Can’t lick the witch wind that carries rumors over shining aurora-lit prairies:

horror of what comes to light at the dawn of the mind. Will you permit me to rise

from my sinkhole, to draw in the dirt the garnet ring my grandmother sold for gas

just to survive? Arrive anonymous, starved on hardtack and shame,

in this place where she was erased? How will you animate this forgotten history?

Pepper the disarray with white-hooded prairie schooners filled with calico-clothed

divas gathering their brood alongside militant fathers donning wide-brimmed hats?

It’s natural to want to lie when you look in the mirror, see you are naked

down to the crimes. Let me tell you, honey, truth is the harmony your song has been

missing. Set down a soapbox and let me step up and sing out about the naked

and the dead. The ghosts we’ve not yet seen clothe the woods of your stories. Let your candy

apple cowboys die in their own desert until my grandmother’s name is spoken

like the emergency it has become.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In the 1980s, the world’s largest producer of shoes was the Communist Soviet Union. In his 1994 book, Dismantling Utopia, Scott Shane reported that the U.S.S.R. “was turning out 800 million pairs of shoes a year—twice as many as Italy, three times as many as the United States, four times as many as China. Production amounted to more than three pairs of shoes per year for every Soviet man, woman, and child.”

And yet, despite this colossal output of Soviet-socialist footwear, queues formed around the block at the mere rumor that a shop might have foreign shoes for sale: “The comfort, the fit, the design, and the size mix of Soviet shoes were so out of sync with what people needed and wanted that they were willing to stand in line for hours to buy the occasional pair, usually imported, that they liked,” Shane continued.

The Soviet economic system put millions of people to work converting useful raw materials into unwanted final products. When released from the factory or the office, those workers then consumed their leisure hours scavenging for the few available non-useless goods. The whole system represented a colossal cycle of waste.

For a younger generation of Americans, the concept of “socialism” is an empty box into which all manner of hopes and dreams may be placed. But once upon a time, some humans took very seriously the project to build an economy without private property and without such market rewards as profits. What they got instead was unwearable shoes. But memories fade; hopes and dreams endure.

[Read: Start budgeting now]

Growing numbers of Americans feel that the economy does not work for them. Donald Trump’s stewardship of the economy has blatantly favored insiders and cronies. And so, in the 2020s, Americans find themselves debating ideas that once seemed dead and dusty, and in some cases, electing politicians who champion them. The new socialism addresses the problems that wrecked the old socialism only by denying or ignoring them. But if socialism is to be beaten back, and if market economics are to uphold themselves in democratic competition, exposing the unworkability of proposed alternatives won’t be enough. It will be necessary to reform and cleanse the market economics indispensable to sustaining Americans’ standard of living.

During socialism’s heyday, the world’s leading minds hailed the superior potential of a planned socialist economy. Albert Einstein wrote in 1949:

The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals … A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child.

In 1960, the Harvard economist Abram Bergson predicted that the Soviet economy was on a trajectory to overtake the U.S. economy. Bergson’s was not a crank opinion at all. Similar estimates underlay CIA analysis of the Soviet economy well into the ’60s. Americans might reject socialism for themselves as oppressive but, the theory held, as unlovely as Soviet socialism was, it could produce positive results.

The same overestimation of the U.S.S.R.’s productive capacity was also applied to Communist China. On the U.S. Senate floor in 1959, the future president John F. Kennedy gave a speech in which he accepted almost completely at face value China’s claims of a “Great Leap Forward”: “The mobilization of the unemployed mass of Chinese rural workers through economic communes, cottage industry, small pig-iron schemes, and all the rest is an achievement whose political and intellectual impact in less developed areas is bound to be immense.”

In actuality, the Great Leap Forward amounted to perhaps the deadliest self-inflicted calamity in human history. Mao Zedong’s forced industrialization program caused a famine that killed at least 23 million people, and perhaps as many as 55 million.

The Soviet economic statistics that so impressed the CIA were faked or meaningless. It did not matter how many pairs of shoes a Soviet factory made if nobody wanted to wear them. To escape Soviet sclerosis, Communist China began, in 1978, to open up first its farm economy, then its industry, to private management, market competition, and foreign investment. Communist Vietnam and other formerly closed and controlled economies followed the Chinese example.

Across the democratic West, socialist ideas went into eclipse. In 1995, under the new leadership of Tony Blair, the British Labour Party amended its party constitution to delete venerable language pledging “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.” In Germany in the early 2000s, Gerhard Schroeder’s Social Democratic coalition government introduced the most dramatic reductions in decades to social benefits to push the long-term unemployed back to work. In the United States, Democratic President Bill Clinton declared in 1996, “The era of big government is over.”

The seeming triumph of market economics was not welcomed by all, of course. Those disgruntled by the seeming triumph rejected Margaret Thatcher’s taunt that “there is no alternative,” yet they could not articulate in any concise or coherent way what that alternative might be.

The anti-corporate activist Ralph Nader ran for president in part to challenge the Clinton-era pro-market consensus. In his 2000 campaign as the nominee of the Green Party, Nader assembled an array of grievances: over-lengthy commutes to work; unhealthy meals at fast-food chains; excessive CEO pay; young people getting too much screen time; the criminalization of narcotics; the demise of urban electric-trolley systems. He could not have been more specific about what he opposed. But what was he for? Nader could not say.

And so it went for one project after another to imagine an anti-capitalist future. Some who belonged to the era’s left glumly quoted a saying attributed to the American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Over the quarter century from early 1983 to late 2007, the United States suffered just two brief, mild recessions: one in 1990–91, and a second that lasted only from spring to fall of 2001. From the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second administration to the end of George W. Bush’s first, the U.S. unemployment rate never once reached 8 percent. Over that same period, inflation was low and interest rates steadily declined.

[Read: The world economy is on the brink of epochal change]

Economists call this era “the Great Moderation.” The moderating influence was felt on politics too. For nearly 50 years, Gallup has surveyed Americans’ mood with a consistent series of questions about the general condition of the country. From 1983 to 2007, the proportion of Americans satisfied with “the way things are going in the U.S.” reached peaks of about 70 percent, and was often above 50 percent.

Then the long period of stability abruptly ended. Over the 15 years from 2007 to 2022, the U.S. economy suffered the Great Recession, the coronavirus pandemic, and post-pandemic inflation: a sequence of bewildering shocks.

You can see the effects in the Gallup polling. Over this period, the percentage of Americans who described themselves as generally satisfied rarely exceeded one-third and often hovered at about a quarter.

