The Atlantic

For decades, Donald Trump has been at war with numbers. Some have capitulated more swiftly than others. His weight, his golf scores, and his net worth have long fallen in line. As I understand it, a Trump doctor appointment consists of going to a medical professional and announcing how much you would like to weigh and what your resting heart rate ought to be, and the wise doctor’s patriotic, good equipment cooperates to measure you correctly. (I have tried this myself without success. My scale is not a true patriot.) Mean, wicked scales that display unflattering numbers, and foolish, incompetent golf balls that do not traverse the correct distance, are promptly discarded and replaced with their more loyal counterparts.

This is how value works! As Trump testified once in court, “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings, even my own feelings … Yes, even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.”

Some data, such as the number of votes he received at the polls in 2020, initially refused to budge. But with a little bit of threatening from some extra-patriotic patriots, the election turned out to have been a Trump blowout. Just ask any elected Republican; they’ll tell you! Now these politicians are working on gerrymandering the country so that it will understand that Republicans are in the majority everywhere—which poll results would already be saying if they were more patriotic.

And now, at last, Donald Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Once these disloyal statisticians are out of the way, the data will finally start to cooperate. The only possible reason the economy could be doing anything other than booming is Joe Biden–legacy manipulation. The economy is not frightened and exhausted by a man who pursues his tariffs with the wild-eyed avidity of Captain Ahab and seems genuinely unable to grasp the meaning of a trade deficit. No, the numbers are simply not patriotic enough. We must make an example of them! When they are frightened enough, I am sure they will show growth.

Fumbling around in a fog of vibes and misinformation and things you saw on Fox News is good enough for the president; why should the rest of us ask for anything better? Soon, no one will know what is happening—what the problem is, or what remedies to apply. What sectors are booming and which are contracting, whether interest rates should be higher or lower, whether it’s hotter or colder than last year, whether mortality has gone up or gone down. It will be vibes all the way down. Soon we will all be bumping around helplessly in the dark.

That’s a good thing. We can all breathe easier and know that the economy is doing just what the president wants it to do. Try feeling like eggs are cheaper! Try feeling like you have a job. Try feeling like you can buy the amount of goods and services with your dollar that you desire. Close your eyes and try a little harder. Then you’ll feel the prosperity. Trickling down, so warmly, from Trump on high. And the invisible hand, lifting you up.

Finally, the numbers will be vanquished. Finally, we will be free.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In the summer of 2022, Donald Trump badly needed criminal-defense lawyers. Tim Parlatore, who was already working for the former president on an unrelated civil matter, joined the team defending Trump after an FBI search found classified government documents stored at his Florida estate. Parlatore had represented prominent Trump allies in their interactions with the congressional committee investigating the January 6 attacks; that was helpful, because Trump also faced charges stemming from the riot. Parlatore was a star lawyer in Trump world, so it’s more than a little surprising that, in the fall of that year, he hired a close associate of one of the most notorious villains in the extended MAGA universe: Jeffrey Epstein.

Before he joined the Parlatore Law Group, Darren Indyke was Epstein’s personal attorney for nearly a quarter century and reportedly among his closest associates and advisers. Parlatore’s decision to hire Indyke appears to have escaped public notice. But Indyke, by his own account, has been working for the firm since October 2022.

Indyke is also a co-executor of Epstein’s estate, which has made settlement payments to more than 100 alleged victims of the deceased multimillionaire’s sex trafficking. Two women have sued Indyke, along with Epstein’s former accountant, claiming that they helped administer a network of dozens of bank accounts, corporate entities, and money transfers that enabled Epstein’s crimes. In court filings, Indyke has categorically denied any involvement in or knowledge of Epstein’s alleged crimes.

I called Parlatore earlier this week after I noticed Indyke’s photo and bio on the law firm’s website. “He has skills doing a bunch of stuff that I don’t know how to do, as far as corporate work,” Parlatore told me during a brief conversation. He added that Indyke’s “experience on the legal side of the Epstein business was valuable.”For instance, Indyke knows how to structure financial arrangements and purchase aircraft, Parlatore said. “I hired him because of that.”

[Read: Inside the White House’s Epstein strategy]

Those kinds of financial skills are what the two women who sued Indyke allege were at the heart of Epstein’s criminal enterprise. In his bio, Indyke touts his experience “as general counsel to family offices, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and other ultra-high-net-worth clientele.” He doesn’t mention Epstein. Among his other capabilities: “Complex business and commercial transactions,” as well as “aviation, marine, and other exotic asset purchases, sales, and operation.”

Indyke “came to me because he was looking for a job,” Parlatore told me. He said he was aware of the allegations in the ongoing civil lawsuit, which was filed in 2024, after Indyke had joined the firm. But he said that Indyke had assured him that “the FBI looked into it, and they didn’t find anything.”

Indyke has not been charged with a crime. He did not respond to an email or a text message I sent, or to a voicemail I left at the number listed for him at the firm.

When he hired Indyke, Parlatore told me, “the Epstein stuff, as far as I was concerned, was irrelevant to me.”

The Epstein stuff is highly relevant, however, and of the utmost political salience to Trump’s base. For many Trump voters, the Epstein story captures how rich and powerful people can use their influence and connections to cover up one another’s dark deeds. It’s the kind of corrupt back-scratching that Trump has long pledged to stamp out. For weeks now, Trump has been at pains to distance himself from Epstein, once a close friend. Parlatore’s work with Indyke seems unlikely to help that effort, particularly because Parlatore is now working closely with a key member of Trump’s Cabinet, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

To describe Parlatore simply as what he is—Hegseth’s personal lawyer and a Pentagon adviser—would overlook the symbiotic relationship that allowed both of them to rise inside Trump’s circle.

Parlatore began representing U.S. troops accused of grave misconduct when Hegseth was catching Trump’s attention as a Fox News host, during the president’s first term. Hegseth made defending troops a personal on-air cause, arguing the military court system unfairly prosecuted “warriors” who had made tough decisions in the heat of battle.

Parlatore represented Navy Chief Eddie Gallagher, who was charged with premeditated murder following the death of a 17-year-old suspected Islamic State fighter in Iraq in 2017. Two years later, a court acquitted Gallagher on all charges except for taking a photograph with the corpse, and the Navy demoted him. Trump then pardoned Gallagher and reinstated his rank.

Parlatore had also become Hegseth’s personal attorney. In 2024, after Trump nominated Hegseth as defense secretary, Parlatore threatened legal action against a woman who had filed a police report seven years earlier saying that Hegseth had assaulted her in a hotel. Parlatore told CNN that Hegseth’s accuser was free to speak publicly, because a confidentiality agreement covering her and the nominee was no longer in effect. But he said he would consider suing her for civil extortion and defamation if she made what Parlatore described as false claims that might jeopardize Hegseth’s chances of Senate confirmation.

Parlatore aggressively criticized reporters who questioned Hegseth's qualifications to run the Defense Department, and he helped his client prepare for a contentious nomination hearing. Hegseth squeaked through, after Vice President J. D. Vance cast the tie-breaking vote to confirm him.

Parlatore has been by Hegseth’s side since he entered the Pentagon in January. A former naval surface-warfare officer, Parlatore rejoined the service as a reserve commander in the JAG Corps. Hegseth swore him back into uniform.

[Read: When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon tenure started going sideways]

Even as Hegseth has fired or dismissed a number of advisers, Parlatore has survived, and many officials in the Pentagon see him as the key intermediary to reach Hegseth. When journalists call the Pentagon with questions, they’re often directed to Parlatore.

Parlatore has also backed up Hegseth’s policy agenda, supporting the removal of hundreds of books flagged for DEI-related content from the library of the U.S. Naval Academy, from which Parlatore graduated.

Before Trump’s reelection, Parlatore was a central member of the legal team representing the former president in the classified-documents case and even testified before the grand jury investigating the matter. He oversaw searches for additional classified documents at Trump properties.

Parlatore left Trump’s legal team in May 2023, shortly before the former president was charged in the documents case, amid disputes with another attorney who Parlatore thought was hindering Trump’s defense.

According to Indyke’s LinkedIn profile, he is “of counsel” at the Parlatore Law Group, which usually describes a lawyer who is not a partner, but also not a junior employee. Some lawyers who are of counsel work on special projects or with particular clients.

Parlatore told me that Indyke’s work on the Epstein estate has kept him so busy that he didn’t have time for much else. Indyke also represents a few individual clients, Parlatore said, without naming them.

Meanwhile, Parlatore has been dabbling in conspiracy theories about the death of his colleague’s former boss. On the Shawn Ryan Show podcast in May of last year, the host asked Parlatore why cases like Epstein’s “are just being whisked away into nothing.”

The obvious reason Epstein’s federal prosecution for sex trafficking did not move forward in 2019 was that he hanged himself in his Manhattan jail cell. But Parlatore sensed darker forces at play.

“There’s always pressure being brought when certain cases could reveal embarrassing things about people in power,” he said. He speculated that Epstein had never stood trial “because he was permitted to kill himself.” By whom, he didn’t say.

Earlier this week, Parlatore posted a monologue on social media dismissing the idea that Epstein kept a “client list,” the white whale of the saga that would supposedly identify powerful men for whom Epstein procured young women and girls. Parlatore suggested that Epstein didn’t create such a list, but that the Justice Department lawyers who prosecuted him may have done so.

Government lawyers, he argued, “only really pursued the theory that Epstein trafficked girls for himself. They didn’t bother looking for who else was involved.”

Left unsaid was that some of Epstein’s victims havegone looking for others involved in enabling Epstein’s misconduct, and they claim that one trail leads to Indyke.

Last year, Epstein’s estate, which Indyke administers with Epstein’s former accountant, received a nearly $112 million tax refund from the IRS. “With most large claims against the estate having been settled, that newfound cash isn’t likely to make its way to victims of the disgraced financier,” The New York Times reported in January. But some of the assets could go to Indyke, as well as other beneficiaries that Epstein named before he died.

I asked Parlatore if he was aware that his associate stood to reap a financial windfall. That was news to him, he said, then added that if Indyke does come into a large amount of money, perhaps he’ll quit the law firm.

Nancy A. Youssef contributed reporting.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Donald Trump, beset by a week of bad news, has decided to rattle the most dangerous saber of all. In a post today on his Truth Social site, the president claimed that in response to recent remarks by former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, he has “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.” (All American submarines are nuclear-powered; Trump may mean submarines armed with ballistic nuclear weapons.) “Words are very important,” Trump added, “and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

And then, of course: “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Trump’s words may mean nothing. The submarines that carry America’s sea-based nuclear deterrent routinely move around the world’s oceans. Each carries up to 20 nuclear warheads, on missiles with a range of more than 4,000 miles, and so almost anywhere can be an “appropriate region.” And Trump may not even have issued such orders; normally, the Pentagon and the White House do not discuss the movements of America’s ballistic-missile submarines.

Medvedev is a man with little actual power in Russia, but he has become Russia’s top internet troll, regularly threatening America and its allies. No one takes him seriously, even in his own country. He and Trump have been trading public insults on social media for months, with Trump telling Medvedev to “watch his words” and Medvedev—nicknamed “Little Dima” in Russia due to his diminutive stature—warning Trump to remember Russia’s “Dead Hand,” a supposed doomsday system that could launch all of Russia’s nuclear weapons even if Moscow were destroyed and the Kremlin leadership killed.

The problem is not that Trump is going to spark a nuclear crisis with a post about two submarines—at least not this time. The much more worrisome issue is that the president of the United States thinks it is acceptable to use ballistic-missile submarines like toys, objects to be waved around when he wants to distract the public or deflect from bad news, or merely because some Russian official has annoyed him.

Unfortunately, Trump has never understood “nuclear,” as he calls it. In a 2015 Republican primary debate, Trump said: “We have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ball game.” When the moderator Hugh Hewitt pressed Trump and asked which part of the U.S. triad (land-based missiles, bombers, and submarines) would be his priority, Trump answered: “For me, nuclear, the power, the devastation, is very important to me.”

That power and devastation, however, is apparently not enough to stop the president from making irresponsible statements in response to a Kremlin troll. One would hope that after nearly five years in office—which must have included multiple briefings on nuclear weapons and how to order their use—Trump might be a bit more hesitant to throw such threats around. But he appears to have no sense of the past or the future; he lives in the now, and winning the moment is always the most important thing.

Trump’s nuclear threats are reckless. (I would call them “silly,” but that is too small a word when the commander in chief even alludes to nuclear arms.) But such threats serve two purposes.

First, they help Trump maintain the fiction that he wants to be tough on Russia, that he is willing to impose consequences on Moscow for its behavior, and that he’s not about to take any guff from anyone in the Kremlin. He takes plenty of guff, of course, from Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he seems to genuinely fear. Trump has never aimed such invective at Putin, and using Medvedev as a surrogate helps Trump thump his chest without any danger of getting into a real fight with someone who scares him.

More important, Trump knows that a foreign-policy crisis, and anything involving nuclear weapons, is an instant distraction from other news. The media will always zero in on such moments, because it is, in fact, news when the most powerful man on Earth starts talking about nuclear weapons. (And here I am, writing about it as well.) Trump has had a terrible week: He’s dug a deeper hole for himself on the Jeffrey Epstein issue, the economy is headed in the wrong direction, and his approval rating is cratering. Using the implied threat of nuclear war to pick a fight with one of Red Square’s most juvenile and odious figures is a convenient distraction.

Nuclear-missile submarines are not toys. No one understood this better than Trump’s predecessors, the 11 presidents who have been the only other people in American history with the authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. They treated any declarations about nuclear weapons with utter gravity and sobriety. They avoided even mentioning such things unless they were articulating a carefully planned policy and communicating it to allies and enemies alike. They did not engage in petty spats with nuclear-armed foreign powers. And they considered using nuclear signals only when faced with crises that involved America’s vital interests.

Trump, however, has now discarded all of these red lines. He has initiated a new era in which the chief executive can use threats regarding the most powerful weapons on Earth to salve his ego and improve his political fortunes. Once upon a time, America was governed by serious people. No longer.

For now, America’s nuclear-armed opponents seem to have priced in a certain amount of drama and foolishness when it comes to Donald Trump, and his most recent social-media bloviation will likely amount to nothing. But if such outbursts are ever taken seriously by our adversaries, the president—and America—may one day regret it.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.

Firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Trump did via a Truth Social post this afternoon, falls into the second category.

McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth in July had fallen somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting—and, to Trump, unwelcome—information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates. Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage.

[Rogé Karma: The mystery of the strong economy has finally been solved]

Trump went with the familiar “fake news” defense. McEntarfer, he posted, had ginned up fake numbers to make him look bad. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” he wrote. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

The backdrop to Trump’s move, and the reason observers are shocked but not surprised, is that the suspicion that jobs numbers are faked to help Democrats has circulated on the right for years. When a strong jobs report came out in October 2012, during Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the former General Electric CEO Jack Welch tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”

Welch’s tweet was considered somewhat unhinged at the time, but like many paranoid forms of conservative thought, it gradually made its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump himself has spent years insisting economic numbers were made up, regularly denouncing every positive jobs report during the Obama era as fake. And so, when this morning’s report came out, his lizard brain was primed to act: Bureaucrat say Trump economy bad. Trump fire bureaucrat. Now economy good.

One problem with this move, even from the narrow standpoint of Trump’s self-interest, is that his complaints with economic statistics don’t fit together logically. Revisions of past numbers are a normal part of BLS methodology. Every monthly report is a projection based on limited information, so the Bureau continues to update its findings. Last August, the BLS revised previous months’ job numbers downward. This was obviously a bad thing for the Biden administration, but Republicans decided that it was in fact evidence that the BLS had been cooking the books to make the economy look good. (They did not address the apparent puzzle of why it finally came clean, months before the election.) Now that Trump is president, however, downward revisions prove that the BLS is cooking the books to make the economy look bad.

The most prominent exponent of these incoherent theories is, of course, Trump himself. In his post firing the BLS commissioner, Trump cited the downward revisions as evidence that she was faking the numbers to hurt him: “McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months.”

In another post an hour and a half later, he cited last year’s revisions as evidence that she had faked the numbers to make Biden look good: “today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad — Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were ‘taken away’ on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM.” (The truth, as we’ve seen, is that the downward revisions under Biden were announced in August, not after the election, but nevermind).

Trump’s anger with government statisticians also runs headlong into his feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Trump has been raging against Powell for being too slow, in Trump’s view, to cut interest rates. But cutting interest rates is what the Fed does when the economy is weak. When the economy is growing fast, it keeps rates high to avoid overheating. Trump is thus simultaneously claiming that the economy is stronger than people think, and that Powell should act as if it’s weaker than people think. He also blames Powell for failing to change policy quickly enough when, according to Trump himself, the most important data Powell would use to make this decision is unreliable.

[Jonathan Chait: What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really about]

Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are the thing that matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda, and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies. But, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public into thinking the economy is better than it is with fake numbers. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy.

The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less of a coup than a temper tantrum. He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The Trump economy doesn’t look so hot after all. This morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised data showing that, over the past three months, the U.S. labor market experienced its worst quarter since 2010, other than during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic. The timing was awkward. Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had announced a huge new slate of tariffs, set to take effect next week. He’d been emboldened by the fact that the economy had remained strong until now despite economists’ warnings—a fact that turned out not to be a fact at all.

After Trump announced his first sweeping round of “Liberation Day” tariffs, in April, the country appeared to be on the verge of economic catastrophe. The stock market plunged, the bond market nearly melted down, expectations of future inflation skyrocketed, and experts predicted a recession.

But the crisis never came. Trump walked back or delayed his most extreme threats, and those that he kept didn’t seem to inflict much economic damage. Month after month, economists predicted that evidence of the negative impact of tariffs in the economic data was just around the corner. Instead, according to the available numbers, inflation remained stable, job growth remained strong, and the stock market set new records.

The Trump administration took the opportunity to run a victory lap. “Lots of folks predicted that it would end the world, there would be some sort of disastrous outcome,” Stephen Miran, the chair of Trump’s council of economic advisers, said of Trump’s tariffs in an interview with ABC News in early July. “And once again, tariff revenue is pouring in. There’s no sign of any economically significant inflation whatsoever, and job creation remains healthy.” A July 9 White House press release declared, “President Trump was right (again),” touting strong jobs numbers and mild inflation. “President Trump is overseeing another economic boom,” it concluded.

The seemingly strong data spurred soul-searching among journalists and economists. “The Economy Seems Healthy. Were the Warnings About Tariffs Overblown?” read a representative New York Times headline. Commentators scrambled to explain how the experts could have gotten things so wrong. Maybe it was because companies had stocked up on imported goods before the tariffs had come into effect; maybe the economy was simply so strong that it was impervious to Trump’s machinations; maybe economists were suffering from “tariff derangement syndrome.” Either way, the possibility that Trump had been right, and the economists wrong, had to be taken seriously.

[Annie Lowrey: Start budgeting now]

The sky’s refusal to fall likely influenced the Trump administration’s decision to press ahead with more tariffs. In recent months, Trump has imposed 25 percent tariffs on car parts and 50 percent tariffs on copper, steel, and aluminum. He has threatened 200 percent tariffs on pharmaceuticals. Over the past week, Trump announced trade deals under which the European Union, Japan, and South Korea agreed to accept a 15 percent tariff on exports to the U.S. Finally, this morning, he announced a sweeping set of new tariffs, a sort of Liberation Day redux, including a 39 percent levy on Switzerland, 25 percent on India, and 20 percent on Vietnam. These are scheduled to take effect on August 7 unless those countries can negotiate a deal.

Then came the new economic data. This morning, the BLS released its monthly jobs report, showing that the economy added just 73,000 new jobs in July, well below the 104,000 that forecasters had expected, and unemployment rose slightly, to 4.2 percent. More importantly, the new report showed that jobs numbers for the previous two months had been revised down considerably after the agency received a more complete set of responses from the businesses it surveys monthly. What had been reported as a strong two-month gain of 291,000 jobs was revised down to a paltry 33,000. What had once looked like a massive jobs boom ended up being a historically weak quarter of growth.

Even that might be too rosy a picture. All the net gains of the past three months came from a single sector, health care, without which the labor market would have lost nearly 100,000 jobs. That’s concerning because health care is one of the few sectors that is mostly insulated from broader economic conditions: People always need it, even during bad times. (The manufacturing sector, which tariffs are supposed to be boosting, has shed jobs for three straight months.) Moreover, the new numbers followed an inflation report released by the Commerce Department yesterday that found that the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of price growth had picked up in June and remained well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. (The prior month’s inflation report was also revised upward to show a slight increase in May.) Economic growth and consumer spending also turned out to have fallen considerably compared with the first half of 2024. Taken together, these economic reports are consistent with the stagflationary environment that economists were predicting a few months ago: mediocre growth, a weakening labor market, and rising prices.

The striking thing about these trends is how heavily they diverge from how the economy was projected to perform before Trump took office. As the economist Jason Furman recently pointed out, the actual economic growth rate in the first six months of 2025 was barely more than half what the Bureau of Economic Analysis had projected in November 2024, while core inflation came in at about a third higher than projections.

[Rogé Karma: Meddling with the Fed could backfire on Trump]

The worst might be yet to come. Many companies did in fact stock up on imported goods before the tariffs kicked in; others have been eating the cost of tariffs to avoid raising prices in the hopes that the duties would soon go away. Now that tariffs seem to be here to stay, more and more companies will likely be forced to either raise prices or slash their costs—including labor costs. A return to the 1970s-style combination of rising inflation and unemployment is looking a lot more likely.

The Trump administration has found itself caught between deflecting blame for the weak economic numbers and denying the numbers’ validity. In an interview with CNN this morning, Miran admitted that the new jobs report “isn’t ideal,” but went on to attribute it to various “anomalous factors,” including data quirks and reduced immigration. (Someone should ask Miran why immigration is down.) And this afternoon, Trump posted a rant on Truth Social accusing the BLS commissioner of cooking the books to make him look bad. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” he wrote. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.” He then went on to argue, not for the first time, that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell should be fired for hamstringing the economy with high interest rates. These defenses are, of course, mutually exclusive: If the bad numbers are fake, why should Trump be mad at Powell?

