paywall
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
“Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long,” Bekah Waalkes wrote this past spring. “As a child, when nice weather came around, I was told to put down my book and go play outside.” But why can’t reading a book be a form of outdoor play? Reading outside can also be a practice in sustained attention, Waalkes writes: The act of focus can actually sharpen “one’s perception of the trees, the soil, the friends chattering at the next table in the beer garden.”
Today’s newsletter offers a guide to reading outdoors—how to make the most of it, and which books to take with you on your adventure.
Six Books You’ll Want to Read Outdoors
By Bekah Waalkes
Reading has been unfairly maligned as an indoor activity for far too long.
24 Books to Get Lost in This Summer
By The Atlantic Culture Desk
The Atlantic’s writers and editors have chosen fiction and nonfiction to match all sorts of moods.
The One Book Everyone Should Read
By The Atlantic Culture Desk
The Atlantic’s staffers on the books they share—again and again
Still Curious?
Take your book outside: Reading al fresco isn’t always idyllic, but it can be sublime, Emma Sarappo writes.The unbearable smugness of walking: Literary walking has long been celebrated, Michael LaPointe writes. Is it really worth the hype?
Other Diversions
How Justin Bieber finally gave us the song of the summerAlexandra Petri: “How I came to be in the Epstein files”The psychological secret to longevity
P.S.
Courtesy of Tim Tumlin
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparked their sense of awe in the world. “I had awakened early on this morning in July 2016 and tiptoed out of the hikers' dorms at Rifugio Lagazuoi, which is perched at 9,000 feet in the Italian Dolomites,” Tim Tumlin, 74, in Darien, Illinois, writes. “As I hoped, the silent overwhelming beauty made the climb the day before more than worthwhile.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
Can this really be the song of the summer? For seven weeks now, the most popular tune in the country has been Alex Warren’s “Ordinary”—a solemn ballad that has all of the warm-weather appropriateness of a fur coat. Ideally, the song of the summer is a buoyant one, giving you a beat to bob a flamingo floatie to. “Ordinary,” instead, is made for stomping, moping, and forgetting.
The top reaches of the Billboard Hot 100 have otherwise mostly been stale and flukey, filled with songs that were popular last summer (Teddy Swims’s “Lose Control”), replacement-level efforts by the streaming behemoths Drake and Morgan Wallen, and tie-ins from the Netflix cartoon show KPop Demon Hunters. Then, just last week, a welcome bit of warmth and novelty emerged at No. 2—“Daisies” by Justin Bieber, the unlikely emblem of our obviously fragile national mood.
Perhaps you aren’t inclined to check out new music by a formerly chirpy child star who lately has been best known for his surreal interactions with paparazzi. But earlier this month, the 31-year-old Bieber suddenly released a new album, Swag, that made headlines for being rather good. Not “good for Bieber”; good for a modern pop release. Swag filled a void in the summer-listening landscape by meeting listeners where they so clearly seem to be—less in need of a party-fueling energy drink than a soothing slather of aloe.
The album is Bieber’s first since parting ways with manager Scooter Braun, the record-business kingpin who recently seemed to suffer a catastrophic collapse in support from the celebrity class. The music departs from the pert poppiness of Bieber’s past to indulge the singer’s well-documented fascination with hip-hop and R&B. In one interlude, the comedian Druski tells Bieber “your soul is Black”; the assertion is cringey, but the album’s music is significantly more subtle than that. Bieber never really raps. Rather, he uses his ever-yearning, creamy-soft voice to do what great rappers and R&B singers often do: find a pocket within a beat, and then let emotions be his guide.
What’s really fascinating about the album, though, is that it sounds like it’s wrapped in gauze. The production is aqueous and rippling, rather than shiny and laminated as one might expect from Bieber. Swag is heavily influenced by the indie producer-artists Dijon (who collaborated on a few of the album’s songs) and Mk.gee (a producer on “Daisies”). They have risen to prominence by swirling bygone rock and pop signifiers into a comforting yet complex stew of sound. Swag’s songs similarly hit the listener with a sense of gentle intrigue, like a minor recovered memory.
The instant hit “Daisies” exemplifies the approach. Its twanging guitars and pounding drums scan as countrified classic rock, but every element seems muffled, as if emanating from an iPhone lost in a couch. The verses steadily build energy and excitement—but then disperse in a gentle puff of feeling. In a lullaby whisper, Bieber sings of pining for his girl and sticking with her through good times and bad. “Hold on, hold on,” goes one refrain: a statement of desire for safety and stability, not passion and heat.
But my personal song-of-the-summer nomination would be Swag’s opening track, “All I Can Take.” It opens in a tenor of pure cheese, with keyboard tones that were last fashionable when Steve Winwood and Boyz II Men were soundtracking school dances. A lightly pumping beat comes to the fore, setting the stage for a parade of different-sounding Biebers to perform. In one moment, he’s a panting Michael Jackson impersonator. In another, he’s an electronically distorted hyperpop sprite. The song is serene, and pretty, and ever so sad—yet it’s also wiggling with details that suggest there’s more to the story than initially meets the ear. The lyrics thread together sex talk with hints of stresses that must be escaped; “It’s all I can take in this moment,” Bieber sings, hinting at a burnout whose cause the listener is left to imagine.
Swag’s approach—downtempo yet bustling, melancholic yet awake—is on trend emotionally as much as it is musically. Though the year has brought no shortage of bright, upbeat pop albums from the likes of Lady Gaga and Kesha, the music that’s sticking around has a reserved, simmering quality. The biggest Wallen song of the moment is “What I Want,” a collaboration with the whisper-singing diva Tate McRae; it builds suspense for a full minute before any percussion enters. One rising hit, Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not,” has a neo-soul arrangement that fidgets enough to keep the ear occupied without demanding active attention.
A dreary technological reason probably explains why this kind of music is popular: Streaming rewards background fare more than it rewards jolting dynamism. But even looking at my own recent playlists, downtempo seems in. The best song by Addison Rae, the TikTok phenom turned pop mastermind, is “Headphones On,” a chill-out track laden with tolling bells and jazz keyboards. I have kept returning to the album Choke Enough by Oklou, a French singer who makes electronic pop that’s so skeletal and frail-seeming, you worry you’re despoiling the songs merely by listening to them. Other recent highlights: the mumbled and dreamy indie rock of Alex G’s Headlights, the depressive easy listening of Haim’s I quit, and “Shapeshifter,” the wintry-sounding standout from Lorde’s Virgin.
It’s hard to avoid psychoanalyzing this season’s musical offerings and concluding that the culture is suffering from malaise, or at least a hangover. After all, just a year ago we had “Brat summer,” named for the hedonistic Charli XCX album. The songs of that summer were irrepressible: Sabrina Carpenter’s sarcastic “Espresso,” Kendrick Lamar’s taunting “Not Like Us,” and Shaboozey’s thumping “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” But this year, Charli XCX’s biggest song is “Party 4 U”—a pandemic-doldrums ballad released in 2020 that recently blew up thanks to a TikTok trend of people sharing emo stories about their lives. The track captures a bleary feeling of trying to have fun but getting pulled into melancholy.
That’s a feeling lots of Americans surely can relate to. Every era brings its own reasons to fret about the state of the world, but the headline-news topics of late—wars, deportations, layoffs—are upending lives in profound ways at mass scale. Swag isn’t about any of that, but great pop always works to make small and personal emotions echo broad, communal ones.
Bieber’s highly publicized experiences navigating mental health, drug use, and physical maladies have long served up a cautionary tale about life in the internet era. In the months leading up to Swag’s release, he posted angry, inscrutable messages online and confronted reporters on the streets. Pundits have taken to asking Is he okay? The cooling, noncommittal, lightly distressed sound of Swag is an answer of sorts. Like many of us, he’s doing as well as can be, given the circumstances.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the climate warnings, cosmic apocalypses, and wolf tales that made an impression on me this week.
First, a dispatch from the northernmost settlement on Earth, where climate warming is completely reshaping the landscape. Then: a case of star-crossed companions, encounters with globular clusters, and some trophic cascades as a treat.
