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Collective Shout, an organization “for anyone concerned about the increasing pornification of culture,” based its claim that Steam and Itch.io host “hundreds of rape and incest games” on user-generated tags, and the organizations that co-signed Collective Shout's open letter to payment processors did not respond to 404 Media’s questions about whether they tried to verify its accusations against the game platforms before signing on their support.

Collective Shout's July 11 letter urged Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Japan Credit Bureau, Paysafe, and Discover to "cease processing payments on gaming platforms which host rape, incest and child sexual abuse-themed games."

On July 15, Steam, a digital storefront for PC games operated by Valve, updated its guidelines to ban “certain kinds of adult content,” blaming restrictions from payment processors and financial institutions. And on July 23, Itch.io, a massively popular indie game store, delisted every game marked NSFW so that those games will no longer be indexed in search results or appear on main pages, but re-indexed free adult NSFW content on Friday. “We are still in ongoing discussions with payment processors and will be re-introducing paid content slowly to ensure we can confidently support the widest range of creators in the long term,” the site’s founder Leaf Corcoran said in an announcement.

Itch.io also blamed pressure from payment processors—which in turn have been pressured by a campaign spearheaded by Collective Shout, a “grassroots campaigns movement against the objectification of women and the sexualisation of girls,” according to its site.

“Most of the content found within the games, including the graphics and the developers descriptions, are too distressing for us to make public,” the letter says. “A Collective Shout team member has conducted extensive research using a Steam account set up for this purpose. She has documented content including violent sexual torture of women, and children including incest related abuse involving family members.”

New ‘Rape and Incest’ Game Tests the Limits of Steam’s Sex Policy“No Mercy” is shocking people who are not familiar with Steam’s adult game ecosystem, but it’s mostly just shovelware.404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

I asked Collective Shout if it would show me the research, name any of the 500 games they found other than No Mercy, or disclose what that research entailed. “We found almost 500 other games tagged with rape or incest on Steam. Some of these included extreme sexual torture and abuse of women,” Caitlin Roper, campaigns manager at Collective Shout, told me in an email. "Given Steam had not responded at any point, we wrote an open letter to payment processors asking them to stop processing payments on gaming platforms which host rape, incest and child sexual abuse themed games. This letter was signed by leaders in the field, including academics, advocates and experts on violence against women and children." Roper did not disclose any specifics about the group's research. I asked Roper if the Collective Shout team played any of those tagged games to check the context of the content, and did not receive a response.

Steam tags, however, are assigned by players, not developers. They’re frequently trolled, with users assigning inappropriate tags to games with unrelated content. Keywords and tags have never been a useful metric for distilling nuance. Collective Shout is repeating history: In the early days of the internet, a researcher successfully fomented one of the first mainstream internet porn panics by claiming that bulletin boards were full of extreme sexual material that children could access.

In 1995, a Carnegie Mellon engineering student, Marty Rimm, claimed that he surveyed 917,410 “sexually explicit pictures, descriptions, short stories, and film clips” from across the internet. More rigorous researchers and online freedom of speech advocates at the time tore his “research” and the subsequent salacious Time magazine article about it apart.

They found that Rimm didn’t examine most of Usenet or the internet at large, but was looking primarily at adult-oriented bulletin boards, which were often behind a paywall (an adult would have to call a board administrator and give them their credit card number, in many cases) or otherwise difficult for children to access. “Further, of the 917,410 files, all text and audio files were deleted from analysis, and only a very small number of images were actually examined,” technologist and academic J. Metz wrote in a paper examining the Rimm report in 1996. “The actual number of descriptions of images retained for the content analysis on which the study’s conclusions are based was 292,114.” Rimm found only nine websites (out of the more than 11,000 sites on the Word Wide Web at the time) that could be classified as R or X-rated, Metz noted. Attorney and longtime internet rights activist Mike Godwin, who was one of the many researchers who analyzed the Rimm report, told me that Rimm was likely only looking at text descriptions of images from adult BBS files without looking at their content, and assumed that those descriptions were accurate. But people often trolled the descriptions of files in bulletin boards or cracked jokes in them—in much the same way Steam tags are trolled by users.

Time ran the most salacious possible angle of the poorly conducted report (the author of that story has since said he regrets it), and religiously affiliated groups that already wanted to stop porn from becoming mainstream on the internet took hold of it. Senator Chuck Grassley brought the July 3, 1995 Time issue to the senate floor for a hearing about the Communications Decency Act, which would amend the Telecommunications Act and hold internet service providers, including BBS owners, liable for any content transmitted that could be interpreted as "obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or indecent."

The Time July 3, 1995 'Cyberporn' story spread. Accessible in full at the Internet Archive

The Christian Coalition, a conservative grassroots political organization founded by Pat Robertson, also jumped on the report and used it to lobby for internet restrictions based on it. “The Religious Right is only a few weeks away from final victory in its effort to shut American citizens out of the Internet as a medium for uncensored communication,” technologist Howard Rheingold wrote at the time. “Discourse on the Net will be restricted to that which is judged suitable for young children in strict households.”