The era of moderation yielded to a time of radicalism: Occupy Wall Street, the Tea Party movement, “birtherism,” the wave of militant ideology that acquired the shorthand “woke.” In 2015, in the throes of this radicalism, Hillary Clinton announced her second campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. In a stump speech some weeks later, she listed categories that described the American electorate as she saw it, offering a fascinating portrait of the politics of the 1990s meeting the realities of the 2010s. She dedicated her candidacy equally to “the successful and the struggling,” to “innovators and inventors” as well as “factory workers and food servers.” In other words, she addressed herself to Americans for whom the world was working more or less well, and to familiar and long-established blue-collar categories. She made no specific mention of gig workers, downwardly mobile credentialed professionals, or any of the other restless social categories that multiplied after the shock of 2008–09.

A few weeks after Clinton’s announcement, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont declared his campaign for the same Democratic nomination. Sanders was an odd messiah. He had spent a lifetime in politics with little to show for it. No major piece of legislation bore his name, and precious few minor pieces either. An independent socialist, he had stayed aloof from the Democratic Party without building a movement of his own. Few had considered him an inspiring personality or a compelling orator. Yet amid this new radical temper, he quickly gathered a cultlike following—and won 13 million votes, to carry 23 caucuses and primaries. When he ultimately lost to Clinton, the defeat left many of his supporters with resentments that divided leftists from liberals in ways that may have helped Donald Trump win the Electoral College in the general election in November 2016.

In 2002, toward the end of her public career, Thatcher was asked to name her greatest achievement. “Tony Blair and New Labour,” she replied. “We forced our opponents to change their minds.”

Sanders might say the same about Trump and his Republican Party. Goodbye to Reagan-era enthusiasm for markets and trade: Trump vowed much more aggressive and intrusive government action to protect American businesses and workers from global competition. He also offered a bleak diagnosis of America’s condition, for which the only way forward was to return to the past.

At the same time, Trump’s persona vindicated every critique Sanders might advance about the decadence of late capitalism. Here was a putative billionaire whose business methods involved cheating customers and bilking suppliers. His private life was one scandal after another, and he spent his money on garish and gimcrack displays. He staffed his administration with plutocrats who were flagrantly disdainful of the travails of ordinary people, and with grifters who liked to live high on public expense.

Then, beginning in 2020, the coronavirus pandemic intensified the anti-market feeling. The economic effects enriched those who possessed assets, especially real estate: The median house price in the U.S. had jumped from $317,000 in the spring of 2020 to $443,000 by the end of 2022. The federal pandemic response could also be gamed by business owners; the U.S. government estimates that as much as $200 billion of COVID-relief funds may have been fraudulently pocketed. But if you were a person who rented his or her home and lived on wages, you were almost certainly worse off in 2022 than you had been in 2019. Your wages bought less; your rent cost more.

The outlook was especially bleak for young college graduates. The average new graduate owes more than $28,000 a year in student debt. Hopes of repaying that debt were dimmed by the weak post-COVID job market for new graduates. Joe Biden’s presidential administration did relieve some student debt, but its most ambitious plans to help new graduates were struck down by the Supreme Court as exceeding executive authority.

In some respects, people born since 1990 are more conservative than their elders. Academic surveys find that Americans, male and female, who attended high school in the 2010s express more traditional views about gender roles than those who attended high school in the 1990s. But on economic questions specifically, an observable shift of attitude against markets and capitalism has occurred. Only 40 percent of adults younger than 30 expressed a positive view of capitalism in a 2022 Pew survey, a drop from 52 percent pre-pandemic. Older groups lost faith too, but not so steeply: Among over 65s, a positive view of capitalism dipped from 76 percent pre-pandemic to 73 percent post-pandemic.

This disillusionment has opened the door to self-described socialists in the 2020s. The most recent and most spectacular of this new cohort is Zohran Mamdani, who earlier this month won the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City in an upset election.

Mamdani campaigned on promises to raise taxes on New York’s richest inhabitants to finance a bold new program of state enterprise: free bus service, government-owned grocery stores, a rent freeze for the 1 million apartments under city jurisdiction, and a vow to build 200,000 affordable-housing units over the next decade. After the tallies were boosted by New York’s ranked-choice voting system, Mamdani won 56 percent of the vote. He now tops polls for the general election in November. His agenda already is influencing Democrats nationwide.

Few if any of the Americans who use the term socialist would today defend Communist central planning. But as they criticize the many failings of contemporary American society, they tend to shirk the obvious counter-question: If not central planning, then what do they want? Liberals such as Bill and Hillary Clinton proposed to let markets create wealth, which governments would then tax to support social programs. If that’s out of style, if something more radical is sought, then what might that something be? Merely Clintonism with higher taxes? Or a genuine alternative? How can a society that aspires to socialism produce the wealth it wants to redistribute if not by the same old capitalist methods of property, prices, and profits?

The socialists of a century ago promised both a new way to create wealth and a new way to share it. The preeminent American socialist of the early 20th century, Eugene V. Debs, outlined that new system in speeches such as the one he delivered in Girard, Kansas, in 1908:

We Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity shall produce, not for profit but in abundance to satisfy human wants … Every man and woman will then be economically free. They can, without let or hindrance, apply their labor, with the best machinery that can be devised, to all the natural resources, do the work of society and produce for all; and then receive in exchange a certificate of value equivalent to that of their production. Then society will improve its institutions in proportion to the progress of invention. Whether in the city or on the farm, all things productive will be carried forward on a gigantic scale.

As soon as it was attempted, this breathtaking utopian vision bumped into a daunting challenge: Without market prices, how can any of those gigantic socialist enterprises know what to make or how to commit their resources? And without market institutions, including the profit motive, how can we have market prices? Socialist enterprises would blunder about in the dark, unable to communicate with one another, unable to respond to changing circumstances, because they severed the lines of communication that connect economic actors.

Much brainpower was invested over many decades to solve this riddle. Francis Spufford’s novel Red Plenty makes improbably poignant literature out of the desperate hopes of Soviet economists that the new technology of the computer might somehow rescue socialism from its own impossibility.

But there was no escape. There is no socialist way to create wealth. There is only a socialist way to spend wealth. The socialist revival of the past half decade no longer even pretends to worry about wealth production. It exists purely as a new set of claims on existing modes of production: socialist apartments funded in effect by taxes on nonsocialist apartments, socialist grocery stores that do not have to pay the taxes or rent paid by nonsocialist grocery stores.

