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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Join Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and contributing writer Arthur C. Brooks for a discussion about Brooks’s new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. Based on Brooks’s popular “How to Build a Life” column in The Atlantic, The Happiness Files offers practical wisdom to help readers lead a life that feels full and meaningful. Subscribers will enjoy this exclusive virtual conversation and have the opportunity to pre-submit questions for Brooks to answer live during the session. Submit your questions here.

To join their conversation, return to this page on Monday, August 11, at 2:30 p.m. ET. If you’re a subscriber, you’ll receive an email reminder before the event starts. Or add the event to your calendar here.

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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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Ng Han Guan / APTimo Barthel of Germany competes in the men’s 3m springboard-diving preliminaries at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on July 31, 2025.Vincent Thian / APGreece's Dimitrios Skoumpakis attempts a shot at goal during the men’s water-polo semifinal at the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore on July 22, 2025.Edgar Su / ReutersOpen-water swimmers dive into the water at the start of the mixed 4x1500m race at Sentosa Island, Singapore, on July 20, 2025.Marko Djurica / ReutersSwitzerland’s Jean-David Duval dives during the men’s 27m high-dive semifinals on Sentosa Island on July 25, 2025.Hollie Adams / ReutersCanada’s Kylie Masse swims in the women’s 50m backstroke semifinals on July 30, 2025.Maddie Meyer / GettyHannes Daube of Team United States and Lorenzo Bruni of Team Italy wrestle in the Classification 7th–8th Place match for men’s water polo on day 14 of the 2025 World Aquatics Championships.Adam Pretty / GettyTeam China competes in the Team Technical Preliminaries on day 11 of the 2025 World Aquatics Championships on July 21, 2025.Lee Jin-man / APZoi Karangelou of Greece competes in the Women’s Solo Free preliminary of artistic swimming on July 20, 2025.Adam Pretty / GettyGold medalists Mayya Gurbanberdieva and Aleksandr Maltsev of Team Neutral Athletes B pose on the podium during the Mixed Duet Technical Final medal ceremony on July 23, 2025.Adam Pretty / GettyShu Ohkubo and Rikuto Tamai of Team Japan compete in the men’s 10m synchronized-diving final on Day 19.Adam Pretty / GettyTeam Croatia gets into position prior to a preliminary-round match against Team Montenegro in men’s water polo at the OCBC Aquatic Center on July 14, 2025.Francois-Xavier Marit / AFP / GettyTeam Neutral Athletes competes in the final of the Team Free artistic-swimming event on July 20, 2025.Yong Teck Lim / GettyNicholas Sloman of Team Australia warms up ahead of the men’s 3km knockout sprint heat on day nine of the 2025 World Aquatics Championships.Oli Scarff / AFP / GettyThe Canadian swimmer Summer McIntosh reacts after competing in a semifinal of the women's 200m butterfly on July 30, 2025.Adam Pretty / GettyTeam Japan competes in the Team Technical Final on day 12, at the World Aquatics Championships Arena in Singapore.Yong Teck Lim / GettyTeam Spain competes in the Team Free Final on day 10.Vincent Thian / APKatie Ledecky of the United States celebrates after winning the gold medal in the women’s 1500m freestyle final on July 29, 2025.Ng Han Guan / APGabriela Agundez Garcia and Alejandra Estudillo Torres of Mexico compete in the women’s 10m synchronized-diving preliminaries on July 28, 2025.Sarah Stier / GettyOsmar Olvera Ibarra of Team Mexico reacts after a dive during the men’s 3m springboard preliminaries on day 21.Manan Vatsyayana / AFP / GettyThe Team USA swimmer Kate Douglass competes in the final of the women’s 100m breaststroke on July 29, 2025.Sarah Stier / GettyMelvin Imoudu of Team Germany competes in the men’s 50m breaststroke heats on day 19.Francois-Xavier Marit / AFP / GettyThe Team China divers Cheng Zilong and Zhu Zifeng compete in the final of the men’s 10m platform synchronized-diving event on July 29, 2025.Maye-E Wong / ReutersTeam Spain performs during the Team Acrobatic Artistic Swimming Final at the Singapore 2025 World Aquatics Championships on July 25, 2025.

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The more than $175 billion that Congress handed to the nation’s immigration enforcers when it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act is larger than the annual military budget of every country in the world except the United States and China. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—just one component of the Department of Homeland Security—is getting more money than any other law-enforcement agency in America. All of this cash will be used to fund the next three and a half years of a deportation campaign that the public is already starting to question, at a time when the southern border is all but deserted.

But as striking as the overall amount of money is how little we know about why it was necessary or how the funds will be spent. The bill placed few guardrails on ICE or Customs and Border Protection—both of which have a history of financial mismanagement—and dedicated no money to oversight. What we do know from the agencies’ public statements and contracts that are already in the works is that the money will be used to expand detention and surveillance systems, and that it will enrich some of the administration’s closest friends.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated, top executives at the two largest private-prison companies that contract with the federal government to detain immigrants reacted with glee. In an earnings call with investors, Damon Hininger, the CEO of CoreCivic, called this “truly one of the most exciting periods” in his 32-year career with the company. CoreCivic’s stock price rose by more than 80 percent in the week after Trump’s reelection, while that of its top competitor, the GEO Group, doubled in less than a month. GEO’s CEO, J. David Donahue, told investors that “we believe the scale of the opportunity before our company is unlike any we’ve previously experienced.” GEO’s executive chairman and founder, George Zoley, estimated that the company could make $1 billion in additional revenue. (Whereas some in the private-prison industry might have become jittery when Trump started talking about detaining immigrants in Guantánamo Bay or countries such as El Salvador, instead of the United States, Hininger assured his investors that there would be enough detained immigrants to go around. “I want to be very clear on this: We don’t see that as an either/or. We actually see it as a both,” he said.)

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

GEO invested $70 million preparing to expand its detention capacity before Trump even took office; CoreCivic spent $40 million doing the same before a single new contract was signed. Just three years earlier, President Joe Biden had signed an executive order directing the Justice Department not to renew its contracts with private-prison companies, saying that they amounted to “profit-based incentives to incarcerate” in a system that “imposes significant costs and hardships on our society and communities and does not make us safer.” JPMorgan Chase said it would stop working with the industry. But now, with Trump, the companies’ leaders had good reason to feel confident: His election meant the elevation of figures such as Pam Bondi, who worked as a lobbyist for GEO as recently as 2019 and became attorney general in February, and Tom Homan, the president’s border czar, who was a GEO consultant during the Biden administration. The website for Homan’s consulting firm touted a “proven track record of opening doors and bringing successful relationships to our clients, resulting in tens of millions of dollars of federal contracts to private companies.” Homan has said he is recusing himself from contract negotiations now that he is back working for the government.

For years, high-level officials at ICE have retired from the agency into plum roles at both companies. Daniel Bible, who oversaw ICE’s detention system, is an executive vice president at GEO, and Matt Albence and Dan Ragsdale, ICE’s former acting director and deputy director, are senior vice presidents. CoreCivic has taken on at least two former ICE field-office directors and ICE’s former head of budgeting. David Venturella has ping-ponged between the two: After 22 years at ICE, he rose through the executive ranks at GEO to become the company’s head of client relations. Then, after Trump took office, he returned to ICE as a senior adviser.

This revolving door of hiring effectively puts private-prison-company executives at the negotiating table across from their former underlings, who may also hope to cash out in the private sector when they leave their government jobs. These conditions are not exactly conducive to making sure that the government’s top negotiators don’t agree to overpay for what they are purchasing, or that they hold contractors to account. DHS officials didn’t respond to my request for a comment. Ryan Gustin, a spokesman for CoreCivic, told me the company follows rules set by the government for how former employees may interact with their previous agencies, and that “there’s no basis for the claim that hiring former ICE officials results in higher costs or reduced accountability.”

The confidence expressed by GEO and CoreCivic executives has paid off. Trump’s spending bill provides $45 billion to ICE to expand the nation’s detention system. It also dedicates $3.33 billion to immigration courts, but caps the number of judges who can be hired at 800–one of the few limits the bill contains. At the same time, the administration has actually been firing immigration judges, who have the power to hand down deportation orders and without which a person can’t be removed from the United States. Hiring more will take months or years, and in the meantime, having fewer of them around now will only lead to more people being detained. “They’re not really serious about getting rid of as many people as they can. They’re serious about causing human pain and suffering,” a former high-level ICE official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, told me. “Putting someone into detention isn’t a removal, it’s a punishment.”

Allies of the administration are also in for a windfall in the technology sector. Palantir—whose co-founder and board chairman, Peter Thiel, is a strong supporter of Vice President J. D. Vance and has a hot-and-cold-but-mostly-hot relationship with Trump—has already secured $30 million to help ICE identify immigrants and track their locations. Palantir’s stock price has soared by 200 percent since Trump was reelected, helped by the growth of its government contracts under both Democratic and Republican administrations and its work in AI.

Several former Palantir employees have gone to work for DOGE, which is reportedly creating a “master database” of immigrants by leveraging data from across the federal government. How the administration will use its stockpile of data, which almost certainly includes information on unsuspecting American citizens too, remains unclear. For a decade after 9/11, DHS spent millions surveilling people from predominantly Muslim countries as part of a program that the government later acknowledged “provided no discernible public benefit.”

ICE has also expanded into phone tracking, and posted a request for contracts to help it monitor up to 1 million people using their social-media accounts, financial records, and the dark web, among other information sources. In April, CBP posted a request for information from vendors on how to expand the use of facial-recognition technology at the border. Trump’s big spending bill provides the agencies nearly $6 billion to fund these technological advancements.

This kind of spyware might make sense if precision were a priority in the administration’s approach to deportations, but the opposite appears to be true. On the streets and in immigration courts, it’s become clear, as ICE strives to conduct 3,000 arrests a day, that anyone whose legal status is in doubt is fair game, including people with no criminal history—even children.  Undocumented immigrants aren’t at all hard to find in the United States: They’re on farms and dairies and in restaurant kitchens and at construction sites. They’re delivering groceries and warm meals to front doors across the country, cleaning and landscaping homes, and caring for elders. An efficient way of deporting 1 million people a year would involve ICE simply raiding those workplaces one by one. But the administration has already learned that the political blowback from doing so would be untenable, because businesses would fail and communities would revolt. Instead of paring back its goals, the White House has continued spending indiscriminately. “They want a lot of toys because it’s fun, but a lot of those toys are not necessary or probably all that helpful at the end of the day in terms of actually making the arrests,” the former ICE official told me.

For years, Congress has criticized CBP and ICE for mismanaging their budgets, while also increasing those budgets at a remarkable pace. Since at least 2012, the United States has spent more money on immigration enforcement than on all other federal-law-enforcement endeavors combined. CBP’s budget went from $5.9 billion in 2003 to $13.6 in 2016; ICE’s increased by 50 percent over the same stretch of time, reaching $6.3 billion in 2016, according to The Deportation Machine, a book by the University of Illinois historian Adam Goodman. The next year, when Republicans controlled both chambers of Congress, House appropriators called out ICE for a “lack of fiscal discipline and cavalier management of funding for detention operations.” In 2018, appropriators scolded the agency again for its “inability to manage detention resources.”

[Read: Trump’s deportations aren’t what they seem]

Congress has specifically faulted ICE for its inability to estimate how much money it will need to carry out its mission, and just this year, legislators raised alarms about the agency’s “especially egregious” overspending. But when it came time to draft Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, its authors seem to have accepted the agency’s requests without question. In a year that has already been one of the deadliest on record in immigration-detention facilities, the bill seems to leave health and safety standards up to the discretion of the secretary, potentially dispensing with years of bipartisan work to establish baseline requirements. Homan has indicated that he believes immigrant-detention standards are too high, and DOGE gutted the two offices that oversaw them: the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. But an ICE spokesperson told reporters that the agency continues to uphold the rules without any changes to its oversight procedures.

The growth that the immigration-detention system is about to undergo may be difficult, if not impossible, to undo. The facilities tend to become economic engines in the communities that surround them, many of which are rural and poor. Once they open, closing them can become a political problem in its own right. Nancy Hiemstra, a professor at Stony Brook University who co-wrote the book Immigration Detention Inc., told me that since the system was established, its funding has almost never decreased. Instead, the spending is reinforced by all of the people and organizations whose financial interest is geared toward growth, including the subcontractors that operate within detention centers, providing services such as medical care and food. The same will be true of state and local agencies vying for a portion of at least $10 billion in reimbursement funds that Trump’s bill created for those that help the administration with immigration enforcement. “Right now they’re saying, ‘We need more space, we’re overcrowded,’ creating this idea of chaos and overcrowding to use more funds,” she told me. “Then, once the money is out there, there are many people who are dependent on it.”

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A few weeks ago, President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu each gave the other something of great symbolic value. Trump excoriated the “out-of-control” prosecutors responsible for the Israeli prime minister’s corruption trial, and Netanyahu nominated the American president for the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted.

But whatever goodwill was generated by these gestures quickly dissipated, and was not enough to overcome deeper sources of conflict between the two men: starvation in the Gaza Strip, air strikes in Syria, and the lack of a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas.

Trump in recent days has publicly and repeatedly broken with Netanyahu, dismissing his on-again, off-again ally’s attempts to downplay the famine in Gaza, which has drawn international condemnation. Upset by images of dying children, Trump dispatched his diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff, to the region partly to pressure Israel to ease the hunger crisis. Meanwhile, the president and his senior aides were blindsided by recent Israeli strikes on Syria and a missile attack that hit Gaza’s only Catholic Church.

Trump, two administration officials told us, has come to believe what many in Washington have thought for months: that Netanyahu is looking to prolong the conflict in Gaza, in open defiance of Trump’s wish for the war to end. The president and some of his aides think that Israel’s military objectives in Gaza were achieved long ago, and that Netanyahu has continued Israel’s assault, which has claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives, to maintain his own political power. The White House also believes that Netanyahu is taking steps that interfere with a potential cease-fire deal.

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

But the two officials said they did not anticipate that Trump would hold Netanyahu accountable in any meaningful sense. (Like others, they spoke with us on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.) Even as Trump has felt disrespected by Netanyahu, his anger hasn’t translated into any significant shift in U.S. policy. The president blamed Hamas for the most recent breakdown of cease-fire talks. He resisted joining France and the United Kingdom in their vows this week to recognize a Palestinian state if Israel does not improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza and commit to a peace process. A White House official insisted to us that “there is no significant rupture” between Trump and Netanyahu and that “allies can sometimes disagree, even in a very real way.” This morning, seemingly trying to set aside his differences with Netanyahu, Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The fastest way to end the Humanitarian Crises in Gaza is for Hamas to SURRENDER AND RELEASE THE HOSTAGES!!!”

Netanyahu has a long history of frustrating U.S. presidents. Joe Biden went from wrapping the prime minister in a bear hug in the days after the October 7, 2023, attacks to yelling at him over his prosecution of the war. Trump and Netanyahu were close during the president’s first term, until Trump grew angry at his Israeli counterpart for recognizing Biden’s 2020 victory. Their relationship has proceeded in fits and starts since then. Trump has hosted Netanyahu at the White House three times in the past six months, including a visit earlier this month, when they exchanged warm words. But Trump did not make a stop in Israel on his recent Middle East trip.

The hunger crisis in Gaza has put a new strain on their relationship. In March, Israel enforced a blockade of the Strip, which is densely populated, preventing food and supplies from reaching Gazans after more than 20 months of war. Human-rights organizations warned this month about widespread famine, particularly among children. Under intense international pressure, Netanyahu has allowed some food aid into the region in recent days, but he has also insisted that there is “no starvation” in Gaza. Before a meeting with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland on Monday, Trump was asked by reporters whether he agreed with Netanyahu’s assessment. “Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry,” Trump said. Later, he added: “That’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

This is not the first time that Trump has responded to gruesome photos. In 2017, he ordered missile strikes on a Syrian air base after he was shown what he said were “horrific” images of children killed by chemical weapons days before. Earlier this year, he unleashed some rare tough rhetoric on Vladimir Putin after being shown photos of Ukrainian children killed by a Russian air strike. And this week, the two administration officials told us, Trump was bothered by images of a Russian strike on a nursing home in Kyiv.

[Hussein Ibish: Food aid in Gaza has become a horror]

Trump’s frustration with the ongoing war in Russia has colored his response to what he is now seeing in Gaza, one of the officials and a close outside adviser to the president told us. During the 2024 campaign, Trump frequently boasted that he had kept the world free of conflict during his first term, and he returned to the Oval Office this year pledging to bring the wars in Gaza and Ukraine to a quick close. Instead, both have escalated, to Trump’s humiliation. Putin has repeatedly defied Trump’s wishes for a cease-fire, causing the president, who so often views foreign policy through a personal lens, to consider finally standing up to the Russian leader. (This week, Trump announced that he was giving Putin 10 days to stop the war in Ukraine or he would green-light a series of sanctions.) Similarly, Netanyahu’s recent strikes in Syria and his rejection of claims about the Gaza famine have angered Trump. The president is eager to stabilize the Middle East—and expand the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Gulf states in his first term—in order to foster business and trade relationships in the region.

Two additional U.S. officials told us that Trump’s willingness to contradict Netanyahu reflects less a new breach between the two men than the president’s “America First” approach—that Washington’s foreign policy won’t be dictated by Israel or any other foreign country. Trump is disinclined to accept Netanyahu’s version of events, whether about conditions on the ground in Gaza or about the new government in Syria. When he visits Israel today, Witkoff, the president’s envoy, has been tasked with developing his own assessment of the humanitarian situation in Gaza and the viability of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an American nonprofit established earlier this year to distribute food in the Strip, these two U.S. officials told us. Aides have discussed pushing Israel to dramatically increase the amount of food and supplies it allows into Gaza—so that even if some were stolen by Hamas, as Israel alleges has happened before, enough would find its way into the hands of civilians—while also pressuring the Israeli military to stop firing on civilians.

As Netanyahu faces criticism for prolonging the war, members of his cabinet are trying to make the case that Israel is an asset to Trump’s foreign policy. Ron Dermer, Israel’s minister of strategic affairs and a former ambassador to Washington, argued in a podcast interview last week with David Friedman, the American ambassador to Israel during Trump’s first term, that Israel’s importance to American national security is “going to go higher and higher and higher and higher” as Washington seeks to reduce its presence in the Middle East and focus on competition with China.

[Robert F. Worth: The dispute behind the violence in Syria]

One of the U.S. officials told us that the president’s patience is wearing thin mainly with Hamas, not with the Israeli prime minister. Trump continues to blame the terror group for starting the conflict with Israel, and has largely sided with Israel’s view of the war (including by promoting a postwar plan for Gaza as a “Riviera of the Middle East”). When asked this week about British plans to recognize a Palestinian state, Trump rejected the idea as “rewarding Hamas.” And just last week, Trump, after a call with Netanyahu, told reporters that Israel needed to “finish the job” and “get rid of Hamas” because the group didn’t want to strike a deal to release the remaining hostages.

A White House spokesperson declined to comment for this article. A spokesperson for the Israeli prime minister did not respond to our request for comment.

Ultimately, Trump wants the war to end. He is aware of the growing anger toward Israel from noninterventionists in MAGA world, who don’t want the U.S. involved in a conflict on the other side of the globe, one of the administration officials and the outside adviser told us. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a staunch Trump supporter, on Monday became the first Republican in Congress to declare the situation in Gaza a “genocide.” Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson have also sharply criticized Israel. Trump and those close to him are wary of further upsetting some of his most die-hard supporters who have already expressed outrage over his administration’s strike on Iran in June and its recent handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Trump was taken aback when several lawmakers and influencers refused to accept his directive to stop fueling the Epstein controversy that has enveloped his White House. And now Netanyahu’s defiance has caused an additional rupture in Trump’s base—and frustrated the president by creating yet another news cycle he can’t control.

“He just really wants these stories to stop being on TV,” the outside adviser told us.

---

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A week ago, President Donald Trump signed an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” The order states that “vagrancy” and “violent attacks have made our cities unsafe” and encourages the expanded use of institutionalization.

The order comes at a crucial moment for many American cities that have tried—and often failed—to meaningfully address homelessness and addiction. In 2024, the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night was 771,480, the highest number ever recorded in the United States.

In recent years, San Francisco has become emblematic of the crisis. And now a new mayor has pledged to prioritize the problem. To understand what’s at stake, I got to know one man who has been living on the street and struggling with addiction—and who says he is finally ready to make a change.

This is the first episode of a new three-part miniseries from Radio Atlantic, No Easy Fix, about what it takes to escape one’s demons.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: A week ago, President Trump signed an executive order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.”

Now, this order could be read as Trump setting up another showdown between his administration and liberal cities. But actually, some cities are already ahead of him on this.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. Over the next three weeks, we’re bringing you a special series about the beginnings of an experiment.

A lot of American cities already know they have a real problem: a few streets or a neighborhood where the social order seems to have completely broken down. They’re crowded with people living on the streets, often with addiction. And even before this executive order was signed, some cities were beginning to take these places on—or at least audition some new ways to fix the problem.