As journalist Ana Valens first reported in her investigations into the Collective Shout campaign (and the group’s claim that its open letter sent to payment processors successfully convinced them to pressure the platforms into changing their policies for adult games), several co-signatories of the letter are anti-porn groups that have pushed for broader legislation against the adult industry. (Valens’ articles on this topic were removed by Vice after publication.)

Haley McNamara, Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives and Programs at the National Center for Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) signed the letter. NCOSE, formerly known as Morality in Media, has long pressured payment processors to remove support from adult content creators. The organization has also lobbied in favor of age verification laws that have spread to more than 30 states in the U.S., which experts say are not only invasive of everyone’s privacy but are ineffective at best, and only exacerbate problems of piracy, nonconsensual abuse material, and exploitation.

I asked NCOSE whether they directly viewed the content Collective Shout mentioned in its letter—or if they’d looked at the organization’s research themselves—before signing it. “Collective Shout collected and analyzed the materials and can best speak to everything they found,” a spokesperson said.

Helen Taylor, Vice President of Impact at Exodus Cry, also signed the letter. Exodus Cry is an organization that aims to end the “commercial sex industry.” In September 2020, Exodus Cry helped a campaign called “TraffickingHub” gather two million signatures on a petition to shut down Pornhub. “We’re calling for Pornhub to be shut down and its executives held accountable for these crimes,” the petition said—rhetoric echoed by extremist online groups that then called for the sentencing and execution of adult industry executives. Exodus Cry’s goal is to support laws that “end the sex industry,” as they write on their website. “We are asking political powers to enact and enforce laws that will eradicate exploitation in the sex industry and eliminate sex trafficking. This is absolutely necessary to restore and preserve freedom and justice in society.”

Exodus Cry did not respond to requests for comment.

Even if and when the tags are accurate, “rape” and “incest” themes in media, whether it’s literature, visual arts, personal memoirs, or games (which are often a combination of these things, especially from indie developers) can represent a range of themes that’s impossible to define. Talking about one’s own sexual abuse is not the same as glorifying sexual abuse, but relying on keywords and tags creates that false equivalency, and seems to be what Collective Shout relied on for its pressure campaign.

Meanwhile, game makers and consumers are caught in this warpath.

“Many trans and queer folks either lived off of or supplemented their income with their earnings on Itch,” Boarlord, an indie game developer who makes choose-your-own-adventure games that she describes as “deeply furry, deeply trans, deeply filthy,” told me days before Itch re-indexed those games. “If these restrictions remain, it means the blanket end of so many livelihoods. This sinks us deeper into economic precarity and our cultures, into obscurity or oblivion, dealer’s choice.”

I asked Boarlord if she thinks tags are a reliable way to understand what’s in a game. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I think there’s something truly profane about flattening an experience—art, entertainment, porn, whatever—to a handful of keywords. All of us live in a world dictated by an apparatus of punishment and surveillance. Because of this apparatus, whatever convenience tagging offers is immediately undermined by its ability to surveil and round us up. We have to dismantle the apparatus first, otherwise we’ll always end up here.”

Ted Litchfield, a journalist at PC Gamer, noted that the “nearly 500 other rape and incest games” figure Collective Shout cites in its own timeline of the campaign doesn’t make sense, and the only way to arrive at it would be to count duplicates, DLCs, and unrelated games removed in that time. “Counting up all ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’ games on SteamDB since the 15th, I got 456 hits, but that includes double counts for most of the offending games (many of which were both ‘Removed’ and ‘Retired’), DLC and demos for those games (also given the double-r treatment), and a number of unrelated games that were taken off Steam during this time,” Litchfield wrote.

“No one platform nor marketplace should be responsible for so much media. We’ve concentrated too much of our culture to a handful of platforms like Patreon, Steam, and even Itch, though the latter, in my opinion, is less concerned with monopolization,” Boarlord said. “That makes them strategic targets for bad faith pressure campaigns. And in the case of Itch, they’re so small and lacking in resources there’s no leverage against the likes of Stripe, Visa, MasterCard. Sex workers have run our throats hoarse screaming about this: With the power to demonetize platforms that so many queer and trans people rely on to survive, payment processors effectively dictate our culture now. Visa, MasterCard, Stripe, Paypal, they decide who lives and dies.”

Visa, Mastercard and PayPal did not respond to my request for comment on the open letter or about whether they reviewed the contents of the games. Mastercard published a statement on August 1: "Mastercard has not evaluated any game or required restrictions of any activity on game creator sites and platforms, contrary to media reports and allegations. Our payment network follows standards based on the rule of law. Put simply, we allow all lawful purchases on our network. At the same time, we require merchants to have appropriate controls to ensure Mastercard cards cannot be used for unlawful purchases, including illegal adult content."

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

A furry fiend with rabbit ears and a maniacal grin has recently been spotted twerking next to the singer Lizzo, baring its teeth on the former soccer star David Beckham’s Instagram, and flopping against a woman’s Chanel bag while wearing its own Tic Tac–size Chanel bag. The creature in question is Labubu—a soft-bellied plushie that the Chinese company Pop Mart began distributing in 2019, and that has, in the past year, gained hordes of admirers. In 2024, Pop Mart reported a more than 700 percent increase in the stuffie’s sales. People have been doling out anywhere from about $30 to $150,000 a toy. At Brooklyn raves, adults hop around under neon lights with Labubus clipped to their belt loops. The devotion, at times, has turned almost ferocious; Pop Mart decided to suspend in-person sales of Labubu in the United Kingdom after reports of chaos at stores.