In these confused denials, one detects a shade of desperation on Trump’s part. Of course, everything could end up being fine. Maybe economists will be wrong and the economy will rebound with newfound strength in the second half of the year. But that’s looking like a far worse bet than it did just 24 hours ago.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

George Anton is hungry, but he’s become used to the sensation—the urgent, aching feeling in his stomach, the heaviness of his limbs. He hardly has time to acknowledge the discomfort, given all the work he has to do. He is the operations manager for an aid-distribution program operating through the Holy Family Catholic Church in Gaza City, the sole remaining Catholic church in Gaza.

Anton lives at the church in a single room that he shares with his wife and three daughters. Four hundred people are sheltering there, he told me; it was once a sanctuary from the war. Recently, however, the fighting has come to encircle it. An Israeli tank shell struck the church early last month, killing three people there, according to a statement by the patriarchate.

This week, daily pauses in the fighting have calmed the neighborhood somewhat, but not enough for the church to resume aid programs: food hampers, a communal laundry, psychosocial support programs and clinics. Some of these functioned even before the current war. But these days, the church has nothing to distribute. Its food pantry is empty, and supplies have run out. When I reached Anton by phone on Wednesday, he was busy looking for a way to bring more food to the church’s pantry.

Anton is one of hundreds of Gazan aid workers—affiliated with religious, international, and local organizations—who are trying to find and distribute supplies to keep others alive. Complicating their work is their own hunger and exhaustion, as well as the paucity of food coming into the territory altogether. An alert on Tuesday from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, an organization made up of United Nations agencies and aid groups, noted that the “latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City.”

The people sheltering at the church have, in the absence of communal supplies, begun to ration their own small stashes of food items, mostly gathered from the markets when the situation was stable enough for them to venture out. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which has become the official mechanism for dispensing food aid, has very few distribution points, all in areas far from the church. Many Gazans fear visiting these sites: According to the UN, more than 1,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces while seeking assistance from GHF, the UN, and other aid convoys. (GHF has called these numbers “false and exaggerated statistics.”)

[Read: Food aid in Gaza has become a horror]

I spoke with one Palestinian aid worker who did try to get food from GHF. In early June, Youssef Alwikhery, an occupational therapist with Medical Aid for Palestinians, hadn’t eaten for close to a week. Several of his brothers, uncles, and cousins had tried to get food from GHF before—30 attempts altogether, he estimated—but only one had succeeded in bringing a box back. So Alwikhery rose one morning at 3 a.m. and made his way to Salah al-Din Street in central Gaza, a main thoroughfare leading to a distribution point that was a little over a mile from his home. He saw thousands of people. Some started running toward the distribution point, and he ran too. “It was like a game, like a death game,” he told me. Soon came the sound of shots and explosions. Alwikhery turned back. “It’s not help. It’s like Russian roulette,” he said. “If you want to run, you might die, or you might get injured. You might get a box. This is the formula. This is the point.”

Alwikhery now pays exorbitant prices for small amounts of food at the market, and he eats just one meal a day. He lives with his parents and his brothers’ families, including 9- and 11-year-old children. They, too, eat only one meal a day, usually around four or five in the evening, and if a family member needs to cook, they burn whatever they can, because the price of fuel is high. One photo Alwikhery sent me shows his occupational-therapy textbook being used as kindling.

I first met Alwikhery in the summer of 2022, at Al-Awda Hospital in the Jabalia refugee camp in the northernmost part of Gaza, when we worked with the same international medical organization. He specialized in helping patients with congenital disabilities carry out their daily activities. Israel ordered the closure of Al-Awda in May, and now Alwikhery works in Medical Aid for Palestinians’ emergency clinic in central Gaza. He told me that he finds the state of his pediatric patients disturbing; he described children with cerebral palsy who couldn’t move their bodies to do simple exercises because they were so calorically deprived.

My call with Anton was at 9 p.m. on Wednesday, and so far that day, he told me, he had consumed nothing but coffee and tea. He rises early, at 6 a.m. The first thing he does is check to make sure the church’s solar panels, water tanks, and piping are still functioning and did not sustain any damage overnight. Then he reads the news, goes to morning prayers, and calls his colleagues in Jerusalem for updates on when food trucks might reach Gaza and how they will be secured.

Around 4 p.m. the day we spoke, his wife and three daughters, ages 9, 11, and 14, had shared one can of tuna with some bread. In recent weeks, his girls have taken to spending much of their time in the family’s room, sleeping and reading to conserve their energy. The oldest and youngest used to enjoy soccer and basketball, but now they don’t feel safe going out, and anyway, they’re too tired. Anton told me he encourages them to pretend they’re fasting, as though for Lent.

[Photos: Starvation and chaos in Gaza]

Sometimes, fellow aid workers or journalists tell Anton about families on the brink, and he gathers any extra supplies he can from the families sheltering in the church to deliver by foot. Recently, a journalist told him about a father of six who used a wheelchair and could not access income or aid. This man had no extended family nearby to share resources. Anton was able to gather only enough food to last the family approximately one week. When conditions were safe enough last Saturday, he delivered the food to the family’s tent. The children, two boys and two girls, were “really suffering,” he told me. “They’re like skeletons, you know.”

Families such as that one, where one or more members have a disability, or whose kinship networks are small or nonexistent, are among those hardest hit by starvation, both Anton and Alwikhery told me.

Anton’s day would not finish after we spoke. He said he would try to find himself some bread later in the night. He and some other people sheltering at the church would stay up to monitor the hostilities in the neighborhood, tend to anyone needing help or comfort, and assist some of the elderly to use the communal bathrooms in the dark.

“We’re trying to do the best we can before we die, you know,” he told me. “Because I’m telling you, if this situation will last for a longer time, all of us will die hungry.”

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For the better part of the past century, the case against nicotine was simple: Smoking a cigarette might feel nice, but it will eventually kill you. Nearly one in five deaths in the United States is caused by complications from cigarette smoke. Chewing tobacco is less dangerous, but still deadly: It has long been associated with head and neck cancers.

But in 2025, nicotine isn’t so straightforward. Smoking is so deadly not because of nicotine, per se, but because of tobacco: Lighting a cigarette burns tobacco, releasing nicotine into the body. Chewing tobacco entails gnawing on actual tobacco leaves. Nowadays, it’s easier than ever to get a nicotine buzz without any tobacco at all: Just puff on a vape or pop a tiny nicotine pouch between your teeth and upper lip. These cigarette alternatives have been around for a while, but only recently have they gone fully mainstream. In January, the FDA officially sanctioned the sale of Zyn, among the most recognizable nicotine-pouch brands. In the past three months alone, Philip Morris International, which makes Zyn, shipped 190 million cans of the stuff to stores. And last month, the agency reversed a prior ruling and authorized Juul e-cigarettes. These products, the FDA has concluded, “generally have lower health risks than cigarettes.”

In this nicotine boom, it’s easy to see the drug as harmless, even good for you. Ads that tout the benefits of nicotine are everywhere: Zyn, for example, has been marketed as an “office essential” that also offers “relaxation on-the-go.” Nicotine somehow feels both energizing and relaxing at the same time, kind of like the buzz of a vodka Red Bull. The drug has been linked to statistically significant improvements in a number of cognitive exercises. The marketing goes further: Joe Rogan has hawked Athletic Nicotine, a nicotine-pouch brand that claims the drug can serve as an “exercise performance-enhancing tool.” Tucker Carlson—who has his own brand of nicotine pouches—recently claimed that because of nicotine, he is “never sick.”

[Read: The inconvenient truth about vaping]

But nicotine is not a wonder drug. The cognitive improvements found in studies were modest. Bethea AnnaLouise Kleykamp, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Maryland who has studied nicotine, summed it up this way: The drug “might be, if you were to subtract it from the smoke, something that could help some people,” such as those who are sleep-deprived or have a cognitive disorder like ADHD. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. Moreover, there’s still a lot we don’t know about what nicotine alone does to the body.

All of this has nicotine in a strange place. Before the advent of newer products, the field of public health was united in its stance that no one should be using cigarettes, and thus nicotine. Now the message is more muddled than ever.

Some public-health experts still suggest staying away from nicotine in and of itself. After the decades-long war against smoking, they see new products as Big Tobacco’s latest gambit to hook the public. Others make a different calculation: If the health effects of nicotine alone are less concerning than those of cigarettes, what’s so bad about an adult sucking on a Zyn? Presuming people recognize that these products “may have some health risks,” Neal Benowitz, an emeritus professor of medicine at UC San Francisco, told me, “I have no problem with that.”

Such differing views stem from the unclear health effects of cigarette alternatives. Consuming nicotine via vape or pouch is surely safer than smoking a cigarette, but that isn’t saying much. No researchers I spoke with gave nicotine an unequivocal endorsement. “I would never go so far as to say that any drug is completely safe,” Jed Rose, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Duke University who runs a research firm that has done paid research for nicotine companies, told me. “Whether nicotine contributes in any way to other diseases associated with smoking is not as firmly resolved as people like to think.”

Rose cited a study that showed nicotine accelerated tumor growth in mice. Other experts I spoke with cited data from Sweden demonstrating that smokeless products carry some cardiovascular risks. And emerging research indicates that the components inside of vapes can leach heavy metals into the mist that users inhale, potentially exposing them to increased cancer risk. For the most part, science simply hasn’t answered the question of how bad nicotine alone is for you. Most of the studies on the bodily effects of nicotine have been completed using subjects who smoke.

For now, the clearest problem with puffing on a Juul is that nicotine remains extremely addictive, whatever form it comes in. Addiction researchers have said that nicotine is just as difficult to quit as heroin. Smokeless products might be a little easier to quit than cigarettes, based on how they deliver nicotine. But it’s reasonable to assume that these new products will also worsen the problem of nicotine addiction by making the drug easier to consume. Desk workers can pop nicotine pouches without having to step away for a smoke break. Vape clouds are more readily concealed than the stench of cigarette smoke. This is part of the appeal: Rogue, a Zyn competitor, advertises its product as a way to “enjoy the nicotine you love without getting noticed, whether you’re in a marathon of meetings, perfecting your meal-prep, or just can’t step away for a smoke break.” (Rogue, like other nicotine brands, has to legally include warnings in its ads that its products are addictive.)

The effects of an addiction alone are not typically a first-order concern in the world of public health. Addictions typically come with other, more pressing consequences: For cigarettes, it’s heart attacks and cancer; for heroin, it’s overdoses. Anyone who has seen photos of smokers hooked to oxygen or revealing their lung-cancer scars can attest that public health has become expert in warning potential victims of these types of health problems. The risks of a nicotine addiction without the smoke are murkier. “There are interpersonal, intrapersonal, and economic consequences to being addicted,” Eric Donny, a neuroscience professor at Wake Forest University who studies nicotine, told me. “It’s really hard to quantify this in a way that we are used to.”

Nicotine boosters have compared the drug to caffeine—which is also addictive, but generally not a problem. (Hence the Death Before Decaf shirts, tote bags, and even tattoos.) But research suggests that nicotine addiction is more intense than a caffeine dependency, potentially taking a bigger toll on people’s lives. The financial costs alone can be onerous: Nicotine prices vary a lot from state to state, but in Washington, D.C., where I live, someone with an extreme Zyn habit may be shelling out upwards of $10 a day to feed their addiction. A Juul isn’t much cheaper. With either product, a heavy user is likely to spend several thousands of dollars a year.

Addiction can also take a psychological toll. Being hooked on nicotine means your brain is always screaming for another hit of the drug. At times, the longing can feel insatiable, and can force people to act in ways that are entirely against their own self-interest. A teen addicted to vaping might take a few puffs in the school bathroom, even if getting caught might mean a suspension. Or a longtime user may continue to pop nicotine pouches after a heart attack, despite research showing that quitting nicotine significantly reduces someone’s risk of death.

These downsides might seem minuscule compared with those of cigarettes. A rotting lung is considerably worse than a $10-a-day nicotine habit. But they shouldn’t be ignored. If cigarette-smoking rates continue their decades-long drop, it’s reasonable to assume that vaping and pouches will become the dominant ways people consume nicotine. New nicotine products might have solved the biggest problem with smoking. Many other, more subtle problems still remain.

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Forgive me for saying this, but Liam Neeson has been in a few very silly movies. I refer not to the actual comedies he’s popped up in but to the legion of action films he’s churned out nonstop over the past 20 years—each seemingly more perfunctory and high-concept than the last. The actor has growled melodramatic lines, brandished a gun, and dealt with assorted faceless bad guys in an airplane and in an ice-road truck, and even while trapped inside a parked car. His on-screen tough-guy persona is so ubiquitous and over-the-top that in the new comedy The Naked Gun, it barely requires any calibration to be funny.

The original Naked Gun films, as well as the TV show, Police Squad!, that inspired them, were rooted in the same comedic spin. They starred Leslie Nielsen, who was known as a dramatic actor before his turn in the film Airplane! established him as a master of spoof comedy. Nielsen played the bumbling LAPD lieutenant Frank Drebin with sincerity, making the absurdity around him all the funnier. Neeson makes sense as Nielsen’s successor: the stone-faced hero squinting at the silliest stuff imaginable.

The goofiness of 2025’s The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer, is especially enjoyable in the current cinematic landscape. Amid the typical clamor of summer blockbusters, an out-and-out farce is like an oasis in the desert. Comedies used to be a major part of the moviegoing world, and I continue to be baffled that films filled with ridiculous gags and one-liners are almost impossible to find in theaters these days. Laughing along with a crowd is a beautiful, irreproducible experience, yet Hollywood seems to have shifted its priorities toward pumping out action-adventure movies—a genre hardly known for its humor.

[Read: The world doesn’t want Hollywood comedies]

Althoughnot quite as transcendent as its forebears, the new Naked Gun manages to provide the inane fun I’ve been missing. The action-inflected comedy keeps the ensemble tight: Neeson plays Lieutenant Frank Drebin Jr.—a macho, trigger-happy presence on the force who’s never without a cup of coffee. (An off-screen figure even passes one to him through his car window while he’s driving on the freeway.) The supporting cast includes the well-meaning Captain Ed Hocken Jr. (played by an affably dim Paul Walter Hauser), the grumpy Chief Davis (CCH Pounder), and a femme-fatale type named Beth (Pamela Anderson), who enters Drebin’s world to request that he investigate her brother’s death.

The movie judders from one set piece to another with only a loose plot to follow—the story involves some dead bodies, an evil billionaire (Danny Huston), and a budding romance between Drebin and Beth. Everyone plays it reliably straight, a contrast that helps the film maintain its zany energy—and, in the spirit of the original trilogy, maximize the number of jokes per minute. If one bit flops, another arrives in a few seconds to make up for it.

The Naked Gun’s commitment to that airy sense of pointlessness is refreshing. Schaffer’s most notable long-form work to date is probably Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a scrappy collaboration with his friends and former Saturday Night Live collaborators Andy Samberg and Jorma Taccone, a.k.a. the Lonely Island; the movie skewered music biopics with cheerful, vulgar aplomb. Popstar was largely ignored by most theatergoers, but it became a near-instant cult classic among comedy diehards. Now Schaffer is trying to sneak the same high-grade, unadulterated fun into a major motion picture, with a steely Neeson as its guise. By attaching his farce to the face of some of Hollywood’s biggest action movies, the director is gambling that it will draw a wider audience.

[Read: Long live the delightfully dumb comedy]

The world needs more comedies, and the sillier the better. The Naked Gun is happy to deliver plenty of chortles, along with some wild swings that are just slapsticky enough to work. (A sequence featuring a sentient snowman defies easy description.) I’m rooting for its success in the hope that it brings some genre diversity to the silver screen—not just action movies with jokes, but action movies that are a joke.

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During the coronavirus pandemic, I flirted with more hobbies than I can recall. I began by picking up the musical instruments lying around my parents’ house—their piano, my sister’s cello. I then ordered a ukulele online, inspired by a friend who marveled at the ease of learning the chords. Next came YouTube yoga, and then bird drawing (because I happened to find a guide to drawing birds on my parents’ bookshelves). At the beach during the summer of 2020, my friend and I enlisted her 13-year-old neighbor to teach us how to surf. Then, perhaps inevitably, I tried knitting and crocheting.

First, here are two new stories from The Atlantic’s books section:

A novelist’s cure for the “loneliness epidemic”“Preamble to the West,” a poem by Iris Jamahl Dunkle

I have kept up none of these pursuits. It’s not because of perfectionism or a lack of free time, those oft-cited foes that prevent us from turning a hobby into a habit. I’m simply more of a dabbler, an approach that Karen Walrond celebrates in her book In Defense of Dabbling, which Sophia Stewart wrote about this week as part of a list of books that demonstrate “the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we might be bad at.” Walrond believes that informally experimenting with new things is a great way to find joy in the world around you, and I agree—but I do think I’ve fallen victim to the need for instant gratification, jumping from one activity to the next as my attention drifts. After reading Stewart’s list, I realized with some regret that I don’t direct any level of sustained attention to areas of my life outside of work. I feel a bit jealous when I hear about someone casually taking up birding or woodworking, only for it to unexpectedly change their life.

So it might be time for me to find a hobby and stick with it. I’ve noticed a common theme among the activities that seem to have the strongest effects on their practitioners: Many of them are physical endeavors, though they don’t have to be strenuous or dangerous (white-water rafting counts, but so does gardening). In my own life, I’ve found that things requiring some amount of fine motor control or hand-eye coordination, such as needlework and tennis, allow me to focus on the process, rather than the result, while not thinking about the past or worrying about the future. Instead of rushing to a destination or chasing an immediate reward, I’d like to learn from the journey. “The decision to pursue an activity simply for one’s own enjoyment,” as Stewart writes, “is deeply human.”

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: csa-archives / Getty

Eight Books for Dabblers

By Sophia Stewart

These practices can enrich our lives, regardless of if we’re any good at them.

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Index of Self-Destructive Acts, by Christopher Beha

Beha’s big-swing novel, set in the late 2000s, follows Sam, a young data-crunching blogger from the Midwest who gets hired to work at a legacy New York magazine. He arrives in the city certain that when one has the right information, the world is “a knowable place”—but he is soon forced to reconsider his rational worldview. Sam encounters an apocalyptic preacher, falls for the daughter of a profile subject (though he’s married), and cranks out a near-constant stream of articles while struggling with unexpected doubts. The novel takes on heady themes, but it never feels dull or brainy, and all the people I’ve shared it with over the years love it too. My New Yorker father told me how well it portrayed the city after the 2008 financial crisis; my friends in journalism affirm its perceptiveness about the industry’s “content farm” days; my church friends appreciate how it takes religious belief seriously. I push it upon pretty much everyone I know.  — Eleanor Barkhorn

From our list: The one book everyone should read

Out Next Week

📚 Trying, by Chloe Caldwell

📚 Sunbirth, by An Yu

📚 What Is Free Speech?, by Fara Dabhoiwala

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Zeloot

Comfort TV Is Overrated

By Shirley Li

The human brain—more specifically, the way it’s wired to enjoy jitters—is partly responsible for how well these shows have been received by viewers. “Our body doesn’t always know the difference between a heart-rate increase associated with watching The Bear versus going for a walk,” Wendy Berry Mendes, a psychology professor at Yale, told me. People have always sought excitement by being spectators; doing so causes, as Mendes put it, “vicarious stress”—a fight-or-flight response that feels good because it involves zero risk. Watching a horror movie can produce the effect, though Mendes pointed out in an email that horror tends to unfold at a more extreme pace, causing reactions infrequently experienced by audiences. (Think of how jump scares can dramatically startle viewers.) The intense shows holding viewers’ attention these days, meanwhile, can conjure a sense of ongoing anxiety. “Certainly, that unremitting pressure” in The Bear, Mendes wrote, “is something more common than running from a zombie.”

Read the full article.

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Every evening around 10 p.m., I settle onto the couch, open up the New York Times crossword app on my phone, and complete the day’s puzzle. One moment I’m stumped; the next I’m struck by an epiphany. Once the grid is filled with interlocking words, I get no tangible reward for my efforts. All I have is a gold star on a screen—and the kind of fulfillment that comes only from doing something for the love of it.

Crosswording, like many other hobbies, is not productive—but it’s not vapid consumption, either. Crocheting a scarf, doing ollies at the skate park, adorning one’s nails with intricate designs: These are hardly the most utilitarian ways to spend an afternoon. The decision to pursue an activity simply for one’s own enjoyment, though, is deeply human—especially at a moment when our time and attention are treated as commodities. Trying a new hobby gives us the opportunity to learn and grow: a situation that can be rare in adulthood.

In the eight books below, casual pursuits such as knitting, gardening, and drawing, undertaken with varying levels of skill and success, become life-affirming practices. Each reminds us of the possibilities that lie in our hobbies—even the ones we might be bad at.

Unraveling, by Peggy Orenstein

During the pandemic, many people revisited old hobbies or took up viral recipes. (Who could forget the great sourdough mania of 2020?) Orenstein doubled down on her lifetime love of knitting. She sought what she calls “the primal joy of transforming raw material into something useful and, hopefully, beautiful,” and challenged herself to create a sweater entirely from scratch. In Unraveling, she recounts her year-long quest to meet this goal: She shears a sheep, spins its wool fibers into yarn, dyes that yarn, designs a sweater, and finally knits the thing together. Orenstein’s book highlights how much of the charm of craft is found not only—or even mostly—in the objects it yields, but also in the private moments and time-consuming processes behind the final results. Unraveling is an ode to the herculean efforts we make for ourselves, for no reason other than to know that we can.

The Backyard Bird Chronicles, by Amy Tan

Tan coped with the political tumult of 2016 by returning to two of her childhood refuges: nature and art. Drawing was an early hobby of hers, but she’d felt discouraged from taking it seriously. At 65, she took “nature journaling” lessons to learn how to depict and interpret the world around her—most notably the inter-avian dramas of the birds behind her Bay Area home. The Backyard Bird Chronicles is a disarming account of one year of Tan’s domestic bird-watching, a book “filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naive observations,” she writes. That naivete is endearing: The accomplished novelist becomes a novice, trying to improve through eager dedication. Over the course of this engaging book, her illustrations grow more sophisticated, more assured—leaving readers with a portrait of the hobbyist as an emerging artist.