 Reporter Ethan Brooks looks at San Francisco, which is an obvious place to look because it’s a city known for being exceptional at thinking up solutions to all kinds of complicated problems.

Why hasn’t it been able to crack this one? Ethan finds some answers close to the ground. He follows one guy and gets some insights about why the solution these cities are looking for is so elusive.

Evan: I know some people that will spend hours and hours and hours and hours just holding up a cardboard sign in an intersection. It might take him 10 hours to make $10.

Ethan Brooks: And you won’t do that?

Evan: I just—fuck. It’s just knowing I could do that, or I could spend 15 minutes inside of a store, 10 minutes inside of a store, five minutes inside of a store sometimes, and then make enough money.

Brooks: There are a lot of ways you could describe Evan. But if we’re really getting down to it, a title that fits pretty well is “thief.” Over the last six years or so, Evan has dedicated many of his waking hours to stealing.

On a typical day, Evan—and I’m just going to use his first name to protect his privacy—Evan takes the train out of town from where he lives, in San Francisco, shoplifts all day, then comes back home. Sometimes he calls this his “job” or “going to work.” When he sleeps, it’s out on the street or in a shelter.

In Evan’s world, what he does is called being an “out-of-town booster,” as in someone who boosts, or steals, property from outside of San Francisco—

which, in his circle, affords him a certain amount of status: one rung higher on the ladder than an in-town booster.

Evan: The in-town booster isn’t making real money. You’re making, like, 20, 40 bucks a run.

Brooks: Okay.

Evan: But out-of-town boosters, somebody’s gonna be gone all day, going to a couple different stores and then coming back, making several hundred bucks.

Brooks: Evan steals so that he can sell. He’s had success converting Frappuccinos, Nutella, honey into cash. Tide Pods, apparently, are always in high demand. Lately, he’s been boosting Stanley cups from the Target in Emeryville, just north of Oakland.

[Music]

Brooks: He then takes the train to the Civic Center in San Francisco to sell to a middleman, who will sell the stolen Stanley cups to a diverter, who will repackage them and resell them on eBay. Evan is part of an economy that sells millions and millions of dollars of stolen goods every year.

Recently, this particular Target has been on Evan’s mind because he just cannot believe how easy it was to steal from them.

Evan:  I literally went, like, 27 days in a row because I kept telling myself, If it doesn’t work, I’ll quit fentanyl. And it just kept working, and it kept working, and it kept working every day. And I was like, What is going—this is, like, a Groundhog’s Day or something.

Brooks: Another title you could give Evan, apart from thief, is “addict.” Fentanyl is the singular driving force behind his shoplifting.

In the eyes of the middlemen who resell what he steals, fentanyl makes Evan the ideal employee: highly motivated, with a huge tolerance for risk and nothing to lose.

In the real world, Evan is just a normal guy, a mechanic, and from what I’m told, a good one. But in San Francisco, as one of Evan’s oldest friends put it to me, he is the “King of the Fools.”

Evan:  It didn’t really feel like that until I got to San Francisco.

Brooks: Uh-huh.

Evan: Everywhere else was super hard to make it, I feel like. Well, of course when I was there I didn’t really think that. Um, but When I got here, it was so much easier. Ow.

Brooks: You all right?

Evan: Yeah, my leg. Can you help me put this back just a little bit again? (Laughs.) I’m sorry.

Brooks: For sure. No problem, dude.

Brooks: Evan pauses our interview here and asks me to adjust his hospital bed.

Brooks: Like here, or all the way further down?

Evan: A little bit more. Right, that’s perfect.

Brooks: We’re sitting in Evan’s room in San Francisco General Hospital. Evan is propped up in bed wearing a paper gown, with an IV drip taped to his arm. There is a huge pile of candy next to his pillow: sour worms and Starburst and Twix that hospital staff gave him.

Addicts often get really intense sugar cravings. This happens for a lot of reasons, but in the end, a sugar high is still a kind of high.

At the moment we’re talking, Evan is in a bad way. He is visibly emaciated—with knobby elbows, rib cage on full display—and he’s struggling to control his body. Depending on what happens next, death, he thinks, is a real possibility.

I met Evan just a few months ago, about six weeks before this conversation in the hospital, and have followed along with him as he has made this journey from being an out-of-town booster, the “King of the Fools,” to where he is now.

Evan: We were watching this show last night about Vikings, and apparently, it was Viking tradition that when men or women would get older and they couldn’t hunt, fish, or farm or help get anything, that they would just go jump off a cliff and kill themselves ’cause they were a burden to their family.

Brooks: Mm-hmm.

Evan: And so I thought about that. But that’s the position I would be in if I was like, if that was back, you know, if it was the time we were in now. They’d be like, You can’t even help us do anything ’cause your leg is fucked up, and you can’t even eat a whole meal without vomiting, so we’re just gonna take you to the Valhalla cliffs or whatever and have you jump. Oh man.

[Music]

Brooks: Like Evan says, there are these places around Scandinavia where, supposedly, in early Norse society, the elderly and infirm leapt to their deaths when they had no more purpose to serve.

In the TV show Evan watched, there’s a shot of a man leaping off this huge, towering cliff and simply falling out of the frame. He disappears.

But the thing about this Viking tradition is that it’s just a story; it’s a myth. The cliffs are real enough, but there’s no evidence anyone ever jumped off them. The Vikings had to figure out a way to care for these people, just like the rest of us.

[Music]

Brooks: The weeks I spent following Evan, a period that ended with him in this hospital bed, were critical weeks for him. It was also a critical period for San Francisco, when the city began to change its approach to people like Evan, people who are in need of real care and whose presence threatens the health of the city.

From The Atlantic, this is No Easy Fix Episode 1, “The Vanishing Point.”

[Music]

Brooks: Back in the first years of the pandemic, a new type of video started showing up on YouTube and other corners of social media.

Tyler Oliveira: This is San Francisco—the city that pays drug addicts to use drugs?

Brooks: They had titles like “I Investigated the City of Real Life Zombies” and “I Investigated the City Where Every Drug Is Legal.”

Oliveira: Rampant homelessness, deadly drug addiction, and unpunished shoplifting and car break-ins. Businesses are fleeing, and the city is dying. But how did it get to—

Brooks: What they were showing, to audiences of millions and millions of people, were these places in American cities where it felt like the social order had broken down completely. City blocks and encampments crowdedwith people injecting, overdosing, and dying—all right out in the open.

Oliveira: —the center of America’s drug epidemic, overrun with a drug known as “tranq,” a mixture of horse tranquilizer and fentanyl that’s turning people there into real-life zombies.

Brooks: It wasn’t just San Francisco in the spotlight.There was Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia, Skid Row in Downtown L.A., encampments underneath I-5 in Seattle, the storm drains under the Las Vegas Strip.

There were, and still are, livestreams of these places broadcasting these images 24/7.

[Music]

Brooks: The videos gave these places a new notoriety. And it was San Francisco—specifically, the Tenderloin neighborhood—that was maybe the most infamous.

There was the reality of the thing, and I’ll just give one stat here to illustrate this: In this period, nearly twice as many people died of overdose in San Francisco than died of COVID-19. Fentanyl killed far more people than the pandemic.

Then there was this contrast that wasn’t quite the same as anywhere else: needles and human waste covering the sidewalk, signs of the most self-destructive, destitute humanity, in the same city at the cutting edge of this new technology that can write and speak like a human.

**Joe Wynne:**From the outside, it’s, like, this really grotesque cesspool, but once you’re in there, it’s a bizarrely normal social situation.

Joe Wynne has spent a fair amount of time among people dealing with addiction in the Tenderloin, not because he’s lived there himself, but because he is Evan’s best friend—from before Evan got wrapped up in fentanyl.

Brooks:  Do you remember the first time you met Evan?

Wynne: Yeah, he was a mechanic at this high-end, custom 4x4r shop in North Carolina.

Brooks: Before living on the streets in San Francisco, Evan worked as a mechanic in North Carolina. The shop he worked for is a sort of Pimp My Ride for wealthy, crunchy digital nomads looking to live the van life for a while.

Joe is not a digital nomad, but he’s wealthy enough and at least a little crunchy. So back then, he enlisted Evan and the shop where he worked to outfit his camper van.

At the time—this was around 2013—Joe was traveling and living out of his van and, with it in the shop, didn’t have a place to live.

Wynne: And Evan was like, You can sleep in my basement. And after, like, half a day there, they’re like, Oh, you can move into the guest bedroom; it’s totally available. You’re not a crazy person.

Brooks: So Joe and Evan became friends not so long ago because Evan offered Joe a place to stay. And they had a lot in common: They both love cars, they both became fathers when they were quite young, and they’re both relentlessly outgoing.

Wynne: He’s one of the most charming people I’ve ever met. If you leave him alone in a group of four or five strangers, he will be best friends with everybody inside of 30 minutes. He’s absolutely a life-of-the-party kind of guy and not in the big, loud, over-the-top way, in the kind of goes around and has a really great conversation with everyone where they feel like the center of the room. That’s really his superpower, is, I feel like, is that type of little conversational loop with people.

Brooks: When Joe’s van was finished, they went their separate ways. Eventually, Joe went on to start a cannabis company in Northern California; Evan stayed in North Carolina.

But they stayed in touch, got to know each other more, and Joe started noticing another side of Evan too.

Wynne:  There’s, like, two sides: There’s Evan and Melvin. Melvin is malicious Evan, or, like, the evil side inside of him that completely takes over, but I almost never see it. I see the aftermath of it, but he never lets me see full-blown.

Brooks: If there were drugs around, Evan would do as much as he could. To Joe, it felt like he didn’t understand how a sacrifice in the present might be beneficial in the future.

[Music]

Despite the lurking threat of Melvin, around 2016, Joe convinced Evan to move out to California to work for him at his cannabis company. They manufactured the oils in THC pens. Evan managed a team; Joe considered him his right-hand man.

Joe had a strict “no hard drugs” policy for his employees, and one day, Evan slipped.

Wynne:  So I had a drug-test kit on-site, so I told him, I said, Hey, we’re going out back, and let’s go piss in a cup. And he was like, Oh, oh, oh—you know, he started to freak out. And I tested him, and it was the thickest blue line for positive opiates ever, so I took him back to his room, and we loaded up everything he owned, and I said, I just can’t carry you if you’re gonna do that.

It was excruciating, man; it was bad, and I knew it was gonna go worse. But I just couldn’t have it go worse in my living room. I had a lot of people who were counting on us to make good decisions to feed their families. And it was one of the toughest days ever in my business career ’cause he was absolutely my best friend, and I felt like, that day, I felt like it was like signing his death warrant.

Brooks: Once he separated from Joe, it didn’t take Evan too long to make his way down to San Francisco. When Evan discovered that he could shoplift and sell what he stole and buy fentanyl all in the same place, he never left. That economy, the ease with which he could support his habit, is what kept him there.

Joe went on to sell his company for a lot of money. He told me that after the sale, many of his employees got bonuses big enough for a down payment on a house. Evan, meanwhile, stole Tide Pods and slept on the street.

Wynne:  I would fight anything to change it. If there was any series of tasks I could go through to get my best friend back—even if I didn’t get him back, even if he just got his life back—I would go through hell, ’cause like Evan, I love a challenging, knives-and-daggers, bleeding-in-the-streets fight for something that’s worth it. And for my best friend who helped me—I’m living my dream life right now: I live in my dream home with the greatest partner I could ever have. My kid goes to a wonderful school and is blossoming. The car that me and Evan always talked about—the insanity car, the insane race car—it’s in the garage, right?

Brooks: (Laughs.)

Wynne: And I’ve completed all life dreams, and I’m having to literally spend time making up new ones.

I would do anything to help him get back his portion of the dream ’cause he helped me get mine.

Brooks: Over the years, Joe has tried to give Evan back his portion of that dream.

One time, he tracked Evan down in the Tenderloin, rented a penthouse suite for them both, with a Jacuzzi tub. I’ve seen the pictures of Evan looking like a wet dog in a tub he has single-handedly turned absolutely filthy.

Joe tried, simply, to return that favor that Evan offered him when they met: a place to live.

Wynne:  I was just like, Hey, and I talked to him about it, and I said, Hey, I’m living alone on this land up north. The wife has not moved in. I was like, You could move in and go through horrific withdrawal and be a total piece of shit, and nobody would know except me. You can hang out. I’ll put you on salary. You’ll make a little money—

Brooks: Yeah.

Wynne: And he was like, he just literally said it: He’s like, Yeah, I’m not done yet. (Laughs.) I’m not finished—

Brooks: Not done yet?

Wynne: Yeah. I’m not—I don’t think I’m done yet.

[Music]

Brooks: Evan is just one of over 4,000 unsheltered people living in San Francisco. “Unsheltered,” by this count, means living on the street, bus stations, parks, tents, and abandoned buildings. There are around 4,000 more in temporary shelters.

Nationally, those numbers are even more grim.

In 2024, the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night was 771,480, the highest number ever recorded in the United States.

To be very clear, “I’m not done yet” is by no means a representative attitude of that whole. Unsheltered life is grueling—sometimes violent, and often deadly. Evan’s willingness to leave that behind, or not, doesn’t change that fact.

There are many reasons why so many people in America are homeless, first among them being a lack of homes. It’s no coincidence that things are so rough in one of the most expensive cities in America, while in places like West Virginia, which has its own opioid crisis and much cheaper housing, unsheltered homelessness is much more rare.

[Applause]

Brooks: This year, San Francisco elected a new mayor, Daniel Lurie, an ultra-wealthy moderate in a city famous for its progressive politics.

Daniel Lurie: Today marks the beginning of a new era of accountability and change at city hall, one that, above all else, serves you, the people of San Francisco.

Brooks: The new mayor has his work cut out for him. San Francisco has become emblematic of what sometimes gets called a “doom loop,” something that has happened in a lot of cities since the pandemic.

In this loop, the office buildings empty out because of the pandemic and remote work. The stores and restaurants that served office workers are forced to shutter. Crime soars. Tax revenues fall. Public transportation is forced to cut back, so even fewer people come downtown. And on and on and on.

Lurie is not a tough-on-crime mayor. He’s not gutting the city’s addiction and homelessness services.

But the way he spoke about these problems, which was the first topic in his inauguration speech, was different.

Lurie:  I entered this mayor’s race not as a politician, but as a dad who couldn’t explain to my kids what they were seeing on our streets.

Brooks: Lurie talks about what he could see—what the problem looks like, the effect of this constant onslaught of imagery on individual well-being.

Lurie: Widespread drug dealing, public drug use, and constantly seeing people in crisis has robbed us of our sense of decency and security.

Now, safety isn’t just a statistic; it’s a feeling you hold when you’re walking down the street. That insecurity is—

Brooks: One reason he might be using these terms is that, by the numbers, the unsheltered, visible homeless population in San Francisco is nearly the same as it was 10 years ago. What has changed is everyone else.

It’s hard to get exact numbers, but downtown San Francisco has lost about two-thirds of its daytime population—that’s hundreds of thousands of commuters and office workers gone, which leaves just Evan and people like him.

This, in short, might be called a visibility problem.

People feel scared and maybe a little ashamed having to see so many people experiencing homelessness every day,which is an odd problem because for many people living on the street, a family member, or a loved one, is looking for them.

[Music]

Brooks: Visible to a city that sees too much of them. invisible to families who would love nothing more than to see them.

That’s after the break.

[Break]

Brooks: In late February, about six weeks before Evan would find himself in the hospital, I met Liz Breuilly. Liz is in her 40s and lives in the mountains outside of San Francisco.

She lives a sort of double life. Her day job is in the medical field, and in her spare time, she does something else.

Liz Breuilly: I’m not a private investigator.  Nobody’s paying me and nobody’s licensing me to do the work that I do.

Brooks: How would you describe what you do?

Breuilly: (Laughs.)I  feel like I started doing one thing, right, in the beginning, several years ago, and I feel like it’s evolved into many different things.

Brooks: Mm-hmm.

Breuilly: Primarily, I would say that I locate missing persons that are either mentally ill, drug-addicted, and/or experiencing homelessness.

Brooks: Liz finds missing people. She does this for free. I’ve asked her probably 25 times why she does this, and even to her, it’s not clear.

[Music]

What is clear is that there’s plenty of finding to do.

There are around 1,400 people on the San Francisco Police Department’s missing-persons list. And given that “missing” just means that someone somewhere is looking for you—and has filed a police report—that number could be much higher.

[Music]

Brooks: Liz and others who spend time in the Tenderloin and encampments think that many of these people are here—which is strange, considering all of these disappeared people are far more visible than those of us spending our days in cars and offices, our nights in houses and apartments and bedrooms, while they’re out on the street, exposed.

In these first couple months of the new mayoral administration, the city has been experimenting with new solutions to this problem of unsheltered homelessness and open drug use.

There have been mass arrests of dealers and users, pushing the jail population to levels that haven’t been seen in years.

One corner of the Tenderloin was turned into a triage center, which has since shut down, where people could go for coffee, to be connected with city services, and be offered a free bus ticket out of town, courtesy of the city.

But there’s no city program that does what Liz does. She’s a sort of one-woman case study of a different approach, a radical approach, to this problem: reconnect lost people with their families and see if things change.

Breuilly:  Most of the time, when families get to me, they think their loved one is deceased. And so they’re almost just looking for validation that that’s the case, and it’s usually not.  I have located, I don’t know, well over 200 people, maybe 2—I don’t even know. It’s been well over 200.

Brooks: Evan was once one of Liz’s lost people.

Brooks: Do you remember who reached out to you about him the first time?

Breuilly: Mm-hmm, yeah, his sister did. His sister did. He had been missing for several years, and she basically was, you know, said, This is my brother, and I heard what you do, and I’m wondering if you would help me. And I said, Sure.

Brooks: There’s no big secret to how Liz works. She asks families about their missing person, about their history of addiction and mental illness. She checks arrest records. She’s in frequent contact with the city morgue. But mostly, she just adds pictures, like Evan’s picture, to a folder in her phone, memorizes faces as best she can, and starts looking.

And then, one day, there Evan was.

Breuilly:  So I roll down the window, and I scream, “Evan! Evan!” (Laughs.) And he stopped, and he looked at me, and he ... (Laughs.) He basically was like, I don’t know you.

And I’m shouting at him from my car, and I said, No, you don’t know me. I just need to talk to you for a second.

 And that’s what started a, I don’t know, four-year friendship, right, with him.

Brooks:  Did Evan call his sister when you—

Breuilly: No.

Brooks: —caught up with him? No?

Breuilly: No, he did not. He just couldn’t do it.

Brooks: A lot of people who Liz finds don’t call their families. Many of them do call but don’t leave the street or go home. One person I met through Liz put it this way: “I don’t want to be missing, and I don’t want to be found either.”

So this limbo—not missing, not found—is where many of Liz’s people stay for years.

Breuilly: Every time they hear about someone overdosing or every time someone posts a video of a sheet over somebody, I’m getting a phone call from five parents asking me if I know who it is and if that’s their kid.

Brooks: Liz and I are driving around downtown San Francisco. A lot of open drug use and encampments that were concentrated in the Tenderloin are now more diffuse.

In the Mission District, the alley behind the Everlane is packed with people smoking, injecting, laid out. Once in a while, a cleanup crew drives through, clears everyone out, hoses the alley down, and then everyone comes back.

Breuilly: People were never spread out like this. I mean, there would be, in certain areas, I mean, at nighttime, there’d be 250, 300 people. And at nighttime, it still gets like that when the cops run around, but because the cops are really doing a lot of work with patrolling and doing all this stuff, it breaks them up.

Brooks: Today, Liz has been looking for one guy in particular. A few weeks ago, he had asked her to find his mom, and Liz learned pretty quickly that his mom had passed away.

Breuilly: So—but I also know that if I don’t tell him, no one else will.

Brooks: Yeah, ’cause nobody even knows, right?

Breuilly:  Yeah, and the only way to reach him is to do what we’re doing today, which is going back out on the street to find him.

Brooks: Late in the afternoon, she sees the guy she’s looking for.

Breuilly: I think that’s him. I think that’s the guy.

Brooks: The man is wearing a red flannel and a corduroy jacket, with a set of neon ski goggles around his neck. He’s half-standing out of his wheelchair, leaning over a row of trash cans, digging through the garbage and throwing things aside.

Here’s what will happen next: Liz will tell him the news—that his mother has passed away. He will cry and thank Liz for telling him. They’ll smoke cigarettes together, even though Liz doesn’t smoke cigarettes, for 10 minutes and then 20 minutes as he tries to adjust to this new reality.

But before any of this can happen, there’s a problem: The street we’ve pulled over in is narrow and behind us, suddenly, is a white Jaguar SUV with no one in the driver’s seat. A self-driving car is stuck behind us, with traffic backing up behind it, preventing this volunteer bearer of the worst possible news from doing her job.