The beneficiaries of these claims will not necessarily be society’s poorest. New York City distributes affordable-housing units through a process that begins with a lottery but rapidly transforms into a test of skill, savvy, and connections. In the first place, New York favors applicants who work for the city, in itself a step that advantages middle-class people over the truly needy. Then, once the lucky lottery winners get their good news, they must assemble a mass of documents to prove their desirability as tenants—pay stubs, lease records, birth certificates. As an expert on the process explained to a real-estate website: “Once you’ve been selected, it’s all about being organized and efficient.” The people most at risk of homelessness are those least likely to navigate New York’s system of nonmarket and submarket rents.

In 2022, Mayor Eric Adams—elected as a Democrat, though now running for reelection as an independent—cut the ribbon on a $120 million project in Far Rockaway. This outer-borough development offered studios starting at $522 a month, two-bedroom apartments for $809 a month. But the building contained only 224 units. For all the excitement of the lucky beneficiaries, this is the faintest replica of a housing solution—as well as a reality check to Mamdani’s grandiose vision of government-led housing abundance.

Given this disappointing record, why are so many New Yorkers signing up for more and bigger? The short answer is that the debate about socialism is scarcely about socialism at all. Socialism’s catastrophes are today obscure, relegated to a poorly remembered past. Dissatisfaction with the present-day economic system is felt urgently in the here and now.

[Read: Zohran Mamdani’s lesson for the left]

The progressive economist Joseph Stiglitz recently remarked, “Trumponomics is ersatz capitalism.” The president and those around him are accumulating huge fortunes by unashamedly preying on the credulity of their followers. Trump insiders have used political power to harass regulatory agencies and cripple tax enforcement. Trump’s big policy moves are accompanied by an avalanche of suspicious trades. “Of the stock and stock fund sales administration officials reported between Jan. 20 and April 30, 90% fell within 10 days of the tariff announcements,” USA Today reported last week. The New York Times suggested in April that if Trump seems to care little about crashing the stock market but a lot about the bond market, that may be explained by his own holdings: few stocks, many bonds. (Unlike most past presidents, Trump has not put his holdings in a blind trust.)

While Trump’s behavior discredits markets, his rhetoric vilifies markets. In April, the Trump administration imposed the most crushing tariffs on international commerce since the Smoot-Hawley Act’s regime of 1930. The Trump adviser Stephen Miller explained to Fox News the administration’s reasons: “Our leaders allowed foreign countries to rig the rules of the game, to cheat, to steal, to rob, to plunder,” he said. “That has cost America trillions of dollars in wealth.” Echoing his boss’s grievance-laden language, he said, “They’ve stolen our industries.” It’s not always phrased so vituperatively, but the message is consistent: free exchange is an illusion; there is nothing but exploitation. The only way to protect Americans from this exploitation is for the nation’s political leaders to subject more and more of the U.S. economy to state control. If this way of thinking is true, then the severest critics of capitalism are right.

Happily, this way of thinking is not true. Free exchange is a system of cooperation and mutual benefit, the most effective that humanity has yet discovered. But who in the Trump-led United States is arguing the case for free exchange? The most influential intellectuals of the left reject markets as too inequitable; those on the right reject them as too cosmopolitan. On one side, the professional politicians are intimidated by their most radical supporters; on the other, the politicians are under the sway of crooks and con artists, whose idea of capitalism is unregulated permission to bilk and defraud.

Marxists condemn capitalism as “organized robbery.” They could not be more wrong. But who will refute them when the government of the world’s largest capitalist democracy is in the hands of organized robbers?

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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

This used to be easy. You grabbed The New Yorker, The New York Times, Time Out New York, or The Village Voice and checked out the event listings. When I graduated from college and moved to the city in 2003, Time Out quickly became my bible, syllabus, and road map. The listings guided me through the cobwebbed bowels of St. Mark’s Church and into the Ontological-Hysteric Theater hidden within, where Richard Foreman’s mind-bending plays made an indelible impression on me. The listings brought me to Southpaw to hear Neko Case’s bloodshot voice; to the Village Vanguard for Jason Moran or Paul Motian; and to a tin-ceilinged basement bar in Park Slope, where I saw a baby-faced Sharon Van Etten sing her earliest songs, and then bashfully hand out CDs burned with her demos, rich with high-frequency hiss from the tape deck onto which she’d recorded them.

But over the past decade, event listings have all but disappeared. The New York Times killed its weekly arts listings at the end of 2016, and its online arts-and-entertainment guide remains frozen, like a butterfly pinned and dried, in March 2020: “New York Arts Institutions Closed Because of Coronavirus” reads the top headline. The Village Voice folded in 2018. (It has recently been revived but has no listings section to speak of.) The New Yorker’s Goings On About Town section was slashed in 2023 to just a page or two, now offering one recommendation per discipline. And Time Out, that veritable doorstop of weekly listings, now previews one or two concerts a month.

[From the June 2025 issue: Is this the worst-ever era of American pop culture?]

This is, in part, a familiar story about declining ad revenue, about changing pressures and priorities in the journalism business. When listings began to disappear, many imagined that the internet would simply fill the void—that artists and their fans (as well as nonprofit institutions and their audiences) would find new ways to connect. But a world in which clicks are dollars has led to an ouroboros of cultural journalism in which what is already popular must be written about—which increases its popularity, which means it must be written about, which increases its popularity—and a social-media ecosystem in which artists, no longer able to rely on legacy media for visibility, must create content to please an algorithm instead of their fans or themselves.

As mainstream culture grows ever narrower, once-robust subcultures are struggling for survival. Perhaps social-media influencers are today’s critics and curators, but even as our feeds promise “discovery,” they mostly serve us what we already like. We have no idea what we’re missing.

The listings were my lodestar. And that star’s orbit was maintained, at least in part, by a journalist named Steve Smith.

Smith was a music editor at Time Out New York from 2001 to 2014. He’d gotten his start at a classical radio station in Houston, introducing Brahms symphonies by day and playing in a rock band in biker bars—he was the drummer—by night. This stylistic mishmash would become a trademark of his sensibility. When we spoke last month, Smith mentioned Karlheinz Stockhausen; the Clash; Billy Idol; John Zorn; John Coltrane; Scandinavian metal; Kronos Quartet; Kiss; Steve Reich; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; and Beethoven—all within the first 10 minutes of our conversation.

Time Out “was a magazine that was basically nothing but the listings,” Smith told me*.* “Nobody said, ‘Oh, that obscure thing that’s happening on a loading dock in Tribeca? No, that’s too weird.’ I was basically told, ‘List what’s interesting; list what people will want to know about.’” A coveted red asterisk denoted a critic’s pick. “I had the privilege,” he said, “of making a difference in the lives of a number of composers and performers. And that, to me, was the most gratifying piece of the job.”