[Read: What it’s like to get worse at something]

Slow Tech, by Peter Ginn

My friends and I are obsessed with the BBC’s “historical farm” series, in which historians and archeologists explore and reenact agrarian life across different eras, spanning the Tudor period to World War II. The shows make clear not only how laborious everyday existence once was, but also how much skill and ingenuity were required just to address our basic needs. In Slow Tech, Ginn, one of the co-hosts, walks readers through dozens of projects featured on the shows, and a good many new ones: weaving baskets, making candles, roasting meat, extracting salt from seawater. The book is a manual for learning skills that, in today’s world, are largely outsourced to technology or industry; it also emphasizes the point that doing these tasks by hand connects us with a long human lineage. Extracting plant dyes, whittling a spoon, making felt—these projects are inefficient and, Ginn argues, extremely satisfying.

Soil, by Camille T. Dungy

Soil follows Dungy’s years-long efforts to remake her “water-hogging” lawn into a pollinator-friendly garden by diversifying the plant species there, while considering what it meant to do so as a mother and a Black woman living in a mostly white Colorado town. Her garden becomes a site of hands-on learning, teaching her daily how to be patient, embrace change, and be a steward for the land she lives on. Importantly, gardening is far from a solitary hobby for Dungy: It can’t be separated from the world at large. On her hands and knees planting tulips, she thinks about laboring to give birth to her daughter; watching goldfinches perched on her budding sunflowers, she is reminded of the Indigenous people who have cultivated these plants in the American West for 4,000 years. “Whether a pot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person”—by which Dungy means anyone who cares about the future of human relationships—“should have a garden,” she writes. “We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn’t easy."

[Read: Housekeeping is part of the wild world too]

The Boatbuilder, by Daniel Gumbiner

Gumbiner’s debut novel introduces readers to Berg, a Silicon Valley defector with an opioid addiction who has left his tech-startup gig to apprentice with Alejandro, an eccentric boatbuilder. Alejandro—a chronic hobbyist who also carves Elizabethan lutes and builds portable pasteurizers in a rural Northern California town—teaches Berg the minutiae of boatbuilding, such as how to gauge the moisture content of a piece of wood and how to ready a vessel for its maiden voyage. The work is painstaking, but Berg’s measurable progress lends direction and meaning to his otherwise unsettled existence. Perhaps most importantly, he forges a profound bond with another human being, something missing from his former life. “When was the last time you got lost in a thing?” Alejandro asks Berg at one point. Berg can’t summon an answer. What he seeks, Gumbiner writes, is to learn “how to do things properly,” and as his skill grows, he only becomes “more confident, more connected to the world.”

The Puzzler, by A. J. Jacobs

Consistent hobbies become rituals that can give our lives shape and meaning. (This has certainly been the case for me; my New York Times crossword streak now exceeds 1,500 days.) In this thorough and spirited survey, Jacobs celebrates how puzzles of all kinds—jigsaws, sudoku, Rubik’s Cubes—give us not only fun and purpose but also a secret set of superpowers. Puzzle lovers, he writes, have heightened capacities for critical thinking and problem-solving, which can come in handy in daily life. “Don’t freak out, seek out,” my dad used to say to me whenever I would misplace an object; similarly, puzzling instructs us to keep cool and find solutions. But self-improvement need not be the goal of puzzling, or of any hobby, for that matter. Offering a succinct quote from Maki Kaji, the “godfather of sudoku,” Jacobs writes that puzzles exist to propel us from “? → !”—that is, from a state of confusion and frustration to surprise and delight.

[Read: What we lose when we’re priced out of our hobbies]

Picture This, by Lynda Barry

Part how-to guide, part graphic memoir, part manifesto about creativity, Picture This celebrates drawing as a means of spontaneous expression. The cartoonist Barry puts aside any pretense toward quality: Even simple doodling can be a salve, she writes, and therefore a worthy endeavor. Through her beguiling multimedia collages, which incorporate hand-drawn illustrations and typewritten notes along with phone-book pages and cotton balls, Barry makes the case that sketching offers us a way to forge a more curious, childlike relationship with our surroundings—an ethos that could apply to just about any artistic act. She tells her readers that they have to “be willing to spend time making things for no reason” and be okay with setting aside self-doubt and its accomplice, perfectionism—the surest enemies of discovery.

In Defense of Dabbling, by Karen Walrond

Unlike some of the other authors on this list, Walrond is not an expert at anything—she says so on the very first page of this ode to what she calls “intentional amateurism.” The word amateur, though mostly used to disparage, is derived from the Latin “to love,” and Walrond builds an argument for indulging our interests free of expectation or commitment. Dalliances demand neither talent nor discipline, she argues—we need only enjoy what we’re doing. The book is a ringing endorsement for being just okay at stuff. Instead of trying to gain mastery at any one thing, Walrond tries to gather as many experiences as she can, letting pleasure lead the way. She attempts surfing, pottery, and astrophotography, with mixed results but sustained amusement. “The joy I’ve had in almost everything I’ve ever done,” she writes, “has arisen mostly in the attempt.” Walrond concludes the book with a compendium of more than 200 amateur pursuits, some of which she’s tried and some she hasn’t (yet)—a great place for the beginning hobbyist to start their journey.

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Abdul Saboor / ReutersCrowds cheer on riders during Stage 21 of the Tour de France, in Paris, on July 27, 2025.Artur Widak / Anadolu / GettySpurt, an Australian shepherd, performs an obstacle run during Wild Wild Woof, at the 2025 KDays festival, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, on July 26, 2025.Yong Teck Lim / GettySabina Makhmudova of Team Uzbekistan competes in the women's solo free preliminaries on Day 10 of the World Aquatics Championships, in Singapore, on July 20, 2025.Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times / GettyFreestyle-motocross rider Taka Higashino does a no-hands Superman trick high over the beach, with Catalina Island in the background, on opening day at the U.S. Open of Surfing, in Huntington Beach, California, on July 26, 2025.Ronen Tivony / NurPhoto / GettyAn anhinga flips a fish into a headfirst position just before swallowing it, in Lake Eola Park, in Orlando, Florida.Eric Gay / APAngel Hernandez power washes a dinosaur figure at the Witte Museum, in San Antonio, on July 29, 2025.Juan Karita / APAn Aymara woman and her llama participate in the 15th National Camelid Expo, in El Alto, Bolivia, on July 26, 2025.Anthony Devlin / GettyParticipants dance during a performance in tribute to the Emily Brontë–inspired Kate Bush song “Wuthering Heights,” in Haworth, England, on July 27, 2025.Indranil Mukherjee / AFP / GettyAbandoned buses, discontinued from active service, stand overgrown with creeper vines and other vegetation at a bus depot in Mumbai, India, on July 26, 2025.Ma Weibing / Xinhua / GettyA view of the Great Wall on Taihang Mountains in Laiyuan County, in China’s Hebei province, on July 26, 2025Connie France / AFP / GettyRelatives of people killed during 2022–23 antigovernment protests, dressed in red, take part in a memorial ceremony at Cerro San Cristobal, in Lima, Peru, on July 27, 2025, on the eve of Peru's Independence Day. 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Honda Reizo’s factory produces 113 tons of ice cubes daily to help people beat the summer heat.AFP / GettyPeople watch humanoid robots box at an exhibition during the World Artificial Intelligence Conference, in Shanghai, China, on July 26, 2025.

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Five years ago, The Atlantic published Floodlines, an eight-part podcast that told the story of Hurricane Katrina and of the people in New Orleans who survived it. The show detailed the ways that failures of federal and local policies concerning flood control and levees created the flood that submerged New Orleans in 2005, and also the ways that preexisting social inequalities marked some people for disaster and spared others. Through the recollections of people who survived Katrina, as well as officials who tried to coordinate a response, Floodlines explored how misinformation, racism, and ineptitude shaped that response, and how Black and poor New Orleanians were pushed away from their homes. In particular, the series follows the story of Le-Ann Williams, who was 14 when the levees broke.

As the 20th anniversary of Katrina arrives, the city of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast are still dealing with the legacy of the flood and with the racial inequality and displacement that were at the heart of the series. The Black population of New Orleans is declining, and some neighborhoods still haven’t come back. Many people who were forced to leave home in 2005 are unable to afford to rent or own where they built their pre-Katrina lives. Experts wonder if the flood-control system there is truly ready for the next “big one,” and because of climate change, more and more cities and towns may face similar threats. Help from FEMA is tenuous under a Trump administration that has slashed its resources and threatened to phase out the department altogether.

So on the occasion of this anniversary, Floodlines takes a fresh visit to New Orleans, to reconnect with Le-Ann Williams, and with her daughter, Destiny. In this special episode, we spend a day with Williams’s family and learn about the heartbreaks, tragedies, and triumphs they’ve experienced since we last spoke. We learn how trauma from Katrina still lives on in the hearts and minds of its survivors, and how, for the generation born after the flood, a disaster they never witnessed still governs their lives.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Vann R. Newkirk II: (Knocks on metal door.)

Male voice: Who’s that?

Vann Newkirk: It’s Vann!

Male voice: Come on.

Newkirk: All right. (Chuckles.) How you doing?

Le-Ann Williams: Hey, Vann!

Newkirk: Hey, how you doing?

Williams: How y’all doing? All right.

Newkirk: Well, hey. It’s Vann Newkirk. I know it’s been a minute since you’ve heard from me here. Five years, to be exact.

Williams: My family: my mom, Patricia; my daughter, Destiny; and my cousin Tasha.

Newkirk: Nice to meet y’all. And I heard a lot about y’all. Nice to meet y’all.

Newkirk: A lot has happened in the time since we put out Floodlines. The pandemic started to really shut everything down the day we put out the show, and it’s been one thing after another since then. There’s been economic chaos. There were elections. There was an insurrection. There’ve been fires and hurricanes and floods. There’s been a lot of death and a whole lot of grief. A lot of people live different lives than they did in 2020. Hell, I know I do.

Five years ago, when I was making Floodlines, I’d been thinking about Richard, the enslaved man who survived the hurricane in 1856 at Last Island, Louisiana.

Newkirk (Floodlines clip): The next morning, the only building still standing on Last Island was that stable. Richard and the old horse had made it. Many other folks weren’t so lucky.

Newkirk: I was interested in memory and what disasters reveal about a place. My reporting took me to meeting somebody who, quite frankly, changed my life.

Williams (Floodlines clip): We’ll have the trumpet player, the trombone player, the snare-drum player, the bass-drum player, and the tuba players will have sticks blowing.

Newkirk: Le-Ann Williams. You remember Le-Ann. She was 14 years old.

**Williams (Floodlines clip):**I had this crush on this boy named Fonso Jones—

Newkirk: She grew up around Treme and Dumaine Street—

Williams (Floodlines clip):—and Fonso was the point guard.

Newkirk: —living in the Lafitte housing projects, when Hurricane Katrina came and the levees broke.

**Williams (Floodlines clip):**And we heard it on the radio, and a man was like, he was in a panic: I repeat, get to safety; get to the Superdome.

Newkirk: She and her family went on an odyssey after the flood. And she came back to a totally different city.

Archival (Floodlines clip): 3,000 people a day heading to Texas.

Archival (Floodlines clip): Arkansas will take 20,000 people.

Archival (Floodlines clip): I’m not going back to New Orleans. I don’t wanna go back to New Orleans.

**Williams (Floodlines clip):**If you push us out, what’s gonna be left? Just come look at things, like a museum. Just come and looking at historic places and buildings? That’s it? If you push us out, where the culture gonna come from?

Newkirk: If you haven’t listened to Floodlines, I recommend starting from the beginning. In 2020, when we put the show out, I honestly didn’t know if it would matter that much with so much going on. But I found out that I was wrong.

Archival (news clip): The breaking news: Stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the coronavirus pandemic spreads. New York, California, Illinois—

Newkirk: Whether it was the early fears of “looting” during the pandemic, or a Black community being destroyed by a fire—

Archival (news clip): Altadena, and this entire hillside is on fire.

**Newkirk: —**or FEMA’s response to Hurricane Helene—

Archival (news clip): The deadliest hurricane for the U.S. since Katrina in 2005.

Newkirk: —people kept coming back to Hurricane Katrina as a point of reference.

Russell  Honoré: That’s rumor gets spread. You know, we dealt with that in Katrina too, Laura.

Newkirk: As it turned out, this show about generations of New Orleanians contending with catastrophe, grief, memory, displacement, and being left behind by our government still had some important lessons for the present. In 2020 we left the show’s narrative unfinished, on purpose. Le-Ann, and the others we met—Fred, and Alice, and Sandy, and General Honoré—were all still living with the legacy of Katrina and making meaning from it themselves. They were still living their stories.

But also, as it turns out, I couldn’t quit Floodlines so easily. I’d become connected to the people I’d interviewed, who’d shared their lives with me. I’d spent hours and days talking to them, eating meals with them, hanging out. I cared about what happened to them.

Before, I had been thinking about Richard, but now I was thinking about Le-Ann. After the show came out, I saw that she’d gone through even more tough times. I also saw that she was celebrating: a new home, a new job, a kid who was doing well in school.

So on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Katrina, I decided to visit New Orleans.

Williams: Oh, Lord.

Destiny Richardson: We’re gonna tear you up in them spades.

Williams: Look at her. We gonna tear him up?

Richardson: Mm-hmm.

Williams: We’re gonna tear you in them spades**.**

Newkirk: I don’t know. I ain’t lost in a minute. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: I paid Le-Ann a visit, and talked to her family. And met her daughter, Destiny, for the first time.

Newkirk: When we last spoke, you were what? Eleven?

Williams: Yeah.

Newkirk: Eleven years old, and Le-Ann told us a whole lot about you, so, and she posts about you on Facebook all the time.

Williams: Look what you do.

Richardson: Always.

Newkirk: Always. I’ve seen the honor roll. (Laughs.) You got the honor roll.

Richardson: Yup, honor roll every year.

Newkirk: Congratulations.

Richardson: Two times in a row.

Newkirk: Congratulations.

Richardson: Thank you.

Williams: I’m a proud parent, of course.

Newkirk: Catch me up; catch me up. What’s been going on with you the last five years?

Williams: I changed jobs; I moved. I’m in a different spot. And I’m in a different place than I was five years ago.

Newkirk: What kind of place?

Williams: I’m at a peace state, like letting things go that don’t mean me no good, you know, I’m trying to just go a different route.

Newkirk: I wanted to know more about that different route. So I stayed a little while.

[Music]

Newkirk: From The Atlantic, this is a special episode of Floodlines, “Part IX: Rebirth.”

It’s Sunday, after church time, when we meet Le-Ann. We’re trying to hurry up and talk so we can get back across town to catch a second line before it rains. We’re in Le-Ann’s new home, and the living room is full of family, everybody just shooting the breeze. She rents here and lives with her mother, Patricia, and with Destiny. It’s a quiet street.

Newkirk: What’s this neighborhood we in?

Williams: We in Pontchartrain Park.

Newkirk: Pontchartrain Park. It’s a historic neighborhood.

Williams: Yes, it is.

Newkirk: So last time we met you were out in the East.

Newkirk: Back then, in 2020, Le-Ann lived in a smaller place off a busy road in New Orleans East. She was working around the clock to provide for Destiny. It was far from the part of the city where she’d grown up, and she told us then how much she resented being forced away from the only home she’d known.

New Orleans East was a tough place to live. After the floodwaters receded, it became sort of a holding area for people pushed out from the core of the city by rising rents and gentrification. When Le-Ann was living there, it was known for crime, violence, for food deserts, for pollution, for all the things you don’t want when you’re raising a little girl.

**Williams:**I just feel like we just was forgotten about, pushed into different neighborhoods. And yeah, the East is dangerous—it’s dangerous out there. Don’t pump gas at night. If you’re on E, you just try and make it home on E. (Laughs.) And a lot of crime is happening now, especially with our youth.

When I was a kid, you could easily go to the gym, get on the swimming team, the double-dutch team, anything. They don’t even have activities like that no more, so it’s easy for the youth to get into things and get in trouble. There’s a lot of carjacking. They’re doing that now—for fun.

Newkirk: The East had felt like a magnet for tragedy. And sure enough, in 2023, when Destiny was around the same age Le-Ann had been during Katrina, catastrophe struck again. But this time, it was a more personal kind of storm. Le-Ann’s stepfather, Jeffrey Hills, the man who’d helped raise her and who’d tried to protect her during Katrina, died suddenly in his sleep, at the age of 47. Talking there in Le-Ann’s living room, the loss still felt recent and present.

Williams: That was two years ago.

Newkirk: People say that’s a long time, but that’s not a long time.

Williams: That’s not.

Newkirk: Yeah. How you dealing with it now?

Williams: Better than two years ago, you know? But we still take it day by day.

Newkirk: The room got a little quieter. Everyone was still grieving. Patricia, Le-Ann’s mom, had lost her husband and partner: for Le-Ann, a father in everything but blood. Jeffrey was smart and he loved books, and he’d always taken pride in her academics. Destiny was his only grandchild, and you know he spoiled her.

But Jeffrey wasn’t just a cornerstone of the family. He was a special part of the whole community. If you were in New Orleans, you knew Jeffrey. He was a veteran tuba player in the city, and he’d played with basically all the big brass bands. He taught and mentored young musicians. I’d seen him play before I even met Le-Ann. His name gets mentioned with all the legends who’ve come through here. And just like it had been for them, for Tuba Fats and Kerwin James and all the rest, when he died, his comrades played in his honor.

[Music]

Newkirk: They played for days. And when it came time to put Jeffrey to rest, they threw a second line like you ain’t never seen. All back in the heart of the Sixth Ward, where Le-Ann used to live.

**Williams:**And when he had his funeral and everything, and it felt like the New Orleans before Katrina. His friends from the band, everybody, musicians, every musician we knew was there for him. And it was Jazz Fest time. A lot of people didn’t go to Jazz Fest; they came. He had gigs lined up for Jazz Fest and everything. So a lot of the musicians didn’t go to the Jazz Fest. They came there for his funeral. And my family all was together, everybody was laughing, and it just felt like the Treme area where I grew up in.

Newkirk: It was like a trip back in time. Back when cousins lived down the street and they used to play pitty-pat. It was bittersweet that it took death to bring back a little bit of the old magic.

But there would be more death before long—more people to grieve and more reasons to reminisce on the old days. The day after Jeffrey’s funeral, Le-Ann found out her brother Christian was gone too.

Williams: My brother was staying with me. He died—he got killed two blocks from my house as soon as he left from my house. He got his bike out the yard, and somebody killed him.

Newkirk: Now she had to grieve her stepfather and her brother, and to be a support for everyone else.

All the trauma of Katrina, all the moving and all the setbacks, all the big life changes like becoming a mother: It had all forced Le-Ann to grow up early. Christian’s and Jeffrey’s deaths were like a second growing-up.

For Le-Ann, what this all meant was that she would have to try to be the kind of cornerstone that Jeffrey had been. She felt like the family was being driven apart, and she wanted to do what she could to hold everything together.

Williams: You know, I’m grown, grown now—you know, people depending on me and things like that.  I gotta make sure our family get together. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: Do you feel like it’s harder to keep up with people now that you’re spread out?

Williams: Yeah, it is. We probably, you know, say a thing or two on Facebook with each other.

Newkirk: On Sundays like this one, Le-Ann tries to get as many people in one place as she can, to eat and chat or watch Saints games. And during Mardi Gras season, she goes all in. The main event for the family is Endymion. It’s one of the biggest Mardi Gras parades, and every year thousands of people march. It’s a time.

Williams: I made a Facebook page: “Family is going to Endymion.” And we get on there, we say who’s bringing what, and what time, you know, who’s holding the spots down. And we all get together for Endymion every—since I was a kid. And you know, I just kind of keep the tradition going on for our kids.

Newkirk: For her kid. For Destiny.

Newkirk: I know she’s sitting right here, but can you tell us a little more about Destiny?

Williams: Oh my god. Destiny—she’s smart, she is kind, very headstrong. I have a good baby. I do. Beautiful.

Newkirk: She sound like you: smart, headstrong.

Patricia Hills: Yes.

Newkirk: Oh, you think so?

Newkirk: Le-Ann’s mom, Patricia, is there behind me.

Hills: Very smart. Yes.

Newkirk: Mm-hmm.

Hills: Very smart.Just like her mom, very smart.

Williams: Yeah, I’m proud of her. (Laughs.) I am. I’m a proud parent. Like, you know, you tell your child things, and you know it go in one ear and out the other sometimes. But when they actually listen and do what you say, that’s a blessing.

Newkirk: And we heard, you told us Destiny just got your first job, right?

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: How long you been working there?

Richardson: Probably like, what, a month or two now?

Williams: About two months.

Richardson: About two months.

Newkirk: So what’s that, two, three paychecks so far?

Richardson: Yeah, I think so

Williams: Three paychecks.

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: All right, how does that feel?

Richardson: Good. It feels good to have your own money (Laughs.) and buy your own self stuff.  I like my job, though. It’s nice. It’s fun. And then you meet a lot of people from, like, all over the world, cause there is like a tourism mall.

Newkirk: In a lot of ways, Destiny is just like any other 16-year-old. She wants to get her license. She had a little marching-band drama. She’s spending those paychecks. She goes to the mall with her friends.

But she’s also dealing with things that would be hard for anyone, let alone a teenager. She’s coping with loss and has witnessed her fair share of violence. Aside from the get-togethers her mom organizes, she doesn’t always have the same closeness to family that Le-Ann did before the flood. It’s like there’s some ghost of Katrina that haunts parts of her life. It’s eerie to see that ghost whenever she watches the old footage in documentaries.

Newkirk: How do you think about Katrina? What’s the first thing that comes to mind?

