friends and I had never seen anything like it so fully pervade the culture, certainly not from someone we felt we could relate to.

I have not admired Combs for decades now, since well before his trial this year. But I will always be partial to the Puff Daddy of the ’90s: from 1993, when he founded his record label, Bad Boy Entertainment, through the spectacular rise and death of the Notorious B.I.G., and peaking around 1998 during hip-hop’s “shiny-suit era,” which he pioneered with Ma$e and the Lox.

By the time I got to college, Puffy was even wealthier, and my cultural references had begun to change. I vaguely remember the preposterous images of him strolling beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun while his valet spread a parasol over his head. He was mainly in the news because of a shooting at Club New York, which resulted in bribery and gun-possession charges against him and a highly publicized trial (he was acquitted). For my friends and me, his shocking newness had begun to fade.

Back in his prime, though, Puffy conveyed a sense of youthful ambition that we revered. He was able to transition from sidekick and hype man to dealmaker and multiplatinum performer. Before turning 25, he had founded his own culture-defining business—soon-to-be empire—and knew precisely how to leverage his growing fortune into social capital.

More than his success, we were struck by two qualities that seemed novel to us. The first was the amount of effort he openly displayed, which counterintuitively amplified his cool. Puffy made no pretense of obscuring the maniacal work required to achieve his goals. When he closed a million-dollar deal, he slammed the phone down and screamed. (Years later, he would become one of the original hustle-culture influencers on Twitter.) He showed us that flourishing was not a condition one had to be born into—that luxury and labor were connected.

The second quality was his ability to make Black people and Black culture—even its less compromising, more street-inflected iteration—feel at home in places, such as the Hamptons, that had not previously welcomed them. Puffy’s motto “I’ma make you love me” felt innocent and aspirational to us, not least because he actually achieved it. We were still many years away from realizing just what he would do with all the love he was given.

[Helen Lewis: The non-exoneration of Diddy]

Puff Daddy seemed to us then like a Black man utterly free in a moment of expanding opportunity. Before the age of social media, before we’d ever stepped on a plane, Puffy represented our first intimation of an unrestricted way of being-for-self in the world. On the one hand, he was the antidote to the soul-crushing squareness of upwardly mobile middle-class life that we so feared—degrees, office jobs, bills. On the other hand, he was perfectly assimilated into the good life of the American mainstream, to which we desperately craved access.

This made him dramatically unlike his peers. Tupac and Biggie were confrontational, and look where it got them. Rap entrepreneurs such as Master P and Brian “Baby” Williams were rich but ghettoized; any number of establishments wouldn’t seat them. Puffy, by contrast, looked like a marvelous solution to the problem of success and authenticity that my friends and I had been struggling to solve.

Yet we were suffering from a kind of myopia. And it wasn’t unique to us. The generation after us put their faith in Kanye West, whose most recent contribution to the culture is a single titled “Heil Hitler.” Role models are like seasons. One passes irretrievably into the next, but for a moment they might reveal possibilities that outlast and surpass them.

*Illustration Sources: Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic, Inc / Getty; Nitro / Getty; Steve Eichner / Getty Images; Al Pereira / Getty Images / Michael Ochs Archives; Richard Corkery / NY Daily News Archive via Getty.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

This month, the Ukrainian government made an unusual choice for its new prime minister. In a rare move for the country—and indeed for most of Eastern Europe—it picked a woman. Yulia Svyrydenko, a 39-year-old selected by President Volodymyr Zelensky and approved by Parliament, will lead the government in a period of intense uncertainty, as Russia escalates its offensive, Europe revamps its security commitments, and the Trump administration waffles on the war.

Some Ukrainian and Western observers have suggested that Svyrydenko isn’t up to the task, in part because they characterize her as a mere “loyalist” to Zelensky. She “would do everything saluting, without fail,” an anonymous source in Zelensky’s party told New Voice, a Ukrainian magazine. “I don’t believe she can reform our country,” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of Parliament, told me as he left a legislative session last week where he’d voted against her candidacy. “If she tries to criticize the president, she will end up like General Zaluzhny,” he continued, referring to Ukraine’s former army chief, whom Zelensky had dismissed after their differences became public.

The new prime minister is also facing overtly sexist criticism. “Svyrydenko is exactly the girl who all of you, dear students, are familiar with from school: She always sits at the front desk” and “carefully writes down the teacher’s notes,” Oleh Posternak, a Ukrainian political strategist, wrote in a Facebook post that a national media site republished.

Very few women have led former Soviet states, and they have virtually all received this kind of disparagement from men. In 2018, Georgia elected its first female president, Salome Zourabichvili, who’d run as an independent. Before she even took office, political observers called her a “finger puppet” of the billionaire leader of the ruling party, which had endorsed her. Today, many in Georgia credit Zourabichvili with uniting the opposition, and she condemned as “totally falsified” a recent election won by the party of her former patron.

In Moldova, many discounted Maia Sandu, who became the country’s first female president in 2020. Sandu’s rival in the race, the pro-Russian incumbent, Igor Dodon, criticized her for not having children—a line of attack that MAGA would later take up against Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential race. In Dodon’s view, Sandu’s lack of offspring meant that she was “not interested in what is happening in the country.” Her opponents launched a misinformation campaign about her, much of which centered on the coronavirus pandemic. “The fake news scared people that I would close schools, hospitals, and even churches,” Sandu told me at the time. Instead, Sandu invested in the country’s medical and educational sectors, recruited European Union support for her agenda, and oversaw funding for the restoration of Orthodox churches. She has also been an effective reformer, working to root out the country’s extensive corruption.

[Anne Applebaum: The country that suffers whenever Russia schemes]

Svyrydenko has a chance to leave a similar legacy in Ukraine. She has ample experience working with foreign governments, whose support is now existentially important to Ukraine. Early in her career, she served as the country’s only permanent representative in China, bringing investment to her hometown of Chernihiv. As deputy prime minister, Svyrydenko negotiated billion-dollar reconstruction projects and trade agreements with the European Commission and Emirati leaders, as well as a $400 million investment from Turkish business interests. She also helped broker a natural-resources agreement with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to create a joint investment fund to rebuild Ukraine.

Her appointment last week was part of a larger government reshuffle by Zelensky, who reassigned the previous prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, to the role of defense minister. In her new role, Svyrydenko will be tasked with rehabilitating the economy, boosting the domestic production of weapons, and strengthening Ukraine’s armed forces, in part by securing financing from allies and the International Monetary Fund. One of her first actions as prime minister was to advance talks with the United States about a major potential investment in Ukraine’s drone industry.

Nevertheless, and despite her strong résumé, Svyrydenko will have to contend with broad reservations in Ukraine about female leadership. According to a 2020 study conducted by the research group Rating, Ukrainians are more likely to prefer male political executives. Sometimes bad actors take advantage of this trust gap. Katerina Sergatskova, the executive director of the 2402 Foundation, which supports and trains Ukrainian journalists, has seen many Ukrainian women in public life become the target of harassment. “It is political sexism. The attacks are well-organized campaigns,” Sergatskova told me. She has experienced such a campaign herself, which included death threats that forced her to stay out of Ukraine for a time.