Commentators have offered all sorts of theories as to why Labubu has become a sensation. One factor might be scarcity: Each new Labubu release on Pop Mart’s online store tends to sell out in minutes. Another might be surprise: The plushie arrives in a blind box. (It could be pink or gray; wear overalls or hold a Coke.) Some people have suggested that the Labubu hype is a product of a trickle-down celebrity effect, or that the toy has become a gay icon.

But the way I see it, the cult of Labubu is simply an extension of the phenomenon known as “kidulthood,” in which the boundary between childhood and adulthood keeps growing fuzzier and fuzzier. In the past few years, more American adults have been buying stuffed animals—some, researchers have told me, in an effort to reject staid versions of adulthood and inject more play into grown-up life. These adults have usually kept their plushies at home, relegating them to bookshelves and beds. Labubus, though, are “public displays of cuteness,” Erica Kanesaka, an Emory University professor and cute-studies scholar, told me in an email. Devotees carry Labubu into subway cars, office cubicles, and dental schools. They clock into shifts at KFC with the toy literally attached to their hip, and take it along for their workdays as football players or airline pilots.

[Read: Welcome to kidulthood]

Adults in other countries—Japan, perhaps most notably—have long worn objects featuring cute characters, such as Hello Kitty, out and about, hooked to bags and key chains. In the 1990s, it wasn’t uncommon to see white-collar Japanese salarymen with Hello Kitty accessories dangling from their phones. The trend, Simon May, a philosopher and the author of The Power of Cute, told me, might have been born of a postwar rejection of overt aggression: After World War II, cute aesthetics were one way that Japan revamped its public-facing image. The country, May said, changed its self-presentation “180 degrees from militarism to pacifism.” But in the United States, loving cute objects has historically been written off as escapism at best and a worrying swing toward infancy at worst. Adults who embraced childlike things were “seen to be irresponsibly regressive, morally immature, and refusing to play their full part in society,” May said in an email after we spoke. As recently as 2020, in an article about plushies, one writer self-consciously described her stuffed hound as her “deep dark secret.”

Yet, as I’ve previously reported, this defensiveness about loving cute objects has been gradually dissipating, part of a century-long evolution in which childhood has come to be seen as a protected life stage. Nowadays, May said, “to be childlike also has an increasingly positive connotation in terms of openness to ideas and freedom from dogmatism.” At the same time, attitudes about what it means to be an adult are shifting. Many have assumed that children are supposed to “grow out of vulnerability” when they become adults, Sandra Chang-Kredl, a professor at Concordia University, in Montreal, who has studied adults’ attachments to stuffed animals, told me. But more and more, people are pushing back on that idea. Years ago, “it would have been hard to admit that, let’s say, Oh, I have anxiety,” Chang-Kredl said. “Today, there’s no shame involved in it.”

Pop Mart has capitalized on this transformation, marketing Labubus—and its other collectibles—specifically to young adults. The company’s social-media posts seem to be aimed at Monday-hating, coffee-drinking workers who might log in to Zoom meetings from disastrously messy rooms or prefer to be outside, playing with buddies (or toys), rather than reporting to an office. Evidence suggests that this approach has been successful; one analysis of Pop Mart’s web traffic found that 39 percent of visitors to the online store in April ranged in age from 25 to 34.

Shame dies hard, though, which might be another reason Labubu has gained traction. Within the realm of cute things, a demonic-looking stuffie is more “ugly-cute”—adorable, monstrous, deliberately weird. (Ugly-cuteness is also by no means a new phenomenon; think of the pygmy-hippo sensation Moo Deng, toys such as UglyDolls and Cabbage Patch Kids, or the eternal appeal of the pug.) People “feel that they themselves are a little bit edgy,” Joshua Dale, a cute-studies professor at Chuo University, in Tokyo, told me, “for liking something that some people don’t like.”

[Read: The ‘Espresso’ theory of gender relations]

As with any popular trend, Labubu does have its haters—or at least some tongue-in-cheek provocateurs. People have suggested (semi-jokingly) that the toy is possessed, possibly by a demon called Pazuzu. The singer Katy Perry, at a recent concert in Australia, used her mic to smack a Labubu out of a fan’s hand. “No Labubus!” she commanded sternly. Still, Labubu’s creepy-cute duality does feel very of this moment, in line with a certain strain of the culture that seeks to undercut anything that feels too buttoned-up. Consider the popularity of “brat”—an irony-tinged aesthetic that embraces the messy and ugly-cute over the prepped and polished. Last year, my colleague Spencer Kornhaber described the “brat” mood as “a little immature, a little selfish, a little nasty.” He also noted that the singer Charli XCX, whose songs affirm that the party-girl life has no age limit, and pop artists such as Sabrina Carpenter and Chappell Roan seem to be making music offering “the assurance that growing up, in the conventional sense, is just optional.”

