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.

A family vacation can seem like the solution to all of life’s tensions: You’ll spend time together, bond, and experience a new place. But travel isn’t a panacea. As Kim Brooks wrote last year about her own halting attempts at taking a successful trip with her kids: “Gradually, lounging among my own dashed hopes, I began to understand that no family vacation was going to change who I was.” Today’s newsletter explores how family trips have changed, and how to make the most of your time with loved ones without expecting too much.

On Family Vacations

On Failing the Family Vacation

By Kim Brooks

How I got dumped, went on a cruise, and embraced radical self-acceptance

Read the article.

The New Family Vacation

By Michael Waters

More and more Americans are traveling with multiple generations—and, perhaps, learning who their relatives really are.

Read the article.

Plan Ahead. Don’t Post.

By Arthur C. Brooks

And seven other rules for a happy vacation

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Summer vacation is moving indoors: Extreme heat is changing summer for kids as we know it.The rise and fall of the family-vacation road trip: The golden age of family road-tripping was a distinctly American phenomenon.

Other Diversions

How to be more charismatic, but not too much moreWhat becoming a parent really does to your happinessWeird, wonderful photos from the archives

P.S.

Courtesy of Ellen Walker

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. Ellen Walker, 69, shared this photo taken on Loch Linnhe in western Scotland in 2019. “We were visiting friends who live south of Glasgow and with whom we take annual biking trips,” Ellen writes. “It had rained much of the time we were exploring the west coast (as it will do in Scotland!) but I began to see the infinite varieties of grey as spectacularly beautiful. When the sun tried to peek through the clouds I snapped this photo and was so pleased to be able to capture the richness of the scene. It no longer seemed gloomy. I was in awe.”

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

— Isabel

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

The early aughts were the worst possible kind of golden age. Tans were inescapable—on Britney Spears’s midriff, on the flexing biceps outside of Abercrombie & Fitch stores. The Jersey Shore ethos of “gym, tan, laundry” infamously encapsulated an era in which tanning salons were after-school hangouts, and tanning stencils in the shape of the Playboy bunny were considered stylish. Self-tanning lotions, spray tans, and bronzers proliferated, but people still sought the real thing.

By the end of the decade, tanning’s appeal had faded. Americans became more aware of the health risks, and the recession shrank their indoor-tanning budgets. But now America glows once again. The president and many of his acolytes verge on orange, and parties thrown by the MAGA youth are blurs of bronze. Celebrity tans are approaching early-aughts amber, and if dermatologists’ observations and social media are any indication, teens are flocking to the beach in pursuit of scorching burns.

Tanning is back. Only this time, it’s not just about looking good—it’s about embracing an entire ideology.

Another apparent fan of tanning is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., America’s perpetually bronzed health secretary, who was spotted visiting a tanning salon last month. What tanning methods he might employ are unknown, but the secretary’s glow is undeniable. (The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to a request for comment about the administration’s views on tanning or Kennedy’s own habits.)

On its face, the idea that any health secretary would embrace tanning is odd. The Obama administration levied an excise tax on tanning beds and squashed ads that marketed tanning as healthy. The Biden administration, by contrast, made sunscreen use and reducing sun exposure%20support%20patients%20and%20caregivers.) central to its Cancer Moonshot plan. The stated mission of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement is to end chronic diseases, such as cancer, by addressing their root causes. Yet the Trump administration’s MAHA report, released in May, doesn’t once mention skin cancer, which is the most common type as well as the most easily preventable. It mentions the sun only to note its connection with circadian rhythm: “Morning sun synchronizes the body’s internal clock, boosting mood and metabolism.”

In fact, there’s good reason to suspect that Kennedy and others in his orbit will encourage Americans to get even more sun. Last October, in a post on X, Kennedy warned that the FDA’s “aggressive suppression” of sunlight, among other supposedly healthy interventions, was “about to end.” Casey Means, a doctor and wellness influencer whom President Donald Trump has nominated for surgeon general, is also a sun apologist. In her best-selling book, Good Energy (which she published with her brother, Calley Means, an adviser to Kennedy), she argues that America’s many ailments are symptoms of a “larger spiritual crisis” caused by separation from basic biological needs, including sunlight. “Shockingly, we rarely ever hear about how getting direct sunlight into our eyes at the right times is profoundly important for metabolic and overall health,” she writes. An earlier version of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill tried to repeal the excise tax on tanning beds. (The provision was cut in the final version.)

The alternative-health circles that tend to attract the MAHA crowd are likewise skeptical of sun avoidance. “They don’t want you to know this. But your body was made for the sun,” says a “somatic energy healer” with 600,000 followers who promotes staring directly into the sun to boost mood and regulate the body’s circadian rhythm. (Please, don’t do this.) On social media, some influencers tout the sun’s supposedly uncelebrated power to increase serotonin and vitamin D, the latter of which some erroneously view as a cure-all. Some promote tanning-bed use as a way to relieve stress; others, such as the alternative-health influencer Carnivore Aurelius, promote genital tanning to boost testosterone. Another popular conspiracy theory is that sunscreen causes cancer and is promoted by Big Pharma to keep people sick; a 2024 survey found that 14 percent of young adults think using sunscreen every day is worse for the skin than going without it.

These claims range from partly true to patently false. The sun can boost serotonin and vitamin D, plus regulate circadian rhythm—but these facts have long been a part of public-health messaging, and there’s no evidence that these benefits require eschewing sunscreen or staring directly at our star. Tanning beds emit little of the UVB necessary to produce vitamin D. Some research suggests that the chemicals in sunscreen can enter the bloodstream, but only if it’s applied to most of the body multiple times a day; plus, the effects of those chemicals in the body haven’t been established to be harmful, whereas skin cancer has. And, if I really have to say it: No solid research supports testicle tanning. Nor does any of this negate the sun’s less salutary effects: premature aging, eye damage, and greatly increased risk of skin cancer, including potentially fatal melanomas.

