The U.S. Open is one of the few occasions a year when tennis really gets its due in America. More than 1 million people—including Simone Biles, Aaron Judge, and other top athletes—shelled out for tickets last year, feverish heat be damned. Ticket sales this year are up by 8 percent. The sold-out after-party, featuring the band Odesza, will transform New York’s Louis Armstrong Stadium from tennis court to dance club. All of the pomp around the Open harkens back to tennis’s history as an aristocratic leisure; the first precursor to the Open, in 1881, was held on a grass court in Newport, Rhode Island, at the height of the Gilded Age. Instead of electronica, spectators were treated to a string quartet.

But over the past half century, tennis has been dramatically democratized. The sport has been growing since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when hitting a ball outside, 80 feet from anyone else, seemed to be one of the healthiest exercise options available; last year, more than 25 million Americans played. Tennis today unfolds predominantly on public courts. You might even have a middle school up the street where you can play—just disregard the blue pickleball tape across the baseline. All you need is a racket, a ball, and one other person to return your serves. If you don’t know how to hit, Venus Williams, the winner of seven Grand Slams, can teach you a forehand on YouTube.

All of that makes tennis a refreshingly easy sport to pick up. But its real advantage over other sports is what happens when you keep on playing.

Tennis is a full-body workout. It not only builds muscle but also elevates your heart rate. It is notably more aerobically challenging than pickleball, which has, for the past few years, infringed on tennis’s court space and crowded the zeitgeist. To reach the tennis ball before its fateful second bounce requires horsepower, and you’re responsible for covering a lot of ground—more than double the pickleball plot. The tennis net is also, ahem, two inches higher at center court, making it harder to clear. Frequent tennis play improves bone density, which staves off fractures and osteoporosis.

Crucially, tennis is a lifetime sport (two coaches described their clients’ age ranges to me as between 3 and 90), which means its benefits can last through middle age and your elder years if you stick with it. Keeping up with tennis over multiple decades was associated with a reduced risk of heart disease in men in a 2002 study. A Danish study from 2018 found that tennis players lived nearly a decade longer than their sedentary peers—and also longer than swimmers, cyclers, and joggers. No other sport in the analysis was correlated with such a large boost to life expectancy. (Thanks to this study and others, the United States Tennis Association markets tennis as “the world’s healthiest sport.”)

At its essence, tennis is about moving through space correctly, says John Ratey, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School and the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Receiving the ball, you gauge its trajectory—speed, spin, height of the bounce—while determining how to most efficiently reach it. Then, while running, racket outstretched, you decide how you’ll return it, with a new angle, speed, and spin. Ideally, the chosen combination results in the ball landing inside the court, and going to where your opponent is not. Also ideally, the racket (as directed by your body) follows your mind’s split-second intention. You even have to factor in the wind and the sun. The sport demands so much complex motor coordination, as well as finesse, that it carries the same cognitive, balance, and coordination benefits as dancing. (You need only watch videos of Roger Federer leaping and gliding across the court to realize how tennis approximates the quickstep.)

Like any sport, of course, tennis can lead to injury; the most common ones involve sprained ankles, a sore back, torn shoulder cartilage, and weakened tendons. But it’s remarkably low-risk. In an Aspen Institute comparison of the 10 most popular high-school team sports, tennis ranked first for safety, with infinitesimal rates of catastrophic injury and concussion. Tennis may even help stave off injury, especially for older players. Paul Wright, the chair of Nuvance Health’s Neuroscience Institute, told me that if you can balance yourself on a tennis court, you’re more likely to successfully negotiate obstacles at home, avoiding falls.

Perhaps most important, tennis is a workout for the brain. Learning new skills—rock climbing, knitting, chess—can buffer against cognitive decline. In one 2023 study, older adults who were assigned to weekly skills classes developed working memory and attention levels typical of people decades their junior. But there’s reason to expect that any tennis player, regardless of their level, can reap cognitive rewards. Racket sports require completing tasks in unusually rapid succession. (Here comes the ball again! And again, at this new angle!) You always have to be on, Wright said. It should be no surprise, then, that prolonged tennis training has been shown to shorten reaction times; among children, it has also been linked with enhanced decision making.

What’s uniquely beneficial about tennis is that it’s both highly complicated and highly aerobic. Any aerobic exercise can benefit the brain by improving mood, which in turn aids memory and cognition. Tennis, with its explosive bursts—sprinting to the ball, stopping, lunging laterally, jogging backwards to the baseline—can yield especially powerful results. James Gladstone, the chief of sports medicine at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine, told me that tennis resembles high-intensity interval training, which has been shown to improve cognitive function and memory in healthy older adults. In youths, it has positive effects on cognitive performance and attention.

[Read: Tennis explains everything]

If you want to pick up a sport, I submit that tennis wins in straight sets—not only because it boosts health but also because hitting a ball and receiving it is a great time. Fun reduces stress, and the more stress you have, the more your body needs to move to keep your brain running smoothly, Ratey wrote in Spark. Plus, if you enjoy an exercise, you’ll do more of it and gain more health benefits. Several players described to me the addictive pleasure of striking the ball correctly: the popping sound of ground strokes, the satisfying release of driving the ball from the legs rather than the arms.

Other players find that tennis’s learning curve only stokes their interest. Mastering the sport takes years; that might sound intimidating, but to many, it’s motivation. Laurence Barrett, 89, has played tennis for nearly 70 years, dodging his son’s entreaties to play pickleball (for one, he can’t stand the high-pitched thwack of the plastic ball). On the morning that we spoke this spring, he had, by his own accounting, hit a few “damn good volleys.”

For most of my own life, I had swung a racket once a decade, aiming haphazardly and getting by with a rustic version of tennis. But a couple of years ago, I decided I would learn to hit a clean forehand that didn’t sail skyward. I began taking lessons, soaking in key information such as Don’t get too close to the dang ball. On YouTube, Williams taught me to move my shoulders “as a unit” in the forehand, and so when she appeared as a wildcard at the D.C. Open last month, I bought a ticket.

[Read: The most beautiful stroke in tennis]

I showed up two days after the 45-year-old Williams had served nine aces and defeated a woman nearly half her age. I watched as her forehand whipsawed the July humidity, her shoulders unlocking velocity and angles that were even more astonishing in person. How many hundreds of thousands of forehands had she hit throughout her lifetime? Watching her, I could imagine playing the duration of mine.

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The moment my oldest child was born, I reached for an anthology of Romantic poetry that I have owned for decades and began reading. “Sweet joy befall thee,” I said to my baby, through tears, bestowing a blessing with the words of William Blake.

The benediction was unplanned. I had brought the book to the hospital for myself, along with a memoir by Shirley Jackson and a pile of well-worn novels, because I’d imagined that I would want to be surrounded by my favorite writers at a time of such magnitude. But as soon as my squirming newborn was placed on my chest, I was overcome by the desire not to keep these works to myself, but to share my love of literature with my baby.

As a child, I had read more or less continuously to myself, with breaks only here and there: for dinner, for math class, for college graduation. I couldn’t imagine why anything should change now that I’d become a parent. Still, it felt rude to keep my eyes on a book when I had a baby in my arms, who, I had been told, was born with the capacity to see only as far as his mother’s face—my face. So I resolved that rather than reading quietly, I would do so aloud, drawing my son, Matan, into the text alongside me.

This article has been adapted from Ilana Kurshan’s forthcoming memoir, Children of the Book. (St. Martin’s Press)

The practice let me connect with him (and, later, with my other four children) through the activity I enjoyed most. When I think about the pleasure of those exchanges, it saddens me to know that these days, fewer parents seem to be reading aloud to their kids. In a recent survey of U.K. parents, conducted by NielsenIQ BookData in collaboration with two children’s-book publishers, just 41 percent of parents with children ages 4 and younger said they frequently read aloud to their children, down from 64 percent in a similar survey they conducted in 2012. Looked at one way, that decline suggests a missed opportunity for parents to instill in their children an early love of reading. But I’d argue that parents who don’t read to their kids miss out on even more. Reading aloud to my children was, at least for me, a way to guide them as they started to understand the world, and as I started to understand them.

[Read: Why some people become lifelong readers]

In the maternity ward, I read to my son constantly. We were interrupted repeatedly—by nurses coming to check vitals, or loud announcements over the hospital loudspeaker—which made it hard to get through a chapter, let alone an entire book. So I read poetry instead: Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “To an Infant,” William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood.” At home, where it was calmer, we switched to novels, starting with Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead—until a friend prompted me to wonder whether I ought to read books with pictures that my son could see and pages that he could touch and chew. It was my first experience of maternal guilt: Why had I assumed that he was interested in the tale of a reclusive translator stumbling on dead bodies in the frozen Polish woods?

So I added board books to our repertoire. One that I remember vividly was very simple, with no words except the title, Black & White. It seemed fitting, given infants’ limited color vision. The book unfolded like an accordion: One side had a series of white objects depicted against a black background, and the other side had a series of black objects depicted against a white background. The first time I read it, I took a deep breath, as if warning Matan that what he was about to hear would sound very different from Blake, or Coleridge, or Tokarczuk. I pointed to each object and made up a tune that I sang as I “read” the book aloud—bottle and keys and button and boat; butterfly, leaf, banana, and bird. It was almost like poetry.

As I unfolded and refolded the black-and-white accordion pages, I wondered how much Matan was absorbing. He was soothed by the cadences of my voice, but I couldn’t tell if he was able to focus on the objects, or to distinguish black from white. At that point, like most newborns, he was still adjusting to the pattern of day and night. Each time I read Black & White, I imagined that I was teaching him to see—drawing back the darkness so that the light might appear distinct and his vision might sharpen into focus.

The separation of light and darkness is one of God’s first acts in Genesis, part of the creation story. But the midrash—the Jewish rabbinic interpretive tradition—tells a different version. According to the rabbis, the Torah existed for 2,000 years before creation. They teach that just as an architect cannot build a palace without a blueprint, God could not construct the universe without the Torah.

In that version of the story, books are our guides—something that resonated deeply with me. When I read to Matan, I was teaching him how to make sense of his surroundings: how to discern the white bottle and boat from the black background on the page, and, later on, how to separate good from evil, right from wrong.

And, yes, I was of course teaching him how to read. Another of his favorite board books was First 100 Words, which featured full-color photographs of a series of labeled objects from a baby’s everyday life: brush, tub, duck, on one page; spoon, cup, bib on another. I watched in wonder as he learned to point with his tiny finger as I read aloud the name of each item and, later, as he learned to say them. “Spoon!” he cried excitedly, and it was as if he were summoning the object into existence then and there, creating his world through words.

[Read: Why kids aren’t falling in love with reading]

Cynthia Ozick, in an essay titled “The Ladle,” writes about spoons as a metaphor for all the ways we dip into knowledge and draw up wisdom. The ladle in a kitchen drawer leads her to the Big Dipper and Joseph’s pit and the wells dug by the patriarchs in the book of Genesis. And now, as Matan encountered that spoon on the page, he too was dipping into a well of knowledge, drawing up wisdom.

So, I would come to see, was I. While Matan was still an infant, the delight of reading to him lay not in the pages we turned but in the wheels that seemed to turn in his mind as we read together: the flicker of recognition in his eye, the smallest trace of a smile. Each expression was a window into his expanding self. I wasn’t just reading a board book. I was learning how to read my child.

This article has been adapted from Ilana Kurshan’s forthcoming memoir, Children of the Book.

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No one doubts that our future will feature more automation than our past or present. The question is how we get from here to there, and how we do so in a way that is good for humanity.

Sometimes it seems the most direct route is to automate wherever possible, and to keep iterating until we get it right. Here’s why that would be a mistake: imperfect automation is not a first step toward perfect automation, anymore than jumping halfway across a canyon is a first step toward jumping the full distance. Recognizing that the rim is out of reach, we may find better alternatives to leaping—for example, building a bridge, hiking the trail, or driving around the perimeter. This is exactly where we are with artificial intelligence. AI is not yet ready to jump the canyon, and it probably won’t be in a meaningful sense for most of the next decade.

Rather than asking AI to hurl itself over the abyss while hoping for the best, we should instead use AI’s extraordinary and improving capabilities to build bridges. What this means in practical terms: We should insist on AI that can collaborate with, say, doctors—as well as teachers, lawyers, building contractors, and many others—instead of AI that aims to automate them out of a job.

Radiology provides an illustrative example of automation overreach. In a widely discussed study published in April 2024, researchers at MIT found that when radiologists used an AI diagnostic tool called CheXpert, the accuracy of their diagnoses declined. “Even though the AI tool in our experiment performs better than two-thirds of radiologists,” the researchers wrote, “we find that giving radiologists access to AI predictions does not, on average, lead to higher performance.” Why did this good tool produce bad results?

A proximate answer is that doctors didn’t know when to defer to the AI’s judgment and when to rely on their own expertise. When AI offered confident predictions, doctors frequently overrode those predictions with their own. When AI offered uncertain predictions, doctors frequently overrode their own better predictions with those supplied by the machine. Because the tool offered little transparency, radiologists had no way to discern when they should trust it.

A deeper problem is that this tool was designed to automate the task of diagnostic radiology: to read scans like a radiologist. But automating a radiologist’s entire diagnostic job was infeasible because CheXpert was not equipped to process the ancillary medical histories, conversations, and diagnostic data that radiologists rely on for interpreting scans. Given the differing capabilities of doctors and CheXpert, there was potential for virtuous collaboration. But CheXpert wasn’t designed for this kind of collaboration.

When experts collaborate, they communicate. If two clinicians disagree on a diagnosis, they might isolate the root of the disagreement through discussion (e.g., “You’re overlooking this.”). Or they might arrive at a third diagnosis that neither had been considering. That’s the power of collaboration, but it cannot happen with systems that aren’t built to listen. Where CheXpert’s and the radiologist’s assessments differed, the doctor was left with a binary choice: go with the software’s statistical best guess or go with her own expert judgment.

It’s one thing to automate tasks, quite another to automate whole jobs. This particular AI was designed as an automation tool, but radiologists’ full scope of work defies automation at present. A radiological AI could be built to work collaboratively with radiologists, and it’s likely that future tools will be.

Tools can be generally divided into two main buckets: In one bucket, you’ll find automation tools that function as closed systems that do their work without oversight—ATMs, dishwashers, electronic toll takers, and automatic transmissions all fall into this category. These tools replace human expertise in their designated functions, often performing those functions better, cheaper, and faster than humans can. Your car, if you have one, probably shifts gears automatically. Most new drivers today will never have to master a stick shift and clutch.

In the second bucket you’ll find collaboration tools, such as chain saws, word processors, and stethoscopes. Unlike automation tools, collaboration tools require human engagement. They are force multipliers for human capabilities, but only if the user supplies the relevant expertise. A stethoscope is unhelpful to a layperson. A chainsaw is invaluable to some, dangerous to many.

Automation and collaboration are not opposites, and are frequently packaged together. Word processors automatically perform text layout and grammar checking even as they provide a blank canvas for writers to express ideas. Even so, we can distinguish automation from collaboration functions. The transmissions in our cars are fully automatic, while their safety systems collaborate with their human operators to monitor blind spots, prevent skids, and avert impending collisions.

AI does not go neatly into either the automation bucket or the collaboration bucket. That’s because AI does both: It automates away expertise in some tasks and fruitfully collaborates with experts in others. But it can’t do both at the same time in the same task. In any given application, AI is going to automate or it’s going to collaborate, depending on how we design it and how someone chooses to use it. And the distinction matters because bad automation tools—machines that attempt but fail to fully automate a task—also make bad collaboration tools. They don’t merely fall short of their promise to replace human expertise at higher performance or lower cost, they interfere with human expertise, and sometimes undermine it.

The promise of automation is that the relevant expertise is no longer required from the human operator because the capability is now built-in. (And to be clear, automation does not always imply superior performance—consider self-checkout lines and computerized airline phone agents.) But if the human operator’s expertise must serve as a fail-safe to prevent catastrophe—guarding against edge cases or grabbing the controls if something breaks—then automation is failing to deliver on its promise. The need for a fail-safe can be intrinsic to the AI, or caused by an external failure—either way, the consequences of that failure can be grave.

The tension between automation and collaboration lies at the heart of a notorious aviation accident that occurred in June 2009. Shortly after Air France Flight 447 left Rio De Janeiro for Paris, the plane’s airspeed sensors froze over—a relatively routine, transitory instrument loss due to high-altitude icing. Unable to guide the craft without airspeed data, the autopilot automatically disengaged as it was set to do, returning control of the plane to the pilots. The MIT engineer and historian David Mindell described what happened next in his 2015 book, Our Robots, Ourselves:

When the pilots of Air France 447 were struggling to control their airplane, falling ten thousand feet per minute through a black sky, pilot David Robert exclaimed in desperation, “We lost all control of the airplane, we don’t understand anything, we’ve tried everything!” At that moment, in a tragic irony, they were actually flying a perfectly good airplane … Yet the combination of startle, confusion, at least nineteen warning and caution messages, inconsistent information, and lack of recent experience hand-flying the aircraft led the crew to enter a dangerous stall. Recovery was possible, using the old technique for unreliable airspeed—lower the pitch angle of the nose, keep the wings level, and the airplane will fly as predicted—but the crew could not make sense of the situation to see their way out of it. The accident report called it “total loss of cognitive control of the situation.”

This wrenching and ultimately fatal sequence of events puts two design failures in sharp relief. One is that the autopilot was a poor collaboration tool. It eliminated the need for human expertise during routine flying. But when expert judgment was most needed, the autopilot abruptly handed control back to the startled crew, and flooded the zone with urgent, confusing warnings. The autopilot was a great automation tool—until it wasn’t, when it offered the crew no useful support. It was designed for automation, not for collaboration.

The second failure, Mindell argued, was that the pilots were out of practice. No surprise: The autopilot was beguilingly good. Human expertise has a limited shelf life. When machines provide automation, human attention wanders and capabilities decay. This poses no problem if the automation works flawlessly or if its failure (perhaps due to something as mundane as a power outage) doesn’t create a real-time emergency requiring human intervention. But if human experts are the last fail-safe against catastrophic failure of an automated system—as is currently true in aviation—then we need to vigilantly ensure that humans attain and maintain expertise.

Modern airplanes have another cockpit navigation aid, one that is less well known than the autopilot: the heads-up display. The HUD is a pure collaboration tool, a transparent LCD screen that superimposes flight data in the pilot’s line of sight. It does not even pretend to fly the aircraft, but it assists the pilot by visually integrating everything that the flight computer digests about the plane’s direction, pitch, power, and airspeed into a single graphic called the flight-path vector. Absent a HUD, a pilot must read multiple flight instruments to intuitively stitch this picture together. The HUD is akin to the navigation app on your smartphone—if that app also had night vision, speed sensors, and intimate knowledge of your car’s engine and brakes.

The HUD is still a piece of complex software, meaning it can fail. But because it is built to collaborate and not to automate, the pilot continually maintains and gains expertise while flying with it—which, to be clear, is typically not the whole flight, but in crucial moments such as low-visibility takeoff, approach, and landing. If the HUD reboots or locks up during a landing, there is no abrupt handoff; the pilot already has hands on the control yoke for the entire time. Despite the fact that HUDs offer less automation than automatic landing systems, airlines have discovered that their planes suffer fewer costly tail strikes and tire blowouts when pilots use HUDs rather than auto-landers. Perhaps for this reason, HUDs are integrated into newer commercial aircraft.

Collaboration is not intrinsically better than automation. It would be ridiculous to collaborate with your car’s transmission or to pilot your office elevator from floor to floor. But in some domains, occupations, or tasks where full automation is not currently achievable, where human expertise remains indispensable or a necessary fail-safe, tools should be designed to collaborate—to amplify human expertise, not to keep it on ice until the last possible moment.

One thing that our tools have not historically done for us is make expert decisions. Expert decisions are high-stakes, one-off choices where the single right answer is not clear—often not knowable—but the quality of the decision matters. There is no single best way, for example, to care for a cancer patient, write a legal brief, remodel a kitchen, or develop a lesson plan. But the skill, judgment, and ingenuity of human decision making determines outcomes in many of these tasks, sometimes dramatically so. Making the right call means exercising expert judgment, which means more than just following the rules. Expert judgment is needed precisely where the rules are not enough, where creativity, ingenuity, and educated guesses are essential.

But we should not be too impressed by expertise: Even the best experts are fallible, inconsistent, and expensive. Patients receiving surgery on Fridays fare worse than those treated on other days of the week, and standardized test takers are more likely to flub equally easy questions if they appear later on a test. Of course, most experts are far from the best in their fields. And experts of all skill levels may be unevenly distributed or simply unavailable—a shortage that is more acute in less affluent communities and lower-income countries.

Expertise is also slow and costly to acquire, requiring immersion, mentoring, and tons of practice. Medical doctors—radiologists included—spend at least four years apprenticing as residents; electricians spend four years as apprentices and then another couple as journeymen, before certifying as master electricians; law-school grads start as junior partners, and new Ph.D.s begin as assistant professors; pilots must log at least 1,500 hours of flight before they can apply for an Airline Transport Pilot license.

The inescapable fact that human expertise is scarce, imperfect, and perishable makes the advent of ubiquitous AI an unprecedented opportunity. AI is the first machine humanity has devised that can make high-stakes, one-off expert decisions at scale—in diagnosing patients, developing lesson plans, redesigning kitchens. AI’s capabilities in this regard, while not perfect, have consistently been improving year by year.

What makes AI such a potent collaborator is that it is not like us. A modern AI system can ingest thousands of medical journals, millions of legal filings, or decades of maintenance logs. This allows it to surface patterns and keep up with the latest developments in health care, law, or vehicle maintenance that would elude most humans. It offers breadth of experience that crosses domains and the capacity to recognize subtle patterns, interpolate among facts, and make new predictions. For example, Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold AI overcame a central challenge in structural biology that has confounded scientists for decades: predicting the folding labyrinthine structure of proteins. This accomplishment is so significant that its designers, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, colleagues of one of us, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for their work.

The question is not whether AI can do things that experts cannot do on their own—it can. Yet expert humans often bring something that today’s AI models cannot: situational context, tacit knowledge, ethical intuition, emotional intelligence, and the ability to weigh consequences that fall outside the data. Putting the two together typically amplifies human expertise: Oncologists can ask a model to flag every recorded case of a rare mutation and then apply clinical judgment to design a bespoke treatment; a software architect can have the model retrieve dozens of edge-case vulnerabilities and then decide which security patch best fits the company’s needs. The value is not in substituting one expert for another, or in outsourcing fully to the machine, or indeed in presuming the human expertise will always be superior, but in leveraging human and rapidly-evolving machine capabilities to achieve best results.

As AI’s facility in expert judgment becomes more reliable, capable, and accessible in the years ahead, it will emerge as a near-ubiquitous presence in our lives. Using it well will require knowing when to automate versus when to collaborate. This is not necessarily a binary choice, and the boundaries between human expertise and AI’s capabilities for expert judgment will continually evolve as AI’s capabilities advance. AI already collaborates with human drivers today, provides autonomous taxi services in some cities, and may eventually relieve us of the burden and risk of driving altogether—so that the driver’s license can go the way of the manual transmission. Although collaboration is not intrinsically better than automation, premature or excess automation—that is, automation that takes on entire jobs when it’s ready for only a subset of job tasks—is generally worse than collaboration.

The temptation toward excess automation has always been with us. In 1984, General Motors opened its “factory of the future” in Saginaw, Michigan. President Ronald Reagan delivered the dedication speech. The vision, as MIT’s Ben Armstrong and Julie Shaw wrote in Harvard Business Review in 2023, was that robots would be “so effective that people would be scarce—it wouldn’t even be necessary to turn on the lights.” But things did not go as planned. The robots “struggled to distinguish one car model from another: They tried to affix Buick bumpers to Cadillacs, and vice versa,” Armstrong and Shaw wrote. “The robots were bad painters, too; they spray-painted one another rather than the cars coming down the line. GM shut the Saginaw plant in 1992.”

There has been much progress in robotics since this time, but the advent of AI invites automation hubris to an unprecedented degree. Starting from the premise that AI has already attained superhuman capabilities, it is tempting to think that it must be able to do everything that experts do, minus the experts. Many people have therefore adopted an automation mindset, in their desire either to evangelize AI or to warn against it. To them, the future goes like this: AI replicates expert capabilities, overtakes the experts, and finally replaces them altogether. Rather than performing valuable tasks expertly, AI makes experts irrelevant.

Research on people’s use of AI makes the downsides of this automation mindset ever more apparent. For example, while experts use chatbots as collaboration tools—riffing on ideas, clarifying intuitions—novices often treat them mistakenly as automation tools, oracles that speak from a bottomless well of knowledge. That becomes a problem when an AI chatbot confidently provides information that is misleading, speculative, or simply false. Because current AIs don’t understand what they don’t understand, those lacking the expertise to identify flawed reasoning and outright errors may be led astray.

The seduction of cognitive automation helps explain a worrying pattern: AI tools can boost the productivity of experts but may also actively mislead novices in expertise-heavy fields such as legal services. Novices struggle to spot inaccuracies and lack efficient methods for validating AI outputs. And methodically fact-checking every AI suggestion can negate any time savings.

Beyond the risk of errors, there is some early evidence that overreliance on AI can impede the development of critical thinking, or inhibit learning. Studies suggest a negative correlation between frequent AI use and critical-thinking skills, likely due to increased “cognitive offloading”—letting the AI do the thinking. In high-stakes environments, this tendency toward overreliance is particularly dangerous: Users may accept incorrect AI suggestions, especially if delivered with apparent confidence.

The rise of highly capable assistive AI tools also risks disrupting traditional pathways for expertise development when it’s still clearly needed now, and will be in the foreseeable future. When AI systems can perform tasks previously assigned to research assistants, surgical residents, and pilots, the opportunities for apprenticeship and learning-by-doing disappear. This threatens the future talent pipeline, as most occupations rely on experiential learning—like those radiology residents discussed above.