Richardson: A disaster. It’s like when I watch it, sometimes it’ll be heartbreaking to watch it because you see the people like with their family, babies and all that. It’s hot, nobody to help them. You’re like, these people was really out here for days doing this, trying to get food, nobody coming to help them, water everywhere, clothes sticky. I don’t want to be like that after the hurricane. (Laughs.) It, it was just a lot. Like, a lot to take in, especially for the people I know. It was a lot for them. People dying.

Richardson: That’s a lot.

Newkirk: Well, you look at those documentaries and imagine your mama going through that?

Richardson: I could see her, she’s (Laughs.)—I could just see her scared, nerves bad. She already nerve-racking, now, (Laughs.) so I could just see her (Laughs.) when a hurricane hit there after. Probably worrying my grandma, worrying everybody in the house.

Hills: Yes, yes.

Newkirk: Naturally, Destiny doesn’t have the same fears and anxieties that Le-Ann has. She likes to poke fun at her mother for being skittish whenever a storm comes around. But Le-Ann says she’s learned her lesson. She’s evacuating every time. It doesn’t matter how much Destiny jokes about it.

Richardson: She’ll leave even if it’s a one-category storm—hurricane. She’d be so scared: We leaving, let’s go, we leaving. We ain’t waiting to see if it gets stronger or not. We leaving.

Williams: But she never experienced something like that before, and she never will, because we’re leaving.

Richardson: She leaving. She says she sure won’t go through nothing like that again.

Williams: I don’t care what! No, indeed, I have a child, so I know how my mom and them felt.

Hills: You know, I just remember my baby being scared.

Newkirk: Le-Ann and Patricia walked through the floodwaters together. They have a shared story, and shared memories that I’d heard before, from Le-Ann. Now, hearing things from Patricia’s point of view, as a parent myself, helped me really understand just how agonizing it all was.

Hills: She was the oldest and she got the most experiences, and she knew about it and she was scared and stuff like that.

Williams: Yes indeed.

Hills: When Hurricane Katrina hit and I just remember my baby being scared and asking if Momma, we going to die? And I said, No, we’re not. Honey, I said, God got us. We gonna get outta here.

Newkirk: In that moment, Le-Ann had come to understand just how vulnerable she was. It wasn’t just the storm or the flood. The city and the federal government had turned their backs on her. It all left a mark.

Williams: I said, They gonna leave us here to die. They don’t care. I, I said, I hear stories about, oh, you, you know, Black and this and that and poor communities and you know, these things I hear about, but they actually go through something and live it—that’s something different. Like, Nobody’s coming to save us? I mean, newborn babies out there, they have dead bodies just laying—older folks can’t take it. They just dropping. I’m like, My God, this is real.

Newkirk: And so you said, Never again to that.

Williams: I’m not taking—she’s not going through that. She’s not. Now, just in her mind to worry about something like that, so young, to worry if she’s gonna die or if somebody’s coming to save—no, she would never. Not if I have breath in my body. She’s not waiting on nobody to rescue her. I’m gonna be the one.

[Music]

Newkirk: When I last sat down with Le-Ann, way back in 2020, I played her tape from my interview with the ex–FEMA director Michael Brown.

**Michael Brown (Floodlines clip):**So you tell Le-Ann I’m sorry, but you tell Le-Ann that her responsibility is to understand the nature of the risk where she lives and to be prepared for it. Knowing that somebody’s not going to come—the shining knight in armor is not going to come and rescue her when that fear sets in.

Newkirk: It feels like Le-Ann’s response to that is to become the knight in shining armor for everyone else. To take care of people. To make sure that her daughter and her family never feel abandoned like she did. I asked her if she saw Destiny’s childhood as like an alternate-reality version of her own, one without that abandonment.

Newkirk: You were 14 when you had to leave the city. Destiny is 16. Do you see, maybe, in Destiny what that childhood could have been like without that disaster?

Williams: I think about it. I used to think about it a lot—like, where would I have ended up? Would my life, you know, still be the same? Or would I have went off to college like my daughter wants to do? But now I’m like, I’m where I’m supposed to be exactly. This is where God wants me to be, you know? I’m where I’m supposed to be today.

[Break]

Williams (Floodlines clip): It’s crazy. There’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be than here. I love it. It’s my home. It’s my home. I love New Orleans. I done been to Arizona, Texas, Mississippi after Katrina. Nothing like New Orleans. Nothing’s like New Orleans.

Newkirk: One of the things Le-Ann talks about a lot is how much she loves her new neighborhood. She says it’s safer, and her street is quiet and peaceful. And it’s a bit closer to where she grew up.

Newkirk: It’s better out here?

Williams: Yeah, it’s much better.

Newkirk: It’s pretty out here, and you got the levee right there. You was on the levees in the east, too, so you go up on both. (Laughs.) You still go up there with daiquiris or not?

Williams: (Laughs.) We have wine. We have wine.

Newkirk: You have wine? Okay, so it’s a classy establishment. We have wine.

Williams: Yes, wine. We have our wine nights.

Newkirk: Now Destiny’s the one who goes up to the levee most often, but to walk her mom’s dog, an adorable French bulldog named Frenchy.

Richardson: No, right here!

Newkirk: Right up there?

Richardson: Nah, right here.

Newkirk: I wanted to check it out, so we took a walk together. It’s not like the levee at the old place, where you could climb up and see into the water, which Le-Ann loved to do. But up here, maybe it’s best that the water is out of sight. The levees here overlook the Industrial Canal, where it meets the lake. It’s a critical point in the complex system of flood control that defines New Orleans. In 2005, certain parts of this very neighborhood stood under 15 feet of water after the levees were overtopped. There’s a new floodgate now, built by the good old Army Corps of Engineers, that’s supposed to stop that from happening again. Le-Ann is not so sure.

Williams: We’re sitting in a bowl. Mississippi, Pontchartrain—we’re just surrounded by water. We’re below sea level. So just imagine, the water’s on top of us, and the city’s just down here. The water sits like that, so that’s why we’re below sea level, so the wind is just going down. You can’t go up; you’re going down! So that’s the scary thing about, too, where we live. We’re below sea level. I told you that before.

Richardson: Yeah.

Williams: Like, I explained it.

Richardson: Now you see why I won’t stay down here? That’s another cue for me to go.

Williams: Keep moving, huh?

Newkirk: Destiny is kinda over it. She’s heard a lot about Katrina from her mother. When she was younger, Le-Ann even made her sit through a class she put together for Destiny and her friends.

Williams: Yeah, I had a classroom. I fed them every day. They had lunch and everything, breakfast. They had their lunchtime and then they had their time when their parents come pick them up.

Newkirk: So were you rolling your eyes?

Richardson: Was I?

Williams: And one day we had—they watched the documentary of Katrina and they had to write about it, like different things.

Richardson: Yes**.** My grandpa Jeffrey was in the documentary! Walking in the water with my auntie.

Williams: He was walking with auntie. He in there.

Newkirk: Even with all the teenage eye-rolling, you can tell Destiny is proud of her family’s story, especially of her grandfather. And that brought Le-Ann and Destiny back to talking about Jeffrey. About how much he meant to them, and how he represented what New Orleans used to be. They pulled up a video of his funeral and started reminiscing.

Williams: The band came in the funeral home.

Newkirk: Oh wow!

Williams: Look at how packed it was.

Richardson: It was so pretty.

Williams: My pastor say, I’ve never seen a celebration like this, my God! The band come in the funeral home?

Richardson: Yes, that was nice.

[Music]

Newkirk: Standing here in the grass, by the levees, the sun slipping behind a cloud, we watched together.

**Richardson:**They had so many people out there and so many people in the funeral home.

Williams: When they opened the door.

Richardson: When they open the door, that’s when you really saw the people. All the people wasn’t even in the funeral home.

Williams: Yes.

Richardson: They had beaucoup people standing outside.

Williams: He was well known—a tuba player.

Richardson: They had 11 tubas out there for him.

Newkirk: Oh, wow.

Newkirk: It seems to me like they weren’t just mourning Jeffrey, but also how they’d lived, and who they were. It got Le-Ann to thinking about her childhood in the Sixth Ward, and to telling Destiny stories she’d already heard 100 times.

Williams: We just did that. If my cousin had a tambourine, we’ll sit on a curb and they’ll just make a beat. And we’ll just start doing, like, little songs and stuff like that. That’s what we did with each other. We all say something.

Richardson: Y’all, it’s raining.

Newkirk: And then it started to rain.

Newkirk: We got to move.

Williams: Look at that. Oh Lord, we don’t want the sugar to melt, huh?

Newkirk: I got a gel in my hair. What you talking about?

Williams: Okay!

Newkirk: We split up, and dried out for a little bit. I put some more gel in my hair.

[Music]

Newkirk: In the evening, we met back up with Le-Ann and Destiny at an ice-cream parlor uptown.

Richardson: She’s getting a Creole Clown. He’s dressed up like a clown, the ice cream. I want to take a picture of him for the aesthetic.

Newkirk: Destiny did get that Creole Clown ice cream. For the aesthetic.

Newkirk: So they serve it upside down?

Richardson: And they got whipped cream.

Williams: Girl, he is too cute.

Richardson: Yes.

Newkirk: I thought it would be nice to end my time with Le-Ann and Destiny with an ice cream. Back during Katrina, when Le-Ann was escaping the flood, after she’d waded through rat-infested waters, cut her foot stepping on something sharp, and climbed up onto the baking-hot freeway, she saw a man with a cooler who handed her and her family ice creams.

Williams (Floodlines clip): He saying, Ice cream! Ice cream! It’s hot. I got ice cream, cold drinks, and water! Come on, baby. Get y’all something to drink, and, I know y’all, you know, thirsty and stuff.

Newkirk: She told us she got a strawberry shortcake.

Williams (Floodlines clip): A strawberry shortcake. You know? You ever had one of those? Yeah. It’s good. I got one of them.

Newkirk: The moment has always stuck with me as a symbol of how we misunderstand disaster and, by extension, what really happened during Katrina. There’s still, even today, a misconception that disasters—that this disaster in particular brought out the worst in people. That it exposed some latent savagery or lack of morals. But what I’ve seen, over and over again, is that Katrina really showed just how much people loved each other. How much they loved their communities and their city. What was exposed, though, was how little the country and that city loved them. It feels like, in her own way, Le-Ann is trying to rectify that.

Newkirk: Do you feel like you are like the heart of the family now?

Williams: Yes. And sometimes that get overwhelming. It does.

Newkirk: What do you do when you feel overwhelmed?

Williams: Pray. I pray a lot.

Newkirk: She’s overwhelmed a lot. Being the person everyone else relies on is hard, and it can feel like every single thing is on her shoulders. She’s doing her best to take up the role Jeffrey played, but now she understands how much of a toll that takes on a person.

Williams: It feel like I’m always responsible for everybody, like, everybody. And sometimes I’m like, Who responsible for Le-Ann? You know, having everybody’s back and making sure everybody’s good. And sometimes you’re like, you know, Who has my back?

Newkirk: But she also takes pride now in the fact that people around the city know her and know her story.

Newkirk: Do you feel like, you know, between us and all the other stuff, are you—would you call yourself an ambassador now for New Orleans, for the city?

Williams: Yes, I want to put my city on; I wanna, you know, bring light to my people, you know, in New Orleans, no matter what race you is or not, because we family down here, and I just want to bring attention to that.

[Music]

Newkirk: Le-Ann still believes in her city, and she wants to stake a new claim to it. She wants to own her own home in New Orleans. She’s working as a phlebotomist, and doing her best to support everybody and build up her credit.

Williams: It’s going to take a minute, but I’m going to do it.

Newkirk: So ideally, what’s your dream house look like?

Williams: Oh. Look, I think about it all the time when I just see houses. I’m like, Oh my God, I can’t wait to—especially to have something that, you know, that I got that I can probably leave my child. You know, something I can call my own. Me and Destiny, we right by the lake, we love looking at those houses. We just go through looking at houses, like Oh my God.

Richardson: We’ll be like, Ooh that pool big, their backyard big. That house so big!

Williams: Oh my God, this is living right here. We just, you know—

Newkirk: What color is your dream door?

Williams: I want to say red. (Laughs.)

Richardson: Red?

Williams: Old-school.

Richardson: Yes.

Newkirk: She wants a red door, just like her grandma’s house on Dumaine Street had.

Richardson: A big, big backyard.

**Williams:**We have to have a big backyard. Ooh, yes, indeed. My family is big—I got to have a big backyard.

Newkirk: Le-Ann wants to be able to leave Destiny something of her own in New Orleans. But Destiny is looking at colleges out of state.

Newkirk: So Destiny, if you leave, do you ever see yourself coming back?

Richardson: Probably not. I’ll probably come back for like, events and stuff—probably, like, Mardi Gras and all that. But as far as coming back to stay, no.

Newkirk: It’s the place where mother and daughter seem to differ most. Le-Ann was forced across the country, and then across the city, and has spent her whole life since trying to get back. Destiny wants to see the world for herself, to get out. She’s working hard in school, and she’s looking at colleges out of state. She’s got the grades to leave.

Newkirk: Have you taken any visits yet?

Richardson: No, I ain’t taken no visits yet. They be emailing me and stuff for visits, but I haven’t took no visits.

Williams: They gave her $500.

Richardson: Oh yeah, I had got one of CASE scholarships for Mercer. It’s at home in the envelope. Yeah, and if I go there, they’ll give me $2,000 more, plus the scholarship I’ve been built up on when I graduate.

Newkirk: You already getting scholarships?

Richardson: Yeah.

Newkirk: She’s saying it real low-key-like. All right.

Newkirk: But still, for as much as Destiny maybe wants to get out of New Orleans, she’s got her mother’s story with her. She might not know Katrina firsthand, but she knows the importance of taking care of people.

Newkirk: Anybody tell y’all y’all are pretty similar?

Richardson: Yeah, I hear that a lot.

Newkirk: (Laughs.)

Richardson: They say our personalities are similar.

Williams: My cousin tell me all the time, she was like, You’re hard on her, but she’s really strong minded. You don’t have to worry about her. Destiny knows her way.She was like, You need to give her more credit than what you’re doing because she, you know, she’s a good kid.

Newkirk: Do you—when people compare you to your mother, is that something where you roll your eyes?

Richardson: Yes, I be like, Oh my God. (Laughs.) They’d be, like, Aw, girl, you act just like your mama and how she acted when she was younger, but just a little bit more—better or something. I was like, Ah, girl. Here they go with this again.

Newkirk: Le-Ann wants to protect Destiny, and to give her the things she didn’t have. But I wonder if maybe she’s got it backwards. Maybe her family has the thing that other families, rich and poor, Black and white, need. Maybe they’ve got what other people are searching for. The things we lost in our own personal floods over the past five years: family, community, and connection. We lost memory; we lost time. What we need is care.

Newkirk: So how was the ice cream?

**Richardson:**That was good.

Williams: It was.

Richardson: I’m gonna most definitely get that again.

Newkirk: The clown, the clown was solid?

**Richardson:**Yeah, he’s still got his eyes and his hat.

Newkirk: Okay. If I could eat dairy, you know—

Richardson: You can’t eat dairy? You should’ve told me! I would have picked something else. (Laughs.)

Newkirk: No, this is fine. This is fine. Look, between the dairy and the shellfish, I come here and I fast.

Newkirk: We finished our ice creams and walked out into the summer. And then Le-Ann and Destiny went home.

[Music]

Floodlines is a production of The Atlantic. This episode was reported and produced by me and Jocelyn Frank. The executive producer of audio, and our editor, is Claudine Ebeid. Our managing editor is Andrea Valdez. Fact-check by Will Gordon.

Music by Chief Adjuah and Anthony Braxton.

Sound design, mix, and additional music by David Herman. Special thanks to Nancy DeVille.

You can support our work, and the work of all Atlantic journalists, when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

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“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.

At the same time, Grant’s project is immediately recognizable as “Hollywood material.” A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a rural blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor—silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.

This tension isn’t lost on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who’s suddenly laid off from a marketing agency and gets a job as a rural carrier associate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. He second-guesses his qualifications—and his motivations—but doesn’t let either concern stop him.

“What I’m feeling is a spiritual disorientation,” he confesses, having been jolted into downward mobility. “Lost in the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing, lost in confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.” He berates himself for his failure to develop a versatile skill set or “build any job security,” despite compiling an impressive résumé (including starting a behavioral-economics lab at a Fortune 50 company). As he arrives at the decision to take the post-office job, he’s facing real hardship: He has cancer, which he mentions almost in passing to explain the urgency of getting health insurance. But he’s also a seeker, unapologetically so, and trying to prove something to himself—that, despite his white-collar CV, he is an authentic Appalachian who can still draw on a reserve of mountain grit.

[From the June 2025 issue: Sarah Yager on how the USPS delivers mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon]

Grant doesn’t hide the self-indulgence latent in what his wife calls “one of your quests.” Yet he also proves to be a compelling and empathetic guide, observing his country and its citizens, not just himself, with open and unjaded eyes. If his jaunty prose sometimes feels forced, his curiosity doesn’t: He needs to focus on the details of his new manual labor, and milieu, or else fall hopelessly behind his co-workers (which he does anyway).

Immersing himself in unfamiliar work in a familiar place throws him off-balance in a way that feels bracing. Driving his late grandmother-in-law’s 1999 Toyota RAV4 (rural carriers, he learns, often have to rely on their personal vehicles) through breathtaking Appalachian landscapes exhilarates, and occasionally terrifies, him. The car loses traction on an uphill dirt road that abruptly becomes “a rutted-out washboard.” Heedlessly reaching a hand into an abandoned mailbox turned hornets’ nest induces “a full-body, screaming freakout, standing in the middle of a dirt road.” He savors surprising, sweet moments, too: an old widower who shows him the sprawling model-train setup in his garage that he began assembling “once Jennie passed”; a man in a trailer who reacts with boyish delight when the Lord of the Rings replica sword he ordered with his pandemic check arrives. “This is Anduril, Flame of the West!” the man explains. Grant chimes right in with “Reforged from the shards of Narsil by the elves of Rivendell.”

With his co-workers, his approach is “show up, don’t sandbag anybody, be humble, play through to the buzzer.” But he’s also keenly aware of being a soft former white-collar worker on a team of hardened veterans—and during a period, the pandemic, when the Postal Service is “on a wartime footing,” its intricate processes strained by new magnitudes of mail. Kat, a terse USPS lifer, helps him get through the worst days: “I think as long as she saw a carrier trying, she was supportive.” Serena, a woman who handles surging Amazon deliveries with Sisyphean dedication, instructs him in a new task, chucking parcels into metal cages organized by route: “Start scanning, start throwing, and get the fuck out of my way.” Glynnis, a 70-something whose back is killing her, “swore like a marine with busted knuckles”—loudly and creatively, sometimes with racist verve. She drives him crazy with her incessant complaining, not that the fan noise and the heat don’t make him cranky too.

By contrast, Wade, an Alaskan, is the Michael Jordan of backwoods mail delivery, which features a degree of “freedom in terms of when and how you wanted to work” absent from bigger urban routes fully plugged into the Postal Service’s centralized system. Wade’s “process fluency” awes Grant—his preternatural ability to keep track of every variety of mail (“the hot case, the raw flats, the parcels, the raw mail,” plus the trays of machine-sorted first-class and standard mail, arriving every morning) and then fit it all, Tetris-like, into his vehicle’s cargo area, arranged for delivery; his mastery of a labyrinthine route; his agility in eating sandwiches with one hand while delivering the mail with the other. Wade could do a route “rated at 9 hours” in five. Grant barely manages half of it in 11 hours, with help.

[Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal Service]

Mailman includes its share of epiphanic wisdom. But unlike many works of nonfiction that focus on this region and its people, it avoids treating those who find themselves in its pages with the sort of condescension or reflexive romanticizing—or worse, a blend of both—that often seeps into writing about Appalachia. Grant doesn’t pretend that the Blue Ridge is all wholesome water-bath canning, porch sitting, and verdant greenery. He doesn’t deal in crude stereotypes of poor rural people, but neither does he avert his eyes from details that might be construed as backwoods caricature. He gets a glimpse into the trailer where the man who buys the expensive sword lives, watching as he has to “slide crabwise” along the wall, hands raised high, to get past a huge flatscreen TV that dominates the space. Imagining how many times a day he does that, Grant doesn’t judge; he just notes “the kind of trade-offs people are willing to make for picture quality.” His portrayals throughout tend toward the gently sentimental, no noble savagery in view.

Grant’s forthright evocation of community, a word so frequently used that its meaning has grown fuzzy, would be easy to attribute to his own roots in the rural-Blacksburg area, where the story unfolds. The truth, though, is more complicated. Sociologists have sometimes categorized Appalachia as an “internal colony”: an impoverished and economically exploited area within a country that is often viewed by elites as if it were an underdeveloped region outside that country. The firmly upper-middle-class Grant—raised in the mountains because he was born to a Virginia Tech professor, rather than into a long line of coal miners or lumberjacks—doesn’t really try to hide that he sometimes feels more like a colonizer than an “authentic” Appalachian.

In one moment of obvious angst early on, after his wife accuses him of having an inordinate soft spot for Virginia’s country people, Grant proclaims, “I’m from Appalachia. I’m Appalachian!” She tells him pointedly, “You are not!” Identitarian anxiety crops up more subtly too: Grant wistfully recalls his desire to join his high-school classmates on their annual November deer-hunting trips, his father’s refusal to take him, and his envy of the homemade venison jerky the other boys would bring to school. When he says, “I wanted a giant Ziploc bag of venison jerky,” he seems to be saying, “I wanted to be a real Appalachian.”

mailman is most distinctive when it ventures into territory that feels timely in a way that goes beyond COVID-era tributes to “essential workers.” Grant finds himself preoccupied with the nature of public service, its scale and scope, and with coordination among systems and humans, of which the Postal Service turns out to be quite an astonishing example. He focuses in on the scene, not just the enormous “superscanner, like a seven-foot-tall mechanical praying mantis,” that logs incoming parcels, but also the low-tech mail-sorting methods. He also gets to appreciate up close the skillful interplay between brain and body involved in becoming “unconsciously competent at complex tasks”; where once he knew only the academic phrase process fluency, now he can see the intricacy involved, and the dignity imparted by mastery.