Breuilly:  Well, it’s definitely a feeling of helplessness, right? This kid is very, very sick. Yes, am I glad I was able to give him the information and hopefully set him free a little bit from this persistent state of looking? But in the same respect, it’s like I’m leaving somebody a little bit worse than in the situation they were in.

And so it’s deflating because, even me, who is really—I know the resources in the city. But right now, there’s nowhere to take him.There’s no space in shelters. He doesn’t have a phone. I can’t bring him home to my house. What am I gonna do?

[Music]

Brooks: It’s not just San Francisco trying to ram a metaphorical self-driving car through a metaphorical alley of grief. Cities around the country are desperate to move on.

Portland, Oregon, elected a new mayor who pledged to end unsheltered homelessness, after the state re-criminalized drug possession, after decriminalizing in 2021.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, elected a tough-on-crime mayor, and hired more police.

Fremont, California, criminalized not just homeless encampments but “aiding” and “abetting” homeless encampments in any way.

Everyone, from city leadership to regular people like Liz, seem desperate to move on and willing to try new things. Liz, in part, does this work because no one else will.

Brooks: It’s night now, and Liz is still out looking for a few missing people. And, tucked up behind the passenger-side visor in her car, Liz has a bundle of printed-out emails from Evan’s family and a picture of his kid, a middle schooler now, playing the clarinet.

At night, the plaza at 16th and Mission turns into a packed open-air market of stolen goods. The sellers, mostly are addicts, are hawking used clothes, kids’ toys, tamales, phone chargers, a tricycle, and remarkably, tonight, an enormous slab of bacon. The shoppers are mostly low-income San Franciscans chasing a good deal. Behind them are the dealers, many of them young Honduran men in masks.

Hundreds of people are walking around this dark patch of concrete. Cash moves in one direction: from the buyers to the sellers to the dealers.

Standing on one corner, leaning against a street sign, is Evan.

Evan:  Every time, every time—like, the last, what, like, five times, it seems like—I’ve been like, I really need to see Liz today. I need to see Liz. Today, I literally kept thinking today—

(Dog barks.)

Evan: —I was like, I need to find her. I need to find her.

Breuilly: Here I am.

Brooks: This is the first time I met Evan, weeks before our conversation in the hospital.

Evan is looking shaggy, but in relatively good health. And he swears that when he needs Liz, he can manifest her.

Breuilly: How are you, though? Why did you manifest me?

Evan: Because I’m, I have to figure something out.

Breuilly: Okay, what’ve you got going?

Brooks: Evan tells Liz that he hasn’t been able to keep much food down for weeks. And his legs are infected and extremely swollen.

Leg infections are common for fentanyl users like Evan due to contaminants in the supply and side effects from injection. It’s why you see so many people in wheelchairs.

Breuilly: How is it? Ooh, it … (Gasps.)

Evan: Yeah—

Breuilly: Evan!

Evan: I know, that’s what I’m saying. So I need, I need some, I need, I’m—I, with my leg and my stomach, I was like, I’m over this.

Breuilly: Oh, wow.

Evan: I’m so over it. I’m so over it. And I’m, like, I’m just ready—

Breuilly: Pitiful.

Evan: —for something to change, something—

Breuilly: Yay!

Evan: (Laughs.)

Brooks: Liz, as Evan is speaking, is beaming. This was a full 180 from the “I’m not done yet” Evan told Joe when he tried to get him off the street a few years ago.

This was the first time in the years Evan and Liz have known each other that Evan has said he wanted to get off the street and get off fentanyl.

Evan: Yeah, I’m falling apart, and I’m, in a way, I’m kind of glad. (Laughs.) ’Cause I’m—it’s kind of making me turn to stop.

Brooks: Yeah.

[Music]

Brooks: It might not sound like much, but when someone like Evan, who has been addicted to opioids for many, many years, says, “I’m ready,” this is the moment that San Francisco’s, and many cities’, strategy to address this problem is built on.

So here we were: Evan is ready to get off the street; the city of San Francisco is eager to help.

Evan’s readiness is supposed to trigger action—a chance to put a dent in this visible suffering that haunts the mayor and so many other San Franciscans. Plus, Evan’s got Liz, who has a car and a phone. How hard could it be?

That’s next week.

[Music]

No Easy Fix is produced and reported by me, Ethan Brooks. Editing by Jocelyn Frank and Hanna Rosin. Engineering by Rob Smierciak. Fact-checking by Sam Fentress. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

See you next week.

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

Texas Republicans are planning to redraw their congressional districts this year, five years ahead of schedule. As with most other recent examples of norm-breaking behavior in American politics, the reason for this involves Donald J. Trump.

Earlier this summer, the president asked Texas Governor Greg Abbott to dabble in a little gerrymandering to produce five more Republican-leaning districts in his state ahead of the 2026 midterm elections. In July, Abbott answered the call, summoning state lawmakers back to Austin for a 30-day special session, in part to begin working on a new district map.(The Texas legislature is in session only once every other year.) The state has been holding public hearings about the redistricting plan; this morning, state lawmakers released a proposed new map that could give the GOP 30 of the state’s 38 House seats and help pad the party’s slim majority.

Not much appears to prevent Texas Republicans from doing this. States typically redraw their congressional districts every 10 years, after a new census is conducted. But the Texas GOP has gone off schedule before, way back in 2003, and the Supreme Court later ruled that the Constitution doesn’t prohibit mid-decade redistricting. There’s been plenty of resistance from Texas voters, who’ve filled public-hearing rooms in protest, and from high-profile politicians, who’ve appeared at rallies and raised money to fight the new map. The state’s Democrats might consider breaking quorum, like they did in 2021 to block a vote on the issue, but GOP lawmakers probably have the leverage to force them back to the table. So far, things are going according to plan for Texas Republicans. They have the votes, and at least right now, they seem to have the political will.

But just as important as whether Texas Republicans follow through with redistricting is how Democrats will respond. A gerrymandering war, in other words, could be on the way. “We’re saying to the Texans, ‘You shouldn’t be going down this path,’” former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said last week. “You want to go down this path? We’ll go down together.” The governors (and wannabe presidential contenders) Gavin Newsom of California and J. B. Pritzker of Illinois both suggested that they will consider redrawing their own state’s districts to favor—or further favor—Democrats. Similar efforts are being considered in New York and Maryland too.

Many experts—and Democrats themselves—have long argued that partisan gerrymandering is undemocratic and unfair. Their embrace of a gerrymandering tit for tat would reflect a new mindset that many Democrats have adopted in the second Trump era: that they should be just as politically ruthless as Republicans—and when the GOP goes low, the Democrats should meet them there.

But two questions complicate this approach. The first is a logistical one: Can Democrats even do what they’re threatening to? “It’s a state-by-state determination,” the election-law expert David Becker told me. Some states, such as California and New York, have independent redistricting commissions, which means that any attempt at partisan gerrymandering would require turning that power back over to politicians—a complicated and slow process. Other states, such as Illinois and Maryland, have laws allowing for a little more flexibility when redrawing maps.

The other, more pressing question for Democrats is whether they should. They certainly may feel inclined to match the GOP’s aggressive tactics, but extreme partisan gerrymandering carries a certain amount of risk, one that Texas Republicans would be undertaking, Becker said. To maximize Republican wins in more districts overall, they might have to reduce their margins in others, making some of those new districts vulnerable in a potential blue-wave election.

All this partisan maneuvering is arguably a race to the bottom. Imagine a future in which every two years, states redraw their congressional maps: Voters would find themselves in a new district several times each decade, unable to get to know the people who are supposed to represent them. “This would do incredible damage to faith in institutions” and add to the cynicism that so many Americans already feel about politics, Dan Vicuña, a senior policy director at Common Cause, told me.

“There appears to be a temptation to meet attacks on democracy with more attacks on democracy,” Vicuña added. It’s up to Democrats to decide if they’ll resist the urge.

Related:

Republicans discover the horror of gerrymandering. (From 2022)Has the tide turned against partisan gerrymandering? (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

To see how America unraveled, go back five years.Emil Bove is a sign of the times.The dangerous logic of CTE self-diagnosis

Today’s News

Former Vice President Kamala Harris announced that she will not run for California governor in 2026, choosing to instead focus on supporting Democrats nationwide after her 2024 presidential loss. Harris didn’t confirm any specific future plans.An 8.8-magnitude earthquake struck off Russia’s Far East region yesterday, triggering tsunami waves that reached Hawaii, California, and Washington. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem confirmed this morning that the threat of a major tsunami had “passed completely,” with no significant damage reported.The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady, despite pressure from President Donald Trump to lower rates, and warned about slowing growth. Officials have signaled potential cuts later this year, as inflation remains somewhat elevated and economic uncertainty increases.

Evening Read

Illustration by Ben Denzer

A Love Letter to Music Listings

By Gabriel Kahane

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

This used to be easy.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

What’s holding Trump back from firing PowellCharlie Warzel: The discourse is broken.Alexandra Petri: Let’s ban more nonexistent things.The David Frum Show: Trump’s tariff disaster

Culture Break

Ross Harried / NurPhoto / Getty

Read. “Preamble to the West,” a poem by Iris Jamahl Dunkle:

“Can’t lick the witch wind that carries rumors / over shining aurora-lit prairies: / horror of what comes to light at the dawn / of the mind.”

Take a look. These photos capture Guédelon Castle, in France, where builders use 13th-century techniques to re-create medieval craftsmanship.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Lots of you responded to last week’s newsletter about finding simple moments of joy in your daily life, and I’ve loved reading your answers. I’ll share two of my favorites here, as a bit of a prelude to a forthcoming, small-delights-focused issue of the Daily.

Eric wrote in to say that he was inspired by the 2023 movie Perfect Days (which I need to watch!) and is now trying to incorporate a simple, daily gesture into his life: “When I walk out my door to go to work, I try to remember to just stop, stand, look at my neighborhood and the sky, and smile—it may take only 10 seconds, but it begins the public version of my life on the right foot.” Another idea I liked, from Sarah, is buying one new thing at the grocery store every time you visit: “It’s a mini flavor adventure every trip, whether it turns out I’d buy that thing again or not.”

Stay tuned: More tips coming soon!

— Elaine

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

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The Bear didn’t wait long to stress out its viewers. “Review,” the seventh episode of the dramedy’s first season, is one of the most anxiety-inducing viewing experiences in recent TV history. In it, the employees at the sandwich shop in which the show originally takes place lose their cool after a food critic’s praise directs a deluge of customers their way. But the crew’s panic quickly permeates off-screen too. “Review” seems designed to elevate a viewer’s blood pressure in tandem with that of its characters: Over the course of 20 minutes unfolding in real time, arguments arise, accidents happen, and several chefs quit their job. The episode exemplifies The Bear’s ethosas a whole; four seasons in, the show remains defined by ticking clocks and barely controlled chaos. As my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote, it’s “horrifically stressful” to watch.

Yet that unrelenting feeling of stress has resonated with viewers, enough for The Bear to break streaming records over the course of its run. And lately, it’s not the only series channeling the pressures audiences may be feeling in real life: The Pitt, aword-of-mouth hit that uses each hour-long installment to follow the minute-to-minute events of one shift inside an emergency room, operates like a close cousin of The Bear when it comes to drumming up unease. The Pitt scored a bevy of Emmy nominations earlier this month, as did The Bear and shows such as Severance and Adolescence, which also use single-take, unbroken sequences to nerve-wracking effect. Even this year’s most-nominated comedy series, The Studio, in which each scene is meant to look like one continuous shot, encourages more nail-biting than laughing as it tracks the trials of a harried Hollywood executive. These programs go beyond merely dialing up the intensity of what’s happening on-screen; they submerge viewers in visceral, in-the-moment tension. The experience of watching them may be stressful as a result—but it is also apparently satisfying at the same time. They seem to be scratching an itch: for realism, and for an acknowledgment that day-to-day concerns can feel extraordinarily high-stakes.

Waning, it seems, are the days of the Emmys being dominated by television predicated on escapism and spectacle: Comfort shows such as Ted Lasso and historical epics such as Shōgun are currently off the air; sumptuous dramas such as The Crown have ended. Meanwhile, there seems to be less appetite for excessive violence. (Yellowjacketsand Squid Game, former nominees known for their high body counts, were completely shut out of the Emmys this year.) Instead, a slate of series concerned with more mundane types of stress has emerged, using hyperrealistic filmmaking techniques to capture anxiety in a way that feels intimate.

[Read: Why The Bear is so hard to watch]

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.”

Research has also shown that witnessing a loved one overcome a tough task is more stressful than seeing a stranger do so. Television shows that unfold in real time can feel like they collapse the fourth wall; combined with techniques such as extreme close-ups, it’s possible they can produce a strong level of empathy for some viewers. “Our minds create what is real and what isn’t real to our stress systems,” Jeremy Jamieson, a psychology professor at the University of Rochester, told me. When a viewer engages intimately with the material, he added, “they could be having essentially a stress response when they’re not actually doing anything stressful.”

This form of immersive storytelling is nothing new. Take 24, a regular presence at the Emmys in the 2000s that, each season and across 24 hour-long episodes, chronicled the events of a single day in the life of an improbably skilled government agent. The scenarios were likely unimaginable to viewers, and their over-the-top—if anxiety-inducing—nature made them compelling. More mundane trials are faced by average-Joe protagonists such as The Pitt’s Robby (played by Noah Wyle), a senior attending physician, and Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), the executive chef on The Bear. Their arcs are prosaic compared with the high-stakes journey of 24’s Jack Bauer: Robby just wants to get through a tough shift in the ER, and Carmy is chasing a dream of turning his brother’s failing sandwich shop into a fine-dining establishment. “They’re sincere characters, grounded in caring about what they’re doing and caring about the people around them,” Nicholas Natalicchio, a professor of cinema and television studies at Drexel University, told me. Even Matt (Seth Rogen), The Studio’s protagonist, is defined more by his struggle to stop people-pleasing than by his noteworthy occupation as the head of a major company.

[Read: How anxiety became content]

The emphasis on emotional responses rather than pulse-quickening plot twists also enhances how much these ensembles resemble actual people. As Robby, Carmy, and their co-workers encounter problems on the job—running out of money to purchase equipment, trying and failing to manage a supervisor’s ego—they begin to seem like a viewer’s own colleagues. (Although The Bear doesn’t always track its story in real time like The Pitt does, it continues to place its characters under the threat of deadlines, frequently showing a countdown clock sitting in the kitchen.) Such recognizable stress helps their stories resonate further. “We all aspire to have that kind of excellence in our work lives,” Yvonne Leach, a professor of cinema and television studies at Drexel, told me. It can be cathartic, as a result, to see hardworking characters struggle realistically—to, as she put it, “see the toll that it takes.”

Besides, Leach added, the recent need for escapist television—the popularity of which grew during the coronavirus pandemic—may be abating. Her students in a class on TV storytelling have recently been voicing how much they want to “see things that are real,” she told me. Natalicchio agreed, adding over email that undergraduate students today have grown up with anxiety as a constant in their life, especially when it comes to entering the workforce. They’ve come of age amid economic turmoil and near-constant disruption to many industries, which may contribute to their interest in shows about challenging workplaces. “That’s not to say there wasn’t stress before, but I think never before has it been a steady hum in the background like it is now,” Natalicchio said. “I think, for many viewers, seeing shows like The Studio or The Bear is cathartic. They can, to a certain extent, relate to it and process their own stress.”

The characters on these shows may fall apart emotionally, but they do make it past their hardest times one way or another. In the case of The Pitt and The Bear, even the worst days yield victories: Robby and his team save plenty of patients, and the employees at Carmy’s restaurant always make it through dinner service. In characters like them, Jamieson said, “you have a role model for resilience.” Such characters are both flawed and capable; they’re who we want to root for and maybe even who we hope to emulate. “We tend to be drawn to people who are competent and warm,” Mendes explained. When both of those qualities are present, it creates, she said, “magic”—the kind that offers a reassurance that other anxiety-inducing shows don’t. The realism of shows like The Pitt and The Bear may remind viewers that simply making it through the day can be an uphill battle. But these shows also embrace the idea that such days don’t last forever.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Until last Thursday, the team behind the app Tea Dating Advice was having an extraordinary week. They claimed to have amassed more than 2 million new users, making Tea the most popular free app in Apple’s App Store, after it stirred discussion on TikTok and Reddit. Women were using Tea, whose tagline is “Helping women date safe,” in exactly the way they were supposed to: reviewing men they’d dated, giving them a “green flag” or “red flag” evaluation, seeking information on new prospects, running background checks to look for a criminal record or a sex-offender registration.

But by Thursday evening, angry men had begun to amass online. They gathered on the anonymous messaging board 4chan, clamoring for a “hack and leak” to publicly expose the app’s users. On Friday morning, someone on 4chan posted a link leading to more than 70,000 images of Tea’s users, including verification photos and pictures of government IDs, according to 404 Media, which first reported these events. Shortly afterward, someone created a map that claimed to link Tea users to locations and told anyone viewing it to “enjoy”; another person created a site for comparing and ranking the users’ physical appearances. Posters across social-media platforms had a field day sharing Tea users’ images, calling them “whales” and “ugly bitches,” saying that they deserved all of this. On Monday, 404 Media reported that a second data breach had revealed direct messages between users, including sensitive personal conversations, real names, social-media handles, and phone numbers. (A Tea representative told me that the company is investigating the issue and, having found that some messages were accessed in the breach, has taken their direct-messaging system offline. Tea has found no evidence of further exposures, she said, and is working to identify affected users and offer them free identity-protection services.)

The whole episode, from start to finish, was horribly bleak—and also bleakly illuminating. Tea is hardly a perfect app. As its name suggests, it allows not only serious warnings about men but also gossip about their supposed defects and romantic tendencies. When Tea users do make serious allegations of predatory behavior, those accusations go unconfirmed, a glaring failure of due process. But for all of the app’s flaws, the breaches have proved its users’ concerns valid: Women had good reasons for wanting something like Tea in the first place.

____

Tea’s emergence felt almost inevitable. Similar platforms have existed before: Consider Facebook groups such as “Are We Dating the Same Guy?” (which have led to multiple lawsuits from men who were the subject of discussion) or an app called Lulu (which took down its man-reviewing feature in 2016 after facing criticism). Those digital whisper networks didn’t exactly revolutionize dating safety. But by 2023, when Tea launched, American dating frustration had been mounting—perhaps especially for women. In 2019, Pew Research Center found that women were far more likely than men to say that dating had “gotten harder for most people in the last 10 years.” The app had a ready audience, particularly among the many women who yearn for the era before apps, when a person was more likely to meet a romantic prospect through family or friends. That nostalgia isn’t entirely misplaced: One real benefit of that courtship culture, researchers have told me, is that people are more likely to behave respectfully if they have mutual social connections who might hear how things go. Dating strangers, by contrast, involves a lack of accountability that may be more likely to lead to transgressions big and small, from ghosting and poor communication to sexual assault.

[Read: The slow, quiet demise of American romance]

On top of all that, women are looking for romance at a time when the U.S. government is stripping away their reproductive rights, making pregnancy more perilous, and dismantling protections against gender discrimination. They’re looking at a time of backlash to #MeToo and to the fact that women are relying less on men for financial security. They’re looking as young men are moving further to the right politically, and when only 43 percent of Gen Z men say they consider themselves feminists—compared with 61 percent of Gen Z women. And they’re looking as fear of sexual assault has grown. One doesn’t need to have experienced assault, or to believe that every man poses a threat, to know that something in the culture has curdled, that caution is warranted.

Tea arrived with good intentions. The actual product, unfortunately, isn’t so great: It denies men the chance to defend themselves and—in some cases, surely—infringes on their privacy, publicizing their worst moments even when they might not make the same mistakes in the future. I would argue that the app isn’t great for women, either. It’s a sad approximation of what I think many really want: not strangers trashing other strangers online, but a return to a time when romantic prospects existed within a familiar context, when dating didn’t feel quite so lonely.

[Read: The dating-app diversity paradox]

What Tea has accomplished, though, is showing what women are up against. The men so hell-bent on revenge against Tea’s users are illustrating that hatred of women is alive and well. And the leaks demonstrated how insufficiently women are protected by the tech companies that shape their romantic lives. Tea’s privacy policy promised that selfies used for verification would be “deleted immediately” after authentication; the company then stored the photos in a way that left them so easy to access, 4chan users apparently didn’t even need to break into anything. Tea was founded by a software engineer who said his mother had experienced “terrifying” encounters with men who turned out to be using false identities on their dating profiles. What a terrible irony that after so many women, feeling unsafe, flocked to his app, it has now left thousands of them in potential danger.

The first breach was awful: humiliating for the women who had to see their images passed around, and grim given the number of men making fun of those images with such open, gleeful cruelty. But news of the second breach, which reportedly exposed a larger amount of data with more identifying information, left a pit in my stomach. In more than 1.1 million private messages, women had told one another about rapes, opened up about abortions, identified cheaters. (“I am his wife,” one user wrote after saying she saw her husband being discussed on the app.) Some shared their phone numbers because, I imagine, they had made connections—because they needed support. When women realized they couldn’t rely on the men in their lives, they tried instead to rely on other women. In the end, misogyny got in the way of that too.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The renowned sportswriter Sally Jenkins is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer this September, where she will continue her exceptional and deeply sourced reporting. Jenkins has been the lead sports columnist at The Washington Post for the past 25 years.