Sergatskova noted that many in Ukraine are comparing Svyrydenko to the country’s first female prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who took office in 2005 and faced several corruption charges. One case resulted in a criminal conviction against her and two and a half years in prison, which the U.S. condemned as politically motivated. After the 2014 revolution, which ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian regime, the supreme court overruled Tymoshenko’s conviction and ordered her release. Nevertheless, a large majority of the Ukrainian public still don’t trust her.

Zelensky has fought against Ukraine’s abiding suspicion of female politicians by promoting a new generation of them into leadership positions. In addition to picking Svyrydenko as prime minister, he also announced the appointment of Olha Stefanishyna as Ukraine’s new special representative to the United States. The approach sets him apart from Vladimir Putin. Valentina Matviyenko, one of two women who serve on the Russian president’s permanent security council, put on a Barbie-pink suit last year and derided feminism as “an anti-male, anti-traditional-values movement.” Meanwhile, Russia bans and prosecutes feminist groups, and Putin tells Russian women to have “minimum two children.”

[Read: Putin’s deal with wife killers]

For those who fear that Svyrydenko will be no more than a Zelensky loyalist, she is already facing her first test. This week, Zelensky tightened the administration’s control over two independent agencies tasked with fighting government corruption. Sevgil Musayeva, the editor in chief of the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, described the move as a step toward authoritarianism. “Svyrydenko has a chance to act now and speak against this decision that is undermining democracy, which our soldiers are dying for,” Musayeva told me. “But such action would require a lot of her courage.”

Two days after Zelensky reined in the government watchdogs, Svyrydenko met with G7 ambassadors in Kyiv to discuss anti-corruption policy—a subtle acknowledgment, perhaps, that the president had gone too far. But not everyone is convinced that Svyrydenko will be able to stand up to Zelensky. “Officially, we are a parliamentary-presidential republic,” Goncharenko, the legislator, told me last week. “I wish that were true. But we live in wartime; the decisions are made by the president.” Goncharenko isn’t holding out hope that Svyrdrydenko will be able to make her own choices: “If she contradicts his policy, he will simply fire her.”

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Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad. Real life is rarely as sunny and sparkly and juicy as vacation life. Right away, I found myself wishing that I could somehow preserve those delicious vacation morsels and store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Which is when I remembered something important: my own free will. What was stopping me from replicating the joy of vacation in my regular life?

So began my quest to do things differently. Call it “romanticizing my life,” if you want. Or call it self-care—actually, please don’t. But soon after returning from my trip, I was living more intentionally than I had before. I was searching for things to savor. I woke up early(ish) and started my day with a slow, luxurious stretch. In the evenings, rather than melting into the couch with the remote, I turned off my phone, made a lime-and-bitters mocktail, and read physical books—only fiction allowed. Less virtuously, I bought things: a towel that promised to cradle me in soft fibers, a new Sharpie gel pen, a funny little French plate that said Fromage in red cursive.

The effort was not a complete success. Replicating the exact feeling of holiday weightlessness is impossible; the demands of work and life always tend to interfere. But I did discover that these small changes were making my daily life, on average, a teensy bit happier. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you, and I’m sure those words  have galvanized many powerful people to action. But regular life is frightening enough. What if we sought out daily moments of joy instead?

I asked some of my colleagues how they create their own tiny moments of delight. Here are a few of their answers:

Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig wakes up and starts working the group chats, sending a “Rise n’ grind” to her girlfriends and a “Goooooood morning lads” to her passel of politics-chat guys. “It’s like starting the day by going to a party with all my friends,” she told me. “Instantly puts me in a good mood.” On the flip side, Ellen Cushing is working on texting less and calling more. She now talks with her oldest friend, who lives far away, almost every weekday—sometimes for an hour, other times for five minutes. Their conversations, which aren’t scheduled, involve two simple rules: You pick up the call if you can, and you hang up whenever you need to.Senior editor Vann Newkirk tends to his many indoor plants: a fiddle-leaf fig, a proliferation of spider plants, a pothos, a monstera, a couple of peace lilies, some different calatheas, an African violet, a peperomia, and a ponytail palm. “Even on no-water days, I like to check on them,” he told me, and “write little notes about how they are growing or where they grow best.”For a while, Shane Harris, a staff writer on the Politics team, began each day by reading a poem from David Whyte’s Everything Is Waiting for You. The purpose “was to gently wake up my mind and my imagination, before I started writing,” he told me. “It’s such a better ritual than reading the news.”Staff writer Annie Lowrey decompresses her spine(!) at night, which, she told me, involves bending over to hang like a rag doll, or dead-hanging from a pull-up bar: “It’s the best.” She also journals every morning about the things that she’s thankful for, and prays in gratitude for achieving difficult feats. “Maybe you accepted a vulnerability and your ability to handle it? Maybe you realized you could celebrate someone else’s success rather than wishing it were your own?” she said. It’s annoying when the “obvious advice,” such as drinking more water and getting more sleep, is right, she said. But gratitude is, unsurprisingly, good for your mood and mental health.Isabel Fattal, my lovely editor for this newsletter, curates playlists for her morning and evening commutes—which are based less on genre or Spotify’s suggestions than on the kind of mood she’d like to be in at that point in the day. “When I was a college intern in New York, I once managed to go seven stops in the wrong direction on the subway because I was listening to the National (I had a lot of feelings in that era),” she told me. “I’ve since improved my spatial awareness, but I maintain that the right music can elevate any experience.”

If you have kids, you can include them in your happiness project, as many of my staff-writer friends do. Ross Andersen, for example, has enlisted his kids to make him a cappuccino every morning, which is genius and perhaps also a violation of child-labor laws. Clint Smith and his son spent a summer watching highlights from a different World Cup every day, which, he told me, was “a fun way to grow together in our joint fandom and also was a pretty fun geography lesson.” And McKay Coppins told me he loves his 2-year-old’s bedtime routine, which involves a monster-robot game, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and a good-night prayer. “Bedtime can be notoriously stressful for parents of young kids—and it often is for me too!” McKay told me. “But I always end up looking forward to this little slice of my day.”

Related:

The quiet profundity of everyday aweWhat it would take to see the world completely differently

Today’s News

A shooting at a University of New Mexico dorm left one person dead and another wounded. Law enforcement is searching for the suspect.Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the “largesse” of the Fed’s headquarters renovations, just a day after President Donald Trump appeared to ease tensions during a visit to the Federal Reserve.The Trump administration will release $5.5 billion in frozen education funds to support teacher training and recruitment, English-language learners, and arts programs ahead of the new school year.

More From The Atlantic

Trump’s Ukraine policy deserves a reassessment.Food aid in Gaza has become a horror.Why is airplane Wi-Fi still so bad?

Evening Read

Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Edward Bottomley / Getty; Dario Belingheri / Getty.

Science Is Winning the Tour de France

By Matt Seaton

For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance—and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L’Équipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline “On Another Planet.” This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling’s premier race, but was code for “he’s cheating.”

At that point, L’Équipe’s dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event.

Read the full article.

Culture Break

See. Check out these photos of the week from an animal shelter in Colombia, a mountain church service in Germany, a memorial to Ozzy Osbourne in England, the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and much more.