Wearing Labubu, especially on a designer purse or a backpack meant for grown-ups, is a choice that speaks in a similar register. It signals a “playful attitude to life,” May told me, “a winking at the world.” Monday will come around again, with its dreaded wake-up alarms and emails. But according to the logic of kidulthood, you might feel a tiny bit better if you bring a devilish tchotchke to that 9 a.m. meeting.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

When Hamas bulldozed its way across the Gaza fence on October 7, 2023, it hoped to eventually provoke the opprobrium that’s now flowing in Israel’s direction. Launching its carnival of murder, rape, and kidnapping, the group wagered that it could bait its enemy into moral blunders that would discredit it in the eyes of the world.

That vision is now unfolding as mass hunger engulfs the Gaza Strip, and images of starving children crumble American support for Israel. The fact that Hamas ignited this chain of events, and that it could end the war if wanted to, does nothing to absolve Israel of its primary role in the food crisis. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government bears responsibility for policies that are now depriving Gazans of adequate nourishment and may soon kill them in staggering numbers. It was his cabinet that imposed a blockade on Gaza starting on March 2. The measure was eventually reversed under international pressure. Still, the subsequent damage was a deliberate choice, because even after Israel lifted its siege, it further limited the ability of the United Nations to distribute relief.

[Read: Food aid in Gaza has become a horror]

Israel executed these policies in the name of achieving Netanyahu’s implausible goal of “total victory.” Food, in his government’s analysis, had become a weapon used by Hamas to sustain its fighters, reward loyalty, and replenish its armaments through black-market profiteering. The United Nations, Israeli officials believed, was at best excessively tolerant of terrorists in Gaza. By wresting control of aid distribution from the world organization, Israel hoped to cut Hamas off from one of its last remaining sources of power.

But the policy has failed on its own terms. Hamas is no closer to surrendering or releasing hostages than before Israel embarked on its campaign of deprivation. A movement animated by theological fervor—and strengthened by the spectacle of civilian suffering—cannot be starved into submission. And now that the toll of hunger is becoming so clear, Israel has an obligation to reverse course as quickly as possible.

When there is hunger, the blazingly obvious solution is food. Humanitarian groups have a cliché for what’s needed in Gaza: “flooding the zone” with food. That would require Israel to lift restrictions and bureaucratic impediments that it has imposed on the UN agencies it loathes.

Flooding the zone is not just a humanitarian imperative; it is a strategic one for Israel. The food crisis is alienating bedrock allies in the U.S. Congress. When Israel launched its response to the atrocities of October 7, with the goal of dismantling Hamas, I considered the war just and necessary. But international law prohibits some tactics in order to protect the innocent and to prevent the perverse exigencies of conflict from disfiguring the soul of the warrior. Even if Israel is prepared to endure international isolation, allegiances it once considered unbreakable won’t survive famine. By flooding the zone, Israel would be rescuing itself.

Just before Israel imposed its blockade on Gaza in early March, a cease-fire prevailed. During the calm, the price of flour—the clearest indicator of a population’s nutritional access—plummeted from about $135 for a 25-kilogram sack to just $14 in February. The United Nations, along with the nongovernmental organizations that it coordinates, imported more aid during that period than at any point in the previous eight months: 295,120 tons in total. Although this was hardly a cornucopia, the surge of food and medicine averted large-scale starvation.

The role the United Nations played in this effort wasn’t unusual. In major humanitarian crises caused by war—for example, in Sudan and Ukraine—the UN serves as the primary mechanism for coordinating the care of civilians displaced by conflict. In Gaza, its role ran even deeper: For decades, the UN had provided not just emergency relief but also the basic infrastructure of daily life—education, housing, food.

Even as Israel and the UN collaborated on the movement of trucks and the flow of aid, they regarded each other as hostile entities. Israel had legitimate reasons for suspicion. For years, schools administered by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza used textbooks glorifying violent resistance. After the October 7 attacks, Israel published intelligence showing that 12 UNRWA employees directly participated in the massacre. To many Israelis, the agency’s very existence affirmed a long-standing belief that the UN reflexively condemns Israel while overlooking Hamas’s genocidal rhetoric.

[Photos: Gaza’s starvation and chaos]

On March 2, the Netanyahu government made a calculated decision to blow up this system. It didn’t just block the entry of all goods, including food. That move preluded a string of policies that seem intended to permanently push the UN out of Gaza.

By summer, Israel had refused to renew the visas of top officials at three UN agencies operating in Gaza. (These officials had publicly condemned Israel’s obstructionism, voicing accusations of genocide, collective punishment, and political sabotage—rhetoric that infuriated Israeli leaders.) Aid groups navigated a growing tangle of permits and bureaucratic impositions that made the UN’s relief efforts in Gaza unworkable. New restrictions gave the government the right to demand the names and contact details of Palestinian staffers and ban any group whose employees have questioned Israel’s existence as a Jewish, democratic state.