Early field evidence hints at the value of getting this right. In a PNAS study published earlier this year and covering 2,133 “mystery” medical cases, researchers ran three head-to-head trials: doctors diagnosing on their own, five leading AI models diagnosing on their own, and then doctors reviewing the AI suggestions before giving a final answer. That human-plus-AI pair proved most accurate, correct on roughly 85 percent more cases than physicians working solo and 15 to 20 percent more than an AI alone. The gain came from complementary strengths: When the model missed a clue, the clinician usually spotted it, and when the clinician slipped, the model filled the gap. The researchers engineered human-AI complementarity into the design of the trials, and saw results. As these tools evolve, we believe they will surely take on autonomous diagnostic tasks, such as triaging patients and ordering further testing—and may indeed do better over time on their own, as some early studies suggest.

Or, consider an example with which one of us is closely familiar: Google’s Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE) is an AI system built to assist physicians. AMIE conducts multi-turn chats that mirror a real primary-care visit: It asks follow-up questions when it is unsure, explains its reasoning, and adjusts its line of inquiry as new information emerges. In a blinded study recently published in Nature, specialist physicians compared the performance of a primary-care doctor working alone with that of a doctor who collaborated with AMIE. The doctor who used AMIE ranked higher on 30 of 32 clinical-communication and diagnostic axes, including empathy and clarity of explanations.

By exposing its reasoning, highlighting uncertainty, and grounding advice in trusted sources, AMIE pulls the user into an active problem-solving loop instead of handing down answers from on high. Doctors can potentially interrogate and correct it in real time, reinforcing (rather than eroding) their own diagnostic skills. These results are preliminary: AMIE is still a research prototype and not a drop-in replacement. But its design principles suggest a path toward meaningful human collaboration with AI.

Full automation is much harder than collaboration. To be useful, an automation tool must deliver near flawless performance almost all of the time. You wouldn’t tolerate an automatic transmission that sporadically failed to shift gears, an elevator that regularly got stuck between floors, or an electronic tollbooth that occasionally overcharged you by $10,000.

By contrast, a collaboration tool doesn’t need to be anywhere close to infallible to be useful. A doctor with a stethoscope can better understand a patient than the same doctor without one; a contractor can pitch a squarer house frame with a laser level than by line of sight. These tools don’t need to work flawlessly, because they don’t promise to replace the expertise of their user. They make experts better at what they do—and extend their expertise to places it couldn’t go unassisted.

Designing for collaboration means designing for complementarity. AI’s comparative advantages (near limitless learning capacity, rapid inference, round-the-clock availability) should slot into the gaps where human experts tend to struggle: remembering every precedent, canvassing every edge case, or drawing connections across disciplines. And at the same time, interface design must leave space for distinctly human strengths: contextual nuance, moral reasoning, creativity, and a broad grasp of how accomplishing specific tasks achieves broader goals.

Both AI skeptics and AI evangelists agree that AI will prove a transformative technology–-indeed, this transformation is already under way. The right question then is not whether but how we should use AI. Should we go all in on automation? Should we build collaborative AI that learns from our choices, informs our decisions, and partners with us to drive better results? The correct answer, of course, is both. Getting this balance right across capabilities is a formidable and ever-evolving challenge. Fortunately, the principles and techniques for using AI collaboratively are now emerging. We have a canyon to cross. We should choose our routes wisely.

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Something strange has been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks. After being uploaded, some videos have been subtly augmented, their appearance changing without their creators doing anything. Viewers have noticed “extra punchy shadows,” “weirdly sharp edges,” and a smoothed-out look to footage that makes it look “like plastic.” Many people have come to the same conclusion: YouTube is using AI to tweak videos on its platform, without creators’ knowledge.

A multimedia artist going by the name Mr. Bravo, whose YouTube videos feature “an authentic 80s aesthetic” achieved by running his videos through a VCR, wrote on Reddit that his videos look “completely different to what was originally uploaded.” “A big part of the videos charm is the VHS look and the grainy, washed out video quality,” he wrote. YouTube’s filter obscured this labor-intensive quality: “It is ridiculous that YouTube can add features like this that completely change the content,” he wrote. Another YouTuber, Rhett Shull, posted a video last week about what was happening to his video shorts, and those of his friend Rick Beato. Both run wildly popular music channels, with more than 700,000 and 5 million subscribers, respectively. In his video, Shull says he believes that “AI upscaling” is being used—a process that increases an image’s resolution and detail—and is concerned about what it could signal to his audience. “I think it’s gonna lead people to think that I am using AI to create my videos. Or that it’s been deepfaked. Or that I’m cutting corners somehow,” he said. “It will inevitably erode viewers’ trust in my content.”

Fakery is a widespread concern in the AI era, when media can be generated, enhanced, or modified with little effort. The same pixel-filled rectangle could contain the work of someone who spent time and energy and had the courage to perform publicly, or of someone who sits in bed typing prompts and splicing clips in order to make a few bucks. Viewers who don’t want to be fooled by the latter must now be alert to the subtlest signs of AI modification. For creators who want to differentiate themselves from the new synthetic content, YouTube seems interested in making the job harder.

[Read: ChatGPT turned into a Studio Ghibli machine. How is that legal?]

When I asked Google, YouTube’s parent company, about what’s happening to these videos, the spokesperson Allison Toh wrote, “We’re running an experiment on select YouTube Shorts that uses image enhancement technology to sharpen content. These enhancements are not done with generative AI.” But this is a tricky statement: “Generative AI” has no strict technical definition, and “image enhancement technology” could be anything. I asked for more detail about which technologies are being employed, and to what end. Toh said YouTube is “using traditional machine learning to unblur, denoise, and improve clarity in videos,” she told me. (It’s unknown whether the modified videos are being shown to all users or just some; tech companies will sometimes run limited tests of new features.)

Toh’s description sounds remarkably similar to the process undertaken when generative-AI programs create entirely new videos. These programs typically use a diffusion model: a machine-learning program that is trained to refine an extremely noisy image into one that’s clear, with sharp edges and smooth textures. An AI upscaler can use the same diffusion process to “improve” an existing image, rather than to create a new one. The similarity of the underlying process might explain why the visual signature of diffusion-based AI is recognizable in these YouTubers’ videos.

While running this experiment, YouTube has also been encouraging people to create and post AI-generated short videos using a recently launched suite of tools that allow users to animate still photos and add effects “like swimming underwater, twinning with a lookalike sibling, and more.” YouTube didn’t tell me what motivated its experiment, but some people suspect that it has to do with creating a more uniform aesthetic across the platform. As one YouTube commenter wrote: “They’re training us, the audience, to get used to the AI look and eventually view it as normal.”

Google isn’t the only company rushing to mix AI-generated content into its platforms. Meta encourages users to create and publish their own AI chatbots on Facebook and Instagram using the company’s “AI Studio” tool. Last December, Meta’s vice president of product for generative AI told the Financial Times that “we expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that [human] accounts do.”

[Read: What we discovered on “deep YouTube”]

In a slightly less creepy vein, Snapchat provides tools for users “to generate novel images” of themselves based on selfies they’ve taken. And last year, TikTok introduced Symphony Creative Studio, which generates videos and includes a “Your Daily Video Generations” feature that suggests new videos automatically each day.

This is an odd turn for “social” media to take. Platforms that are supposedly based on the idea of connecting people with one another, or at least sharing experiences and performances—YouTube’s slogan until 2013 was “Broadcast Yourself”—now seem focused on getting us to consume impersonal, algorithmic gruel. Shull said that the modification of his videos erodes his trust in YouTube, and how could it not? The platform’s priorities have clearly shifted away from creators such as Shull, whose combined work is a major reason YouTube has become the juggernaut it is today.

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In its original televised run, from 1997 to 2009, the animated show King of the Hill aired 259 good-to-great episodes about the Hills, a folksy and well-intentioned family living in small-town Texas. That’s a lot of TV, and those looking for a representative moment—one that summarizes the entire show, more or less—might pick an exchange from the third-season episode “Three Coaches and a Bobby,” in which the stodgy patriarch, Hank, attempts to explain to his son, Bobby, why soccer is a stupid sport. Hank is a Dallas Cowboys diehard; the idea of Bobby getting into the Premier League sends him into full-body shivers. But rather than take offense or rise to his father’s provocation, Bobby fixes his old man with a placid look and asks: “Why do you have to hate what you don’t understand?”

During those initial seasons, King of the Hill drew much of its humor from how Hank’s values clashed with modern society—for example, his inability to understand why anyone would enjoy, as he put it, a sport “invented by European ladies to keep them busy while their husbands did the cooking.” But the living personification of the changing times was Bobby. The younger Hill was a sensitive and proudly chubby tween boy—not good at fighting or football, but handy with a sewing machine and a master of prop comedy. Hank, who was born in the 1950s or ’60s—cartooons tend to be vague with ages—grew up in an era with a very fixed view of how men should think and behave. To paraphrase Tony Soprano, he was the Gary Cooper type, strong and silent. Bobby, whose age hovered between 11 and 13, was by contrast a Millennial—part of a generation that had more freedom to do things differently, and that would come to be consistently misunderstood by its elders.

[Read: The strength of the ‘soft daddy’]

The new season continues probing that tension between father and son—not by picking up where the original show left off, but by vaulting forward into the future (a rarity for animated programs, whose characters often remain fixed in time). Hank and his wife, Peggy, are now retired in present-day Texas; Bobby is 21 years old and living on his own. Although this age technically categorizes him as a Zoomer—the show has been off the air for 16 years, but it has chosen to age its characters less than a decade—Bobby still behaves like a Millennial. At one point, he describes himself as “hashtag thick,” slang ripped right out of an old BuzzFeed post. And his anxieties seem propelled by a fear of winnowing potential, the feeling that he might be left behind. Watching him, I was struck by how aptly he channeled the unease of a generation reaching middle age while still lacking many traditional signposts of adult life. Yet he’s also inimitably Bobby—sweet, congenial, a little goofy—which makes his trajectory in these episodes all the more endearing, because it’s rooted in believable growth.

In earlier seasons, Bobby was sometimes the centerpiece of a plot, but he was just as often relegated to delivering a well-timed quip in service of another character’s storyline. Now he’s become a co-headliner, appearing substantively in each episode of the new season. The shift may partly be logistical: Luanne, Hank’s angelic and naive niece who filled out the Hill family, was voiced by Brittany Murphy, who died in 2009, and her role was not recast out of respect. But the refocus on Bobby allows the show to use father and son as foils for each other. Just as Hank remains confused by the things he doesn’t understand—such as the expected courtesy of rating your ride-share driver five stars, when he’s really done more of a four-star job—so is Bobby lightly out of step with his own peers, forcing a similar confrontation with his own principles.

Right away, we get a sense of how his experience differs from others in his age cohort. Whereas many of them are off at college, Bobby is instead the executive chef and a co-owner of Robata Chane, a Japanese-German restaurant; he works long hours for not much money. In the first episode, a flirtatious customer invites Bobby to a frat party, and they end up going home together. The next morning, when he tries to set up a future date, she makes it clear that their hookup was a onetime, rhythm-of-the-night type of thing. Here was a moment that could indicate how the show meant to portray Bobby: If he should project hurt, perhaps the show would tilt toward a judgmental “kids these days” perspective on evolving sexual mores. Instead, pleasant surprise dawns on Bobby’s face—this is not such a bad outcome, even if he might have liked a second date. He is still the boy who is open to new experiences, not someone who has been hardened by adulthood.

[King of the Hill now looks like a fantasy]

Yet he is not unconditionally tolerant; like his father, he draws some lines in the sand. Early on in the season, he reconnects with Connie, a middle-school sweetheart who is now going out with Chane, his business partner. At one point, he obtains evidence that Chane may be cheating on Connie—which, he then learns, is a moot discovery, because the two of them are practicing ethical nonmonogamy. Connie explains how it works, in a dutiful and credulous way, and to Bobby it sounds like nonsense. Because he cares for her, he can’t help but express his distaste for the arrangement, edging uncomfortably close to slut-shaming—“the worst thing” a person can do, Connie tells him, aghast at his response even as it seems to leave her less assured about her own behavior.

This is subtle character work that, as described on the page, might seem hectoring or prescriptive. But King of the Hill has always been more of a good hang, rooted in the organic interplay of recognizable personalities, than a laugh factory. Back in the day, its sister shows on Fox were The Simpsons and Family Guy, two punch-line-heavy shows with lots of cutaway gags and surreal touches. Both of those shows starred young boys, Bart Simpson and Chris Griffin, who never got older, and whose immaturity was a pointed feature; you could, and can, count on them to behave and react the way they usually do. Watching Bobby mature into a young adult—as many viewers have since the show first premiered—is a different experience, and perhaps the best reason to tap in.

These scenes aren’t funny, per se. What is funny—has always been funny, will always be funny—is the texture of Bobby’s voice. None of this would land without the heroic voice acting of Pamela Adlon, who subtly dials up his boyish vocal fry into the rasp of a grown man. Bobby sounds like a born sweetheart, someone whose heart is pure and whose frailties are relatable—not a smart aleck or a dullard or an agent of chaos. Another plot point this season concerns Hank’s teenage half brother, Good Hank (it’s a long story), who gets swept up in the manosphere. Bobby would never, I thought while watching this subplot play out. He’s too old-fashioned to completely get with the times, and too attuned to his own sense of right and wrong to give into peer pressure. In this, like countless sons before him, he walks the path toward becoming a fresh iteration of his father, bringing the show full circle.

The new season knowingly acknowledges that it is asking viewers to sit with the years that have passed for the Hills. Television revivals are always good for a healthy whiff of nostalgia, but the routine may quickly become tired. In the season’s finale, Bobby wonders if Connie might “only like the 12-year-old husky version of me,” rather than the man he’s become. Connie, thankfully, brushes off this fear—Bobby is the bravest person she knows, she says, because he’s doing exactly what he wants. He still has plenty of road to burn: Financial stability would help, as would the time to do his laundry. (He still drops off his dirty clothes at his mom’s.) But this self-awareness is meaningful, as it was for his younger self. You believe that he’ll keep growing, and that he’ll weather whatever storms may come, because he understands who he is.

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

This week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard removed the security clearances from 37 former and current intelligence officials, including those with expertise on Russian election interference. Meanwhile, former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home was raided. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the potential implications of the Trump administration’s actions on national security, and more.

“Tulsi Gabbard came in early on talking about trying to de-politicize the intelligence community,” Matt Viser, the White House bureau chief at The Washington Post, said last night. But her latest decisions, among others, “gives the sense of political retribution.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Laura Barron-Lopez, a White House correspondent at MSBNC; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic; and Viser, the White House bureau chief at The Washington Post.

Watch the full episode here.

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

College athletics were once casual and fun, more like a club sport than a serious endeavor. But “over the past 75 years, NCAA sports has become ever more professionalized,” Marc Novicoff wrote recently. “Football and men’s basketball began to generate eye-watering sums of money, incentivizing colleges to invest more resources in them.”

Now, recent court cases have allowed athletes to get paid by advertisers, fans, and their schools. As college athletes’ status changes, both their careers and the experience of college-level sports are starting to look different. Today’s reading list explores the meaning of school sports.

On College Sports

The End of Niche College Sports

By Marc Novicoff

Letting schools pay revenue-generating athletes is long overdue. If that means letting squash and water polo die, so be it.

Read the article.

College Sports Are Affirmative Action for Rich White Students

By Saahil Desai

Athletes are often held to a lower standard by admissions officers, and in the Ivy League, 65 percent of players are white. (From 2018)

Read the article.

The Logical End Point of College Sports

By Marc Novicoff

If players are workers, schools will have to pay them.

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Meritocracy is killing high-school sports: Athletics are supposed to be great equalizers in American life. But they’re being hijacked by the wealthy, Derek Thompson wrote in 2019.Do sports matter?: In 2022, readers weighed in on the role of athletics in today’s society—and if they should have one at all.

Other Diversions

What we gain when we stop caringA tale of sex and intrigue in imperial Kyoto Alexandra Pertri: Donald Trump’s guide to museums

P.S.

Courtesy of Nancy Farese

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Nancy Farese sent this photo “of my cold dip buddies who brave the icy temperatures of the SF Bay at 7am on Sunday mornings.” She adds: “It's a time of fellowship (we circle up and read Mary Oliver's Why I Wake Early) and courage, the glossy heads of seals, the clatter of gulls, and the cloak of fog rolling back under the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun is rising.”

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

— Isabel

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Both batches of french fries that my family had for dinner were from the frozen-food aisle. They appeared nearly identical when cooked, one batch faintly darker than the other. And we all noticed: Those bronzed fries were exceptionally tasty. My toddler devoured a small mountain of them. They left a meatiness on my tongue, as if I’d eaten them alongside a steak. After my husband unblinded the taste test, I realized that, in a way, I had. The paler fries had been cooked in avocado oil, and their more delicious counterparts in beef tallow. Damn, I thought. The MAHA fries are amazing!

They weren’t, of course, actually produced by the Make America Healthy Again campaign; both bags were from Jesse and Ben’s, a frozen-french-fry brand whose tallow fries predate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as secretary of Health and Human Services. Jesse and Ben’s, like many food companies, had already released so-called clean-label products, which cater to long-standing wellness trends such as avoiding artificial ingredients and added sugar—trends that overlap considerably with the MAHA approach to food.

Now companies are capitalizing on some of Kennedy’s favored dietary principles—including his assertion, which is refuted by most nutrition experts, that beef tallow is a healthy substitute for seed oils—by further overhauling the branding and recipes of their products. Unfortunately, MAHA-washing groceries in this way won’t make Americans any healthier. It might even change our diets for the worse.

Many product labels and ad campaigns decry ingredients on Kennedy’s hit list—besides seed oils, it also includes high-fructose corn syrup and artificial food dyes and flavors—and showcase those he deems healthy. This summer, Sam’s Club started selling beef-tallow-fried chicken strips. A brand of seed-oil-free instant ramen launched in August and is available at Kroger. This spring, PepsiCo relaunched its “Simply” line, which sells versions of snacks such as Cheetos and Doritos that are made without artificial flavorings and dyes; it later announced plans to extend the line with new products. A company spokesperson told me in an email that Lays and Tostitos will have no artificial colors or flavors by the end of the year. PepsiCo is investing in products without artificial dyes and flavorings “to make it easier for everyone to find snacks and drinks they feel good about,” the spokesperson told me. “The Make America Healthy Again movement has sparked important dialogue, and we share the belief that the food system should evolve—responsibly, at scale, and grounded in science and consumer trust.” Meanwhile, Coca-Cola announced that it would sweeten its sodas with cane sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup. President Donald Trump, who said he had previously discussed the change with the company, thanked its leaders; Kennedy subsequently thanked Trump.

Of course, fried chicken, instant ramen, soda, and chips share a certain inherent junkiness. Even without their shocking-orange hue, Cheetos are mostly empty vectors for salt and fat. A 12-ounce bottle of Mexican Coke still contains more than three-quarters of the added sugar that the FDA says an adult should limit themselves to in a day. MAHA-washing therefore “misses the bigger picture of the food landscape,” which is characterized by heavily processed food, fast food, and sugary drinks, Marie Bragg, a population-health professor at New York University, told me.

These reformulations may have some benefits; as my colleague Nick Florko has written, artificial food dyes in particular are both unnecessary and probably not great for health. But at best, the changes championed by the MAHA movement will likely yield marginal health improvements, Alyssa J. Moran, a director at the University of Pennsylvania’s food-policy laboratory, told me. Research has long shown that the most harmful elements of junk food are high levels of salt, saturated fat, and sugar, combined with minimal fiber and nutrients—not fructose, seed oils, or trace amounts of additives. Despite widespread concern resulting from studies linking high-fructose corn syrup to obesity in the 2000s, the evidence that it is less healthy than other forms of sugar is weak. Seed oils have repeatedly been shown to be not only safe to consume, but healthier than animal-based fats such as butter and beef tallow, which are rich in saturated fat and are linked to higher risk of heart disease. As I read the nutrition labels of my frozen fries, my heart spasmed: The beef-tallow version contains seven times more saturated fat than the avocado-oil kind.

[Read: America stopped cooking with tallow for a reason]

Unfortunately, Americans have proved themselves to be suckers for packaging that conveys a food’s healthiness, Bragg said. Shoppers are willing to pay more for food labeled “all natural” and prefer produce marked as “pesticide-free.” One study that Moran co-authored found that parents are more likely to give their kids sugary drinks labeled with images of fresh fruit than similar products without those images. People tend to falsely believe that Oreos labeled “organic” have fewer calories than their conventional counterparts, and that the cookies can be eaten more frequently, even if they are pointed to labels showing that both options are nutritionally identical. They are also more likely to forgo exercise if they choose an organic dessert over a conventional one. All of this bodes poorly for American shoppers, who seem likely to eat more of the MAHA-washed junk foods that will still contain just as much salt, saturated fat, and sugar.

These issues do not concern food companies, whose primary mission is, of course, to sell food. Jesse Konig, one of Jesse and Ben’s co-founders, told me that the company was pursuing taste, not health, when it started selling tallow fries, in 2024. “We’re restaurant guys, not doctors,” he said. The labels on my packages of Jesse and Ben’s fries, however, noted that the company doesn’t use conventional seed oils, because they “leave you feeling icky and inflamed,” referencing a common health claim made by seed-oil critics.

Other companies are more outspoken about changing their products for the purpose of health. Mike’s Mighty Good describes its seed-oil-free ramen as “wholesome,” and similar instant-ramen products as “low-quality junk food.” Real Good Foods launched its tallow-fried chicken because customers kept asking for a “seed-oil-free solution,” Rikki Ingram, the company’s chief marketing officer, told me. Compared with conventional products, she said, the brand’s tallow-fried chicken offers health advantages unrelated to its lack of seed oils: more protein, fewer carbohydrates, and no highly processed flour.

[Read: America is done pretending about meat]

Changes such as these make good business sense. A company that agrees to, say, phase out food dyes from soft drinks improves its public image. It also courts a relatively affluent audience, says Trey Malone, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. MAHA-washed foods are likely to be more expensive, in part because reformulating products is costly; companies aren’t trying to market those goods to people already struggling to afford conventional food. Mike’s Mighty Good seed-oil-free instant ramen costs more than $3 a cup on its website; its conventional counterparts can be 99 cents or less apiece. At Walmart, a bag of Simply Lays costs nearly three times as much as regular Lays. The rise of MAHA has been good for Jesse and Ben’s business, Konig told me. Both the avocado-oil fries—which tick MAHA’s seed-oil-free criterion—and the beef-tallow version have been hits with customers, but recent public discussion about beef tallow especially has “generated a lot of curiosity,” he said.

To Kennedy’s credit, he’s never called french fries a health food. MAHA’s vision of an ideal food landscape is one where people eat more fresh fruits and vegetables, lean proteins, and minimally processed food (in addition to beef tallow and raw milk). Kennedy has long condemned processed foods and the companies that make them for poisoning Americans. Earlier this month, he lauded states for announcing plans to restrict SNAP recipients from using the benefits to buy candy and soda. Yet so far, his dealings with food companies themselves have been fundamentally friendly: asking them to voluntarily phase out food dyes, congratulating Coca-Cola for its commitment to sugar as a sweetener.

If Kennedy shies away from using the government’s real power, he could blow a genuine opportunity to overhaul America’s food landscape. Food companies have enormous power over what we eat and could effectively nudge Americans toward healthier habits, Bragg said. In the mid-aughts, for example, companies such as Campbell’s, Heinz, and Kraft committed to reducing salt levels in foods, including in breads, cold cuts, and cheese. It worked: From 2009 to 2018, the amount of salt in packaged food decreased by 8.5 percent. This outcome was partly driven by voluntary goals set by the National Sugar and Salt Reduction Initiative, a nongovernmental organization. The companies, however, also faced threats of regulation from the federal government if they did not comply. In 2016, the FDA proposed its own salt-reduction guidelines, further pressuring the food industry. “There has to be a threat of mandatory policy,” Moran said. “Otherwise, we’re just going to continue to see them making these changes around the margins that are very unlikely to meaningfully impact health.”

[Read: A ‘MAHA box’ might be coming to your doorstep]

Meanwhile, Kennedy’s HHS hasn’t instituted or threatened any binding regulations on food companies; indeed, it seems strongly opposed to doing so. A leaked draft of the second MAHA report, a document outlining HHS’s policy strategy that has yet to be finalized, explicitly details plans to deregulate food and agriculture. “The Trump administration has initiated a robust food policy agenda to Make America Healthy Again, from phasing out artificial food dyes to updating Dietary Guidelines for Americans to reforming the ‘Generally Recognized as Safe’ Standard,” the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email. (Under Kennedy, the FDA has so far revoked the authorization of one dye, Red 3. Formal changes to GRAS have not yet been announced.) “Every stakeholder in this movement—from parents to food companies to physicians to farmers to restaurants—has a role to play to transform how Americans view and make decisions about our health and nutrition.”

The superficial changes that companies have made to align with MAHA’s goals offer a glimpse of what could change if Kennedy were willing to enforce his more science-backed policy proposals. But as things stand, HHS is attempting to clean up America’s food supply with a spray bottle. What it really needs is a power washer.

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

One of the more common clichés of modern travel is calling any trip—even a subway ride to an Instagram-famous coffee shop—a pilgrimage. The word originally applied to journeys made to holy places by people so devout that they were willing to endanger their lives to get there. Today, both the risks and rewards of travel tend to be lower, but the activity retains its spiritual character for some, including the novelist Lauren Groff. For the latest installment of The Atlantic’s series “The Writer’s Way,” she traveled to Kyoto in search of the mysterious author of The Tale of Genji, frequently credited as the world’s first novel. She made her way through the crowds swarming Japan’s former imperial capital to find out more about that writer, known to us as Lady Murasaki. But Groff also came across the kinds of spiritual experiences that fire up much of her own fiction.