“Unseasonably warm” hits differently in Svalbard
Bradley, James et al. “Svalbard winter warming is reaching melting point.” Nature Communications.
Science journals are constantly packed with new alarms about human-driven climate change, but one dispatch in particular stood out to me this week. The authors report a freakish warm spell that occurred in Svalbard, a Norwegian Arctic archipelago, in February 2025, and include surreal accounts of how the normally frozen research outpost turned into a “melting ice rink,” according to the study.
“Svalbard is at the front line of the climate crisis, warming at six to seven times the global average rate,” said researchers led by James Bradley of Queen Mary University of London.
“Our winter-time field campaigns in Svalbard are conducted under the expectation of sub-zero temperatures and extensive snow cover—conditions that have historically been typical in Svalbard during winter,” the team continued. “However, in February 2025, we encountered air temperatures persistently above 0°C, as well as rainfall, exceptionally low snow cover, and pooling meltwater covering the tundra.”
Bradley and his colleagues were based around Ny-Ålesund, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, which is about 750 miles from the North Pole. From 1961 to 2001, the town’s average air temperature in February hovered around -15°C (or 5°F). In February 2025, the average was -3.3°C (26°F), with the hottest day reaching 4.7°C (40°F).
All of us are now living with the effects of climate change, but the authors document the dizzying pace of change in this polar community and cite tangible differences as their familiar research haunt thaws out.
“Vegetation emerged through the melting snow and ice, displaying green hues typically associated with spring and summer,” the team said. “Blooms of biological activity were widespread across the thawing tundra. Surface soils, which are typically frozen solid during this time of the year, thawed such that they were soft enough to be directly sampled with a spoon, rather than digging snow pits to the soil surface and using drills and pickaxes to extract frozen soil samples (which has been necessary during our normal wintertime sampling operations).”
The researchers also note that Arctic communities and infrastructure are reeling from the changes, which include an increased risk of avalanches and unstable snowpack. New foundations have been installed in many buildings, including the team’s research bases, to keep up with instabilities from thawing permafrost.
The team concludes with a sentiment that is becoming more common in this field: It may be worse than we think. It’s not an uplifting thought, but one that should be confronted, especially since few people are able to travel to these remote communities to experience the changes for themselves.
“The thaw event of February 2025 was not an isolated occurrence,” the team warned. “Witnessing it in real time served as a reminder of the accelerating pace of change, and made us wonder if we have been too cautious with our climate warnings.”
In other news…
First sighting of the Betelbuddy
Betelgeuse, the supergiant star on Orion’s left shoulder, may have a Betelbuddy. Astronomers think they have directly spotted Betelgeuse’s companion star, provisionally called Alpha Ori B, which orbits the senescent giant every six years and has been predicted for years.
We “report the likely direct-imaging detection of a stellar companion to Betelgeuse,” said researchers led by Steve Howell of NASA Ames Research Center, who captured the images with an instrument on Hawaii’s Gemini North telescope. “The results presented here are not definitive as the detection is at the limit of the instrument capabilities. However, the results do present the most direct and substantive evidence for the existence of a stellar companion to Betelgeuse, as well as the properties of that companion.”
Gemini North direct image of likely companion star. Image: International Gemini Observatory/ NOIRLab/NSF/AURA Image Processing: M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab)
Betelgeuse’s wild variations in radiance, especially the so-called Great Dimming of 2020, are seen by some stargazers as heralds of imminent supernova explosion. Astronomers ultimately showed that the Great Dimming was just some dust coughed out by the dying giant, but Betelgeuse could still blow at any time—and when it does, it will take its companion down with it.
Left alone, Alpha Ori B would mature into a main-sequence star similar to our Sun, but “it will likely never arrive at that stage as Betelgeuse is predicted to produce a much-anticipated supernova in the coming millennia,” the study noted.
The perils of supergiant siblings! At least the new star might get a cool name before it's blown to bits. Since Betelgeuse means “the hand of the giant” in Arabic, the new study suggests naming the star “Siwarha,” or “her bracelet.” But considering the future in wait for the star, I’d say it's more a handcuff than a bracelet.
Watch your back for globular clusters
We move now from pyrotechnic stellar detonations to killer globular clusters. The universe is a dangerous place.
Using data from the Gaia telescope and next-generation simulations, scientists gamed out the probability that the Oort cloud, the spherical mass of icy bodies that surrounds our solar system, might be disrupted by passing globular clusters, which are clumps of stars wandering around the galaxy.
“We identified 35 globular clusters that could potentially experience close encounters with the Sun…throughout the Sun’s entire lifetime,” said the authors Maryna Ishchenko and Peter Berczik of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. “Comet activity influenced by these interactions could disrupt ecosystems or pose threats to life.”
Even if these clusters passed more than a hundred light years from the Sun, they could still have a major effect, possibly nudging a slew of comets into the inner solar system that could pelt Earth and spark mass extinction events.
While it’s hair-raising to imagine marauding star blobs nudging death snowballs toward Earth, there is zero threat of such an encounter happening within our lifetimes, as no cluster is currently nearby. But it’s a helpful heads-up to flag for Earthlings in tens of millions of years, whatever shape they might take.
Wolves at the table help aspens become stable
Wolves continue to reshape Yellowstone National Park in the wake of their reintroduction to the historic range in the mid-1990s. During the long absence of the predators, which were wiped out by humans in this area by 1930, animals that would normally be wolf-chow, especially elk, spiraled ever upwards in numbers, putting pressure on many trees and plants.
Now, a study documents “the first new generation of overstory aspen trees in Yellowstone’s northern range in 80 years” mainly due to “increased predation [that] has caused a sustained reduction of elk numbers within the park, as well as changes in elk distribution, resulting in less browsing,” said researchers led by Luke Painter of Oregon State University.
New small trees are “present in 43 percent of stands and 22 percent of random plots in 2020–21, where none were found in 2012, beginning to replace an overstory in pronounced decline.”
One of the recovering aspen stands in northern Yellowstone that was documented in the study. Image: Photo provided by Luke Painter, OSU College of Agricultural Sciences.
“While a return to more extensive aspen stands will take time, and future conditions may not fully replicate the past, these new trees will help to ensure that aspen will persist into the future as a cornerstone of biodiversity in the northern Yellowstone landscape, and an example of widespread ecological change resulting from large carnivore restoration,” the team said.
To that end, movements to reintroduce carnivores—including bears, tigers, wolverines, and wolves—are ongoing around the world, in part because of observed ecosystem benefits. While these efforts must weigh risks to surrounding farms and communities, it is amazing to consider the far-reaching consequences that the 120-odd wolves that make up Yellowstone’s packs have had on its iconic landscape in just one generation.
Thanks for reading! See you next week.
From 404 Media via this RSS feed
Aufort Jerome / GettyAn aerial view of Guédelon Castle in Treigny, France, in 2023
Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersStonecutters work at the construction site of the Chateau de Guédelon on June 25, 2005.
Xavier Rossi / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA person in medieval-style clothing observes the building site of Guédelon Castle in June 2002.
Thierry Perrin / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA blacksmith in period attire works at the Guédelon Castle site on April 12, 2018.
Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyTwo people walk inside the “squirrel cage,” a medieval treadwheel crane, to lift material at the construction site in 2011.
Aufort Jerome / GettyA view of the castle, under construction, as seen in 2023.
Philippe Desmazes / AFP / GettyA person prepares a medieval dish for tourists visiting the construction site of Guédelon Castle on July 15, 2014.
Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersOn June 25, 2005, a carpenter prepares a log to be used for the construction of the castle.
Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersA stoneworker pours water onto stones and mortar being placed on September 13, 2016.
Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyTimbers support the roof of the Great Hall inside of Guédelon Castle.
Jacky Naegelen / Hans Lucas / ReutersA woman plays with geese at the construction site on September 13, 2016.
Arnaud Finistre / AFP / GettyA visitor enters the castle from the courtyard on June 23, 2025.