To replace the UN presence, Israel worked with the Trump administration to hastily design a new system to feed Gaza. Where the old international agencies were run by technical experts and experienced professionals, the new system was concocted by management consultants and private security contractors under the aegis of a newly created nonprofit, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Where the UN had tried to address the full spectrum of civilian needs—medicine, sanitation, nutrition—the GHF largely focuses on food, distributing boxes and bags in just four sites, all in areas fully controlled by the Israeli military, none of them in northern Gaza. This plan transgressed fundamental principles that guide humanitarian work, and the UN announced that it wanted nothing to do with GHF.

The result was predictably disastrous. Hundreds of Palestinians were shot while mobbing soldiers during chaotic food distributions. Whatever the faults of the UN, it remains the world’s most capable relief agency. And in Gaza, it had a network of warehouses, bakeries, and kitchens and a pool of local employees. Flooding the zone is simply not possible unless Israel restores the visas of international-aid workers and allows them to operate without the labyrinthine restrictions currently paralyzing their work.

A primary impediment to providing ample food is epistemic closure. That is, many Israelis simply don’t believe the warnings of famine, because they doubt the veracity of the evidence. They say that the UN has a history of predicting catastrophes in Gaza that never come to pass. But this time is genuinely different. The price of a sack of flour, which by the end of May had skyrocketed to about $500, tells the story. And although intermittent shortages do not always lead to famine, the nature of a prolonged crisis is that it grinds down the resilience of both the human body and entire communities.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the head of Refugees International, who oversaw disaster relief for the Obama administration, told me: “In the early months of the war, if you cut off all the food, people are starting from a place where they’re still healthy. They still have money and resources. They have assets they can sell. There are still stockpiles of food. So there’s a lot more of what we in humanitarian terms would call a ‘coping mechanism.’” But those mechanisms, he said, are now gone.

That’s true not just for the recipients of aid but also for those delivering it. Relief networks rely heavily on Gazans to move and distribute food. “Like on an airplane,” Konyndyk said, “you put on your own mask before helping others. That applies here. We need to stabilize the aid providers in order to enable them to scale up the operation.”

[Read: The corrupt bargain behind Gaza’s catastrophe]

The thoroughfares that would carry food to the hungry are in no better shape. Sixty-eight percent of Gaza’s roads are damaged, according to the UN, and will require Israeli engineers to regrade and pave them. (Israeli crews have made roads passable on multiple occasions over the course of the war.) David Satterfield, a longtime American diplomat who coordinated the distribution of aid in Gaza during the Biden administration, told me that the continued warfare has “just physically disrupted the ability of aid implementers to get their stuff to warehouses, from warehouses to distribution points.”

As hunger deepens, trucks navigating these roads become ever more vulnerable to mobs desperate to plunder the contents. Crowds descend to loot out of fear that waiting in line means getting nothing. Humanitarians call this “self-distribution.” There is no functioning government to secure the convoys. Even if Gaza were inundated with food, the looting would likely persist—until the supply became so reliable that people stopped fearing it might vanish.

Every image of a child with protruding ribs is both a human tragedy and a propaganda victory for Hamas—and proof of how a just war badly lost the plot. I believed in Israel’s casus belli. I don’t believe in this. No justification can redeem the immorality of a policy built on deprivation. As Gaza braces for the worst, Israel still has a narrow window to correct its course. By flooding the zone, Israel has one last chance to redeem itself.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Jim Henson’s Creature Shop has sat, for the past 16 years, on the fourth floor of an office building in Long Island City, New York, behind a metal door that looks like any other. When I opened it one gray morning after the holidays, I was greeted by a plastic Christmas tree hung with fake fish skeletons and desiccated banana peels, Oscar leering nearby from his can, and a brown, fuzzy blob sitting on a table. At first I thought it might be a complete Muppet, until I saw, a few yards beyond, a matching brown, fuzzy, headless body. As the archivist Karen Falk began to lead me on a tour of the workshop—drawers of googly eyes, noses, and “special facial hair”; filing cabinets for “fur” and “slippery sleezy”; a stack of banker’s boxes, one marked “Grover,” another “Boober”—I looked back, briefly, to catch the bulbous nose and round eyes of Junior Gorg from Fraggle Rock staring at me, or perhaps at his own body, waiting to be reunited.

“There are only three Snuffleupagi in the world,” Falk told me, gesturing toward a puppet near the entrance that she said was kind of an extra, deployed when Snuffleupagus needs a family member on set next to him. I reached out to give Snuffy’s relation a little pet—his soft brown fur, curly and dense like a poodle’s, was overlain with orange feathers—and scribbled a note: “remarkably lifelike.” For a what? I later asked myself. For a giant woolly mammoth cum anteater puppet? But the space made it easy to slip across the human-Muppet divide and into Henson’s world, where the realness of the puppets is sacrosanct. When I asked to take a picture of the decapitated Junior Gorg, just for my notes, Falk looked at me as if I’d asked to check under Miss Piggy’s dress. “We don’t allow photos of things like that, Muppets without heads,” she tutted, and ushered me to another part of the workshop, where a handful of archival boxes had been set aside for me.

After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I’d come to grieve with the Muppets.