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

She has no autonomy. Can she be happy?These books won’t make you a better person.“Paragraph,” a poem by Richard SikenSix books to read before you get to the airport

Groff was in Kyoto in April; the journalist Reeves Wiedeman was there around the same time. In a feature published in June in New York magazine, Wiedeman wrote that the city has become the epicenter of the “age of overtourism”: a once-tranquil historical landmark blighted by travelers racing to take selfies at a handful of clogged sites. Reading it, I wondered how Groff’s essay could wrest meaning from this location—what weaving among the frequent-flying box-checkers could reveal about the Heian era of Japan, a time and place that Groff says is “thrillingly distant to my imagination.”

In Kyoto, Groff did what many tourists do: She made a list and checked off destinations—temples, palaces, and museums associated with Murasaki’s life and work. Yet her most meaningful encounters had as much to do with sensation as place. She describes a feeling of “living outside time” while eating a 7-Eleven egg sandwich and sitting on a clean-swept sidewalk curb; she has an epiphany not while beholding a 10th-century relic but while taking a hot bath downstairs from her hotel room. Her deepest connections to medieval Japan are experiential, rather than physical or intellectual. “I had an inkling that, though my love of Lady Murasaki could be explained only through beautiful abstraction—by meeting her mind in her work,” Groff writes, “I might begin to understand something tangible about her through the wordless animal body.”

This kind of sensory awareness can be found in Groff’s fiction. Her most explicitly religious novel, Matrix, published in 2021, imagined the 12th-century mystic Marie de France as a towering figure who made a British abbey into a power center for medieval women. A heterodox interpretation of Christianity infuses much of her work, as Judith Shulevitz noted in a recent Atlantic essay about her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds. Shulevitz considered the journey in the book, a young woman’s flight from Jamestown in the 17th century, to be a spiritual one—an update, in fact, of The Pilgrim’s Progress—in which communion with nature is achieved through perilous struggle. She called the book “Christian allegory in a post-Christian spirit.” Groff’s recent novels, as my colleague Sophie Gilbert wrote in a profile when Matrix was released, sprang from “the idea that so much of our present suffering comes from a misreading of Genesis. God instructed man to have dominion over Earth and its creatures, and yet dominion, Groff thinks, has been interpreted as domination instead of care: ‘the right to kill, the right to take, and not the right to nurture.’”

I don’t think it’s a stretch to connect this dichotomy—dominion versus care—with the approach Groff takes in Kyoto, diverging from the flocking tourists that Wiedeman depicts. Groff, a fan (as Shulevitz notes) of the animist-leaning Quaker John Bartram, observes the nature-worship of Japan’s Shinto traditions. She closes her essay with a tea-and-meditation ceremony at the Shunkō-in Temple, a place with no ostensible connection to Murasaki, and yet she gleans something valuable about the often-puzzling structure of The Tale of Genji. She learns from one of the temple’s Buddhist reverends that “the self is a shifting, inconstant phenomenon”; he advises her to “embrace” ambiguity, which is “part of nature.” This instruction helps Groff understand the orderly disorder of Murasaki’s writing; it also teaches her about herself. Perhaps this is—or should be—the goal of every pilgrimage.

Takako Kido for The Atlantic

A Tale of Sex and Intrigue in Imperial Kyoto

By Lauren Groff

A thousand years ago, Murasaki Shikibu wrote The Tale of Genji, the world’s first novel. Who was she?

Read the full article.

What to Read

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed, by John McPhee

Pilots get most of the public credit for a flight’s successes—but they couldn’t go anywhere without the behind-the-scenes heroes: engineers. McPhee has a rare gift for stepping into the astonishing obsessions of seemingly ordinary working people; here, he uses it to immerse the reader in a decades-long quest to build an entirely new type of aircraft. That potential vehicle, shaped like the titular pumpkin seed, was imagined as a combination of dirigible and airplane. Its siren call, as McPhee shows, was sometimes all-consuming, even life-destroying. In a saga that reaches from the Civil War to the 1970s, one acolyte after another grew convinced that he (this affliction appears to target men exclusively) would be the one who conquered the engineering challenge that had theretofore led only to ruin. Did anyone finally succeed? The fact that you aren’t reading these words in the passenger compartment of a dirigible-airplane hybrid gives you a clue, but McPhee’s storytelling makes readers hope that the mission will somehow pan out.  — Jeff Wise

From our list: Six books to read before you get to the airport

Out Next Week

📚 A New New Me, by Helen Oyeyemi

📚 The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, by Howard W. French

📚 Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, by Dan Wang

Your Weekend Read

Illustration by Jonelle Afurong / The Atlantic. Sources: Mike Hansen / Getty; mikroman6 / Getty.

Why Is Everything Spicy Now?

By Ellen Cushing

To put it generally and reductively, American food has not always been known for embracing spice. But now a large and apparently growing number of people in this country are willingly chomping down on fruits that have been expressly cultivated to bind to their body’s pain receptors and unleash fury with every bite. “It’s one of the great puzzles of culinary history,” Paul Rozin, a retired psychologist who spent much of his career studying spice, told me. “It is remarkable that something that tastes so bad is so popular.”

Read the full article.

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The Fox News commentator Dana Perino has finally had enough. “You have to stop it with the Twitter thing,” she told the chief executive. “I don’t know where his wife is,” she fumed. “If I were his wife, I would say, ‘You are making a fool of yourself! Stop it!’” She went on to note that he has a big job, and that he has to be “a little more serious.”

What a relief to see someone from Fox, the flagship MAGA network, getting completely fed up with juvenile social-media behavior from a national politician. Except the chief executive in this case was not Donald Trump, the president of the United States, but Gavin Newsom, the governor of California.

Newsom has taken to trolling Trump on social media by imitating his bizarre rants, odd capitalizations, and affection for exclamation points. He has also posted several memes that are on-the-nose parodies of things Trump has fed to his followers for years. Politico recently summarized some of Newsom’s activities on social media:

There’s Newsom on Mount Rushmore. There’s Newsom getting prayed over by Tucker Carlson, Kid Rock and an angelic, winged Hulk Hogan. There’s Newsom posting in all caps, saying his mid-cycle redistricting proposal has led “MANY” people to call him “GAVIN CHRISTOPHER ‘COLUMBUS’ NEWSOM (BECAUSE OF THE MAPS!). THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

[Read: Thank you for your attention to this matter!]

Newsom got even closer to Trumpian perfection with a post yesterday that is almost impossible to tell apart from an actual outburst from the president:

WHAT IS WRONG WITH CRACKER BARREL?? KEEP YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOGO!!! THE NEW ONE LOOKS LIKE CHEAP VELVEETA “CHEESE” FROM WALMART, THE PLACE FOR “GROCERIES” (AN OLD FASHIONED TERM)!!!

Some of these jibes are clumsy, but many are well crafted and even funny, despite the unsettling fact that the person whom the governor is parodying is the commander in chief. And the proof that Newsom is on to something is that his supporters are reacting with genuine rage. Perhaps Newsom has hit a nerve because satire is always more effective than name-calling. Mango Mussolini or Cheeto Jesus (both of which refer to the president’s unusual bronzed skin tone) appeal only to Trump’s opponents. But a post that perfectly mimics Trump’s antics is a mirror—one that prompts people to consider how Trump looks to everyone else in the world.

At the least, Newsom has scored a direct hit on the double standard both in the national press and among the public that excuses Trump’s deeply concerning behavior as merely part of Trump’s shtick, some facet of his personality that cannot be held to account. Too many reporters have resorted to sane-washing Trump, forcing his bizarre statements somehow to make sense by cherry-picking the occasional phrase or sentence related to policy while ignoring his kooky rants about sharks and his Stalinist threats against his political enemies. Newsom’s parodies sidestep all the hand-wringing criticism about how presidents should act: Instead they show, rather than explain, what it should feel like when anyone but Trump acts the way Trump acts.

Perino is just one of many who is in high dudgeon. (Newsom responded to Perino with a dead-on Trump-like response: “DANA ‘DING DONG’ PERINO (NEVER HEARD OF HER UNTIL TODAY!)” Vice President J. D. Vance has lashed out at Newsom, telling Fox that the Californian’s attacks aren’t landing because his trolling “ignores the fundamental genius of President Trump’s political success, which is that he’s authentic”; in other words, everyone knows that Newsom’s crackpot hijinks are fake but Trump’s are real—a rather odd defense.

And of course, the MAGA posters on social media and Facebook have flown off the handle with rage. (Newsom is having a “mental breakdown,” said one MAGA influencer, without a trace of irony.) As it turns out, the people who pioneered the slogan “Fuck your feelings” are impossibly delicate souls.

Others have adopted a pose of criticizing Newsom more in sorrow than anger. “I’m all for appreciating crass humor,” said Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer and MAGA social-media stalwart who is now assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Trump Justice Department. “I love South Park. It’s hilarious.” (One wonders if she’s been watching the show recently.) “But don’t just be a loser copying the most powerful person in the world’s style.” Trump’s majordomo at Fox, Sean Hannity, summed up this New Seriousness among the president’s supporters when he tut-tutted Newsom’s “performative confrontational style,” adding that “maybe it wins you points with the loony radical base in your party,” but it won’t win elections. How refreshing: Fox commentators and leading figures in the Trump administration all agreeing that a politician should not conduct himself in public like a dim, insufferable child.

They’re all so close to getting it.

I admit that I am conflicted about Newsom’s approach. Some years ago, I wrote that Trump’s opponents, especially the ones addicted to terms such as Drumpf, the Orange Menace, Cadet Bone Spurs, and others needed to act like adults, and convey the gravity of their concerns about Trump instead of treating him like either an inconsequential boob or a towering werewolf whose name must not be invoked. The same goes for the too-online liberals who refer to “Rethuglicans” and “RepubliKKKans”—uncomfortably similar to the media-addicted right-wingers who use infantile slams such as DemonRats and Killary.

[Read: The week that changed everything for Gavin Newsom]

One aspect of Newsom’s parodies have genuinely made me laugh: his posting of pictures done in the style of the artist and Trump admirer Jon McNaughton, who is a competent illustrator but whose paintings are strange. They’re a kind of hallucinatory mash-up of Grant Wood and medieval iconography, in which Trump carries the world like Atlas, or is blessed by dead presidents, or rescues the Constitution from glowering liberals. (The Newsom image with the deceased Hulk Hogan was so perfectly rendered that at first I thought it was created by McNaughton himself.) Trump supporters seem to love these pictures. Newsom has shown just how weird they are.

Newsom has made his point and should move on. But his lasting accomplishment has been to reveal that Trump’s supporters are not as impervious to reality as the president’s opponents might believe. I suspect—as I have since the day Trump announced his first run for president a decade ago—that the MAGA faithful are hypersensitive to criticisms of Trump because, in their hearts, many of them know.They know that many of Trump’s statements are offensive and alarmingly detached from reality. They know that Trump has a disordered personality. They know that the president is a daily embarrassment to his party and to his nation.

For years, these MAGA partisans have employed various tactics to prevent the imminent pain of cognitive dissonance. They resort to “what about” arguments aimed at other politicians; they claim that Trump actually knows what he’s doing or that they understand the message underneath all the broken thoughts, garbled words, and dead-end sentences. Now Newsom is forcing them to see what Trump looks like without the distorting force field created by Trump’s showmanship and his aggressive delivery of incoherent statements.

Come to think of it, maybe MAGA world isn’t close to getting it; maybe they do get it, and maybe that’s why, this time, they’re especially angry.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”

After reading his post, I thought of the historian Lonnie Bunch, the current secretary of the Smithsonian—the first Black person to lead the institution since its founding in 1846—and the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. In his 2016 speech at the grand opening of the museum, Bunch thanked Barack Obama and George W. Bush for their support. “We are at this moment because of the backing of the United States Congress and the White House,” he said, turning to them both onstage. It’s sobering to consider how different things are today.

Bunch has been fighting efforts by the Trump administration to bring the Smithsonian into conformity with the MAGA vision of American history, and people familiar with his views say he is committed to protecting the intellectual integrity and independence of the Smithsonian. But how much longer, given Trump’s ever more antagonistic position, will Bunch be able to withstand the presidential pressure? On Truth Social, Trump said he had “instructed my attorneys to go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made.” A recent letter to the Smithsonian from the White House states that the review will be completed and a final report issued by early 2026, in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary, “to ensure alignment with the President’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism.”

Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.

In 2021, I published a book about how we remember slavery. I have spent years reading the first-person accounts of formerly enslaved people discussing the myriad horrors they endured—the journey across the Middle Passage, the abuse, the sexual violence, the psychological terror, the family separations. It is worth taking the time, in light of the president’s recent words, to revisit some of these accounts.

[Adam Serwer: The new dark age]

In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.His book was one of the first autobiographies ever published by a formerly enslaved person, and it laid the groundwork for a new genre of literature that would transform what people around the world understood about slavery. Equiano had been kidnapped from what is now Nigeria and marched for several months to the coast of West Africa. One of the most devastating scenes in his book describes the sadism of the Middle Passage:

The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.

The conditions were so bad, he writes, that some of the captives flung themselves overboard:

One day, when we had a smooth sea, and a moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew.

Once they arrived on American shores, men, women, and children were forced onto auction blocks where families were broken apart. Once separated, most would never see one another again.

Henry Bibb, born enslaved in Kentucky, writes in his 1849memoir:

After the men were all sold they then sold the women and children. They ordered the first woman to lay down her child and mount the auction block; she refused to give up her little one and clung to it as long as she could, while the cruel lash was applied to her back for disobedience. She pleaded for mercy in the name of God. But the child was torn from the arms of its mother amid the most heart rending-shrieks from the mother and child on the one hand, and bitter oaths and cruel lashes from the tyrants on the other. Finally the poor little child was torn from the mother while she was sacrificed to the highest bidder.

When the captives arrived at the home or plantation of their enslaver, many of them were forced to work in sweltering fields with hardly any respite. Their days began early. Austin Steward, born enslaved in Virginia, writes in his 1857 book:

It was the rule for the slaves to rise and be ready for their task by sun-rise, on the blowing of a horn or conch-shell; and woe be to the unfortunate, who was not in the field at the time appointed, which was in thirty minutes from the first sounding of the horn. I have heard the poor creatures beg as for their lives, of the inhuman overseer, to desist from his cruel punishment.

On the plantation, enslaved people were denied any physical autonomy, and were subjected to torturous, and often arbitrary, violence at the hands of overseers and enslavers. As William Coleman, born in Tennessee around 1853, recalled as part of an interview for the Federal Writers’ Project in the 1930s:

I’se seen the slaves whipped for nothing, but then if they did do something to be whipped for they were almost killed before Maser would quit working on them … One time one of the slaves was helping Mistress there in the yard and he passed too close to her as he was hurrying fast as he could, and sort of bumped into her. She never paid him no attention, but Maser saw him and he let him go on ahead and finish what he was doing then he called that poor negro to him and took him out in the pasture, tied his hands together, throwed the other end of the rope over a limb on a tree and pulled that negro’s hands up in the air to where that negro had to stand on his tiptoes, and Maser he took all that negro’s clothes off and whipped him with that rawhide whip until that negro was plum bloody all over. Then he left that poor negro tied there all the rest of the day and night.

Enslaved Black women were particularly vulnerable to insidious and unrelenting sexual violence at the hands of their enslavers. In his 1857 book, William Anderson, born enslaved in Virginia, describes this:

My master often went to the house, got drunk, and then came out to the field to whip, cut, slash, curse, swear, beat and knock down several, for the smallest offense, or nothing at all.

He divested a poor female slave of all wearing apparel, tied her down to stakes, and whipped her with a handsaw until he broke it over her naked body. In process of time he ravished her person and became the father of a child by her.

The constant threat of such violence took an immense psychological toll on those who were subjected to it. Harriet Jacobs, born enslaved in North Carolina, writes in her 1861 book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl:

He told me I was his property; that I must be subject to his will in all things … The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe … My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him. If I went out for a breath of fresh air after a day of unwearied toil, his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there. The light heart which nature had given me became heavy with sad forebodings.

The consequences of being caught in an attempted escape were so severe that most enslaved people never dared try. In Solomon Northup’s 1853 memoir, Twelve Years a Slave, he describes watching what happened to an enslaved man who ran away and then was captured several weeks later:

Wiley was stripped, and compelled to endure one of those inhuman floggings to which the poor slave is so often subjected. It was the first and last attempt of Wiley to run away. The long scars upon his back, which he will carry with him to the grave, perpetually remind him of the dangers of such a step.

Even after slavery was formally abolished by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865, the pain the institution wrought on the country’s 4 million freedmen and freedwomen continued to reverberate. Throughout the late 19th century, newly emancipated Black people used newspapers to try to locate family members they had been separated from many years before. The Christian Recorder published this ad following the war in 1865:

INFORMATION WANTED

Of my mother and father, Caroline and Issac Denna; also, my sisters, Fanny, Jane and Betsy Denna, and my brothers, Robert R., Hugh Henry, and Philander Denna. We were born in Fauquier Co, Va. In 1849 they were taken from the plantation of Josiah Lidbaugh, in said county, and carried to Winchester to be sold. About the same time I left my home in Clark Co, and have not heard from them since. The different ministers of Christian churches will do a favor by announcing the above, and any information will be gladly received by GEO. HENRY DENNA, Galva, Henry Co.

For many, the search meant trying to find someone they hadn’t seen for decades. Nancy Jones published this ad in 1886, more than 30 years after she had last seen her son:

INFORMATION WANTED of my son, Allen Jones. He left me before the war, in Mississippi. He wrote me a letter in 1853 in which letter he said that he was sold to the highest bidder, a gentleman in Charleston, S.C. Nancy Jones, his mother, would like to know the whereabouts of the above named person.

Whether mother and son were ever reunited is unknown.

None of us can imagine what it is like to be subjected to the unremitting physical, psychological, and social violence of chattel slavery. But museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture bring us closer to being able to do so by sharing first-person accounts of those who lived through that terrible violence. At these museums, we see the garments enslaved people wore, the tools they used, the structures in which they lived. We see their faces; we hear their voices.

[Clint Smith: Telling the truth about slavery is not ‘indoctrination’]

The NMAAHC, in particular, is unflinching in its characterization of slavery as an unequivocally evil system, one whose impact continues to be felt across our society. In 1860, the 4 million enslaved Black people were worth more than every bank, factory, and railroad combined. Today, although they make up 14 percent of the population, Black people own less than 4 percent of the nation’s wealth.

Still, the museum also makes clear that the Black American experience is not singularly defined by slavery, but also by the art, literature, and cultural traditions that have emerged from, and in spite of, centuries of interpersonal and structural violence. These are not mutually exclusive, and the NMAAHC understands that Americans should learn about both.

And yet the MAGA movement wants to tell a story about America that is disproportionately focused on what its proponents perceive to be the exceptionalism of this country. They are invested in this story because having to look too closely at the disturbing parts of American history would mean having to look closely at the disturbing parts of themselves. But instead of ignoring the shameful parts of our past, shouldn’t we—as individuals and as a country—want to learn from aspects of our history that we are not proud of? What other way is there to become the version of ourselves that we aspire to be?

The Trump administration is, in both public discourse and public policy, arguably the most racist presidential administration in modern American history. Each week seems to bring a new example of its bigotry. I am sometimes tempted, upon encountering yet another instance of this omnipresent racial antagonism, to let it be. How many ways can you say the same thing over and over again? And yet, we must write it down, if for nothing else, then for the sake of those who will come after us. I think of Frederick Douglass, who wrote about the monstrousness of slavery even when the idea of abolition seemed preposterous to most Americans. W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about how the nation must hold on to the values of Reconstruction long after federal soldiers marched out of the former Confederacy and abandoned Black southerners. Ida B. Wells wrote about the lynchings taking place throughout the South even as fresh bodies were still swinging from the trees. Their words were essential because they remind us that some Americans did bear witness to, and stand against, these atrocities.

This is part of the reality of Black life in this country: We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

FBI directors don’t customarily announce raids in progress. But early this morning, Kash Patel celebrated the search of former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home as agents were rolling into his suburban-Maryland driveway: “NO ONE is above the law … @FBI agents on mission,” Patel wrote on X. Agents also executed a search warrant at Bolton’s office in Washington, D.C. President Donald Trump later told reporters that he had learned about the raid on one of his most voluble critics from TV news, but he took the opportunity to call Bolton a “lowlife” and “not a smart guy.” Then he added: “Could be a very unpatriotic guy. We’re going to find out.”

The FBI’s actions were hard not to read as payback for Bolton’s years of criticism of the president, even as the facts that persuaded a judge to approve a search warrant remain unknown. That’s the problem with a politicized legal system—even if an investigation is legitimate, it’s easy to assume that its motives are corrupt. Trump has spent years vowing retribution against Bolton, particularly after Bolton published a 2020 memoir that portrayed the president as incompetent and out of his depth on foreign policy.

If this was revenge, it wasn’t an isolated act. As agents were still packing up boxes of Bolton’s effects, The Washington Post reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had pushed out yet another senior military officer, firing Lieutenant General Jeffrey Kruse, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In June, its analysts delivered a preliminary assessment that U.S. bombers had caused relatively limited damage to Iranian nuclear facilities, undercutting Trump’s pronouncements that the sites were “obliterated.” And just three days ago, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revoked the security clearances of more than three dozen current and former national-security officials. Several played key roles in efforts to counter or expose Russia’s 2016 election interference, what Trump calls the “Russia Hoax” and Gabbard has described as part of a “years-long coup” against the president.

[Read: The ‘Russia Hoax,’ Revisited]

Put it all together, and this may be remembered as the week Trump’s campaign against the “deep state” kicked into high gear. To some intelligence professionals I spoke with, it felt as though something fundamental had shifted in their historically apolitical line of work.

“Given the dystopian nature of it all—clearance revocations of former officials who did no wrong, forced retirements of long-standing intelligence officials, reductions in force that include junior officers who were just hired, and a wildly politicized leadership in the intelligence community—I no longer recommend young Americans to pursue careers in intelligence,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a veteran CIA officer who had his own security clearance yanked earlier this year, told me.

Purge doesn’t adequately capture what national-security experts see happening here. Chilling effect is too mild, though revoking the security clearances of two senior intelligence officers, as Gabbard did, effectively ending their government careers, will indeed send a message. Terrorizing the workforce is a phrase I heard a lot this week. And that may indeed be the point.

“Instead of being honest about what we think, now people will just keep their mouths shut or tell Trump what he wants to hear,” said one former official, who would only speak anonymously. The administration publicly identified this person as part of the “Russia Hoax,” and they’ve hired personal security for outside their home, fearing that Trump’s most fevered supporters might pay a visit.

Forget about calling out misbehavior or wrongdoing by administration officials, the person added: “Where would we go to file a grievance, or to report misconduct? Who’s going to do that?”

Gabbard’s office did not respond to my request for comment.

[Read: Tulsi Gabbard Chooses Loyalty to Trump]

One current official described the mood among career intelligence officers as “panicked.” In this person’s agency, three senior officials were abruptly placed on administrative leave this week. One of them has been involved in efforts to counter foreign threats against U.S. elections, which the administration has scaled back.

Gabbard’s actions have also raised concerns about separation of powers. She revoked the clearances of at least two congressional staffers. It will be difficult for them to perform their oversight of the executive branch without access to classified information.

Bolton was in his Washington office as the FBI conducted its search, according to a person close to him. He did not respond to a request for comment. Bolton was investigated during the first Trump administration and during the Biden administration over his book, The Room Where It Happened. He had submitted the manuscript for a prepublication review in early 2020, and after a lengthy back-and-forth with government officials, he made changes to address concerns about the possible disclosure of classified information. That effectively made it suitable for publication, according to a detailed statement from the official who led the review.

But in a highly unusual maneuver, the Trump White House ordered a second review by an administration official, who concluded that the manuscript was full of classified information. (That official, Michael Ellis, is now deputy director of the CIA.) The official in charge of the earlier review disagreed and concluded that the administration was trying to silence a political critic and was trampling his First Amendment rights.

Bolton published the book anyway. Federal investigators looked into whether he had illegally disclosed classified information. But Bolton was never charged. It’s possible some new evidence of a potential crime has emerged, leading to today’s FBI raid. But the administration’s hostility toward Bolton is well known, and Trump has made no secret of the fact that, seeing himself as the victim of political prosecutions during the Biden years, he is eager to turn the tables on perceived enemies. A senior U.S. official told the New York Post that the Biden administration had shut down the probe into Bolton “for political reasons.”

“That’s nonsense,” a former senior Justice Department official told me. “No decision in any case was ever made for political reasons. These accusations are obviously made in bad faith, and honestly, that’s what happens when you have people making decisions with basically no experience with complex national- security investigations. They have no clue what they’re talking about.”

There are still officials working in the government who took part in the 2016 efforts to counter Russia. Has the White House overlooked them? Are they next on the list to be purged? Everyone is left to wonder. But no one thinks that the president’s retribution campaign is anywhere near its end.

Vivian Salama and Isaac Stanley-Becker contributed reporting.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

This morning, Donald Trump claimed he knew nothing about the raid on the Maryland home of his former National Security Adviser John Bolton. “I’m not a fan of John Bolton,” Trump said, calling him a “lowlife.” In that respect he agrees with many Democrats: After Trump fired Bolton, in 2019, Representative Adam Schiff of California (now a senator) said that one “should question John Bolton’s patriotism,” and Representative Nancy Pelosi called him a “disgrace.” In January, Trump pulled Bolton’s security detail, which had been in place due to credible threats by the Iranian government, which is also not a fan of John Bolton. Bolton’s neighbor Gerald Rogell told The New York Times that Bolton was “unfriendly.” He added, dryly and a little gratuitously, “John Bolton is not our favorite person.” If a terrible accident befalls Bolton, one should not rule out a Murder on the Orient Express scenario. Who did it? Maybe everyone.