The specific questions raised in alternative-health spaces matter less than the conspiracist spirit in which they are asked: What haven’t the American people been told about the sun? What lies have we been fed? Their inherent skepticism aligns with Kennedy’s reflexive mistrust of the health establishment. In the MAHA world, milk is better when it’s raw, beef fat is healthier than processed oils, and the immune system is strongest when unvaccinated. This philosophy, however flawed, appeals to the many Americans who feel that they’ve been failed by the institutions meant to protect them. It offers the possibility that regaining one’s health can be as simple as rejecting science and returning to nature. And what is more natural than the sun?

[Read: You’re not allowed to have the best sunscreens in the world]

Now is an apt moment for American politics to become more sun-friendly. Tanning is making a comeback across pop culture, even as “anti-aging” skin care and cosmetic procedures boom. Young people are lying outside when the sun is at its peak—new apps such as Sunglow and Rayz AI Tanning tell them when UV rays are strongest—to achieve social-media-ready tan lines. Last year, Kim Kardashian showed off a tanning bed in her office (in response to backlash, she claimed that it treated her psoriasis). Deep tans are glorified in ads for luxury goods, and makeup is used in fashion shows to mimic painful-looking burns. Off the runway, “sunburned makeup,” inspired by the perpetually red-cheeked pop star Sabrina Carpenter, is trending.

Veena Vanchinathan, a board-certified dermatologist in the Bay Area, told me that she’s noticed more patients seeking out self-tanning products and tanning, whether in beds or outdoors. Angela Lamb, a board-certified dermatologist who practices on New York’s well-to-do Upper West Side, told me her patients are curious about tanning too. “It’s actually quite scary,” she said. A recent survey by the American Academy of Dermatology found that a quarter of Americans, and an even greater proportion of adults ages 18 to 26, are unaware of the risks of tanning, and many believe in tanning myths, such as the idea that a base tan protects against a burn, or that tanning with protection is safe. (“There is no such thing as a safe tan,” Deborah S. Sarnoff, the president of the Skin Cancer Foundation, told me.)

Recently, some experts have called for a more moderate approach to sun safety, one that takes into account the benefits of some sun exposure and the harms of too much shade. “I actually think we do ourselves a bit of a disservice and open ourselves up to criticism if the advice of someone for skin-cancer prevention is ‘Don’t go outside,’” Jerod Stapleton, a professor at the University of Kentucky who studies tanning behaviors, told me. But the popular rejection of sun safety goes much further. Advances in skin-cancer treatment, for example, may have lulled some Americans into thinking that melanoma just isn’t that serious, Carolyn Heckman, a medical professor at Rutgers University’s Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, told me. Skin-cancer treatment and mortality rates have indeed improved, but melanomas that metastasize widely are still fatal most of the time.

[From the June 2024 issue: Against sunscreen absolutism]

In previous decades, tans were popular because they conveyed youth, vitality, and wealth. They still do. (At least among the fairer-skinned; their connotations among people of color can be less positive.) But the difference now is that tanning persists in spite of the known consequences. Lamb likened tanning to smoking: At this point, most people who take it up are actively looking past the well-established risks. (Indeed, smoking is also making a pop-culture comeback.) A tan has become a symbol of defiance—of health guidance, of the scientific establishment, of aging itself.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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, Congress passed Donald Trump’s request to claw back $9 billion in approved federal spending, including funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined last night to discuss the president’s rescissions request—and what its approval may signal about future appropriations.

“What I think will be remembered of this vote is it was a test case in whether” Republicans in Congress “could change the way the government appropriates money,” Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, said last night.

Historically, Scherer explained, even when one party controls both chambers of Congress, 60 votes are still required to pass a budget through the Senate. “That means you need a bipartisan process,” he continued. But this differs from a rescissions request, which can pass with only 51 votes. The Trump administration’s goal, Scherer argued, is to break away from a bipartisan budgeting process “by making it a purely partisan” one. This, Scherer said, could “change dramatically the whole way the federal government’s been budgeted for years.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, Meridith McGraw, a White House reporter at The Wall Street Journal; and Michael Scherer, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the studies that made me smile, think, and despair for humanity this week.

First up, it’s officially a hot Jurassic summer with the recent release of yet another Mesozoic movie filled with de-extincted animals that are oddly preoccupied with human flesh. We’ll lead with a story about a fantastic Jurassic predator that didn’t make the cut for Jurassic World: Rebirth, but will eternally star in your nightmares hereafter.

Then: a whole new world, the horrific consequences of Medicaid cuts, and the cosmologies of ancient graveyards.

The case of the cursed ichthyosaur

Lindgren, Johan et al. “Adaptations for stealth in the wing-like flippers of a large ichthyosaur.” Nature.

Jaws, a summer blockbuster about how a rampaging shark can expose paradigms of masculinity, turned 50 years old last month. But if you want to meet a truly O.G. stealth ocean predator, you'll need to wind the clock back another 181 million years, according to a new study about Temnodontosaurus, a Jurassic predator that belongs to the extinct ichthyosaur family.

Scientists have discovered an exquisitely preserved front fin from this giant hunter, which grew to lengths of more than 30 feet. Unearthed in Germany, the fin includes a “wing-like” shape with “a serrated trailing edge” that probably evolved to reduce the sound it makes while sneaking up on its prey, according to researchers led by Johan Lindgren of Lund University.

183-million-year-old soft-tissue fossil (SSN8DOR11; Paläontologisches Museum Nierstein, Nierstein, Germany). Image: Randolph G. De La Garza, Martin Jarenmark and Johan Lindgren.

“The notably wing-like fin sheds light on the unique hunting strategy” of Temnodontosaurus, “revealing secondary control structures that probably served to minimize self-generated noise during foraging activities in low-light habitats—in effect, a novel form of stealth (silent swimming) in an ancient marine reptile,” the team said in the new study.