Xavier Rossi / Gamma-Rapho / GettyA carpenter works on support timbers for a rounded roof in June 2002.
Albert Ceolan / De Agostini / GettyYoung women work on a shingled roof at the castle construction site in 2019.
Godong / Universal Images Group / GettyA close view of stonework and an arched opening in the castle wall.
Arnaud Finistre / AFP / GettyVisitors tour the construction site of Guédelon Castle on June 23, 2025.
Stephane Mouchmouche / Hans Lucas / ReutersChildren and adults attend a construction workshop led by a worker at the castle on April 29, 2023.
Arnaud Finistre / AFP via GettyA school group tours the Guédelon construction site in Treigny, France, on June 23, 2025.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
Americans have a long history of enduring heat waves by going outside. In a 1998 essay for The New Yorker, the author Arthur Miller described urbanites’ Depression-era coping mechanisms: People caught the breeze on open-air trolleys, climbed onto the back of ice trucks, and flocked to the beach. In the evenings, they slept in parks or dragged their mattresses onto fire escapes.
But since air conditioning went mainstream, in the 1960s, the easiest way to beat the heat has been by staying indoors—at home, the office, the mall—where cool air is a constant and blinds are often drawn to prevent homes from overheating (and electric bills from skyrocketing). For this convenience, Americans sacrifice the benefits of sunshine and the opportunities for fun it creates. As climate change turns up the temperature, summers in America are coming down to a choice between enduring the heat and avoiding it—both of which might, in their own ways, be making people sick.
In cities across the country, summers are, on average, 2.6 degrees hotter than they were some 50 years ago. In Phoenix, where a 95-degree day is a relief, schedules are arranged around the darkness; Jeffrey Gibson, an accountant who works from home, takes his eight-month-old daughter out for walks before 6:30 a.m.; after that, it’s so hot that she flushes bright red if they venture outside. He spends the rest of his day indoors unless leaving is absolutely necessary. It’s like this from April to October. Gibson recently told his wife, “Man, I think I’m a little depressed.”
Josef A. Von Isser, a therapist in Tucson, Arizona, told me that feeling low in the summer comes up a lot with his clients. Some feel that the heat affects them directly; others struggle with its indirect effects, such as fewer opportunities to socialize and be somewhere other than home or the office. All of them, he suspects, might be experiencing seasonal affective disorder.
The DSM-5 categorizes SAD as a type of major depression with a seasonal pattern, with symptoms such as sadness, feelings of worthlessness, and low energy. Usually, it presents in the winter, though scientists don’t agree on why. Some suspect that it’s because a lack of sun exposure may contribute to decreased levels of serotonin, a hormone that regulates mood, as well as vitamin D, which helps stimulate serotonin activity. Another theory links low exposure to sunlight with unusually high levels of melatonin, a hormone that helps regulate sleep.
[Read: The surprising truth about seasonal depression]
Summer SAD is generally accepted as a variety of the disorder, but it’s much rarer than the winter form; one study from earlier this year puts its prevalence at about 0.6 percent. That makes summer SAD especially hard to study. “It’s clearly a different kind of illness,” Paul Desan, a psychiatry professor at Yale, told me, but “it’s not in their imagination.” Unlike the winter form, which comes with a tendency to overeat, oversleep, and withdraw from society, summer SAD involves reduced appetite, insomnia, and restlessness—all of which can also be effects of heat. The scientific literature shows that heat is associated with mood disorders, anxiety, aggression, and reduced cognitive abilities. Uncomfortably hot nights, longer periods of daylight, and extended stretches of time spent indoors all disrupt sleep, which can in turn fuel mood disorders, Amruta Nori-Sarma, an environmental-health professor at Harvard, told me. Extreme heat can also be an obstacle to exercising, spending time in nature, and socializing, all of which can make people feel good and also double as important coping mechanisms for emotional distress.
Taking comfort in air conditioning when it’s too hot out is a natural human response. But air-conditioned spaces can be stifling in their own way. Staying home where it’s cool also means socializing less; some offices and homes hardly let in a wink of sunlight all day. It’s plausible that in the summer, people experience SAD symptoms not only from excessive heat but also because they spend all of their time avoiding the sun, Kim Meidenbauer, a psychology professor at Washington State University, told me. “It does make sense to me that you’d have, potentially, an analogous pattern of effects” to winter SAD, she said. The link between indoor time and summer SAD hasn’t been studied, but plenty of Americans, even if they don’t meet the DSM-5 criteria, are noticing that summer is starting to feel a lot like winter. Reddit abounds with users who lament that being forced indoors by the heat gives them “summer depression.”
America’s summer quandary—suffer inside or out?—will become only more persistent as climate change intensifies. In the United States, heat waves have grown more frequent and intense every decade since the 1960s. During a single heat wave last month, people in 29 states were warned to stay inside to avoid dangerously high temperatures. All of the experts I spoke with expressed concerns about the impacts of escalating heat on mental health. “I am not optimistic,” Ayman Fanous, a psychiatry professor at the University of Arizona, told me, noting that heat also has a well-established link with suicide risk and can exacerbate mental-health conditions such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Many Americans don’t have access to air conditioning, or they work jobs that require them to be outside in the heat. Those who can stay cool inside may avoid the most severe consequences but still end up miserable for half of the year.
[Read: Earth’s new gilded era]
As long as summer SAD remains poorly understood, the options for addressing it will be limited. Treatment for winter SAD usually involves exposure to light boxes that mimic sunlight, but these aren’t recommended for summer SAD, because it might have a different neurobiological basis, Fanous said. For now, the first-line treatments are SSRIs such as Prozac—which can make people even more sensitive to heat.
For those with the means, the best strategy for beating summer SAD might be to move somewhere cooler. After eight years in Phoenix, Gibson has had enough of hiding from the heat for six months at a time and is ready to leave behind what he believes is his own summer SAD. Later this year, he plans to move his family to Colorado, where he hopes to be able to bring his daughter out during daylight hours. Yet Colorado summers, too, are becoming uncomfortably hot—and the same goes around the country. Last month, Alaska issued its first-ever heat advisory. As summer temperatures continue to rise, perhaps Americans will start to look back with envy on the ways our forebears beat the heat. The hotter summer nights get, the more sleeping on the fire escape starts to sound like a luxury.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
Black cool is one of America’s great innovations, right up there with basketball, blue jeans, and the internet. It blends several forms—music, sports, fashion, speech, ways of cutting through space—into a wholly distinctive, globally influential aesthetic. There are French fashion houses in thrall to silhouettes first spotted in Harlem, Japanese men who have devoted their lives to spinning jazz records in Shibuya, and lavish murals of Tupac Shakur as far apart as Sydney and Sierra Leone.
Sean Combs, the disgraced record mogul, certainly did not invent Black cool. But like Miles Davis, Muhammad Ali, and Michael Jordan before him—and like Jay-Z, Kanye West, and many others who followed—for a flicker of time he was its most formidable ambassador.
That moment coincided with my adolescence, which is why the revelation of Combs’s extravagant cruelties—the depravity with which he used all that he’d gained—has left my childhood friends and me feeling so betrayed. We had looked up to Diddy, whom I will always think of as Puff Daddy or Puffy. When we were at our most impressionable, he taught us what to want and gave us a model for how to behave and succeed. Seeing him fall apart in our middle age feels like a kind of heartbreak. The verve and swagger he injected into our childhood dreams have curdled into something rancid.
[Read: The disturbing implications of the Diddy verdict]
Certain photographs of Puffy are permanently etched into my memory. In 1995, dipped in a flowing black-and-gold Versace Barocco silk chemise, liberally unbuttoned to flex a thick Cuban link anchored by a diamond-encrusted Jesus piece—the definitive signifier of inner-city affluence. September ’96, on the cover of Vibe magazine: head peering from behind his greatest protégé, the Notorious B.I.G.; signature blackout shades; a perfect S-curl relaxing the weft of his fade. The cool he exuded in these moments was inspirational, even masterful. My friends and I had never seen anything like it so fully pervade the culture, certainly not from someone we felt we could relate to.