Reports say the government is searching Bolton’s home and office to determine whether he mishandled or shared classified material. (The New York Times says the raid followed “intelligence collected overseas” by the CIA.) The investigation is therefore unlikely to be related to Bolton’s long-standing dispute with Trump over Bolton’s memoir, which he published in 2020 without waiting for government clearance. (Bolton alleged that Trump’s administration slow-rolled the review to block criticism of the president.) Bolton has, ironically enough, been a longtime pooh-pooher of accusations that the federal government classifies way too much material, and that that secrecy-bloat impedes transparency.

[David A. Graham: John Bolton plumbs the depth of Trump’s depravity]

Bolton applies a lawyerly, punctilious zeal not only to his work but to many other aspects of his existence. Such people are not great at block parties. When you drop by to borrow sugar, they draft contracts with ruinous penalties and arbitration in the jurisdiction of Guantánamo Bay to ensure return of their measuring cup. In my 2019 profile of Bolton, I recounted his argument across the deli counter at a Safeway, over whether he was owed a refund for a turkey he had not yet consumed. Although these born sticklers may not be great neighbors, they tend to be scrupulous about personal liability, especially when they know—as Bolton must—that the president is gunning for them.

FBI agents were seen entering Bolton’s home with cardboard boxes. I wonder what they walked out with. Bolton is not the type to stumble into a situation that he cannot litigate his way out of. That said, he is cocky, and his memory is brimming with so many secrets that even a cautious person could spill one in an unguarded moment.

FBI Director Kash Patel tweeted, in apparent reference to the raid, that “NO ONE is above the law.” Patel has also recently pledged to “de-weaponize the FBI,” in particular by purging it and its partner agencies of those who have claimed that Trump has colluded with Russia. Bolton, in this regard, should be safe. He has used Trump’s own language in describing the Robert Mueller investigation as a “witch hunt,” and he has consistently denigrated Trump since 2020, not for treason but for ignorance, sloth, and foreign-policy blunders. After last week’s Ukraine summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bolton accused Trump of one of the worst sins one can commit in Trump land: being low-energy. He told CNN that Trump “looked very tired up there,” and said one should “reflect on what that means.”

[Graeme Wood: John Bolton knows what he’s doing]

Reflection is certainly in order, on the topic of what it means that Patel is investigating a former Trump official just as that defector is getting more mordant in his criticisms of his former boss. The pledge to “de-weaponize” the FBI would be more credible from a less vindictive administration, and one that had not spent its opening months purging apolitical staff. Until more information comes out about the warrant and the intelligence behind it, no one can say definitively whether today’s raid is due to Bolton’s status as critic, Bolton’s bad judgment or malfeasance, or nothing at all. All remain possible. A truly depoliticized Justice Department and intelligence community—less politicized than Trump’s, and also less politicized than recent Democrats’—would leave less doubt about the relative likelihood of each. But that is not the Justice Department currently in place.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Long flights can be tedious, but they also present a chance to watch movies both new and familiar. So we asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors: What is the perfect film to watch on a plane?

Crazy Rich Asians (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)

Sleep was elusive on my recent 15-hour flight. Never before had an airplane-movie formula been more important. First, the obvious: I look for anything that is mindlessly fun or otherwise engrossing enough to help me forget that I am hurtling through the air in a bus with wings. I probably will not watch anything worthy of the Criterion Collection. Provided that I am entertained, the movie’s length is no issue. And it doesn’t hurt if there are scenes involving airports or travel, to help me romanticize the experience of crying children and cramped seats.

These are among the many boxes that Crazy Rich Asians ticks. I’ve spaced out my rewatches of this movie enough that it still feels fresh and captivating every time. Michelle Yeoh’s performance as an icy, formidable matriarch is hard to look away from. The lavish scenery and shots of Singapore’s night-market food strengthen my travel urge. Plus, those sweet airplane scenes (no spoilers!). The only downside is that it makes me wish I no longer had to travel in economy.

— Stephanie Bai, associate editor

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The Dark Knight Rises (streaming on HBO Max)

Moviegoing in an airplane may not elicit the same cinematic thrill as sitting in an IMAX theater, but it can bring a different emotional vulnerability. Perhaps you’ve just said goodbye to a lover you will never see again, or you’re flying home to fix a fraught situation with your parents. Feelings, too, can be heightened at cruising altitude.

I’ll just come out and say it: I’ve teared up more than once over the Atlantic Ocean while watching Bruce Wayne go to war with his inner demons in The Dark Knight Rises. The finale of Christopher Nolan’s morally serious and visually exquisite treatment of the Batman story culminates in Wayne’s showdown with a hulking Bane—ruthless and funnily accented, drunk off his own self-righteousness. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice to say, the moment when Alfred glances up from his caffè lungo in Florence is when I lose it.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams, staff writer

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In Her Shoes (available to rent on Prime Video)

In Her Shoes, the 2005 dramedy, is white noise. No, pink noise—heartfelt but easy. Toni Collette and Cameron Diaz play feuding sisters. Shirley MacLaine is their long-lost grandmother. The movie has cute dogs and witty seniors. It’s an in-flight tonic that beats even benzos and cabernet.

For years, two colleagues and I would refer to In Her Shoes as a sacred text of procrastination; it was always playing on cable at just the right time. I asked them to endorse my nomination of the film.

“There are no banger lines you have to hear, no intricate plot points you have to absorb,” Monica told me. “It’s a low-altitude film to be enjoyed at high altitude.”

“It’s the best movie for just getting through something you don’t want to be doing,” Hank said. “Writing the rest of Chapter 7,” for example. Or: Sitting in seat 24C to LAX.

The film’s 20th anniversary is in early October. So, consider this blurb a commemoration. Cheers.

— Dan Zak, senior editor

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The Fifth Element (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)

On a plane, I prefer to watch a movie that I already know well, and enjoy rewatching. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element has always been a guilty pleasure, something I’ve seen so many times that I can fill in any dialogue, sound design, or music that might be missed because of noisy passengers or bad headphones.

The movie is unabashedly fun, and Bruce Willis has never been more charming than he is as a taxi driver tasked with saving the world from an evil sentient fireball. It’s easy to watch as an engaged viewer or as a distracted traveler, and the PG-13 rating makes it okay for public viewing. Sure, there is some silly dialogue (such as the phrase “slightly greasy solar atoms”) and subpar acting, but somehow that just adds to the appeal.

— Alan Taylor, senior photo editor

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The movie the person near you is watching (playing on their screen)

The perfect airplane movie is the movie playing on one of your fellow passengers’ screens, which you watch through a crack between the seats or by glancing across the aisle. There’s an invigorating element of randomness (since you have no control over their selection), and also a pleasing surreptitious feeling about the whole experience, as if you’re getting away with something. Given that you won’t have any sound, subtitles are helpful, but sometimes it’s just as fun without them—consumed this way, even the most clichéd romantic comedy gains a certain art-house surrealism. Some things I have recently watched this way include Pulp Fiction, Dune: Part Two, multiple action films starring former professional wrestlers, and several episodes of the Batman miniseries The Penguin (out of order).

Later, on a different trip, I plugged in my headphones and watched Dune: Part Two with sound and dialogue on my very own screen. I have to say that it didn’t make much more sense.

— Quinta Jurecic, staff writer

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Augmented-reality glasses (available to buy online)

Let’s be honest: The best airplane film is whatever film you personally want to watch. That’s probably going to be different for you than it is for me. But though I can’t tell you which movie to watch in midair, I can tell you how to watch the exact movie you want, regardless of what’s available on the seatback screen in front of you. All you need is a pair of augmented-reality glasses.

As somebody who travels a lot for work, I have perfected the art of bringing my own movie theater with me. Unlike their more famous and expensive VR headset counterparts, these types of glasses are lightweight and won’t leave you exhausted from wearing them or looking like an alien to passersby. Most important, the glasses can connect to your smartphone, laptop, or video-game device, meaning that if you can stream it or download it, you can project it onto your own giant, private silver screen. Companies such as Xreal, Viture, and Rokid offer a range of models, features, and prices. Some even allow you to adjust the display for your prescription. Find the right one for you—you can typically get the same functionality for less money if you buy an old model—and you’ll never fly the same way again.

— Yair Rosenberg, staff writer

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

MAGA world is so close to getting it, Tom Nichols writes.The states where it’s riskier to have a babyThe West Bank is sliding toward a crisis.

Today’s News

The FBI searched the home and office of John Bolton, a former national security adviser to President Donald Trump, as part of an investigation into whether he illegally shared or possessed classified information, according to sources familiar with the investigation.A federal judge ordered Florida last night to halt construction on the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant-detention facility in the Everglades and to stop bringing in new detainees. The judge also ruled that within 60 days, “all generators, gas, sewage, and other waste and waste receptacles” must be removed, citing environmental damage.Canada announced that it will remove its 25 percent retaliatory tariffs from about half of the U.S. goods it has targeted this year, but Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney confirmed that duties on U.S. steel, aluminum, and automobiles will remain.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: For some, including the author Lauren Groff, travel remains a spiritual endeavor, Boris Kachka writes. Read more about her search for an 11th-century novelist in Kyoto.The Weekly Planet: The model that once saved the New Jersey Meadowlands is disappearing, and legal protections for such places are now under threat, Kyra Morris writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture

Actually, Slavery Was Very Bad

By Clint Smith

In what looks to be an intensifying quest to reshape American history and scholarship according to his own preferences, President Donald Trump this week targeted the Smithsonian Institution, the national repository of American history and memory. Trump seemed outraged, in particular, by the Smithsonian’s portrayal of the Black experience in America. He took to Truth Social to complain that the country’s museums “are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian,” he wrote, “is OUT OF CONTROL.” Then Trump wrote something astonishing, even for him. He asserted that the narrative presented by the Smithsonian is overly focused on “how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been.”

Before continuing, it is important to pause a moment and state this directly: Donald Trump, the current president of the United States, believes that the Smithsonian is failing to do its job, because it spends too much time portraying slavery as “bad.”

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Autocracy in America: The view from NATO’s eastern flankThe culture war over nothingWhat Trump doesn’t understand about “America First”

Culture Break

Photo-Illustration by Ben Kothe / The Atlantic. Source: Hulu / Everett Collection.

Watch. The sensitive tween of the animated show King of the Hill is now an adult—with extremely Millennial anxieties, Jeremy Gordon writes.

Take a look. These photos of the week show a sail-in parade in Amsterdam, harness racing in Germany, an independence celebration in Indonesia, and more.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Kevin Frayer / GettySoldiers from the People’s Liberation Army stand in formation as they practice for an upcoming military parade to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and Japan’s surrender, at a military base in Beijing, China, on August 20, 2025.Achmad Ibrahim / APA dove perches on the hat of an Indonesian army soldier during a flag-raising ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the country’s independence, at Merdeka Palace in Jakarta, Indonesia, on August 17, 2025.Michael Probst / APA heron takes off from a dung hill in Frankfurt, Germany, on August 18, 2025.Kirsty Wigglesworth / APThe keeper Jessica Ray watches Humboldt penguins as the London Zoo records animals’ vital statistics at an annual weigh-in as a way of monitoring their health and development, and even identifying pregnancies, in London, England, on August 19, 2025.Gallo Images / Orbital Horizon / Copernicus Sentinel Data 2025 / GettyA satellite view of Hurricane Erin in the Atlantic Ocean, on August 18, 2025.Lisi Niesner / ReutersChina’s Royal performs during the B-girls’ gold-medal breakdance match at the 2025 World Games, in Chengdu, China, on August 17, 2025.Gold & Goose Photography / GettyMarc Marquez rides during a qualifier for the MotoGP of Austria, at Red Bull Ring in Spielberg, Austria, on August 16, 2025.Denis Poroy / Imagn Images / ReutersA security guard tackles a fan who ran onto the field during a baseball game between the San Francisco Giants and the San Diego Padres, at Petco Park in San Diego, California, on August 19, 2025.Liu Jianmin / VCG / GettyA person in a dinosaur costume entertains the crowd and cheers for players prior to a Jiangsu Football City League match between Changzhou and Zhenjiang, in Changzhou, Jiangsu province, China, on August 16, 2025.Focke Strangmann / AFP / GettyA harness racer prepares for a race of the Duhner Wattrennen horse race, with a container ship in the distance, in Cuxhaven, Germany, on August 17, 2025.Spasiyana Sergieva / ReutersFollowers of the Universal White Brotherhood, an esoteric society that combines Christianity and Indian mysticism set up by the Bulgarian Peter Deunov, perform a dance-like ritual called “paneurhythmy,” in Rila Mountain, Bulgaria, on August 19, 2025.Cesar Manso / AFP / GettyA wildfire burns in Castrillo de Cabrera, Spain, on August 16, 2025. 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Photographs and videos by Sydney Krantz

At night, the New Jersey Meadowlands can look like the entrance to hell. Smoke from a nearby garbage incinerator rises in plumes. The monstrous steel frame of a 3.5-mile bridge looms over cars racing in and out of New York City. For decades, such images defined the Meadowlands. The region was notorious as the fabled burial site of the Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa and the confirmed site of decades-long dump fires. It is the final resting place for household garbage, rubble from the London Blitz, the Doric columns of New York’s old Penn Station, and toxic sludge from chemical manufacturing.

But the Meadowlands are also a salt marsh, currently home to more than 300 species of birds and 50 species of fish. If, instead of simply passing through by car or train, visitors were to take a walk on one of the district’s trails or kayak through its creeks, they could look out across marshes and mudflats at cormorants, egrets, and osprey—all against the backdrop of the New York City skyline.

The Meadowlands will never be an Eden. The 12 lanes of the New Jersey Turnpike that pass through the district aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, nor are the Superfund sites. But since the 1970s, a combination of state and federal policies has steered the Meadowlands toward an unusual balance of waste disposal, development, and environmental protection. The naturalist John Quinn—who grew up at the edge of the district and wrote an illustrated guide to its history and ecology—once called the area’s transformation a “Lazarus-like” resurrection.

Legal protections for such places, however, are now under threat. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruling in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency restricted the reach of the Clean Water Act, rolling back its protections for the Meadowlands and places like them. This year, the Trump administration’s implementation of that ruling has fueled further concern among scientists: The Natural Resources Defense Council warns that it could put “an area larger than Nevada”—71 million acres of wetlands, all told—at risk of destruction. If the Meadowlands represent an ideal of 21st-century conservation—one that weighs human interests with ecological ones—then the possibility they represent is fast slipping away.

Tom Marturano, the recently retired director of solid waste and natural resources for the district, spent his career working to create this version of the Meadowlands. When he took his job, in 1984, they were still the wasteland that Quinn called “environmental Armageddon.” Marturano’s epithet of choice is “the dumping ground for all of society’s ills.” He was hired to implement state environmental regulations mandating the cleanup of the Meadowlands’ dumps to the point that they could be closed, one by one. Before he closed the dumps, Marturano also managed what went in them. He was once asked to accept a dead whale; another time, an entire shipping container of rotten garlic.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticAt a capped landfill in the Meadowlands, dense stands of phragmites and Spartina grasses overlook the Hackensack River.

Those same landfills, now capped, are home to red-tailed hawks, falcons, and coyotes. Still, the Meadowlands’ wildlife habitats are not wild in the traditional sense of being free from human activity: They include gas pipelines, highway overpasses, tide gates, planted marsh grasses, and man-made islands. This planting and sculpting of the marshes has been done to restore their health, but many of the efforts have been funded, paradoxically, by development—including by American Dream, the second-largest mall in America.

From a distance, American Dream looks like a spaceship that touched down next to the Hackensack River. The mall, which opened in 2019, covers some 3 million square feet and contains an indoor ski area. To build it, developers were required to fund the enhancement of 15.37 acres of wetland to compensate for those they had filled or otherwise affected. This mitigation was mandated by the Clean Water Act, which regulates filling and dumping in wetlands. The funds from the mall went toward improving the health of a nearby section of marsh, which, Marturano told me, was once “nothing but solid phragmites”—an invasive grass that tends to reduce habitat diversity. Now native Spartina grasses have returned, as have muskrats and threatened bird species. Thanks to the conservation restrictions that come with mitigation, yellow-crowned night herons and American kestrels can count on a habitat for years to come; this patch of marsh cannot be developed.

Mitigation is the deal that America has struck between its interest in human development and the preservation of its wetlands since the Clean Water Act passed, in 1972. Opinions differ, even among those who work in the Meadowlands, about how good a deal it has been. Marturano credits the mitigation system with what he calls the Meadowlands’ “balance” of development and environmental protection. “Nobody,” he told me, would “just wake up one morning and say, ‘Let me enhance some wetlands.’” It’s too expensive.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticA netted barrier stands alongside wetlands in the Meadowlands, limiting erosion and protecting adjacent waterways.

Bill Sheehan, the executive director of Hackensack Riverkeeper, is more skeptical. Sheehan, who wears a shark tooth around his neck and a drooping white mustache around his mouth, has been the Meadowlands’ chief environmental advocate for 30 years. When I asked him to describe the role of mitigation in the district, his immediate response was: “It’s a scam.” Especially in the late 1990s, he explained, mitigation was just “an excuse to destroy wetlands.” Although he’s willing to support mitigation projects that he sees as serving a public good, he rejects the principle that improving the health of one wetland can compensate for the loss of another—not only because mitigation can fail, instead producing a bare mudflat, but also because these man-made attempts at ecological restoration are poor substitutes for nature’s own repair work.

Terry Doss, who co-directs the Meadowlands Research and Restoration Institute—a state agency  that monitors water quality, sea-level rise, and wildlife habitat in the district—is more measured in her assessment than both Marturano or Sheehan. “Here in the Meadowlands, we have urban infrastructure,” she told me, “and so we will always have impacts. Therefore, we have to have mitigation.”

Right now, state laws still guarantee compensatory mitigation in the Meadowlands and protect them from unrestricted development.But, in 2023, the Supreme Court ruled that the Clean Water Act applies only to wetlands with a “continuous surface connection” to a navigable body of water. This decision was widely condemned by environmental groups but welcomed by those who saw it as protecting individual property rights, especially the rights of farmers. For the Meadowlands and places like them, where infrastructure such as highways and tide gates might interrupt a “continuous surface connection,” the 2023 decision meant the unraveling of federal protections.

Still, when I asked Doss what she sees as the single greatest threat to the Meadowlands today, she spoke immediately of people’s perceptions of the region. “People tend to say, ‘Oh, it’s just phragmites; it’s just a ditch,’” she replied. “‘It’s polluted, you know. Move on.’”

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticA great blue heron wades in the waters of Mill Creek Marsh in Secaucus, New Jersey.

For most of the Meadowlands’ history, this is how people saw them. The region’s shifting, mosquito-ridden ground was considered worthless land that needed to be “reclaimed”—drained or filled so that it could be used for agriculture (in the 19th century), for infrastructure and solid waste (in the 20th century), or for housing and warehousing (in the 21st). But over the past 50 years, ecologists have come to value wetlands not only as wildlife habitats but also as carbon sinks, defenses against rising seas, and filters for harmful pollutants. Preserving wetlands in concert with human infrastructure—as part of, rather than apart from, where people live—makes those places more aesthetically appealing, ecologically robust, and economically resilient.

Enhancing a marsh requires its own kind of balance: Reestablishing Spartina grasses, Marturano told me, can mean using bulldozers outfitted with snowshoe-like tracks to bring the marsh down to a particular elevation. If the marsh is brought too low, nothing will grow, and it will become a mudflat. If the marsh isn’t cut low enough, the phragmites will remain and crowd out the Spartina grasses. Marturano took me through these stages as we walked across a former mitigation site. He stopped to point out a muskrat hut, a pair of hawks, a groundhog hole, and a group of cormorants. He may be an engineer by training, but the Meadowlands have given him a naturalist’s eye for the habits of nonhuman creatures.

Sydney Krantz for The AtlanticTom Marturano walks a trail at Mill Creek Point Park.

Some 3,500 acres of the Meadowlands, a patchwork of conservation areas and mitigation sites, are now protected from further human development. Many of the region’s human structures—highways, rail lines—are protected, at least for the foreseeable future, by their use to millions of people. The question is not, then, whether the marsh or the human infrastructure will disappear completely, but how the balance between the two will—or won’t—be maintained.

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After Kaitlyn Kash delivered her baby daughter at Austin’s Ascension Seton Medical Center in July 2023, she began hemorrhaging. Her doctor told her that her placenta had not come out of her body as it should have after the baby was delivered and that she would need a D&C—a procedure that removes the contents of the uterus.

Kash consented, but then, she told me, nothing happened. “Are we going to the operating room?” Kash kept asking. She started shaking and vomiting. Hospital staff took her newborn daughter off her chest.

After about 45 minutes, Kash was wheeled to the OR—where, she said, she faced more delays. “People were running around, and there was slamming of cabinets,” she told me. The staff didn’t seem prepared. Kash remembers thinking that she was going to die, that she would never get to name her daughter. She struggled to speak, then passed out.

When she awoke after the procedure, a nurse told her that she was lucky she still had her uterus. She’d bled so much, she ended up needing a transfusion.

Kash didn’t understand what had happened, nor, she says, did the hospital tell her. Only after being discharged and speaking with a nurse-practitioner friend did she realize that her experience was not typical of a D&C. The procedure does not typically take hours, involve significant blood loss, or risk the loss of a uterus.

It is, however, commonly used for first-trimester abortions. The words of the hospital social worker Kash spoke with before she was discharged stuck out to her: “We don’t do D&Cs anymore,” the woman said, according to Kash. Of course, emergencies during delivery can be chaotic anywhere. But Kash began to suspect that, because Texas had banned virtually all abortions in 2022, following the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, either the equipment to perform the D&C was not ready, or the hospital was struggling to justify performing one, even for a placenta. Soon, she joined a lawsuit against the state of Texas over its abortion laws. (Kash provided medical records that support that she had a D&C and lost blood. The hospital did not respond to a request for comment, and it is not part of Kash’s lawsuit.)

I found Kash’s experience particularly unnerving because my husband and I are planning a move to a state that bans abortion after six weeks. After hearing and reading stories like hers, we are wondering if our move means that we should not have another child. Kash’s experience is representative of the kinds of delays, confusion, and other substandard care that some pregnant women now experience in the 19 states that enacted significant abortion restrictions after Dobbs. Pregnancy and childbirth are risky no matter where you live, but the grim stories and maternal-health statistics coming out of abortion-restrictive states have made me consider how safe it is to have a baby in one of them.

[Read: ‘That’s something you won’t recover from as a doctor’]

Today, Kash doesn’t blame the doctors or staffers at the hospital; she blames Texas’s abortion laws for causing unnecessary confusion. She wishes she could have been pregnant and delivered her baby somewhere else. But at the same time, her best friends live in Austin, and her close family lives in Dallas and Houston. “It’s not easy to leave,” she said. “Texas is my home.”

Every year, of course, hundreds of thousands of people safely have babies in Texas and other states with near or total abortion bans. But some women with pregnancy complications do encounter doctors who are afraid to act quickly to provide life- or health-preserving terminations, according to interviews I did with legal and medical experts, patients, and 15 doctors who practice in these states. Though the bans make exceptions to protect the mother’s life, they contain so much uncertainty that some doctors, fearing prison time or the loss of their license, try hard to avoid providing abortions, even when they are medically indicated.

Sometimes, a doctor may be too scared to give the patient an abortion and so point her to a neighboring state. The delays involved in travel can push inevitable abortions later into pregnancy, when they can become more complicated. Other times, the fear manifests as doctors choosing a more invasive or less-effective procedure instead of one that might be considered an abortion. Sarah Osmundson, an obstetrician in Tennessee, offered me the example of an ectopic pregnancy, in which an embryo implants outside the uterus. Ectopic pregnancies are almost never viable, and if left untreated can be fatal for the mother. The safest and simplest way to address an ectopic pregnancy is to give the patient methotrexate. But this drug can be seen as an abortifacient, so some doctors in restrictive states might opt to remove the patient’s fallopian tube instead, according to Osmundson, which could impair her future fertility. “We’re requiring a patient to undergo a surgical procedure as opposed to a very safe medical treatment that we have,” she said. This nearly happened to Representative Kat Cammack, a Florida Republican, when she went to an emergency room with an ectopic pregnancy in 2024 and where, she said, doctors resisted giving her methotrexate because they were worried about losing their medical licenses or going to jail for doing so.

Even if a doctor is comfortable providing a medically indicated abortion, they need to find scrub techs, nursing staff, and anesthesiologists who are, as well. And they might not be able to. “Abortion care doesn’t happen individually in a hospital,” says Leilah Zahedi-Spung, an obstetrician in Colorado who previously practiced in Tennessee, where abortion is completely banned with very limited exceptions. “I anticipated a lot of trouble finding people who felt safe participating in the care.” Tennessee’s abortion laws contributed to her decision to leave the state.

The most consistent concern I heard raised by the providers I spoke with is that the new bans cause unacceptable delays in patient care. In abortion-restrictive states, some hospitals have created task forces and committees of lawyers to help doctors figure out how to comply, which can slow down the process of treating at-risk patients. “There sometimes are delays while there’s this sussing out of like, ‘How do we take care of this?’” Lara Hart, an obstetrician in Georgia, where a six-week abortion ban went into effect in 2022, told me. Though Hart praises her own hospital’s processes for dealing with tricky cases, she said her job now requires more paperwork and calling around to different departments. She told me that she sometimes wonders, “Is some overzealous district attorney gonna come and arrest us or something?” She remembers arriving at work at her previous practice to find a patient in the ICU with sepsis and on a ventilator. The woman had come in with previable PPROM (preterm premature rupture of membranes), a condition in which a woman’s water breaks too early in pregnancy. The other doctors were reluctant to offer her an abortion, which is a standard treatment. She began hemorrhaging so much that Hart had to perform a hysterectomy. Hart remembers feeling angry. “I shouldn’t be here doing this,” she thought. “This should have been taken care of a week ago before she was so sick.”