Examine. Hulk Hogan embodied the role of larger-than-life pro-wrestling hero with unwavering showmanship, even as controversy and complexity shadowed his legacy, Jeremy Gordon writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic*.*

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I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”

I looked at my watch. It was 1987.

“Who?” I asked.

“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing. Not even enigmas. His name is Jeffrey.”

“Great!” I said. I loved to be introduced to people, in case they could help me with the orphans or connect me to a good sackcloth dealer. I was wearing a lot of sackcloth at that time, out of humility. I put down the biography of William McKinley that I had been reading in order to learn whether tariffs were good or bad. I had hoped that I could read it to the orphans, after we finished with the soup. But that could wait. “Please, introduce me.”

Thus began almost two decades of association that were nothing but miserable for me. I don’t know if you have any friends with whom you have nothing in common, but that was how it was with me and this guy. I assume! I never found out what he did, or how exactly he made his money, or even what his interests were. I would look at him and think, What a head of hair! “Even better than William McKinley’s!” I would mouth silently to myself. Then I would notice that, below the hair, his mouth was moving, and I’d try to guess what he had been saying, so that I could answer appropriately. Usually, I would just laugh and say, “You know that’s right!”

“You’re a pal,” Jeffrey would tell me. I wondered if I really was a pal. I spent so little time understanding what he had to say, and so much time lost in my own world, thinking about William McKinley and wondering what tariffs were. Tariffs—what a beautiful sound that word has. Tariff: the tip of the tongue taking a trip from the glorious Ta to the explosion of riff!

Again and again, my new friend would drag me to parties that I had no interest in attending. I was miserable. I sat in the front row at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show with my biography of William McKinley open on my lap. But it was hard to read in the dark room, and I was not getting to the part that explained what tariffs were as fast as I would have liked.

“I don’t want to go to another of Jeffrey’s island soirees,” I complained at one point. “I just want to stay in and read up about tariffs. I don’t feel that I understand them yet.” Everybody knows how much I love reading and how zealously I guard my reading time.

“No,” the mysterious man said. “It’s very important that you attend these parties. We need you in pictures. It’s for the conspiracy.”

I could tell the conspiracy was very important to him, so I always wound up going.

“Come on the plane,” Jeffrey said once. “It’s called the Lolita Express.”

“Sure,” I said. This was the most excited I had been in some time. I had no idea that Jeffrey also loved Nabokov. “I love a literary classic with an unreliable narrator.”

On the plane, I was disappointed. I searched it up and down for books to read but did not find any. Not even The Art of Translation!

“You should call your next plane the Ada, or Ardor: A Family-Chronicle Express,” I suggested. Jeffrey didn’t laugh. Now that I think back, I am beginning to doubt that Jeffrey had even read Lolita!

Jeffrey claims I met Melania on his plane, but I am certain I was with the orphans that week. Once I asked Melania about it.

“Have you ever been on that plane?” I asked. “Is that where we met? I don’t think that would have been how.”

She shrugged. “Could be. I do a lot of conspiracy things, what with all the body doubles. What do you remember?”

“I remember approaching you. I said, ‘I respect women too much to have any sense of what you look like physically, but there is something about your soul that makes me think of tariffs.’ And then you said, ‘Oh, no.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s good. Tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language.’”

“That does sound more like you,” she said.

Jeffrey kept inviting me to parties or, worse, urging me to throw parties of my own with themes that he suggested. I didn’t want to, but never told him so. That would have been impolite.

“I’m having a party,” I told Jeffrey once. “The theme is respect for women. I respect women so much that I feel bad even singling them out to say that I respect them, because really they’re just people. It’s a party about that, and I’d like you to be there.”

“That’s not a good theme,” he said. “Do a different theme instead.” So we did Jeffrey’s theme. I was very unhappy about it. We were the only two people there. I spent the whole party in the corner with my book about William McKinley, trying to get to the tariff part. I didn’t, though. It was too loud.

The mysterious man who introduced me to Jeffrey in the first place came back in roughly 2002. He had a book for Jeffrey that he wanted me to sign. “Do a picture,” he suggested.

“But,” I said, “I never write a picture.”

“It’s okay,” he said. He had an autopen with him. “I always carry this, for conspiracy reasons.” He used the pen to make a very obscene doodle and then pointed for me to sign my name to it. There was text above it.

“What does the text say?” I asked. “It doesn’t imply I share a creepy secret with this man, does it? I am beginning to think that he is not on the level, and I wouldn’t like to have it in writing that we had shared a creepy secret if, say, he were later revealed to be a terrible pedophile.”

“It says, ‘I love tariffs!’” the man said.

“Great,” I said. I signed it enthusiastically.

Over the years, the man kept coming to me and asking me to pose for pictures or make incriminating videotapes “for the files.” I should have asked more about the files, now that I think about it. “What are the files for?” I should have said. But he was clearly so passionate about them that I did not want to rain on his parade. When pressed, he said, “Conspiracies to do with the 2016 election,” or, “Conspiracies to do with the 2020 election,” or, “Conspiracies generally,” or, “Ask Dan Bongino.”

“We’re going to put all of this into files,” he explained. “Reams and reams of really damning stuff. And then we’re going to keep them secret. And you need to keep asking for them. Don’t take no for an answer.”

“This conspiracy confuses me,” I said. “You have spent decades painstakingly assembling this file, but you also will hide it from everyone, and I have to ask for it to be released?”

“Yes,” he said. “But then you have to stop asking for it to be released. Abruptly, and as suspiciously as you can. Indeed, if Congress shows any interest in having it released, have the speaker of the House shut them down for the summer.”

“But,” I said, “why would Congress listen to me?”

“He’ll listen,” the man said, and winked. “You’ll be the president, although many of the people who voted for you will be people who have felt for a long time that there is a secret conspiracy of elite pedophiles and that you are the one to help them blow it wide open. So they might not be happy when you start calling the files ‘boring.’”

“Why would they care so much?”

“The idea that there are secretly elite cabals of pedophiles wherever you look has been the stuff of conspiracy theories for years. Your supporters will be particularly interested in such things.” He paused. “But this time there’s an actual man preying on actual girls. That’ll be the horrible thing about this: a lurid conspiracy theory wrapped around real horrors that happened to real girls.” He got quiet for a moment.

I was thinking about something else. “You said I would be president,” I said, my voice hushed with wonder. “Can I do tariffs, as president? Like William McKinley did?”

He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Is that really your only question about this?”

I nodded. “Tariffs are all I think about.” I halted for a moment. “And they’re—they’re a good idea, right? Tariffs?”

“Are they a good idea? Are they a good idea?” He laughed. “Why, you might as well ask if there is reason to cast doubt on the legitimacy of my birth certificate!”

I frowned. “Is there?” He didn’t answer. “Is there?”

But he had already vanished into the parking lot, clutching his precious files.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

This was supposed to be the summer superhero movies became fun again. At first, that appeared to be true: Superman, released earlier this month, relaunched DC’s previously dour cinematic universe as a brighter and bouncier affair; the film zips from one encounter to the next with sincere aplomb. Now, two weeks later, comes Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which, coincidentally or not, seems similarly positioned as an injection of Technicolor fizz into a progressively more leaden franchise. Dispensing with continuity from previous installments, the film is set on a retro-futuristic version of Earth where everything looks as if it were designed by Eero Saarinen. As an effort to breathe new life into a particularly moribund title—there have been four prior takes on these characters, all of them bad—First Steps is essentially successful. What it somehow can’t manage to do is have much of a good time in the process.