I have not admired Combs for decades now, since well before his trial this year. But I will always be partial to the Puff Daddy of the ’90s: from 1993, when he founded his record label, Bad Boy Entertainment, through the spectacular rise and death of the Notorious B.I.G., and peaking around 1998 during hip-hop’s “shiny-suit era,” which he pioneered with Ma$e and the Lox.
By the time I got to college, Puffy was even wealthier, and my cultural references had begun to change. I vaguely remember the preposterous images of him strolling beneath a blazing Mediterranean sun while his valet spread a parasol over his head. He was mainly in the news because of a shooting at Club New York, which resulted in bribery and gun-possession charges against him and a highly publicized trial (he was acquitted). For my friends and me, his shocking newness had begun to fade.
Back in his prime, though, Puffy conveyed a sense of youthful ambition that we revered. He was able to transition from sidekick and hype man to dealmaker and multiplatinum performer. Before turning 25, he had founded his own culture-defining business—soon-to-be empire—and knew precisely how to leverage his growing fortune into social capital.
More than his success, we were struck by two qualities that seemed novel to us. The first was the amount of effort he openly displayed, which counterintuitively amplified his cool. Puffy made no pretense of obscuring the maniacal work required to achieve his goals. When he closed a million-dollar deal, he slammed the phone down and screamed. (Years later, he would become one of the original hustle-culture influencers on Twitter.) He showed us that flourishing was not a condition one had to be born into—that luxury and labor were connected.
The second quality was his ability to make Black people and Black culture—even its less compromising, more street-inflected iteration—feel at home in places, such as the Hamptons, that had not previously welcomed them. Puffy’s motto “I’ma make you love me” felt innocent and aspirational to us, not least because he actually achieved it. We were still many years away from realizing just what he would do with all the love he was given.
[Helen Lewis: The non-exoneration of Diddy]
Puff Daddy seemed to us then like a Black man utterly free in a moment of expanding opportunity. Before the age of social media, before we’d ever stepped on a plane, Puffy represented our first intimation of an unrestricted way of being-for-self in the world. On the one hand, he was the antidote to the soul-crushing squareness of upwardly mobile middle-class life that we so feared—degrees, office jobs, bills. On the other hand, he was perfectly assimilated into the good life of the American mainstream, to which we desperately craved access.
This made him dramatically unlike his peers. Tupac and Biggie were confrontational, and look where it got them. Rap entrepreneurs such as Master P and Brian “Baby” Williams were rich but ghettoized; any number of establishments wouldn’t seat them. Puffy, by contrast, looked like a marvelous solution to the problem of success and authenticity that my friends and I had been struggling to solve.
Yet we were suffering from a kind of myopia. And it wasn’t unique to us. The generation after us put their faith in Kanye West, whose most recent contribution to the culture is a single titled “Heil Hitler.” Role models are like seasons. One passes irretrievably into the next, but for a moment they might reveal possibilities that outlast and surpass them.
*Illustration Sources: Jeff Kravitz / FilmMagic, Inc / Getty; Nitro / Getty; Steve Eichner / Getty Images; Al Pereira / Getty Images / Michael Ochs Archives; Richard Corkery / NY Daily News Archive via Getty.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
This month, the Ukrainian government made an unusual choice for its new prime minister. In a rare move for the country—and indeed for most of Eastern Europe—it picked a woman. Yulia Svyrydenko, a 39-year-old selected by President Volodymyr Zelensky and approved by Parliament, will lead the government in a period of intense uncertainty, as Russia escalates its offensive, Europe revamps its security commitments, and the Trump administration waffles on the war.
Some Ukrainian and Western observers have suggested that Svyrydenko isn’t up to the task, in part because they characterize her as a mere “loyalist” to Zelensky. She “would do everything saluting, without fail,” an anonymous source in Zelensky’s party told New Voice, a Ukrainian magazine. “I don’t believe she can reform our country,” Oleksiy Goncharenko, a member of Parliament, told me as he left a legislative session last week where he’d voted against her candidacy. “If she tries to criticize the president, she will end up like General Zaluzhny,” he continued, referring to Ukraine’s former army chief, whom Zelensky had dismissed after their differences became public.
The new prime minister is also facing overtly sexist criticism. “Svyrydenko is exactly the girl who all of you, dear students, are familiar with from school: She always sits at the front desk” and “carefully writes down the teacher’s notes,” Oleh Posternak, a Ukrainian political strategist, wrote in a Facebook post that a national media site republished.
Very few women have led former Soviet states, and they have virtually all received this kind of disparagement from men. In 2018, Georgia elected its first female president, Salome Zourabichvili, who’d run as an independent. Before she even took office, political observers called her a “finger puppet” of the billionaire leader of the ruling party, which had endorsed her. Today, many in Georgia credit Zourabichvili with uniting the opposition, and she condemned as “totally falsified” a recent election won by the party of her former patron.
In Moldova, many discounted Maia Sandu, who became the country’s first female president in 2020. Sandu’s rival in the race, the pro-Russian incumbent, Igor Dodon, criticized her for not having children—a line of attack that MAGA would later take up against Kamala Harris in the 2024 U.S. presidential race. In Dodon’s view, Sandu’s lack of offspring meant that she was “not interested in what is happening in the country.” Her opponents launched a misinformation campaign about her, much of which centered on the coronavirus pandemic. “The fake news scared people that I would close schools, hospitals, and even churches,” Sandu told me at the time. Instead, Sandu invested in the country’s medical and educational sectors, recruited European Union support for her agenda, and oversaw funding for the restoration of Orthodox churches. She has also been an effective reformer, working to root out the country’s extensive corruption.
[Anne Applebaum: The country that suffers whenever Russia schemes]
Svyrydenko has a chance to leave a similar legacy in Ukraine. She has ample experience working with foreign governments, whose support is now existentially important to Ukraine. Early in her career, she served as the country’s only permanent representative in China, bringing investment to her hometown of Chernihiv. As deputy prime minister, Svyrydenko negotiated billion-dollar reconstruction projects and trade agreements with the European Commission and Emirati leaders, as well as a $400 million investment from Turkish business interests. She also helped broker a natural-resources agreement with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to create a joint investment fund to rebuild Ukraine.
Her appointment last week was part of a larger government reshuffle by Zelensky, who reassigned the previous prime minister, Denys Shmyhal, to the role of defense minister. In her new role, Svyrydenko will be tasked with rehabilitating the economy, boosting the domestic production of weapons, and strengthening Ukraine’s armed forces, in part by securing financing from allies and the International Monetary Fund. One of her first actions as prime minister was to advance talks with the United States about a major potential investment in Ukraine’s drone industry.
Nevertheless, and despite her strong résumé, Svyrydenko will have to contend with broad reservations in Ukraine about female leadership. According to a 2020 study conducted by the research group Rating, Ukrainians are more likely to prefer male political executives. Sometimes bad actors take advantage of this trust gap. Katerina Sergatskova, the executive director of the 2402 Foundation, which supports and trains Ukrainian journalists, has seen many Ukrainian women in public life become the target of harassment. “It is political sexism. The attacks are well-organized campaigns,” Sergatskova told me. She has experienced such a campaign herself, which included death threats that forced her to stay out of Ukraine for a time.
Sergatskova noted that many in Ukraine are comparing Svyrydenko to the country’s first female prime minister, Yulia Tymoshenko, who took office in 2005 and faced several corruption charges. One case resulted in a criminal conviction against her and two and a half years in prison, which the U.S. condemned as politically motivated. After the 2014 revolution, which ousted Ukraine’s pro-Russian regime, the supreme court overruled Tymoshenko’s conviction and ordered her release. Nevertheless, a large majority of the Ukrainian public still don’t trust her.