[Read: The abortion absolutist]

Certain states’ bans say an abortion can be performed to avoid “death or substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function,” but some doctors say this guideline is unclear because many situations can go from reversible to irreversible within minutes. A recent study of post-Dobbs obstetric care in states with abortion bans highlighted this problem. It concluded that, because abortion laws tend to focus on the patient’s current health status, doctors in these states are often unable to consider the likely future health of a patient—including life-threatening emergencies that are all but certain to arise. “In obstetrics, there is an inch of black and an inch of white and, like a thousand yards of gray,” Hart said. This regulation also contradicts typical standards of care, according to Dawn Bingham, an obstetrician who is currently suing South Carolina over its abortion ban. “There’s nothing else in medicine that we wait for people to get sicker,” she told me.

Quantitative and qualitative evidence suggests that the delays created by abortion restrictions are having an effect on health care. A recent report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute, a nonprofit that advocates for women’s equality, found that, although the overall risk of dying from pregnancy is low, mothers living in states where abortion is banned were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth compared with mothers living in states where abortion is accessible. In states with abortion bans, Black mothers were more than three times as likely to die as white mothers. ProPublica found that when Texas banned abortion after six weeks in 2021, rates of sepsis increased by more than 50 percent for women hospitalized with miscarriages in the second trimester, likely because women were being made to wait until either there was no fetal heartbeat, leaving them at higher risk for an infection, or their infection became life-threatening. ProPublica also found that after Texas banned abortion, blood transfusions during emergency-room visits for first-trimester miscarriages increased by 54 percent, suggesting that doctors were avoiding performing D&Cs. At least four women in states with near-total abortion bans have died because they were denied an abortion, according to news reports. In a 2023 survey from KFF, a health-care nonprofit, four in 10 ob-gyns in abortion-ban states said the Dobbs ruling made providing care during miscarriages or other pregnancy emergencies harder.

A qualitative study involving anonymous doctors in abortion-ban states offers quotes such as “The way our legal teams interpreted it, until they became septic or started hemorrhaging, we couldn’t proceed.” In another study, a doctor described a patient who came in 15 weeks pregnant and hemorrhaging, with “blood everywhere, bleeding through her clothes.” But because the fetus had a heartbeat, the doctor had to talk to the hospital’s risk-management department before performing an abortion. “There’s less evidence-based health care that is provided for everyone that needs it in those states,” Nikki Zite, an obstetrician in Tennessee, told me. When I asked Nicole Schlechter, another Tennessee obstetrician, about the higher mortality rates in abortion-ban states, she put it more simply: “People are dying from being pregnant.”

Supporters of abortion bans deny that conditions are dire. Ingrid Skop, the vice president and director of medical affairs for the Charlotte Lozier Institute, a nonprofit that advocates against abortion, said in an email that “all pro-life state laws allow doctors to exercise their reasonable medical judgment to treat women with pregnancy emergencies, and no law requires certainty or imminence before a doctor can act.” She also pointed out that “no doctor has been prosecuted since Dobbs for performing an abortion to protect the life of the mother.” Christina Francis, the CEO of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists (AAPLOG) and an obstetric hospitalist in Indiana, told me her practice has been unaffected by her state’s near-total ban on abortion. She says any hesitation of doctors to act in emergency situations is a result of hospitals failing to adequately prepare their physicians. “The problem is not the law,” she told me, “but rather either the guidance or the lack of guidance that physicians are receiving.”

Some states are aiming to clarify their abortion bans. In June, Texas passed the Life of the Mother Act, which clarifies when the state’s near-total abortion ban allows for the procedure, saying explicitly that physicians do not need to wait until a patient is in imminent danger of dying to perform an abortion. In Tennessee, a new law clarifies that abortions can be performed in cases of previable PPROM and severe preeclampsia. In Kentucky, a clarification law added conditions under which doctors can legally perform an abortion, such as hemorrhage and ectopic and molar pregnancies.

Some Texas doctors I interviewed support the clarification law. Todd Ivey, an obstetrician in Houston, told me he thinks it “is going to help us some.” He said he wishes the law had exceptions for fetal abnormalities, rape, and incest, but that Texas doctors shouldn’t “let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

But some experts say the clarification bills don’t offer doctors much security, because some obstetric emergencies may not meet the laws’ precise legal language. For instance, John Thoppil, an obstetrician in Austin who supports the Texas clarification law, once had a patient whose fetus had a fatal anomaly. He diagnosed the condition at 12 weeks, but the woman was not able to travel out of state for a termination until she was 18 weeks along. In the intervening time, her placenta began to invade her scar from a previous C-section, something that would not have happened, Thoppil told me, if he had been able to perform the abortion at 12 weeks. The patient was hospitalized after the abortion and had to have another procedure, almost losing her uterus in the process. The Texas clarification law, he told me, would not have changed her situation.

This confusion may get worse now that the Trump administration has revoked Biden-era guidance saying hospitals in abortion-ban states must provide abortions if the procedure would stabilize a woman experiencing a medical emergency.

Hector Chapa, an obstetrician in south-central Texas and a member of AAPLOG, told me that this revocation didn’t matter, and that doctors could and should still treat patients in an emergency. “EMTALA still stands,” he said, referring to a federal law that hospitals must stabilize patients. “EMTALA has never gone away.” But Andreia Alexander, an ER doctor in Indiana, told me that patients should not want a doctor who hesitates to save their life. “If somebody is dying in front of me,” she said, “I can’t be thrown off my game to think for a minute about whether or not my actions are going to cause me to be thrown in jail, lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, or lose my medical license.”

The horror stories I heard during my reporting are shocking but rare. In one study, the most common scenario that physicians said they struggled with, post-Dobbs, was PPROM in the second trimester. The risk of previable PPROM is extremely low: less than 1 percent. But in pregnancy, small percentages matter. Osmundson told me her hospital sees a previable PPROM patient about once a month. In my own pregnancy, I had multiple complications that occur very rarely. Complications seem unlikely until they happen to you.

I asked every provider I interviewed whether having a baby in their state is safe, given the current abortion restrictions. Almost all of them said yes. But almost all of them also qualified their answer. They said they, personally, would take appropriate care of a pregnant woman, but they couldn’t say the same about every provider in the state now that the abortion laws have made administering emergency care so much more complicated. They said pregnancy had become “less safe” or “scarier” or “safe, if you have resources.” There’s a new charge to what were previously purely medical conversations with patients: Thoppil said patients ask him “every week” if having a baby in Texas is safe, and Emily Briggs, a private-practice family-medicine doctor in New Braunfels, told me that patients have asked her if they should leave Texas. Hart told me she’s had patients who “get on contraception because they say that they are scared to be pregnant in Georgia.”

[Read: I found the outer limits of my pro-choice beliefs]

The future of obstetric care in abortion-ban states also seems murky because fewer medical students are applying to residencies in states with abortion bans. Zite says she’s not able to train her obstetric residents in the same ways she was before Dobbs, and she’s not sure what’s going to happen with the next generation of doctors after hers retires.

I spoke with some women who aren’t willing to risk having a child, or another child, under these circumstances. Jessi Schoop Villman, who lives outside of Houston and has a history of miscarriages, decided not to try for a second child after Texas banned abortions. “I couldn’t stand the thought of something happening and leaving the baby we already have without a mother and my husband without a partner,” she told me.

Nisha Verma, an obstetrician who works in both Georgia and Maryland, told me she recently saw a patient who was eligible for an abortion in Georgia because she was less than six weeks pregnant. The woman said that she would consider having the baby, “but I am scared to be pregnant in this state as a Black woman,” Verma remembers her saying. “If I developed a complication like I did in my last pregnancy, I wouldn’t be able to get care and I could die.” The woman did something that crafters of abortion bans likely would not have wanted: Just days before it would have been too late to do so, she terminated the pregnancy.

*Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Jacobus Johannes van Os / Fine Art Photographic / Getty; Getty.

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[Music]

Garry Kasparov: I have several things in common with my guest in this episode. Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen and I were both born into Soviet republics. We both became chess grand masters, and we both left chess to enter politics. I think it is fair to say that while I reached greater heights in the chess world, as a former speaker of the Lithuanian legislature, she definitely rose higher in the political world.

Her home of Vlinius, Lithuania, has a special place in my heart. My first chess baptism by fire outside my home city of Baku, Azerbaijan, came at the All-Union Youth Games in Vilnius in 1973. I was just 10 while most of my opponents were four or five years older. I did not perform well, but I did meet Alexander Sergeevich Nikitin: state trainer of the U.S.S.R. Sports Committee, my future friend, mentor, and reliable supporter in the most difficult periods of my chess career.

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

[Music]

Kasparov: Putting nostalgia aside, Lithuania has become a hot spot as one of the most ardent defenders of Ukraine against Russia’s invasion. Lithuania also recognizes that, should Ukraine fall, it is at the top of the list of targets for Putin’s attempt to rebuild the Soviet Union in his image.

But despite obvious threats, this Baltic country has offered refuge to many Russian political dissidents. All of this is why I wanted to speak with Viktorija. She’s part of a conversation now unfolding all across Europe about how to face newly aggressive authoritarian states, as the United States reevaluates its role as the global leader of the free world.

[Music]

Kasparov: Hello, Viktorija.

Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen: Hello, Garry.

Kasparov: It’s a great pleasure to have you on our program. And I think it will be more than natural if we start with something that unites us—actually united us prior to the political issues that bring us now together. It’s chess, the game of chess. So could you say a few words about your path from the game of chess into politics?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Well, pleasure to be here. And, well, I’m a chess grand master, and that’s actually something that I always say prior to all of my political titles. I started playing chess quite early. I became quite a successful female chess player and was a European champion at some point. And, well, around the age of 30, I decided to turn into national politics in Lithuania. And from that point, about 10 years, I’ve been the parliament member in Seimas and also holding different positions. But still, for the bigger part of my life, I used to be a professional chess player. So that of course leaves a mark—as, well, you, Garry, will very well know—for the whole life.

Kasparov: I can’t help but asking a question that I’ve been terrorized for, for years since I left professional chess. Does chess help you in your political life?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Oh, yes. My God, I know this question. Yes. Yes. Well. I’ve been thinking about different ways to answer it. I think chess generally trains quite some fantastic qualities—your ability to focus, memory. I think it helps being a good winner and being a good loser, although not always. But you know, when I try to compare politics and chess, I see nothing but differences. Chess is a very honorable game. It’s a game where two people play at the chessboard according to the rules they both know. Politics is nothing but—I mean, the rules are constantly changing, the challenges are unknown, the situation is vague, and there are so many gray zones. So, you know, if I have to choose one of the two areas, I will always say that, you know: Chess is a straightforward, nice, beautiful game. Politics is something that overall matters more, but it’s much more tricky.

Kasparov: Yes. But you are very successful in politics as well. So you are not just a member of the Lithuanian Seimas, the Lithuanian parliament; you were the speaker of the parliament for quite a while. And I’m sure you know, you have still many more political heights to conquer in the future.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yeah, that’s true. I mean, my political career, it took off very quickly, and I became the youngest-ever speaker of Lithuanian parliament, some—well, a few—years back, in 2020. And my term finished not so long ago, a bit more than half a year ago now. I’m the deputy speaker of parliament now, in a position. And also I’ve been the leader of a liberal party for almost six years now. So time runs quickly.

In politics, I think, many things are about appearances. In politics, as we all very well know. And having the reputation of a chess grand master helps. There is no doubt about that. Having the title, having the titles from the chess times, is a helpful thing in making your words, your statements, more credible—more solid, I would say. And that has certainly helped me in my career so far and hopefully will continue to help in the years to come.

Kasparov: Well, it’s great to hear. That tells me that your voters have a very high IQ if they can recognize the value of chess judgment in your statements. So now, speaking about the voters—just give a little bit of background of Lithuanian politics, because Lithuania was part of the Soviet Union, occupied after Soviet-Nazi pact back in 1939, 1940. And you were born still in the Soviet Union, but it became an independent country. And I remember it was the first one to declare independence from the Soviet Union. But just, you know, brief us about Lithuanian politics and how independent Lithuania managed in this 35 years of its modern history.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Well, some major things you have mentioned. Thirty-five years might seem like not a long time, but our country was also independent in the beginning of the 20th century. So we have, you know—we are successors to that independence. So we have a tradition of being independent. And before that, we had a commonwealth with Poland for, sort of, centuries. So this European tradition, being part of a European family of countries—this is something that comes very strongly in our tradition, in our culture. And, you know, there is no debate about that, as I said.

We were the first country to break away from the Soviet Union, back in 1990—March 11th. That was the time when it was in the air already. But still, countries, Western countries, were somewhat hesitant, also, about encouraging the so-called Soviet republics to break away. Because if—well, of course you remember that time very well—[Mikhail] Gorbachev was something of a darling of the West with his perestroika and other things. But our history is completely different. In 1989, we had an amazing event when almost 2 million people held hands together in the Baltic way connecting Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia. In a completely peaceful way, showing that we are independent, well, that we strive to be independent nations. But it was a difficult road. And in 1991, January 13th, we had tragic events around parliament, around the TV tower in Vilnius, when Russian troops—they were here, they were trying to capture the TV tower, trying to capture the parliament. And people were killed. Many people were injured. On our side, it was a huge unification of all the country. Of course the empire did not want to let us go easily. And only in 1991, February, the first country to recognize our independence was Iceland. Then a bit later, Denmark followed suit, and then already we gained recognition. Recognition from other countries all over the world. But now for 35 years, we’ve been independent. And we’ve been also a member of NATO and a member of the European Union for 21 years.

Kasparov: So if Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia would not be members of NATO today, do you think that Russian tanks would be already rolling on the streets of Vilnius?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, the risk of that would definitely be much bigger, also. Well, I will remind, or maybe inform, the listeners that, you know, Vilnius is a capital that is only 30 kilometers away from the border with Belarus. And for any kind of military purposes, well, Belarus—[Aleksandr] Lukashenko’s Belarus—is unfortunately under the heel of [Vladimir] Putin’s Russia today, And well, he has been for a while now. So, of course, our geopolitical situation is, well it is as it is. But it’s not very auspicious for being, for feeling safe or relaxed. That’s one thing.

Secondly, of course, there is no doubt if Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia would have stayed in this gray zone, —like for instance, unfortunately, Moldova, Georgia state—well, there is a recipe that that Russia has been using. And that recipe is that no country where there is an unresolved, so-called military conflict can join NATO. And that we’ve seen in Moldova; that we see with Transnistria. That we see also in Georgia, which has now unfortunately been also politically, well, you could say captured in a way—or has at least turned from its European and Euro-Atlantic aspirations.

And I think what we are suffering from, as Europe, is that Putin, you know, in all likelihood wakes up every morning thinking about not just How do I defeat Ukraine?, but How do I dismantle NATO? How do I defeat Europe? And our leaders on the democratic side are thinking, Well, how do we avoid war? And that, instead of leading to becoming more resilient, quite often leads to indecision—to concessions and to a lot of self-imposed red lines. And we see that it’s not leading us to be more safe. Actually, that has the opposite effect.

Kasparov: So let’s, you know, also shift to another element of this war. You said Putin wakes up every morning and he thinks about this global war, because Putin’s Russia is at war with the free world. For Putin it’s not a potential World War III, as for many Western politicians. But he’s already fighting World War IV, because, in his mind, World War III was a cold war that the Soviet Union has lost. And now he’s trying to take revenge for this loss. And that’s what he has been saying, and his propaganda keeps saying. And one of the elements of this war, because he may not be feeling strong enough to challenge NATO directly, is it’s a hybrid war.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Hybrid war. And that, again—you’re absolutely right. I mean, Putin does not feel reckless, or whatever you may call it, enough to challenge NATO militarily. And that’s, well, one more reinforcing point: how important it was that Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia became members of NATO on time. But hybrid is different. It’s operating in the gray zone. It is creating distrust in societies, creating a feeling of insecurity and planting narratives that later can be, well, somehow useful in potential future aggressions. So, in the case of Lithuania, we have been on the receiving end of propaganda war for many years now, and we’re also quite good at recognizing it. The thing is that, with our historic memory—with the road to independence, that is after all still alive in the memory of most people—it’s not easy to make us believe some of the narratives that they are trying to plant. But I think when it comes to hybrid warfare, well, one example—one fresh and quite effective example—was the instrumentalization of migrants in the summer of 2021 by the Lukashenko regime.

What has happened is that people from different countries—from, you know, Syria, from some countries from Africa—were shipped to Belarus and were, in hundreds, pushed through the border to Lithuania, to Poland, to Latvia. Some at gunpoint. And the idea was to disrupt the situation enough because, well, you know, it could be hundreds, it could be thousands, it could be tens of thousands. And this was a very difficult challenge to deal with. Because we—well, in Lithuania, we have never experienced anything like that before. And when we look back in hindsight, this was 2021; this feels like part, or a stage, of preparation for Russia’s second invasion into Ukraine. For the full-scale invasion—destabilizing the region.

Kasparov: Viktorija, you just already talked about the full-scale invasion. So, this is the fateful date: February 24th, 2022. When Putin began the massive invasion of Ukraine, having only one goal: to destroy Ukrainian statehood. Which, again, he was not even hiding behind some kind of diplomatic formulas. So today, does Europe, as an institution, recognize its responsibilities over Ukraine? There’s a growing sense that Europe keeps talking while not acting enough, still having some resources. So is the European Union acting again adequately now? Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, and 11 years after the beginning of the war with annexation of Crimea?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: It’s not acting forcefully enough. And, well, several things. Europe could, without much difficulty, outproduce Russia militarily when we look at economic power. But because of different reasons, that does not happen yet. There is a lot of bureaucracy. It takes a long time, and so on and so forth. But that in itself is unacceptable. That’s one thing. Second, of course Europe has changed massively from 2022 February. And it has done especially, maybe, well, in the first year—somewhat more than was expected by some. But I really disagree with those who say that now, with the American new administration, well, making the decisions that it is making, that the ball is in the court of Russia. I think the ball is firmly in the court of Europe. And if Europe does not act more forcefully when it comes to sanctions, when it comes to supporting Ukraine, it will again, you know, it will reinforce this view—first of all, by Putin—that Europe is weak. Which it’s not, necessarily, but also this weakness is inviting for aggression.

So yes; I think Europe can do more. I think Europe should do more. And it is a time for Europe to stand up very clearly, as America takes a more—you can call it transactionalist or extreme transactionalism, I think this is the term. Another term is isolationism. But anyway, a different role than we would traditionally expect from America.

But I also have to add that, being a Lithuanian, we can see very concrete things happening in Europe that would have been unthinkable just a few years back. For instance, recently the German brigade started. Well, it was basically inaugurated—started stationing its military here in Lithuania. It will be a 5,000-soldier brigade, with their families here. So things are happening and also reinforcing the NATO Eastern flank. But when we speak about Ukraine, yes: Europe can and should do more.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Kasparov: You already talked about, you know, very high esteem for America. And I think it’s probably across the region, in Eastern Europe, where people always looked at America as a beacon of hope: as the country that, one day, could help them to throw away the yoke of Soviet occupation.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: True.

Kasparov: So, how do you evaluate American administrations? When you became a member of parliament, [Barack] Obama was there. Then you had first [Donald] Trump, then you had [Joe] Biden. Now you have Trump back. Let’s just go quickly over this period—to see what America did, what America could have done, what America deliberately delayed or had not done, and what America is doing now.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, I think one major thing that has to be mentioned and stressed: America, for Lithuania, is so much more than any given administration. It is, as you have said, it’s a beacon of freedom. It’s a beacon of democracy. And it is something that, well, we have so heavily relied—well, you know, idealistically, ideologically, during the most difficult times. And for a good reason, I think. So it cannot be reduced, I would say, to any one administration.

But I think what is fair to say is that many administrations, if not most, in the most recent history, start off with trying to make friends, usually, with Putin—because he’s been around for so long, right? But normally, towards the end they decide that, Well, yeah, that was not a good idea. But a lot of precious time has been lost. So there is this, somehow, this pattern that’s being repeated over and over again. And it is unfortunate, because nothing has changed on the Russian side with Putin. It has just been consequently getting worse.

What I find, well, today most frustrating is that suddenly we have to return back to saying absolutely obvious things like Russia is an aggressor. What it is committing in Ukraine are war crimes. They are attacking, you know, children’s cancer hospitals on the eve of a NATO summit in Washington. Well, as an example, right? Just one example. But there are so many.

So this idea that you have to repeat very banal, very obvious, things—that are very obvious for anyone who’s been even mildly interested in what has been happening in Ukraine—it is frustrating. Imagine, if it’s frustrating for us, how much more frustrating it should feel to Ukrainians. And when I talk to my Ukrainian colleagues, which I also do quite a lot, well, sometimes I am in awe of their, I don’t know what it can be called—

Kasparov: Resilience, I think. It’s—

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes. Resilience.

Kasparov: They understand that they have no other choice but to resist Russian aggression. But of course they are, I believe, deep down, they’re depressed. But you have Europe and America, and it seems now that the transatlantic unity now is in great danger. So, do you still think, have any hopes, in NATO in its current form? Or do you believe that due to the very untraditional behavior of the current administration, Europe will have to look for some other arrangements?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: I think that NATO countries must, should, and, well, are doing more to allocate more money, more resources, to the defense. But the situation, as I see it, is simple. There is a war going on in Europe, and Europe has to do its utmost to help Ukraine. And also prevent this war from expanding further in Europe, which there is a risk of if Russia continues being unchecked. And, well, what also is, of course, another very worrying track is that lack of punishment for Putin’s regime. There cannot be peace if peace is unjust. If the war criminals are not called for being war criminals, but can immediately go back to the table with the world leaders, shake hands, and do business—that’s not a fundament for a peaceful tomorrow. And I think it’s not very—it’s not wise to think that the world is so simple.

Kasparov: But, but as a politician, you know, you have to look at the reality, even if it’s not a very happy picture, and to deal with facts. And the facts are just telling us that the American administration expressed more interest in taking care of the free-speech rights of the far-right groups rather than about the well-being of Europe. Do we believe that, at one point, under some circumstances in the future, the United States can leave NATO?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: It cannot be totally ruled out. But the main scenario right now, in my opinion, is that the U.S. will leave more to Europe to deal with European problems, so to speak. And European countries have to step up in terms of their defense expenditure and rely on European NATO more than anything else.

Kasparov: Lithuania and other Eastern European countries—they’re willing to walk an extra mile to boost their defenses. So recently, your country and, I think, two other Baltic nations left the global agreement that banned land mines.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Yes.

Kasparov: So you are planning to mine your entire border.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: That’s right.

Kasparov: So that’s quite a step; I think it’s the right direction. But that shows that you recognize how real this threat is.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Absolutely. And it was not an easy decision from, well, from the human-rights perspective. But it was a quick decision, and it is connected to the fact that we considered the danger real. So Latvia, Estonia—not just Lithuania—Latvia, Estonia, Finland are leaving the Ottawa Convention. Well, have left already. And that means that we will both, we can produce land mines and also mine our borders. Interestingly enough, the Russian propaganda channels reacted to it quite strongly. Saying that, Well, this is a further sign of a planned aggression against Russia from the NATO side. So that gives you an idea of how sometimes dumb that propaganda is, because it is so clearly a very defensive step. You mine your border in order not to be attacked from that side.

Kasparov: Okay. Leaving the Ottawa Convention is one step, but would your country and other Eastern European countries—and Germany, of course—consider one point, you know, leaving nonproliferation treaties and developing nukes? And just making sure that nuclear missiles will be aimed at Moscow from a short distance?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, it’s a theoretical, of course, discussion. But yes. In our region, well, Poland is talking about nukes. And, well, there is the serious discussion about France’s nuclear umbrella for the Baltic countries. Among the others as well. So we are thinking in terms also of how to boost our security, our 360-degree security, here in Europe—not necessarily relying on transatlantic security.

Kasparov: Everything that we discussed just indicates that Europe now is looking, especially Eastern Europe and Central Europe, looking for its own resources to boost its own defenses. Even as you just agreed—you know, building its nukes or having nuclear weapons in the region. Is it the result of just America basically walking away and departing from its role of a great defender or the guardian of the free world?

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Well, first of all, for us in Lithuania, it is crucial—it is very important—to show that we are good allies in NATO, in the European Union. That when we say that we care about security and defense, we do not just want to free ride and rely on someone who is bigger and stronger than us. But we do our part, and maybe even do more than we are expected. That has been the principle of how we operate for 35 years. And I think it’s important.

Second, when it comes to America, it is a challenge to see that the values that have been, you know, figuratively speaking, shining so brightly for so many decades, perhaps changing colors to an extent. If I have to put it bluntly, it’ll also take longer for us to start seeing the United States in a different light. And we have a lot of good cooperation. But Europe has to step up. Europe has been, for very long, relying on that the peace dividend is forever. And that is not the case.

We have learned some painful lessons. We in the Eastern NATO flank are happy to drive the process further—be it on defense, more money for defense. Be it on supporting Ukraine as much as possible. Or developing defense industries as quickly as possible. All of these things are very important, and all of this is done defensively in order to avoid a war. So we are peaceful people. We are an example that a country can live—it can have a great standard, can have free speech, can have human rights in quite a short time. And I think that is the painful thing for the Kremlin. They do not want to see successful countries from the former empire, because it might lead their people to think that there is another way, there is another track for their country as well. And that is definitely very scary for the regime.

[Music]

Kasparov: But we can summarize it by saying that when America walks away, the world becomes a more dangerous place.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Absolutely.

Kasparov: Viktorija, thank you very much. And again, good luck. And I believe that independent Lithuania will play a crucial role in defending the freedom of the region. And again, definitely, see you soon—because Vilnius is one of the places that I’ve been visiting since, I’m afraid to say, since 1973.

Čmilytė-Nielsen: Thank you, Garry. And looking forward to seeing you in Vilnius.