My father, Marshall, amassed many accolades over the course of his career—a gold record for playing bluegrass banjo on the Deliverance soundtrack; an Oscar for co-writing the script of Annie Hall; a Tony nomination for Best Book for the musical Jersey Boys, which won Best Musical in 2006 (and an Olivier Award, too)—but way cooler to me, as a kid, was the fact that for a brief stint, long before I was born, he’d been part of Henson’s crew.

For much of my life, I knew little about the specifics. I do remember one time being feverish and crying for a Kermit doll after a doctor’s appointment, even though, despite Dad’s involvement in the show, I can’t remember ever watching any Muppets, or even Sesame Street, at home. The local toy store was all sold out, so Dad called in a favor, and we headed to the old Muppet offices on the Upper East Side to pick one up. While we were waiting, I watched, slack-jawed, as puppet makers working on a new creation pulled googly eyes out of thin drawers, one after another, a fever dream come to life and branded in my memory like a surrealist madeleine. After that, the Muppets all but receded from my life.

[Read: The secret life of grief]

That changed after my father got sick last year, when my daily life became not just a logistical mire—managing therapy appointments, speaking with doctors—but also one of constant dread: about which Dad I’d find when I walked into his room each day, his personality somehow refracted, as if I were looking at it through a prism; about whether a middle-of-the-night phone call might signify an Earth-tilting inflection point; about how devastating it was going to be to navigate the world without the beloved father I’d always looked up to.

At the end of each day, like any well-adjusted individual faced with looming, profound change, I chose to run screaming as far away from reality as I could, which is how I ended up in the arms of the 1970s Muppets. I had no grand plan. I simply gravitated toward their fluffiness and goofiness as an antidote to grief. I sensed—rightly, it turned out—that they’d help keep me afloat.

Dad and Henson first connected through Al Gottesman, Henson’s longtime lawyer. Their mutual affinity makes total sense to me, even a generation later. They were born three years apart and grew up delighting in Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic strip. They shared an off-kilter sense of humor and a reverence for the silly. Although I can’t remember ever seeing Dad with a puppet on his hand, when I was growing up he would put on elaborate bedtime shows for my sister and me, starring our menagerie of stuffed animals. Using a pair of needle-nose pliers from his tool case—a bulky, black-leather valise full of primary-colored screwdrivers I liked to play with, a relic from his days attending Brooklyn Technical High School to appease his practical immigrant father—he made pince-nez out of a paper clip for my plush dachshund, Ollirina, a feisty Southern grande dame who propelled herself around by farting (my contribution); he then had her perform miraculous acts of levitation. Dad’s tried-and-true finale: shooting my Ping-Pong-ball-sized plush hedgehog through a toilet-paper-roll cannon as I drumrolled on my lap. Looking back on this now that I’m a parent of three young children, I marvel that he could summon this level of creativity after dinnertime.

For a few months in the mid-’70s, Dad helped Henson write a failed Broadway Muppets revue, and what would become the pilot of The Muppet Show, called “Sex and Violence With the Muppets”—Henson’s attempt to establish the Muppets as not just for kids. Dad is listed as head writer on the script, in which Nigel, Sam the Eagle, and a few other Muppets put together a “Seven Deadly Sins” pageant to determine which sin is the most deadly. Although the final show evolved from the pilot—Kermit replaced Nigel as the emcee; a human guest star was added—you can see from the script that its style was already developed, as was its tone: equal parts outlandish and sophisticated, countercultural, never talking down to the audience. Sloth arrives, of course, during the closing credits, too late to participate. One stage direction reads, simply, “Chaos in progress.” The script established the framework with which Henson would go on to parody a vaudeville show from all angles—the divas (Piggy), the technical malfunctions (Crazy Harry, blowing up sets left and right), the well-meaning guy trying to hold the whole ball of crazy together (Kermit).

My father’s contributions are impossible to disentangle from the general Muppetness of the script—collaborations work, he always told me, because they are collaborative—save for one: Despite being Brooklyn born and bred, with not a Nordic bone in his body, he is, by many accounts, the source of the Swedish Chef’s accent and nonsense lexicon, the one typified by “Hurdy, gurdy, gurdy, bork bork bork!” The character had originated with Henson in the ’60s. Back then, he’d been German. For reasons lost to Muppetdom, at some point the character moved northwest, to a place with more centralized health care. And he needed an accent to match.

Andrea McCallin / Disney / Getty

I loved listening to Dad parody foreign languages. He liked to throw off telemarketers by answering the phone as a hard-of-hearing woman from some indeterminate Latin American country, or as an eccentric Central European man, characterized by a sibilant, Peter Sellers–as–Strangelove delivery that would typically escalate into a shriek and send the person on the other end skedaddling to their next call. So I was not surprised to learn that, decades earlier, Dad had apparently reduced the Henson puppeteer Frank Oz to tears by mimicking languages during brainstorming sessions. He later made an ersatz-Swedish tape for Henson to listen to on his commute into the city from his home in Bedford. “He would drive to work trying to make a chicken sandwich in mock Swedish or make a turkey casserole in mock Swedish,” Henson’s son Brian told Jim’s biographer, remembering having heard my dad’s tape. “It was the most ridiculous thing you had ever seen, and people at traffic lights used to stop and sort of look at him a little crazy.”