First Steps, directed by Matt Shakman, has several things working in its favor. It’s quite handsome to look at, and features an elegant ensemble of actors who are capable of the big, dramatic moments thrown at them. Its action sequences also achieve a true sense of scale, something chintzier Marvel entries often struggle with. But First Steps zooms past the Fantastic Four’s origins and, more detrimentally, their odd family dynamic. Instead, it dives headfirst into a portentous, celestial story in which Earth’s apocalypse is almost immediately at hand. There’s no time for the characters to engage in era-appropriate diversions (such as, perhaps, kicking back with martinis) or match wits with colorfully costumed adversaries. This adventure is all end-of-the-world menace, all the time.

The lack of breathing room is striking. After all, these characters come from one of comic books’ richest texts: The Fantastic Fourare the original Marvel superhero team, created by the legendary writer-illustrator team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The comic kicked off the company’s 1960s revival and redefined the medium for an entire generation. Mr. Fantastic, a.k.a. Reed Richards (here played by Pedro Pascal), is the irritable, busy father figure; he’s also a genius scientist who can stretch like rubber. (He mostly uses his power in this adaptation to fill many wide chalkboards with math equations.) His wife, Susan Storm, also known as the Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), is able to vanish and throw force fields around everything; her brother, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), is the Human Torch, who can burst into flame and take to the skies. The trio’s best pal is Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a human turned orange, rocky beast known as the Thing.

[Read: Will there ever be a great Fantastic Four film?]

First Steps begins a few years after the foursome’s brush with a cosmic radiation storm, which transformed them into superhumans. The crew now keeps New York City safe from costumed villains and subterranean monsters, while enjoying their status as chummy celebrities; they’re cheered by teeming audiences holding pennants everywhere they go. Shakman whisks us past all of this information, perhaps assuming that viewers have picked up the gist from past cinematic efforts and wouldn’t want to sit through all that backstory again. (Maybe the director was also hell-bent on keeping the run time under two hours—an impulse I do approve of.)

But Shakman’s endeavor to pick up the pace means the movie loses its grasp of what makes the source material so special: the genuine, sometimes fraught chemistry of this found family. Johnny and Ben are usually depicted as bickering surrogate brothers, the hotheaded youngster and the curmudgeonly elder; Susan is a pragmatic force, with Reed often lost in his own world. In First Steps,however, the characters felt flattened out to me, while all four performances are muted and somewhat excessively grounded. An early scene sees Ben cooking tomato sauce with the group’s helper robot, H.E.R.B.I.E., crushing garlic gloves with his gigantic fists “to add a little bit of zip.” It’s a cute moment, but an oddly underplayed one; in scene after scene like this, I kept wondering—where’s the extra zip?

Instead of playful banter, First Steps serves up deep, emotional conversations about the meaning of parenthood and the heroes’ deepest fears. The plot kicks off with the reveal that after years of trying, Susan is pregnant, a joyful realization that, for Reed, quickly turns into worry that their child will also be superpowered. Soon after that, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner)—a shiny interstellar being riding a big surfboard—appears, zooming from the clouds and proclaiming Earth’s doom. She heralds Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a skyscraper-size villain from space who cruises around the universe eating planets whole; his arrival immediately plunges the Fantastic Four into a crisis that they spend the rest of the film trying to untangle.

[Read: Marvel doesn’t have to try so hard]

The Galactus saga is the most famous in Fantastic Four lore, but it’s also a conflict the comic built up to in the 1960s, churning through sillier villains before introducing a more impassive, terrifying force. He’s a tough first challenge for this new on-screen team to take on, one that drives Reed into instant misery as he struggles to fathom how to confront an enemy who cannot be bargained with. Pascal is smart casting for the role—he has the right air of sophistication and maturity—but the script engulfs his character in such a dark crisis of confidence that the actor’s charisma can’t shine through.

The same goes for Kirby as the joyless Susan, who impressively handles all the steeliness required of her. Quinn, who charmed me in recent blockbusters such as A Quiet Place: Day One and Gladiator II, feels too tightly woundas Johnny. Moss-Bachrach does quite lovely work as Ben, but the movie is perhaps overly focused on the hardened fella’s softer side; it largely ignores the character’s more tormented feelings about his physical transformation. First Steps is also shockingly comfortable to go long stretches without big action; the centerpiece is a space mission with shades of Interstellar that is genuinely thrilling, but some members of the team (particularly Mr. Fantastic) get few chances to really show off their superpowers.

As surprisingly downbeat as it is, I appreciated the fundamental message of the film, which is set in a more hopeful world. When a crisis arises, Reed and company are actually capable of rallying the world to help save itself. Multiple times in First Steps, Shakman emphasizes the power of a global community, the kind he’s clearly longing for in our world. Those are the zippiest ingredients he tosses into the sauce; I just wish he’d allowed the heroes to loosen up.

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Adolf Hitler’s first weeks as chancellor were filled with so many excesses and outrages—crushing states’ rights, curtailing civil liberties, intimidating opponents, rewriting election laws, raising tariffs—that it was easy to overlook one of his prime targets: the German central bank.

The Reichsbank president was a man named Hans Luther, a fiscal conservative who subscribed to the “golden rule” of banking, which stipulated that a country’s indebtedness should never exceed its obligations. In his adherence to protocol and policy, Luther could be “holier than the Pope,” according to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who served as the German finance minister from 1932 to 1945.

On the afternoon of Monday, January 30, 1933, just hours after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Luther stood in Hitler’s office with a complaint. Nazi storm troopers, known as the SA, had forced their way into the Reichsbank building in central Berlin, despite what Luther described as “emphatic protests” by bank personnel, and hoisted a swastika flag over the bank.

“I pointed out to Hitler that the SA actions were against the law,” Luther recalled, “to which Hitler immediately answered that this was a revolution.” Luther informed Hitler in no uncertain terms that the Reichsbank was not part of his revolution. It was an independent fiscal entity with an international board of directors. If any flag were to be flying over the bank, it would be the national colors, not the banner of his political party. The next morning, the swastika flag was gone.

On Hitler’s first full day in office, rumors circulated that he wanted Luther gone. Alfred Kliefoth, the chargé d’affaires at the United States embassy in Berlin, dispatched a memorandum to the State Department: “I have been informed, in confidence, by Dr. Ritter, the Chief Economist in the Foreign Office, that the new Government intends to exert pressure on Dr. Luther to resign.”

Hitler’s rumored plans to oust the Reichsbank chief came amid a massive purge of the Weimar Republic’s civil service. Senior officials who had served for decades were fired. Hitler assigned his chief lieutenant, Hermann Göring, to clean house in Prussia, the largest of Germany’s 17 federated states. When Göring entered the Prussian government offices in central Berlin, he told Rudolf Diels, the head of the Prussian political police, “I want nothing to do with the scoundrels sitting here in this building.” When Diels tried to defend one senior colleague, Göring responded by firing the colleague on the spot.