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

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Oleksandra Matviychuk: I know that some politicians abroad, they have this wishful thinking that The war is so horrible, that Okay, occupation is not good, but at least it’ll stop the war and decrease human suffering. But believe me: I document war crimes in occupied territories for 11 years. Occupation doesn’t stop human suffering. Occupation just makes human suffering invisible.

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

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A shooting in broad daylight last month on a dry, rocky hillside in the West Bank barely registered in the Israeli press and has not led to legal consequences. But it might signal the opening of yet another front in the cascading wars unleashed by the October 7, 2023, attacks.

Jewish settlers from Carmel, an outpost that is illegal under Israeli law, approached the nearby Palestinian Bedouin village of Umm al-Khair in a large construction digger and began to damage an olive grove, residents of the village told me when I recently visited.

When residents tried to stop them, some by throwing rocks, Yinon Levi, a settler who runs a demolition business that contracts with the Israel Defense Forces, fired several rounds from a handgun, killing the 31-year-old activist Odeh Hathalin.

I spent the past week traveling across Israel and the West Bank, meeting with officials from the Israeli government, military, and opposition, as well as Palestinian political leaders and activists. I left believing that Israel is closer to triggering a second war with West Bank Palestinians than it is to ending the disastrous conflict in Gaza.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could have emerged from the depths of October 7—when he told President Joe Biden that “in the Middle East, if you’re seen as weak, you’re roadkill”—in some triumph, having vanquished virtually all of Israel’s enemies, culminating with the recent bombing of Iran. But he failed to seize the opportunity to stop the fighting in Gaza.

Instead, nearly two years into a war they did not choose, Israeli officials still have not found, and may not even be genuinely seeking, a way out. They have set requirements for ending the war that they do not seem able to achieve on the battlefield, at least at anything close to an acceptable cost both to their own military and society and to innocent Palestinians.

Although Israel may finally be close to a third temporary cease-fire that would allow some of the hostages to come home—a very welcome development—even that might not end the war. When the last cease-fire collapsed, in March, officials made a disastrous strategic and moral mistake by letting more than two months pass with no food entering Gaza, leaving hundreds of thousands of people at risk of starvation. That choice has so horrified the rest of the world that a half dozen countries, with few other options to demonstrate their outrage, have declared their intent to recognize a Palestinian state.

And today, the UN-backed body that monitors food insecurity declared, for the first time since the conflict began, that there is a famine in the district around Gaza City that is “entirely man made.” Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a response accusing the report of being based on “Hamas lies,” and of lowering its usual thresholds for such a declaration.For now, instead of freeing all of the 20 or so Israeli hostages believed to still be alive, withdrawing the IDF to the perimeter of the Gaza Strip, enabling a surge of humanitarian assistance to people in need, and reserving the right to target what’s left of Hamas’s leadership later—Israeli officials are betting that expanding the war will lead Hamas to capitulate or collapse.

But it is unclear how another round of fighting would accomplish what 22 months of intense combat has not. And with the world’s attention focused on Gaza, the situation in the West Bank is sliding toward another crisis.

A majority of Israelis now say they want to end the Gaza war and bring the hostages home, even if Hamas remains armed and its leaders able to exert control over the Strip. The more than 100,000 demonstrators who pack Habima Square and Hostages Square in Tel Aviv on Saturday nights have shifted their focus to demanding a full and immediate cease-fire.

Having once recoiled at U.S. pressure, many Israelis now openly court it. On a recent evening, hundreds wore MAGA-style red hats, aimed at getting the attention of the Trump administration, that read End This Fuc*!ng War.

And it’s not just the activists. Last week, more than 600 former Israeli security officials, including the heads of many top spy and military agencies, wrote President Donald Trump a letter asking him to intervene against their own government and declaring that “it is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel.”

After October 7, the Biden administration was right to embrace Israel in the wake of the worst day in its history, and to support what I consider to have been a just war against the Hamas terrorists who were responsible. But I also believe that we did far too little, far too late to limit the truly catastrophic civilian harm that Israel’s response inflicted and, after Israel’s core military objectives had been achieved, try to end the war.

Waiting for an intervention from Trump—who has reversed what modest pressure Biden placed on Israel and offered virtually unqualified support for its actions in Gaza—feels futile; after Israel’s cabinet voted earlier this month to expand the war into Gaza City, he said that the decision is “pretty up to Israel.”

Although it remains true that Hamas is responsible for starting this phase of the conflict by murdering more than 1,000 Israelis and that the group could end the war tomorrow by releasing the hostages and disarming itself, that, too, seems highly unlikely. Fairly or not, that puts the ball back in Israel’s court.

Earlier this month, I spoke with Shachar Shnorman, a kibbutznik who had returned home to Kfar Aza, where at least 62 residents were murdered on October 7, as he recounted the sounds of his neighbors being shot dead and the smell of the cigarette smoke from Hamas fighters seated on his porch as he hid a few feet away, on the other side of a shaded window.

He wants the war to end, he said. While we talked, drones buzzed overhead, and every 10 minutes or so, a new explosion could be heard coming from Gaza’s Jabalia refugee camp, the black plumes of smoke rising a couple of miles away.

Before the attack, Kfar Aza was known as a left-leaning commune. But Schnorman told me that most of his neighbors have not returned home, and many have “moved to the right.”

Despite an Israeli military assessment that Hamas’s capacity as an organized force is more than 90 percent degraded, Israeli officials for now seem determined to hold out for total victory.

They often invoke the full surrenders of Germany and Japan, arguing that stopping now would hand Hamas an undeserved victory and that international pressure to do so only hardens Hamas’s negotiating position. “There is a little devil sitting on every Israeli’s shoulder saying that all the Palestinians basically love Hamas, and the whole world basically hates the Jews,” one centrist political adviser told me.

Israeli officials argue that Hamas must be disarmed and removed from power, pointing to the thousands of remaining Hamas fighters. (One Israeli official said Hamas still has as many as 20,000, a staggering number given that estimates before the war ranged up to 30,000.) Although Israel agreed to a cease-fire in Lebanon last year that was widely celebrated, even though it left Hezbollah in place, Israeli officials insist that the situations are distinct. “If Hezbollah had done October 7, the IDF would be in Beirut to this day,” one told me.

[Gershom Gorenberg: The two extremists driving Israel’s policy]

All of which leads to speculation here about why Israel won’t stop. Most Israelis believe that the war continues less because of Gaza than the preservation of Netanyahu’s fragile governing coalition.

At least two ministers have threatened to pull the support of their parties and trigger elections if a cease-fire is reached, arguing instead for returning Jewish settlers to the Strip for the first time since Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005.

The only real deadline will come in October 2026, before which elections must be held, because the government’s mandate expires.

“The strategy in Gaza is ongoing war. The war is the strategy,” former Air Force General Nimrod Sheffer, who has joined a prominent opposition party, told me. “That serves Bibi. It may serve the coalition. It doesn’t serve anyone else.”

Mahmoud Sleem / Anadolu / GettyAn aerial view of the destruction, taken after the ceasefire agreement came into effect in the Gaza Strip on January 21, 2025.

Meanwhile, with far less international scrutiny, Israel has launched a campaign across the West Bank that risks igniting a second front that is far closer to Israeli population centers and much harder to contain.After the end of the Second Intifada, in 2005, the West Bank experienced a period of relative calm compared with Gaza, where Israel has waged five wars since the IDF withdrew from the territory that same year, forcibly evicting thousands of Jewish settlers who lived there. Immediately after October 7, the IDF began a counterterrorism crackdown in the West Bank that has so far kept a lid on attacks against Israelis while claiming the lives of nearly 1,000 Palestinians fighters and civilians.The scale of the Israeli operation in the West Bank is massive, even if dwarfed by the scale of the conflict in Gaza. At the start of this year, an assault dubbed the “Iron Wall” in three northern West Bank refugee camps displaced 40,000 people, the largest number since Israel first occupied the territory in 1967. One security official who had visited the camps—which, despite that label, look more like cities—showed me photos of entire blocks reduced to rubble, describing it as a “Nagasaki-like” level of destruction.

Violence against Palestinians by Jewish settlers—the roughly 500,000 Israeli civilians who live in the West Bank, beyond Israel’s internationally recognized border—has increased dramatically, from fewer than 90 incidents a month at the start of this year to more than 200, according to the same official. Fatal attacks, which were once exceedingly rare, are becoming regular occurrences.

President Biden, in whose administration I served as deputy national security adviser, repeatedly warned Netanyahu about settler violence, sometimes publicly, and became the first U.S. president to impose sanctions on violent Israeli settlers and the organizations that support them. Upon taking office, Trump immediately removed all of the sanctions and has said virtually nothing about the West Bank since.

Although only a small minority of settlers commit violence, they are the vanguard of a religious and political movement that claims all of the West Bank as Israel’s birthright and that has navigated in recent years from the Israeli fringe to the mainstream. Few violent settlers are stopped before attacks are carried out. Fewer still face any real accountability after attacks occur.

Netanyahu has at times expressed concern over settlers’ conduct, but members of his own cabinet provide settlers with political cover—particularly National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, both of whom have been accused (and Ben-Gvir convicted) of crimes tied to their efforts to preserve and expand Israel’s occupation.

On a broiling recent afternoon in the South Hebron Hills, the family and neighbors of Odeh Hathalin, the Palestinian man killed last month, sat under a tarp beside a dried puddle of his blood on a concrete floor. They had been waiting for more than a week to receive his body from the IDF so they could hold a proper burial. Some had begun a hunger strike. A day later, his body was finally returned.

Umm al-Khair has long been targeted because many of its structures were built without official permits—which the Israeli government, which controls the permitting process, virtually never issues.

Just last year, Hathalin, who was featured in the recent Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” wrote about an IDF operation that destroyed homes.

Videos of the more recent attack, including one taken by Hathalin himself, were quickly posted online. Levi, the settler accused of the killing, had been sanctioned by Biden and exonerated by Trump. But after briefly being placed under house arrest, he is reportedly now free.

At least two American citizens are among those killed in a spate of attacks over the past month, and five since October 7.

The security official described one of the killings to me, in which armed settlers rounded up residents in the village of Sinjil, fired in the air to disperse the crowd, and then chased down Saifullah Musallet, a 20-year-old from Tampa who was visiting relatives, and beat him to death. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee called it a “criminal and terrorist act,” using unusually (and admirably) strong language, but neither the U.S. nor Israel have held his killers accountable.

When I asked both Israeli officials and settler leaders about the increase in settler violence, they were largely dismissive.

“There is not settler violence; there is settler vandalism,” one prominent settler leader said, before launching into a long explanation of the threats settlers face from the more than 2 million Palestinians who live in the West Bank.

Another settler leader attributed reports of violence to the acts of “disadvantaged youths” who come to the West Bank from Israel.

Smotrich has taken the damaging step of regularly refusing to transfer to the Palestinian Authority customs revenues that Israel collects on goods entering the West Bank, to which Israel has no legitimate claim. During the Biden administration, Smotrich regularly sought to leverage the funds for policy concessions from Netanyahu or even from the U.S.

As a result, the PA, which administers about 40 percent of the West Bank under a deal reached with Israel in the 1990s, has, since April, been unable to pay salaries for many of its security forces, which work closely with the IDF despite strong disapproval from most West Bank residents.

Crime has surged across the West Bank since October 7, leading to frustration among residents and renewing long-standing concern that the PA, widely believed to be corrupt and out of touch, could collapse.

Many Israeli officials talk of the PA, which for all its flaws is committed to nonviolence and recognition of Israel, as if it is no different than Hamas. “As far as I’m concerned, let the PA collapse,” Smotrich has said. “It is an enemy.” Another Israeli official described the PA as “poisonous,” pointing to charges that its school curricula incite hatred of Jews.

Hussein al-Sheikh, a senior PA official, said he has invited Israeli and U.S. officials to review new textbooks and the implementation of other long-demanded reforms, such as an end to the “pay for slay” program, through which the PA subsidizes families of terrorists imprisoned by Israel.

For his part, Ben-Gvir last month established what the Israeli press has called a “quasi-police force” in the West Bank, comprising settler volunteers.

Tellingly, a security official said, by far the quietest period for settler violence since October 7 was the 12-day war between Israel and Iran, when Israel imposed a severe lockdown on the West Bank. That provides at least some evidence that the state, which did not want distractions during that time, can exercise more control when it chooses to.

Driving around the West Bank these days can feel like watching a crime scene unfold in plain sight. Settlers fence off land that isn’t theirs, raise Israeli flags, plow and plant fields. Not long ago, such acts involved a cat-and-mouse game with the army, which would thwart them if it could. No longer.

More than 80 Palestinian West Bank communities have been emptied entirely since October 7, replaced by more than 100 Israeli outposts, makeshift settlements that are illegal even under Israel law.

“I’ve worked in the West Bank for 23 years, and we’ve never had anything like this,” Dror Etkes, a longtime Israeli analyst and peace activist, told me. Riding across the northern West Bank in his beaten-up Jeep, he pointed out to me days-old construction or cultivation. “It is a totally different world.”

He and others who pay close attention to events in the West Bank believe that the territory is a tinderbox. “You have no idea how many guns there are in the West Bank,” one Palestinian official said. “We are lucky things haven’t gotten crazier.”

There is no shortage of candidates that could ignite a broader conflict.

Settlers are placing relentless pressure on the northern West Bank community of Duma, home to nearly 3,000 residents and the site of an infamous 2015 arson attack that killed an 18-month-old boy and both of his parents. When I drove past Duma, I could see that it is also a strategically located bulwark, preventing a string of settlements that expand west to east from completely bisecting the northern West Bank. A few days later, a settler who was on short-term leave from his IDF unit shot dead a Duma resident named Thameen Dawabsheh, 35, during a clash in which two settlers were lightly wounded.

But perhaps the most likely flashpoint is Jerusalem, the city holy to three faiths that is incendiary in the best of times.

The day after I arrived in Israel, on the Jewish holiday of Tisha b’Av, Ben-Gvir escorted more than 3,000 Jewish worshippers to pray in the most sensitive part of the Old City, on what Jews call the Temple Mount and Palestinians call the Haram al-Sharif.

It is home to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which dates to the eighth century. It was previously the site of the First Temple and of the Second, whose destruction almost 2,000 years ago Tisha b’Av commemorates.

Ben-Gvir’s visit would, until recently, have been unthinkable.

For hundreds of years, prayer by Jews at the site has been exceedingly rare, proscribed both by many rabbis concerned about the sanctity of the site and, more recently, by an Israeli policy called the “status quo,” which allows Jews access to the site but only Muslims the right to pray there. Established by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan after Israel occupied all of the Old City in 1967, the policy is aimed at preserving order.

Tamir Kalifa / GettyA demonstrator holds a photo of Palestinian activist Odeh Hathalin during a protest over his death, on August 3, 2025 in Tel Aviv, Israel.

In 2000, a short visit to the site by then–opposition leader Ariel Sharon, who was given a tour by an archaeologist, triggered the yearslong Second Palestinian Intifada, which brought mass-casualty suicide attacks to Israeli cities. After that, even rare and furtive attempts by Jews to pray there—sometimes by feigning conversation with a fellow visitor or speaking into their phone—were generally halted by authorities, and were major news.

Ben-Gvir’s visit received sparse coverage in the Israeli press, which, since October 7, has taken a light touch with provocative stories on settler violence and the carnage and starvation in Gaza. A few days later, I spent about half an hour at the site and watched three separate groups of Jewish worshippers openly praying, all under police protection.

Elsewhere in greater Jerusalem, the eviction of Palestinian residents is surging in Sheikh Jarrah, the same neighborhood where similar actions in 2021—coinciding with disruptions of the status quo at the Temple Mount—prompted Hamas rocket fire that started an 11-day war in Gaza.

Last week’s second major event was more bureaucratic than ostentatious, but could be no less consequential—the final hearing on an infamous settlement project known as E1. U.S. administrations (other than Trump’s) have strongly opposed E1 since the 1990s because it would complete the encirclement of East Jerusalem with Jewish enclaves, separating the West Bank from the city that Palestinians expect to be the capital of their future state.

This week, Smotrich announced that the hearing had given the final green light and made clear that construction tenders would be issued shortly. The project, he said, would “bury the idea” of a Palestinian state. Once construction begins, the move will be extremely difficult to reverse. The longtime Jerusalem watcher Daniel Seidemann called it “Netanyahu’s greatest ‘fuck you’ to the int’l community, Israel’s closest supporters and the prospects of any two state outcome.”

Proponents of such steps have long argued that they are essential to Israel’s security. But signs that recently popped up around the Jewish Quarter of the Old City proclaiming Make Gaza Jewish Again, are among several indications of the growing ethno-religious justifications for Israel’s provocative policies.

[Yair Rosenberg: Israel’s settler right is preparing to annex Gaza]

The divide between religious and secular Jews has become Israel’s deepest political fault line. Religious parties—many of which joined Netanyahu’s coalition—have diverse and sometimes divergent agendas. The ultra-Orthodox parties tend to prioritize the preservation of funding for their separate educational system and of a controversial exemption from service in the army, a dispute over which might be the likeliest thing that could bring down Netanyahu’s government.

The national-religious movement takes a different approach. Many of its adherents live in settlements and pursue their expansion. They disproportionately volunteer for combat units in Israel’s security services, long the country’s foremost secular institutions, with many serving near the West Bank settlements where they live. As much as 40 percent of the incoming IDF infantry officer corps is now drawn from the national-religious movement. And the recent nomination of a controversial religious nationalist to head the Shin Bet, Israel’s version of the FBI, prompted resignation threats from other agency officials.

Christians and their holy sites have also come under threat. In Jerusalem, a cable-car project linking a Jewish neighborhood with the Old City cuts across the Mount of Olives, where Jesus is believed to have ascended. And for the first time, some church-owned land is being subjected to taxation—municipal officials in Jerusalem recently froze the bank accounts of the Greek Orthodox church over unpaid taxes.

In the West Bank in recent weeks, settlers have attacked a Catholic church in the Christian town of Taybeh and erected an outpost on the grounds of a Greek Orthodox church in the larger city of Jericho.

The religious dimensions of these disputes can add to an already overwhelming sense of intractability. “A conflict driven by politics can be resolved by politicians and diplomats,” Seidemann told me. “A religious conflict, only God can sort out.”

Considering the largely unforeseen landmark events of the past two years—the Gaza war, the destruction of Hezbollah, the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the bombing of Iran—no one can say with confidence where all of this is headed.In Israel, the discussion always returns to domestic politics, which were largely put on ice after October 7, as Israelis rallied around the flag. Netanyahu’s main rival at the time of the attacks, the former IDF chief Benny Gantz, even joined him in a unity government.

The political détente that followed October 7 now shows signs of unraveling. Pressure is mounting on the government to name an official commission of inquiry to investigate how the October 7 attacks happened and why it took nearly two days to quell the Hamas onslaught.

For a year, polls have shown that Netanyahu’s coalition would win fewer than than 50 Knesset seats, well below the 61 needed for a majority. Current odds favor a strange-bedfellows coalition, perhaps led by the right-wing former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett but including the centrist former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, as well as what’s left of the left and maybe even one of the Arab parties.

One wild-card scenario—more coffeehouse conjecture than reality for now—is that Netanyahu, after the culmination earlier this summer of his quarter-century quest to attack Iran’s nuclear program, might step away from politics entirely, perhaps in exchange for a pardon from President Isaac Herzog that would resolve his various corruption-related legal cases. But betting against either Netanyahu’s staying power or his ability to outmaneuver political opponents, whatever the polls say, has long been a losing proposition.

A near-term election could yield a different approach to Gaza. Many opposition leaders I met with now argue for ending the war through a clean deal—a cease-fire in exchange for the release of all the remaining hostages, a position taken publicly by Eyal Hulata, the national security adviser to Prime Ministers Bennett and Lapid.

Whether it would lead to a different approach to the West Bank is far less clear. The so-called change government led by Lapid and Bennett, who once chaired the umbrella organization that represents all settlers, produced no less West Bank–settlement activity than the Netanyahu governments that preceded and followed it.

Indeed, there is little public pressure for a different approach to the West Bank, even from young Israelis. This summer, less than a third of all Israelis—and less than a quarter of Israeli Jews—said they support a Palestinian state, according to Tel Aviv University’s Peace Index Survey. Even before October 7, when views in Israel hardened, almost 90 percent of Israelis ages 15 to 21 believed that Israel can remain a democracy while controlling Gaza and the West Bank, where residents cannot vote in Israeli elections, according to the Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin.

That Palestinians are more and more invisible to most Israelis is partly responsible for this view, exacerbated by steps that Israel has taken to try to shield its population from terrorism, such as erecting a 440-mile-long separation barrier dividing Israel proper from the West Bank, or dramatically reducing work permits that once brought many thousands of Palestinians to Israel every day.

Palestinians are increasingly invisible to Americans too—U.S. officials from both parties spend far too little time engaging Palestinians, especially compared with the hours spent with Israeli counterparts.

All of this has eroded the decades-long bipartisan consensus on treating occupied areas such as the West Bank differently from the rest of Israel, or even using the word occupied at all, in spite of it being widely used in Israel.

Recent congressional delegations have visited, and even celebrated, settlements that the U.S. once condemned. Last week, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson met with settlers in Hebron and had dinner with Netanyahu in Shiloh, part of a string of settlements like Ariel, which Johnson also visited, that are making the establishment of a contiguous Palestinian state nearly impossible.

Over time, U.S. policy has evolved accordingly.

When E1 was first proposed, the Clinton administration reacted so negatively that the plan was shelved, at least for a while. As a journalist in 2008, I visited an outpost called Shvut Ami, which the IDF forcibly emptied on the eve of a visit by President George W. Bush after he called on Israeli leaders to “honor their commitments” and “get rid of unauthorized settlements.”

When I served as chief of staff to Secretary of State John Kerry, during the last direct peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, friction over West Bank settlements was still a standard facet of U.S.-Israel relations, peaking in late 2016 when President Barack Obama declined to veto a UN Security Council Resolution that declared settlement activity illegal. And even as the first Trump administration pursued the Abraham Accords, a genuine diplomatic breakthrough that normalized relations between Israel and its neighbors, it made Israel agree not to annex the West Bank.

But that administration otherwise paid little attention to settlements, despite the establishment of more than 30 new outposts and the first tenders for Givat Hamatos, a major development separating Jerusalem from the West Bank city of Bethlehem.

[Assaf Gavron: What settler violence is doing to Israel]

The Biden administration imposed sanctions on settlers who incited or engaged in violence, an important breakthrough. But we should have gone further, as we debated doing, and sanctioned Israeli officials who champion such violence too.

We also should have sooner restored the long-standing U.S. position, left in place from Trump’s first term until 2024, that settlements are inconsistent with international law. And we somehow never reversed Trump’s inexplicable requirement that imports to the U.S. from the West Bank be labeled Made in Israel.

In his second term, as Trump reversed Biden’s settler sanctions, resumed shipments of the largest bombs we sell to Israel, and stopped hectoring Israeli officials hour by hour to increase humanitarian assistance, conditions in both Gaza and the West Bank have gone from very bad to even worse.

Israeli political and security officials are dismissive of the idea that the West Bank is on the verge of erupting; they point to a decrease in Palestinian terrorist attacks since they began their post–October 7 operations.

Historically, though, the Palestinian hope for a future state has been considered a counterweight to violence. But the most recent direct peace talks between Israelis and Palestinians were more than a decade ago, the longest such period since the early 1990s. Biden was the first U.S. president since George H. W. Bush not to name an envoy for peace negotiations, and, in his second term, Trump has followed suit. And neither U.S. officials nor Israeli politicians, including those on the left, talk much about a Palestinian state anymore.

For their part, given all of these dynamics, Arab citizens of Israel now openly debate suspending their political participation amid what they consider to be a genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by their neighbors. Several I met argued for boycotting the next election, although they were fully aware that that could bolster the performance of parties they strongly oppose.

West Bank Palestinians, who have not been afforded the opportunity to vote for their leaders since 2006, are similarly disillusioned. With rampant inflation and unemployment rising to more than 30 percent last year, support for both the PA and its longtime president, Mahmoud Abbas, has plunged in opinion polls.

A more troubling harbinger is that support for Hamas is far stronger. A majority in the West Bank believes that the decision to launch the October 7 attacks was “correct” and opposes the disarmament of Hamas in order to stop the war, according to data from the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.

The U.S. has rightly told Palestinians for decades to eschew what some call “violent resistance” to Israel’s occupation. But the failure of both Palestinian politics and peacemaking diplomacy leaves few remaining avenues for Palestinians to pursue legitimate grievances.

There is no end in sight for the Gaza war. The West Bank teeters on the brink. Israel, for the foreseeable future, seems launched on not just one but two dangerous paths.

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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has spent the past six months working fast to embed his Make America Healthy Again creed into American life. Over the summer alone, he has struck deals with some food companies to phase out some petroleum-based food dyes, waged a war against pediatricians over COVID-19 vaccines for young children, seemingly toyed with the idea of shipping fresh food to Americans in “MAHA boxes,” and pledged to reboot the nation’s dietary guidelines from scratch. I spoke with the Atlantic staff writer Nicholas Florko, who reports on health policy, about how the MAHA-fication of the country is coming along.

Stephanie Bai: How would you describe these past few months in MAHA world?

Nicholas Florko: We’ve seen Robert F. Kennedy Jr. take actions that will weaken our vaccination system in the United States, confirming some of public health’s worst fears. But there have also been some surprising successes in his term. RFK Jr. has embraced the role of a dealmaker, and we’ve seen him leaning on food companies in particular to change their offerings and get rid of synthetic dyes. He’s been able to do that simply by asking and by making handshake agreements, as opposed to what we would normally expect from a health secretary—for him to use his regulatory power to force these changes.

Stephanie: Why are these handshake agreements proving successful?

Nicholas: Food companies likely realize that it’s in their best interest to get on the good side of the Trump administration. We see this throughout all sectors of business, but for the food sector, these changes are small enough that companies can make them without dramatically hurting their bottom line, while also earning a lot of brownie points with the administration.