When Grant declares, “My robot brain was in charge” at one point, reflecting on the execution of letter gathering while driving, he’s speaking with pleasure and pride about achieving a flow state in the fulfillment of a worthwhile task; he’s not complaining about drudgery or soul-sucking labor. Ever the marketer, Grant celebrates the Postal Service’s uniqueness (indulging in a bit of statistical overreach). “FedEx? UPS? They simply cannot do what the USPS does. All they carry are parcels,” he scoffs. “We carry everything for everybody, with 99.993 percent accuracy.”

[Read: What happens to mail during a natural disaster?]

Mailman is also a shameful revelation of the inexcusable working conditions that letter carriers are subjected to: The injury rate for postal workers is higher than for coal miners. You can almost feel Grant’s blood pressure rising as he describes the decades-out-of-date, unsafe, and AC-less delivery trucks—“death traps,” he calls them. (The advent of new electric vehicles, thanks to a 2022 infusion of federal funds, doesn’t make it into his book, perhaps because their expected delivery last year has been running behind schedule.) Grant’s indictment—and his celebration—predates DOGE, whose arrival only makes both more relevant: a counter to the slander of public servants routinely dispensed by Elon Musk, a man who accrues more money in an hour than the average USPS employee will make in a lifetime.

When Grant says he finally learned that “what was essential was just doing your job,” he doesn’t mean that the USPS work is easy but that it is hard, and that being a mail carrier, showing up day in and day out, matters. “That’s the difference between a regular and a sub,” he observes, remarking on the distinction between being a fill-in and someone’s daily letter carrier. “The sub just delivers the mail. The regular is delivering something else. Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff the government is supposed to do for its people.” In Grant’s telling, postal workers bring order and predictability to a country that can feel like it’s unraveling, especially during crises that starkly illustrate how reliant we are on the federal bureaucracy.

If Hollywood were to option this story, the hero would get offered the job of his dreams and turn it down, realizing in his heart that he is meant to be a mailman after all. But Grant has indicated from the start that his USPS stint is a placeholder. He applies for and ends up accepting a cushy position at a media agency, turns in his Halloween-job uniform, and takes a dig at himself for becoming “just another white-collar ghost with a job that nobody understands.”

You may roll your eyes when this interloper describes the solace that his brief sojourn in blue-collar life has brought: that after decades of “feeling like I wasn’t doing any good in the world, being part of something—even something as mundane as the Postal Service—made me feel whole.” Glynnis certainly takes a different view as she counts down to retirement. When Grant, hoping to quiet her carping, says, “I’m in the same jam as you are,” she calls him on it: “No you ain’t, because I’m here to get my motherfucking pension, and you’re too goddamned stupid to stay at home and collect unemployment.” Grant acknowledges that “she had a point.”

His final revelation is that Americans misunderstand the difference between white- and blue-collar work. “Both forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other,” he writes. “The real distinction is between work and service, and I think it’s one of the great dividing lines in American life.” The question this leaves for readers isn’t why Grant decided to stop being a mailman. The question is how we ended up with a country where choosing a life of service all too often feels financially untenable and socially undervalued.

This article appears in the September 2025 print edition with the headline “Playing Mailman.”

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How should American power be deployed in the world? Since the Cold War, America’s role as a global leader has been up for debate.

Host Garry Kasparov and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton dissect the state of the neoconservative geopolitical worldview. They consider what the latest iteration of the “America First” foreign-policy rationale signals for democracy worldwide and analyze what it means that the new American right sometimes sounds like the old American left.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Garry Kasparov: I would like to begin this episode with two quotes from American presidents. You might try to guess which presidents they are from.

[Music]

Kasparov: The first: “Good leaders do not threaten to quit if things go wrong. They expect cooperation, of course, and they expect everyone to do his share, but they do not stop to measure sacrifices with a teaspoon while the fight is on. We cannot lead the forces of freedom from behind.”

And the second presidential quote, “We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations—acting individually or in concert—will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.”

The first, with the memorable line about not measuring sacrifice with a teaspoon while the fight is on, was spoken by my namesake, President Harry S Truman, in a 1951 address in Philadelphia at the dedication of the Chapel of the Four Chaplains. He had brought American troops into combat in Korea: a controversial decision to stand up to Communist aggression, only six years after the end of World War II.

The second presidential quote, about nations being morally justified to use force, is more surprising. It was spoken on stage in Oslo, Norway, in 2009, during Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.

Donald Trump’s “America First” isolationist cry echoes the America Firsters of the 1930s who wanted to stay out of what they called “Europe’s war,” even as late as 1941. Refusing to defend Ukraine against Russia’s invasion has many parallels to the U.S. staying out of World War II until Pearl Harbor. Harry Truman learned the lesson. As he said in Philadelphia, you fight small conflicts to avoid big wars. Evidence of the good that can come from military intervention starts with South Korea, a thriving democratic ally, and North Korea, a prison-camp nation.

From The Atlantic, this is Autocracy in America. I’m Garry Kasparov.

[Music]

Kasparov: Terms like intervention and regime change are practically dirty words in U.S. politics, since the disastrous occupation of Iraq. But when aggressive dictatorships—like the Soviet Union in the past, or Vladimir Putin’s Russia today—go on the march, words alone do not stop them.

My guest today, Ambassador John Bolton, would agree with both of those presidential quotes, although, like me, he did not find much else to agree on with Obama during his eight years in office! Bolton has strong opinions on American foreign policy and the use of force. At a time when the new American right sounds like the old American left, his thoughts are critical.

[Music]

Kasparov: John Bolton, you have had many distinctions and titles in your career, including ambassador to the United Nations, national security adviser, and many others. I will add one more. You are the only guest to join us in both seasons of this show. Thank you for doing it.

John Bolton: Glad to be with you.

Kasparov: And by the way, I see the chessboard in your office. Do you play chess?

Bolton: I do. You know, that was given to me by Nikolai Patrushev, my opposite number—

Kasparov: Ooof! (Laughs.)

Bolton: —when he was the Russian national security adviser. And it is interestingly made out of Karelian wood from the Finnish territory. So, and it was checked out by the Secret Service before I accepted it.

Kasparov: Do you think that the chess rules apply to this, you know, current geopolitics? Or it’s more like a game of poker?

Bolton: Well, I think I wouldn’t argue with you about the rules of chess. I don’t think people like Vladimir Putin care about the rules. When people talk about the rules-based international order, the prime malefactors didn’t get the memo. They don’t believe in it, and they don’t act like it’s there. And for us to believe that it’s there, I think, handicaps our ability to defend ourselves.

Kasparov: I want to talk with you about how American power should be deployed in the world, in service of democracies and against autocracies. But I want to start with what seems to be the ever-changing meaning of “America First” as a foreign-policy rationale. How do you interpret that term based on what you’re seeing in the second Trump administration?

Bolton: Well, I think Trump himself has basically given us the answer on “America First,” “Make America great again”—whatever his slogans are. They are exactly what he says they are at any given moment. They don’t reflect an overarching philosophy. They don’t reflect, in this case, a clear national-security grand strategy. Trump doesn’t even really do policy as we understand it. I don’t think to this day that he really appreciates that the words America first were initially used in the run-up to World War II to be the slogan of the isolationists, those who did not want to be drawn into the European war.

He doesn’t see, he never saw the background of that, or the concerns about anti-Semitism that lurked in that “America First” movement. And I think from Trump’s point of view—because to him everything is transactional—it means he just makes the best deals in the world, and he doesn’t necessarily distinguish among the terms of the deals he’s making. It’s the fact of making a deal that shows who’s in charge.

Kasparov: You said, and we all suspected, that Trump was not aware about the true meaning of “America First,” because he’s not a—no matter what he says—a good scholar of history. But assuming he knew that “America First” meant isolationism back then in 1939, 1940, and a clear distinction of anti-Semitism, would he care?

Bolton: I don’t think he would care. And I think he views truth in a very relative way. People say Trump lies a lot. I actually don’t think that’s an accurate description. I don’t think he cares much about what’s true and what’s not true. He says what he thinks he would like the world to be, and as it benefits him at any given time. And if pressed on that point about anti-Semitism in particular, I think he would just brush it away.

Kasparov: So you’ve written that Trump’s decisions are like an archipelago of dots that don’t really line up, and that advisers in the first term, you included, would try to string good decisions together. Now, what about the second administration? What is happening now?

Bolton: Well, you know, even just about six months in, I think you can see the difference in personnel selections pretty clearly. Certainly in the national-security space. In the first term, he had people who largely shared a Republican philosophy, a Reaganite approach to foreign policy. Obviously there were many disagreements on tactics, on priorities, on a whole variety of things, which is perfectly natural in any administration. And Trump, not knowing much about international affairs, could often buy one argument one day and another argument the next day. But eventually he got frustrated, I think, that his visceral instincts weren’t necessarily automatically adopted by his advisers, who were trying to give him the best advice, trying to get to the optimal outcome. So to avoid the problems that he saw in the first term, in the second term, I think, he has consciously looked for people who act as yes-men and yes-women.

They don’t say, Well, have you considered these alternative options? Have you looked at these facts? He wants people who will listen to what he says and then go out and implement it. Now, in the first term, people said his advisers tried to constrain him, tried to really to make the decisions in his place. And I just think that’s wrong. I think I can speak for many others: We were trying to make sure that he made the best decision possible, and giving our advice was part of our function. My title was national security adviser. I don’t know what else I’m supposed to do, other than give advice, in that job. But in the second term, he wants not loyalty—I think loyalty is a good word; I think it conveys a valuable commodity—he wants fealty. He wants people who are gonna say Yes, sir, and do it really without thinking, in many cases without trying to improve or suggest modifications. I think that’s—ironically, it’s gonna be harmful to Trump. It’s certainly gonna be harmful to America, but that approach ultimately will hurt Trump too.

Kasparov: How so?

Bolton: Well, if a president is making decisions in a very narrow focus without understanding the broader implications, the additional risks, the additional opportunities, he’s gonna miss a lot of what the rest of the world will see. And then contingencies will arise that he simply won’t be prepared for. So that even what was a reasonably good decision can go bad, because you don’t take into account the second- and third-order consequences. And I hesitate to say this with Garry here, but in chess you have to think a couple moves ahead. Maybe some people think lots of moves ahead. Trump plays it one move at a time, and that is dangerous.

Kasparov: Yeah, it’s not a very rosy picture. So it seems that his Cabinet now, and all people who are supposed to give him advice, they are not going to contradict him.

Bolton: You knowI have to say, contrary to the first term, there haven’t been so many leaks out of this White House in the early months. So I don’t have confidence we really know how the decision making is going. But to the extent we do, my impression is that while there’s a lot of discussion about the optics of how you present a particular decision—the kind of background politics, how it makes Trump look—in terms of strategic thinking by people who understand international affairs, there’s not an awful lot of that.

And indeed, even in some cases it might seem unusual, people who disagree get excluded. It appears Tulsi Gabbard—who opposed, from all we can tell, the strikes against Iran’s nuclear-weapons program—was just cut out of the picture. And I have to say in the short term, I’m delighted by that. It probably contributed to the right decision. But what that means more basically is that Trump made a fundamental mistake appointing her, because you want people who will give their best advice, and it helps the president—should help the president—make a better-informed decision.

Kasparov: You mentioned Tulsi Gabbard. What about other advisers? Who do you find the most worrisome?

Bolton: Well, I think Secretary of Defense [Pete] Hegseth really is in over his head in this job. I think his comments in public about comments and criticisms that people made about the outcome of the bombing of the Iranian nuclear sites demonstrated that. It’s fine to defend the president. That’s what Cabinet members should do. If you get tired of defending the president, you should resign. But that’s not your only job. Your job is also to explain and justify the conduct that you’ve ordered on behalf of the president. Not in a partisan way, but in a way that helps the American people understand. Leadership here is in large part education, and that’s not what they’re doing. They’re doing a kind of attack partisan politics. Again, it makes Trump feel good in the short term, but in the longer term, he will not be well served by that kind of approach either.

Kasparov: Now a strategic question: our allies in Europe. J. D. Vance went to Munich, the Munich Security Conference, back in February and chastised European democracies for many things—among them being afraid of the far right and suppressing democracies at home. What’s your take?

Bolton: Well, there are a lot of interesting things in that speech. No. 1, you know, Vance is really on the quasi-isolationist side of the political spectrum. And he, and people like him, have been very critical over the years of the neoconservatives for their constant emphasis on human rights and similar concerns. And yet at Munich, what he gave was a neoconservative speech. Although he was criticizing the Europeans for their democratic failures, I would’ve felt better if he had included Russia and China as part of his critical analysis. But he was doing exactly what he criticized the neoconservatives for doing. This is, I think, a measure of how really partisan these kinds of approaches are from a domestic American point of view. He’s scoring—Vance there is scoring points against the neoconservatives, against liberal internationalists, against a variety of people that I’m not part of. So I didn’t take it personally. But it was carrying on a domestic-U.S. political debate in an international forum.

I think that Trump himself doesn’t understand alliances. I’m not sure Vance understands them any better. In Trump’s case, he looks at NATO, for example, and he sees it as the United States defending Europe: We don’t get anything out of it, and they won’t pay. Well, if I thought NATO worked that way, I probably wouldn’t be very enthusiastic about it either. But the whole point of a collective-defense alliance is that the security of all the members is enhanced when they live up to their obligations. And I think NATO remains the most effective politico-military alliance in human history.

There are members who are not pulling their fair share. That’s right. I think Trump was right to criticize that. What’s not right is to break the alliance up over it. And I think we are—notwithstanding the recent NATO summit where everybody smiled and seemed to be happy—I don’t think we’re past the danger point of Trump potentially withdrawing the U.S. from NATO in less happy times.

Kasparov: Oh, that’s interesting. So can he withdraw from NATO unilaterally without a vote in the Senate, Congressional approval, whatever—or is it just totally in the hands of the president?

Bolton: It’s my very firm view that the Constitution does entrust that authority solely to the president. In the case of NATO, ironically, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and some others passed legislation a few years ago that said the president could not withdraw from NATO without the consent of the Senate. I think that provision is unconstitutional. I don’t think you can limit the president’s authority. So if Trump decided to pull out, and he issued an executive order doing that, that might be challengeable in litigation, but it would take years to resolve. And in effect, Trump would have withdrawn by the time the case was decided by the Supreme Court.

Kasparov: Do you think it’s realistic, that he will go that far?

Bolton: You know, I think he, as I say, he doesn’t understand the alliance viscerally. He doesn’t like it. He has said, and his advisers have said, things like, Well, we’ll only defend NATO members that are meeting what used to be the 2 percent threshold: 2 percent of GDP spent on defense, now 3 and a half percent, 5 with infrastructure. Well, that’s a statement that the NATO alliance is like a piece of Swiss cheese. You can’t defend this country and then not defend the country next to it because it’s not at 2 percent; it’s just not viable militarily. But that kind of thinking has not left Trump’s mind, and has not left the minds of his advisers. So I remain very worried, notwithstanding this recent NATO summit where things seem to go well. This is deep within Trump that he distrusts the alliance, thinks it’s part of America getting a raw deal.

Kasparov: But I think that all countries that might be in danger, countries that border Russia or are just in the vicinity of potential Russian aggression, they already are almost at 5 percent. They spend a bigger percentage of GDP than the United States on their defense. Does it mean that America will defend them?

Bolton: Well, we certainly should, but I think this is an important question about Trump the man faced with a crisis situation like that. Let’s say Russia invades the Baltics: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Not impossible; certainly something the Baltics fear very much. Now, we did not have any crisis nearly that dangerous in the first term. COVID was a crisis, but it was a health crisis played out over a long period of time. So what would Trump do if the Baltics were attacked by Russia? I don’t know the answer to that question. And it’s legitimate for the Eastern European countries in NATO in particular to be worried about, because Trump does not like decisions where he can’t reverse himself the next day. And obviously a decision to comply with Article V and defend countries invaded by Russia would be a decision that would be irrevocable for a long time until the military struggle played itself out.

Kasparov: So what do you expect to happen in Ukraine? Again, Ukraine is fighting this war, and many of us believe it’s shielding the free world against Russian aggression. And Ukrainians and many Europeans, especially neighboring countries, they are disappointed, I would probably say shocked, by the Trump administration’s policy in the region. Can Ukraine survive on its own, or basically can Europe provide enough for Ukraine? And how long will America take this neutral stand?

Bolton: Well, I’m afraid the answer is the rest of Trump’s presidency. I think it’s gonna remain undecided. My guess is in the near term—which may be the remaining three and a half years of the administration—Trump is not gonna go back and make a major effort to seek a diplomatic solution. I think he was burned by the failure of Russia to show any conciliatory impulses at all when he tried in the last few months.

And I think he sees it as a failure to live up to his campaign boast that he could solve the problem in 24 hours, which of course was never realistic. So the real issue is: Will he allow the continuation of U.S. military assistance at approximately the same levels—weapons, ammunition, and, to my mind, most important of all, military intelligence that’s so critical to the Ukrainians on the battlefield?

And to the question you’ve raised, can the Europeans make up the difference? I don’t think they can on the intelligence. I just don’t think they have the capability. It could be they can make it up in hardware. I would hope they could, but it just won’t be the same if Trump really does cut off the aid.

Kasparov: Now, about another crisis or another war, it’s the Middle East. How do you rate Trump’s actions there—attacking Iran, then offering the olive branch? And again, some say he did it in a desperate search for the Nobel Peace Prize, Trump’s policy vis-à-vis Israel-Palestinians.

Bolton: Right. Well, I think he’s not gonna get the Nobel Peace Prize for bringing peace to Ukraine, that’s for sure. So he’s looking for another opportunity. I find myself to a certain extent satisfied, but to a certain extent frustrated. I think it was the right thing to do to order American military attacks on some of the key Iranian nuclear-weapons facilities. There’s been a huge and kind of intellectually arid debate about exactly how much damage was done by those attacks, which we don’t know because we were not close enough to get a full assessment. But I think Trump cut off U.S. military action too soon. I don’t think that there will ever be peace and stability in the Middle East while the regime of the ayatollahs remains in power. I’m not saying that requires extensive U.S. involvement. It certainly doesn’t require boots on the ground. It could involve assistance to the Iranian people.

[Music]

Bolton: I think the question is: Will they have the courage to try to take advantage of the splits and tensions within the regime that I think are pretty obvious across the world now, and see if this is not the moment to rid themselves of the ayatollahs.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Kasparov: Let’s move from the world of practicalities into the world of idealism. What could be an ideal world if we could have our wishes granted? So, how should American power be deployed in service of democracy? So what are the tools to use, and where to use them? Exporting democracy, military interventions, regime change?

Bolton: Well, I think where American interests are at stake, there are a number of things we could do. I think regime change doesn’t obviously have to involve American boots on the ground. There are all kinds of ways that regime change can take place. We tried that in the case of Venezuela in 2018 and 2019, that would’ve allowed the Venezuelan people to take control away from the [Nicolás] Maduro, really the Chavez-Maduro dictatorship.

But we would’ve, at the same time, pushed the Russians, the Cubans, the Chinese, the Iranians out of positions in Venezuela, very advantageous to them. It didn’t work, but it was worth the effort. If we had succeeded, I would’ve said basically to the people of Venezuela, Congratulations. It now belongs to you. You figure out what you’re gonna do with it. I have never been a nation builder, in the sense that some people have been, but I don’t shy away from regime change. In the case of Iraq, which is the case that people point to again and again, I give full credit to the people who tried to make the coalition provisional authority in Iraq work. I think they did it out of the best of motivations. But it’s not what I would’ve done. In my perfect world, I would’ve given the Iraqi leaders—some in exile, some who had been in the country—a copy of the Federalist Papers and said, Good luck. Call us if you have any questions. We’ll hold the ring around you. We’ll protect you from Iranian and other external influences, but you need to do this yourself.

And I think that’s really how you nation build. You don’t enhance people’s political maturity by making decisions for them. Even if you can make better decisions than they can, you enhance political maturity by saying, You’re gonna make the decisions, and you’re gonna learn by your mistakes. It’s not guaranteed for success, but I think that’s a more solid way of nation building than for Americans to try and do it for them.

Kasparov: But let me press on this issue. Because you mentioned Venezuela. I can add Belarus. In these countries, we clearly saw the opposition winning elections. Not hearsay. Winning elections, having physical proof of receiving, in both cases, 70 percent of votes. And both dictators—[Alexander] Lukashenko and Maduro—they stayed in power. They didn’t care. They used force. Lukashenko, we understand he’s too close to Russia. Putin was there. The opposition stood no chance. But Venezuela is just next door. Recently we had these elections, and Maduro basically ignored it. He made the deal with the [Joe] Biden administration, so some kind of relief of sanctions, but promising free and fair elections. So he reneged on his promise. Should America intervene?

Bolton: Well, look—back in 2018 and 2019, I think we were at the point where we should have been doing more. But you know, we didn’t have many capabilities in the Western hemisphere, thanks to the Obama administration, that where we could have had opportunities through our intelligence community and others to help Juan Guaidó, the legitimate president of Venezuela. The days are long gone by when we really could have done very much, and I feel we didn’t enforce the sanctions as strictly as we could have. We made a lot of mistakes there. The Biden administration didn’t even try that. They thought they could make a deal with Maduro. It was a total mistake. I don’t see how anybody could believe he would honor any commitment he made.

I want to come back to Belarus, though, because I do think that that was a situation where it was very much in our interest to see if there was any way at all to persuade Lukashenko to pull away from Russia. So I went to Minsk in August of 2019, about two weeks before I resigned—I was the first senior American to visit Belarus in a long, long time—just to see the guy, and see if there were some hooks we could put in to bring him away, for his own safety’s sake, but ultimately leading to popular government. I, as I say, I resigned two weeks later, so I didn’t carry through on it. But it was a case to me that suggested we could have some influence there, and maybe, as in the case of Poland with solidarity, maybe there were ways to make that work. But we never tried, because Trump didn’t really care about Belarus. Trump asked in his first term, Is Finland still part of Russia? So to him, Belarus, Ukraine: They all look Russian to him. And it’s hard to get him to focus on things.