[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to “transform the state bureaucracy from the most senior positions down to the administrative levels to align with his political positions.” In a speech on March 11, Göring compared the Nazi’s draconian measures to cutting wood: “When you chop, chips fly.”

Despite Hitler’s heavy-handed assault on the government bureaucracy,  he could not touch Hans Luther. According to a 1924 law, the Reichsbank was independent of the elected government; the Reichsbank president served at the discretion of a 14-member board, which included seven international bankers and economists. Even Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, the ultimate constitutional authority, possessed the power only to confirm the appointment of the Reichsbank president, not to dismiss him. The Reich president headed the state and commanded the military, and the Reich chancellor ran the government, but the Reichsbank controlled the currency and the economy.

Luther brandished his independence and power with confidence and control. He had already served as finance minister and had also done a stint as chancellor. He understood both politics and economics. In 1923, Luther had designed the rescue plan that saved Germany from the inflation crisis that saw Germans pushing wheelbarrows full of cash through the streets to buy a loaf of bread. After the global market crash of 1929, he had guided Germany back to employment stability and production growth by the spring of 1932. Great Britain emerged from the crisis with twice the national debt of Germany. France’s was fourfold. The New York Times reported that Luther had “stood like a rock” amid the global financial turmoil. The newspaper Vossische Zeitung described Luther as “equal to any storm.”

Finance Minister Krosigk attributed the Reichsbank president’s success in stabilizing the economy to Luther’s “intelligence, his clear-sightedness, his extraordinary work ethic, his common sense and his energy.” Luther was firm in his principles and policies, and he believed in meeting international obligations. But he was cautious with his pronouncements. As a central banker, Luther knew that a single word, or even a smirk or smile, could send markets tumbling.

On Wednesday, November 23, 1932, Luther had been invited to address a group of industrialists and businessmen in the city of Düsseldorf, in the country’s industrial heartland, along with the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was already renowned as the the most eloquent political theorist and advocate of authoritarianism in Germany. (Known as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” Schmitt would later supply legal justification for Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, and for the anti-Semitic Nürnberg Laws of 1935.) On that November Wednesday in 1932, Luther listened in dismay as Schmitt laid out his arguments for the “Hitler system” of authoritarian rule, which included ending representative government and parliamentary rule, as well as the eradication of political parties, press freedoms, due process, and rule of law in favor of “totale Diktatur.” Luther was appalled.

For the first and only time in his career as Reichsbank president, Luther took a public political stance. Speaking after Schmitt, he argued that a functioning economy required democratic structures and processes, and that industrialists and businessmen were duty bound to support constitutional democracy. “We all bear the responsibility,” Luther said, arguing that it was in everyone’s interest—financial, social, and political—to support the Weimar Republic’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law. “I believe that the private sector in particular has a tremendous interest in emphasizing the necessity of legal security across the board,” Luther said, “because legal stability is the foundation of all economic life.”

[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]

That same month, Luther cautioned Chancellor Franz von Papen against “experiments” with the recovering German economy. “I told Dr. Luther that if he was not prepared to accept the risks involved,” Papen later recalled, “the government would be obliged to disregard his advice.” Within a month, Papen was out as chancellor. Papen’s successor, Kurt von Schleicher, encountered similar resistance. When Schleicher informed his cabinet that his government would seek a 2.7 billion reichsmark credit line, he received a chastening reply, as recorded in the cabinet minutes: “The Reich Minister of Economics, who had also participated in the meeting with the President of the Reichsbank, declared that, based on all experiences in negotiations with the Reichsbank, further commitments would probably not be possible.” Schleicher’s government fell within the month. By the time Hitler assumed the chancellorship, Luther had already outlasted three chancellors, and there was reason to believe that Hitler could be the fourth. However much Hitler might want to remove Luther from his post, Vossische Zeitung reported, “existing legal frameworks make this hardly possible.”

But that still left extralegal frameworks. Luther knew all too well about these. Months earlier, on the evening of April 9, 1932, Luther had been shot by two assailants in the Potsdam Train Station in central Berlin. According to the court record, the attackers intended to “slightly wound” Luther—which they succeeded in doing—as a “protest” against currency policies they believed “were wrong and damaging to the German people.” Although the court said it could not rule on Luther’s currency policies, it did sentence the two assailants to 10 months in prison for their “choice of means” in expressing their policy objections.

Following the meeting about the swastika banner on his first day as chancellor, Hitler did not see Luther for six weeks. Instead, Hitler turned for economic guidance to Luther’s predecessor at the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. The former central banker had become a key Hitler ally in the financial world, seeking to rally bankers and industrialists behind the Nazi government. Kliefoth, the U.S. embassy chargé, dined with Schacht shortly after Hitler ascended to the chancellorship. “Schacht took pains to impress me with the fact that he is Hitler’s financial and economic adviser and that he is constantly in consultation with the new chancellor,” Kliefoth reported. Kliefoth further noted that Schacht had told him German industrialists were backing Hitler and his program. “I have good reason to believe, however, that this statement is an exaggeration,” Kliefoth reported in a subsequent memo to the State Department. “A leading executive official of the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie told me only this morning that the four-year plan announced by Hitler last night was an absurdity and that this organization viewed the latest political developments with skepticism and reserve.”

Only after national elections on March 5, when National Socialists secured 44 percent of the electorate and a mandate to move forward with a major rearmament program, did Hitler again summon Luther to the chancellery. Hitler admitted that he’d been compelled to meet with Luther because, given that the government was already running significant budget deficits, it would have been “completely impossible to begin the work of rearmament” without substantial funds from the Reichsbank. After spending two hours explaining to Luther the need for expanded military capacities, Hitler asked him how much financing the Reichsbank would be able to make available. In response, Luther assured Hitler that, as a “nationally minded man,” he appreciated Hitler’s intentions, and would be willing to provide 100 million reichsmarks—not even one-20th of the billions Hitler had requested. Hitler was stunned. He thought he had misheard, so he repeated his question. Luther gave the same answer. He later observed that, beyond the gross violation of Germany’s international debt obligations the chancellor was calling for, Hitler’s preparations for the “mass-murderous poison of war” were not in Luther’s medicine cabinet of remedies for the German economy.

Hitler informed President Hindenburg that he wanted Luther removed as head of the Reichsbank. Hindenburg reminded Hitler that the Reichsbank was an internationally governed institution and thus beyond the reach of German authority. So once again, Hitler summoned Luther to the Reich chancellery. At his first meeting with Hitler, back in January, Luther had been struck by Hitler’s apparent moderation. The chancellor was not the ranting, raging fanatic—“the abnormal man”—depicted in press accounts. Six weeks later, that moderation was gone.

Although it was becoming ever clearer to Luther that Hitler was going to make it impossible for him to carry out his fiduciary duties to the government, Luther used the occasion to remind Hitler of the Reichsbank’s independence and his own immunity from dismissal.

Hitler acknowledged that, as chancellor, he did not have the legal power to remove Luther as central banker. But, he told Luther bluntly, as the new “boss” of the country, he had access to considerable alternative sources of power that he would not hesitate to employ “ruthlessly” against Luther “if the interest of the state demanded it.” The nature of Hitler’s threats was unmistakable. Luther—who had already been shot once before in protest of his monetary policies—did not need to be warned again.