In a staff announcement, shared below, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg writes: “Sally is quite possibly America’s greatest living sportswriter—and more generally one of the best feature writers working today. Sally is joining us from The Washington Post, where she has published years of history-making stories. The Jenkins completists among us—and I know there are many here at The Atlantic—will remember well her fantastic work for Sports Illustrated in its heyday. Anyone who takes a trip through the past three decades of her writing will receive a masterclass in the arts of lede writing, deep reporting, and narrative structure.”

Recently announced editorial hires at The Atlantic include staff writers Tom Bartlett, Idrees Kahloon, Tyler Austin Harper, Quinta Jurecic, Jake Lundberg, Toluse Olorunnipa, Alexandra Petri, Vivian Salama, Josh Tyrangiel, Caity Weaver, and Nancy Youssef; and senior editor Drew Goins.

Dear everyone,

I’m writing today to share the tremendous news that one of the legends of American journalism, Sally Jenkins, is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. Sally is quite possibly America’s greatest living sportswriter—and more generally one of the best feature writers working today. Sally is joining us from The Washington Post, where she has published years of history-making stories.

The Jenkins completists among us—and I know there are many here at The Atlantic—will remember well her fantastic work for Sports Illustrated in its heyday. Anyone who takes a trip through the past three decades of her writing will receive a masterclass in the arts of lede writing, deep reporting, and narrative structure.

Her remarkable story about the relationship between Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova is one such example—though Sally’s interests are not limited to sports. She has written stop-everything-and-read pieces about a huge range of subjects, including this close study of Hillary Clinton’s father, and a beautiful, memorable story about how the rubble at Ground Zero went from wreckage to relic, as well as this moving obituary of Sandra Day O’Connor. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in commentary in 2020 for her writing at the Post, making her the first sportswriter to achieve this distinction in 30 years. Sally has also written more than a dozen books, and is the first woman ever to be inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame.

Sally starts with us on September 15 and you’ll see her frequently in our New York office. We cannot wait for her to get here—and we especially cannot wait to read her in our pages.

Please join me in welcoming her to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,

Jeff

Press Contact: Anna Bross and Paul Jackson, The Atlantic | press@theatlantic.com

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump made a surprise visit to an unexpected place last week, touring the Federal Reserve’s headquarters, where two buildings are currently under renovation. Trump then staged a bizarre photo op with the Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, and criticized Powell over the cost of the renovation before telling him to lower interest rates, which the Fed could do—but almost certainly won’t—at its meeting today.

This presidential conduct was all but unimaginable before Trump. Previously, only three presidents in American history have ever visited the Fed. In each of those visits, the president honored the institution rather than attacked it; Trump’s motive was different. His visit was the latest move in a high-pressure campaign to get Powell to either cut interest rates or resign.

Past presidents have generally refrained from commenting on Fed decisions, or at most offered mild public criticisms. Trump, by contrast, has called Powell—whom he originally nominated as Fed chair—“a very stupid person,” “a stubborn mule,” and a “knucklehead”; he’s additionally posted that Powell should “resign immediately.” Trump’s proxies have been even more aggressive in their criticism. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (which runs the mortgage guarantors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac), has kept up a steady stream of invective blasting Powell as “obnoxious, arrogant, pompous,” and also calling on him to “RESIGN.” And a Republican member of Congress earlier this month made a criminal referral to the Department of Justice alleging that Powell gave false statements to Congress about the Fed renovation.

Trump’s position is easy to understand: He’s the president, the head of the executive branch, so why shouldn’t he have a Fed chair who will do what he wants? But the irony of Trump’s effort to push Powell out is that it is a perfect illustration of why we have central-bank independence in the first place. Were Trump to succeed in his quest to get rid of Powell, the result would be chaos in the markets. That would very likely lead to higher interest rates, which is the exact opposite of the outcome he wants. In other words, this is a campaign that no one—Trump included—should hope he wins.

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

In going after Powell, Trump is flouting not just historical norms but the very structure of the Fed, which like most of the world’s central banks was designed to be independent of political pressure. The central bank is not wholly independent; an element of accountability is also built in. The members of its board of governors—who all sit on the Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates—are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate for 14-year terms, while the chair and vice chair are appointed to four-year terms and may be reappointed by the sitting president (Powell was reappointed by Joe Biden). Once confirmed, though, the members cannot be removed except for cause, involving some serious misconduct.

However much Trump wants to fire Powell, such a move would be legally dubious, at best—Powell has stated flatly that such a move is “not permitted under the law.” Although investors generally want Fed officials to do their job without worrying about whether the president or Congress like what they’re doing, Trump very much wants people to worry about what he likes and does not like. After nominating Powell in 2017, Trump quickly soured on his pick and spent much of his first term blasting Powell for not cutting interest rates fast enough. Trump reprised the theme almost as soon as his second term started. For now, Trump has settled for trying to get Powell to self-deport.

In doing so, Trump is inadvertently making a great argument for why we don’t want presidents involved in monetary policy. Trump’s case for interest-rate cuts is confused at best: He simultaneously says that the economy is “BOOMING,” which usually means interest-rate cuts aren’t necessary, and that interest rates should also be a full three points lower than they are. And he keeps mentioning the cost of financing the U.S. national debt, which is not something the Fed should be worrying about.

More simply, Trump wants to cut rates because it’ll give the economy an immediate boost. But the economy continues to chug along at a good clip: GDP grew at an annualized rate of 3 percent in the second quarter. Prioritizing a short-term boost over the long-term benefits of controlling inflation—which remains well above the Fed’s 2 percent target—is a constant temptation for politicians, because the benefits of economic growth such as lower unemployment and higher wages are felt very quickly. Inflation typically takes a long time to develop but, once it has, can take even longer to purge from the system.

[James Surowiecki: How did they get inflation so wrong]

The canonical example of the executive branch messing with monetary policy came during Richard Nixon’s first term, when the president strongly pressured Federal Reserve Chair Arthur Burns to cut rates. Although inflation was already rising, Nixon was more concerned about an increase in unemployment. Burns did cut rates, and unemployment fell. Nixon won reelection easily, but inflation soon jumped to heights not seen in decades, and the Fed struggled for years to get it back under control. Congress ultimately responded by passing an amendment in 1977 that enshrined “stable prices” as well as “maximum employment” and “moderate long-term interest rates” as the Fed’s central aims.

Central-bank independence makes the Nixon-Burns scenario less likely. The premise is not that the Fed’s judgment will be perfect—as recently as 2021 and 2022, we saw how slow the committee was to recognize the threat of inflation and raise interest rates—but that Fed governors have different incentives from elected officials. Because they don’t need to worry about playing to voters, they’ll do a better job of balancing the benefits of economic growth against the risk of inflation. This independence is especially important for monetary policy because, unlike fiscal policy, it can be changed so easily: All that’s required to cut interest rates is for the Federal Open Market Committee to decide to do so.

The central bank’s independence does have its downside. Despite the congressional mandate to promote stable prices and high employment, the Fed arguably cared more about the former than the latter until recently. But it’s still better to have a Fed that sees its role as the stewardship of key economic levers, rather than a duty to keep the president satisfied.

The ultimate check on Trump in all of this is the markets. Bond investors—who ultimately set long-term interest rates—prize stability and dislike inflation; they would probably react badly if Powell were forced out, pushing interest rates higher. But the stock and bond markets have sent mixed messages to Trump over the past six months. They forced him to back down from most of his “Liberation Day” tariffs, but they’ve pretty much yawned at everything else he’s done or talked about doing. So we just have to hope he hasn’t taken the wrong lesson and become convinced that, whatever he does, the markets will adjust. Trump might like playing with fire, but we could all end up getting burned.

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum examines how protectionism, once a fringe idea in U.S. politics, became central to modern Republican trade policy. He traces how President Donald Trump made tariffs a political weapon, and why these policies continue to carry political appeal despite their economic cost.

Then David is joined by the historian and trade expert Doug Irwin for a conversation about what tariffs actually do. Irwin explains how protectionist policies have repeatedly backfired in American history, why they persist, and how the U.S. abandoned the bipartisan free-trade consensus that lasted for nearly a century. The two discuss who really pays for tariffs, why tariffs rarely achieve their stated goals, and what it would take to rebuild political support for open markets.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest today will be Douglas Irwin, who teaches at Dartmouth College and is, in my opinion, America’s leading expert on the history of trade and tariffs in this country. We’ll be talking directly about many of the myths that are offered by protectionists to justify trade restrictions, tariffs. We’ll be looking at episodes from American economic history and refuting some of the stories that the protectionists tell to justify their otherwise obviously self-harming policies.

Before we begin, though, a few thoughts about some very recent events. I am recording this podcast a few hours after the Trump administration announced a supposedly big deal with the European Union that will see Americans paying much higher tariffs on everything they import from the countries of Europe. We are speaking a few hours before—or a few days before—the August 1 deadline for a whole lot more tariffs on everything from all the rest of the world.

Now, these measures follow announced so-called trade deals with Japan—about which the details are extremely hazy and where the details keep changing and where the Japanese don’t seem at all to have the same idea of what has been agreed, if anything, that the United States does—and shortly after announcements of equally vaporous agreements with Britain and with China.

There’s a kind of trade truce in effect with China, where the round of tariff increases has stopped rising and rising and rising. But Americans are still paying more for everything because of the Trump tariffs than they were. It’s a tax paid by the Americans least able to pay taxes. It’s a tax that exempts all of the wealthiest people, who spend more of their money on things that aren’t internationally traded: services here at home. Remember, the dues at the country club aren’t subject to the tariff. Your rent and your fancy penthouse, that’s not subject to a tariff. But the knives and forks on the dinner tables of ordinary people, those are tariffed.

So we are seeing, also, a slowdown in the American economy. Beginning about April, when the Trump tariffs were announced, the growth projections for the United States economy have been slowing. We’re not in a recession yet, but this year is obviously shaping up to be much less prosperous than people expected at the beginning of the year.

I want to talk a little bit about what the Trump tariffs do and what the Trump tariffs do not do. Let me start with what they do not do. Tariffs are advertised as a way to increase your country’s manufacturing. What you do is: You put a tax on all manufacturers from other countries. It makes those other manufacturers more expensive, and therefore your manufacturers are more competitive. Not only that—better still: Your manufacturers can increase their prices because they’re shielded from competition. That makes them more profitable, so they can afford to hire more people and put out more goods. That’s the theory, that by shielding your domestic industry from competition, you’ll be able to produce more and therefore export more, and you’ll fix this trade balance that the Trump people are so upset about—the trade balance being the difference between what you import and what you export.

None of this is true, and any economist of any merit will agree. Here’s what tariffs actually do. First, they hurt your manufacturing. Remember, every manufactured good has inputs in it. Every product is an input into the next product. What tariffs do is: They raise the price of all your inputs. So the Trump people say, We have to bring back American shipbuilding. Oh, yeah—we’ve increased the price of steel. We have to bring back American automobiles. Oh, yeah—we’ve increased the price of aluminum, of glass and electronic components. Everything that they are promising America will make more of is going to be made of things that are more expensive, and often a lot more expensive. Some of these tariffs are in the vicinity of 50 percent.

And so what you’ll find is: Even if the tariff is sufficient to protect the American product, it can’t be sold to the rest of the world. The American ship made out of a high-cost American steel will not be able to compete on world markets with the South Korean ship or the Chinese ship. America’s manufacturing exports will go down, not up. And by losing export markets, America will see its manufacturing actually tend to shrivel rather than to grow.

The Trump people say, Well, it’ll fix the trade balance. That is, We’ll import less and export more. Well, that’s not true either. We won’t export more, even of nonagricultural, nonindustrial goods, because other countries will retaliate. You know, before Donald Trump became president the first time, the United States was the world’s largest exporter of soybeans. Trump imposed tariffs on China. They retaliated by switching their soybean purchases from the United States to Brazil and Argentina, and America’s share of the world’s soybean market collapsed. And America is now far behind Brazil as a soybean producer and exporter.

During the 2024 election campaign, the Trump people had the nerve to say, Under Biden, the United States became a net importer of food. Yeah, that’s true. You know why? Because the Trump tariffs wrecked the export market for American soybeans and other agricultural products. So the United States imported pretty much the same as it always had, but exported less and so became more of a net importer.

And that effect on imports is what you see everywhere that tariffs are imposed. What tariffs are doing is severing America from all of its trading relations, making other countries less willing to buy American goods, and separating the United States from the rest of the world.

They advertise the tariffs as a way to check China. But the way you check China is by having friends and allies. And America under Trump has a lot fewer of those. The Trump people have come back from their talks in Europe by saying, Look—we’ve built this giant trading block of the United States plus the EU. Look how powerful we are. The European Union now regards the United States—and every European does, and I’m speaking to you from Canada, where this is true, once America’s most intimate economic partner.

People see the United States as a dangerous predator on world markets, one that you want to have less and less to do with in the years ahead because Americans can’t be trusted. The deals that the United States signed become worthless, like the trade deals with Canada and Mexico that Donald Trump signed in his first term and disregarded in the second. No one wants to do business with you, with a person who approaches business in a mood of relentless bad faith.

No, it won’t reverse the trade deficit. It won’t boost manufacturing. It won’t boost U.S. exports. It won’t check American imports. And it won’t balance China. All of those things will not happen.

So here’s what will happen. First, we’re going to see slower economic growth. And that shows up in every economic model because everything that the Americans make that depends on inputs from the rest of the world, all of those things, those inputs become more expensive, and the goods become less competitive, and so you’re going to see a slowdown in growth. You’re going to see a slowdown in business investment, because the rules change all the time. Americans don’t know what to build, who to sell it to. They don’t know if they’ll have customers overseas for anything, and they don’t know whether foreigners will buy American goods, because the foreigners will be retaliated against. They’ll see a slowdown in business investment and a slowdown in growth.

You’re going to see the government having a much bigger role in economic life, picking winners and picking losers. One of the reasons that the United States moved away from tariffs as a way of funding the government back in the early 20th century was because it led to so much corruption as different interests bought their way into protection and favors from the United States government.

It creates privileged winners. And here’s one more thing it does, and this is maybe the most important of all: Once you see a tariff as a tax on those Americans least able to pay, it’s pretty hard to think of it as anything else. When the Trump people boast that they’re on their way to trillions of dollars of new revenue, understand that what they’re talking about is financing the tax cut for the rich that they passed just weeks ago in this one giant, big, boastful bill. And they’re going to offset a lot of those revenue losses that were given to the richest people in America by having a massive tax on the consumption of the poorest people in America. A tariff is a tax on the poorest people because it falls most heavily on goods.

Tariffs shift the burden of taxation onto the goods. They tend to fall most heavily on the least expensive goods, and they impose the greatest costs on those Americans who spend more of their incomes on goods, less on services, less on saving—those least able to pay. What we are seeing here is a massive redistribution of the fiscal burden of the United States, the tax burden of the United States, from those best able to pay [to] those least able to pay. And the whole thing is being mystified and disguised by appealing to people’s envy and spite and ignorance and mistrust of foreigners.

Trump is fooling you, trying to make you angry at the outside world for things that are happening, because he’s choosing to do them to make taxes fall more heavily on the average person, less heavily on those best able to pay, destroying the world trading system, severing the United States from allies. And all of this is advertised as a win. They advertise them as wins because they say, Look—the United States is imposing all these tariffs on Americans. And the other countries—the Japanese, the Europeans—they’re not doing the same to their own people. See? We win. Our tariff on them is higher than their tariff on us.

But all that that means is that the Trump administration is more willing to inflict pain on Americans than European and Japanese governments are willing to inflict pain on their people. Their governments are trying to protect their people from the consequences of American tariffs. The United States government is eagerly accepting the consequences of American tariffs for Americans. And why not?

Because once you understand that the whole purpose here of the Trump administration is to move the burden of taxes from themselves and their friends to those least able to pay, and to mobilize ignorance and hatred of foreigners and prejudice and team spirit as ways to disguise the pocket-picking that is really going on, then you see why they may call this a win. They win. You lose. And the you here is not just the ordinary person who needs to buy tomatoes or automobiles or any good that includes any foreign component, which is every good.

The losers here are the American economy as a whole, which will grow more slowly. The losers here are Americans looking for security in the world, because they will have fewer friends than allies. The losers here include future generations of Americans. We’re discovering that as crushingly as Trump raises tariffs on those least able to pay, it’s still not enough to compensate for all his big tax cuts everywhere—so the deficits and the debt that future generations of Americans must grow.

A question occurs: Given the harmfulness of tariffs to growth, to the whole economy, why are indicators of the economy doing pretty well? The stock market collapsed or sank on the first shock of Trump’s tariffs back in April, but now there are more and more tariffs, and yet the stock market seems to be revived and holding its own, at least the U.S. stock market. Now, the U.S. dollar has dropped against other currencies, so if you’re measuring your stock-market portfolio in euros or yen, you’re not as well off as you are if you just measured it in dollars. But still, the shock in dollars is not as big as you might expect. Why not a bigger shock?

I think one answer to that is that many investors are expecting the courts to strike down the Trump tariff program. In May of 2025, the United States Court of International Trade ruled that Trump had exceeded his authority by imposing all of these many different tariffs on his presidential say-so. And I think a lot of investors are betting that other courts, and ultimately the United States Supreme Court, will agree with the U.S. Court of International Trade that the tariffs exceed Trump’s authority. But if those bets are wrong, if the courts do—as they so often have done—appease Trump, accommodate Trump, go along with Trump, we’re going to be seeing a big shock, and soon and hard.

Trump is plundering the country, counting on hatred of foreigners and mistrust of foreigners as the emotional disguise that will allow him to plunder the country, and leaving everyone with a terrible bill and lower growth, fewer friends to be paid by this generation of Americans and the next. It’s a scandal. It’s a disgrace. But it’s the future.

And now my discussion with Douglas Irwin.

[Music]

Frum: Douglas Irwin is America’s leading historian of tariffs and trade. A professor at Dartmouth, he is the author of seven books on trade history, including the 2018 masterwork Clashing Over Commerce. Clashing Over Commerce won the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek award for the best book on economics and personal liberty.

I devoted most of the summer of 2023 to Clashing Over Commerce, and it repaid every minute. It’s a history of the whole flow of trade and tariffs in the United States, from the founding era to the present. It’s a sad statement that we need the highest wisdom of the finest minds to refute the ignorance of fools and the deceits of the malicious, but there it is. And here we are.

Doug Irwin, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Douglas Irwin: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Frum: Alright, I’m going to begin with some basics, and then I want to cover some historical issues that I think will be of value to people who feel a lot of the stream of events takes too much for granted. I think for many of us of a certain age, tariffs, like banking, were chapters of the history books we skipped over to get from the Civil War to the First World War. (Laughs.) And that was all ancient history. But now it’s the future.

So take us from the beginning. What is a tariff? What does it do? Who pays?

Irwin: Well, a tariff is a tax on imported goods. And it’s something the Constitution gives Congress the power to levy. In fact, one reason why we have the Constitution, in some sense, is because of the difficulty we had with trade policy in the 1790s under the Articles of Confederation—1780s, that is. So it’s a tax on imports.

It’s designed for one of three purposes I sort of emphasize in Clashing Over Commerce: revenue—so it’s a tax, so it raises revenue. Restriction—you might want to use the tariff to keep out foreign goods. Notice there’s a conflict between those two. If you want the revenue, you want the imports to keep coming in, you just levy the tax on those imports. If you want to keep the imports out, you raise the tax high enough; there’s not going to be much revenue, but you give space to domestic producers by keeping out those imports. And then the last one is reciprocity, which is sort of a bargaining chip. So throughout history, the United States has used tariffs to achieve all three of those objectives in various, different ways. But that’s essentially what it is.

Frum: You mentioned that the Constitution awards power over tariffs and trade to Congress. How is it that the president is announcing new whimsical tariffs, announcing them every week, removing them every week, adjusting them every week, giving deadlines? How is the president doing something that Congress is supposed to do, according to the Constitution? How did that happen?

Irwin: Well, we’ll get into this when we get into the ebbs and flows of trade-policy history. But in the 1930s, we shifted from a sort of Congress-dominated system of tariffs to the president. Congress started delegating powers over the tariff to the president, and that delegation has gone on since the 1930s. It’s gotten bigger and broader over time, largely, I think, because Congress trusted the president to act in the national interest and was a force for opening markets and liberalizing trade. But now, over time, the president has a lot of power over trade, and this president uses it very differently than previous presidents.