Zelensky has fought against Ukraine’s abiding suspicion of female politicians by promoting a new generation of them into leadership positions. In addition to picking Svyrydenko as prime minister, he also announced the appointment of Olha Stefanishyna as Ukraine’s new special representative to the United States. The approach sets him apart from Vladimir Putin. Valentina Matviyenko, one of two women who serve on the Russian president’s permanent security council, put on a Barbie-pink suit last year and derided feminism as “an anti-male, anti-traditional-values movement.” Meanwhile, Russia bans and prosecutes feminist groups, and Putin tells Russian women to have “minimum two children.”
[Read: Putin’s deal with wife killers]
For those who fear that Svyrydenko will be no more than a Zelensky loyalist, she is already facing her first test. This week, Zelensky tightened the administration’s control over two independent agencies tasked with fighting government corruption. Sevgil Musayeva, the editor in chief of the newspaper Ukrainska Pravda, described the move as a step toward authoritarianism. “Svyrydenko has a chance to act now and speak against this decision that is undermining democracy, which our soldiers are dying for,” Musayeva told me. “But such action would require a lot of her courage.”
Two days after Zelensky reined in the government watchdogs, Svyrydenko met with G7 ambassadors in Kyiv to discuss anti-corruption policy—a subtle acknowledgment, perhaps, that the president had gone too far. But not everyone is convinced that Svyrydenko will be able to stand up to Zelensky. “Officially, we are a parliamentary-presidential republic,” Goncharenko, the legislator, told me last week. “I wish that were true. But we live in wartime; the decisions are made by the president.” Goncharenko isn’t holding out hope that Svyrdrydenko will be able to make her own choices: “If she contradicts his policy, he will simply fire her.”
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Earlier this summer, I spent one blissful week on vacation doing some of the best vacation things: lying in the sun with a book until my skin was slightly crisp, making full meals out of cheese and rosé. Of course, when I returned, I felt very, very sad. Real life is rarely as sunny and sparkly and juicy as vacation life. Right away, I found myself wishing that I could somehow preserve those delicious vacation morsels and store them in my cheeks like a chipmunk preparing for winter. Which is when I remembered something important: my own free will. What was stopping me from replicating the joy of vacation in my regular life?
So began my quest to do things differently. Call it “romanticizing my life,” if you want. Or call it self-care—actually, please don’t. But soon after returning from my trip, I was living more intentionally than I had before. I was searching for things to savor. I woke up early(ish) and started my day with a slow, luxurious stretch. In the evenings, rather than melting into the couch with the remote, I turned off my phone, made a lime-and-bitters mocktail, and read physical books—only fiction allowed. Less virtuously, I bought things: a towel that promised to cradle me in soft fibers, a new Sharpie gel pen, a funny little French plate that said Fromage in red cursive.
The effort was not a complete success. Replicating the exact feeling of holiday weightlessness is impossible; the demands of work and life always tend to interfere. But I did discover that these small changes were making my daily life, on average, a teensy bit happier. Someone once said that you should do something every day that scares you, and I’m sure those words have galvanized many powerful people to action. But regular life is frightening enough. What if we sought out daily moments of joy instead?
I asked some of my colleagues how they create their own tiny moments of delight. Here are a few of their answers:
Staff writer Elizabeth Bruenig wakes up and starts working the group chats, sending a “Rise n’ grind” to her girlfriends and a “Goooooood morning lads” to her passel of politics-chat guys. “It’s like starting the day by going to a party with all my friends,” she told me. “Instantly puts me in a good mood.” On the flip side, Ellen Cushing is working on texting less and calling more. She now talks with her oldest friend, who lives far away, almost every weekday—sometimes for an hour, other times for five minutes. Their conversations, which aren’t scheduled, involve two simple rules: You pick up the call if you can, and you hang up whenever you need to.Senior editor Vann Newkirk tends to his many indoor plants: a fiddle-leaf fig, a proliferation of spider plants, a pothos, a monstera, a couple of peace lilies, some different calatheas, an African violet, a peperomia, and a ponytail palm. “Even on no-water days, I like to check on them,” he told me, and “write little notes about how they are growing or where they grow best.”For a while, Shane Harris, a staff writer on the Politics team, began each day by reading a poem from David Whyte’s Everything Is Waiting for You. The purpose “was to gently wake up my mind and my imagination, before I started writing,” he told me. “It’s such a better ritual than reading the news.”Staff writer Annie Lowrey decompresses her spine(!) at night, which, she told me, involves bending over to hang like a rag doll, or dead-hanging from a pull-up bar: “It’s the best.” She also journals every morning about the things that she’s thankful for, and prays in gratitude for achieving difficult feats. “Maybe you accepted a vulnerability and your ability to handle it? Maybe you realized you could celebrate someone else’s success rather than wishing it were your own?” she said. It’s annoying when the “obvious advice,” such as drinking more water and getting more sleep, is right, she said. But gratitude is, unsurprisingly, good for your mood and mental health.Isabel Fattal, my lovely editor for this newsletter, curates playlists for her morning and evening commutes—which are based less on genre or Spotify’s suggestions than on the kind of mood she’d like to be in at that point in the day. “When I was a college intern in New York, I once managed to go seven stops in the wrong direction on the subway because I was listening to the National (I had a lot of feelings in that era),” she told me. “I’ve since improved my spatial awareness, but I maintain that the right music can elevate any experience.”
If you have kids, you can include them in your happiness project, as many of my staff-writer friends do. Ross Andersen, for example, has enlisted his kids to make him a cappuccino every morning, which is genius and perhaps also a violation of child-labor laws. Clint Smith and his son spent a summer watching highlights from a different World Cup every day, which, he told me, was “a fun way to grow together in our joint fandom and also was a pretty fun geography lesson.” And McKay Coppins told me he loves his 2-year-old’s bedtime routine, which involves a monster-robot game, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and a good-night prayer. “Bedtime can be notoriously stressful for parents of young kids—and it often is for me too!” McKay told me. “But I always end up looking forward to this little slice of my day.”
Related:
The quiet profundity of everyday aweWhat it would take to see the world completely differently
Today’s News
A shooting at a University of New Mexico dorm left one person dead and another wounded. Law enforcement is searching for the suspect.Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell over the “largesse” of the Fed’s headquarters renovations, just a day after President Donald Trump appeared to ease tensions during a visit to the Federal Reserve.The Trump administration will release $5.5 billion in frozen education funds to support teacher training and recruitment, English-language learners, and arts programs ahead of the new school year.
More From The Atlantic
Trump’s Ukraine policy deserves a reassessment.Food aid in Gaza has become a horror.Why is airplane Wi-Fi still so bad?
Evening Read
Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Edward Bottomley / Getty; Dario Belingheri / Getty.
Science Is Winning the Tour de France
By Matt Seaton
For fans of the Tour de France, the word extraterrestrial has a special resonance—and not a fun, Spielbergian one. In 1999 the French sports newspaper L’Équipe ran a photo of Lance Armstrong on its front page, accompanied by the headline “On Another Planet.” This was not, in fact, complimenting the American athlete for an out-of-this-world performance in cycling’s premier race, but was code for “he’s cheating.”
At that point, L’Équipe’s dog-whistling accusation of doping was based on mere rumor. More than a decade passed before the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency declared Armstrong guilty of doping. His remarkable streak of seven Tour wins was wiped from the record, but misgivings about extraterrestrial performances have never left the event.
Culture Break
See. Check out these photos of the week from an animal shelter in Colombia, a mountain church service in Germany, a memorial to Ozzy Osbourne in England, the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore, and much more.
Examine. Hulk Hogan embodied the role of larger-than-life pro-wrestling hero with unwavering showmanship, even as controversy and complexity shadowed his legacy, Jeremy Gordon writes.
Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic*.*
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
I was taking soup to the orphans, as usual, when a young man I’d never before met seized me by the arm. “Donald,” he said. “My name is Barack Obama, although that’s not important right now. In fact, you’ve already forgotten it. Before I matriculate at Harvard Law School, I must introduce you to someone who’s going to change your life.”
I looked at my watch. It was 1987.
“Who?” I asked.
“A man with whom you have nothing in common,” the mysterious figure went on. “Not one single thing. Not even enigmas. His name is Jeffrey.”