In other words, this animal had a silencer built into its fin, all the better to ambush fish, squid, reptiles, and other aquatic Jurassic delicacies. But wait—it gets creepier. Temnodontosaurus is most famous for its absolutely enormous eyeballs, with sockets that measured some 10 inches in diameter, potentially making them the biggest eyes of any animal that ever lived.

“A conspicuous feature of Temnodontosaurus is its huge eyeballs; these are the largest of any vertebrate known, rivaling those of the giant and colossal squid (of the genera Architeuthis and Mesocychoteuthis) in absolute size,” Lindgren and his colleagues said. “There is broad consensus that the eyes conferred advantages at low light levels, and thus were well suited either for nocturnal life or deep diving habits.”

Temnodontosaurus, staring at you from beyond the grave. Image: Ghedo, taken at the Paris Museum of Natural History

In Jaws, the shark hunter Quint, played by Robert Shaw, seems especially haunted by the eyes of sharks, describing them as “lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes” in his chilling firsthand account of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis.

But hey, I’ll take the doll’s eyes of a great white over the freakish monster gaze of Temnodontosaurus any day of the week (or geological epoch). What a relief that none of us will ever encounter this nighttime predator with its bus-length body, acoustic invisibility cloak, and pizza-pan peepers.

In other news…

New sednoid just dropped

Chen, Ying-Tung et al. “Discovery and dynamics of a Sedna-like object with a perihelion of 66 au.” Nature Astronomy.

Scientists have discovered a new world in the solar system: the trans-Neptunian object (TNO) 2023 KQ14, nicknamed Ammonite. The object is estimated to be about a hundred miles across and has an extreme orbit that takes it as far as 252 times the orbit of Earth. It belongs to a family of distant worlds called “sednoids” after the dwarf planet Sedna.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z561PGgTe8I

“The discovery of ‘Ammonite’...offers a valuable opportunity to evaluate current models of outer Solar System formation and evolution,” said researchers led by Ying-Tung Chen of Academia Sinica in Taipei. “These findings highlight the diversity of orbital properties and dynamical behaviours among distant Solar System objects.”

As an interesting twist, this new world may be a strike against the idea that a giant hypothetical planet, popularly known as Planet Nine, is lurking in the outer reaches of the solar system. Its orbit doesn’t seem to line up with that theory. Time will probably tell, because Planet Nine—if it does exist—is running out of places to hide.

Medicaid cuts could cause thousands of excess deaths by 2034

Basu, Sanjay et al. “Projected Health System and Economic Impacts of 2025 Medicaid Policy Proposals.” JAMA Health Forum.

There has been a lot of speculation about the extreme Medicaid cuts in the recently passed Big Beautiful Bill, but a new report summarizes the predicted effects with devastating brevity.

“CBO projections suggest 7.6 million individuals in the US would become uninsured by 2034 due to Medicaid policy changes” resulting in an annual increase of “approximately 1,484 excess deaths, 94,802 preventable hospitalizations” and “1.6 million people delaying care due to cost,” said researchers led by Sanjay Basu of the University of California, San Francisco.

This is a conservative estimate: In the higher-impact scenario where more than 14 million people lose Medicaid by 2034, annual impacts “are estimated be substantially greater: 2,284 excess deaths, 145,946 preventable hospitalizations [and] 2.5 million people delaying care,” according to the study.

This analysis doesn’t include the cutting of subsidies to the Affordable Care Act Marketplace plans or possible changes to Medicare, which will compound these negative effects. At the risk of sounding glib…seems bad!

Eternal sunsets for the Yangshao dead

Chen, Yuqing. “Cosmology in the Orientation of Neolithic Burials in Central China: The Xipo and Qingliangsi Cemeteries.” Journal of World Prehistory.

You can tell a lot about a culture from the way it treats its living (see above) but also from the way it treats its dead.

With that in mind, Yuqing Chen of Durham University set out to better understand the Yangshao culture (仰韶) of central China, which spanned 4700–2800 BCE, by cataloging the orientations of graves of people buried at the Xipo and Qingliangsi burial grounds.

This work is overflowing with cool insights, from the careful placement of goods inside graves, like cooking pots and ovens, to reconstructions of the Neolithic sky, to an explanation of the Gaitian model of the universe in which “the sky was perceived as a lid parallel to the Earth, and the celestial bodies, such as the Sun, were thought to move within the lid,” according to the study.

A diagram of the Gaitian model. Image: Wu, 2020

Ultimately, Chen concluded that the predominately westward orientations of the Neolithic graves did not necessarily reflect “the importance of particular astronomical phenomena known to have been important in later times (e.g. the Milky Way or the star Antares), but rather the direction in which sunsets are most commonly seen throughout the year.”

“It is suggested that in the cosmology of the Late Neolithic period, the Sun was perceived to play a key role throughout the year in the worlds of the living and the dead, by maintaining the harmony of sky, Earth and human,” she said.

May we all aspire to maintain some harmony between, sky, Earth, and humanity this weekend, and beyond. Thanks for reading! See you next week.

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

In a court document filed earlier this month, the Internal Revenue Service quietly revealed a significant break with long-standing practice: Churches will no longer risk their nonprofit status if clergy endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The change stemmed from a lawsuit brought against the agency by evangelical groups that argued that the prior ban on church involvement in political campaigns infringed upon their First Amendment rights. Their victory, though, may turn out to be a Faustian bargain: Churches can now openly involve themselves in elections, but in doing so, they risk becoming de facto political organizations. What may appear to be a triumph over liberalism could in fact be a loss, the supersession of heavenly concerns by earthly ones.