All of this I learned from books, from interviews with Muppet staffers, and by emailing Falk, the Henson archivist. But the bulk of my embedding in Muppetdom over the past year involved watching The Muppet Show with my husband and three kids on weekend evenings, our world cocooned between the real, live present and a completely nonsensical 1970s. I’d slice up some apples and we’d cackle together as Rita Moreno flung a noodly Muppet man around set in a particularly violent tango; as Zero Mostel, only mildly indignant that a Muppet was eating him during his cold open, helped wash down his own arm with a little water; as Gene Kelly taught Kermit to tap-dance on the piano.

[Read: The father-daughter routine that transformed our family life]

Given what I’d learned, was it a cosmic sign that my youngest, just 3 years old, started to develop an obsession with the Swedish Chef? He took to running around the apartment, crowing his bastardized version of the Chef’s already bastardized Swedish and then, mimicking his new Nordic hero, flinging into the air whatever he had handy. Sometimes it was a stuffed animal; other times it was hard objects, which would necessitate a stern lecture (after my husband and I had taken cover) about the dangers of throwing things up, because they tend to come down, even if the Chef’s flapjacks do not. After my son got a Swedish Chef action-figure set that included a small chicken and a handful of cooking tools, he would sit on the ground, brow furrowed in concentration, making the cleaver-wielding chef hop after the chicken—or sometimes, in keeping with Muppet sensibility, vice versa.

My daughters became obsessed with “Pigs in Space,” a recurring Muppet sketch parodying Star Trek and other space operas of the 1960s and ’70s. They erupted in cheers whenever the USS Swinetrek flew across the screen, indicating that the sketch was back again. The setup is that three pigs are flying through the cosmos—Captain Link Hogthrob, Dr. Julius Strangepork, and Miss Piggy as first mate—and … nothing really happens. John Cleese shows up as a pirate and tries to make a call from a payphone on the ship, while his parrot, who is in love with him, gripes that Cleese is neglecting her and should take her to dinner with all his doubloons. The ship is invaded by two alien beings, who turn out to be the Swedish Chef and his chicken, and after they leave, the pigs get bored. When the USS Swinetrek nears the end of the universe, where its crew will finally discover the meaning and purpose of life, the dinner bell rings, and the pigs get sidetracked. Miss Piggy is routinely degraded, asked by the boars to do the laundry or make more swill, though the audience understands that she’s smarter and tougher than her male co-stars.

According to Oz, Miss Piggy’s puppeteer, her toughness was hard-won. In multiple interviews, he has spoken about his need to understand the complete biographies of the characters he portrayed, even if viewers don’t share that need. In Oz’s mind, Miss Piggy was born on a farm, loved her father very much, and was grief-stricken when he died in a tractor accident. As her mother’s subsequent suitors turned their attention to Miss Piggy, a single path forward emerged: to leave. She was later forced to do some things she wasn’t proud of as she clawed her way to diva-dom, including appearing in a bacon commercial.

Does any of that come through the screen as she floats around in outer space? I suppose that, for some viewers, it does—that having a deep understanding of Miss Piggy’s character somehow enabled Oz and the other puppeteers to present her simulated world as real enough that the audience would jump into it with her, feetfirst, willingly suspending disbelief.

Or maybe that’s not why it works. “It’s just so weird,” my third grader said to me one night, with a snort. “Like, why are there even pigs in space?”

I didn’t experience what others warned me I might, after the months of decline that led to Dad’s death late last year: picking up the phone to call him and forgetting that there would be no one on the other end, looking up from the sidewalk at the window where he worked for decades, expecting to see the light on and being knocked sideways that it was dark. I never forgot. I never expected the light to be on. But occasionally, I’d find myself dropping from one reality straight through to another, something most likely aided by my living just eight blocks from where I grew up. My neighborhood is saturated with memories spanning my whole life.

Passing a street corner, I would suddenly reverse-age four decades and see Dad’s belt buckle sliding along my tricycle’s handlebars, because I was so hot and sweaty and tired that I simply couldn’t pedal one more inch, and he was pulling me around that corner, home. I’d be running the Lower Loop in Central Park, where we used to take our daily afternoon walks, and I’d pass a busker playing the fiddle and have to stop, hands on knees, to catch my breath, remembering the Flatt and Scruggs Dad played through his computer speakers. These temporal shifts through eras were uncontrolled, unexpected, all-encompassing. My scrim between reality and memory, truth and simulation, had become porous, faulty. Like the Swedish Chef, who starts making a turtle soup only to find that the turtle has woken up and is trying to escape, my reality was pitched, slightly, on its axis.

The first time one of these temporal shifts through eras, one of these free falls from today back to childhood, happened was a few nights after the burial. My husband, kids, and I gathered, the children freshly showered and damp-haired, and put on the Muppets, as we’d done, at that point, for months. The episode featured Señor Wences, the ventriloquist whose main act involved Johnny, a boy made from Wences’s hand, on which he stuck two googly eyes, and on top of which he draped a ridiculous orange wig. His other star performers were a bespectacled chicken named Cecilia (Wences: “Second name?”; Cecilia: “Chicken”) and Pedro, a surly talking head (literally just a head, not an MSNBC type) who, after a train accident that decapitated the poor puppet, spent his life, disembodied, in a box.