Frum: So Congress would’ve said, Look—we know we have a drinking problem. Here’s the keys to the liquor cabinet. You’re a responsible, sober adult. We know you will not foolishly and promiscuously swig the Curaçao. So over to you. And then it turns out they handed it over to a man who’s not only swigging the Curaçao, but mixing it with grain alcohol to make an extra-potent punch.

Irwin: (Laughs.) You said it much better than I could, yes.

Frum: And then we’re all splashing around.

Alright, I want to ask you some historical questions, because as there are people who are shameless enough or ignorant enough to defend what President Trump is doing in the trade realm. So let’s try to meet ignorance and malice with some knowledge. Let me start with a couple of basic arguments that you often hear. You hear them from the president; you hear from the people who influence the president.

As you point out in your book, the period from the Civil War to the Great Depression is a period of mostly high tariffs. There’s a little interruption along the way, but mostly very high tariffs from the Civil War to the Great Depression. And during that period, America rose to industrial greatness. So people will argue, Well, look—these two things happened at the same time. We had a lot of tariffs, and we rose to industrial greatness. It must be that the tariffs caused the rise to industrial greatness.You hear that a lot. What’s wrong with it?

Irwin: Well, it’s a classic case of correlation not being causation. So yes, the two went hand in hand, but there are a lot of other things going on between the Civil War and the Great Depression. We had massive immigration. We had massive capital accumulation—and we’ll get into some of the causes of those—but also this idea that the tariffs were causing that industrial growth. We also have the period before the Civil War. That’s a period in which 20 or 30 years before the Civil War, tariffs were going down, but the U.S. industrialized at exactly the same rate then as we did after the Civil War. So it’s not like the post–Civil War period was this tremendous industrial boom. It was. But we were also booming before the Civil War, when the tariffs were low. U.S. manufacturing was growing quite rapidly before the Civil War with those lower tariffs, as well. So right there, there’s sort of a bit of a problem with that idea that the tariffs were causing the growth.

But so many things are happening after the Civil War. I mean, one of the things that economic historians point to is that we had important banking legislation that really increased the return to saving. And so we had a massive savings-and-investment boom. And, of course, that was going somewhere. It was going into building railroads, in terms of building manufacturing industries. We had tremendous western expansion. A lot of the employment in manufacturing was by immigrants coming from Italy and elsewhere in Europe, not by native-born Americans. So between the capital accumulation, the massive immigration, the openness to capital flows, and the transfer of technology from the U.K., sorting out and trying to parse out exactly the contribution of the tariff to all that is very difficult.

And what people have found, including some recent work by some other economic historians, is that U.S. productivity growth was not particularly strong after the Civil War. We saw a lot of expansion in the service sector, transportation, improvements with the railroads, and what have you. But it’s not as though manufacturing was some sort of great productivity buster, or experienced some big sort of boom. And once again, the tariffs may have inhibited things as much as helped them, because a lot of our imports were intermediate goods.

Frum: Yeah. Well, I want, if I can supplement that with three points that Brad Lighthizers [sic]—and President Trump, when he’s trying to repeat what Brad Lighthizer says—miss.

Irwin: Yeah. Actually, Robert—Robert Lighthizer.

Frum: Oh, Robert Lighthizer. Thank you. I beg your pardon.

The three things they miss. The first is that the world in the era after the Civil War is becoming generally more protectionist. And so the United States was the largest area of free trade that was available anywhere on the planet. It was a bigger free-trade zone than Germany—I mean, Germany had high tariffs. France had high tariffs. Britain remained a free-trade country in the 19th century. But you could trade freely inside the United States over one of the largest trade spaces that existed in the world at that time.

And the second thing I think that people don’t give enough count to is: You know those other things you skipped over in the history book, along with the tariffs and banking, all of the protest movements and this agrarian discontent—that the tariffs were taxing the countryside in order to advantage the industrial areas, and especially the owners of industry, and people at the time noticed. And there was huge political instability as a result—that you had all of these protest movements now with all these picturesque names. But that the country was heading, and it was a period of extraordinary labor violence, of violence of other kinds. The tariff was the mother in many ways of those civil dissensions that then became much more peaceful in the years when the United States moved to a freer-trade system, where the proceeds of growth were shared much more fairly than they were shared during the high-tariff period.

Irwin: Absolutely. And you used that term mother. The phrase at the time was “The tariff is the mother of the trust.” So the tariff was not used to build up small businesses and increase employment. It was really not designed, but certainly helped out big business and insulated them from foreign competition, led to higher prices, and that led to a progressive movement that really complained about that high level of taxation that helped the urban elites and hurt the rural poor.

Frum: I want to now move to a slightly later period. This is a period that I think Americans of today know more about or hear more about, and that is the Great Depression and the famous Smoot-Hawley Tariff [Act]. One of the things that, again, the apologists for high tariffs will say is, Well, Smoot-Hawley didn’t cause the Great Depression. The Great Depression had already begun when Smoot-Hawley was imposed. And anyway, trade was already collapsing anyway, so you can’t blame Smoot-Hawley for it. So, Sorry, Wall Street Journal editorial page, which is always teaching people about Smoot-Hawley. The Smoot-Hawley tariff—which you’ve written two books about—was not the culprit and something else was to blame. What do you say to that error?

Irwin: Well, it’s certainly right I think that Smoot-Hawley did not cause the Great Depression. Milton Friedman wrote and Anna Schwartz wrote a book on the monetary history of the United States, and sort of conclusively showed that as a monetary-policy phenomena, very deflationary policies pursued by the Fed sort of under the gold standard. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have any impact whatsoever on the economy.

It did contract trade that lead to foreign retaliation against U.S. exports, so it’s not exactly a boom to the U.S. economy. It led to this downward spiral of world trade because other countries mimicked the U.S., not just to retaliate against us, but also in raising their own trade barriers. So the trade-to-GDP ratio of the world shrank. U.S. exporters—both manufacturers and farmers—were locked out of foreign markets. A lot of discrimination. And Canada, one of our largest trading partners, really hit back at the U.S. with retaliatory tariffs that hurt, once again, U.S. agriculture and other industries.

So it was not a good thing for the United States. And the question for economic historians has been: How much did it contribute to the depression? Not whether it was, you know, a major cause or provided some boost.

Frum: Well, I’m going to launch a theory of my own about how tariffs were to blame for the Great Depression, and tell me if you think this is too fanciful. Because I do think tariffs caused it, but not the Smoot-Hawley Tariff [Act] of 1930. It was the tariffs of the early 1920s, and we hear less about them because, frankly, the republicans in The Wall Street Journal who want to condemn Smoot-Hawley also want to save the memory of the Republican presidents of the 1920s—[Warren] Harding and [Calvin] Coolidge—and they don’t want to remember the tariffs that those guys were responsible for. But here’s the story I would tell about where the Great Depression came from.

So the world emerges from the First World War with massive debts, both the debts to pay for the war and then the debts to pay for the reparations that Germany owed to make up for the damage Germany did to Belgium, to France, and to other countries. So this enormous amount of debt, almost all of it owed to the United States, either directly or indirectly, the countries that had been ravaged by the war (Germany, Belgium, and France) and the countries that were left deeply indebted by the war, like Great Britain—the only way they could service those debts was by massive exports to the country to whom they owed the money: the United States. That was what happened after World War II so successfully, that all the countries that had been left impoverished by the war exported to get the dollars to pay for the things they needed from the United States, not only food, but capital goods, and after the First World War to service the debts.

What the United States did, instead of letting them export, was to impose in the early 1920s a pair of deadly tariffs. Coming out of the Great Depression of 1919, 1920, the world is hit by the war. It’s hit by the flu epidemic. It’s hit by the 1920 depression. They need to export. The United States lays on these massive tariffs. Belgium, Germany, France, Britain, the others cannot export to the United States, but they still need the dollars. So what do they do? They borrow them. They borrow them on a breathtaking scale. So to the First World War debt, we add the whole new 1920s reconstruction debt, all of it forced by the inability to export to the United States. They had to get dollars. You either sell, or you borrow; they borrowed instead. And it was that pile-up of debt that was not the direct cause of the Great Depression, but it was the precondition that when the Great Depression started, or when the recession started in 1929–30, that it was the match that was thrown on that giant pyre of preexisting debt, and that was the origin of the Great Depression. Smoot-Hawley made it worse. But if you are not interested in saving the reputation of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert [Hoover] and Warren Harding, you can face up to that the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of the 1920s should be as famous as Smoot-Hawley, and I think they’re the culprit.

And so while not the Smoot-Hawley tariff was to blame, tariffs in general were the cause. And the people of the period after the Second World War knew that, and that’s why, basically, when you’re rebuilding from World War II, Americans went to the big book at the library that said, What did we do in the 1910s and 1920s? Let’s do the opposite and see if it works better. And it did. The United States switched to a free-trade policy, allowed the ravaged countries to export the United States, and the result was the extraordinary expansion of growth.

What do you think of that fanciful theory?

Irwin: No, actually there’s a lot to that, in particular, identifying the Fordney-McCumber Tariff of 1922 as being a big culprit for the instability in the 1920s, which of course fed into the 1930s.

So you’re right. This is a period—this is an opportunity for the U.S. Coming out of World War I, we could have taken a different stance in terms of isolationism, protectionism, immigration policy. Instead, what the Republican Party did is revert to where we had been in the late 19th century. I mean, even William McKinley, who President Trump often refers to—he, as late as 1901, wanted to shift the Republicans and shift the country onto a different track in terms of trade policy. We could have done that after World War I, and we did not.

We reverted to form. We’ve raised tariffs. And you’re absolutely right—it made a bad situation worse. It compounded all the problems that Europe was facing. You’re absolutely right—they had to earn dollars to pay back their debts during World War I. We made that more difficult, and the 1920s was maybe the Roaring ’20s for the U.S. in part. But for most of the Western Europe, it was not a good decade. They were trying to recover, and we sort of squelched that effort. And of course, when we have the monetary shocks of the late 1920s, early 1930s, we’re already in a bad situation, and it just compounds the disaster.

Frum: Can I put in a little historical footnote here? Because everyone uses the phrase Roaring ’20s as if it was coined as a compliment. And that’s not true. That’s another mistake. So the phrase Roaring ’20s, which referred to the big stock market that was in 1920s, is a formation. When you go by sailing ship from Britain to Australia, as you round the lower left-hand corner of Australia, you pick up—you’re at the 40th parallel of the Earth’s geography, and there are huge and very fast winds there. And so sailors in the sailing-ship days referred to this area underneath Australia as the Roaring ’40s—that you went zoom, shooting along the southern shore of Australia from the lower left-hand corner around the horn, where Melbourne and Sydney were.

But the Roaring ’40s were also incredibly dangerous. They roared because the winds literally roared. And so when the stock market began to be whipped around by all the crazy tariffs and economic policies in the 1920s, nervous people, not as a compliment, called it the “Roaring ’20s” in reference to this danger to sailing ships of the Roaring ’40s underneath Australia. And then, you know, we now think of it as, Oh, it just meant good times for everybody. The ’20s are not a good time for American farmers, at a time when half the country lived on agriculture, and they’re not a good time for American export industries, which found European markets lost to them.

Certain industries benefited. There was the new technology of the automobile, the new technology of the radio. But just, I think there’s just, like, a lot of mythmaking here—that a period that was unstable and entered into a disaster gets remembered too fondly because people have forgotten about the sailing ship, which is where it got its name from. (Laughs.)

Irwin: Right. I agree. It’s a very misleading metaphor for the U.S. economy in the 1920s, because as you point out so appropriately, the farm sector, which is a third to half of the U.S. economy, did very poorly during that decade. They had a lot of debts coming out of World War I. They had overexpanded. They lost markets with the recovery. And Smoot-Hawley Tariff [Act] in some sense was some very poorly designed attempt to help out farmers. Of course, it wouldn’t have been able to do that, and it didn’t do that. But the economy was not doing so well for a lot of Americans in the 1920s.

Frum: Alright, let me pick up with a third historical episode, and that’s one closer to the present.

So the Chinese Communists come out of the disasters of Mao Zedong’s rule and decide to reform their economy. At first, they do it cautiously and slowly, first confined to the farm sector. Then they move to industry. But by the 1990s, they’re allowing private property, private management in industry, as well as farming. And they’re beginning to become an export power, and they become very much a rapid export power after the year 2000, and goods pour out of China to the rest of the world.

And a paper published in the early 2010s looked at the areas that were exposed to Chinese imports in the early 2000s. David Autor, I believe, was the name of the principal author of the paper—I believe there are others—and wrote a paper called “The China Shock.” So can we talk about the China shock? We are invited to believe that Americans are worse off today than they were 30 years ago because of trade. You and I were there, and it doesn’t seem true if you were there and remember what it was like, but tell us about the China shock and what lessons should we really learn.

Irwin: Well, first of all, your characterization of the paper is absolutely right. They’re looking at relative differences across different regions of the country, not looking at whether overall employment’s going up or overall employment’s going down, which is often how it’s interpreted.

But you’re right. So the China shock, sort of, there two phases to it: The 1990s, then the 2008 period, in particular, is when there’s a big ramp-up in U.S. imports from China. In some sense, they’re absolutely right. If we’re importing more of certain labor-intensive goods, we’d expect those industries located in the United States to do relatively poorly. They’re facing a lot more competition. We saw that with apparel—apparel employment goes way down. Of course, apparel employment is relatively low-wage employment located in the South, but I think one of the things they highlighted was that it’s the regional concentration of those impacts of Chinese imports that proved particularly important. But once again, that’s missing the overall picture for what’s happening to the overall economy.

During the 2000s, coming out of the recession of 2000–2001, the unemployment rate is going down during this period of the China shock. We have many industries expanding employment. So this is not exactly a period of the whole economy being ravaged by China. It’s very much—there are certain particular sectors in certain parts of the country that’re not doing well. But the country overall was doing reasonably well. In fact, it’s only in retrospect that we sort of identified the China shock. At the time, a lot of firms were not filing antidumping complaints against Chinese imports. A lot of labor groups were not really upset about what China was doing. So it’s only in retrospect we see, aha, that maybe Chinese imports played a bigger role during that period than we thought.

One thing that’s missing, too, in a lot of the studies here is the important role of the exchange rate. The U.S. had urged China in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, in the late 1990s, not to depreciate or devalue its currency. So they did that because the U.S. requested that, and they kept it fixed. Arguably, this is a time when the renminbi should have been appreciating rather than remaining fixed. And I think that that had a bigger role to play in terms of how we think about that period than sometimes suggested.

Frum: Yeah, this gets at one of my biggest, maybe my single biggest, grievances or complaints, about how trade policy is misrepresented to people who don’t study it closely. So the story that we’re invited to believe—and it’s a story that goes back to writers about trade, going back to Roman times, literally Roman times—what happens is you have a lot of extravagance in the imperial capital, blame especially the women, and they want foreign fripperies and foreign luxuries. And because they want all these foreign fripperies and foreign luxuries, they import too much. And because they import too much, capital leaves the country. And you get poor.

But the story is always told that the driver is trade, and this is ultimately a moral story of overconsumption. And in the modern terms, we say, Look—we have all these big deficits, and most people don’t know.I mean, not only does Trump, but his vice president, [J. D.] Vance, who reads books, often, either accidentally or willfully, mixes up the trade deficit and the fiscal deficit. The fiscal deficit is: How much does the government tax? How much does the government spend? Trade is: How much merchandise does the United States bring into the country? How much merchandise does it sell out?

The trade deficit often overlooks the fact that when the United States sells insurance abroad, that’s an export. When foreign students come to the United States to study in American universities, that’s also an export. That’s a way of earning money on international markets. It’s confusing because you’re earning it on your own soil, but in fact, you’re selling to foreigners. They just come to you—tourism, in the same way: They come to you to consume the benefit, but it’s a benefit you are selling to foreigners.

So if exports are good, those are also exports. Although trade deficits don’t always properly account for them, because people often focus on the merchandise trade deficit, not the whole balance of goods and services. But they always want to tell this moral story of: You overconsume, and therefore, you get capital flows when the truth—and this is my grievance—the story is really the other way around, oftentimes, that the United States borrows a lot. And because it borrows a lot—partly for good reasons. It’s the most attractive place in the world to invest, so capital flows in in order to invest in American industry, which is good. But also governments, especially the present one, do not tax as much as they want to spend. And so again, it has to suck in capital to fund the government. And when capital flows in—well, you tell us what happens next.

Irwin: Well, when capital comes in, we have a, quote-unquote, “capital-account surplus,” where foreign residents are buying U.S. assets, they’re buying U.S. assets rather than buying U.S. goods. So we’ll have a current-account deficit, as we’ll have a deficit on our trade goods and services. Although, as you point out correctly, we have a surplus. We’re a net exporter of services—it’s not enough to counteract the goods deficit, but we’ll have a deficit on trading goods that is the mirror image of that capital inflow to the U.S. because, once again, U.S. rate of return on assets is very high. We’re a very safe country to invest, and foreign residents want to invest in the U.S.

So my grievance here—and this is one that goes way back in U.S. history—is that we either have trade surplus or trade deficits. And what’s interesting is: In the 1960s, there’s so many people in the U.S. complaining about the U.S. trade surplus, because once again, if you take that mirror image, what that means is capital is leaving the U.S. The U.S. multinationals are making investments in Europe and elsewhere, and people were complaining, Why aren’t multinationals investing in the U.S.? Why are we investing in other countries?

So my view has always been: It doesn’t matter whether you’ve run a trade surplus or trade deficits; people are going to complain, either that foreigners are buying up too much of our assets, or we’re not investing enough home, and we’re, you know, buying assets abroad.

But set that aside—we blame trade on other countries. We’re not to blame at all. So the fact that we have large fiscal deficits, actually, that is related to our trade deficit. If we want to reduce the trade deficit, reducing the U.S. fiscal deficit would be one thing we could do to address that problem. But going back to Thomas Jefferson, one of the first reports he issued as secretary of state, complaining about all the policies of other countries that affect U.S. trade without looking at: What are we doing with respect to trade? It’s easier to blame the other guy than ourselves.

Frum: I worked for a while for Bob Bartley, of The Wall Street Journal. Although I complained a little bit earlier about the Journal and its valorization of Harding and Coolidge, nonetheless, they have been heroes of the fight for free trade and against Trump too. They’ve been very outspoken, so kudos to them for that. But somebody once asked Bob Bartley, What should the United States do about the trade deficit? And he said, Very simple. I have a very direct plan that’ll completely address the problem: I think we should stop collecting the statistics.

Irwin: (Laughs.) Yes. Yeah.

Frum: And he then went on to explain: You know who has the biggest trade deficit of any place on Earth? Manhattan island—everything flows in. And the United States and Manhattan, it doesn’t send ball bearings out; it doesn’t send steel plates. But somehow, Manhattan island manages to keep on making a living because it is making things that the world wants: intellectual products, insurance, advertising, all kinds of nontangible goods. And in return, the planet sends it fruits and vegetables and fancy sofas and subway cars and everything that is consumed in Manhattan island.

But the real point here is: When, as Trump does, you incur, put the United States on a path to unprecedented peacetime borrowing ever, you are guaranteeing that that is going to be equalized by the collapse of American exports into the world.

Irwin: Absolutely. Absolutely.

I was going to say, what is true in Manhattan is true in my little town here of Hanover, New Hampshire. We don’t produce cars. We don’t produce carpeting. We don’t produce just about any of the goods we consume here. We have a reasonable standard of living because we export educational services here at Dartmouth. And so once again, that trade enables us to consume a lot more because we specialize in one activity and export as a result of that.

I just want to say something about The Wall Street Journal too. They, in addition to not collecting the statistics, and I said that it’s absolutely right that if we didn’t collect economic statistics, we would still know if there’s inflation. We’d see it every day. We’d still know if the economy’s doing well or not: GDP growth. We’d feel it in terms of our own jobs and income. If we have a trade deficit or surplus, I don’t think we’d know. It’s only because we have the statistics that we know.

But my favorite one line from The Wall Street Journal editorial page, also about the trade deficit, is the line, “The best way to think about the trade deficit is not to think about it.”

Frum: (Laughs.) Yeah.

[Content truncated due to length...]

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Sydney Sweeney is inexplicably reclining and also buttoning up her jeans. She’s wearing a jacket with nothing underneath. She’s attempting to sell some denim to women, and appears to be writhing while doing so. In a breathy voice, the actor recites the following ad copy as the camera pans up her body: “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality, and even eye color.” When the camera lands on her eyes, which are blue, she says, “My jeans are blue.” The commercial is for American Eagle. The whole thing is a lot.

The jeans/genes play is a garden-variety dad pun. But when uttered by Sweeney—a blond, blue-eyed actor whose buxomness and comfort in her own skin seems to drive everyone just a little bit insane—it becomes something else. Sweeney does not speak much about her politics (for interested parties, there are potential clues, such as a 2020 tweet supporting Black Lives Matter and a mention of having conservative relatives), but this hasn’t stopped the right wing from framing her as one of their own. Her mere appearance in a plunging neckline on Saturday Night Live led the right-wing blogger Richard Hanania to declare that “wokeness is dead.” Meanwhile, speaking about the American Eagle ad in a TikTok post that’s been liked more than 200,000 times, one influencer said, “It’s literally giving Nazi propaganda.”