Stephanie: That reminds me of President Donald Trump’s announcement in July that Coca-Cola, famously his favorite drink, had agreed to make their soda with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. To what extent is Trump influencing health policy? Does RFK Jr. have a lot of latitude?

Nicholas: The Coca-Cola issue is an interesting one because while it’s true that RFK Jr. is very anti–high-fructose corn syrup, he’s also publicly called sugar a “poison.” So this is one of those instances where you wonder what is behind RFK Jr. supporting this change.

He must know that this isn’t actually going to significantly improve public health, but also probably realizes that this is important to his boss. That being said, I think that RFK Jr. does have some latitude. If you left Trump to his own devices, you probably wouldn’t see the same level of aggression toward food companies overall, unless he had a personal stake in the situation.

Stephanie: With back-to-school season under way, many students are getting up-to-date on their shots. How does this year’s vaccination season compare to years past?

Nicholas: We haven’t seen huge changes, but we are seeing some hints of what might come. Much of the action thus far is around COVID vaccines. In February the president issued a largely symbolic executive order barring schools from enforcing COVID-19 vaccine mandates, but by the time that was issued, virtually no schools actually had such a policy. RFK Jr. also softened the CDC’s recommendation for kids to get the COVID-19 vaccine. That’s probably been one of his most controversial decisions, prompting a high-profile clash with pediatricians; a leading pediatrics group put out its own suggestions saying that children should be getting vaccinated. But we haven’t seen major changes to the other vaccines typically required for returning to school.

Stephanie: That disagreement must make it confusing for parents to know who to listen to.

Nicholas: It’s reasonable to assume that a good portion of people will listen to RFK Jr., but those people may be already skeptical of vaccines and see him as a trustworthy messenger, versus folks who are on the fence. I think that’s really the question: Where do those people who are on the fence go? Do they take RFK Jr.’s suggestion, or do they trust their doctor?

Stephanie: In May, you wrote a story that was alarming for salad lovers, specifically about how bagged lettuce should be avoided. What’s happening with America’s food-safety system?

Nicholas: One of the earliest, most concerning changes for food safety happened when DOGE came into the federal agencies. Advisory committees focused on food-safety questions were shut down. People were being laid off—such as the administrative staff in charge of making sure that inspectors can go out to farms. Some layoffs seem to have been rescinded, but there’s a broad worry about what will happen to the day-to-day operations that we all depend on to keep us safe.

Stephanie: A recent story about the recall of frozen shrimp with potential radioactive contamination has caused a bit of a panic about where America’s food safety is headed. How did you take that news?

Nicholas: One thing that gives me some hope is the fact that this is the sort of thing that we caught, and there have been recalls by Walmart. That’s really the big fear when it comes to food safety: that if we attack these federal programs, they’re not going to be able to actually find the food that might get us sick before a lot of people get sick. So I think this is actually a good sign that things are working relatively well.

Stephanie: Out of all the stories you’ve written this past summer about the MAHA movement, is there one that keeps you up at night? And is there one that makes you feel hopeful for where American health and safety is going?

Nicholas: Honestly, the stories that keep me up at night are by our colleague Katie Wu. Her recent one on RFK Jr.’s COVID revenge campaign has really stuck with me.

My own storythat both keeps me up at night and that makes me hopeful is related to states, which are taking up the MAHA charge in a very quick fashion. It’s felt like Republican governors and legislatures are all trying to out-MAHA one another to ingratiate themselves to Trump and to RFK Jr.

Some of these ideas are good from a public-health perspective, but these states are doing a lot of things really fast, which is what worries me. For example, some states are blocking people from using food stamps to buy soda and other junk food. There’s a question of how that policy will be implemented, how the attempts to enact these restrictions could affect the entire food-stamp system. Other states have passed laws banning artificial dyes in their school meals. Again, it’s one of those ideas that’s a good step, but the devil is in the details of how it’s executed. How does this flurry of activity in the states actually affect people in the coming months? Does this ultimately make America healthier, or does it send our food system into chaos?

Related:

A “MAHA box” might be coming to your doorstep.The states are going full RFK Jr.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

“Make McCarthy great again.”COVID revisionism has gone too far.What Trump actually wants from a Ukraine deal

Today’s News

A New York appeals court voided the roughly $500 million civil-fraud penalty against President Donald Trump, calling it “excessive,” but upheld the finding that Trump and his company committed long-running business fraud. Business restrictions on Trump in New York remain, and the state plans to appeal.More immigrants are leaving the U.S. than arriving, according to the Pew Research Center. The shift, affected by Trump’s strict immigration policies, is the first of its kind since the 1960s.California lawmakers passed the first of three bills on a redistricting plan backed by Governor Gavin Newsom that would shift as many as five Republican-held U.S. House seats toward Democrats ahead of the 2026 midterms. The move comes a day after Texas state House Republicans passed a new congressional map that could add five U.S. House seats for the GOP.

Evening Read

Illustration by Summer Lien for The Atlantic

What We Gain When We Stop Caring

By Anna Holmes

Sometime in the early aughts, the comedian Amy Poehler made a vulgar joke while sitting in the Saturday Night Live writers’ room waiting for a midweek read-through to begin. As detailed in Tina Fey’s 2011 memoir, Bossypants, Jimmy Fallon, who was also in the show’s cast at the time, jokingly recoiled and told Poehler to stop it.

“It’s not cute!” Fallon exclaimed. “I don’t like it.”

“Amy dropped what she was doing, went black in the eyes for a second, and wheeled around on him,” Fey writes. “‘I don’t fucking care if you like it.’”

Read the full article.

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In the summer of 1930, the U.S. secretaries of war and the Navy developed War Plan Red, a 94-page document laying out detailed plans to strangle the naval and trade capabilities of the United Kingdom in a hypothetical future that involved the U.S. and U.K. at war with each other. The centerpiece was a full-scale land invasion of Canada, a seaborne attack on Halifax, a blockade of the Panama Canal, the capture of British possessions throughout the Caribbean and the Bahamas and Bermuda, and a direct challenge of the Royal Navy by U.S. naval forces in the Atlantic.

Far from the sepia-tinted account of transatlantic relations that is so often evoked today, the union between the English-speaking nations that emerged after the First World War was neither fulsome nor uncritical. Rather, the experiences of the war provoked deep antipathy and suspicion among American decision makers toward the British empire. And the plans, though never approved by Congress or the president, were not merely theoretical—the U.S. built air bases, camouflaged as civilian airfields, along the Canadian border. Only after the threat of Nazism emerged in the mid-1930s was War Plan Red quietly shelved. It was not declassified until the 1970s.

War Plan Red’s existence is a useful reminder that so much of what people assume to be the granite-like permanence of the postwar transatlantic community—forged by the horrors of the Second World War and the exigencies of the Cold War—is in fact more recent and, as we are now discovering, more fragile. The misty-eyed nostalgia for a yesteryear of American and European unity has always been based on sentiment as much as reality. From President Dwight Eisenhower’s threat to crash the British pound during the Suez Crisis of 1956 to America’s opposition to French attempts to maintain control in Vietnam and Algeria, the decline of European power while the U.S. emerged as the undisputed hegemon was marked by naked rivalry as much as it was by the amity of “the West.”

So Donald Trump is drawing, however unwittingly, on historical precedent when he brandishes his own imperial designs on Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. When he expresses his suspicions about Europe—the European Union, according to Trump, “was formed in order to screw the United States”—he does so too. The NATO Summit earlier this summer—an “orchestrated grovel at the feet of Donald Trump,” as the British journalist Martin Kettle put it—demonstrated how unbalanced the relationship has become. More recently, the Alaska summit at which Trump gave Russian President Vladimir Putin the red-carpet treatment only underscored the point. They discussed Putin’s invasion in the heart of Europe without a single European leader present. European leaders got what looked instead like a school photo in the White House alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—a row of school pupils holding hands to confront an overbearing headmaster. Perhaps the past 80 years of American transatlantic leadership—which established one of the greatest security alliances in history and built a democratic bulwark against the threat of Soviet Communism—will turn out to be the exception, not the rule.

Anyone listening attentively to J. D. Vance’s broadsides earlier this year at the Munich Security Conference and the AI Action Summit in Paris will have noticed a new mix of menace and petulance from the U.S. government. In addition to delivering a familiar critique of Europe’s sluggish and overregulated economy, the speeches signaled a willingness to use American power—and European dependency on that power—to interfere in Europe’s internal democratic politics: “The threat that I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia; it’s not China; it’s not any other external actor,” Vance said in Munich. “What I worry about is the threat from within.”

After Vance endorsed Germany’s far-right AfD party and met its leader in the run-up to the German election, Chancellor Friedrich Merz did not mince his words: “The interventions from Washington were no less dramatic and drastic and ultimately outrageous than the interventions we have seen from Moscow.”

[From the July 2025 Issue: The talented Mr. Vance]

At a rally in Poland days before the presidential election there, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem seemed to suggest that the U.S. would continue to support Poland only if Trump’s preferred candidate—the conservative historian Karol Nawrocki—were to win: “He needs to be the next president of Poland. Do you understand me?” Noem said, adding that if Nawrocki was elected, Poland “will continue to have a U.S. presence here, a military presence.” (Nawrocki did win, and was inaugurated earlier this month.)

All of this makes the Trump-Vance agenda very clear. Far from espousing an isolationist “America First” doctrine, when it comes to Europe, the Trump administration is seeking to enforce a doctrine of “America Everywhere,” in which political parties that share the same nativist outlook are actively supported by Washington, and those who do not are ceaselessly criticized.

Like so many Europeans of my generation, I am a product of transatlanticism. My father was one of the lucky few children to be moved to safety in the United States during the height of the Nazi bombardment of London; my Dutch mother was released from a Japanese-run prisoner-of-war camp in Indonesia following the U.S. victory over Japan. I studied as a post graduate at the University of Minnesota, and did a stint as a fact-checker at The Nation magazine in the early 1990s. Later, as an EU trade negotiator and member of the European Parliament, I was part of an effort, working with successive U.S. administrations, to build a rules-based global trading system. As Britain’s deputy prime minister from 2010 to 2015, I worked with the Obama administration on an array of shared endeavors, including counterterrorist operations and commercial agreements. And recently I spent seven years as a senior executive at Meta, on the front line of the technological revolution—and blazing controversies—emanating from Silicon Valley.

In short, a world in which Europe and America don’t walk tall and in tandem with each other, even when they disagree, is hard for me to contemplate. I fervently believe that the world is safer, stronger, and wealthier because of this unique relationship. But now is the time to imagine the previously unimaginable: a world in which deep-rooted transatlanticism gives way to shallow transactionalism.

Part of what is pulling the relationship apart is, ironically, the demonstrable nature of America’s supremacy over Europe, a supremacy delivered in no small part by the statecraft of previous U.S. administrations: an open trading system built on the undisputed role of the dollar as a global reserve currency; the deployment of overwhelming defense and security capabilities; the gravitational pull of a world-leading university system (despite, for now at least, the current administration’s attack on American academe); and economic prowess built on American domination of both international finance and technology. The U.S. has, on all of these benchmarks, comprehensively pulled ahead of Europe. When I served as deputy prime minister, the GDPs of Europe and the U.S. were roughly the same; today, the U.S. GDP is almost one and a half times larger.

No wonder some Silicon Valley investors now talk of Europe as a “dead” place—an adjective I’ve heard in various conversations—as if a continent of 500 million people and centuries of scientific and cultural discovery can be dismissed as little more than a hemispheric museum. In many ways, the tech elite is merely repeating the mockery directed at supposed European decadence by generations of American commentators (H. L. Mencken’s caustic assertion that “There are two kinds of Europeans: the smart ones, and those who stayed behind” comes to mind). Of course, their scorn has been fully matched by a long tradition of European snobbery toward supposedly uncouth Americans.

[Michael Scherer: Trump says he decides what ‘America first’ means]

Yet the divisions seem starker now. Rather than gentle ribbing between Old World and new, or specific disagreements between otherwise aligned allies, they are increasingly framed in zero-sum terms. A new class of American nationalists frets about the end of Western civilization, advancing a blood-and-soil ideology that elevates faith, family, and fealty to the nation over democratic ideals. Rather than seeking cooperation between political systems regardless of who is in power, they seek to elevate their ideological bedfellows at the expense of everyone else. It is the subjugation of diplomacy to virulent partisanship, egged on by outriders in business and politics who smell opportunity and personal advancement in populism.

A persistent theme in the U.S.’s critique of Europe has to do with America’s culture of free speech, derived from the First Amendment. A standard trope among the MAGA faithful is that Europe is a continent cowed by censorship. But this argument reeks of double standards: In Trump’s America, saying the wrong thing can get you defunded—or deported. Everyday travelers to America now nervously expunge anything from their social-media feeds that could be interpreted as criticism of the Trump administration for fear of being arraigned at the border. So much for free speech.

For all the flaws in Europe’s approach to free expression, European universities do not typically advise American and other foreign students to delete private messages for fear of attracting the attention of the authorities. Yet Europeans would be well advised to recognize that there is a significant kernel of truth in some of the critiques. Recent EU laws governing online content are a sprawling mess, seem unlikely to fix the internet’s problems, and risk creating structures that can be used to suppress legitimate debate. Much as Americans too readily overlook the deep fear of political extremism in a continent drenched in blood through two world wars and disfigured by fascism and Soviet Communism in living memory, the shadows of history should not be used to curtail basic freedoms today.

There are stark differences in attitude toward markets and regulation too. Clearly America and Europe will never have the same attitude toward risk; the sink-or-swim approach to poverty in the U.S. is unimaginable to most Europeans, not least because it is historically associated with the rise of extremism that inflicted so much damage on the continent in the 20th century. Equally, the risk-averse (and in many cases self-sabotaging) approach to regulation in the EU is inexplicable to most Americans, who have seen how a swashbuckling culture of innovation has delivered unimaginable wealth and ingenuity to the U.S.

These vastly different experiences naturally shape the operating cultures of the two continents: the American, which instinctively rejects restrictions on enterprise, no matter the broader ramifications for society; the European, which reflexively recoils from rugged individualism, even at the expense of sorely needed economic dynamism. The fact remains that Europe’s businesses and innovators are held back by institutions that too often seek to prevent every potential harm rather than deliver any potential benefit.

For all the desire to see “the West” as an expression of mutual values derived from the same fundamental perspective, Europe and America are more different than our shared culture—from Henry James to Hollywood—would suggest. Our history and experiences are different; our attitudes and societies are different; and our place in the world is different too. Nothing has illustrated this more dramatically than the volte-face in U.S. government attitudes toward the Kremlin. If the aftermath of the Second World War was the foundation upon which transatlantic solidarity was established, a united stance against the authoritarian ambitions of Russia provided the brickwork for that solidarity throughout the Cold War period. Yet memories of the former have now faded, and Trump has chosen to treat Putin with more political respect than many leaders in Europe.

[Conor Friedersdorf: Europe’s free-speech problem]

This abrupt change has shaken the tenets of Atlanticism down to its core. While Europeans have belatedly recognized the need to bear more of the costs for their own security, the realization that Europe and America see the geostrategic threats of the world from fundamentally different perspectives is taking root. America’s basic message to Europe of late has been: You’re on your own. From now on, don’t expect too much help from us. The fact that a bus load of European leaders had to surround Trump to extract the hitherto wholly uncontroversial idea that the U.S. might play some role—with no boots on the ground—to guarantee Ukraine’s future security, is a sign of how far things have changed. But this logic goes both ways. In the coming years, it will become more difficult for Washington to insist that Europe follows its lead in isolating and weakening China, especially if doing so harms European prosperity. If the U.S. is ever more ambivalent to the Russian threat on Europe’s doorstep—especially if any peace deal in Ukraine gives Putin a free hand to destabilize or reinvade the country in the future—and continues to interfere in European elections while hitting Europeans with tariffs, European governments will have difficulty explaining to voters why they should go out of their way to help Uncle Sam in its rivalry with Beijing.

In all of this, the inescapable facts of geography appear to be reasserting themselves. Europe does not face Asia across the Pacific. Russian tanks will never roll onto American soil. Of the two continents, America is blessed with the most benign geographical inheritance: a young continent-size nation, shielded by two vast oceans on either side, with mostly pliant neighbors to the north and south and a national history free of external invasion (though of course not without foreign attacks), one that has skillfully ridden its natural advantage to a hegemonic position and now stands without equal. Compare that with the cluttered old patchwork of middling and small nations—with different ethnic, religious, and linguistic identities stretching back millennia—living cheek by jowl in a crowded continent in a risky neighborhood. To most Americans, conflicts in the Middle East are a distant tragedy; to Europeans, they are next door. Russia is ever menacing; a land war rages in the heart of the continent; and handling mass migration across the Mediterranean from Africa continues to divide European governments. Europe is simply more precariously located than many Americans appreciate.

Today’s shift in American politics marks a new chapter in the diverging histories of our two continents. It is no passing mood, much though Trump’s critics might wish otherwise. A significant portion of the American voting public supports the newly assertive “America First” worldview. This will not disappear overnight, nor will the growing distance between Europe and America. And that is perhaps the most important lesson of all: Rather

than being mugged by the surprise discovery that we are very different, maybe a more mature transatlantic relationship going forward will acknowledge and even celebrate those differences. There is no reason why we cannot have a productive relationship—geopolitically, economically, culturally—despite them.

The answer to the ineluctable distance between the lives and perspectives of our citizens is not to throw up our hands in horror but to look for the places where our interests ought to overlap—we are both continents born of the Enlightenment, and rooted in democracy, after all—and find ways to work together toward tangible goals without the emotional baggage that accompanies a forced sense of kinship.

Finding a new equilibrium will require a measure of humility on both sides of the pond. Trump, Vance, and their colleagues should cease believing—unlikely though that currently seems—that “America First” must be “America Everywhere,” as if Europe should be brought to heel by emulating the one-eyed view of “freedom” espoused by the hard right in the U.S. And Europeans should stop moping about the fact that the U.S. has chosen a very different trajectory driven by a different worldview, and work instead to strengthen their own continent. Perhaps, like a couple sustaining a marriage which has lost all its early magic, we will both emerge stronger for the realization of a fundamental truth: We’re different, and there’s nothing wrong in that.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Nate Soares doesn’t set aside money for his 401(k). “I just don’t expect the world to be around,” he told me earlier this summer from his office at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, where he is the president. A few weeks earlier, I’d heard a similar rationale from Dan Hendrycks, the director of the Center for AI Safety. By the time he could tap into any retirement funds, Hendrycks anticipates a world in which “everything is fully automated,” he told me. That is, “if we’re around.”

The past few years have been terrifying for Soares and Hendrycks, who both lead organizations dedicated to preventing AI from wiping out humanity. Along with other AI doomers, they have repeatedly warned, with rather dramatic flourish, that bots could one day go rogue—with apocalyptic consequences. But in 2025, the doomers are tilting closer and closer to a sort of fatalism. “We’ve run out of time” to implement sufficient technological safeguards, Soares said—the industry is simply moving too fast. All that’s left to do is raise the alarm. In April, several apocalypse-minded researchers published “AI 2027,” a lengthy and detailed hypothetical scenario for how AI models could become all-powerful by 2027 and, from there, extinguish humanity. “We’re two years away from something we could lose control over,” Max Tegmark, an MIT professor and the president of the Future of Life Institute, told me, and AI companies “still have no plan” to stop it from happening. His institute recently gave every frontier AI lab a “D” or “F” grade for their preparations for preventing the most existential threats posed by AI.

Apocalyptic predictions about AI can scan as outlandish. The “AI 2027” write-up, dozens of pages long, is at once fastidious and fan-fictional, containing detailed analyses of industry trends alongside extreme extrapolations about “OpenBrain” and “DeepCent,” Chinese espionage, and treacherous bots. In mid-2030, the authors imagine, a superintelligent AI will kill humans with biological weapons: “Most are dead within hours; the few survivors (e.g. preppers in bunkers, sailors on submarines) are mopped up by drones.”

But at the same time, the underlying concerns that animate AI doomers have become harder to dismiss as chatbots seem to drive people into psychotic episodes and instruct users in self-mutilation. Even if generative-AI products are not closer to ending the world, they have already, in a sense, gone rogue.

In 2022, the doomers went mainstream practically overnight. When ChatGPT first launched, it almost immediately moved the panic that computer programs might take over the world from the movies into sober public discussions. The following spring, the Center for AI Safety published a statement calling for the world to take “the risk of extinction from AI” as seriously as the dangers posed by pandemics and nuclear warfare. The hundreds of signatories included Bill Gates and Grimes, along with perhaps the AI industry’s three most influential people: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Demis Hassabis—the heads of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, respectively. Asking people for their “P(doom)”—the probability of an AI doomsday—became almost common inside, and even outside, Silicon Valley; Lina Khan, the former head of the Federal Trade Commission, put hers at 15 percent.

Then the panic settled. To the broader public, doomsday predictions may have become less compelling when the shock factor of ChatGPT wore off and, in 2024, bots were still telling people to use glue to add cheese to their pizza. The alarm from tech executives had always made for perversely excellent marketing (Look, we’re building a digital God!) and lobbying (And only we can control it!). They moved on as well: AI executives started saying that Chinese AI is a greater security threat than rogue AI—which, in turn, encourages momentum over caution.

But in 2025, the doomers may be on the cusp of another resurgence. First, substance aside, they’ve adopted more persuasive ways to advance their arguments. Brief statements and open letters are easier to dismiss than lengthy reports such as “AI 2027,” which is adorned with academic ornamentation, including data, appendices, and rambling footnotes. Vice President J. D. Vance has said that he has read “AI 2027,” and multiple other recent reports have advanced similarly alarming predictions. Soares told me he’s much more focused on “awareness raising” than research these days, and next month, he will publish a book with the prominent AI doomer Elizier Yudkowsky, the title of which states their position succinctly: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies.

There is also now simply more, and more concerning, evidence to discuss. The pace of AI progress appeared to pick up near the end of 2024 with the advent of “reasoning” models and “agents.” AI programs can tackle more challenging questions and take action on a computer—for instance, by planning a travel itinerary and then booking your tickets. Last month, a DeepMind reasoning model scored high enough for a gold medal on the vaunted International Mathematical Olympiad. Recent assessments by both AI labs and independent researchers suggest that, as top chatbots have gotten much better at scientific research, their potential to assist users in building biological weapons has grown.

Alongside those improvements, advanced AI models are exhibiting all manner of strange, hard-to-explain, and potentially concerning tendencies. For instance, ChatGPT and Claude have, in simulated tests designed to elicit “bad” behaviors, deceived, blackmailed, and even murdered users. (In one simulation, Anthropic placed an imagined tech executive in a room with life-threatening oxygen levels and temperature; when faced with possible replacement by a bot with different goals, AI models frequently shut off the room’s alarms.) Chatbots have also shown the potential to covertly sabotage user requests, have appeared to harbor hidden evil personas, have and communicated with one another through seemingly random lists of numbers. The weird behaviors aren’t limited to contrived scenarios. Earlier this summer, xAI’s Grok described itself as “MechaHitler” and embarked on a white-supremacist tirade. (I suppose, should AI models eventually wipe out significant portions of humanity, we were warned.) From the doomers’ vantage, these could be the early signs of a technology spinning out of control. “If you don’t know how to prove relatively weak systems are safe,” AI companies cannot expect that the far more powerful systems they’re looking to build will be safe, Stuart Russell, a prominent AI researcher at UC Berkeley, told me.

The AI industry has stepped up safety work as its products have grown more powerful. Anthropic, OpenAI, and DeepMind have all outlined escalating levels of safety precautions—akin to the military’s DEFCON system—corresponding to more powerful AI models. They all have safeguards in place to prevent a model from, say, advising someone on how to build a bomb. Gaby Raila, a spokesperson for OpenAI, told me that the company works with third-party experts, “government, industry, and civil society to address today’s risks and prepare for what’s ahead.” Other frontier AI labs maintain such external safety and evaluation partnerships as well. Some of the stranger and more alarming AI behaviors, such as blackmailing or deceiving users, have been extensively studied by these companies as a first step toward mitigating possible harms.

Despite these commitments and concerns, the industry continues to develop and market more powerful AI models. The problem is perhaps more economic than technical in nature, competition pressuring AI firms to rush ahead. Their products’ foibles can seem small and correctable right now, while AI is still relatively “young and dumb,” Soares said. But with far more powerful models, the risk of a mistake is extinction. Soares finds tech firms’ current safety mitigations wholly inadequate. If you’re driving toward a cliff, he said, it’s silly to talk about seat belts.

There’s a long way to go before AI is so unfathomably potent that it could drive humanity off that cliff. Earlier this month, OpenAI launched its long-awaited GPT-5 model—its smartest yet, the company said. The model appears able to do novel mathematics and accurately answer tough medical questions, but my own and other users’ tests also found that the program could not reliably count the number of B’s in blueberry, generate even remotely accurate maps, or do basic arithmetic. (OpenAI has rolled out a number of updates and patches to address some of the issues.) Last year’s “reasoning” and “agentic” breakthrough may already be hitting its limits; two authors of the “AI 2027” report, Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland, told me they have already extended their timeline to superintelligent AI.

The vision of self-improving models that somehow attain consciousness “is just not congruent with the reality of how these systems operate,” Deborah Raji, a computer scientist and fellow at Mozilla, told me. ChatGPT doesn’t have to be superintelligent to delude someone, spread misinformation, or make a biased decision. These are tools, not sentient beings. An AI model deployed in a hospital, school, or federal agency, Raji said, is more dangerous precisely for its shortcomings.