One of the lives he changed was mine. The first review I ever received as a singer-songwriter, for a set at Tonic, was written by Smith, for his blog Night After Night. A 33-word listing in Time Out came soon after—a blurb that would remain in my press kit for years. In 2009, he interviewed me for a New York Times Sunday Arts & Leisure profile. The morning after the story ran, Lincoln Center called my manager and offered me a debut on its American Songbook performance series. Who reviewed that concert for the Times? None other than Steve Smith.

These listings weren’t just a boon for artists like me—they were also a teeth-cutting opportunity for cub journalists, one that demanded brutal concision. Smith, a master of the miniature, stood on the shoulders of those such as Robert Christgau, a longtime Village Voice music editor and the self-proclaimed dean of American rock critics. About a Patti Smith show, from the April 7, 1975, issue: “Funny, frightening, and just polished enough, Smith shifts from rock and roll to poetry reading like someone who really believes in street literature.”

In its heyday, the Voice’s newsroom reverberated with the chaotic counterpoint of freaky choristers, all covering New York City with an obsessive commitment to hyperlocalism: Scenesters haunted hardcore shows at warehouses in Brooklyn; theater nerds ventured to East Village basements for experimental one-acts; dance lovers frequented Lower East Side nightclubs to cover bawdy performance art and contortionist spectacles. Here was a newspaper that, through dogged documentation of small and sometimes-fragile artistic microclimates, came to wield wide-reaching influence over national aesthetic trends as it championed unknown artists like Smith, the Talking Heads, Philip Glass, and so many others. That New York media have turned away from the local in favor of established celebrities may ultimately result in its irrelevance.

Sixteen years after that first profile in the Times, I am fortunate to still be making a living playing music. But mine was a transitional generation: I came of age just in time to benefit from the old models and media apparatuses, only to watch them crumble around me. Few emerging musicians today could dream of a two-sentence blurb previewing a Monday-night set at a small club on the Lower East Side, let alone a thousand-word profile.

The demise of listings is “tangled up with the erosion of review coverage,” the jazz critic Nate Chinen told me, while stressing that “the fundamental utility of a publication is bringing people out” to see a gig: “The immediate danger is that artists play and people don’t know about it.”

Chinen would know. He wrote the jazz listings at The New York Times from 2005 until 2016. Those blurbs, he understood, could mean the difference between a standing-room-only show and one where the musicians outnumbered the audience. Today, it’s harder than ever for aesthetically adventurous artists to make ends meet. Some have left the business, and others limp along, subsidizing their income with teaching gigs and odd jobs. Meanwhile, pop stars are doing great.

The decline of listings followed the broader trend toward “poptimism,” a critical movement that began as a corrective to the white-male-dominated popular-music journalism of the late 20th century. In a now-canonic broadside published in 2004, the critic Kelefa Sanneh argued that the snobbery of those white-male critics was bathed in racism and sexism, and often resulted in the neglect of music by women and people of color. Poptimists believed that music that was actually popular—the guilty-pleasure radio hits we wail in the car, many of them performed by nonwhite, nonmale artists—ought to be treated with the same reverence granted to the art rockers. Fair enough!

But what Sanneh and like-minded critics could not have anticipated was the extent to which their goal would collide with the economic imperatives of internet-based journalism*.* In the 21 years since Sanneh’s essay was published, poptimism has become the status quo in mainstream music criticism, reaching its apotheosis in 2023 with USA Today’s hiring of a full-time Taylor Swift reporter, Bryan West, who would go on to file—you may want to sit down—501 articles about Swift during her Eras Tour. In such a climate, it’s easy to forget that poptimism was once driven by the impulse to lift up marginalized voices.

Indeed, much of today’s cultural coverage reflects a different societal more, one in which, as the political philosopher Michael J. Sandel has written, we measure the value of people’s contributions to the common good solely by “the market value of the goods or services they sell.” In other words, covering what’s popular doesn’t just serve journalism’s economic bottom line; it also expresses our beliefs. In a society in which dignity and status accrue to the powerful, it’s no wonder that outlets once dedicated to nurturing subcultures now publish endless paeans to celebrities.

A reader might object: Aren’t you just complaining about the cultural version of natural selection? If niche genres can’t hack it in today’s algorithm-driven world, maybe they deserve extinction. But if they are allowed to die, popular music will also suffer. The terms highbrow and lowbrow conceal a broader ecology in which the raw materials of art move easily from one genre to another. Classical composers have long ransacked folk music to furnish their symphonies with great tunes. Similarly, there would be no Beatles’ White Album without Karlheinz Stockhausen’s tape music, no Rosalía’s Motomami without the vocal arrangements of the Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw. If we want the next Billie Eilish to be able to work with the next Attacca Quartet, we should ensure that lesser-known artists enjoy a bare minimum of support.

To look at a page of event previews was to understand how a collection of artists related to one another. This, according to the opera critic Olivia Giovetti, was one of Smith’s great gifts as an editor. “He crafted listings,” Giovetti told me, “in such a way that drew out and illuminated the connections between artists, so that the reader came to understand that if they enjoyed that Victoire show at Le Poisson Rouge, they might also dig a yMusic concert at Rockwood Music Hall.” You may not have heard of either group, but you likely know the Metropolitan Opera, where Victoire’s founder, Missy Mazzoli, is headed with her adaptation of George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and you’ve probably heard of Paul Simon, who tapped yMusic to join him on his farewell tour in 2018.

The loss of listings is, in this sense, the loss of a whole world, which historians, too, will have to contend with. Take any issue of The New Yorker from the first 98 years of its existence, and the Goings On About Town section offers a rich snapshot of the city and its subcultures. The same was true of the Times. “On any given day,” Chinen told me, “there would be a review of a New York–based dance company at the Joyce Theater, a Ben Ratliff review about a koto player at Issue Project Room, Jon Pareles reviewing an indie-folk artist at Joe’s Pub. It was this incredibly robust account of a thriving arts community in a city that, right or wrong, considers itself to be the center of the universe. That’s the garden. That’s the plant mix that existed.” How will historians write the story of a city that no longer maintains a record of its own cultural life?

In this new paradigm, I, like so many others, feel shackled to my Instagram account, resentful that it has become my personal marketing and public-relations departments, yet resigned to its relative efficacy as a mouthpiece. (I tried to opt out, taking a full year off from the internet and another six months away from social media, returning only when my manager begged me to do so. “The phone has stopped ringing,” he said bluntly.) So yes, amid the gallimaufry of links, photos, and screen caps, I post bite-size songs: here, a William Carlos Williams–inspired lament for the tariff-burdened penguins of Heard Island; there, a setting of a Craigslist ad for free reptiles. A lot of my work is sober and politically minded, but I think it’s important to hold on to laughter and absurdity too.