For some, the ad copy about parents and offspring sounded less like a dictionary entry and more like a 4chan post—either politically obtuse or outrightly nefarious. Across platforms, people expressed their frustration that “Sydney Sweeney is advertising eugenics.” One of the posters offered context for their alarm, arguing that “historic fascist regimes have weaponized the feminine ideal,” ultimately linking femininity to motherhood and reproduction. Another said that, in the current political climate, a fair-skinned white woman musing about passing down her traits is “uncreative and unfunny.”(To further complicate matters, before the controversy, American Eagle announced that a butterfly insignia on the jeans represented domestic-violence awareness and that the company would donate 100 percent of profits from “the Sydney Jean” to a nonprofit crisis text line.) Are you tired? I’m tired!

The trajectory of all this is well rehearsed at this point. Progressive posters register their genuine outrage. Reactionaries respond in kind by cataloging that outrage and using it to portray their ideological opponents as hysterical, overreactive, and out of touch. Then savvy content creators glom on to the trending discourse and surf the algorithmic waves on TikTok, X, and every other platform. Yet another faction emerges: People who agree politically with those who are outraged about Sydney Sweeney but wish they would instead channel their anger toward actual Nazis. All the while, media outlets survey the landscape and attempt to round up these conversations into clickable content—search Google’s “News” tab for Sydney Sweeney, and you’ll get the gist. (Even this article, which presents individual posts as evidence of broader outrage, unavoidably plays into the cycle.)

Although the Sweeney controversy is predictable, it also shows how the internet has completely disordered political and cultural discourse. Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement. People are not quite talking past one another, but clearly nobody’s listening to anyone else.

Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding on the context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.

Unfortunately for us all, our institutions, politicians, influencers, celebrities, and corporations—virtually everyone with a smartphone—operate inside this ecosystem. It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape—all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.

Did American Eagle know what it was doing when it made the Sweeney advertisement? The company hasn’t addressed the controversy, but the ad—not unlike the famous and controversial Brooke Shields Calvin Klein campaign it appears to be playing off of—seems like it was perhaps meant to walk a line, to be just controversial enough to garner some attention. Casting Sweeney to begin with supports this theory. Her image has been co-opted by the right, accurately or not, in part because of where she’s from (the Mountain West) and some of her hobbies (fixing cars). Even her figure has become a cultural stand-in for the idea, pushed by conservative commentators, that Americans should be free to love boobs. (Sweeney’s cultural associations with conservatism have also been helped along by an Instagram post she made in 2022 featuring photos from a “surprise hoedown” party for her mother’s 60th birthday; online sleuths found separate photos depicting guests in MAGA-style hats and “Blue Lives Matter” gear, which led to a backlash.) A marketing executive with enough awareness of Sweeney’s image and the political and cultural conversation around her might have figured that an ad featuring her talking about her good jeans would draw eyeballs.

This does not mean that some of the outrage isn’t culturally significant. Those who have spoken out about the advertisement aren’t doing so in a vacuum: Fears over eugenics creeping into mainstream culture are empirically grounded—just glance at some aspects of the very public and loud pronatalist movements, which have been supported by influential people such as Elon Musk. Proud eugenicists have found purchase in mainstream culture on platforms such as X. The Trump administration is making white-supremacist-coded posts on X and enacting cruel immigration policies, complete with military-style ICE raids and imprisonment in a makeshift gulag in the Florida swamps. That’s the real context that the ad was dropped into. It makes sense that, as one commentator noted, the ad might feel like it is part of “an unbridled cultural shift toward whiteness.”

But all of this reality is stripped away by opportunists across the internet. The right-wing-media ecosystem is excellent at cherry-picking examples that look, to their audiences, like egregious examples of so-called snowflake behavior. MAGA influencers and Fox News prime-time segments feed off this type of content, which allows their audiences to feel morally superior. Very real concerns about the political direction of the country and the emboldening of bigots are reduced to: Democrats are triggered by cleavage. The right-wing-media apparatus has every incentive to go at the Sweeney stuff, as the MAGA coalition struggles to distract its base from Donald Trump’s Epstein-files debacle.

But it’s not only the right that cherry-picks. In their rush to publish viral news stories explaining the controversy, the media credulously grab examples of supposed outrage—regardless of whether the accounts in question have tens of thousands of followers (and actual influence) or just a handful. One BuzzFeed story quoted an Instagram comment from a user who is not a public figure, just a person with 119 followers. This kind of amplification, where nonpublic figures become stand-ins for public opinion, is a dangerous game. It distorts the conversation, sending a flood of attention to posts from small accounts, often in the form of other users who pile on and excoriate the original poster. In turn, this leads to the otherwise inconsequential post taking on the appearance of relevance, causing more outrage.

What ends up happening in these scenarios is that everyone gets very mad, in a way that allows for a touch of moral superiority and is also good for creating online content. The Sweeney ad, like any good piece of discourse, allows everyone to exploit a political and cultural moment for different ends. Some of it is well intentioned. Some of it is cynical. Almost all of it persists because there are deeper things going on that people actually want to fight about.

The polarized discourse obscures the real possibility that the majority of people encountering this ad are uninvested, passive consumers. Rather than having any conviction at all about the entire affair, they’re consuming this discourse the way that people consume sports content about player infighting in a locker room or the way that people read celebrity gossip. Perhaps this is why American Eagle hasn’t issued a panicked statement about the ad or why its stock price, barring a small fluctuation, hasn’t changed much. For some, the stakes are high; for others, this is content to be consumed in a moment of boredom.

The internet loves Sweeney—not as one might love, say, a person, but as one might love an object, an atomic unit of content. Her image is fawned over but also analyzed, co-opted, and monetized. She is savvy enough to get a piece of this action too—hence selling her bathwater and these jeans. But the internet loving you, it should be said, is not often a good thing. Its desire is limitless. It ingests a person and slowly turns them into a trend, a main character, a thing that people struggle to speak normally about.

Perhaps the impulse to label these predictable culture-war moments as discourse reflects a need to make all the anger and fighting mean something. Discourse suggests a process that feels productive, maybe even democratic. But there’s nothing productive about the end result of our information environment. What we’re consuming isn’t discourse; it’s algorithmic grist for the mills that power the platforms we’ve uploaded our conversations onto. The grist is made of all of our very real political and cultural anxieties, ground down until they start to feel meaningless. The only thing that matters is that the machine keeps running. The wheel keeps turning, leaving everybody feeling like they’ve won and lost at the same time.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The social-justice movement that began in earnest with Trayvon Martin’s shooting in 2012, and culminated eight years later, after George Floyd’s murder, once looked unstoppable. By the summer of 2020, a slew of recorded killings of Black people had seemed to convince a pivotal bloc of Americans that the persistence of racial injustice was both inarguable and intolerable.

Yet the ensuing riots—and the disorder they appeared to countenance—prefigured a surge of white grievance that still hasn’t subsided. Throughout the summer of 2020, many on the left exalted lawlessness and violence as pardonable offenses, if not political virtues. Within a few months, this impulse had migrated to the right, yielding even worse damage to the liberal order, most notably on January 6, 2021. The mass unrest of the preceding year certainly did not cause the sacking of the Capitol. But that winter siege amounted to an outgrowth of the summer revolt—the rotten fruit of imitation.

This article has been adapted from Williams’s forthcoming book.

At the moment of his death, two George Floyds came into public view. First, there was the mortal man, the son and brother, unemployed when law enforcement encountered him dozing in a parked car that long May weekend in Minneapolis. Methamphetamines and fentanyl flowed through his system. Moments earlier, he had allegedly passed a counterfeit banknote, which even the cashier seemed embarrassed to report. This George Floyd had survived a bout of COVID-19, only to be asphyxiated in broad daylight by a police officer he’d once worked with at a nightclub. The mortal man’s biography fixed him in a specific time, when the coronavirus pandemic—and Donald Trump’s mismanagement of it—had primed the nation for protest.

Then there’s the immortal George Floyd, whose last breaths exist in a wretched loop that can be conjured on our screens. The man spawned a meme, as Richard Dawkins defined the term—an idea that spreads by means of imitation. In a 10-minute-and-eight-second clip, many Americans found evidence of an idea that had long simmered in the national psyche: By perpetrating violence, the state forfeits its legitimacy and must be resisted, even if that means inflicting violence in return. This immortal Floyd was put to death by horizontal crucifixion in a midwestern Golgotha. A man who died for all Americans on that squalid pavement, not asking why his father had forsaken him but calling for his deceased mother instead.

[David A. Graham: George Floyd’s murder changed Americans’ views on policing]

Floyd’s killing inspired a summer of revolt that seemed, to much of the country, obviously justified. The postracial promise of the Barack Obama era had subsided. Some Black Americans and many more of their supporters saw little hope of achieving equality, let alone safety, without rebellion. The following January, this same underlying idea—that the unheard must speak through violence—was used to justify terrible wrong. (A different group of Americans naturally regarded that wrong as indisputably right.) In this way, the summer of 2020 and the siege of the Capitol are fratricidal twins. They imbued all factions of American society with antipathy and certitude, a perilous combination that continues to touch virtually every aspect of our public lives, and much of our private ones also.

During the season of rebellion that followed Floyd’s death, nearly 8,000 Black Lives Matter rallies took place across the nation—not to mention the mass protests that erupted in places as far away as Paris, Amsterdam, London, Seoul, Taiwan, and Helsinki. Millions of Americans rose up, disgusted by what they saw, taking part in what was likely the largest demonstration against racism in the history of humanity.

Hundreds of the protests in the United States involved violence or property destruction, or both—a fact that much of the media addressed by noting that most of the protests were peaceful. That incessant refrain was true, but it obscured the extent of the bedlam that Americans of all political persuasions were witnessing. In Minnesota, the Twin Cities alone incurred some $500 million in damage.

Much of this chaos was unrelated to racial injustice. In New York City, one week after Floyd’s death, “hundreds of people who had no apparent connection to the protests commanded the streets of Manhattan’s SoHo district,” The Intercept reported. “They looted businesses, and robbed each other, with impunity. Burglar alarms blended with the roaring of getaway engines, the chaotic medley punctuated every few moments by tumbling plywood, crashing plate glass, and grating steel. Then a gunshot went off, as a 21-year-old man was shot.” That same night, an off-duty security guard told a New York Times reporter, “I don’t think this has anything to do with Black Lives Matter. It’s just chaos. People are just using this as an excuse to act crazy.” The reporter noted that “the man declined to give his name, because he, too, was looting.”

Why did all this come to pass in the summer of 2020 but not after any number of previous killings? In 2014, a New York City police officer, Daniel Pantaleo, dragged the unarmed Eric Garner to the sidewalk for the crime of peddling loose cigarettes, compressing Garner’s windpipe beneath his forearm, deafening himself to the dying man’s protests. That was when Americans first heard the phrase I can’t breathe, which Floyd would echo in Minneapolis (and protesters in Paris would learn to chant in English).

Two years later, Philando Castile bled out on Facebook Live in front of his girlfriend and her daughter. Castile had done nothing wrong; in fact he’d done everything right, calmly announcing after being pulled over that he was carrying a licensed firearm. Protests broke out when a jury found the cop who’d shot Castile not guilty, but they didn’t compare to what was coming.

[Sue Rahr: The myth propelling America’s violent police culture]

These are just two examples from a long list of Black men, women, and children whose outrageous deaths could well have triggered sustained nationwide protest. But none of them did—not until the pandemic overturned American life. By May 2020, many of us were sidelined from our daily routines, homeschooling and working remotely or panicking about not working, anxious about a juvenile president whose ineptitude had turned lethal.

That’s when a fatal confrontation in Georgia came across our screens. Ahmaud Arbery, a young Georgia man, had been ambushed and shot while jogging in a predominantly white neighborhood. A few weeks after Arbery was killed, Kentucky police broke into the home of a young medic named Breonna Taylor and shot her to death. Then the turning point: Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck.

“To draw momentous conclusions from a single video shot on the sidewalks of Minneapolis might seem excessive,” the author Paul Berman wrote in the journal Liberties.“Yet that is how it is with the historic moments of overnight political conversion.” Berman cited the case of Anthony Burns, who’d fled slavery in Virginia and been captured in Boston, where his ensuing trial inspired protests that drew national attention and galvanized the abolitionist movement. “There were four million slaves in 1854,” Berman wrote, “but the arrest of a single one proved to be the incendiary event.”

For a significant portion of the American left and center—and even some of the right—the possibility that the country had a racial sickness suddenly seemed undeniable. Many in this group were white people aware of the disproportionate toll COVID-19 was taking on communities they did not belong to. In those early months of the pandemic, whatever illusions these Americans may have had about the robustness of their society, and the general direction of progress within it, was obliterated.

Secular social-justice rhetoric took on a religious fervor. In particular, “whiteness” was reconceived as an original sin. Adherents of this idea became convinced that they were implicated in a constellation of racism and implicit bias. And they believed that these structures had allowed a madman like Trump to hazard American lives with the same lack of concern that a policeman evinced as he knelt on the neck of a handcuffed, writhing civilian.

These Americans felt the need to revolt against something. While Trump and his supporters rebelled against stay-at-home orders, progressives found their own outlet for rebellion in the protest against police brutality. They saw their opponents on the right as exacerbating a scourge that disproportionately killed Black people, whose lives they saw themselves as fighting to save. This dichotomy opened a furious new front in intra-white status jockeying. It created a renewed opportunity for “those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites,” as Reihan Salam wrote in 2018, “to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites.”

An understandable and even noble regard for the health and safety of Black communities metastasized into something else: an oppressive moral panic in response to Floyd’s murder that chased after all real and perceived racial inequity, and resorted to violence and property destruction to make its argument. It helped spawn a counterreaction that America still hasn’t escaped.

I’ve rarely felt farther from America than when I was hunched over my smartphone in Paris, watching dozens of people scale the sides of the Capitol.

As I witnessed the event in real time—and replayed clips over and over again—I was struck by its artificiality. Rioters wore costumes, draping themselves in tawdry Trump paraphernalia and Stars and Stripes; some came dressed as Founding Fathers. Many wore expressions of disbelief as they meandered the halls of Congress, marveling like tourists amid the pandemonium. Others filmed themselves—simply, it seemed, to prove to themselves that all of this was really happening.

That day reminded me of the “society of the spectacle” described by the 20th-century sociologistGuy Debord, in which “everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.” Photos and videos of the melee in Washington began to stand in for the whole of American society, a memeified performance of the country’s divisions, which in turn supercharged them. “The spectacle is not a collection of images,” Debord wrote, “but a social relation between people, mediated by images.”

[Quinta Jurecic: January 6 still happened]

Perhaps no American showman has better understood the power of spectacle than Trump. Reality, filtered through his will, amounts to little more than a two-dimensional ruse—a “stolen” election, say—to market to the public. The insurrection, whipped up by internet conspiracies and spurious videos of “ballot suitcases,” was a manifestation of a much larger and more sustained assault on truth—what the historian Christopher Lasch identified half a century ago as America’s “pervasive air of unreality.” The rise of mass media has transformed life into a series of “impressions recorded and reproduced” by modern technologies, he wrote.

Today, the tendency to flatten and distort reality extends far beyond Trump, and includes large and influential swaths of the progressive left. Some of the members of the January 6 mob, such as the Proud Boys and other organized militias, had prepared for armed revolt—standing by, as the president had instructed them to do. Many more, however, were neither organized nor trained. They had watched the riots and looting in Ferguson, Minneapolis, Kenosha, Portland, Seattle, and many other theaters of open lawlessness. And they had witnessed a large share of the country pardon these rebellions, even celebrate them.

It is fantastical to presume that such sustained chaos—so regularly portrayed as “mostly peaceful protest”—would exert no influence over the American psyche at a time of heightened tension and pandemic. The right-wing insurrection on January 6 was but the intensification of a pattern already visible on the social-justice left: the belief that one’s own moral clarity confers the license to storm the streets the moment political institutions disappoint us. It was a form of hubris for the left to cast its own cause as so righteous that even lawlessness became a kind of virtue. One can easily imagine that the populist right learned from this tendency—or found justification in it—after having endured the previous summer’s unrelenting mayhem.

Today, lawlessness and spectacle have become a philosophy of government. The second Trump administration has deported American citizens and turned undocumented immigrants into grotesque fodder for the basest social-media engagement. While the president defies court orders and usurps congressional authority, his supporters excuse him with apparent ethical certitude.

The arc of the American moral universe, wherever it ultimately bends, has been warped by the competing pressure of a social-justice movement that has grown impatient with the liberal project, and a reactionary populism that both feeds off and weaponizes that impatience. The result is a politics—and a society—dominated by grief and fury. One day, these passions erupt in Minnesota. Later, they rage through Washington, D.C. They can blind as well as ennoble, and we typically don’t know which until the hour is late.

This article has been adapted from Thomas Chatterton Williams’s forthcoming book, Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse.

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In theory, the proposition seems foolproof: Everyone hates the taxman and loves to keep their money, so a tax cut must be politically popular.

But Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act has tested the theory and found it wanting. A new Wall Street Journal poll shows that more than half of Americans oppose the law, which cuts taxes for many Americans while reducing government spending. That result is in line with other polling. The data journalist G. Elliott Morris notes that only one major piece of legislation enacted since 1990 was nearly so unpopular: the 2017 tax cuts signed by President Donald Trump.

The response to the 2017 cuts was fascinating. Americans grasped that the wealthy would benefit most from the law, but surveys showed that large swathes of the population incorrectly believed that they would not get a break. “If we can’t sell this to the American people then we should be in another line of work,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said at the time. Americans agreed, giving Democrats control of the House a year later.

If tax cuts are no longer political winners, that’s a major shift in American politics. McConnell’s sentiment reflected the orthodoxy in both parties for more than four decades. Ronald Reagan won the presidency in 1980 by promising to cut taxes, which he did—in both 1981 and 1986. The first cut was broadly popular; the second had plurality support. His successor, George H. W. Bush, told voters while campaigning, “Read my lips: no new taxes,” and his eventual assent to tax hikes while in office was blamed in part for his 1992 defeat. The next GOP president—his son, George W.—made popular tax cuts. Democrats Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were careful to back higher income taxes only on the wealthy.

Although separating Trump’s own low approval from the way the public feels about any particular policy he pursues is difficult, the old consensus may just no longer hold. A few factors might explain the shift. First, thanks to 45 years of reductions, the overall tax burden is a lot lower than it was when Reagan took office, especially for wealthy taxpayers. In 1980, the top marginal individual tax rate—what the highest earners paid on their top tranche of income—was 70 percent; it had been as high as 92 percent, in 1952 and 1953. In 2024, it was 37 percent, applying only to income greater than $609,350. Since 1945, the average effective tax rate has dropped significantly for the top 1 percent and 0.01 percent of earners, while staying basically flat for the average taxpayer, according to the Tax Policy Center. The top corporate tax rate has also dropped from a high of 52.8 percent, in 1968 and 1969, to 21 percent, in 2024.

Second, and not unrelatedly, income inequality has risen sharply. Although the gap between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us has stabilized in the past few years, it remains well above historical averages. Voters aren’t interested in subsidizing even-plusher lifestyles for the richest Americans. That’s especially true when tax cuts are paired with cuts to government-assistance programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. Majorities of people in polls say Trump’s policy bill will mostly help the rich and hurt the poor, and they are correct, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Third, Republicans have argued for years that tax cuts are good policy because they generate enough growth to pay for themselves. This effect is known as the Laffer Curve, named after the influential conservative economist Art Laffer, and it allows supposed fiscal conservatives to justify tax cuts that increase the deficit in the short term. The problem is that it isn’t true. Reagan’s tax cuts didn’t pay for themselves, nor did W. Bush’s, nor did Trump’s first-term cuts. These cuts won’t either. Voters also consistently worry about the national debt and deficit, and today even liberal economists who wrote those concerns off in the past are sounding alarms, citing the cost of interest payments on the debt and concerns about the debt as a percentage of GDP.

This points to a future problem: Even if voters have soured on tax cuts, that doesn’t mean they are willing to endorse tax increases. As my colleague Russell Berman explained to me back in May, Republicans felt pressure to pass the budget bill, lest the first-term Trump tax cuts expire—which voters would hate, and which could hurt the economy. (Those cuts were time-limited as part of procedural chicanery.) And few politicians are willing to run on raising taxes. Most Republicans have signed a pledge not to raise taxes. Trump’s tariffs are a tax, and he made them central to his campaign, but he also falsely insisted that Americans wouldn’t pay their cost. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats have in recent cycles vowed to raise taxes on the very wealthy but generally rejected increases for anyone else.

This math won’t work out forever. At some point, Americans will have to reconcile the national debt, their desire for social services, and their love of low taxes. It will take a brave politician to tell them that.