Churches have long been divided over the proper role for religion in American politics. One approach has been to militate against the separation of church and state, insofar as that distinction limits what churches can do to exercise power in society. The IRS change, along with several others by the Trump administration, will soften that barrier, allowing churches to take on a much more pronounced role in electoral politics. Another approach has been to operate within the confines of that separation—which has produced some very noble results: a norm of discouraging churches from turning into mere organs of political parties, and an emphasis on forming the conscience of believers rather than providing direct instructions about political participation.

A conservative 30 years ago might have preferred that latter approach, or at least said so. Back then, members of the right complained that Black churches frequently gave political endorsements or raised funds for electoral campaigns, and that the IRS neglected to enforce its now-eliminated ban, known as the Johnson Amendment. Yet by 2016, that dynamic had reversed, leading Donald Trump, then still a presidential candidate, to court the coveted right-wing evangelical vote by vowing to destroy the amendment once in office. A number of religious leaders took the implications of that promise and ran with them—an investigation by The Texas Tribune and ProPublica published in 2022 found that plenty of evangelical churches were offering endorsement despite the rule. The hope in paring down the Johnson Amendment is apparently that church endorsements will influence the outcome of elections in the right’s favor.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: Progressive Christianity’s bleak future]

But there’s little reason to believe that church endorsements will do much in the way of persuasion. American churches have already undergone so much liberal attrition that, in practice, many right-wing evangelical pastors will be instructing their congregations to vote for candidates most members already intend to vote for. To the degree that broadly conservative churches retain some liberal members, endorsing right-wing candidates seems like just the thing to alienate them, which is a loss for those congregations as well as for the faith as a whole. Church intervention in particular electoral races is an efficient polarization machine.

For that and other reasons, this policy shift doesn’t really offer any benefits to Christians quaChristians. Providing political endorsements makes churches susceptible to powerful campaign tactics: PACs, for example, will have incentives to fund churches that reflect their agendas, meaning that pastors’ livelihoods could come to depend on contorting their religious beliefs to suit political interests. Politically active congregants will also have good reason to lobby their pastors for certain endorsements, another source of pressure for church leaders to say that supporting a particular candidate is the will of God. And the practice of offering endorsements prioritizes accepting specific instructions from church leaders over cultivating Christian values and methods of reasoning that allow the faithful to determine which candidates to support for themselves. (Indeed, the Christian religion itself seeks to cultivate those very things for that very reason, rather than providing an itemized list of every behavior to perform and every behavior to avoid.) This is apparently why the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a statement that Catholic clergy will still decline to make political endorsements. “The Church seeks to help Catholics form their conscience in the Gospel,” the release read, “so they might discern which candidates and policies would advance the common good.”

That is a much more logical way for church leaders to proceed. Dictating which candidates to vote for is at once presumptuous, assuming much more about God’s judgment than can rightly be accounted for, and also nihilistic, assuming that churchgoers are so ill-formed in their faith that they can’t be trusted to figure out the right answers to these earthly, prudential questions. Granting the imprimatur of the faith to ordinary charlatans—the most common breed of politician—is ill-begotten, and borders on sacrilegious.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Shoplifters gone wild]

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

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

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.

It dismissed every option. Any decision would ultimately come from Bondi and Trump together—or from Trump alone—and for days, the president was adamant about doing nothing.

Trump was annoyed by the constant questions from reporters—had Bondi told him that his name, in fact, was in the Epstein files? (“No,” came his response)—and frustrated by his inability to redirect the nation’s attention to what he views as his successes, four White House officials and a close outside adviser told us. But more than that, Trump felt deeply betrayed by his MAGA supporters, who had believed him when he’d intimated that something was nefarious about how the Epstein case has been handled, and who now refused to believe him when he said their suspicions were actually baseless.

[Jonathan Chait: Why Trump can’t make the Epstein story go away]

He—the president, their leader, the martyr who had endured scandals and prosecution and an assassin’s bullet on their behalf—had repeatedly told them it was time to move on, and that alone should suffice. Why, he groused, would the White House add fuel to the fire, would it play into the media’s narrative?

In particular, Trump has raged against MAGA influencers who, in his estimation, have profited and grown famous off their association with him and his political movement, according to one of the officials and the outside adviser, who is in regular touch with the West Wing. They and others we spoke with did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to anger Trump by talking about a subject that has become especially sensitive. Trump told the outside adviser that the “disloyal” influencers “have forgotten whose name is above the door.”

“These people cash their paychecks and get their clicks all thanks to him,” the adviser told us. “The president has bigger fish to fry, and he’s said what he wants: Move on. People need to open their ears and listen to him.”

But Trump’s haphazard efforts at containment—specifically, his effort to simply bulldoze through this very real scandal—came to an end last night, when The Wall Street Journal published an explosive story about a bawdy 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein, which alluded to a shared “secret” and was framed by a drawing of a naked woman’s outline. (Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, and has threatened to sue the paper.) Shortly after the article posted online, Trump wrote on Truth Social that because of “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” he has asked Bondi to produce all relevant grand-jury testimony related to the Epstein case. Bondi immediately responded, writing, “President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”

The Journal story underscored, yet again, the part of the Epstein saga that Trump and his allies most wish would go away: that Trump was one of Epstein’s many famous pals and had a long—and public—friendship with the hard-partying, sex-obsessed financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to two prostitution-related crimes and became a registered sex offender. Chummy photos of the two men, including at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club, abound; from 1993 to 1997, Trump flew on Epstein’s private jets seven times, according to flight logs that emerged at an Epstein-related trial; in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he’d known Epstein for 15 years and praised him as a “terrific guy.”

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump enthused to the magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The two reportedly had a falling-out in 2004 when Epstein bought an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that Trump wanted.

On Wednesday—after the White House had been alerted that the Journal was working on a big story, but at a moment when it still thought it might be able to kill it—Trump took to social media to blast as “past supporters” Republicans still discussing the Epstein matter. He also tore into them during an Oval Office appearance with the crown prince of Bahrain. The president declared that “some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans” had fallen for a hoax that he said had been created by the Democrats. The president also privately fumed at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for “transparency”—and for Trump’s Justice Department to release more files related to the Epstein case—while White House aides wondered if the apparent split could lead to further Republican defiance on other issues.