Kasparov: We’ve talked now at length about Trump’s view of the world, such as it is. Now I want to talk about the Bolton view. So my experience of growing up in the Soviet Union during the Cold War instilled in me a great deal of clarity about good and evil in the world of geopolitics. But there has been a terrible decline in American values after the Cold War, and a new lack of clarity about the American role in the world. So what has that meant for how you see America’s place as the global leader?

Bolton: Well, I think we’re seeing today play out in the Trump administration and among many people who are supportive of him that this virus of isolationism—which isn’t a coherent ideology itself, it’s a knee-jerk reaction to the external world—can go through a long period of being irrelevant and then suddenly reappear.

And I attribute this in part to a failure in both political parties, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, to develop political leaders who thought about what it would take from America to help in the wider world, create conditions of stability that would be beneficial to the U.S. here at home: that would allow our economy to flourish, that would allow our society to flourish. And so people at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, some were saying, It’s the end of history. Others were saying, you know, We can have a peace dividend; we can cut our defense budgets; globalization will take care of everything; it’s the economy, stupid.

And we lost the post–World War II and Cold War generations of leaders, who spoke very plainly to the American people—whether it’s Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, many, many more—to say, look, safety for America doesn’t begin on the Atlantic and Pacific shores. Safety for America is having a broader place in the world, a forward defense posture with allies to guard against aggression and to try and deter aggression. And that means a robust, strong America that sees its economic and political and social issues really involved all over the world.

Now, there’s a cost to that. There’s a defense budget that has to be paid. There are allies that have to be dealt with. There are risks that have to be taken. But to say we don’t live in a perfect world, far from it, but the way to protect America is not to put our head in the sand—not to turn away from the rest of the world—but to deal with it in ways that are most favorable to us.

And I think one of the things we’re seeing today, 35 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, is: We don’t have much in the way of political leadership that can speak to the American people in these terms. The Americans have always risen to the challenge when their leaders are straight with them. And the idea that we can’t, we don’t need to worry about the rest of the world—it’s not a threat, it doesn’t concern us, it’s not gonna affect us—is deeply uninformed. I don’t call it naive. It’s almost perverse, and yet that’s what we’re dealing with. If we could see political leaders emerge, most likely I think in the Republican Party, that can make that case to the American people, we could return to a Reaganite kind of foreign policy that that was successful in the Cold War and could be made applicable to the very different, but no less threatening, challenges we see around the world today.

Kasparov: Going back to 1991, 1992. The Soviet Union is gone, and I think Americans expected some benefits from the victory, phenomenal victory in the Cold War. But eight years of [Bill] Clinton presidency brought no security. Prosperity yes, but security no. Because by the time Clinton left the office, al-Qaeda was ready to strike. Something went wrong, terribly wrong, in the ’90s. So do you think that if [George H. W.] Bush 41 would’ve won the elections and stayed in the office, the Republican administration had a plan on how to redefine American leadership in the new world?

Bolton: No. I mean, I think there was a lot of uncertainty all around the political spectrum. George H. W. Bush talked about a “new world order.” Well, it wasn’t much order before, and frankly there wasn’t much order after. But what he was referring to was the collapse of the Soviet Union. What we didn’t see, because we were too optimistic perhaps, was that Russia would return to authoritarianism. We thought, Well, now they’ve got the chance; everything will be fine. That obviously didn’t work out. We didn’t see the turmoil in the Arab world. We didn’t see the radicalization, the effect of the 1979 revolution in Iran. And we also, in the 1990s, didn’t see China, didn’t see that it was a threat, that it would be a threat. You know, we heard Deng Xiaoping say to the Chinese, Hide and bide.Hide your capabilities; bide your time. We didn’t realize what he was saying. So this illusion that the end of the Cold War meant the end of history—that conflict was no longer a threat to us—led us to make grave mistakes about Russia, about China, about the threat of Islamic terrorism.

And we have suffered through all of those and are still suffering through them today. So it was a catastrophic series of mistakes, that there’s a lot of blame to spread around here for sure, and [the] Clinton administration bears a full share of it. Whether George H. W. Bush would’ve done better? I don’t know. I think so, because I think he understood the world a lot better than Bill Clinton did.

Kasparov: But it still sounds very disturbing that the same people—okay, Clinton replaced Bush, but the apparatus was there, you know, the CIA, Pentagon, the so-called deep state. And the same people, the same agencies, the same institutions that were instrumental in defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War made such huge blunders. You said—missed Russia, missed China, missed Islamic terrorism, basically missed everything. Every threat that we are dealing with now has been totally missed in the ’90s. What was that? It’s just a kind of relaxation? We won. Let’s go celebrate. You know, let’s uncork champagne bottles.

Bolton: Look, I think it was escapism, and I think it was the desire to think, Okay, so in the 20th century we’ve had three world wars. Two of them hot, one of them the Cold War. We’re past all that. Now, that’s what “the end of history” means. And, it was a delusion. It was a detour from history. It really was. And we’ve paid the price.

We’re still paying the price, and one reason is we’re not spending nearly what we should on defense. The 5 percent commitment that NATO made, we’re not approaching. The Trump budget for the next fiscal year is only a small nominal increase over the current budget. It’s not gonna do nearly enough. We’re setting ourselves up for, I think, a very risky future if we don’t change that.

Kasparov: You just mentioned Trump’s budget and its nominal increase in defense, but it’s a huge increase in ICE. So do you think it’s a bit dangerous? Yes? That this military force has been built in America and the control of the DOJ? And they already demonstrated very little respect for the Constitution. Could it be a potential tool for terror?

Bolton: Actually, Trump has come very close to achieving the goal he expressed of closing the border. I mean, he had the border closed at the end of the first term, because deterrence works. If you think you’re gonna walk through Mexico and get stopped at the Rio Grande, you’re not gonna leave your city or town or village. That’s been restored. His—what he wants now is the deportation of the illegals. And I think he’s going to have a lot of trouble with that. But the immigration issue is, I think, part of the isolationist temptation that somehow the rest of the world is gonna corrupt us. I think with careful attention and screening of who comes in, we can minimize the risk of terrorists coming in, criminals, agents of foreign governments. Nothing’s perfect, but I think we can do a pretty good job of it. I don’t think that’s what Trump wants to do. He wants the issue of the fight with California, for example. That’s why he federalized the California National Guard and sent in the Marines. Ironically, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, wanted to fight too. It benefited both of them politically. It was just the country that was hurt.

Kasparov: So do you think it’s a real chance that Trump will do something totally unconstitutional in America to preserve his power, or just to secure the desired outcome of the next elections?

Bolton: Well, I think he tried that in 2020, and he failed. The system was stressed, but it held. I think Trump is gonna do—he did a lot of damage in the first term; he will do more damage in the second term. Some of it might be irreparable. I think withdrawing from NATO would be irreparable, for example. But I have confidence in the Constitution and the institutions. This is not the late Roman Republic. We’re not—I don’t think we’re in danger of succumbing. It does require more people to stand up and say, We don’t accept the way Trump behaves. I’m disappointed more Republicans in the House and the Senate haven’t done that. I don’t think this is gonna be easy. But I do think, for example, the courts are holding up pretty well. I think their independence is critical to sustaining the Constitution. And I think as time goes on, Trump’s influence will decline. Remember, he’s not just a new president now, which he is. He’s also a lame-duck president. And as people begin to appreciate that more and more, I think his influence will wane.

Kasparov: So, anything to be optimistic about today? Just, you know, give us just some hope that with Trump in the office, with the rise of authoritarianism, with Iranian regimes surviving, and with terrorism not yet being defeated, what’s the best-case scenario?

Bolton: Well, I think realistically we’ve been through worse. I mean, it always seems you’ve got troubles unique to our time. But the U.S. has been through a lot worse than this, including an incredibly violent Civil War. And we came out on top. And I think one reason is that when you level with the American people—and it’s gonna take the next president to do it—then we do rise to the occasion. I believe in American exceptionalism. And I think betting against America is always a dangerous thing to do.

[Music]

Bolton: So I think in the near term, we’ve just gotta grit our teeth, make sure we do the best we can to minimize the damage that Trump will cause, and try and get ready to meet the challenges we’re gonna face. The threats from China, from the China-Russia axis, from the nuclear proliferation, the threat of terrorism. There are a lot of threats out there, and it’s gonna take a lot of effort. But I believe in the United States. I think we will prevail.

Kasparov: John, thank you very much for joining the show. And let’s see, you know, if the future brings us more positive than negative news. Thank you.

Bolton: I certainly hope so. Thanks for having me.

Kasparov: This episode of Autocracy in America was produced by Arlene Arevalo and Natalie Brennan. Our editor is Dave Shaw. Original music and mix by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Ena Alvarado. Special thanks to Polina Kasparova and Mig Greengard. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. Next time on Autocracy in America:

George Friedman:  It is a historical norm, that there is a king, that there is a ruler. So authoritarianism historically is far more the norm than liberal democracy. Liberal democracy opened the door to the idea that people with very different beliefs could live together. It is a great experiment, but it’s a very difficult experiment. If you believe that the way you should live is a moral imperative, then it is very difficult to have a liberal democracy.

Kasparov: I’m Garry Kasparov. See you back here next week.

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Tomorrow is Donald Trump’s deadline to agree to trade deals before he imposes tariffs, and he means it this time. Why are you laughing? (In fact, since saying that yesterday, he’s already chickened out with Mexico, putting the “taco” in, well, TACO.)

But the president has already written off hopes of reaching agreements with some allies. Yesterday, Trump announced that he was raising tariffs on many Brazilian goods to 50 percent across the board, as retribution for Brazil’s prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally. This morning, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s decision to recognize a Palestinian state “will make it very hard” to strike a deal with Canada.

The president’s perpetual caving can make him seem craven and opportunistic, but you can detect a different impulse in his handling of trade policy too: a warped kind of idealism. When Trump began his political career, he said he would put “America First,” rather than using American power to enforce values overseas. Wars to fight repressive autocrats were foolish ways to burn cash and squander American lives. The promotion of human rights and democracy were soft-headed, bleeding-heart causes. Trump, a man of business, was going to look out for the bottom line without getting tangled up in high-minded crusades. Now that’s exactly what he’s doing: using trade as a way to make grand statements about values—his own, if not America’s.

This is troubling on legal, moral, and diplomatic levels. The Constitution specifically delegates the power to levy tariffs to Congress, but legislators have delegated some of that capacity to the president. Trump has invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allows him to impose tariffs in response to an “unusual and extraordinary threat,” on the basis that Congress cannot act quickly enough. This use of the law is, as Conor Friedersdorf and Ilya Somin wrote in The Atlantic in May, absurd. The White House’s months of vacillation on its tariff threats since make the idea of any emergency even less credible.

Understanding why Trump would be sensitive about Bolsonaro’s prosecution, which stems from Bolsonaro’s attempt to cling to power after losing the 2022 election, is not difficult—the parallels between the two have been often noted—but that doesn’t make it a threat to the United States, much less an “unusual and extraordinary” one. Likewise, Canadian recognition of a Palestinian state is unwelcome news for Trump’s close alliance with Israel, but it poses no obvious security or economic danger to the U.S. A Congress or Supreme Court interested in limiting presidential power could seize on these statements to arrest Trump’s trade war, but these are not the legislators or justices we have.

Setting aside the legal problems, Trump’s statements about Brazil and Canada represent an abandonment of the realpolitik approach he once promised. Even if Carney were to back down on Palestinian statehood, or Brazil to call off Bolsonaro’s prosecution, the United States wouldn’t see any economic gain. Trump is purely using American economic might to achieve noneconomic goals.

Previous presidents have frequently used U.S. economic hegemony to further national goals—or, less charitably, interfered in the domestic affairs of other sovereign nations. But no one needs to accept any nihilistic false equivalences. Trump wrote in a July 9 letter to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva that the case against Bolsonaro was “an international disgrace” and (naturally) a “Witch Hunt.” Although the U.S. has taken steps to isolate repressive governments, Trump’s attempts to bail out Bolsonaro are nothing of the sort. The U.S. can’t with a straight face argue that charging Bolsonaro is improper, and it can’t accuse Brazil of convicting him in a kangaroo court, because no trial has yet been held.

The U.S. government has also long used its power to bully other countries into taking its side in international disputes, but the swipe at Canada is perplexing. The Trump administration remains the most stalwart ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (notwithstanding some recent tensions), and the U.S. government has long withheld recognition of any Palestinian state as leverage in negotiations. Even so, slapping tariffs on Canada for a symbolic decision such as this seems unlikely to dissuade Carney or do anything beyond further stoking nascent Canadian nationalism.

This is not the only way in which Trump’s blunt wielding of tariffs is likely to backfire on the United States. Consumers in the U.S. will pay higher prices, and overseas, Jerusalem Demsas warned in April, “the credibility of the nation’s promises, its treaties, its agreements, and even its basic rationality has evaporated in just weeks.” But it’s not just trust with foreign countries that the president has betrayed. It’s the pact he made with voters. Trump promised voters an “America First” approach. Instead, they’re getting a “Bolsonaro and Netanyahu First” government.

Related:

The TACO presidency Start budgeting for Trump’s tariffs now.

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Virginia Giuffre’s family was shocked that Trump described her as “stolen.”Every scientific empire comes to an end.Hamas wants Gaza to starve.

Today’s News

President Donald Trump’s tariffs are set to take effect tomorrow as his administration scrambles to finalize trade deals with key partners. Mexico received a 90-day extension, while other countries, including China and Canada, remain in negotiations.Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, and Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee will visit Gaza tomorrow to inspect aid distribution as the humanitarian crisis worsens in the region.

About 154,000 federal workers accepted buyouts offered by the Trump administration this year, according to the government’s human-resources arm.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century remade how Americans engaged with the world, Jake Lundberg writes.

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Evening Read

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

Remarkable News in Potatoes

By Katherine J. Wu

For decades, evolutionary biologists pointed to such examples to cast hybridization as hapless—“rare, very unsuccessful, and not an important evolutionary force,” Sandra Knapp, a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, told me. But recently, researchers have begun to revise that dour view. With the right blend of genetic material, hybrids can sometimes be fertile and spawn species of their own; they can acquire new abilities that help them succeed in ways their parents never could. Which, as Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world’s third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and … an ancient tomato.

Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes.

Read the full article.

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Early in the Civil War, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. announced in The Atlantic that the necessities of life had been reduced to two things: bread and the newspaper. Trying to keep up with what Holmes called the “excitements of the time,” civilians lived their days newspaper to newspaper, hanging on the latest reports. Reading anything else felt beside the point.

The newspaper was an inescapable force, Holmes wrote; it ruled by “divine right of its telegraphic dispatches.” Holmes didn’t think he was describing some permanent modern condition—information dependency as a way of life. The newspaper’s reign would end with the war, he thought. And when it did, he and others could return to more high-minded literary pursuits—such as the book by an “illustrious author” that he’d put down when hostilities broke out.

Nearly 40 years after Holmes wrote those words, newspapers were still on the march. Writing in 1900, Arthur Reed Kimball warned in The Atlantic of an “Invasion of Journalism,” as newspapers’ volume and influence grew only more intense. Their readers’ intellect, Kimball argued, had been diminished. Coarse language was corrupting speech and writing, and miscellaneous news was making miscellaneous minds. The newspaper-ification of the American mind was complete.

The rise of the cheap, daily newspaper in the 19th century created the first true attention economy—an endless churn of spectacle and sensation that remade how Americans engaged with the world. Although bound by the physical limits of print, early newspaper readers’ habits were our habits: People craved novelty, skimmed for the latest, let their attention dart from story to story. And with the onset of this new way of being came its first critics.

In our current moment, when readers need to be persuaded to read an article before they post about it online, 19th-century harrumphs over the risks of newspaper reading seem quaint. Each new technology since the newspaper—film, radio, television, computers, the internet, search engines, social media, artificial intelligence—has sparked the same anxieties about how our minds and souls will be changed. Mostly, we’ve endured. But these anxieties have always hinted at the possibility that one day, we’ll reach the endgame—the point at which words and the work of the mind will have become redundant.

Worries over journalism’s invasive qualities are as old as the modern daily newspaper. In New York, where the American variant first took shape in the 1830s, enterprising editors found a formula for success; they covered fires, murders, swindles, scandals, steamboat explosions, and other acts in the city’s daily circus. As James Gordon Bennett Sr., the editor of the New York Herald and the great pioneer of the cheap daily, said, the mission was “to startle or amuse.” Small in size and packed with tiny type, the papers themselves didn’t look particularly amusing, but the newsboys selling them in the street were startling enough. Even if you didn’t buy a paper, a boy in rags was going to yell its contents at you.

These cheap newspapers had relatively modest urban circulations, but they suggested a new mode of living, an acceleration of time rooted in an expectation of constant novelty. Henry David Thoreau and other contrarians saw the implications and counseled the careful conservation of attention. “We should treat our minds,” Thoreau wrote in an essay posthumously published in The Atlantic, “that is, ourselves, as innocent and ingenuous children, whose guardians we are, and be careful what objects and what subjects we thrust on their attention.” This included newspapers. “Read not the Times,” he urged. “Read the Eternities.”

But the problem was only getting worse. The Eternities were steadily losing ground to the Times—and to the Posts, the Standards, the Gazettes, the Worlds, and the Examiners. In the last third of the 19th century, the volume of printed publications grew exponentially. Even as more “serious” newspapers such as the New-York Tribune entered the marketplace, the cheap daily continued to sell thousands of copies each day. Newspapers, aided by faster methods of typesetting and by cheaper printing, became twice-daily behemoths, with Sunday editions that could be biblical in length. A British observer marveled at the turn of the century that Americans, “the busiest people in the world,” had so much time to read each day.

American commentators of high and furrowed brow worried less that newspapers were being left unread and more that they were actually being devoured. The evidence was everywhere—in snappier sermons on Sundays, in direct and terse orations at colleges, in colloquial expressions in everyday usage, in the declining influence of certain journals and magazines (including The Atlantic).

If I may apply what Kimball deplored as “newspaper directness,” people seemed to be getting dumber. Those who were reared on slop and swill wanted ever more slop and swill—and the newspapers were all too ready to administer twice-daily feedings. Writing in The Atlantic in 1891 on the subject of “Journalism and Literature,” William James Stillman saw a broad and “devastating influence of the daily paper” on Americans’ “mental development.” No less grave were the political implications of a populace marinating in half-truths, seeking the general confirmation of what it already believed. In such a market, journalists and their papers had an incentive to perpetuate falsehoods.

Was all of this hand-wringing a little too much? Has not one generation predicted the doom of the next with each successive innovation? Socrates warned that writing would weaken thought and give only the appearance of wisdom. Eighteenth-century novels occasioned panic as critics worried that their readers would waste their days on vulgar fictions. And as for newspapers, didn’t Ernest Hemingway famously take “newspaper directness” and make it the basis for perhaps the most influential literary style of the 20th century? Each innovation, even those that risk dimming our broader mental capacity, can stimulate innovations of its own.

But at the risk of sounding like those 19th-century critics, this time really does seem different. When machines can so agreeably perform all of our intellectual labors and even fulfill our emotional needs, we should wonder what will become of our minds. No one has to spend much time imagining what we might like to read or pretend to read; algorithms already know. Chatbots, meanwhile, can as readily make our emails sound like Hemingway as they can instruct us on how to perform devil worship and self-mutilation. Thoreau may have never divined the possibility of artificial intelligence, but he did fear minds smoothed out by triviality and ease. He imagined the intellect as a road being paved over—“macadamized,” in 19th-century parlance—“its foundation broken into fragments for the wheels of travel to roll over.”

“If I am to be a thoroughfare,” Thoreau wrote, “I prefer that it be of the mountain-brooks, the Parnassian streams, and not the town-sewers.”

Wouldn’t we all. But who has the time for that?

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“I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people,” wrote John Steinbeck in his private journal when he was working on The Grapes of Wrath, his 1939 epic novel about a family fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl during the Depression to seek a better future in California. You might think he was simply experiencing momentary self-doubt but, informed by my work as an academic and writer, I see a hint of something more insidious, which plagues many people of great intellect and erudition: impostor syndrome. For many of these high achievers, the more plaudits they receive, the more they worry that they’re putting one over on everyone.

You don’t even have to be a genius to feel like an impostor. In today’s environment, when people are assiduously cultivating an image on social media that accentuates the positive and buries the negative, anyone can be made to feel they’re a failure and a phony. If you worry about this too, I have some good news for you: The fact that you have the worry means you probably aren’t a phony; the true phony is convinced they’re not one. Even so, suffering from impostor syndrome is certainly deleterious to your happiness. But you can do something about that.

[Read: ChatGTP has impostor syndrome]

The condition was first described in 1978 by two psychologists in the journal Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice as the common affliction in which people who possess real skills and knowledge secretly believe they’re inadequate or incompetent. The authors of the study found evidence that many high-achieving women felt insecurity about their abilities—“an internal experience of intellectual phoniness.” Later research found that this phenomenon applied not just to women or to any particular demographic group; “impostor phenomenon,” as they labeled it (syndrome was a later refinement), was something anyone could experience. (One exception is age—older people experience it less than younger adults.)

A number of tests have been validated for impostor syndrome. One is the Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale, which asks respondents whether they agree with such statements as “I’m afraid people important to me may find out that I’m not as capable as they think I am.” (You can get an idea of how you score on the scale by using a slimmed-down online survey.) By testing, researchers find that certain personalities tend to experience the syndrome more than others. People high in neuroticism and low in conscientiousness are more afflicted than others. Perhaps not surprisingly, introverts are prone to feeling fake more than extroverts (who tend toward narcissism). Perfectionists typically feel like phonies, because they’re so focused on their own perceived errors.