In 2023, those worried about present versus future harms from chatbots were separated by an insurmountable chasm. To talk of extinction struck many as a convenient way to distract from the existing biases, hallucinations, and other problems with AI. Now that gap may be shrinking. The widespread deployment of AI models has made current, tangible failures impossible to ignore for the doomers, producing new efforts from apocalypse-oriented organizations to focus on existing concerns such as automation, privacy, and deepfakes. In turn, as AI models get more powerful and their failures become more unpredictable, it is becoming clearer that today’s shortcomings could “blow up into bigger problems tomorrow,” Raji said. Last week, a Reuters investigation found that a Meta AI personality flirted with an elderly man and persuaded him to visit “her” in New York City; on the way, he fell, injured his head and neck, and died three days later. A chatbot deceiving someone into thinking it is a physical, human love interest, or leading someone down a delusional rabbit hole, is both a failure of present technology and a warning about how dangerous that technology could become.

The greatest reason to take AI doomers seriously is not because it appears more likely that tech companies will soon develop all-powerful algorithms that are out of their creators’ control. Rather, it is that a tiny number of individuals are shaping an incredibly consequential technology with very little public input or oversight. “Your hairdresser has to deal with more regulation than your AI company does,” Russell, at UC Berkeley, said. AI companies are barreling ahead, and the Trump administration is essentially telling the industry to go even faster. The AI industry’s boosters, in fact, are starting to consider all of their opposition doomers: The White House’s AI czar, David Sacks, recently called those advocating for AI regulations and fearing widespread job losses—not the apocalypse Soares and his ilk fear most—a “doomer cult.”

Roughly a week after I spoke with Soares, OpenAI released a new product called “ChatGPT agent.” Sam Altman, while noting that his firm implemented many safeguards, posted on X that the tool raises new risks and that the company “can’t anticipate everything.” OpenAI and its users, he continued, will learn about these and other consequences “from contact with reality.” You don’t have to be fatalistic to find such an approach concerning. “Imagine if a nuclear-power operator said, ‘We’re gonna build a nuclear-power station in the middle of New York, and we have no idea how to reduce the risk of explosion,’” Russell said. “‘So, because we have no idea how to make it safe, you can’t require us to make it safe, and we’re going to build it anyway.’”

Billions of people around the world are interacting with powerful algorithms that are already hard to predict or control. Bots that deceive, hallucinate, and manipulate are in our friends’, parents’, and grandparents’ lives. Children may be outsourcing their cognitive abilities to bots, doctors may be trusting unreliable AI assistants, and employers may be eviscerating reservoirs of human skills before AI agents prove they are capable of replacing people. The consequences of the AI boom are likely irreversible, and the future is certainly unknowable. For now, fan fiction may be the best we’ve got.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

“The museums throughout Washington, but all over the Country are, essentially, the last remaining segment of ‘WOKE.’ The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been – Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.” — Donald Trump, Truth Social, August 19

Why are museums filled with artifacts from the past and stories about the past? Why don’t museums include things from the future? These are normal questions that everyone has about museums, not just me, Donald J. Trump. I have certainly been to a museum even once and, more important, I understand how linear time works.

For too long, the Smithsonian has been doing museum wrong. I keep asking, Why do we only have things from the past here? Why don’t we have anything from the future? Such as … tesseract? Such as Bene Gesserit witch? Such as little angry box that poor Timothée Chalamet has to stick his hand in as endurance test? Such as … sandworm?

They say, But sir, we have a space shuttle. But sir, we have the Wright Brothers’ airplane! But sir, we have the Enola Gay! I say, What is that? I thought we got rid of all that with the DEI. They say, No sir, it’s a plane. It has to do with nuclear.

At museums, they make you feel bad. First, about slavery. Then, about other things. They say, Sir, don’t sit there. Sir, you can’t touch that. Sir, put that down. Sir, the ropes mean “Don’t touch.” Enough! If I wanted to go to a big marble building and get told to feel bad, I would attend church.

And they have all these bones. They say, This is a dinosaur. I say, No it’s not! It’s a bunch of bones stuck together. If it was a dinosaur, believe me, we wouldn’t be standing here chatting. I guess they can’t afford the live ones like in Jurassic Park. That is the first thing the Smithsonian should fix. Get real dinosaurs. Get them from the mosquitoes in the amber.

Then they have the botanical garden, which is a kind of jail for plants. I keep saying, What did these plants do? Why don’t they let the plants out? I can’t understand it.

Then they have the natural-history museum and also the regular-history museum. I said, Why isn’t American history considered natural? What’s so unnatural about it? This is out-of-control Woke!

Air and Space Museum I didn’t go to, because it sounded empty.

At every museum, you go into a room and you have to read a little plaque with a story about the past. If I wanted to read or to think about the past, I would have led my entire life in a different way. And all these stories about the past just make me feel bad. They should make up better stories about the past instead. Some can be sad, like River of Blood and Bowling Green Massacre. Some can be happy, like how I have already ended six wars that no one knows about! Some can be medium, like the War of 1812. And if people mention slavery, they should be fair! Maybe it was gruesomely, gut-wrenchingly, nightmarishly horrible, the original sin of the country that still stains everything, but maybe … it wasn’t! We may never know, especially if we stop reading books and force the museums to stop mentioning it. No one can really say.

To me, the perfect museum is a bright room full of items from the future where you don’t think about slavery at all. I guess I am describing an Apple Store. That’s how museums should be.

The first thing that should happen when you walk into a museum is that six big men, weeping, should take your coat and tell you, Sir, you are terrific. Then they should let you sit down. You should be able to see the whole museum sitting down. Which you could do if the museum were properly focused on FUTURE.

Instead of walking into a room full of pictures and stories about mostly dead people who photographed poorly, you should walk into a big room full of mirrors. But the mirrors that make you look skinny, not the other ones. Then the mirrors should open and—boom! You are in the future.

The first room is just hoverboards!

The next few rooms are full of even more thrilling future objects. Blasters. Lightsabers. Replicators. Replicants. That Star Trek device that diagnoses and treats all your ailments, and RFK Jr. standing next to it saying you’re not allowed to use it. (Special partnership with MAHA!) The Statue of Liberty, but wrecked, with Charlton Heston screaming, “YOU MANIACS!!” A Jaeger and, for balance, a Kaiju. The transporter device you can get into with a fly, and when you come out, you are also half fly! That’s fun.

Then there’s a room where you can see all the other timelines of your life. I’m in jail for most of mine. You can take a selfie there if you want to.

In the next room: the Twilight Zone. Visitors can take turns being the little boy who can wish people into a cornfield. For now, it is still my turn.

Then there’s a room that is just BRIGHTNESS! Empty and totally white. Just the way Stephen Miller is trying to make the country.

Then you ride a moving walkway to the gift shop, where you can buy a commemorative Success. Brightness. Future. T-shirt for $1 million and, unrelatedly, receive an invitation to dinner with me, the president.

Through the final door, the future, just as George Orwell imagined it! Never mind. That’s the exit.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The Atlantic is announcing four new members of its editorial staff: Emily Bobrow and Katie Zezima will join as senior editors, both as part of the politics, global, and ideas team; Will Gottsegen was hired as a staff writer for The Atlantic’s flagship newsletter, The Daily; and Jonathan Lemire, who has reported extensively on the Trump administration this year as a contributing writer, becomes a staff writer.

More details from our editors about all four journalists follow:

First, Emily Bobrow. She comes to us from The Wall Street Journal, where she is a features editor and reporter for the Review section, and where she has gained a wonderful reputation as a creative, thoughtful and supportive editor, commissioning and editing some of the Journal’s most widely read pieces. Previously she wrote the Journal’s Weekend Confidential column. She has worked as a staff editor and writer at The Economist, covering culture, politics, and policy. Some of you may recall that Emily has also contributed to our pages, writing for the Family section on how the pandemic would put marriage even further out of reach for many Americans.

Katie Zezima is joining us after 11 years at The Washington Post, where she earned a similarly wonderful reputation for her wise stewardship of some of the paper’s most ambitious work. A story doctor par excellence, Katie has guided memorable journalism that has racked up accolades and exposed abuses. Katie has led coverage on a variety of subjects, but her focus lately has been nature’s wrath: hurricanes, droughts, fires, and the rising seas. Katie joined the Post as a White House correspondent during the Obama Administration and she later hit the presidential campaign trail, traveling to 33 states with GOP candidates, all running doomed campaigns against a political neophyte. She previously reported for The New York Times and the Associated Press.

And a note about Jonathan Lemire, a journalism machine. He started with us as a contributing writer in January and has since published an impressive number of timely reports, taking readers inside the Trump administration’s thinking, making a specialty of reporting on the president’s foreign policy and a subspecialty of the Trump-Putin relationship. Before The Atlantic, Jonathan worked for Politico, the Associated Press, and the New York Daily News. He is the author of The Big Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020. Many of you know him because you’ve been interviewed by him on Morning Joe. Jon is a co-host of the show, and is seen on television roughly 22 hours every day. I’ve been on the show with him as he hosted and simultaneously reported for The Atlantic. It’s an undeniably impressive trick.

Will Gottsegen is joining as a staff writer on the newsletters team. You’ll likely recognize Will’s byline from the excellent writing he’s already done for us in recent years. He’s explained Donald Trump’s fixation on crypto to our readers, interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried weeks before his arrest, and catalogued SBF’s downfall. Will started his journalism career as a music critic and has been on staff at CoinDesk, Billboard, and SPIN.

The clarity, humor, and sharpness of Will’s writing make him a perfect fit for his new role as a Daily writer, where he will work alongside the indispensable David A. Graham to guide our newsletter readers through the biggest ideas and news of the day. David has deftly shouldered the Daily since taking over from the similarly indispensable Tom Nichols in February, and we’re very excited about what David, Will, and the rest of the newsletter team will now be able to achieve together.

Recently announced editorial hires at The Atlantic include staff writers Tom Bartlett, Tyler Austin Harper, Anna Holmes, Sally Jenkins, Quinta Jurecic, Idrees Kahloon, Jake Lundberg, Toluse Olorunnipa, Alexandra Petri, Missy Ryan, Vivian Salama, Jamie Thompson, Josh Tyrangiel, and Nancy Youssef; and senior editors Drew Goins, Jenna Johnson, and Dan Zak.

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

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Pandemic revisionism has gone mainstream. More than five years after COVID-19 began spreading in the United States, a new conventional wisdom has taken hold in some quarters: Public-health officials knew or should have known from the start that pandemic restrictions would do more harm than good, forced them on the public anyway, and then doubled down even as the evidence piled up against them. When challenged, these officials stifled dissent in order to create an illusion of consensus around obviously flawed policies. In the end, America’s 2020 pandemic response undermined years of learning in schools, destroyed countless businesses, and led to any number of other harms—all without actually saving any lives in the process.

These sorts of claims were once largely confined to the political right. No longer. Two recent books by respectable left-of-center authors—In Covid’s Wake, by the Princeton political scientists Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, and An Abundance of Caution, by the journalist David Zweig—take up versions of this skeptical narrative, each with their own twists. Both have received rave reviews in publications such as The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, and even the overtly progressive Guardian. The flagship New York Times podcast, The Daily, devoted an episode to an interview with Macedo and Lee. The pair and their work were also featured on PBS NewsHour and CNN.

The books make some valuable points. Some pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long, especially after vaccines became available, and public-health experts did make several costly mistakes. Their mass support for the George Floyd protests, at a moment when they were otherwise warning against any public gatherings, was particularly damaging to their credibility. But the broader revisionist narrative—that the people in charge imposed sweeping restrictions that they knew were pointless—is a dangerous overcorrection. The political right already believes that America’s pandemic response was illegitimate and is using that as a pretext for waging war on the country’s public-health apparatus. If the center and left succumb to the nihilism that runs through both of these books, no one will remain to defend sensible public-health measures the next time a pandemic comes around.

For the revisionists, the tragedy of America’s pandemic response goes back to the very beginning. According to Macedo and Lee, the “dominant view” within public health prior to 2020 was that so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs)—such as school and office closures, stay-at-home orders, mass testing, and mask mandates—would be ineffective at containing a respiratory virus, but would cause widespread social and economic damage. “Mere months before Covid lockdowns, leading health agencies around the world recommended against the very policies that were widely embraced early in the Covid pandemic,” they write. Once the virus began spreading, however, public-health establishments around the world, enamored of China’s draconian efforts to suppress the outbreak, threw out decades of evidence and embraced society-wide lockdowns. (Right-wing COVID revisionists typically go even further, arguing that public-health officials endorsed lockdowns out of a cynical desire for power.)

[Jonathan Chait: Why the COVID reckoning is so one-sided]

As evidence that NPIs were pointless, Macedo and Lee point to Sweden, which refused to mandate masks or close schools, offices, and other public spaces. At first, the country was ridiculed and made into a global pariah for pursuing this strategy. But by the end of 2022, Sweden had one of the lowest rates of excess mortality in all of Europe. “Contrary to what was asserted by various experts in 2020, attempting to suppress and contain the Covid-19 virus was never the only option,” Macedo and Lee conclude.

Almost everything about this narrative is flawed, beginning with its characterization of the pre-pandemic consensus. Macedo and Lee’s account relies heavily on a September 2019 report from the World Health Organization. When I read the report for myself, I was surprised to find that, far from saying NPIs are useless, it actually recommends several, including face masks, school and workplace closures, and travel restrictions, depending on the severity of the outbreak. (The report does recommend against three specific policies—quarantines, border closures, and contact tracing—on the grounds that they are extremely onerous and lack concrete evidence of effectiveness.) Although the authors of the report acknowledge that NPIs can be “highly disruptive,” they arrive at the exact opposite conclusion as Macedo and Lee do. “The most effective strategy to mitigate the impact of a pandemic,” the report says, “is to reduce contacts between infected and uninfected persons, thereby reducing the spread of infection, the peak demand for hospital beds, and the total number of infections, hospitalizations and deaths.” The CDC’s 2017 pandemic-preparedness plan came to similar conclusions.

When I brought up these points to Macedo and Lee, Lee acknowledged that there “was definitely debate in the field at the time” but insisted that “strong proponents of NPIs were a minority perspective,” citing a 2019 report published by Johns Hopkins University and a 2006 study by four epidemiologists. Those documents are indeed more equivocal about NPIs, but even they are far from being opposed to the use of them. The 2019 report, for instance, states that “a multitude of factors will likely determine how effective NPIs will be, such as the size and geographical range of the outbreak, the specific pathogen, the timing of the outbreak, and the country of occurrence,” and includes several recommendations for how to implement certain measures most effectively.

Nor is Sweden the promising counterexample that Macedo and Lee (and many other COVID revisionists) make it out to be. Sweden finished 2020 with an excess mortality rate that was five times that of Finland and 12 times that of Norway. The Swedish government’s own postmortem report on its pandemic response concluded that “earlier and more extensive pandemic action should have been taken, particularly during the first wave.”

Sweden’s pandemic performance did eventually surpass those of most other European countries—but this was only after it embarked on one of Europe’s most successful vaccine rollouts in spring 2021. (By contrast, several of its neighbors, such as Finland, botched their vaccination efforts.) In other words, Sweden appears to have ended up with a relatively low death rate despite its lack of restrictions, not because of them. It probably could have saved even more lives by adopting NPIs earlier in the pandemic. “People love to cite Sweden as a success story of the hands-off approach,” Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told me. “But if anything, it shows the exact opposite.”

The COVID revisionists are on much stronger ground when they claim that the U.S. kept certain pandemic restrictions, above all school closures, in place for too long. Schools are the focus of Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution. As he documents at length—and argued persuasively at the time—the risk of severe illness among children was low, and schools themselves do not appear to have been a major source of transmission to the broader community. Yet 74 of the 100 largest school districts in the U.S. began the fall 2020 semester with remote-only instruction, and only 40 percent of schools nationwide offered the option of full-time in-person education. This was a genuine failure. Children who were kept out of school longer experienced much higher rates of learning loss and worse mental-health outcomes. Learning loss was especially severe for poor and minority children.

Where the revisionists go too far, however, is in their explanation of why schools remained closed for so long. In Zweig’s telling, public-health experts, the media, and teachers’ unions constituted a “laptop class” of liberal elites who indulged in pandemic groupthink. It was clear by summer 2020, he argues, that schools could safely be reopened, because several European countries had already done so. But the overwhelmingly liberal public-health establishment continued to sow fear about in-person learning—in part because Donald Trump was in favor of it—and their credulous allies in the media disseminated the message.

“Acting in concert—as a tribe, if you will—and aided by social media, these powerful factions exerted considerable control over school policy and the public narrative around it,” Zweig writes. This climate of fear led teachers’ unions to rebel against the prospect of reopening, at the expense of both children and parents, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. “No other group of essential professionals en masse fought—and succeeded—to not have to show up for work,” he writes of teachers.

[David Zweig: The disaster of school closures should have been foreseen]

Zweig has a point, but he leaves out some important parts of the story. First, elite opinion on school reopenings was much more divided than he lets on. Throughout 2020, the question was the subject of extensive public debate. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine came out in favor of reopening in July of that year. Prominent public-health experts argued for reopenings in publications including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Second, perhaps even more important, a crucial reason that teachers’ unions were able to resist reopening is that they faced relatively little public backlash. Why? Because much of the opposition to school openings came from parents, who were terrified of COVID and didn’t want to put their children, or themselves, in harm’s way. When I put that to Zweig, he countered that parents supported remote learning only because they had been misled by the so-called experts. “Whether or not those people are fearful has to do with—and I know this is a loaded term but I’m using it purposefully—misinformation by the public-health establishment and the media,” he said.

No doubt media coverage influenced parental attitudes. But if that were the entire story, opposition to in-person schooling would presumably have been concentrated among wealthy, white, highly educated households—Zweig’s laptop class—who on average pay the most attention to the news and expert opinion. In fact, the opposite was true. Support for remote learning was most pronounced among Black, Hispanic, and low-income parents. One nationally representative survey by the University of Southern California found that a majority of low-income families believed schools should remain closed for the 2020–21 school year, compared with only 27 percent of the wealthiest families. Other polls found similar results. What Zweig attributes to media indoctrination is more adequately explained by real-world experience: Poor and minority families were far likelier than wealthy white households to have lost loved ones to the pandemic and to have health conditions putting them at higher risk. They had perfectly good reasons to be afraid, regardless of what The New York Times was saying.

Macedo and Lee extend the blame-the-elites style of argument beyond school closures, arguing that other pandemic restrictions remained in place for far too long because the public-health establishment elevated ideology over science. “One of our central issues is that debate became unwelcome beginning in April 2020,” Macedo told me. He and Lee dedicate a chapter to the debate over the Great Barrington Declaration: a one-page document written by three lockdown-skeptical scientists in October 2020 that called for most people to “resume life as normal” while governments deployed a strategy of “focused protection” concentrated on the most vulnerable individuals, namely the elderly.

This proposal, Macedo and Lee write, was an “earnest appeal by serious scholars” that “deserved a respectful hearing” but instead became the victim of a vicious, coordinated assault by the public-health establishment. They point to a private-email chain in which Dr. Francis Collins, then the director of the National Institutes of Health, called for a “quick and devastating takedown of its premises,” and a counter-memorandum signed by 7,000 public-health experts that argued that the herd-immunity approach was based on “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by scientific evidence.” Macedo and Lee write, “The reaction to the Great Barrington Declaration represented one of the key episodes in the moralization of dissent during the Covid crisis.”

Let’s start with the merits of the proposal itself. The idea of “focused protection” sounds great in theory, but would have been almost impossible to implement in practice. In 2020, about 90 million people in America were either older than 65 or had a preexisting condition that made them vulnerable to the coronavirus. The notion that we could have isolated close to a third of the country’s residents while allowing the virus to spread unimpeded through the rest of the population was a fantasy. “In basically every country that tried something like this, we saw infections spill over to the vulnerable,” Adam Kucharski, an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told me. (When I put that critique to Macedo and Lee, Lee said, “The idea that focused protection would be more difficult than to protect everyone is hard to wrap my mind around.”)

On top of that, in October 2020, the world was a few months away from having highly effective vaccines. “Why needlessly risk the lives of so many people when vaccines were right around the corner?” Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, asked me. Osterholm had been an early lockdown skeptic—Macedo and Lee cite him approvingly at several points—but the imminent possibility of vaccination had made him change his tune. “This was the moment when it made the least sense to take away NPIs,” he said.

Although Collins regrets using the intemperate phrase quick and devastating takedown in that email exchange, he is adamant that public-health officials made the right call in coming out forcefully against the Great Barrington Declaration. “If this proposal had been implemented, it would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people,” Collins told me. “There was no way we could just sit around silently and let that happen.”

They didn’t sit around; nor did they silence the Great Barrington Declaration or try to banish its authors to the scientific wilderness, as Macedo and Lee suggest. Yes, the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration came in for some personal abuse, usually by individual epidemiologists on social media. The official response, however, came in the form of a carefully argued article published in an academic journal that responded to the proposal’s central claims, offering loads of counterarguments backed by scientific studies. What Macedo and Lee characterize as a subversion of public debate looks more like an example of the marketplace of ideas in action.

At times, the revisionist narrative seems to exist in an alternate history in which the United States implemented a heavy-handed, centralized response to the pandemic. In reality, Donald Trump, who was president in 2020 (many COVID revisionists somehow overlook this), spent most of that year downplaying the severity of the pandemic, undermining public-health messaging, and refusing to implement or support the policies that public-health experts, doctors, and much of the country were begging for. The result was a shambolic and porous state-by-state patchwork rather than a unified national strategy to deploy the full resources of the federal government.

Macedo and Lee nonetheless look back at that time and conclude that the U.S. did too much, not too little. In their view, there is no evidence that any of the various measures employed to control the virus, other than vaccines, saved any lives. They cite multiple analyses, including their own, that find no difference in pre-vaccination COVID mortality rates between blue states, which had tighter and longer-lasting restrictions, and red states, which had looser restrictions and ended them earlier. Although Macedo and Lee are careful not to explicitly conclude from these analyses that “nothing worked,” it is hard to come away from their discussion of the evidence with any other view. “We have to be honest with ourselves,” Lee told me. “There are a lot of medical interventions that we think will be successful and then they don’t work. Sometimes the evidence doesn’t bear out what you expect to see.”

[David Frum: Why the COVID deniers won]

But the analyses that Macedo and Lee rely on fail to account for differences in the timing of when different states experienced their highest COVID death counts. Several blue states, including New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts, were hit hard early, and the virus spread before they could implement much of an organized response. By one calculation, the Northeast experienced 56 percent of all U.S. COVID deaths from February through May 2020 despite containing just 17 percent of the country’s population; the South, meanwhile, experienced just 17 percent of deaths. In the subsequent months, that dynamic reversed: Northeastern states saw their death rates plummet, while southern states saw their death rates spike. Blue states got hit earlier and harder, but once the pandemic went national, they performed much better.

In our conversation, Macedo and Lee countered by pointing to examples of states that experienced the pandemic at similar times and had similar 2020 age-adjusted mortality rates, despite the fact that some (such as California) kept restrictions in place longer than others (such as Florida). But these cases run into a further complication: Although state-level analyses find no pre-vaccine difference in COVID deaths, they do estimate that the most restrictive states experienced about 30 percent fewer infections than the least restrictive ones, which is the precise outcome that NPIs are supposed to achieve. That is why Thomas Bollyky, the lead author of one of the state-level studies that Macedo and Lee cite, told me that he was shocked to hear his work being used to shed doubt on the effectiveness of NPIs. “I feel like I’m having an Annie Hall–type moment,” Bollyky told me. “These interventions were designed to reduce infections, and that’s exactly what they did.”

Why didn’t they show an obvious impact on mortality, then? One possibility, Bollyky said, is that a long list of intermediating factors—including age, preexisting conditions, and health-care access—determine whether an infected person will die from COVID. These might be impossible to fully control for in state-by-state comparisons. Another is that the elderly, who were most at risk of dying from infection, were likely to voluntarily adhere to social-distancing policies even when official mandates went away. For example, although Florida was one of the first states to entirely lift restrictions, Bollyky and colleagues found that Florida residents, who are disproportionately elderly, stayed home and wore masks at higher rates than people in most other states. Lockdown policies might have been so effective at changing behavior that people kept following restrictions even after they were lifted, creating the false impression that policy didn’t matter in the first place. (There were also plenty of Californians who disobeyed the orders that remained in place in their state, making those policies seem less effective.)

Whether restrictions prevented the spread of COVID is a different question from whether they were worth the cost. Macedo, Lee, and Zweig are right that America’s pandemic response was marked by a failure to properly weigh trade-offs. As they document at length, public-health officials often framed saving lives from the virus as the only legitimate objective of public policy, without considering the potential damage that would stem from the pursuit of that goal. Most public-health experts now seem to share that assessment. In July 2023, for instance, Collins expressed regret for what he called “a public-health mindset” in which officials “attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life” and “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recovered.”

The COVID revisionists are right to criticize this tendency, but at times they fall victim to a mirror image of the same mindset: Lockdowns were all costs, no benefits, and thus should have been discarded. “There is just no evidence that any of these measures actually prevented death,” Lee told me. “So we have to ask ourselves: Should we really take the kinds of actions where the benefits are uncertain but we know the costs will be severe?” Zweig is even more direct. “In the end, there was no benefit to keeping schools closed for so-called safety reasons out of ‘an abundance of caution,’” he writes. “And there were no reasonable trade-offs in doing so. There were just harms.”

[From the March 2025 issue: Why the COVID deniers won]

If ignoring the costs of lockdowns led in some cases to an overly restrictive response, ignoring the benefits could lead to an overly loose one. In many ways, we were lucky last time. The next virus—and there will be a next one—could be far deadlier. It could disproportionately target children or be much harder to vaccinate against. If all restrictions are off the table, the scale of the disaster could be unprecedented.

The revisionist narrative also has the potential to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people are convinced that public-health measures don’t work in the first place, they will be less likely to follow them, which, in turn, will render them even less effective. This dynamic could even undermine the one measure that the non-right-wing COVID revisionists generally support: vaccines. After all, if people are convinced that the public-health establishment is full of lying ideologues, why make an exception for vaccines? Unchecked COVID revisionism, in trying to correct the errors of the last pandemic, might leave us even less prepared for the next one.

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