[Helen Lewis: ‘Just asking questions’ got no answers about Epstein]

Still, before the Journal story changed the stakes yet again, Trump did not have plans to make additional calls to MAGA media allies or Republican lawmakers, one of the officials told us; instead, the president believed that his public comments and Truth Social posts were sufficient. (Despite his ire, he did not, for instance, reach out to Johnson or his team.)

“He’s being tested and doesn’t like it,” the official told us. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”

Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once observed, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” And although the country does sometimes accept politicians who campaign in poetry and govern in prose, it is less willing to countenance those who campaign in conspiracy theory and then govern in a nothing-to-see-here-folks reality.

Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court in 2008 and was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He received a generous (and controversial) plea deal and served a short prison sentence before being released. He was arrested again in August 2019 and accused of sex-trafficking minors, leading some to wonder who else in Epstein’s powerful orbit might have been involved and also face charges. He died a month later. Getting to the bottom of the details surrounding Epstein’s death in jail while awaiting trial—which has been ruled a suicide—and releasing additional information about Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women, and whether other well-known figures were involved, was never a top Trump-campaign promise. Trump answered when asked, but it was not a mainstay of his stump speech, something he regularly read from the teleprompter or riffed about at rallies.

Nevertheless, when Trump retook office, his supporters were eager for a big reveal. The wave began to crest when Bondi, asked in a February Fox News interview if she would release a list of Epstein’s clients, replied, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Less than a week later, she did herself no favors when, with much fanfare, she invited MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what she claimed were binders full of the declassified Epstein files, only for the beaming, gleeful sleuths to realize that the most scandalous thing about the binders was just how little information they contained. But a two-page memo that the Department of Justice released last Monday—which, in bureaucratese, offered a version of Trump’s current time-to-move-on mantra—is what finally sent the MAGA wave crashing down on Bondi and the president.

Laura Loomer, a Trump ally and far-right provocateur who called for Bondi to be fired over the memo, told us on Wednesday that she is sensitive to the challenges of separating fact from fiction—but that although not everyone in Epstein’s orbit is inherently guilty, those who are guilty should be revealed. “They’re trying to say there’s no list,” she said. “There’s a difference between people who were caught on video engaged in foul pornography and people who were caught in Jeffery Epstein’s contact list.” Demonizing everyone in Epstein’s purported black book would be like tying her to the misdeeds of everyone saved in her cellphone—“I have 7,000 contacts,” she said—“but they should release the names of the people involved in the child pornography.” Although Loomer and others have raised questions about video recordings of child sexual abuse collected by investigators, Bondi has said that Epstein downloaded those videos and that they were not records of crimes committed by him or his friends.

Loomer has also publicly called for a special counsel to investigate the Epstein case and release the files. In our conversation, she reiterated that appeal and suggested that having “Pam Blondi”—her derisive nickname for the flaxen-haired attorney general—“apologize for either deliberately lying or overexaggerating” her claim that the key files sitting on her desk in February would help to mitigate the base’s angst. Still, Loomer acknowledged, a Bondi apology would at this point be but “one step.” “Obviously, now this has taken on a life of its own,” she observed.

The Epstein news cycle has also distracted from the accomplishments Trump hopes to showcase—his trade deals, the massive legislative package he just muscled through—and has embroiled his West Wing in a familiar cycle of drama. As the MAGA movement turned not just on Bondi but also on FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, over their handling of the Epstein files, tensions among the three became public. Bongino and Patel seemed to blame Bondi for their reputational hit, and last Friday, Axios reported that Bongino had simply refused to show up for work. Trump was upset with Bongino and Patel, and Vice President J. D. Vance was dispatched as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker. (A White House official told us that the president has no plans to fire Bondi, Bongino, or Patel, but noted pointedly that Trump is very supportive of Bondi, and merely supportive of the other two.)

What additional information could, and should, be revealed remains genuinely unclear. Questions worthy of further scrutiny were raised by Wired’s recent reporting on the footage that the Justice Department released from the lone security camera near Epstein’s jail cell the night before he was found dead; the video’s metadata were shown to have likely been modified, and nearly three full minutes were cut out. But it is also possible that Epstein kept no written log of his crimes, and that whatever has not yet been released is simply to protect Epstein’s victims. (There is also, of course, the competing theory that information is being withheld to protect Trump, or others close to him.)

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

The White House official told us that the Justice Department did a thorough investigation and that much of what remains unreleased falls into one of these categories: documents that are sealed by courts (though Trump and Bondi’s Thursday appeal may change that); child pornography; and material that could expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.

This, perhaps, has been the most confusing and upsetting part for Trump: his inability to manage his uber-loyallists and regular allies. In June, during an unrelated fight with Elon Musk—Trump’s on-again, off-again benefactor and buddy—Elon posted on X, “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” He later deleted the post, but more recently, as the Epstein controversies resurfaced, he again posted an appeal for further disclosure. “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” Musk wrote.

In the run-up to the Journal story, Trump personally appealed to Rupert Murdoch, his longtime friend and the paper’s owner, not to run the article he also appealed to Emma Tucker, the editor of the paper whose editorial page has long been conservative and generally friendly to Trump (except on the matter of his tariff policy). But again, the limits of his power over normal allies became evident; the president was unsuccessful, and the story ran. But even if he lost the skirmish with the Journal, he may have at least briefly regained his purchase in the broader battle.

This morning, Trump posted a long, angry screed attacking the paper and promising to sue the Journal, its parent corporation, and Murdoch himself. His base likely still has questions surrounding Epstein, but for now, at least, Trump has redirected them back to the more familiar and comfortable territory of fighting with the media.