Related:

Why don’t most Americans realize they’re getting tax cuts for Christmas? (From 2017)Congressional Republicans vs. reality

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The corrupt bargain behind Gaza’s catastropheThe FBI’s leaders “have no idea what they’re doing.”The Pentagon against the think tanks, by Tom NicholsWhy marriage survives

Today’s News

A gunman killed four people and critically injured another in a shooting at a building in Midtown Manhattan yesterday evening. He was found dead, and police say a note in his wallet indicated that he may have targeted the NFL’s headquarters.

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a revocation of its 2009 finding that greenhouse gases threaten public health, in an effort to end federal climate regulations under the Clean Air Act. The proposal seeks to remove emissions limits for cars, power plants, and oil and gas operations.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s lawyers said today that Maxwell, who was convicted of child sex trafficking and other crimes, would be willing to testify before Congress under certain conditions, including receiving immunity and the questions in advance. The House Oversight Committee rejected the request.

Evening Read

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

Homes Still Aren’t Designed for a Body Like Mine

By Jessica Slice

Seven years ago, while sitting in my eighth-floor apartment with my toddler, I heard a voice over the intercom: Our building had a gas leak, and we needed to evacuate. A few weeks prior, a coffee shop down the street had exploded from a gas leak, killing two people and injuring at least 25. Terror struck me: Our elevators were powered down—and I use a wheelchair. I was trapped, unable to take myself and my child to safety.

The fire department quickly determined that it was a false alarm. Still, I didn’t stop shaking for hours. After a similar episode a few months later, my husband, David, and I bought a duffel bag the size of a human. We invited our neighbors over for pastries and asked if anyone would be willing to help carry me out during an emergency; my toddler could ride in the bag with me. A few neighbors agreed, but I couldn’t ignore that my survival—and that of my child—was contingent on who else might be at home, and who might remember our request and be able to reach me. Eight months later, we moved out. We vowed never to live in a high-rise again. Yet nothing could free me from the indignities of seeking housing while disabled.

Read the full article.

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Oh, good! Congressional Republicans have introduced the Clear Skies Act, a bill “to prohibit weather modification within the United States, and for other purposes.” I cannot stress enough that this is not what is causing any of the extreme weather we are seeing. Maybe that’s the point. As Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee (who sponsored the bill alongside Marjorie Taylor Greene) put it, “If it doesn’t exist, then you don’t have anything to worry about.”

As long as we are applying this “let’s ban nonexistent things” approach to legislation, I have some notes for the Clear Skies Act as it seeks to ban weather modification. This term, the bill notes, “includes (i) geoengineering (ii) cloud seeding (iii) solar radiation modification and management (iv) a release of an aerosol into the atmosphere to influence temperature, precipitation, or the intensity of sunlight.” Why not cast a wider net? Don’t stop at just (iv)! Let’s also ban:

(v) strip-club patrons “making it rain”

(vi) children singing “Rain, rain, go away / come again some other day”

(vii) any and all actions of the weather-modifying rodent Punxsutawney Phil, who must be brought before the House in chains to answer for his crimes

(viii) Thor

(ix) when your knees ache (this brings on rain)

(x) witches setting to sea in eggshells (it is from these small crafts that they cast spells and raise storms to bedevil ships at sea)

(xi) pathetic fallacy (banned until further notice)

(xii) butterflies flapping their wings even a single time (this is how you make hurricanes)

(xiii) the demigod Maui insofar as he is doing things with the breeze

(xiv) caterpillars growing suspiciously thick winter coats (this is how we get blizzards)

(xv) any and all frozen treats with names like Blizzard, McFlurry, Frosty, ICEE (could their intention be any clearer?)

(xvi) fairies, fae, Fair Folk, sprites of all kinds

(xvii) Prospero from The Tempest, specifically (known to use weather for revenge)

(xviii) Storm from X-Men (ditto)

(xix) Magneto (I don’t understand how electromagnetism affects weather so we had better ban him just in case)

(xx) Gandalf the Grey (Gandalf the White is okay, according to Stephen Miller)

(xxi) leprechauns

(xxii) Santa Claus (NORAD is already tracking him; simply order them to shoot to kill)

(xxiii) The Midgard Serpent (if it ever releases its tail from its mouth, Ragnarok will ensue, and that is the last thing we need right now)

(xxiv) gray aliens (Pleiadians are okay, according to Stephen Miller)

(xxv) Hillary Clinton (some say she does weather things)

(xxvi) NOAA (does this still exist?)

(xxvii) releasing greenhouse gases willy-nilly without regard for the climate (well, it was worth a shot).

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Emil Bove has had a busy six months at the Department of Justice. Appointed to a leadership role by President Donald Trump almost immediately after the inauguration, Bove quickly set about establishing himself as a feared enforcer of presidential will. He personally fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 rioters, pushed other prosecutors to resign rather than go along with what they considered to be unethical orders, and accused FBI officials of “insubordination” for refusing to hand over a list of FBI agents to fire for political reasons. According to a whistleblower, Bove played a key role in encouraging the administration to defy court orders, suggesting that the department should consider telling judges, “Fuck you.”

Under any previous administration, revelations of behavior like this would probably have been enough to get Bove fired. They might even have been enough to bring down the attorney general, if not the presidency as a whole. But this is the second Trump administration, so instead of being punished, Bove was rewarded with a nomination to a lifetime appointment on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit. On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed him to that seat, 50 to 49, with all Democrats voting against the nominee. (Republican Senator Bill Hagerty did not vote; his GOP colleagues Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski cast their votes against Bove.)

As an appellate judge, Bove, who is 44 years old, will have a hand in shaping the law for decades to come. Even more significant is the message that his confirmation sends to bright young lawyers seeking to get ahead. During Trump’s first term, the president was able to tilt the courts to the right with a slate of judicial nominees hand-selected by the leadership of the conservative Federalist Society. Many of these judges were ideologically extreme, but their road to a nomination came through a legal movement that, whatever its flaws, had developed a distinct culture and set of jurisprudential principles that sometimes conflicted with devotion to Trump or the MAGA movement. Bove’s confirmation suggests that, in Trump’s second term, the route to a plum judicial appointment may be distinguishing oneself as a bruiser willing to do anything for Trump himself.

When, in late November, the president-elect announced that he would pick Bove to help run the Justice Department, Bove was best known for his role as a member of Trump’s criminal-defense team. Even so, his résumé seemed relatively normal for an appointee of the new administration. Over the course of the New York hush-money trial in spring 2024, he’d appeared regularly in the Manhattan courtroom alongside Todd Blanche, whom Trump would later nominate as deputy attorney general. Bove was a capable litigator with a light touch in front of the judge that seemed at odds with his dour appearance: a shaved head and a long, saturnine face that, together with his dark suit, led some journalists watching the trial to joke about his resemblance to Nosferatu.

[Listen: The wrecking of the FBI]

Even in this period, Bove gave no public signs of being a MAGA diehard. His legal pedigree is respectable, without any obvious ideological tilt one way or the other. He went to Georgetown Law School and spent years as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, a famously hard-charging corner of the Justice Department, before leaving in 2021 to work in private practice.

Bove’s time in the Southern District was not without controversy. He was reportedly reprimanded for abusive management and left the office not long after a judge excoriated a unit he led for hiding exculpatory evidence in a terrorism trial. His job as Trump’s lawyer, meanwhile, raised the potential for conflicts of interest. But he was not an obviously bad pick to serve as the deputy attorney general’s lead adviser—especially compared with the slate of conspiracy theorists and unqualified media figures chosen to lead various crucial departments.

This soothing notion did not persist for long. On January 31, when Bove fired attorneys involved in prosecuting January 6 defendants, he quoted Trump’s assertion that the lawyers’ work constituted a “grave national injustice.” The choice of language was particularly striking because Bove himself, as NBC News would soon report, had pushed aggressively during his first stint at the DOJ to be involved in investigating the insurrection. This hypocrisy did not seem to trouble him.

Bove continued to establish himself as Trump’s hatchet man, the avatar of a new order under which the Justice Department’s guiding star was not even-handed enforcement of the law but immediate assent to whatever Trump said. In February, Bove forced his old office in the Southern District to end the corruption prosecution of New York City Mayor Eric Adams in exchange for Adams’s assistance with immigration roundups. This was so jaw-droppingly inappropriate that it ultimately led 10 department lawyers, including the acting head of the Southern District, to resign rather than carry out the order. The judge in the case reluctantly acknowledged that his only choice was to dismiss the charges, but he did so in a manner that blocked the government from dangling a future prosecution over Adams’s head, decrying the apparent scheme as “grave betrayal of the public trust.”

Trump, however, was pleased. He announced Bove’s nomination to the federal bench on May 28, in a Truth Social post. “He will end the Weaponization of Justice,” the president wrote of the new nominee. “Emil Bove will never let you down!”

Shortly afterward, whistleblower testimony surfaced from yet another fired Justice Department lawyer who alleged that Bove had played a significant role in encouraging the government to defy court orders in multiple immigration cases. According to the whistleblower, Erez Reuveni, Bove was a key driver behind the government’s decision to send Venezuelans to a Salvadoran prison under the Alien Enemies Act despite a court ordering it not to. At his confirmation hearing on June 25, when he was asked directly whether he had suggested potentially defying the court, Bove did not quite deny the allegations. Instead, he said he had “conveyed the importance” of the flight to El Salvador and did not recall the specifics of which words he used. In the days before the confirmation vote, another whistleblower announced that they had alerted the Senate Judiciary Committee of additional information corroborating Reuveni’s report. News also broke of a third whistleblower who had attempted to warn Republican senators that Bove had lied in his confirmation hearing concerning his role in tossing out the Adams prosecution.

Bove’s nomination produced a flood of opposition. More than 80 retired judges and more than 900 former Justice Department lawyers signed letters urging the Senate to reject his appointment. “It is intolerable to us that anyone who disgraces the Justice Department would be promoted to one of the highest courts in the land,” the former government attorneys wrote. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board voiced concern. Other prominent supporters of Trump’s first-term efforts to shift the courts to the right dissented as well. “I have serious doubts that Bove has the character and integrity to be worthy of confirmation as a federal judge,” warned Ed Whelan, a conservative strategist known for his work shepherding the Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh.

Republican senators, apparently, were not swayed. Nor could a series of last-minute revelations—including that the Justice Department Office of Inspector General said it had “lost” the second whistleblower’s complaint, and that the Adams whistleblower had recorded audio of Bove making the incriminating statements—change their minds. Speaking on the Senate floor after the vote, Democratic Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, where Bove’s new judgeship is based, lamented the chamber’s “abdication of its responsibilities.”

How Judge Bove will comport himself on the bench is not obvious. During his confirmation hearing, he seemed to support an aggressive vision of unilateral presidential power in line with arguments that the Trump administration has pursued in court. There is widespread speculation that Bove will use his spot on the Third Circuit to audition for the Supreme Court. Or perhaps he will be satisfied with his achievement, taking advantage of a lifetime appointment to drop his pro-Trump posturing.

Whatever approach Bove takes from here, his path so far has demonstrated that total sycophancy to the president can be a fantastic career move for ambitious lawyers—especially those for whom other avenues of success might not be forthcoming. During Trump’s first term, the president essentially outsourced his judicial nominations to Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the Federalist Society. With the administration pushing to appoint as many judges as possible to reshape the federal bench, affiliation with the conservative legal movement was the smart play for up-and-coming attorneys dreaming of a judicial appointment. Now, though, the alliance between the president and the movement is splintering, as some of the administration’s tactics prove too much even for judges on the right. In May, after a panel of three judges—including one whom Trump himself had appointed during his first term—blocked tariffs from going into effect, Trump raged against Leo and the Federalist Society. Leo, the president wrote on Truth Social, was a “bad person” and a “sleazebag.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: A MAGA judiciary]

Trump’s alignment with legal conservatives was never entirely stable. In the long term, Trump couldn’t accept an equal partnership with a community whose primary fealty is to a system of reasoning that does not orbit entirely around his whims. Although many Trump-appointed judges are all too willing to go along with his plans, every exception is, to Trump, a personal insult. Still, even as cracks showed between Trump and Leo, there was always the question of where Trump would find his next batch of judges. Now we have an answer: enforcers like Bove.

The newest member of the Third Circuit does not appear to have been an ideologue. Instead, his résumé suggests an ambitious lawyer who was looking to get ahead. When he had a chance to distinguish himself by pushing hard on investigating January 6, he did that. When the winds changed, he changed with them. What is striking about Bove is just how normal he once was, and how normal his path to the bench may soon come to seem.

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Police are still investigating what exactly prompted a gunman to kill four people in a Manhattan office building yesterday evening, but perhaps the clearest aspect of his motive is the condition that he evokes in a note found on his body: chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

The 27-year-old gunman, Shane Tamura, was a former high-school football player. He targeted the Midtown skyscraper that houses the National Football League, though none of the four people he shot and killed before ending his own life was an NFL employee. (According to a statement from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, one league employee was “seriously injured” and in stable condition at a hospital.) In his note, Tamura reportedly speculated that CTE might have been a cause of his mental illness, but it’s still too early for medical examiners to offer a diagnosis. (And even if an autopsy were to show anomalies in his brain, it could never reveal what precisely drove him to homicide.) Like at least one NFL player who died by suicide, Tamura asked that his brain be studied after he died.

Concerns about CTE and football have been mounting for more than two decades. In 2013, the NFL settled a lawsuit brought by more than 4,500 former players who claimed that the league concealed from them the risks of brain injury, including CTE. CTE is both rare and difficult to diagnose, so scientists haven’t definitively established its symptoms. They’re thought to include memory loss, personality changes, suicidality, and loss of motor control—all of which can be both devastating and caused by any number of disorders. Research overwhelmingly validates the link between the condition and professional football careers.

But the consequences of playing high-school football are not well studied—a major oversight, given that most people who play do not end up in the NFL, Eleanna Varangis, a University of Michigan professor who studies brain injury, told me. “The majority of the experience is at the youth level, and we still don’t know a lot about how those people look later in life,” she said.

Because CTE can be diagnosed only after death, whether Tamura had it is not yet known. Clearly, based on his note, something appears to have led him to suspect that he did. But two experts I spoke with about the condition—both of whom are advocates for better research and care in understanding CTE—told me that they had little reason to suspect that a person like Tamura would in fact have had the condition just because he played high-school football. (So far, a high-school teammate and a coach have told NBC News that Tamura was a talented player, but no further details have emerged about his time in the sport.) Jesse Mez, an associate professor of neurology at Boston University’s Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and a co-director of clinical research at its CTE Center, has studied the risks of CTE across football careers ranging from one year up to 30—high schoolers to professional players. He found that the longer people play, the greater their risk of developing CTE. After five and a half years of playing, the relationship starts to be linear. But in careers shorter than that, “the likelihood of getting the disease is quite low,” Mez told me.

CTE is thought to be caused by repetitive blows to the head, whether or not they lead to concussions. But scientists have not been able to pin down the precise number of impacts (or concussions) that cause someone to tip over the threshold into CTE, and even if they could, the length of a player’s career is an imperfect proxy for how many times they hit their head, Kristen Dams-O’Connor, the director of Mount Sinai’s Brain Injury Research Center, told me. There is variability, too, in susceptibility: Some people might develop CTE after fewer blows to the head. Genetics may also play a role. Although research shows the chances that a high schooler would develop CTE are extraordinarily small, “it’s hard to say what small is,” Mez said.

[Read: Tua Tagovailoa’s impossible choice]

The ambiguities around diagnosing CTE are made only worse by the fact that it cannot be confirmed before death. “I think it would be a huge service to be able to diagnose it in life, even without absolute certainty,” Mez said. Some signs indicate that all of that fear and confusion has led to excessive self-diagnosis. CTE appears to be “uncommon” in professional football if you take all players into account, Dams-O’Connor told me. And yet, in a 2024 study of former NFL players, more than one-third believed they had CTE. To assume that CTE is to blame for, say, depression, just because a person played football, is “really harmful logic,” Dams-O’Connor said: It suggests that nothing can be done, that a person is doomed to a life of irreversible decline from a disease with no direct treatments. Whether or not Tamura had CTE, it’s chilling to think that his conjecture that it contributed to his mental illness may have driven him to violence.

Plenty of other factors, football-related or not, may have also caused or exacerbated Tamura’s mental illness, Mez said. Some research suggests that high-school football players may have greater risk for comorbidities that affect brain health, such as cardiovascular or cerebrovascular disease. A 2018 study found that people who start playing football before age 12 are at risk of experiencing cognitive, behavioral, and mood-related problems earlier in life than those who start playing when they’re older. And studies have shown that brain injuries (from football or any other cause) are associated with mental-health issues, including a higher risk of suicide, homicide, and criminal tendencies. New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a press briefing last night that the gunman had a “documented mental-health history,” and multiple outlets have reported that he was placed on psychiatric hold in both 2022 and 2024.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

The New York City Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said in a statement today that it would examine Tamura’s brain during an autopsy—just as he wished. Perhaps the findings will add to the messy, ongoing science of CTE. Or perhaps they will prove a lesson in what happens when players are too quick to suspect it.

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Mohammed Y. M. Al-yaqoubi / Anadolu / GettyFive-year-old Lana Salih Juha, who fled with her family from Gaza's Shuja'iyya neighborhood to the city center, suffers from severe malnutrition, seen on July 28, 2025. Her family is calling for urgent help to ensure she receives proper treatment and nutrition.

United Nations agencies are now warning that the hunger crisis in Gaza is evolving into a famine, with growing evidence of starvation and malnutrition. The estimated 2 million Palestinians in Gaza have limited access to aid, facing the threat of being shot by Israeli soldiers as they make their way to crowded food-distribution points. Israel claims to have allowed 5,000 aid trucks into Gaza over the past two months, but aid groups are saying that’s far less than what is needed. According to NPR, Gaza health authorities are now reporting that more than 130 people in Gaza have died from “famine and malnutrition” since the war began.

Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto / GettyPalestinians gather at a food-distribution point in Gaza City on July 20, 2025.Mohammed Arafat / APTrucks carrying humanitarian aid line up to enter the Rafah crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip on July 27, 2025.Saeed M. M. T. Jaras / Anadolu / GettyPalestinians climb aboard a food-aid truck after walking for miles to receive flour distributed from several trucks that entered the area of Zikim, a kibbutz in southern Israel, on July 27, 2025.Ramez Habboub / GocherImagery / Future Publishing / GettyPalestinians carry humanitarian aid distributed at the Zikim crossing, near the Al-Sudaniya area in northern Gaza, as they return to their families after the beginning of airdrop operations.Ramez Habboub / ABACA / ReutersA boy carries a bag of flour that was distributed at the Zikim crossing on July 26, 2025.Mahmoud Issa / Anadolu / GettyPalestinians carry large sacks of flour away from a distribution point in the Zikim area on July 27, 2025.Hassan Jedi / Anadolu / GettyResidents of the Nuseirat refugee camp line up in front of water trucks every day to collect clean water to carry back to their tents in Gaza City, seen on July 20, 2025.Abdalhkem Abu Riash / Anadolu / GettySacks of lentils are poured into cooking pots at a food-distribution station run by a charity organization in the Gaza Strip, seen on July 18, 2025.Abdel Kareem Hana / APPalestinians struggle to get donated food at a community kitchen, in Gaza City, on July 26, 2025.Khames Alrefi / Anadolu / GettyA child is seen among a crowd waiting to get hot meals distributed by an aid organization in Gaza City on July 26, 2025.Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP / GettyA displaced Palestinian girl takes a sip of lentil soup that she received at a food-distribution point in Gaza City on July 25, 2025.Jehad Alshrafi / APHumanitarian aid is air-dropped over Gaza City to Palestinians on July 27, 2025.Abdel Kareem Hana / APAid packages drop to the ground in the northern Gaza Strip on July 27, 2025.Abdel Kareem Hana / APA Palestinian youth carries a sack of aid that landed in the Mediterranean Sea, off the shore of Zawaida, after being air-dropped over central Gaza on July 29, 2025.Jehad Alshrafi / APPalestinians carry sacks of flour unloaded from a humanitarian aid convoy that reached Gaza City from the northern Gaza Strip on July 22, 2025.Jehad Alshrafi / APYazan Abu Ful, a malnourished 2-year-old child, sits at his family home in the Shati refugee camp in Gaza City on July 23, 2025.

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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has scanned the horizon for threats, and sure enough, he has found a new group of dangerous adversaries: thinktanks, the organizations in the United States and allied nations that do policy research and advocate for various ideas. They must be stopped, according to a Defense Department announcement, because they promote “the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country, and hatred for the president of the United States.”

This particular bit of McCarthyist harrumphing was the rationalization the Pentagon gave more than a week ago for pulling out of the Aspen Security Forum, a long-running annual conference routinely attended by business leaders, military officers, academics, policy analysts, foreign officials, and top government leaders from both parties, including many past secretaries of defense. For good measure, the Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell invoked the current holy words of the Hegseth Pentagon: The Aspen forum, he said, did not align with the department’s efforts to “increase the lethality of our war fighters, revitalize the warrior ethos and project peace through strength on the world stage.”