Still, those miniature tunes, delivered algorithmically, often bypass my own Instagram followers, landing instead in the feeds of total strangers. For them, these songs are divorced from the broader footprint of my work, which has included oratorios about homelessness and railway travelogues documenting a divided America. Cultural journalism once created that context.

[Spencer Kornhaber: Taylor Swift is having quality-control issues]

What’s to be done? Performing-arts institutions could work together to underwrite their own weekly listings website or print publication, with their financial contributions scaled according to their budget so that small operations aren’t left out. Sure, there would be challenges, namely a blurring of the line between advertising and editorial. Ideally, a group of writers and editors would produce listings with total independence, shielded from pressure by funders.

The other solution—plausible or not—is for outlets such as the Times and The New Yorker to reverse course: to recognize that their listings were a public good serving artists, audiences, and arts presenters alike. The societal benefit of a comprehensive guide to the cultural sector can’t be readily calculated on a balance sheet.

For now, Smith is still serving as the secretary, the minute keeper, the town historian for the creative-music community in New York. After Time Out, he spent two years at The Boston Globe as an arts editor, and then bounced between various jobs covering music back in the city, including a five-year stint writing listings for The New Yorker. He’s now a copywriter at an arts institution. Still, he maintains a Substack newsletter, Night After Night, which shares the name of his old blog, the one on which he gave me my first review. Each week, Smith compiles a roundup of notable events in music that lives beyond that narrow mainstream. When I asked him when he returned to writing listings, he said, “I never really stopped.”

Although a comprehensive digital archive of Time Out does not exist, The New Yorker is searchable back to its inaugural issue, published in February 1925. Like any good elder-Millennial narcissist, I did a quick search of my name to look for its first mention in Goings On About Town. There it was, in the issue for April 27, 2009. What else was happening? That week, Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin were starring in a production of Waiting for Godot; Steve Wilson was at the Village Vanguard; Judy Collins was at Café Carlyle; Carnegie Hall featured appearances by Zakir Hussain, Kronos Quartet (playing the compositions of Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Osvaldo Golijov), and the soon-to-be opera superstar Eric Owens; Chick Corea was leading an all-star band at Lincoln Center; and Lou Reed was holding court at the Gramercy Theatre.

Hell of a city, no?

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Luis Parrales, an assistant editor who has written about what the border-hawk Catholics get wrong and why the papacy is no ordinary succession.

Luis is a new fan of the author Mario Vargas Llosa and a longtime listener of the singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. His other recommendations include “Femininomenon,” by Chappell Roan; The Bear; and anything by Conan O’Brien—whom he deems “the king of American comedy.”

The Culture Survey: Luis Parrales

Best novel I’ve recently read, and the best work of nonfiction: I was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa before his death, in April, besides some high-level lore—his role in the Latin American Boom, his failed presidential bid, the time he socked Gabriel García Márquez in the face. Soon after, I decided enough was enough and picked up his historical novel The Feast of the Goat, published in 2000. Through the brutal regime of Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic until his assassination at the hands of revolutionaries, in 1961, Vargas Llosa explores how the wounds inflicted by a dictatorship remain long after it officially ends. But as gritty and dark as the novel gets—and it gets dark—The Feast of the Goat is one of the most readable books I’ve ever encountered. That’s both because Vargas Llosa’s crisp prose makes the 400 or so pages fly by and, more important, because his novel never loses sight of the power of human resilience.

I was a bit more familiar with the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who also passed away earlier this year. Although best known for his 1981 book, After Virtue (if you haven’t already, read David Brooks’s reflections on how its arguments help explain President Donald Trump’s appeal), MacIntyre also wrote Dependent Rational Animals. The book offers one of the most persuasive cases I’ve read against treating individual autonomy as the highest ideal, as well as a plea to view our limitations—aging, illness—and dependence on one another not as failings but as constitutive elements of human nature. Oh, and MacIntyre dedicates long stretches of his book to the intelligence of dolphins. Which is great.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: Quiet: “If I Don’t Hear From You Tonight,” by Courtney Barnett. Loud: “Femininomenon,” by Chappell Roan.

Something I recently rewatched: Before earning box-office cachet with the Dune series, Denis Villeneuve directed Incendies, a modern Sophoclean tragedy set during a civil war in the Middle East. Nearly 15 years after its release, the film remains one of the most sobering portrayals of familial ties on-screen—of how they can at once inflict unspeakable pain and inspire courage and selflessness.

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: The latest season of FX’s exquisite The Bear.

The last thing that made me snort with laughter: For my money, Conan O’Brien is the king of American comedy, though part of his greatness is that he’s always reveled in playing the fool. He doesn’t have the commanding swagger of a Dave Chappelle or Bill Burr, opting instead for a style that my colleague David Sims has described as a “mix of silly surrealism with an old-timey flair.” I’ve been keeping up with O’Brien since his Late Night days, when I would get home from school and play the previous night’s episode, so watching him get the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor earlier this year felt plenty nostalgic. The full ceremony is on Netflix now, and it’s a comedic cornucopia for any Team Coco stans.

The last thing that made me cry: A few weeks before Independence Day, while visiting New York City, I ended up going to mass at Ascension Church, which has a jazz liturgy on Sunday evenings. Most of my favorite church music leans traditional, yet to my surprise, I felt incredibly moved by the unconventional reverence of melodies with echoes of Art Blakey and Miles Davis. One highlight: the jazz mass’s version of the hymn “This Is My Song.” These lines in particular felt providentially relevant for anybody searching for a more warmhearted patriotism:

This is my home, the country where my heart is; here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine; but other hearts in other lands are beating with hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

The last museum or gallery show that I loved: Museo Nacional de Historia, in Mexico City.

A musical artist who means a lot to me: The Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler isn’t super well known in America—though he did write the first Spanish-language song to win an Oscar for Best Original Song—but he’s pretty acclaimed in Latin America and Spain, especially for his lyricism. He can use scientific principles (the law of conservation or the evolution of cells, for example) as metaphors for love, or meditate on weighty political questions (migration, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) without coming off as preachy. No musician means more to me than Drexler, whose art teems with the wonder of a wide-eyed humanist.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: “Two in the Campagna,” by Robert Browning:

Only I discern— Infinite passion, and the pain Of finite hearts that yearn.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The first survivors of CECOT tell their stories.The one book everyone should readChasing le Carré in Corfu

The Week Ahead

The Naked Gun, an action-comedy film starring Liam Neeson as a hapless yet determined detective (in theaters Friday)Season 2 of Twisted Metal, a postapocalyptic action-comedy series with murderous clowns and a deadly demolition tournament (premiering Thursday on Peacock)Black Genius, an essay collection by Tre Johnson that identifies overlooked examples of genius in the Black community (out Tuesday)

Essay

Eero Jarnefelt / Heritage Images / Getty

The Mistake Parents Make With Chores

By Christine Carrig

Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with …

Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I’ve been known to say, “You live here!” as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes.