“This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!” his post concluded, not accidentally.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Mark Zuckerberg was supposed to win the AI race. Eons before ChatGPT and AlphaGo, when OpenAI did not exist and Google had not yet purchased DeepMind, there was FAIR: Facebook AI Research. In 2013, Facebook tapped one of the “godfathers” of AI, the legendary computer scientist Yann LeCun, to lead its new division. That year, Zuckerberg personally traveled to one of the world’s most prestigious AI conferences to announce FAIR and recruit top scientists to the lab.

FAIR has since made a number of significant contributions to AI research, including in the field of computer vision. Although the division was not focused on advancing Facebook’s social-networking products per se, the premise seemed to be that new AI tools could eventually support the company’s core businesses, perhaps by improving content moderation or image captioning. But for years, Facebook didn’t develop AI as a stand-alone, consumer-facing product. Now, in the era of ChatGPT, the company lags behind.

Facebook, now called Meta, trails not just OpenAI and Google but also newer firms such as Anthropic, xAI, and DeepSeek—all of which have launched advanced generative-AI models and chatbots over the past few years. In response, Zuckerberg’s company quickly launched its own flagship model, Llama, but it has struggled relative to its competitors. In April, Meta proudly rolled out a Llama 4 model that Zuckerberg called a “beast”—but after an experimental version of the model scored second in the world on a widely used benchmarking test, the version released to the public ranked only 32nd. In the past year, every other top AI lab has released new “reasoning” models that, thanks to a new training paradigm, are generally much better than previous chatbots at advanced math and coding problems; Meta has yet to deliver its own.

[Read: Chatbots are cheating on their benchmark tests]

So, a dozen years after building FAIR, Meta is effectively starting over. Last month, Zuckerberg went on a new recruiting spree. He hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old ex-head of the start-up Scale, as chief AI officer to lead yet another division—dubbed Meta Superintelligence Labs, or MSL—and has reportedly been personally asking top AI researchers to join. The goal of this redo, Zuckerberg wrote in an internal memo to employees, is “to build towards our vision: personal superintelligence for everyone.” Meta is reportedly attempting to lure top researchers by offering upwards of $100 million in compensation. (The company has contested this reporting; for comparison, LeBron James was paid less than $50 million last year.) More than a dozen researchers from rival companies, mainly OpenAI, have joined Meta’s new AI lab so far. Zuckerberg also announced that Meta plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build new data centers to support its pursuit of superintelligence. FAIR will still exist but within the new superintelligence team, meaning Meta has both a chief AI “scientist” (LeCun) and a chief AI “officer” (Wang). At the same time, MSL is cloistered off from the rest of Meta in an office space near Zuckerberg himself, according to The New York Times.

When I reached out to Meta to ask about its “superintelligence” overhaul, a spokesperson pointed me to Meta’s most recent earnings call, in which Zuckerberg described “how AI is transforming everything we do” and said that he is “focused on building full general intelligence.” I also asked about comments made by an outgoing AI researcher at Meta: “You’ll be hard pressed to find someone that really believes in our AI mission,” the researcher wrote in an internal memo, reported in The Information, adding that “to most, it’s not even clear what our mission is.” The spokesperson told me, in response to the memo, “We’re excited about our recent changes, new hires in leadership and research, and continued work to create an ideal environment for revolutionary research.”

Meta’s superintelligence group may well succeed. Small, well-funded teams have done so before: After a group of former OpenAI researchers peeled off to form Anthropic a few years ago, they quickly emerged as a top AI lab. Elon Musk’s xAI was even later to the race, but its Grok chatbot is now one of the most technically impressive AI products around (egregious racism and anti-Semitism notwithstanding). And regardless of how far Meta has fallen behind in the AI race, the company has proved its ability to endure: Meta’s stock reached an all-time high earlier this year, and it made more than $17 billion in profit from January through the end of March. Billions of people around the world use its social apps.

The company’s approach is also different from that of its rivals, which frequently describe generative AI in ideological, quasi-religious terms. Executives at OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind are all prone to writing long blog posts or giving long interviews about the future they hope to usher in, and they harbor long-standing philosophical disagreements with one another. Zuckerberg, by comparison, does not appear interested in using AI to transform the world. In his most recent earnings call, he focused on five areas AI is influencing at Meta: advertising, social-media content, online commerce, the Meta AI assistant, and devices, notably smart glasses. The grandest future he described to investors was trapped in today’s digital services and conventions: “We’re all going to have an AI that we talk to throughout the day—while we’re browsing content on our phones, and eventually as we’re going through our days with glasses—and I think this will be one of the most important and valuable services that has ever been created.” Zuckerberg also said that AI-based updates to content recommendations on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads have increased the amount of time that users spend on each platform. In this framework, superintelligence may just be a way to keep people hooked on Meta’s legacy social-media apps and devices.

Initially, it seemed that Meta would take a different path. When the company first entered the generative-AI race, a few months after the launch of ChatGPT, the firm bet big on “open source” AI software, making its Llama model free for nearly anyone to access, modify, and use. Meta touted this strategy as a way to turn its AI models into an industry standard that would enable widespread innovation and eventually improve Meta’s AI offerings. Because open-source software is popular among developers, Zuckerberg claimed, this strategy would help attract top AI talent.

[Read: New Mark Zuckerberg dropped]

Whatever industry standards Zuckerberg was hoping to set, none have come to fruition. In January, the Chinese company DeepSeek released an AI model that was more capable than Llama despite having been developed with far fewer resources. Catching up to OpenAI may now require Meta to leave behind the company’s original, bold, and legitimately distinguishing bet on “open” AI. According to the Times, Meta has internally discussed the possibility of stopping work on its most powerful open-source model (“Behemoth”) in favor of a closed model akin to those from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. In his memo to employees, Zuckerberg said that Meta will continue developing Llama while also exploring “research on our next generation of models to get to the frontier in the next year or so.” The Meta spokesperson pointed me to a 2024 interview in which Zuckerberg explicitly said that although the firm is generally “pro open source,” he is not committed to releasing all future Meta models in this way.