Impostor syndrome tends to manifest among people who work in highly technical fields that require the trust of others. Multiple studies have found a high incidence among young physicians: For a 2021 survey, more than three-quarters of surgical residents reported a significant or severe feeling of being an impostor. I suspect this occurs because doctors think that they must demonstrate a great deal of confidence they don’t authentically feel—which is indeed a form of phoniness, albeit a functionally necessary one. You hardly want your surgeon saying, “Hmm, let’s see how this goes, then,” as you’re being wheeled into the operating room. And if you’re a parent, remember the way your kid looked at you when they were little—with complete trust. If they only knew, I used to think.

Some scholars have argued that impostor syndrome can theoretically lead to higher performance in tasks, insofar as it provides an emotional motivation to succeed. If you’re telling yourself that you’re merely a poser, you will be impelled to improve, the theory goes. But just as such denigration would be destructive when applied to a child, such an abusive method, when self-inflicted, can have huge psychic costs, possibly provoking depression and anxiety. Such negative feedback can also lead to cognitive distortion, causing its subjects to discount legitimate compliments and overgeneralize failure. This makes useful learning harder and is associated with impaired job satisfaction and burnout.

[Read: When you fear that your writing doesn’t measure up to your ambitions]

If you experience impostor syndrome, your well-being is almost certainly compromised. Fortunately, several straightforward ways to treat the condition are available.

1. Don’t talk to yourself like someone you hate. Just as you wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, tell your spouse or your child that they’re an incompetent idiot, you should avoid speaking that way to yourself. Kinder self-talk might sound like the sort of indulgent self-focus that characterizes narcissism, which would indeed hazard phoniness, but in this necessary therapeutic context, it is simply recognizing reality: You are not an incompetent idiot; you are simply a person hoping to learn and improve.

2. Track your progress. Whether you’re a surgeon or a parent (or both), when engaged in a challenging task, try framing your activity as an opportunity for growth and learning. Keep an account of your personal progress to create an objective record of your momentum toward your goals, as opposed to obsessing over what you haven’t yet achieved. So for example, if you’ve recently started a new job, think each day about the new skills and knowledge you’ve acquired, rather than worrying about what you still don’t know or can’t do. Keep a log of these accomplishments and review it regularly.

3. Get some company. Building or joining a community of people similarly situated professionally can be very helpful. This provides a peer group with whom you can speak frankly about any insecurities and discover that such doubts are quite common. This turned out to be a benefit of the Lean In movement started by Sheryl Sandberg, the former Meta executive, because the circles of professional women it created were invited to share the experiences that held them back—and impostor syndrome was a very typical example. The business group YPO’s Forum program for young chief executives is based on a similar idea, which members find enormously helpful as a venue for unburdening themselves of feelings of isolation and insecurity.

[Arthur C. Brooks: The strength you gain by not taking offense]

We’ve looked in depth at people who feel like an impostor but aren’t. Despite the temporary misery he confided to his diary, Steinbeck clearly was no fraud: The Grapes of Wrath went on to win the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was a major factor in his later being awarded the Nobel Prize. But we should consider a phenomenon closely related to the syndrome: people who disingenuously claim to be impostors, even though they don’t think they are, out of false modesty. I’m talking about the humblebraggarts who say such things as “I’m the last person to deserve the personal invitation I just got from the president to visit the White House!”

Nothing is phonier, of course, than this veneer of humility. The humblebrag’s ruse is transparent, and makes its perpetrator instantly irritating and unlikable—a bit like, well, a phony.

Want to learn more about leading a life that feels full and meaningful? Join Arthur C. Brooks and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on Monday, August 11, at 2:30 p.m. ET as they discuss Brooks’s new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. Learn more about the event here.

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The annals of evolutionary history are full of ill-fated unions. Many plants and animals can and do sometimes reproduce outside of their own species, but their offspring—if they come to be at all—may incur serious costs. Mules and hinnies, for instance, are almost always sterile; so, too, are crosses between the two main subspecies of cultivated rice. When lions and tigers mate in zoos, their liger cubs have suffered heart failure and other health problems (and the males seem uniformly infertile).

For decades, evolutionary biologists pointed to such examples to cast hybridization as hapless—“rare, very unsuccessful, and not an important evolutionary force,” Sandra Knapp, a plant taxonomist at the Natural History Museum in London, told me. But recently, researchers have begun to revise that dour view. With the right blend of genetic material, hybrids can sometimes be fertile and spawn species of their own; they can acquire new abilities that help them succeed in ways their parents never could. Which, as Knapp and her colleagues have found in a new study, appears to be the case for the world’s third-most important staple crop: The 8-to-9-million-year-old lineage that begat the modern potato may have arisen from a chance encounter between a flowering plant from a group called Etuberosum and … an ancient tomato.

Tomatoes, in other words, can now justifiably be described as the mother of potatoes. The plant experts I interviewed about the finding almost uniformly described it as remarkable, and not only because dipping fries into ketchup just got a little more mind-bending. Potatoes represent more than the product of an improbable union; they mark a radical feat of evolution. Neither of the first potato’s parents could form the underground nutrient-storage organs we call tubers and eat in the form of sweet potatoes, yams, and potatoes. And yet, the potato predecessor that they produced could. Tubers allowed the proto-potato plant to flourish in environments where tomatoes and Etuberosum could not, and to branch out into more than 100 species that are still around today, including the cultivated potato. It’s as if a liger weren’t just fertile but also grew a brand-new organ that enabled it to thrive on a vegan diet.

Scientists have spent decades puzzling over potatoes’ origin story, in large part because the plants’ genetics are a bit of a mess, Ek Han Tan, a plant geneticist at the University of Maine who wasn’t involved in the study, told me. Researchers have struggled to piece together the relationships among the 100-plus potato species found in the wild; they cannot even agree on exactly how many exist. And when they have tried to orient the potato in its larger family, the nightshades—which includes tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and Etuberosum—they have found mixed clues. Some evidence has seemed to point to the potato being a tomato derivative: Large stretches of their genomes resemble each other, and the two crops are similar enough that they can be grafted together into a plant that produces both foods. But other patches of the potato genome look more similar to that of Etuberosum, which bears flowers and underground stems that are far more potato-esque than anything that the tomato sports. “We couldn’t resolve the contradiction for a long time,” Zhiyang Zhang, a biologist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and one of the paper’s lead authors, told me.

[Read: Tomato + potato = TomTato]

To settle the potato paradox, Zhang and his colleagues amassed more than 120 genomes from dozens of species spanning the potato, tomato, and Etuberosum groups and tried to piece together a narrative. One explanation for all of the shared genes, for instance, might have been that the potato lineage originally split off from the tomato one, then crossbred with Etuberosum later on. If that were the case, the genomes of more ancient potato species would be expected to look more tomato-like, and more modern ones should carry more of Etuberosum’s genetic baggage. Instead, the researchers found that all of the potato genomes they sequenced had about the same tomato-Etuberosum split. That points to a possibility that potato researchers hadn’t really considered before, Helen Tai, a plant geneticist with the Canadian government’s agricultural department, told me. The entire potato lineage must have sprung from the same ancient source: a fusion between tomato and Etuberosum that persists, in a multitude of forms, into the modern day.

The key to that success seems to have been the hybrid’s newfound ability to tuberize, a feat that neither of its parents managed, because each lacked the necessary genetic accoutrement. Only the proto-potato had the proper combination: underground stems from Etuberosum that provided a structural scaffold for the tubers, and a genomic switch from the tomato that told the tubers to grow there. Many hybrids struggle to sexually reproduce, but the proto-potato one didn’t have to: The plant’s underground storage organs (that is, the potatoes) allowed it to propagate asexually. (Potatoes can still be cloned today—just bury bits of one in the ground—but sometime in the past 8 to 9 million years, the plants gained the ability to reproduce sexually, too, a shift that scientists are still puzzling through.) Ancient tomatoes and Etuberosum were native to different stretches of the western coast of South America. But the proto-potato was able to colonize colder, higher, drier environments, allowing it to spread as far north as Arizona and west, out to the coasts of Argentina, Uruguay, and parts of Brazil. “That’s what a tuber does for you—it allows you to survive better in stressful conditions,” C. Robin Buell, a plant-genomics expert at the University of Georgia who wasn’t involved in the study, told me.

Hybridization in nature still, more often than not, ends in tragedy—“offspring that are sterile, inviable, maladapted, or mixed up in some negative way,” Robin Hopkins, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard who wasn’t involved in the research, told me. But through the sheer power of mixing genes into new combinations, the risky gamble of interspecies pairings has also sometimes majorly paid off. Hybridization among East African cichlids seems to have triggered an explosion in the diversity of certain genes important for eyesight, helping the animals navigate waters of varying murkiness and depth. Certain frogs have been documented soliciting mates outside of their own species to up the chances that their offspring will survive periods of drought. Our own ancestors mingled with Denisovans and Neanderthals, equipping modern humans with traits that may have helped us adapt to new environments. Today, farmers frequently breed different species of crops together to boost yield or hardiness against extreme weather and disease. The potato’s innovations, though, are still exceptional. Rather than just collapsing its parents’ various traits together, this ancient hybrid struck out on its own evolutionary path.

[Read: Why these frogs make ‘the grossest blunder in sexual preference’]

Although that proto-potato is long gone, understanding its origins could still keep fries and hashbrowns on modern tables. Cultivated potatoes are prone to disease, and—thanks to their four-copy genomes—a pain to breed and genetically manipulate. Some scientists are trying to address those issues by developing a two-copy-genome potato. But the past could offer another avenue toward sustainable spuds, Yiyuan Ding, a biologist at Huazhong Agricultural University and one of the paper’s lead authors, told me. Perhaps, with some genetic help from Etuberosum, scientists might someday coax tomato plants into producing edible underground tubers of their own.

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Vinay Prasad, until Tuesday one of the country’s top medical regulators, just got a bitter taste of what it means to have real power. In recent months, the academic hematologist-oncologist, medical contrarian, and polemic podcaster had become a central figure at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In May, he was chosen to lead its Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research—a position that gave him authority over vaccines and gene therapies. In June, Marty Makary, who is currently the FDA commissioner, bestowed upon him an even more important role: chief medical and scientific officer of the entire agency. This week, Prasad abruptly departed.

We don’t know the exact reason behind Prasad’s departure. According to a Department of Health and Human Services spokesperson, he resigned to “spend more time with his family.” (Neither Prasad nor HHS responded to my request for comment.) Politico reports that President Donald Trump ordered his removal this week over the objections of Makary and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Whatever the particulars, Prasad’s sudden need for a better work-life balance suggests the administration is following a time-honored approach to medical regulation: Business comes first.

Prasad’s troubles began in the first weeks of his tenure at the FDA, when he overruled the agency’s own scientific reviewers by limiting the use of COVID vaccines. In doing so, he managed to anger the country’s pro- and anti-vaccine factions at the same time. While many public-health experts criticized the decision to limit access to the shots, Kennedy’s allies in the “Make America healthy again” movement felt betrayed by the fact that the government had allowed mRNA shots to remain available at all.

Prasad also faced a blitz from the pharmaceutical industry and patient-advocacy groups after the FDA tried to suspend distribution of a gene therapy for Duchenne muscular dystrophy called Elevidys, over safety concerns. For those affected by this rare, incurable condition, the move was seen as an outrageous denial of their right to weigh the drug’s risks and benefits for themselves, and an extinguishing of what had been at least a glimmer of hope. Two days later, the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer publicly accused Prasad of “sabotaging Trump’s deregulatory agenda,” and an opinion writer for The Wall Street Journal declared him a “one-man death panel.”

I know Prasad a bit: I’ve twice been a guest on his podcast, and I’ve followed his prolific academic work and public commentary about evidence-based medicine since about 2016, when he was a young professor at Oregon Health & Science University working to identify low-value medical practices. We’ve had our disagreements over the years. But with respect to Elevidys and drugs like it, our views are in alignment. We share the worry, for example, that the FDA keeps lowering its approval standards for drugs that keep getting more expensive. “The American economy can handle a great deal of wasteful health-care spending,” Prasad told me in an interview in 2021. “But it can’t tolerate an infinite number.”

His skepticism of Elevidys, in particular, is both long-standing and well-founded. The therapy has not been conclusively shown to slow the progression of the muscle-wasting disease it targets, but it does often induce vomiting and damage patients’ livers. Worryingly, it also appears to be related to a pair of deaths. Prasad’s predecessor in his role at CBER, Peter Marks, approved the drug, which costs $3.2 million per course of treatment, in spite of his own staff’s uncertainty about its benefit. (Marks was forced out by Kennedy this spring, after the two clashed over access to vaccine-safety data.)

[Read: The sanewashing of RFK Jr.]

That Prasad should take a tough line on drug regulation was perfectly in keeping with his history. He rose to prominence on that basis: To his many fans, he was a dogged and courageous industry watchdog; to his many critics, a self-righteous pharma scold. That mainstream Republicans should balk at this approach, and strive to undo it, was equally predictable. Politicians, particularly those on the right, have for years supported patients’ ability to obtain still-unproven therapies. During Trump’s first term, the president signed into law the “Right to Try Act,” which expanded access to experimental drugs. That law was championed by Republican Senator Ron Johnson, who, according to reporting from STAT, may have been instrumental in Prasad’s ouster.

One might have guessed that things were different now in Washington—that Kennedy’s eccentric philosophy had ushered in a novel form of conservative leadership, in which business interests didn’t always lead the way. Thus far, however, the MAHA movement has done little to adjust the status quo. Instead, it has mostly wallowed in its own contradictions. We’ve been told that cooking with seed oils is toxic but that treating measles with cod-liver oil is great; and that both deworming pills and microbe-laden raw milk are good for you. MAHA leaders have declared the FDA a “sock puppet of industry” from which Prasad himself would provide a “welcome reprieve,” while also championing the public’s right to choose its food and drugs (even as they interfere with the distribution of some vaccines).

[Read: How ivermectin became right-wing aspirin]

So which is it? Should people have easy access to almost any health-care intervention, or should the government protect vulnerable patients from drugs for which there isn’t rigorous evidence of benefit? For years, Prasad has been clear on where he stands in that regard. “It is not a case of patients who crave risk facing off with regulators who abhor it,” he wrote in a medical journal in 2019. Rather, the current system, in which “reliable data are inconsistently generated,” has failed patients who wish to make informed decisions about their care.

Whenever this tension has been tested in the Trump administration, MAHA leaders have almost always seemed inclined to move the other way. A recent op-ed by the FDA’s Makary and Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, summed up the current regulatory approach as follows: Agency bureaucrats should cooperate with industry leaders instead of antagonizing them, and the government should favor “market solutions” over “prescriptive regulation.” Indeed, even as the news of Prasad’s firing was coming out, Makary was promoting his “national listening tour” of private interests. “Looking forward to hearing from more pharma and biotech CEOs!” he wrote on X.

Prasad himself appeared to recognize which way the wind was blowing. From the moment he took office, he was tempering his point of view. Before he became a political appointee, Prasad was dogmatic in his dismissal of evidence that did not emerge from large, randomized clinical trials. (“As readers know, my philosophy is RCT or STFU,” he wrote in his newsletter in 2023.) But Prasad seemed to back away from this idea even in his opening remarks to his new colleagues and staffers. “Randomized controlled trials are not always necessary, and when they are done, they are not always informative,” he reportedly said on May 7, his second day on the job.

Such appeasement efforts proved insufficient to protect him from rival forces in the Republican Party, if not also in the MAHA movement itself. For the moment, Prasad has been replaced at CBER by the wealthy biomedical entrepreneur George Tidmarsh. Surely that will come as a relief to a constituency that seems to hold immense sway with this administration: America’s drug companies and medical-device makers.

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This week, the world seems to be finally paying attention to the magnitude of the suffering in Gaza. The futile policies pursued by the Israeli government—prodded by the far-right cabinet ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir—have reduced the supply of humanitarian aid, food, and supplies in Gaza. Israel has unnecessarily reengineered the distribution of aid, failing to achieve its goal of separating the civilian population from Hamas while further constricting its supply. And for these decisions, it has attracted the justified condemnation of the international community.

Despite the surge of hundreds of trucks into Gaza over the past four days, very few supplies have made it into warehouses to be distributed to the population. Aid shipments are being seized by a combination of desperate civilians, lawless gangs, clan-affiliated thugs, and merchants of death. Chaos and apocalyptic scenery are the norm, not the exception. There is no denying the reality of the widespread malnutrition and hunger in the Gaza Strip.

In recent days, I’ve spoken with dozens of Gazans who are furious about what is unfolding around them. They are angry, one told me, at the “hordes of selfish people who are attacking aid convoys to steal and collect aid in a horrific manner without caring for Gazans who chose not to participate in these humiliating and demeaning displays of inhumanity, no matter the level of hunger.” But their anger is directed primarily at Hamas, which they hold responsible for putting the people of Gaza in this position, and for its continued refusal to end the war that it started. “Hitler fought in his bunker until he killed himself in World War II in the Battle of Berlin,” another person said, complaining that Hamas is hunkered down in its tunnels, willing to see Gaza destroyed to the very last child.

[Yair Rosenberg: The corrupt bargain behind Gaza’s catastrophe]

Hamas actually wants a famine in Gaza. Producing mass death from hunger is the group’s final play, its last hope for ending the war in a way that advances its goals. Hamas has benefited from Israel’s decision to use food as a lever against the terror group, because the catastrophic conditions for civilians have generated an international outcry, which is worsening Israel’s global standing and forcing it to reverse course.

Online supporters of the terror group have consistently attacked any efforts to alleviate the crisis. In posts and videos, they have dismissed efforts to send in food by convoys of trucks from Egypt and Jordan, pointing to the chaotic scenes as desperate Gazans scramble for aid. They have likewise attacked the airdrops that are now under way and called for them to be stopped immediately.

Hamas’s evident desire to extend and deepen the crisis of hunger helps explain the recent breakdown of cease-fire negotiations, even as Gazans are needlessly dying. The group’s intransigence led both Israel and Trump’s envoy, Steve Witkoff, to walk away from the talks. If the hunger crisis and humanitarian issues are addressed, Hamas can no longer use the suffering of Gazans to generate an international outcry or use the resultant leverage to end the war on its own terms.

[Read: Why Trump broke with Bibi over the Gaza famine]

But the two-state-solution conference convened by France and Saudi Arabia at the United Nations shows the way forward. In a remarkable statement, endorsed by the European Union and the Arab League, the participants condemned the October 7 attacks and the taking of hostages, and declared that “Hamas must end its rule in Gaza and hand over its weapons to the Palestinian Authority.” The conference envisions the end of hostilities, the establishment of an international mission in Gaza, and the ultimate return of the Palestinian Authority to govern the strip.

Many Arab states have been reluctant to call out Hamas publicly, even though they do so privately on a regular basis, for fear of upsetting their own populations. But now they have recognized the importance of openly and transparently calling for Hamas to give up control of Gaza and disarm. Both Israel and the international community should capitalize on this shift, to isolate the terrorist organization and give hope for a better trajectory for Gaza’s future.

If Hamas believes that the suffering of Gazans bolsters its cause, Israeli decision makers should take that to heart. They should abandon their misguided and inhumane policies and cease their efforts to pressure the population as a means of pressuring the terror group. The best way to undermine Hamas’s position is to instead flood Gaza with food, and to alleviate the suffering of its people.

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It was exactly the kind of case that a prosecutor eager to win more death-penalty convictions looks for: When he arrived at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh in 2022, 11-week-old Sawyer Clarke had fractures in both legs and bleeding behind both eyes from a brain hemorrhage; he died a day later. His father, Jordan Clarke, had been supervising Sawyer at the time, and insisted that he hadn’t hurt his son on purpose, but rather had slipped on a plastic grocery bag while holding him and had fallen on top of him. Evidently nobody in a position of authority took his explanation seriously. In very short order, Clarke was arrested and charged with homicide. He remains in police custody awaiting his trial, where he will face the death penalty.

But the district attorney in Pennsylvania’s Washington County, Jason Walsh, was apparently not as certain about the nature of the case as his quick decision to seek capital punishment would suggest. This week, a petition filed in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court argues that Walsh deliberately tampered with the child’s death certificate, allegedly telling Timothy Warco, his county’s coroner, “You know that I need this to be a homicide. I need it to win an election.”

Warco claims that Walsh then pressured him into producing a certificate that listed the death as a “homicide, with shaken baby syndrome/abusive trauma as the mechanism.” A copy of this allegedly fraudulent death certificate is included in the petition. (Walsh disputes Warco’s account, calling the allegations “false and without merit.”)

Society detests child murders, and capital punishment in that context can be especially appealing to the voting public. A canny prosecutor might deduce, therefore, that harshly punishing child killers would increase their odds of reelection. An affidavit signed by Warco suggests that Walsh had said as much privately.

If Walsh did what the petition alleges, it is not only a shocking case of prosecutorial misconduct but also proof of a point that advocates against the death penalty have long argued: The punishment, theoretically reserved for the worst of the worst, is in fact exploited by prosecutors for political advantage, even in cases where guilt is unclear.

The petition was submitted by the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, a nonprofit group (with no connection to this magazine), on behalf of Jordan Clarke and another defendant. It describes Walsh’s lusty pursuit of the death penalty since he became DA, in 2021: “His office has sought a death sentence in 11 out of 18 homicides, a shocking percentage (61%) far outside the mainstream of Pennsylvania capital prosecutions.” (Walsh dismissed the petition as “an attempt by a liberal Philadelphia anti-death penalty group to throw a liberal Hail Mary and also create a liberal smear campaign against a Republican.”)

Warco’s affidavit lays out what he says happened after the baby’s death. The longtime medical examiner in Allegheny County, where the hospital is located, was responsible for performing the autopsy—but Warco attests that Walsh conspired to change jurisdiction over the autopsy to his own county. He did this, presumably, because he doubted that Karl Williams, who was then Allegheny County’s chief medical examiner, would rule the death a homicide, and because believed that he would have more sway over Warco, his local coroner, who indeed eventually acted as he directed. (Walsh disputes these allegations too: “They are made by an individual, whom I have an established record in the Court system of challenging his ability to do his job as coroner. He admits in an affidavit to being a liar and perpetrating a fraud.” He added: “This Office will protect children and seek justice for children when they are victims of heinous crimes.”)