On March 16, Luther submitted his resignation to the Reichsbank board. In an extended letter to Hindenburg, Luther explained his reasons for stepping down. Luther reminded Hindenburg “that the leadership of the Reichsbank must be stable and independent of partisan political currents, that a change in political parties, directions, and majorities must not in itself result in a change in the leadership of the Reichsbank.” Luther also reminded Hindenburg that he had served as Reichsbank president alongside three previous governments. Nevertheless, Luther continued, it had become clear to him that the strained relationship between the Reichsbank and the current government was not sustainable and would only damage the country and its economy. But Luther insisted to Hindenburg that his resignation was contingent on the assurance that “an independent Reichsbank be preserved for the sake of the German state, its people and its economy.”

[Timothy W. Ryback: What the press got wrong about Hitler]

The Berliner Morgenpost, like many mainstream newspapers, lamented the departure of the man whose “strict fiscal policy” had twice rescued Germany from economic ruin. The New York Times observed that regulatory safeguards designed to secure the independence of the Reichsbank proved to be “wholly illusory” with the current administration. “Under the pressure of the kind in which the National Socialists are adept at applying,” the Times wrote, “even high government officials in Germany do not now try to retain their posts.”

Amid the turmoil of his wrangling with Luther, Hitler had summoned Hjalmar Schacht to the Reich chancellery, where he posed to Schacht the same question he had asked Luther: How much did Schacht think the Reichsbank could provide in helping finance the Hitler government’s plans? Schacht dodged the question. Giving a precise amount was impossible, Schacht said.

“You must be able to tell me to what degree the Reichsbank can or should provide assistance,” Hitler pressed.

“Herr Reich Chancellor,” Schacht said, “I really cannot give you a specific amount.” Too many factors existed when it came to a massive rearmament program. But Schacht assured Hitler of one thing: that the Reichsbank would provide Hitler with as much money as he needed. Hitler paused. He studied Schacht in silence, then asked, “Would you be willing to resume the leadership of the Reichsbank?”

Schacht assumed office the same day Luther departed.

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“Wi-Fi is available on this flight,” the flight attendant announced on a recent trip I took from New York City to St. Louis. She recited her routine by rote, and Wi-Fi is among the details that now need to be conveyed, along with explaining how to use a seatbelt and enjoining passengers not to smoke e-cigarettes on board.

But when the time came to use the Wi-Fi, the service didn’t work. Eventually, enough people noticed this that the crew “rebooted” it, after which it still didn’t work. A new announcement acknowledged that Wi-Fi was, in fact, not available on this flight (and offered an apology). This was the can’t even access the portal kind of failure, but I’ve frequently encountered others, including can log in but not connect and so slow as to be worse than nothing. And then, at other times, the internet works great—as reliably as it does in an office building.

For two decades now, in-flight Wi-Fi has occupied this limbo between miracle and catastrophe. Way back in 2008, on Conan O’Brien’s late-night show, Louis C.K. told the story of a man who was complaining about the in-flight Wi-Fi not working mere moments after learning of its existence. “Everything is amazing right now and nobody’s happy,” the comedian joked. The bit was never quite right—nobody was happy, because services such as in-flight Wi-Fi were not yet amazing, actually. A chasm separated the service’s promise and its reality.

Today, 17 years later, I sense that same distance when I try to go online in the air. The matter feels more urgent now that more airlines, including JetBlue, Delta, and soon American and United, are offering free, purportedly better in-flight Wi-Fi (mainly to loyalty members so far). Air travel is neither a haven for offline delight nor a reliable place to carry out normal online life. Either option would be welcome, because each would be definitive. Instead, one is left to wonder if the hours about to be spent in flight can be filled with scrolling, shopping, Slacking, and tapping at Google Docs—or not.

I set out to learn why. Is the issue technological? Are the airlines promising more service than they can deliver? Most of all, I wanted to know if this situation will ever be fixed, making airplane Wi-Fi feel as brisk and reliable as it does elsewhere. The answer, it turns out, is familiar: soon, any day now, probably next year.

* * *

Because it’s the thing they use most often and turn on directly, people use Wi-Fi as a nickname for internet access in general. (“The Wi-Fi is down,” your spouse or child might say.) But the Wi-Fi part of airplane Wi-Fi—the access points in the plane that appear as “Delta Wi-Fi” or whatever on your computer or smartphone—is almost never part of the problem. Instead, the problem is the pipe to which the Wi-Fi connects—the in-flight equivalent of the cable or fiber that delivers internet service to your house.

An airplane flies in the air, and there are two ways to get the internet to connect to such a place: from above or below. At first, the only option was down. If you’re old enough to remember the September 11 attacks, you might also recall the Airfone service on some airlines—a phone handset stuffed into the seatback. These phones used air-to-ground communication, meaning that the signal was sent from the plane to a relay on the ground. Airfone (and its competitors) were expensive, didn’t work well, and few people used them. But that technology would be repurposed for early in-flight internet, offered via providers such as Gogo Inflight.

Jack Mandala, the CEO of Seamless Air Alliance, a standards organization for in-flight connectivity, told me that air-to-ground works like your cellphone—the bottom of the plane needs a view (metaphorically speaking) of base stations from the air. That’s why, for a time, you could use in-flight internet only over 10,000 feet. It’s also why the service is unreliable. Just like your cellphone might hit a dead spot, so can your airplane. Air-to-ground bandwidth was limited, meaning that the service would get worse as more people on a plane used it. And finally, air-to-ground service operates extremely slowly when it sends data down to the ground—this is why sending an email attachment or texting an image from a plane can take an eternity, before possibly failing completely.

Going up instead of down mostly solved these issues. Around the time of Louis C.K.’s Conan bit, airlines began offering internet service to planes via satellite communication. The improved speed and reliability allowed JetBlue to provide the industry’s first free in-flight internet to commercial passengers, in 2013. According to Mandala, satellite services are easier to scale as more planes adopt them and more passengers use them. Satellite also has the benefit of being usable over water, in bad weather, and on the ground.

The problem is that having viable technology is different from rolling it out seamlessly everywhere. Doing so requires investing in the equipment and service, and that requires time and money. In 2019, Delta, for instance, made a commitment to roll out free Wi-Fi across its entire fleet. Joseph Eddy, the airline’s director of cabin and in-flight entertainment and connectivity, told me that Delta’s effort is still ongoing. Unlike hotels or convention centers, Eddy reminded me, aircraft are highly regulated. Each type of aircraft needs to be configured differently, and a big airline such as Delta—or American, which told me it will also soon have 1,500 aircraft of its own with Wi-Fi service—requires some planning. “We need to make software upgrades. We need to make sure we have all the satellite coverage that we need to ensure that we have enough capacity and the experience is as good as possible,” Heather Garboden, American Airlines’ chief customer officer, told me.

But, hold up: American is the carrier I fly most these days, and I keep finding myself unable to use the internet. Garboden confirmed that American is still transitioning its regional jets to satellite service—many are still using air-to-ground. And that’s exactly the kind of plane I was on from New York. Delta’s Eddy told me that its regional jets and some short-haul planes, including the Boeing 717, are also still operating on air-to-ground service.