While Zuckerberg figures out the path forward, he will also have to contend with the basic reality that generative AI may alienate some of his users. The company rolled back an early experiment with AI characters after human users found that the bots could easily go off the rails (one such bot, a self-proclaimed “Black queer momma of 2” that talked about cooking fried chicken and celebrating Kwanzaa, tied itself in knots when a Washington Post columnist asked about its programming); the firm’s stand-alone AI app released earlier this year also led many users to unwittingly share ostensibly private conversations to the entire platform. AI-generated media has overwhelmed Facebook and Instagram, turning these platforms into oceans of low-quality, meaningless content known as “AI slop.”

Still, with an estimated 3.4 billion daily users across its platforms, it may be impossible for Meta to fail. Zuckerberg might appear to be burning hundreds of millions of dollars on salaries and much more than that on new hardware, but it’s all part of a playbook that has worked before. When Instagram and WhatsApp emerged as potential rivals, he bought them. When TikTok became dominant, Meta added a short-form-video feed to Instagram; when Elon Musk turned Twitter into a white-supremacist hub, Meta launched Threads as an alternative. Quality and innovation have not been the firm’s central proposition for many, many years. Before the AI industry obsessed over scaling up its chatbots, scale was Meta’s greatest and perhaps only strength: It dominated the market by spending anything to, well, dominate the market.

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In fall 1963, as President Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn’t be worth the electoral hit he’d take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” he said.

No one would have to ask President Donald Trump that question. His vision of power is dangerous but clear, and he’s wasted little time in implementing it. One reason he’s been so successful is that members of the House and Senate seem to have no idea what the hell the Congress is for. The past few weeks have seen Republican members of Congress wringing their hands furiously over bills under consideration, criticizing the White House’s legislative priorities … and then voting for them.

The most torturous, and tortuous, example is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a prominent member of the supposedly populist wing of MAGA Republicans. On June 28, Hawley criticized Medicaid cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the form of work requirements. “If you want to be a working-class party, you’ve got to deliver for working-class people,” he said. “You cannot take away health care from working people.”

Three days later, on July 1, he voted for a bill that did exactly that. It also cut funding to rural hospitals, and yet, a few days later, he told NBC News, “I think that if Republicans don’t come out strong and say we’re going to protect rural hospitals, then, yeah, I think voters aren’t going to like that.” This week, he introduced a bill to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts he’d voted for two weeks earlier.

If Hawley didn’t like the cuts, he could have voted to stop them. I don’t mean that symbolically: The bill passed 51–50, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie. By withholding his vote, Hawley could have killed the bill or forced changes. This is how legislating is supposed to work. But in his defense, Hawley has terrible role models: He’s a relatively young senator surrounded by elders who seem just as confused about their role.

Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted for the OBBBA too, and then told reporters that she hoped that the bill she had just voted for would not be enacted as written, pleading with the House to do her job for her by altering it. (The House didn’t.) Years ago, my colleague Ashley Parker, then at The New York Times, identified the existence of a Republican “Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus.” Murkowski is perhaps the spiritual founder of a Vote Yes/Hope No Caucus.

She has plenty of company. Her comrades were out in force for this week’s vote on rescissions, retroactive budget cuts requested by the White House and approved by Congress. Some members worry that acceding to the rescissions is effectively surrendering the power of the purse to the executive branch. “I don’t have any problem with reducing spending. We’re talking about not knowing,” complained Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader. “They would like a blank check, is what they would like. And I don’t think that’s appropriate. I think they ought to make the case.” McConnell voted for the bill.

“I suspect we’re going to find out there are some things that we’re going to regret,” North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, ostensibly freed up by his decision not to run for reelection, said on Wednesday. If only there were some way to avoid that! But Tillis voted yes, because he said he’d been assured by the White House that certain programs wouldn’t be cut. It should be clear by now that the administration’s promises to senators aren’t worth the red cent that Trump is eliminating; regardless, the way to ensure that something happens is to write it into law. Isn’t that what we send legislators to Washington to do?

Apparently not. Also this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune paused a bill to levy sanctions against Russia, deferring to Trump, who has threatened to impose tariffs on Moscow. “It sounds like right now the president is going to attempt to do some of this on his own,” he said. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise concurred: “If anybody’s going to be able to get Putin to the table to finally agree to peace, it’s President Trump.” Never mind that the Constitution places the tariff power primarily with Congress.

Trump’s executive-power grab, I’ve argued here and in my recent book, is the product of careful planning laid out in Project 2025, whose authors make a case for how and why the president should seize new authorities. In Project 2025’s main document, Kevin D. Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, attacks “Congress’s preening cowardice” in refusing to exercise its duties and leaving them to the presidency. Project 2025’s paradoxical response is for the executive to seize even more power. That has worked because members of Congress are—unlike LBJ—afraid to take votes that might create some sort of political backlash.

They might pay the price anyway. “In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsibility for its actions,” Roberts writes. That trick works for only so long. Trump never has to face voters again, but having passed up the chance to set their own agenda, many members of Congress will have to answer for his decisions in next year’s midterms.

After the longest vote in House history this week, Speaker Mike Johnson—no relation genealogically, ideologically, or stylistically to Lyndon—lamented the state of affairs in the legislature. “I am tired of making history; I just want normal Congress,” he said. “But some people have forgotten what that looks like.” It’s a shame that Johnson doesn’t know anyone who has the power to change the way things work at the Capitol.

Related:

The missing branchThe Trump administration targets Congress—again.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Can this man save Harvard?David Sims: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crownAutocracy in America: The pollster who sensed democracy was faltering

Today’s News

President Donald Trump asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to unseal grand-jury testimony from the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes.An explosion at a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department training facility killed at least three deputies, according to department officials.The House gave final approval to Trump’s request to cut $9 billion from public-broadcasting funding and foreign aid. Trump is expected to sign the bill into law.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Emma Sarappo on what Andrea Gibson understood about very simple poetry.