The Aspen gathering is not exactly a secret nest of Communists. This year’s roster of speakers included former CIA Director Robert Gates, former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper—a Trump appointee—and a representative from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s office, among many others. John Phelan, the current secretary of the Navy, and Admiral Samuel Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, were set to attend as well.

[Read: The Pentagon’s policy guy is all in on China]

Nor is Hegseth content just to stop America’s intellectual enemies cold at the Rockies: The Pentagon last week suspended Defense Department participation in all such activities, functionally a blanket ban on any interaction with think tanks or other civilian institutions that hold conferences, convene panels, and invite speakers. The New York Times reported that the order to pull out of Aspen came from Hegseth personally. And as Politico first reported, the lager ban appears to extend “to gatherings hosted by nonprofit military associations, such as Sea Air Space, which is led by the Navy League, the military service’s largest veteran organization, and Modern Day Marine, a similar trade show for the Marine Corps.” The Pentagon also “specifically banned attendance at the Halifax International Security Forum, which takes place in Nova Scotia each winter and where the Pentagon chief is usually a top guest.”

Take that, Canada.

Right now, no one seems certain of how this new policy works. Hegseth appears to have suspended all such participation subject to additional review by the Pentagon’s public-affairs office and general counsel, so perhaps some defense officials could one day end up attending conferences after their requests have been vetted. Good luck with that, and best wishes to the first Pentagon employee who pops up out of their cubicle to request a pass to attend such meetings. At some point soon, this prohibition will almost certainly be lifted, but why did Hegseth’s Pentagon impose it in the first place?

I am a former Defense Department employee who, over the course of my career, attended (and spoke at) dozens of conferences at various think tanks and other organizations, and I will make an educated guess based on experience: The main reasons are resentment, insecurity, and fear.

The most ordinary reason, resentment, predates Hegseth. Government service is not exactly luxurious, and many trips are special perks that generate internal gripes about who gets to go, where they get to stay, and so on. (These trips are not exactly luxurious either, but in my government-service days, I learned that some people in the federal service chafe when other employees get free plane tickets to visit nice places.) It’s possible that someone who has never been invited to one of these things convinced Hegseth—who seems reluctant to attend such events himself—that these meetings are just boondoggles and that no one should go.

Bureaucratic pettiness, however, isn’t enough of an explanation. One hazard for people like Hegseth and his lieutenants at a place like Aspen or the International Institute of Strategic Studies or the Halifax conference is that these are organizations full of exceptionally smart people, and even experienced and knowledgeable participants have to be sharp and prepared when they’re onstage and in group discussions. The chance of being outclassed, embarrassed, or just in over one’s head can be very high for unqualified people who have senior government jobs.

Hegseth himself took a pass on the Munich Security Conference (usually a good venue for a new secretary of defense), and instead decided to show videos of himself working out with the troops. We can all admire Hegseth’s midlife devotion to staying fit and modeling a vigorous exercise regimen for the troops (who must exercise anyway, because they are military people and are ordered to do it), but America and its allies would probably benefit more from a secretary with an extra pound here and there who could actually stand at a podium in Munich or London and explain the administration’s strategic vision and military plans. The overall prohibition on conferences provides Hegseth and his deputies (many of whom have no serious experience with defense issues) with an excuse for ducking out and avoiding making fools of themselves.

But perhaps the most obvious and Trumpian reason for the Pentagon’s brainpower lockdown is fear. Officials in this administration know that the greatest risk to their careers has nothing to do with job performance; if incompetence were a cause for dismissal, Hegseth would have been gone months ago. The far greater danger comes from the chance of saying something in public that gets the speaker sideways with Trump and turns his baleful stare across the river to the Pentagon. “The Trump administration doesn’t like dissent, I think that’s pretty clear,” a Republican political strategist and previous Aspen attendee told The Hill last week. “And they don’t like dissenting views at conferences.”

The problem for Trump officials is that “dissent” can mean almost anything, because the strategic direction of the United States depends on the president’s moods, his grievances, and his interactions with others, including foreign leaders. Everything can change in the space of a post on Truth Social. To step forward in a public venue and say anything of substance is a risk; the White House is an authoritarian bubble, and much like the Kremlin in the old Soviet Union, the man in charge can decide that what is policy today could be heresy tomorrow.

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

In the end, banning attendance at meetings where defense officials can exchange ideas with other intelligent people is—like so much else in this administration—a policy generated by pettiness and self-protection, a way to batten down the Pentagon’s hatches so that no one speaks out or screws up. If this directive stays in place for even a few years, however, it will damage relationships among the military, defense officials, business leaders, academics, and ordinary Americans.

Public conferences are part of the American civil-military relationship. Sometimes, these are events such as Aspen, where senior officials present policies or engage their critics under a national spotlight; other gatherings at various nongovernmental organizations help citizens understand what, exactly, their government is doing. At academically oriented meetings, members of the defense community gather ideas, debate, discuss, and sometimes establish contacts for future research and exchanges. Retired Army Colonel Jeffrey McCausland, who served on the National Security Council staff and as the dean of the Army War College, told me that the Pentagon’s shortsightedness could prevent important civil-military exchanges about national defense, and he wonders how far such prohibitions will go: Might the new directive mean that the “guy who teaches history at West Point or a war college,” for example, “can’t go to a history conference and be a better history professor?”

Maybe someone is mad that they didn’t get to go to Colorado or Canada; perhaps someone else is worried that accepting an invitation could be career suicide. Somehow, the Pentagon has managed to engage productively in such events for decades, under administrations of both parties. But Hegseth, after a string of embarrassments—McCausland points to the lingering “radioactivity” of Signalgate—has apparently chosen a safety-first approach. Unfortunately, the secretary still has to appear in public, and the chances of yet more stumbles from him and his team are high. But at least he’ll be able to reassure the American public that the upright employees of the Pentagon won’t be wined and dined by politically suspect eggheads.

Besides, when people get together and start thinking, anything can happen. Better safe than sorry.

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

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Dear James,

I rarely ever think about past events unless explicitly reminded, and I wonder if I’m missing out on some core human experience. It’s not that I can’t or won’t reminisce; I have a pretty good memory, and I’m happy to relive old scenes when my partner or family prompt me. I don’t dwell much on past failures and embarrassments, but I’m also not living entirely in the present—indeed, I tend to obsessively worry about the future. So what am I missing? Should I be making an effort to look backwards more often?

Dear Reader,

I want some of what you’re on.

Me, I’m a nurser of ancient grievances. I believe in forgiveness, but then again—do I? If you pushed me around in 1982, ripped me off in 1997, failed to be sufficiently fascinated by me in 2013, I haven’t forgotten, and vengeance will be mine. Not to mention the grievances against myself: For them I get revenge every day, and rather painfully too.

Oh, to leave the past behind! To dump it, toss it overboard, and tread blithely as a lamb into the eternal welcome of the present moment! But I dunno, something in the wiring (mine, anyway) won’t allow it. Is it evolutionary? Are we meant to drag all our mistakes around with us—plus the bruises to our nature, plus the dilapidated hulk of our crappy memories—so as to avoid them next time? As Kingsley Amis wrote to a friend after his second divorce: “Well, it’s all experience, though it’s a pity there had to be so much of it.”

So what’s my advice? Only this: If you find yourself able to stay clear of the shadow of what’s already happened, I’d say that’s something of a superpower. You might consider using it out there in the world, this mutant gift of yours. Use it for good. Seek out people who offended you, or who worry they may have wronged you at some point, and tell them it doesn’t matter. Seek out anybody—why not?—who’s guilty or ashamed or bogged down with regret, and tell them they’re free.

Hauling my deluxe, personalized baggage,

James

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

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In the summer of 2018, I found myself enraptured by the television show Pose, a first-of-its-kind drama that featured a cast of Black and brown transgender performers. Much of the press around the series—nearly all of it, actually—highlighted this fact, and I approached the show with some trepidation, expecting it to feature gauzy, conventional storylines in an attempt to attract a mainstream audience. Indeed, amid its gritty sequences of emotional turmoil was a focus on the most conventional television theme of all—the obligations and joys of family life. But this turned out to be Pose’s most interesting asset, because what distinguished its kitchen-table scenes from others, and its family from my own, was that each member had chosen to be there.

Pose presents the concept of chosen family as both a necessary lifeline for trans people and an enthralling and recurrent act of love. These characters, and the real people whose lives served as inspiration for them, choose one another continually, though their bonds are often not recognized by external authorities. Those of us seeking to build meaningful connections to people with whom we share little but our common humanity might have something to learn from them.

I thought of Pose a great deal while reading Necessary Fiction, the Nigerian writer Eloghosa Osunde’s second novel. The book follows a group of queer Nigerian characters who fit awkwardly within their biological communities and who, as a result, must form new ones. Families are the driving force of this novel, and Osunde depicts them in various forms: families falling apart as they bicker and grow in different directions, families that have all but ceased to function, and newly formed families, fragile and delicately wrought. Osunde’s characters pursue degrees and jobs, and they seek self-actualization, but their understanding of life is filtered almost entirely through their closest relationships.

Osunde has published this novel amid a flood of LGBTQ literature from Africa, and specifically Nigeria, that is perhaps a reaction to the sorry state of gay rights across the continent. Yet Necessary Fiction is singular because it subtly transposes an idea that recurs in queer media—that families are both essential and malleable—to a broader tapestry of human lives, the billions of us around the globe who find ourselves isolated despite our reliance on tools that promise connection. By unbinding family from biological duty, the novel imagines connection as an act of sustained intention, not inherited obligation. It offers not only a story about queer life in Nigeria, but also a vision of how kinship might evolve for everyone in a world of increasing mobility, urbanization, and atomization.

[Read: What to read when you want to reimagine family]

Necessary Fiction includes a sprawling cast of characters whose connections vary in depth and intensity—Osunde helpfully provides a list at the beginning of the book—and throughout the novel we meet small clusters of them, observing as they attract or repel one another. Yet the most vital and arresting moment occurs 19 pages in, well before Osunde has formally introduced most of the novel’s players. In a chapter titled “Truth Circle,” a group of queer friends discuss their lives, relationships, and regrets in a 10-page scene that unfolds entirely in dialogue.

They remember the tragic 2020 Lekki massacre in Lagos State, when soldiers opened fire on unarmed protestors; they share stories of estrangement from their direct kin; they reflect on the overwhelming burden of projecting strength even as they unravel internally; they explore the shifting definitions of what it means to be “normal.”

Threaded through all this heaviness, however, is a palpable joy, a kind of luminous gratitude for having found one another, despite their presence in a country that routinely shuns them. One character, reflecting on the recent loss of a loved one, says that they “also feel thanks, because who wouldn’t have reasons to, with people like you as fam? You guys are that for me.”

The “truth circle” in this scene is a space of confession and free expression, but it is also a crucible in which the characters create and affirm their bonds to one another. Over the course of these pages, the reader begins to discern the outlines of their relationships through hints about how they came to know and care for one another. But most important, Osunde introduces them immediately as a family, inviting readers to think of people they don’t yet know as parts of a coherent whole, one they have forged in order to survive.

Osunde also reminds the reader how deeply vulnerable, and deeply restorative, conversations among family members can be when they’re sustained through loyalty and mutual respect. Though grounded in queer experience, the scene’s emotional resonance extends beyond it. Osunde seems to be proposing a model of kinship that could serve anyone navigating alienation or rupture.

As the book progresses, we learn more about the people who were present at the truth circle, and eventually one character, a DJ named May, takes center stage. Osunde describes May as a “free” person, someone “even rebels look up to and say, Wow, you’re so brave.” She has a tense relationship with her father, a man of “unending charisma and gaslighting,” and recognizes “that something about her mother was different, that she had an askewness to her that her friends’ mothers did not have.” One point of friction between mother and daughter is May’s gender identity; as May grows older, her mother begins to understand that “May was not the daughter she was raising. May was something else beyond that—something more manly than a daughter, more feminine than a son—an inbetweener.”

[Read: A redacted past slowly emerges]

One day May calls home and learns that her mother is in the hospital after her father insisted on “yet another psychiatric hold.” May falls into despair and confides in her roommates, twins who were present at the truth circle. She confesses that she longs for a motherly presence, and the twins introduce her to their aunt, who goes by “Aunty G” (we eventually learn the “G” stands for “Gladness”). What follows is one of the most quietly transformative relationships in the book. May eventually tells Aunty G about her love life, something she never felt comfortable doing with her own mother. Osunde captures the poignancy of this connection:

It wasn’t that Aunty G was a replacement mother or anything. Aunty G was just the elder of her dreams, someone who had seen enough life to not be fazed by her choices. May thought often about what a difference it would have made if she was known (or loved) by a woman like Gladness when she was stumbling around in the dark. And now here she was.

Through the twins’ intervention, May gains the mother figure she was looking for, someone who offers the kind of counsel her own parents never could. Osunde’s depiction of this bond—its gradual deepening, its subtle healing—reinforces the novel’s central insight: that family is not a fixed inheritance but an evolving architecture.

In recent years, there has been much talk about people spending more and more time alone. According to a 2023 analysis by the U.S. Surgeon General, “half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness.” Medical professionals and social scientists have proposed a few potential causes, including the disappearance of “third places” and the increasing ubiquity of the internet and social media, which may facilitate connections, but at the expense of meaningful—and essential—in-person interactions.

In Necessary Fiction and other stories revolving around LGBTQ lives, we can glimpse the kind of community the internet once promised. No matter how advanced our technology becomes, it is not a replacement for the rituals that make us human, such as gathering around a dinner table after a long day apart, and telling honest and vulnerable stories as your family sits close, listens, and remains.

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a cunning political operator, but even he can’t weaken President Donald Trump’s bond with television. The two leaders are at odds again over Gaza, now because of human-rights-organization warnings of widespread starvation. Under intense international pressure, Netanyahu has allowed some food aid into the region, but he insists that there is “no starvation” in Gaza.

This morning, before a meeting with U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, Trump was asked by reporters whether he agreed with Netanyahu’s assessment. “Based on television, I would say not particularly, because those children look very hungry,” Trump said. Later, he added: “That’s real starvation stuff. I see it, and you can’t fake that.”

Trump has arrived at the right conclusion in a terrible way. As president, Trump has access to the most powerful information-gathering network in the world, yet he takes his cues from what he watches on television. This helps him see the news from the same perspective as the general public, which has enabled his political success. But it also narrows his understanding, and it makes him highly susceptible to manipulation.

In this case, the evidence suggests that Trump is right. Cindy McCain, the executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme, has been warning for months of humanitarian disaster; WFP says one-third of Gazans have not eaten for multiple days in a row. Other organizations say Gaza is on the brink of famine. The Israeli government has defended its restriction of aid by saying that Hamas is pilfering food, but that doesn’t address its responsibility to feed the civilian population caught up in the war. As Hussein Ibish recently wrote in The Atlantic, more than 1,000 Gazans may have been killed since May just trying to get food.

But Trump had little to say on the matter until it broke through mass media, where images of skeletal adults and children with distended bellies make the point more viscerally than any statistics. The spread of videos and photos has helped force this story to the center of attention, just as previous footage helped turn American opinion against the war in Gaza. Less than a quarter of Americans now say Israeli military actions are “fully justified.”

Trump is attuned to—and responds to—this kind of change in public opinion more than he responds to the substance of underlying events. I often think about testimony from Hope Hicks, Trump’s former press aide, during his trial in Manhattan related to hush money. Prosecutors asked Hicks how Trump reacted in 2016 when The Wall Street Journalreported on his alleged extramarital sexual relationship with Karen McDougal. Hicks couldn’t recall, but added: “I don’t want to speculate, but I’m almost certain he would’ve asked me how’s it playing.” Now, as president, he sometimes approaches news events not as things over which he has control but just like a guy watching from his easy chair, remote in hand: opportunities for punditry, not policy making.

Trump’s reverence of television interacts dangerously with his skepticism of anyone who represents independent expertise. “I know more about ISIS than the generals do,” he said in 2015. Former aides say he doesn’t read or pay attention during briefings, and he particularly distrusts the intelligence community, to the point that he has repeatedly taken Vladimir Putin’s word instead. This means that despite access to high-quality information about what’s going on in Gaza, he seems to really perk up only once it’s on the tube.

Such a narrow information stream is a problem, because TV is not a good source of information on its own; it should be consumed as part of a balanced news diet. That’s especially true for the television channel that Trump seems to consume most, Fox News. (The liberal researcher Matt Gertz painstakingly documented the direct connection between Fox News segments and Trump tweets during his first term.) Various research over many years has found that Fox viewers are less informed than other news consumers.

Trump’s reliance on television news presents an easy target for anyone trying to influence him, as Gertz’s research underscores. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina adopted a strategy of going on TV to try to get messages to Trump. “Have you conveyed this personally to the president?” a host once asked him during an interview. “I just did,” Graham answered. Politicians seeking Trump’s support have tried to use TV too. Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, ran ads in Florida when he was up for reelection in 2020 to get them in front of Trump. So have Trump opponents wishing to troll him.

The fact that the president can be so easily persuaded is concerning enough on its own, and helps explain the policy whiplash during his two presidencies. But it’s especially dangerous in an age of misinformation. I wrote in 2017 about how Trump’s tendency to fall for fake news could cause him trouble. Eight years later, Trump has a White House staff less interested in saving him from himself, and technology has developed to allow for extremely convincing and realistic deepfakes. Trump’s naive belief that you “can’t fake” what you see on TV is belied by the many tear-jerking but counterfeit AI images that circulate on Facebook. When it comes to Gaza, he has access to much more reliable evidence and warnings from human-rights experts, but those don’t really seem to penetrate.

News coverage is not the only obsession shaping, or warping, the administration’s approach to Gaza. The president’s inclination to view nearly everything as a potential real-estate deal inspired his bizarre suggestion to clear the strip and turn it into a luxury beachfront development, the “Riviera of the Middle East.” And his poorly concealed fixation on winning the Nobel Peace Prize seems to animate many of his choices in the region. As an added benefit, a Nobel would play well on the news.

Even as TV news is driving Trump’s worldview, Trump’s worldview is reshaping TV news. Having worked to dominate news coverage for years, Trump now wants to control it directly, as he and Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr seek unprecedented control over broadcasters such as CBS. Trump once considered starting his own TV network, but he and the nation’s major broadcasters could instead create a closed loop with Trump taking his tips from channels that do what he says. Who needs facts when you can construct your own reality?

Related:

The worst-kept secret of the Israeli-Palestinian conflictTrump’s campaign to crush the media

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How NASA engineered its own declineThe Pentagon’s policy guy is all in on China.Trump is making socialism great again, David Frum argues.

Today’s News

President Donald Trump announced that he will shorten the 50-day deadline he gave Russia two weeks ago to reach a peace deal in Ukraine. He warned of severe tariffs if no agreement is made soon.About half the country is under active heat advisories, affecting more than 198 million Americans, according to the National Weather Service; some temperatures are reaching higher than 100 degrees Fahrenheit.A federal judge extended a block on a policy in Trump’s bill that would have banned for one year Medicaid funding to health-care providers offering abortions.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores how reading outdoors can transform a traditionally indoor activity into a form of outdoor play—and suggests great reads to bring along on your next adventure.

The Weekly Planet: Rising summer heat is leading many Americans to stay indoors—and seems to be contributing to a rare form of seasonal affective disorder, Yasmin Tayag writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Steph Chambers / Getty

The WNBA Has a Good Problem on Its Hands

By Jemele Hill

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

While warming up recently for the WNBA All-Star Game, players wore T-shirts that read Pay us what you owe us, in reference to the ongoing collective-bargaining negotiations between the players and the league. Until that point, there had not been much buzz about the WNBA’s negotiations, but the shirts had their intended result, taking the players’ labor fight mainstream.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Trump’s desperate move to quiet the Epstein scandalThe death of democracy promotionAlexandra Petri: How Trump came to be in the Epstein filesZelensky learned the wrong lesson from Trump.A Democrat for the Trump era

Culture Break

Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic. Sources: Will Heath / NBC / NBCU Photo Bank / Getty.

Listen. Justin Bieber’s new song, “Daisies,” is not the summer anthem we expected—but it might be the one we need, Spencer Kornhaber writes.

Read. Our assistant editor Luis Parrales shares his culture and entertainment musts—including Mario Vargas Llosa, Alasdair MacIntyre, The Bear, and Conan O’Brien.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Back in May, I wrote about Trump’s plans to accept a white-elephant 747 from Qatar: “If there’s no such thing as a free lunch, there’s certainly no such thing as a free plane.” I was thinking primarily about what Qatar might expect in return, but in The New York Times, David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt report on the more immediate costs of refitting the plane for its new role as Air Force One. No one in government will talk about these costs, Sanger and Schmitt report, but the military appears to be raiding nearly $1 billion from a missile-defense project to pay for Trump’s pet project—all while achieving no savings on the plane. It’s enough to make you wonder just how sincere Trump is about government efficiency.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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