In both cases, the airlines made a deliberate choice to invest first in the routes and planes that carry the most passengers—big, mainline jets. That means that if you’re flying on a long flight across or between continents, or on an airline with fewer types of planes, such as JetBlue or Southwest, you might have a better shot at reliable internet. And if you’re on a small or regional jet, chances are greater that the Wi-Fi won’t work, or won’t work well. Eddy told me that Bombardier CRJ regional jets have proved more troubling to certify for the satellite antennas that sit on top of the fuselage, because of the aircraft’s rear-mounted engines. “You can’t allow any form of debris to fly off the antenna at all,” he said. If you board a plane and Wi-Fi isn’t available on the ground, that’s a sign that your aircraft is still using air-to-ground service. Good luck.

* * *

Beyond the technology itself, the expectation of always being connected is also driving flier perceptions of in-flight internet performance. Fliers are only now starting to take in-flight internet access as a given, rather than viewing it as a surcharged luxury.

Eddy thinks the tide started to turn during COVID. Even though people weren’t flying as much, everyone became more familiar with digital tools—Zoom, but also Slack, Teams, Google Docs—that might once have been lesser known. When travel resumed, those expectations made in-flight Wi-Fi “significantly more important,” Eddy said. American Airlines’ Garboden added that a younger, always-online generation is buying tickets now—26 percent of the airline’s customers are Gen Z and younger, she told me. For both airlines, the evolution of in-flight entertainment has reinforced the need for internet service. American delivers its movies and shows directly to its passengers’ devices; once those people are already staring at their phones, habit makes them expect to be able to switch to email or a social-media app. But Delta, which offers seatback screens on most of its planes, believes that having a television in front of you also now implies the need for internet. “If you look at the younger generations, they’re at home watching Netflix and they’re playing on their phone. They’re doing both almost constantly,” Eddy said, adding that 20 percent of Delta’s Wi-Fi customers use more than one device at a time.

Competition and passenger expectations may be the key to making in-flight internet work for good. After 9/11, the domestic airline industry devolved into pure carriage, stripping away all comforts in the name of safety—and profit. That appears to be changing. Nomadix, the company that invented the enter-your-name-and-room-number hotel internet service more than 25 years ago, told me that the quality of Wi-Fi is one of the top three factors in customer satisfaction at every hotel property. That’s because hotels are in the hospitality business, and catering to customer comfort (not to mention facilitating work for business travelers) is core to their success. Airlines haven’t been as concerned with making flyers content in the cabin, but both Delta and American admitted that in-flight internet service is transitioning from an amenity into part of the hard product. “You would expect that your seat is there, right? Wi-Fi has become that for us,” Eddy said. Almost overnight, he told me, Wi-Fi went from having no impact on people choosing Delta to being “more important than flight times and airports.”

For now, consistency is the missing ingredient. This is what Louis C.K. failed to grasp: The issue has never been the flying public’s unwillingness to marvel at the miracles of human invention, but rather, the fact that carriers appear to make promises and then fail to deliver on them. Now that customer expectations, technological feasibility, and airline investments all align, it should just be a matter of time before the air is as well connected as the ground. But how much time? Delta initially promised “fast, free Wi-Fi” across its global fleet by the end of 2024, but now the airline thinks reaching that milestone will take until the first half of 2026. Garboden said American is on track for early 2026. United also plans to offer free satellite Wi-Fi across its entire fleet, but offered no projected date for full rollout.

Like cabin safety or timely arrival, until every passenger on every flight feels confident that the internet will take off along with their bodies and their luggage, the service doesn’t really exist, because it can’t be relied upon. Internet in the air is both a concrete advancement that’s mature and widespread, and a conceptual one frequently deferred into the future. That future may come, and perhaps even soon. Or it might not. Just like the Wi-Fi on your next flight.

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This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.

Many of my most memorable reading experiences are conflated with incongruous settings. I first picked up Slaughterhouse-Five in Venice, on the recommendation of a fellow backpacker. I read Death in Venice, however, in Amsterdam, where the canals thinly evoked Thomas Mann’s pestilent waterways. And if you ask me about San Sebastián, the lovely Basque seaside town, I’ll flash back to the mind-blowing middle section of Cloud Atlas, which is set in postapocalyptic Hawaii. For authors, too, a place can serve as more of a catalyst than a setting. They go somewhere on holiday and end up learning something about their characters—or themselves. This is what happened to John le Carré in Corfu, and it’s why, for this week’s installment of The Atlantic’s literary-travel series, “The Writer’s Way,” Honor Jones chose to investigate le Carré’s 600-page masterpiece, A Perfect Spy, by traveling to a place that takes up only a few pages in the novel.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:

Eight books that explain the university crisisThe most dangerous kind of friendshipThe one book everyone should read“Your Horses,” a poem by Jodie Hollander

“If you wanted to write about le Carré and travel, you could go almost anywhere,” Jones explains: “Vienna or Bern or Kenya or Cornwall would make the list long before Corfu.” But consider the predicament of le Carré’s protagonist, Magnus, an MI6 agent who has betrayed his country to the Communist Czechs and is lying low in Greece under cover of a family vacation. “If you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you don’t go to the obvious places,” Jones writes. “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.”

Le Carré himself had a chance encounter in Corfu that made its way into A Perfect Spy, in a scene that opens up a central theme of the novel—the legacy of a father (Magnus’s but also le Carré’s) who was a monstrous, charismatic narcissist. It was on the Greek island that le Carré ran into a man who’d worked for his father, a globe-trotting con artist. “We was all bent, son,” the former henchman told him. “But your dad was very, very bent.”

Because great novels are rarely on the nose, le Carré sets a fictionalized version of this encounter in England. Corfu instead becomes the place where Magnus’s Czech contact, the mysterious Axel, tries to entice the Brit to join him behind the Iron Curtain. The island, for centuries beset by repeated invasions and then an onslaught of tourism, holds broader thematic significance for Jones: “Corfu is a good place to think about influence and identity, about how so many disparate fragments can cohere into a whole.”

As it happens, I’m going to stop in Bern next week on a European rail vacation. The Swiss city takes up many more pages in A Perfect Spy than Corfu does; it’s where Magnus, as a very young man, first meets Axel. But I’ve already read the novel, so I’ll pack a different one. Inspired by The Atlantic’s new list of staffers’ recommendations for must-read books, I’m going to finally dig into Hernan Diaz’s Trust, which is set primarily in New York. So although I’ll be in Europe, I’ll probably be thinking of home.

A narrow street in Corfu’s Old Town Alice Zoo for The Atlantic

Chasing le Carré in Corfu

By Honor Jones

If you’re trying to find someone who doesn’t want to be found, you don’t go to the obvious places.

Read the full article.