Read the full article.

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Despite flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains in the Philippines, Jade Rick Verdillo and Jamaica Aguilar decided to stick to their planned wedding date.

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All the comforts of a Waldorf Astoria city-view suite did not, at that moment, seem to cheer Jasmine Crockett. The 44-year-old Texas Democrat known for her viral comebacks was frowning as she walked into her hotel room in Atlanta last month. She glanced around before pulling an aide into the bathroom, where I could hear them whispering. Minutes later, she reemerged, ready to unload.

She was losing her race to serve as the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, she told me, a job she felt well suited for. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were planning to vote for the senior-most person in the race, even though that person wasn’t actually a Black Caucus member, Crockett complained. California members were siding with the California candidate. One member was supporting someone else in the race, she said, even though “that person did the worst” in their pitch to the caucus. Crockett was starting to feel a little used. Some of her colleagues were “reaching out and asking for donations,” she said, but those same colleagues “won’t even send me a text back” about the Oversight job.

To Crockett, the race had become a small-scale version of the Democratic Party’s bigger predicament. Her colleagues still haven’t learned what, to her, is obvious: Democrats need sharper, fiercer communicators. “It’s like, there’s one clear person in the race that has the largest social-media following,” Crockett told me.

In poll after poll since Donald Trump’s reelection, Democratic voters have said they want a fighter, and Crockett, a former attorney who represents the Dallas area, has spent two and a half years in Congress trying to be one. Through her hearing-room quips and social-media insults, she’s become known, at least in MSNBC-watching households, as a leading general in the battle against Trump. The president is aware of this. He has repeatedly called Crockett a “low-IQ” individual; she has dubbed him a “buffoon” and “Putin’s hoe.” Perhaps the best-known Crockett clapback came last year during a hearing, after Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia made fun of Crockett’s fake eyelashes. Crockett, seeming to relish the moment, leaned into the mic and blasted Greene’s “bleach-blond, bad-built, butch body.” Crockett trademarked the phrase—which she now refers to as “B6”—and started selling T-shirts.

At the time, I wrote that the episode was embarrassing for everyone involved. But clearly it resonated. Crockett has become a national figure. Last year, she gave a keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention and was a national co-chair of Kamala Harris’s campaign. This year, she has been a fixture on cable news and talk shows as well as a top party fundraiser; she was in Atlanta, in part, for a meet and greet with local donors. At an anti-Trump protest on the National Mall in April, I saw several demonstrators wearing B6 shirts. Others carried signs with Crockett’s face on them.

Crockett is testing out the coarser, insult-comedy-style attacks that the GOP has embraced under Trump, the general idea being that when the Republicans go low, the Democrats should meet them there. That approach, her supporters say, appeals to people who drifted away from the Democrats in 2024, including many young and Black voters. “What establishment Democrats see as undignified,” Max Burns, a progressive political strategist, told me, “disillusioned Democrats see that as a small victory.” Republicans understand this, Crockett said: “Marjorie is not liked by her caucus, but they get her value, and so they gave her a committee chairmanship.”

Perhaps inadvertently, Crockett seemed to be acknowledging something I heard from others in my reporting: that the forthrightness her supporters love might undermine her relationships within the party. Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats worry that her rhetoric could alienate the more moderate voters the party needs to win back. In the same week that Democratic leadership had instructed members to focus on Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for billionaires, Crockett referred to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who uses a wheelchair, as “Governor Hot Wheels.” (Crockett claimed that she was referring to Abbott’s busing of migrants.) In an interview with Vanity Fair after the 2024 election, Crockett said that Hispanic Trump supporters had “almost like a slave mentality.” She later told a CNN host that she was tired of “white tears” and the “mediocre white boys” who are upset by DEI.

Unsurprisingly, Trump himself seems eager to elevate Crockett. “They say she’s the face of the party,” the president told my Atlantic colleagues recently. “If she’s what they have to offer, they don’t have a chance.” Some of the Republican targeting of Crockett is clearly rooted in racism; online, Trump’s supporters constantly refer to her as “ghetto” and make fun of her hair.

[From the June 2025 issue: ‘I run the country and the world’]

None of this appears to be giving Crockett any pause. The first time I met her, a month before our conversation in Atlanta, she was accepting a Webby Award, in part for a viral exchange in which she’d referred to Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina as “child” and Mace suggested they “take it outside.” Backstage, in a downtown-Manhattan ballroom, I asked Crockett whether she ever had regrets about her public comments. She raised her eyebrows and replied, “I don’t second-guess shit.”

This spring, I watched Crockett test her theory of politics in a series of public appearances. At the Webbys, most of her fellow award winners were celebrities and influencers, but only Crockett received a standing ovation. A week later, Crockett flamed Republicans and the Trump administration during a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A 15-minute clip of her upbraiding ICE agents—“These people are out of control!”—has racked up more than 797,000 views on YouTube; I know this because she told me. On TikTok and Instagram, Crockett has one of the highest follower counts of any House member, and she monitors social-media engagement like a day trader checks her portfolio. She is highly conscious, too, of her self-presentation. During many of our conversations, Crockett wore acrylic nails painted with the word RESIST, and a set of heavy lashes over her brown eyes. The lock screen on her phone is a headshot of herself.

Representative Jasmine Crockett rides in a vehicle after attending events in the Atlanta area last month. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Behind the scenes, the congresswoman speaks casually. At the Waldorf, I watched her deliver a quick Oversight-campaign pitch via Zoom. It was a virtual meeting of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, she’d explained to me beforehand. But then, after the call, she wasn’t sure. “CAPAC is the Asian caucus, right?” she asked. “Yes,” the aide confirmed. “That would’ve been bad,” Crockett said with a laugh. She can also be brusque. During our interview at the Waldorf, she dialed up a staffer in D.C. in front of me and scolded him for an unclear note on her schedule. Another time, in the car, after an aide brought Crockett a paper bag full of food from a fundraiser, she peered inside, scrunched her nose, and said, “This looks like crap.”