“Great!” I said. I loved to be introduced to people, in case they could help me with the orphans or connect me to a good sackcloth dealer. I was wearing a lot of sackcloth at that time, out of humility. I put down the biography of William McKinley that I had been reading in order to learn whether tariffs were good or bad. I had hoped that I could read it to the orphans, after we finished with the soup. But that could wait. “Please, introduce me.”
Thus began almost two decades of association that were nothing but miserable for me. I don’t know if you have any friends with whom you have nothing in common, but that was how it was with me and this guy. I assume! I never found out what he did, or how exactly he made his money, or even what his interests were. I would look at him and think, What a head of hair! “Even better than William McKinley’s!” I would mouth silently to myself. Then I would notice that, below the hair, his mouth was moving, and I’d try to guess what he had been saying, so that I could answer appropriately. Usually, I would just laugh and say, “You know that’s right!”
“You’re a pal,” Jeffrey would tell me. I wondered if I really was a pal. I spent so little time understanding what he had to say, and so much time lost in my own world, thinking about William McKinley and wondering what tariffs were. Tariffs—what a beautiful sound that word has. Tariff: the tip of the tongue taking a trip from the glorious Ta to the explosion of riff!
Again and again, my new friend would drag me to parties that I had no interest in attending. I was miserable. I sat in the front row at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show with my biography of William McKinley open on my lap. But it was hard to read in the dark room, and I was not getting to the part that explained what tariffs were as fast as I would have liked.
“I don’t want to go to another of Jeffrey’s island soirees,” I complained at one point. “I just want to stay in and read up about tariffs. I don’t feel that I understand them yet.” Everybody knows how much I love reading and how zealously I guard my reading time.
“No,” the mysterious man said. “It’s very important that you attend these parties. We need you in pictures. It’s for the conspiracy.”
I could tell the conspiracy was very important to him, so I always wound up going.
“Come on the plane,” Jeffrey said once. “It’s called the Lolita Express.”
“Sure,” I said. This was the most excited I had been in some time. I had no idea that Jeffrey also loved Nabokov. “I love a literary classic with an unreliable narrator.”
On the plane, I was disappointed. I searched it up and down for books to read but did not find any. Not even The Art of Translation!
“You should call your next plane the Ada, or Ardor: A Family-Chronicle Express,” I suggested. Jeffrey didn’t laugh. Now that I think back, I am beginning to doubt that Jeffrey had even read Lolita!
Jeffrey claims I met Melania on his plane, but I am certain I was with the orphans that week. Once I asked Melania about it.
“Have you ever been on that plane?” I asked. “Is that where we met? I don’t think that would have been how.”
She shrugged. “Could be. I do a lot of conspiracy things, what with all the body doubles. What do you remember?”
“I remember approaching you. I said, ‘I respect women too much to have any sense of what you look like physically, but there is something about your soul that makes me think of tariffs.’ And then you said, ‘Oh, no.’ And I said, ‘No, it’s good. Tariff is the most beautiful word in the English language.’”
“That does sound more like you,” she said.
Jeffrey kept inviting me to parties or, worse, urging me to throw parties of my own with themes that he suggested. I didn’t want to, but never told him so. That would have been impolite.
“I’m having a party,” I told Jeffrey once. “The theme is respect for women. I respect women so much that I feel bad even singling them out to say that I respect them, because really they’re just people. It’s a party about that, and I’d like you to be there.”
“That’s not a good theme,” he said. “Do a different theme instead.” So we did Jeffrey’s theme. I was very unhappy about it. We were the only two people there. I spent the whole party in the corner with my book about William McKinley, trying to get to the tariff part. I didn’t, though. It was too loud.
The mysterious man who introduced me to Jeffrey in the first place came back in roughly 2002. He had a book for Jeffrey that he wanted me to sign. “Do a picture,” he suggested.
“But,” I said, “I never write a picture.”
“It’s okay,” he said. He had an autopen with him. “I always carry this, for conspiracy reasons.” He used the pen to make a very obscene doodle and then pointed for me to sign my name to it. There was text above it.
“What does the text say?” I asked. “It doesn’t imply I share a creepy secret with this man, does it? I am beginning to think that he is not on the level, and I wouldn’t like to have it in writing that we had shared a creepy secret if, say, he were later revealed to be a terrible pedophile.”
“It says, ‘I love tariffs!’” the man said.
“Great,” I said. I signed it enthusiastically.
Over the years, the man kept coming to me and asking me to pose for pictures or make incriminating videotapes “for the files.” I should have asked more about the files, now that I think about it. “What are the files for?” I should have said. But he was clearly so passionate about them that I did not want to rain on his parade. When pressed, he said, “Conspiracies to do with the 2016 election,” or, “Conspiracies to do with the 2020 election,” or, “Conspiracies generally,” or, “Ask Dan Bongino.”
“We’re going to put all of this into files,” he explained. “Reams and reams of really damning stuff. And then we’re going to keep them secret. And you need to keep asking for them. Don’t take no for an answer.”
“This conspiracy confuses me,” I said. “You have spent decades painstakingly assembling this file, but you also will hide it from everyone, and I have to ask for it to be released?”
“Yes,” he said. “But then you have to stop asking for it to be released. Abruptly, and as suspiciously as you can. Indeed, if Congress shows any interest in having it released, have the speaker of the House shut them down for the summer.”
“But,” I said, “why would Congress listen to me?”
“He’ll listen,” the man said, and winked. “You’ll be the president, although many of the people who voted for you will be people who have felt for a long time that there is a secret conspiracy of elite pedophiles and that you are the one to help them blow it wide open. So they might not be happy when you start calling the files ‘boring.’”
“Why would they care so much?”
“The idea that there are secretly elite cabals of pedophiles wherever you look has been the stuff of conspiracy theories for years. Your supporters will be particularly interested in such things.” He paused. “But this time there’s an actual man preying on actual girls. That’ll be the horrible thing about this: a lurid conspiracy theory wrapped around real horrors that happened to real girls.” He got quiet for a moment.
I was thinking about something else. “You said I would be president,” I said, my voice hushed with wonder. “Can I do tariffs, as president? Like William McKinley did?”
He shrugged. “Sure, I guess. Is that really your only question about this?”
I nodded. “Tariffs are all I think about.” I halted for a moment. “And they’re—they’re a good idea, right? Tariffs?”
“Are they a good idea? Are they a good idea?” He laughed. “Why, you might as well ask if there is reason to cast doubt on the legitimacy of my birth certificate!”
I frowned. “Is there?” He didn’t answer. “Is there?”
But he had already vanished into the parking lot, clutching his precious files.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
This was supposed to be the summer superhero movies became fun again. At first, that appeared to be true: Superman, released earlier this month, relaunched DC’s previously dour cinematic universe as a brighter and bouncier affair; the film zips from one encounter to the next with sincere aplomb. Now, two weeks later, comes Marvel’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which, coincidentally or not, seems similarly positioned as an injection of Technicolor fizz into a progressively more leaden franchise. Dispensing with continuity from previous installments, the film is set on a retro-futuristic version of Earth where everything looks as if it were designed by Eero Saarinen. As an effort to breathe new life into a particularly moribund title—there have been four prior takes on these characters, all of them bad—First Steps is essentially successful. What it somehow can’t manage to do is have much of a good time in the process.
First Steps, directed by Matt Shakman, has several things working in its favor. It’s quite handsome to look at, and features an elegant ensemble of actors who are capable of the big, dramatic moments thrown at them. Its action sequences also achieve a true sense of scale, something chintzier Marvel entries often struggle with. But First Steps zooms past the Fantastic Four’s origins and, more detrimentally, their odd family dynamic. Instead, it dives headfirst into a portentous, celestial story in which Earth’s apocalypse is almost immediately at hand. There’s no time for the characters to engage in era-appropriate diversions (such as, perhaps, kicking back with martinis) or match wits with colorfully costumed adversaries. This adventure is all end-of-the-world menace, all the time.