What to Read

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.  — Tyler Austin Harper

From our list: Eight books that explain the university crisis

Out Next Week

📚 Flashout, by Alexis Soloski

📚 Kicking the Hornet’s Nest: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East From Truman to Trump, by Daniel E. Zoughbie

📚 The Trembling Hand: Reflections of a Black Woman in the Romantic Archive, by Mathelinda Nabugodi

Your Weekend Read

A24

When It Feels Good to Root for a Bad Guy

By David Sims

The local sheriff in Eddington, Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix), is the film’s Bickle, though his final showdown is a far more absurd spectacle than the one in Taxi Driver. Aster’s film is frightening, yes—but it’s a dark and lacerating comedy first and foremost, playing out the power fantasies that fueled many an online conspiracy theory in the pandemic’s early days (and still do now). And although Cross may not be as crushingly lonely as Bickle, he does share the character’s escalating sense of paranoia. By plunging the viewer into this chaotic inner world, Aster illustrates the dissonant appeal of being enmeshed in the perspective of, and maybe even rooting for, an individual committed to their belief in justice—even if that commitment can border on sordid.

Read the full article.

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The world of professional wrestling includes many types of characters: the tough guy; the masked acrobat; the silent killer; the undersize underdog; the wild man; the high-flying heartthrob; the sex god. Over the course of a pro-wrestling event, which may last a few hours and feature several matches, these roles work in tandem as a type of variety show, giving fans many flavors of entertainment. But over the past half century, the headlining star—the one whose name tops the marquee, and who is paid the most money—has usually been someone like Hulk Hogan. Hogan himself was uncommonly tall, blessed with biceps bigger than a baby’s head, a booming voice, dozens of repeatable catchphases, and a 1,000-watt personality that could be felt from the cheap seats. Both visually and in his affectations, he was what you might come up with if you were to ask 100 strangers on the street, or ChatGPT, to draw the prototypical “pro wrestler.”

Hogan, who died yesterday at the age of 71, is by many objective metrics the most famous pro wrestler of all time. Pro wrestling, as entertainment, has existed since at least the early 20th century. But in the 1980s, Hogan popularized a brash and cartoonish style that became swiftly synonymous with the form, at least in America. When the promoter Vince McMahon built up the company now known as World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), which transformed the business by becoming the first to broadcast its wrestling show across the country, Hogan was his agent of change—a muscle-bound pitchman who sold a patriotic vision of strength, heroism, and integrity. (As his theme song went: “I am a real American / Fight for the rights of every man.”) Hogan’s superpower was his pure conviction; he embodied outlandishness without a trace of irony, imprinting himself onto the hearts and minds of millions of people, many of them children who would carry their adoration into adulthood.

Most pro-wrestling fans will freely admit that the entertainment is at least a little ridiculous. We’re talking about half-naked men and women in leather underwear and fake tans who pretend to fight one another, their beefs based on storylines as simplistic as I don’t like you. But the unbelievability is part of the point. Pro wrestling offers a digestible fantasy in which good guys usually triumph and villains get their comeuppance. The bad guys aren’t acquitted on technicalities or rewarded for their deviousness; they’re punched in the mouth, before a roaring crowd of thousands. When Hogan became wrestling’s brightest star, this was his essential promise—he was not just a do-gooder who said the right things about loving God and eating your vitamins; he also almost always won. He was like a one-man Harlem Globetrotters, a dazzling showman guaranteed to come out on top. He remained beloved even when he became a bad guy, in the 1990s, popularizing a new archetype of “cool scoundrel” that upended the entire business by making it unclear which side of the good-versus-evil conflict fans should root for. In his case, it was obvious: You rooted for Hulk Hogan.

This success brought millions of dollars, worldwide fame, acting roles, a few restaurants—even as Hogan himself remained something of a cipher. Today, WWE produces hours of behind-the-scenes documentary programming in which its wrestlers speak as themselves. But in that earlier era, when it was not yet publicly acknowledged that the entertainment was predetermined, men like Hogan were careful to stay in character, lest they be judged as phonies. The WWE admitted that the wrestling wasn’t “real” as far back as 1989, but still, Hogan never quite shed the role of  “Hulk Hogan”—never casually transitioned into being known by his birth name, Terry Bollea. Even his reality show, which purported to depict his everyday family life, was called Hogan Knows Best. (His ex-wife Linda; his son, Nick; and his daughter, Brooke, all adopted “Hogan” as their public surname, too.)

Hogan generally seemed to be living out some version of his wrestling identity. In a courtroom, he might admit that “Hogan” was a character he played for a living; still, he would say this while wearing his trademark bandanna and bleached-blond goatee. As the years went on and he spent more time out of the wrestling ring—his last match was in 2012, but he hadn’t been a regular performer since 2002—he extended the logic of his character into real life. When in 2013 he sued Gawker for publishing a tape that showed him having sex with his friend’s wife (with the friend’s consent), and eventually won a $140 million judgment, he dominated the court of public opinion by portraying the website as just his latest adversary to overcome. (That the behind-the-scenes circumstances of his lawsuit were more complicated didn’t matter much.) When audio of Hogan using wildly racist invective, from that same tape, was leaked in 2015, he was excommunicated from WWE—“It was unacceptable for me to have used that offensive language; there is no excuse for it; and I apologize for having done it,” he said in a statement—but negotiated a triumphant return to its programming just a few years later. He was sometimes down, but never out; he behaved as though the fans would always be there for him, and they usually were.

This ability to wave away the past and shamelessly present himself for renewed applause was an especially American trait. Like a carnival barker or a veteran televangelist, Hogan wielded his charisma as a cudgel against all criticism. The sordid, tasteless incidents never dinged him for long. Whatever happened then did not matter as much as what was happening now. If he could present as the Hulkster, his muscles rippling and his bandanna tightly strapped on, he could pretend to be the conquering hero even when the truth was more troublesome, more dreary, more human.

In pro wrestling, the ability to stay in character is highly valuable; in real life, it’s sort of obnoxious. (Try affecting the loudest version of your personality, all of the time, and see how many of your loved ones stick around.) But if your paying customers don’t care, there’s little downside to maintaining the illusion for as long as possible. Today, America is inundated with public figures who loudly insist they are one thing when they’re really something else, who stick around mostly because they refuse to go away. We are surrounded by Hulk Hogans, boisterous personalities who commit to their bit as they try to sell something and unabashedly ignore the truth.

Even by the standards of his wrestling peers, Hogan’s ability to stretch the truth was something else. And his belief in himself was rarely shaken; no matter the occasion, he could always snap into character and launch into a bravura monologue. Slowly, though, the covenant between Hogan and those paying customers began to crack. The racist tapes were a major blow, even after WWE brought him back; several Black wrestlers refused to accept his apology, calling him insincere. The ugliness of his remarks is still shocking to revisit today—for many fans, they will be his enduring legacy. And his public alliance with President Donald Trump, which included an absurd pro-wrestling-style speech at last year’s Republican National Convention (“I know tough guys but let me tell you something, brother, Donald Trump is the toughest of them all”), was just as polarizing.

When Hogan made his last WWE appearance earlier this year, on the Netflix debut of the company’s Monday Night Raw, he was resoundingly booed by the Los Angeles crowd. It was an ignoble final interaction with an audience he had helped create, though hardly surprising, given his recent reputation. Even so, he was willing to bet on being forgiven: This year he co-founded the wrestling company Real American Freestyle, whose first show is scheduled for August. Ticket sales were soft, and many pro-wrestling fans derided the concept; still, he was going for it one more time, committing to a character who was no longer believable to anyone but himself.

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