The autopsy was carried out by Warco’s office, which determined that the cause of death was “blunt force trauma to the head” but was unable to determine the manner of death. Those findings were forwarded to Williams’s office, which ruled that the manner of death “could not be determined.” Warco alleges that Walsh, unhappy with this result, pressured him into filing a second death certificate, this one listing the manner of death as a homicide, and shaken-baby syndrome as the mechanism.

When I spoke with Williams, he confirmed that he would never have produced the certificate that Walsh desired. “The most pernicious dogma, especially in pediatrics, is that you can grab a baby and shake them to death,” Williams told me. “There is no scientific foundation for the ability to shake a baby to death,” he said. “It has no science.” The most common criteria for ruling that a child died of shaken-baby syndrome are bleeding in the tissue at the back of the eye and bleeding near the brain. But those injuries can result from a variety of different kinds of trauma. Williams told me that he has been fighting against the notion of shaken-baby syndrome for more than 20 years—and had ruled the manner of death in at least one potential shaken-baby case “undetermined” rather than homicide.

That coroners continue diagnosing shaken-baby syndrome, and that prosecutors keep basing cases on it, despite the fact that the syndrome has come under scientific and legal scrutiny, is “horrible, it’s frightening, it’s scary,” Williams said. And it could get an innocent person killed.

Walsh’s alleged plan to evade that “undetermined” ruling eventually failed. Pennsylvania state officials rejected Warco’s death certificate, ruling that he lacked jurisdiction in the case, despite Walsh’s attempt to convince the court otherwise. But Jordan Clarke is still charged with homicide and aggravating factors including “torture,” and, if convicted, could still face the death penalty—unless the Pennsylvania Supreme Court intervenes. The petition asked it to do just that, and to curtail Walsh’s capacity to pursue the death penalty going forward. If he did what the coroner alleges, it could be construed as obstruction of justice, and it raises the dark possibility that more of Walsh’s cases may be similarly corrupted.

This story also provides a glimpse into the machinery behind capital punishment. Prosecutors, the petition reminds readers, have “considerable discretion to seek the death penalty,” and “might abuse that discretion in a corrupt, illegal, unconstitutional, and self-aggrandizing way.” If nothing else, this case undermines the presumption that the death penalty is administered fairly. It’s impossible to know how many Jason Walshes there might be in America prosecuting cases right now, nor how many Jordan Clarkes, staring down death.

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Roald Sagdeev has already watched one scientific empire rot from the inside. When Sagdeev began his career, in 1955, science in the Soviet Union was nearing its apex. At the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, he studied the thermonuclear reactions that occur inside of stars. A few lab tables away, Andrei Sakharov was developing the hydrogen bomb. The Soviet space program would soon astonish the world by lofting the first satellite, and then the first human being, into orbit. Sagdeev can still remember the screaming crowds that greeted returning cosmonauts in Red Square. But even during those years of triumph, he could see corruption working its way through Soviet science like a slow-moving poison.

The danger had been present from the U.S.S.R.’s founding. The Bolsheviks who took power in 1917 wanted scientists sent to Arctic labor camps. (Vladimir Lenin intervened on their behalf.) When Joseph Stalin took power, he funded some research generously, but insisted that it conform to his ideology. Sagdeev said that his school books described Stalin as the father of all fields of knowledge, and credited the Soviets with every technological invention that had ever been invented. Later, at scientific conferences, Sagdeev heard physicists criticize the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics on the grounds that it conflicted with Marxism.

By 1973, when Sagdeev was made director of the Soviet Space Research Institute, the nation’s top center for space science, the Soviets had ceded leadership in orbit to NASA. American astronauts had flown around the moon and left a thousand bootprints on its surface. Sagdeev’s institute was short on money. Many people who worked there had the right Communist Party connections, but no scientific training. Eventually, he himself had to join the party. “It was the only way to secure stable funding,” he told me when we spoke in June.

In 1985, Sagdeev briefly gained the ear of power. Mikhail Gorbachev had just become general secretary at 54, young for the Soviet gerontocracy. He promised broad reforms and appointed Sagdeev as an adviser. The two traveled to Geneva together for Gorbachev’s first arms talks with Ronald Reagan. But Sagdeev’s view of Gorbachev began to dim when the premier filled important scientific positions with men whom Sagdeev saw as cronies.

In 1988, Sagdeev wrote a letter to Gorbachev to warn him that the leaders of the Soviet supercomputer program had deceived him. They claimed to be keeping pace with the United States, but had in fact fallen far behind, and would soon be surpassed by the Chinese. Gorbachev never replied. Sagdeev got a hint as to how his letter had been received when his invitation to join a state visit to Poland was abruptly withdrawn. “I was excommunicated,” he told me.

Sagdeev took stock of his situation. The future of Soviet science was looking grim. Within a few years, government funding would crater further. Sagdeev’s most talented colleagues were starting to slip out of the country. One by one, he watched them start new lives elsewhere. Many of them went to the U.S. At the time, America was the most compelling destination for scientific talent in the world. It would remain so until earlier this year.

I thought of Sagdeev on a recent visit to MIT. A scientist there, much celebrated in her field, told me that since Donald Trump’s second inauguration she has watched in horror as his administration has performed a controlled demolition on American science. Like many other researchers in the U.S., she’s not sure that she wants to stick around to dodge falling debris, and so she is starting to think about taking her lab abroad. (She declined to be named in this story so that she could speak openly about her potential plans.)

The very best scientists are like elite basketball players: They come to America from all over the world so that they can spend their prime years working alongside top talent. “It’s very hard to find a leading scientist who has not done at least some research in the U.S. as an undergraduate or graduate student or postdoc or faculty,” Michael Gordin, a historian of science and the dean of Princeton University’s undergraduate academics, told me. That may no longer be the case a generation from now.

Foreign researchers have recently been made to feel unwelcome in the U.S. They have been surveilled and harassed. The Trump administration has made it more difficult for research institutions to enroll them. Top universities have been placed under federal investigation. Their accreditation and tax-exempt status have been threatened. The Trump administration has proposed severe budget cuts at the agencies that fund American science—the NSF, the NIH, and NASA, among others—and laid off staffers in large numbers. Existing research grants have been canceled or suspended en masse. Committees of expert scientists that once advised the government have been disbanded. In May, the president ordered that all federally funded research meet higher standards for rigor and reproducibility—or else be subject to correction by political appointees.

[Read: Trump’s ‘gold standard’ for science manufactures doubt]

Not since the Red Scare, when researchers at the University of California had to sign loyalty oaths, and those at the University of Washington and MIT were disciplined or fired for being suspected Communists, has American science been so beholden to political ideology. At least during the McCarthy era, scientists could console themselves that despite this interference, federal spending on science was surging. Today, it’s drying up.

Three-fourths of American scientists who responded to a recent poll by the journal Nature said they are considering leaving the country. They don’t lack for suitors. China is aggressively recruiting them, and the European Union has set aside a €500 million slush fund to do the same. National governments in Norway, Denmark, and France—nice places to live, all—have green-lighted spending sprees on disillusioned American scientists. The Max Planck Society, Germany’s elite research organization, recently launched a poaching campaign in the U.S., and last month, France’s Aix-Marseille University held a press conference announcing the arrival of eight American “science refugees.”

The MIT scientist who is thinking about leaving the U.S. told me that the Swiss scientific powerhouse ETH Zurich had already reached out about relocating her lab to its picturesque campus with a view of the Alps. A top Canadian university had also been in touch. These institutions are salivating over American talent, and so are others. Not since Sagdeev and other elite Soviet researchers were looking to get out of Moscow has there been a mass-recruiting opportunity like this.

Every scientific empire falls, but not at the same speed, or for the same reasons. In ancient Sumer, a proto-scientific civilization bloomed in the great cities of Ur and Uruk. Sumerians invented wheels that carried the king’s war chariots swiftly across the Mesopotamian plains. Their priest astronomers stood atop ziggurats watching the sky. But the Sumerians appear to have over-irrigated their farmland—a technical misstep, perhaps—and afterwards, their weakened cities were invaded, and the kingdom broke apart. They could no longer operate at the scientific vanguard.

Science in ancient Egypt and Greece followed a similar pattern: It thrived during good times and fell off in periods of plague, chaos, and impoverishment. But not every case of scientific decline has played out this way. Some civilizations have willfully squandered their scientific advantage.

Spanish science, for example, suffered grievously during the Inquisition. Scientists feared for their lives. They retreated from pursuits and associations that had a secular tinge and thought twice before corresponding with suspected heretics. The exchange of ideas slowed in Spain, and its research excellence declined relative to the rest of Europe. In the 17th century, the Spanish made almost no contribution to the ongoing Scientific Revolution.

The Soviets sabotaged their own success in biomedicine. In the 1920s, the U.S.S.R. had one of the most advanced genetics programs in the world, but that was before Stalin empowered Trofim Lysenko, a political appointee who didn’t believe in Mendelian inheritance. Lysenko would eventually purge thousands of apostate biologists from their jobs, and ban the study of genetics outright. Some of the scientists were tossed into the Gulag; others starved or faced firing squads. As a consequence of all this, the Soviets played no role in the discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure. When the ban on “anti-Marxist” genetics was finally lifted, Gordin told me, the U.S.S.R. was a generation behind in molecular biology and couldn’t catch up.

But it was Adolf Hitler who possessed the greatest talent for scientific self-harm. Germany had been a great scientific power going back to the late 19th century. Germans had pioneered the modern research university by requiring that professors not only transmit knowledge but advance it, too. During the early 20th century, German scientists racked up Nobel Prizes. Physicists from greater Europe and the U.S. converged on Berlin, Göttingen, and Munich to hear about the strange new quantum universe from Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, and Albert Einstein.

When the Nazis took over in 1933, Hitler purged Germany’s universities of Jewish professors and others who opposed his rule. Many scientists were murdered. Others fled the country. Quite a few settled in America. That’s how Einstein got to Princeton. After Hans Bethe was dismissed from his professorship in Tübingen, he landed at Cornell. Then he went to MIT to work on the radar technology that would reveal German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. Some historians have argued that radar was more important to Allied victory than the Manhattan Project. But of course, that, too, was staffed with European scientific refugees, including Leo Szilard, a Jewish physicist who fled Berlin the year that Hitler took power; Edward Teller, who went on to build the first hydrogen bomb; and John von Neumann, who invented the architecture of the modern computer.

In a very short time, the center of gravity for science just up and moved across the Atlantic Ocean. After the war, it was American scientists who most regularly journeyed to Stockholm to receive medals. It was American scientists who built on von Neumann’s work to take an early lead in the Information Age that the U.S. has still not relinquished. And it was American scientists who developed the vaccines for polio and measles.

During the postwar period, Vannevar Bush, head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development under FDR, sought to make America’s advantage in the sciences permanent. Bush hadn’t liked the way that the U.S. had to scramble to staff up the radar and atomic-bomb projects. He wanted a robust supply of scientists on hand at American universities in case the Cold War turned hot. He argued for the creation of the National Science Foundation to fund basic research, and promised that its efforts would improve both the economy and national defense.

Funding for American science has fluctuated in the decades since. It spiked after Sputnik and dipped at the end of the Cold War. But until Trump took power for the second time and began his multipronged assault on America’s research institutions, broad support for science was a given under both Democratic and Republican administrations. Trump’s interference in the sciences is something new. It shares features with the science-damaging policies of Stalin and Hitler, says David Wootton, a historian of science at the University of York. But in the English-speaking world, it has no precedent, he told me: “This is an unparalleled destruction from within.”

I reached out to the office of Michael Kratsios, the president’s science and technology adviser, several times while reporting this story. I asked whether Kratsios, who holds the role that once belonged to Vannevar Bush, had any response to the claim that the Trump administration’s attack on science was unprecedented. I asked about the possibility that its policies will drive away American researchers, and will deter foreigners from working in American labs. I was hoping to find out how the man responsible for maintaining U.S. scientific dominance was engaging with this apparent slide into mediocrity. I did not receive a reply.

All is not yet lost for American science. Lawmakers have already made clear that they do not intend to approve Trump’s full requested cuts at the NIH, NSF, and NASA. Those agencies will still have access to tens of billions of dollars in federal funds next year—and blue-state attorneys general have won back some of this year’s canceled grants in court. Research institutions still have some fight left in them; some are suing the administration for executive overreach. Universities in red states are hoping that their governors will soon summon the courage to take a stand on their behalf. “Politically speaking, it’s one thing to shut down research at Harvard,” Steven Shapin, a science historian at the school, told me. “It’s another thing to shut down the University of Arkansas.”

The U.S. government doesn’t bankroll all of American scientific research. Philanthropists and private companies support some of it, and will continue to. The U.S. shouldn’t face the kind of rapid collapse that occurred in the Soviet Union, where no robust private sector existed to absorb scientists. But even corporations with large R&D budgets don’t typically fund open-ended inquiry into fundamental scientific questions. With the possible exception of Bell Labs in its heyday, they focus on projects that have immediate commercial promise. Their shareholders would riot if they dumped $10 billion into a space telescope or particle collider that takes decades to build and generates little revenue.

A privatized system of American science will be distorted toward short-term work, and people who want to run longer-term experiments with more expensive facilities will go elsewhere. “American science could lose a whole generation,” Shapin said. “Young people are already starting to get the message that science isn’t as valued as it once was.”

If the U.S. is no longer the world’s technoscientific superpower, it will almost certainly suffer for the change. America’s technology sector might lose its creativity. But science itself, in the global sense, will be fine. The deep human curiosities that drive it do not belong to any nation-state. An American abdication will only hurt America, Shapin said. Science might further decentralize into a multipolar order like the one that held during the 19th century, when the British, French, and Germans vied for technical supremacy.

[Read: ‘This is not how we do science, ever’]

Or maybe, by the midway point of the 21st century, China will be the world’s dominant scientific power, as it was, arguably, a millennium ago. The Chinese have recovered from Mao Zedong’s own squandering of expertise during the Cultural Revolution. They have rebuilt their research institutions, and Xi Jinping’s government keeps them well funded. China’s universities now rank among the world’s best, and their scientists routinely publish in Science, Nature, and other top journals. Elite researchers who were born in China and then spent years or even decades in U.S. labs have started to return. What the country can’t yet do well is recruit elite foreign scientists, who by dint of their vocation tend to value freedom of speech.

Whatever happens next, existing knowledge is unlikely to be lost, at least not en masse. Humans are better at preserving it now, even amid the rise and fall of civilizations. Things used to be more touch-and-go: The Greek model of the cosmos might have been forgotten, and the Copernican revolution greatly delayed, had Islamic scribes not secured it in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom. But books and journals are now stored in a network of libraries and data centers that stretches across all seven continents, and machine translation has made them understandable by any scientist, anywhere. Nature’s secrets will continue to be uncovered, even if Americans aren’t the ones who see them first.

In 1990, Roald Sagdeev moved to America. He found leaving the Soviet Union difficult. His two brothers lived not far from his house in Moscow, and when he said goodbye to them, he worried that it would be for the last time. Sagdeev thought about going to Europe, but the U.S. seemed more promising. He’d met many Americans on diplomatic visits there, including his future wife. He’d befriended others while helping to run the Soviet half of the Apollo-Soyuz missions. When Carl Sagan visited the Soviet Space Research Institute in Moscow, Sagdeev had shown him around, and the two remained close.

To avoid arousing the suspicions of the Soviet authorities, Sagdeev flew to Hungary first, and only once he was safely there did he book a ticket to the U.S. He accepted a professorship at the University of Maryland and settled in Washington, D.C. It took him years to ride out the culture shock. He still remembers being pulled over for a traffic infraction, and mistakenly presenting his Soviet ID card.

American science is what ultimately won Sagdeev over to his new home. He was awestruck by the ambition of the U.S. research agenda, and he liked that it was backed by real money. He appreciated that scientists could move freely between institutions, and didn’t have to grovel before party leaders to get funding. But when I last spoke with Sagdeev, on July 4, he was feeling melancholy about the state of American science. Once again, he is watching a great scientific power in decline. He has read about the proposed funding cuts in the newspaper. He has heard about a group of researchers who are planning to leave the country. Sagdeev is 92 years old, and has no plans to join them. But as an American, it pains him to see them go.

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Over the course of its nearly 30-year run, South Park has deployed toilet humor, ruthless political commentary, and profane asides to eviscerate wide swaths of people. No one is spared—celebrities, religious groups, foreign governments, and a variety of ethnicities have all been fair game. The series gained instant notoriety upon its 1997 debut thanks to this approach, and it hasn’t let up since. But when South Park, which airs on Comedy Central,returned last week following an extensive hiatus, it was to a political moment that some satirists have found harder to work with.

In the past, President Donald Trump’s second term would have been an obvious target for South Park, low-hanging fruit to tackle in a flashy, long-awaited premiere; the show has mocked the surreality of contemporary politics before. (A 2016 episode depicts a local elementary-school teacher, Mr. Garrison, triumphing in an election over Hillary Clinton; he soon adopts a Trump-style blond comb-over.) Yet in a Vanity Fairinterview last year, the show’s co-creator Matt Stone said that reflecting previous presidential elections had been a “mind scramble” for him and his co-creator, Trey Parker, and they didn’t care to tackle the specter of the 2024 campaign in South Park’s then-forthcoming season. “I don’t know what more we could possibly say about Trump,” Parker said.

Parker and Stone’s solution to the quandary of Trump-era satire, it seems, is to use the president as something of a Trojan horse for mocking another subject entirely—and a way to dramatically up the stakes while doing so. Trump is not a bull’s-eye in the episode, titled “Sermon on the ’Mount,” despite numerous shocking jokes that might suggest as much: an AI-generated video of Trump’s genitalia addressing the camera, and a recurring gag involving the president cozying up in bed with a grumpy Satan, prodding the devil into coitus. Rather, he is a high-profile conduit for the show’s true target: Paramount, Comedy Central’s parent company.

Paramount’s investment in South Park is clear: The same week that the outrageous premiere aired, the company paid Parker and Stone a reported $1.5 billion for 50 new episodes and the streaming rights to the show. But the expensive deal also came days after Paramount canceled the popular Late Show With Stephen Colbert for what the company claimed were financial reasons. The timing fueled speculation about the company’s motivations; two weeks prior, Paramount had agreed to settle a lawsuit with Trump for $16 million over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris last fall. As some reports have pointed out, both the settlement and the Late Show cancellation—which Colbert referred to on air as “a big fat bribe”—came amid Paramount’s bid for federal approval of its merger with the media company Skydance.

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

These details fueled “Sermon on the ’Mount,” which in a dense 22 minutes mashes up industry-focused satire with jokes about people’s growing trust of AI and the cultural decline of “woke” terminology. South Park reimagines the Paramount events as a community issue; in the episode, Trump sues the titular town for $5 billion, after local parents disagree with his administration’s bringing religion into schools. While publicly protesting, the townspeople are joined by Jesus himself, who reveals through clenched teeth that even he’s embroiled in a lawsuit against Trump. He urges them to hold their complaints, lest they face serious consequences: “You really wanna end up like Colbert?” he hisses.

The scene is a thinly veiled, relentless prodding at Paramount’s allegiances, as well as the chilling effect Trump’s actions have created. This approach stretches across the bulk of the episode. Further twisting the knife is a parody of 60 Minutes that portrays its journalists as constantly hedging to avoid displeasing the president: The segment opens with a ticking bomb, in lieu of a clock, as a voice-over shakily announces, “This is 60 Minutes. Oh, boy. Oh, shit.” An anchor then nervously introduces a report of South Park’s protest against the president, who, he is quick to add, “is a great man; we know he’s probably watching.”

South Park isn’t breaking new ground in criticizing its parent company. The sitcom 30 Rock featured frequent jokes-slash-metacommentary about NBC throughout its seven seasons, including about the network’s own late-night-host drama; The Simpsons has ridiculed Fox constantly over the years. Even Barbie, for all its pink-colored wholesomeness, embedded jabs about Mattel; the movie’s creative team publicly spoke of their successful bid to get certain gags into the box-office-dominating film, and a Mattel executive later heralded the jokes at the company’s expense.

[Read: South Park imagines the Trumpocalypse]

But what feels, frankly, so punk rock about Parker and Stone’s approach is how big of a swing they took in biting the billionaire hands that are feeding them. By making Trump a vehicle for addressing the close-to-home Paramount drama, South Park’s creators did something canny: They transformed a politically layered scenario—one involving the show’s parent company and America’s leadership at the highest level—into a storyline that was both pointed and accessible to a wide audience. Instead of focusing on entertainment-industry satire, Parker and Stone feature Trump heavily—and, in a first, use his actual face over a tiny animated body. The bluntly provocative characterization, which went viral, helped the episode reach some viewers that otherwise may not have been as attuned to Paramount’s recent decisions. As such, Parker and Stone managed to attract attention from audiences across party lines. Those who were ticked off by the president and delighted in his portrayal cheered the episode, while the White House issued a statement writing off the show as a “desperate attempt for attention.”

In an ironic twist, the town of South Park follows in Paramount’s footsteps toward the episode’s end. Jesus persuades the town’s parents to settle with Trump, warning that “if someone has the power of the presidency and also has the power to sue and take bribes, then he can do anything to anyone.” The townspeople’s attorney then talks Trump down from $5 billion to $3.5 million—“That’s not so bad!” coos one parent. The mayor concurs: “We’ll just have to cut some funding for our schools and hospitals and roads, and that should be that!” In so closely linking Paramount’s actions with Trump’s bullying tactics, the episode manages to not just poke at the network’s decision to settle in lieu of defending its properties in court. It also suggests that there’s still potent satire to be wrung from the contemporary political maelstrom—and that South Park is willing to push the buttons of more than one powerful institution while doing so.

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