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Photograph by Johnathon Kelso

What to Do With the Most Dangerous Book in America

By James Shapiro

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

The book is a vile, racist fantasy culminating in genocide, but it isn’t just a how-to manual for homegrown terrorists. What has been labeled the “bible of the racist right” has influenced American culture in a way only fiction can—by harnessing the force of storytelling to popularize ideas that have never been countenanced before.

Read the full article.

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Watch. Eddington (out now in theaters) is a nasty, cynical, and eerily accurate look at all-too-recent history, Shirley Li writes.

Read. “Seven Summers,” a poem by Jana Prikryl:

“The summer I was twelve I don’t remember / Thirteen we drive the Continent, hit Chamonix / The summer I’m fourteen go back alone to Čechy”

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When CBS embarked on the project of replacing David Letterman as the host of The Late Show,in 2014, the network spared no expense. It hired Stephen Colbert, who had collected Emmys and acclaim while hosting his Comedy Central talk show, The Colbert Report; gave him total creative control; and fully revamped Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater so Colbert could make the show’s longtime venue his own. After a shaky first year, Colbert found his footing in the lead-up to the 2016 election by focusing his opening monologues more pointedly on politics. The Late Show soon became the highest-rated talk show in America—a crown it has not relinquished since.

Ten years on, CBS has snatched the crown off its head. The network appears to have grown so dismayed with the state of late-night television that it has unceremoniously canceled one of the genre’s most successful stalwarts: In a statement last night, CBS announced that not only will this season of The Late Show—set to air through May 2026—be the program’s last, but the franchise will also be retired entirely. (“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable,” the statement offers as explanation.) The decision quickly prompted plenty of speculation among industry observers, given Colbert’s recent, unvarnished scorn for CBS’s parent company, Paramount, after it settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump; the president had accused 60 Minutes, the network’s venerated TV newsmagazine, of deceptively editing an election-season interview with Kamala Harris. (CBS News, which produces 60 Minutes, denied the claim.) But whether or not there was some political motivation behind the cancellation (the network called the reason purely financial), the underlying point is clear: The Late Show is no longer valuable enough for CBS to bother protecting it.

[Read: Is Colbert’s ouster really just a ‘financial decision’?]

As the business of television changes, late-night talk shows have found themselves in a particularly awkward spot. For one, people have stopped flocking to linear television as their evenings wind down. If they do turn the TV on, it’s often to check out what’s new to stream rather than to put up with a somewhat staid format interrupted by many commercial breaks. The customary celebrity chats and musical performances typically appear online not long after they air, and said celebrities now have many other outlets for plugging their projects: video podcasts, YouTube shows. The cost of producing one of those alternatives is also far smaller than the budget for a glitzy affair like The Late Show.

These arguments always get trotted out as nightly programs drop off the map—like when The Late Show’s lead-out, The Late Late Show, didn’t survive its host James Corden’s departure; and when its follow-up, the Taylor Tomlinson–hosted variety show At Midnight, lasted just over a year before the comedian decided to return to performing stand-up full-time. Questions about the genre’s relevance are also why Late Night With Seth Meyers had to get rid of its house band to survive, and why Comedy Central chose not to replace The Daily Show’s former host Trevor Noah. Instead, the cable channel was satisfied with bringing back Noah’s predecessor Jon Stewart for one night a week, rotating the other episodes among the current cast.

And yet: Even though Puck reported that Colbert’s program was losing more than $40 million a year for CBS, there’s something quite shocking about a network simply giving up a foothold as established as The Late Show. Brand names are hard to come by in television, and The Late Show was a big one: Letterman built it up over the course of the 1990s, after NBC passed him over as Johnny Carson’s successor to The Tonight Show. Colbert then inherited a program defined by its past host’s curmudgeonly brand of snark and fundamentally remade it into a much more thoughtful and authentic show. He’s proved capable of deep, empathetic interviews with guests and spiky, aggressive political joke-making (by broadcast TV’s rigid standards).

[Read: The late-night experiment that puts comedy first]

Still, Colbertwould never be able to achieve the ubiquity that Carson and Letterman enjoyed before the advent of streaming. The occasional clip might go viral, and entertainment sites will write up the best parts of the monologue; the talk-show desk, however, no longer comes with a seat of cultural power. Colbert was once the most irreverent member of his late-night brethren (people forget what a bomb-thrower his satirical Colbert Report character could be), but he has since become more of a fatherly figure—one I value as part of the TV firmament but who doesn’t exactly scream “cutting edge.”

Then again, “cutting edge” is not something CBS has sought in a long time. It’s hard to know what could possibly take over for The Late Show when it vanishes in mid-2026. Sitcom reruns? Movies you could just as easily catch on Netflix? The point of network television is to offer something that has a live jolt to it—sports, stand-up, the occasional drama or comedy shows that become appointment viewing. As the medium dissolves from relevance, its owners instead seem content not to create anything of cultural importance. The Late Show is not the juggernaut it once was, sure. But what’s most tragic is to think of it being replaced by nothing at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss data dumps, high stakes, and lizard brain screen time.

JOSEPH: Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador is the hardest hacking related article we’ve ever worked on.

I’ve obtained some very sensitive data breaches over the last decade: metadata of specific individuals from the massive AT&T breach; photos of peoples’ genitalia pre- and post-plastic surgery. Honestly it’s hard to remember them all.

The data here wasn’t even necessarily as sensitive or personal as those. It was flight manifests, which contain peoples’ names, the flight they were on, and their gender. That’s basically it. But it was how to handle publication of the data that was exceptionally complicated and why it took us a while from when we first obtained the data a few months ago to publishing this week.

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