The lack of breathing room is striking. After all, these characters come from one of comic books’ richest texts: The Fantastic Fourare the original Marvel superhero team, created by the legendary writer-illustrator team of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The comic kicked off the company’s 1960s revival and redefined the medium for an entire generation. Mr. Fantastic, a.k.a. Reed Richards (here played by Pedro Pascal), is the irritable, busy father figure; he’s also a genius scientist who can stretch like rubber. (He mostly uses his power in this adaptation to fill many wide chalkboards with math equations.) His wife, Susan Storm, also known as the Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), is able to vanish and throw force fields around everything; her brother, Johnny (Joseph Quinn), is the Human Torch, who can burst into flame and take to the skies. The trio’s best pal is Ben Grimm (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a human turned orange, rocky beast known as the Thing.
[Read: Will there ever be a great Fantastic Four film?]
First Steps begins a few years after the foursome’s brush with a cosmic radiation storm, which transformed them into superhumans. The crew now keeps New York City safe from costumed villains and subterranean monsters, while enjoying their status as chummy celebrities; they’re cheered by teeming audiences holding pennants everywhere they go. Shakman whisks us past all of this information, perhaps assuming that viewers have picked up the gist from past cinematic efforts and wouldn’t want to sit through all that backstory again. (Maybe the director was also hell-bent on keeping the run time under two hours—an impulse I do approve of.)
But Shakman’s endeavor to pick up the pace means the movie loses its grasp of what makes the source material so special: the genuine, sometimes fraught chemistry of this found family. Johnny and Ben are usually depicted as bickering surrogate brothers, the hotheaded youngster and the curmudgeonly elder; Susan is a pragmatic force, with Reed often lost in his own world. In First Steps,however, the characters felt flattened out to me, while all four performances are muted and somewhat excessively grounded. An early scene sees Ben cooking tomato sauce with the group’s helper robot, H.E.R.B.I.E., crushing garlic gloves with his gigantic fists “to add a little bit of zip.” It’s a cute moment, but an oddly underplayed one; in scene after scene like this, I kept wondering—where’s the extra zip?
Instead of playful banter, First Steps serves up deep, emotional conversations about the meaning of parenthood and the heroes’ deepest fears. The plot kicks off with the reveal that after years of trying, Susan is pregnant, a joyful realization that, for Reed, quickly turns into worry that their child will also be superpowered. Soon after that, the Silver Surfer (Julia Garner)—a shiny interstellar being riding a big surfboard—appears, zooming from the clouds and proclaiming Earth’s doom. She heralds Galactus (Ralph Ineson), a skyscraper-size villain from space who cruises around the universe eating planets whole; his arrival immediately plunges the Fantastic Four into a crisis that they spend the rest of the film trying to untangle.
[Read: Marvel doesn’t have to try so hard]
The Galactus saga is the most famous in Fantastic Four lore, but it’s also a conflict the comic built up to in the 1960s, churning through sillier villains before introducing a more impassive, terrifying force. He’s a tough first challenge for this new on-screen team to take on, one that drives Reed into instant misery as he struggles to fathom how to confront an enemy who cannot be bargained with. Pascal is smart casting for the role—he has the right air of sophistication and maturity—but the script engulfs his character in such a dark crisis of confidence that the actor’s charisma can’t shine through.
The same goes for Kirby as the joyless Susan, who impressively handles all the steeliness required of her. Quinn, who charmed me in recent blockbusters such as A Quiet Place: Day One and Gladiator II, feels too tightly woundas Johnny. Moss-Bachrach does quite lovely work as Ben, but the movie is perhaps overly focused on the hardened fella’s softer side; it largely ignores the character’s more tormented feelings about his physical transformation. First Steps is also shockingly comfortable to go long stretches without big action; the centerpiece is a space mission with shades of Interstellar that is genuinely thrilling, but some members of the team (particularly Mr. Fantastic) get few chances to really show off their superpowers.
As surprisingly downbeat as it is, I appreciated the fundamental message of the film, which is set in a more hopeful world. When a crisis arises, Reed and company are actually capable of rallying the world to help save itself. Multiple times in First Steps, Shakman emphasizes the power of a global community, the kind he’s clearly longing for in our world. Those are the zippiest ingredients he tosses into the sauce; I just wish he’d allowed the heroes to loosen up.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed
Adolf Hitler’s first weeks as chancellor were filled with so many excesses and outrages—crushing states’ rights, curtailing civil liberties, intimidating opponents, rewriting election laws, raising tariffs—that it was easy to overlook one of his prime targets: the German central bank.
The Reichsbank president was a man named Hans Luther, a fiscal conservative who subscribed to the “golden rule” of banking, which stipulated that a country’s indebtedness should never exceed its obligations. In his adherence to protocol and policy, Luther could be “holier than the Pope,” according to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, who served as the German finance minister from 1932 to 1945.
On the afternoon of Monday, January 30, 1933, just hours after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Luther stood in Hitler’s office with a complaint. Nazi storm troopers, known as the SA, had forced their way into the Reichsbank building in central Berlin, despite what Luther described as “emphatic protests” by bank personnel, and hoisted a swastika flag over the bank.
“I pointed out to Hitler that the SA actions were against the law,” Luther recalled, “to which Hitler immediately answered that this was a revolution.” Luther informed Hitler in no uncertain terms that the Reichsbank was not part of his revolution. It was an independent fiscal entity with an international board of directors. If any flag were to be flying over the bank, it would be the national colors, not the banner of his political party. The next morning, the swastika flag was gone.
On Hitler’s first full day in office, rumors circulated that he wanted Luther gone. Alfred Kliefoth, the chargé d’affaires at the United States embassy in Berlin, dispatched a memorandum to the State Department: “I have been informed, in confidence, by Dr. Ritter, the Chief Economist in the Foreign Office, that the new Government intends to exert pressure on Dr. Luther to resign.”
Hitler’s rumored plans to oust the Reichsbank chief came amid a massive purge of the Weimar Republic’s civil service. Senior officials who had served for decades were fired. Hitler assigned his chief lieutenant, Hermann Göring, to clean house in Prussia, the largest of Germany’s 17 federated states. When Göring entered the Prussian government offices in central Berlin, he told Rudolf Diels, the head of the Prussian political police, “I want nothing to do with the scoundrels sitting here in this building.” When Diels tried to defend one senior colleague, Göring responded by firing the colleague on the spot.
[Timothy W. Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]
A memorandum was circulated to all state civil servants demanding blind loyalty to the Hitler government. Anyone who did not feel they could support Hitler and his policies, Göring added, should do the “honorable” thing and resign. The Berliner Morgenpost observed that Hitler was clearly working to “transform the state bureaucracy from the most senior positions down to the administrative levels to align with his political positions.” In a speech on March 11, Göring compared the Nazi’s draconian measures to cutting wood: “When you chop, chips fly.”
Despite Hitler’s heavy-handed assault on the government bureaucracy, he could not touch Hans Luther. According to a 1924 law, the Reichsbank was independent of the elected government; the Reichsbank president served at the discretion of a 14-member board, which included seven international bankers and economists. Even Reich President Paul von Hindenburg, the ultimate constitutional authority, possessed the power only to confirm the appointment of the Reichsbank president, not to dismiss him. The Reich president headed the state and commanded the military, and the Reich chancellor ran the government, but the Reichsbank controlled the currency and the economy.
Luther brandished his independence and power with confidence and control. He had already served as finance minister and had also done a stint as chancellor. He understood both politics and economics. In 1923, Luther had designed the rescue plan that saved Germany from the inflation crisis that saw Germans pushing wheelbarrows full of cash through the streets to buy a loaf of bread. After the global market crash of 1929, he had guided Germany back to employment stability and production growth by the spring of 1932. Great Britain emerged from the crisis with twice the national debt of Germany. France’s was fourfold. The New York Times reported that Luther had “stood like a rock” amid the global financial turmoil. The newspaper Vossische Zeitung described Luther as “equal to any storm.”