Still, Crockett is often more thoughtful in person than she might appear in clips. Once, after a hearing, I watched as she responded to a request for comment with a tight 90-second answer about faith and service. Another time, a reporter who was filming her tried to provoke her by asking what she would say to people who think she is “mentally ill.” “They can think whatever they want to, because as of now, we live in a democracy,” Crockett answered calmly, before taking another question. “I don’t want people to lose sight of the fact that this is someone with a very fine, legally trained mind,” Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, a mentor of Crockett’s, told me.

Crockett’s Republican critics like to say that she’s a private-school girl playing a plainspoken Texas brawler for social-media clout. They’re not wrong about her background. Crockett grew up an only child in St. Louis, not Dallas, and attended private high school before enrolling at Rhodes College, a small liberal-arts school in Tennessee. When Crockett was young, her father was a life-insurance salesman and a teacher, she told me, and she has talked often about his work as a preacher; her mother, she said, still works for the IRS. Crockett’s stage presence precedes her political career. At Rhodes, from which she graduated in 2003, she was recruited to the mock-trial program after a team leader watched her enthusiastic performance as the narrator Ronnette in Little Shop of Horrors, her former coach, Marcus Pohlmann, told me. She won a national award during her first and only year in the program.

As Crockett tells it, she became interested in the law after she and a few other Black students at Rhodes received anonymous letters containing racist threats. The school hired a Black female attorney from the Cochran Firm, a national personal-injury-law group, to handle the case, Crockett told me. The attorney became Crockett’s “shero,” she said, and inspired her to attend law school herself. When I asked for the name of her shero so that I could interview her, Crockett told me that she did not remember. I reached out to a former Cochran Firm attorney in Tennessee who fit Crockett’s description; she remembered the incident in broad terms but was not sure if she had worked on the case or with Crockett. Although Rhodes College had no specific records of the incident, two people who worked at the college at the time told me that they recalled it.

Crockett worked for a few years as a public defender in deep-red Bowie County, Texas, before starting her own law firm, where she drew attention for defending Black Lives Matter demonstrators. She was sworn in to the Texas state House in 2021 and became the body’s third-most progressive member, according to the Texas Tribune, authoring dozens of bills, with an emphasis on criminal-justice reform. (None of the legislation for which she was the main author ever passed the Republican-dominated legislature.) “Most freshmen come, they are just trying to learn where the restrooms are,” but Crockett “came with a fight in her,” Texas Representative Toni Rose, a former Democratic colleague of Crockett’s, told me.

[Read: The real problem with Democrats’ ground game]

Having defeated an incumbent Democrat to win her seat, Crockett was already viewed as an agitator by some of her new colleagues. Then, in 2021, she became the unofficial spokesperson for a group of more than 50 Texas Democrats who fled to D.C. in a high-profile effort to stall Republican legislation. Her dealings with the press built up “real resentment” with Democratic leaders, one Texas-based party strategist, who was familiar with caucus actions at the time, told me. (This person, like some others interviewed for this story, was granted anonymity to speak candidly.) “When they broke quorum and it was important that everything be secret, she was on the phone to the press talking about what they were getting ready to do,” the strategist said. Both Crockett and her chief of staff at the time, Karrol Rimal, denied this version of events and told me that she had not given an interview before arriving in D.C. Rimal said that Crockett had agreed to do press only if the story would not be published until the Texas lawmakers crossed state lines. He added that state Democrats were sometimes jealous because Crockett “outshined them.”

Crockett attends a conference at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Stonecrest, Georgia, in June. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

The state-House drama was short-lived: After one term, Crockett became the handpicked replacement for 15-term U.S. Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson. Crockett sailed to victory, and less than a year later, her breakthrough moment arrived: While questioning a witness in a committee hearing, Crockett held up a photograph of several boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. The classified documents, she said, looked like they were “in the shitter to me!” Trump critics  praised her as an “absolute star” and their “new favorite Congresswoman.”

Not everyone agreed. Johnson felt that the freshman congresswoman was dismissive of her experience and advice, according to two sources familiar with the relationship. “I don’t think it was a secret” that by the time Johnson died, in December 2023, “she had had second thoughts about Jasmine,” the Texas-based Democratic strategist said. Crockett strongly denied this characterization and said that she had never heard it from those close to Johnson. I reached out to Johnson’s son for his view, but he didn’t respond.

The race to replace the Oversight Committee’s top Democrat, the late Representative Gerry Connolly, presented a multipurpose opportunity. Democrats could preview their resistance strategy for a second Trump administration. And Crockett, who’d run an unsuccessful, last-minute bid for a leadership position the previous year, could test her own viability as a party leader.

In late May, Crockett brought me along to a private meeting in the green-walled office of a freshman member—Maxine Dexter of Oregon—where she made her pitch: The Democrats have a communication problem, Crockett said. “The biggest issue” with Joe Biden’s presidency wasn’t “that he wasn’t a great president,” she explained. “It was that no one knew what the fuck he did.” (Crockett acknowledged to Dexter that the former president is “old as shit,” but said, “He’s an old man that gets shit done.”) Crockett highlighted her own emphasis on social media, and the hundreds of thousands of views she had received on a recent YouTube video. “The base is thirsty. The base right now is not very happy with us,” Crockett continued, and if any lawmaker could make them feel heard, “it’s me.”

Crockett told Dexter that she had big plans for Oversight. She wanted to take hearings on the road, and to show voters that “these motherfuckers”—Republicans—are all “complicit” in Trump’s wrongdoing. She wasn’t worried about her own reelection. “I guess it’s my fearlessness,” she told Dexter.

Dexter asked Crockett about her relationship with leadership. Another young firebrand, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had bumped up against then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi when she arrived in Congress, Dexter noted. Crockett dismissed that concern, explaining that she had never wanted to “burn it down” and prefers to be seen as working on behalf of the party. The national “Fighting Oligarchy” tour featuring Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez is a good idea, Crockett said, but it “kind of makes people be like, Oh, it’s about them, right? Instead of the team.” (Through a spokesperson, Ocasio-Cortez declined to comment. Crockett told me that the two have a positive relationship.)

[Read: Can you really fight populism with populism?]

By the end of the meeting, Dexter was ready to vote for Crockett. But she would never get the chance. Five days after Crockett’s fundraiser in Atlanta, Punchbowl News reported that she had “leaned into the idea of impeaching President Donald Trump,” which spooked swing-district members. Representative Robert Garcia of California was quickly becoming the caucus favorite. Like Crockett, he was relatively young and outspoken. But he had spent his campaign making a “subtle” case for generational change, Punchbowl said, and he’d told members that the Oversight panel shouldn’t “function solely as an anti-Trump entity.”