Finance Minister Krosigk attributed the Reichsbank president’s success in stabilizing the economy to Luther’s “intelligence, his clear-sightedness, his extraordinary work ethic, his common sense and his energy.” Luther was firm in his principles and policies, and he believed in meeting international obligations. But he was cautious with his pronouncements. As a central banker, Luther knew that a single word, or even a smirk or smile, could send markets tumbling.
On Wednesday, November 23, 1932, Luther had been invited to address a group of industrialists and businessmen in the city of Düsseldorf, in the country’s industrial heartland, along with the jurist and political philosopher Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was already renowned as the the most eloquent political theorist and advocate of authoritarianism in Germany. (Known as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich,” Schmitt would later supply legal justification for Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives, in 1934, and for the anti-Semitic Nürnberg Laws of 1935.) On that November Wednesday in 1932, Luther listened in dismay as Schmitt laid out his arguments for the “Hitler system” of authoritarian rule, which included ending representative government and parliamentary rule, as well as the eradication of political parties, press freedoms, due process, and rule of law in favor of “totale Diktatur.” Luther was appalled.
For the first and only time in his career as Reichsbank president, Luther took a public political stance. Speaking after Schmitt, he argued that a functioning economy required democratic structures and processes, and that industrialists and businessmen were duty bound to support constitutional democracy. “We all bear the responsibility,” Luther said, arguing that it was in everyone’s interest—financial, social, and political—to support the Weimar Republic’s constitutional democracy and the rule of law. “I believe that the private sector in particular has a tremendous interest in emphasizing the necessity of legal security across the board,” Luther said, “because legal stability is the foundation of all economic life.”
[Timothy W. Ryback: The oligarchs who came to regret supporting Hitler]
That same month, Luther cautioned Chancellor Franz von Papen against “experiments” with the recovering German economy. “I told Dr. Luther that if he was not prepared to accept the risks involved,” Papen later recalled, “the government would be obliged to disregard his advice.” Within a month, Papen was out as chancellor. Papen’s successor, Kurt von Schleicher, encountered similar resistance. When Schleicher informed his cabinet that his government would seek a 2.7 billion reichsmark credit line, he received a chastening reply, as recorded in the cabinet minutes: “The Reich Minister of Economics, who had also participated in the meeting with the President of the Reichsbank, declared that, based on all experiences in negotiations with the Reichsbank, further commitments would probably not be possible.” Schleicher’s government fell within the month. By the time Hitler assumed the chancellorship, Luther had already outlasted three chancellors, and there was reason to believe that Hitler could be the fourth. However much Hitler might want to remove Luther from his post, Vossische Zeitung reported, “existing legal frameworks make this hardly possible.”
But that still left extralegal frameworks. Luther knew all too well about these. Months earlier, on the evening of April 9, 1932, Luther had been shot by two assailants in the Potsdam Train Station in central Berlin. According to the court record, the attackers intended to “slightly wound” Luther—which they succeeded in doing—as a “protest” against currency policies they believed “were wrong and damaging to the German people.” Although the court said it could not rule on Luther’s currency policies, it did sentence the two assailants to 10 months in prison for their “choice of means” in expressing their policy objections.
Following the meeting about the swastika banner on his first day as chancellor, Hitler did not see Luther for six weeks. Instead, Hitler turned for economic guidance to Luther’s predecessor at the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht. The former central banker had become a key Hitler ally in the financial world, seeking to rally bankers and industrialists behind the Nazi government. Kliefoth, the U.S. embassy chargé, dined with Schacht shortly after Hitler ascended to the chancellorship. “Schacht took pains to impress me with the fact that he is Hitler’s financial and economic adviser and that he is constantly in consultation with the new chancellor,” Kliefoth reported. Kliefoth further noted that Schacht had told him German industrialists were backing Hitler and his program. “I have good reason to believe, however, that this statement is an exaggeration,” Kliefoth reported in a subsequent memo to the State Department. “A leading executive official of the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie told me only this morning that the four-year plan announced by Hitler last night was an absurdity and that this organization viewed the latest political developments with skepticism and reserve.”
Only after national elections on March 5, when National Socialists secured 44 percent of the electorate and a mandate to move forward with a major rearmament program, did Hitler again summon Luther to the chancellery. Hitler admitted that he’d been compelled to meet with Luther because, given that the government was already running significant budget deficits, it would have been “completely impossible to begin the work of rearmament” without substantial funds from the Reichsbank. After spending two hours explaining to Luther the need for expanded military capacities, Hitler asked him how much financing the Reichsbank would be able to make available. In response, Luther assured Hitler that, as a “nationally minded man,” he appreciated Hitler’s intentions, and would be willing to provide 100 million reichsmarks—not even one-20th of the billions Hitler had requested. Hitler was stunned. He thought he had misheard, so he repeated his question. Luther gave the same answer. He later observed that, beyond the gross violation of Germany’s international debt obligations the chancellor was calling for, Hitler’s preparations for the “mass-murderous poison of war” were not in Luther’s medicine cabinet of remedies for the German economy.
Hitler informed President Hindenburg that he wanted Luther removed as head of the Reichsbank. Hindenburg reminded Hitler that the Reichsbank was an internationally governed institution and thus beyond the reach of German authority. So once again, Hitler summoned Luther to the Reich chancellery. At his first meeting with Hitler, back in January, Luther had been struck by Hitler’s apparent moderation. The chancellor was not the ranting, raging fanatic—“the abnormal man”—depicted in press accounts. Six weeks later, that moderation was gone.
Although it was becoming ever clearer to Luther that Hitler was going to make it impossible for him to carry out his fiduciary duties to the government, Luther used the occasion to remind Hitler of the Reichsbank’s independence and his own immunity from dismissal.
Hitler acknowledged that, as chancellor, he did not have the legal power to remove Luther as central banker. But, he told Luther bluntly, as the new “boss” of the country, he had access to considerable alternative sources of power that he would not hesitate to employ “ruthlessly” against Luther “if the interest of the state demanded it.” The nature of Hitler’s threats was unmistakable. Luther—who had already been shot once before in protest of his monetary policies—did not need to be warned again.
On March 16, Luther submitted his resignation to the Reichsbank board. In an extended letter to Hindenburg, Luther explained his reasons for stepping down. Luther reminded Hindenburg “that the leadership of the Reichsbank must be stable and independent of partisan political currents, that a change in political parties, directions, and majorities must not in itself result in a change in the leadership of the Reichsbank.” Luther also reminded Hindenburg that he had served as Reichsbank president alongside three previous governments. Nevertheless, Luther continued, it had become clear to him that the strained relationship between the Reichsbank and the current government was not sustainable and would only damage the country and its economy. But Luther insisted to Hindenburg that his resignation was contingent on the assurance that “an independent Reichsbank be preserved for the sake of the German state, its people and its economy.”
[Timothy W. Ryback: What the press got wrong about Hitler]
The Berliner Morgenpost, like many mainstream newspapers, lamented the departure of the man whose “strict fiscal policy” had twice rescued Germany from economic ruin. The New York Times observed that regulatory safeguards designed to secure the independence of the Reichsbank proved to be “wholly illusory” with the current administration. “Under the pressure of the kind in which the National Socialists are adept at applying,” the Times wrote, “even high government officials in Germany do not now try to retain their posts.”
Amid the turmoil of his wrangling with Luther, Hitler had summoned Hjalmar Schacht to the Reich chancellery, where he posed to Schacht the same question he had asked Luther: How much did Schacht think the Reichsbank could provide in helping finance the Hitler government’s plans? Schacht dodged the question. Giving a precise amount was impossible, Schacht said.
“You must be able to tell me to what degree the Reichsbank can or should provide assistance,” Hitler pressed.
“Herr Reich Chancellor,” Schacht said, “I really cannot give you a specific amount.” Too many factors existed when it came to a massive rearmament program. But Schacht assured Hitler of one thing: that the Reichsbank would provide Hitler with as much money as he needed. Hitler paused. He studied Schacht in silence, then asked, “Would you be willing to resume the leadership of the Reichsbank?”
Schacht assumed office the same day Luther departed.
From The Atlantic via this RSS feed