The same day the Punchbowl report was published, 62 Democratic leaders met to decide which of the four Oversight candidates they’d recommend to the caucus. The vote was decisive: Garcia, with 33 votes, was the winner. Crockett placed last, with only six. Around midnight, she went live on Instagram to announce that she was withdrawing her name from the race; Garcia would be elected the next morning. In the end, “recent questions about something that just wasn’t true” had tanked her support, Crockett told her Instagram viewers. She hadn’t campaigned on impeaching Trump, she told me later; she’d simply told a reporter that, if Democrats held a majority in the House, she would support an impeachment inquiry. And why not? She was just being transparent, Crockett told me, “and frankly, I may not get a lot of places because I am very transparent.”

Some of Crockett’s fellow Democrats find that candor refreshing. “People don’t necessarily agree with her aggressive communication style,” Representative Julie Johnson of Texas told me. “I’m thrilled she’s doing it, because we need it all.” Garcia, in a statement from his office, told me that Crockett is “one of the strongest fighters we have,” and that, “as a party, we should be taking notes on the kinds of skills she exemplifies.” But several other Democrats I reached out to about the race seemed uninterested in weighing in. Thirteen of her colleagues on the Oversight and Judiciary committees, along with 20 other Democratic members I contacted for this story, either declined to talk with me on the record or didn’t respond to my interview requests. Senior staffers for three Democratic members told me that some of Crockett’s colleagues see her as undisciplined but are reluctant to criticize her publicly. “She likes to talk,” one of the staffers said. “Is she a loose cannon? Sometimes. Does that cause headaches for other members? 100 percent.”

Crockett said that people are free to disagree with her communication style, but that she “was elected to speak up for the people that I represent.” As for her colleagues, four days before this story was published, Crockett called me to express frustration that I had reached out to so many House members without telling her first. She was, she told me, “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.”

Crockett does not have supporters so much as she has admirers. Everywhere she goes, young people ask for selfies, and groups of her red-clad Delta Sigma Theta sorority sisters pop up to cheer her on. A few days before she dropped out of the Oversight race, a congregation outside of Atlanta full of middle-aged Black Georgians was giddy to host her: Here was Jasmine Crockett, recounting her feud with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“She thought she could play with me,” Crockett told Pastor Jamal Bryant, the leader of the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church and a progressive activist. There were a few “oh no”s in the crowd. “The average, maybe, person in my party potentially would have just let it go,” Crockett went on. “I wasn’t the one.” There were claps and whoops. “I was steaming, and I was ready,” she said. “I was like, ‘Well, two wrongs gonna make a right today, baby, cause I ain’t gonna let it go!’” The righteous anger in Crockett’s voice was audible; people applauded for it, probably because it sounded a lot like their own.

Audience members react to Crockett during a live recording of Pastor Jamal Bryant’s podcast at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church. (Photograph by Melissa Golden for The Atlantic)

Crockett’s fans are rooting for her to go bigger. And when I asked if she was considering running for Senate in the future—John Cornyn is up for reelection next year—Crockett didn’t wave me off. “My philosophy is: Stay ready so you don’t have to get ready,” she said. Crockett imagines a world in which Democrats are associated with lofty ideals and monosyllabic slogans, like Barack Obama once was. When I asked her what the party should stand for beyond being against Trump, and what she stands for, she explained, “For me, I always just say ‘the people,’” adding that her campaigns have always been associated with “fire.”

[Read: Where is Obama?]

Plenty of other Democrats believe that Crockett’s approach comes dangerously close to arson. Her critics argue that it’s easy to be outspoken in a safe Democratic seat; they might also point out that Crockett received 7,000 fewer votes in 2024 than Johnson, her predecessor, had in 2020. You can see James Carville coming from a mile away. “I don’t think we need a Marjorie Taylor Greene,” the longtime Democratic consultant told me. Crockett is “passionate. She has an instinct for making headlines. But does that help us at the end of the day?” he said. “You’re trying to win the election. That’s the overall goal.”

Crockett is not Marjorie Taylor Greene; for one, she is not peddling space-laser, weather-control conspiracy theories. Yet Crockett’s combative style could be a misreading of the moment, Lakshya Jain, an analyst at the political-forecasting site Split Ticket, told me. “People think the brand issue that Democrats have is they don’t fight enough and that they’re not mean enough,” Jain said, but “those are all just proxies for saying that they can’t get stuff done for people.” In Congress, Crockett has championed progressive causes and introduced plenty of legislation, but none of the bills she’s been the lead sponsor of has become law.

Clearly, though, lots of real-life voters want Jasmine Crockett. At the church outside Atlanta, Pastor Bryant triggered a standing ovation when he declared, “Jasmine Crockett for president” and “2028 is coming, y’all!” Outside, in the parking lot, someone shouted at Crockett, “First Black-woman president!” June was a disheartening month for Crockett. She was soundly rejected by her own colleagues and shut out of a chance at institutional power. But when we talked in her hotel room in Atlanta, she’d framed the situation differently: If Americans on the outside could vote, she’d insisted, “I absolutely feel like I know where it would go.”

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.

Lingering questions over the Epstein case are consuming the White House and paralyzing Congress. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how a once-fringe conspiracy theory became a spiraling controversy.

One of the reasons Donald Trump cannot manage to deny or deflect attention over the Epstein investigation is that the case centers on “what the MAGA base is about, which is powerful people doing things behind closed doors,” Eugene Daniels, a senior Washington correspondent at MSNBC, argued last night.

The president tends to talk to his base about “how the lowly man and woman are losing out to these interests in Washington,” Daniels continued. “But now they are seeing Donald Trump seemingly being one of the people doing the defending and the protecting of the powerful people,” and “that’s why I think he can’t shake it.”

Joining the Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Eugene Daniels, a co-host of The Weekend at MSNBC; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; and Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News.

Watch the full episode here.

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

“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.

Read the article.

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.

Read the article.

The One Book Everyone Should Read

By The Atlantic Culture Desk

The Atlantic’s staffers on the books they share—again and again

Read the article.

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

Howell, Steve B. et al. “The Probable Direct-imaging Detection of the Stellar Companion to Betelgeuse.” The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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

Ishchenko, Maryna, and Berczik, Peter. “Gravitational influence of the globular cluster NGC 7078 (M 15) flyby of the Oort cloud system.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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

Painter, Luke E. et al. “Changing aspen stand structure following large carnivore restoration in Yellowstone.” Forest Ecology & Management.

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.

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Aufort Jerome / GettyAn aerial view of Guédelon Castle in Treigny, France, in 2023Jacky 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.

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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.

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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.

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