The episode’s conceit was that Kermit has decided to do something new: a puppet show! “It’s a complete change of pace, folks,” he said to cheers. “Yes, it’s a real first!” Toward the end, Wences held up an egg and asked Cecilia Chicken to identify it. As she replied, softly and directly, “My son” (rhymes with moan), a memory of childhood weekend breakfasts welled up from deep in my subconscious, collapsing time just as the puppets on-screen were collapsing their simulation. I saw the kitchen table, the oval wooden one my father had waxed by hand until it shone. I felt its slight stickiness beneath my hands. And by the stove was Dad, apron halved and tied around his waist, holding up an egg reverently, sighing, lovingly pronouncing it “my son!” in Salamancan-inflected English, then cracking it, with a flourish, into a cast-iron skillet.

He used to do that with eggs.

I’d completely forgotten. For a moment, I stayed there at the kitchen table, giggling. I stayed with the feeling of being closer to my children’s age than middle age; closer to those evenings spent cross-legged and damp-haired myself, watching my dad turn stuffed animals into performers; closer still to a moment years before my birth, when, across town at the Henson studios, in a healthy body with long legs kicked up on the desk in front of him, my dad held a bulky tape recorder to his mouth, paused, then started up for the first time in ersatz Swedish, the beginning of a thread that would reach out, decades later, and tether him to me.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Last month, a group of seven U.S. generals and admirals—including the top admiral in charge of U.S. military operations in the Asia-Pacific region—prepared to travel to the Aspen Security Forum, in Colorado. Security officials had spoken at the annual conference for years, including during Donald Trump’s first term, and were set to discuss topics such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the future of AI, and threats from China. But a day before the forum began, the officers’ staff got calls from the Pentagon telling them to stay away. On social media, Sean Parnell, the Defense Department’s top spokesperson, later made clear why: The forum, he said, was “hosted by an organization that promotes the evils of globalism, disdain for America, and hatred for our great president, Donald J. Trump.”

Aspen, it turned out, was only the beginning. Within days, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered the DOD to vet all future event attendance by any defense official. In a statement to Politico, Parnell declared that the move was meant to “ensure the Department of Defense is not lending its name and credibility to organizations, forums, and events that run counter to the values of this administration.” (The Aspen Institute, which sponsors the security forum, describes itself as nonpartisan.)

Parnell’s characterization of the new policy was vague, but it represented an abrupt departure from long-established DOD practices, and an important shift in the way that the military engages with the outside world: A Pentagon that has already grown more insular under Hegseth could end up cutting itself off from thinkers and ideas beyond the building, or at least those with which the administration disagrees.

[Tom Nichols: The Pentagon against the think tanks]

Military personnel and conference planners I spoke with described the decision as the latest battle in a broader war on ideas at the Pentagon under Hegseth. Earlier this year, the DOD eliminated the Office of Net Assessment, which had been created in the 1970s as a hub for strategic analysts to produce internal assessments of U.S. readiness against potential foes. Hegseth, who himself keeps a small group of advisers, was behind both decisions, defense officials told me.

Troops and civilians attend hundreds of events annually on behalf of the Pentagon, and have been doing so for decades. Whether gatherings on heady topics such as economic warfare and “gray zone” tactics or highly technical symposia about combatting rust on ships and the future of drone warfare, these events keep the military plugged into ideas from scholars and industry. Particularly since the Iraq War, the military has said that it wants to seek out ways to challenge its assumptions and solicit outside views—to make officers think through their plans and strategies and the second- and third-order effects of their decisions. Conferences are some of the main venues for this kind of exchange, though not the only ones; officers from dozens of other nations sit alongside American counterparts at U.S. war colleges, for example.

Previous administrations have required military personnel to secure approval to attend conferences. The difference, this time, is the apparently partisan slant to the vetting process. By prohibiting DOD personnel from engaging with viewpoints that the administration disagrees with, defense officials and conference planners told me, the Pentagon risks groupthink that could have real consequences.

Pete Mansoor, a retired Army colonel who served as executive officer to General David Petraeus during the 2007 surge in Iraq, told me he believes that Hegseth’s emphasis on “lethality” over the kind of strategic thinking often fostered at conferences and think tanks could prove dangerous. “The fact that officers stopped thinking strategically and only thought about lethality resulted in a war that was almost lost in Iraq,” Mansoor, now a senior faculty fellow at Ohio State University’s Mershon Center for International Security Studies, said. “I’m sure the Russian army also stresses lethality,” he continued, “but they have educated their generals on the basis of a million casualties” in Ukraine.

[Read: Trump’s cosplay Cabinet]

If the department continues to ban conference attendance in a substantial way, it will also make U.S. forces more like their Russian and Chinese counterparts, which in many cases can seek outside views only through state-sanctioned academics. “When did our ideas become so fragile that they can’t stand up to someone who has alternate views?” one defense official asked me. (The official requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about this issue.)

The Defense Department review of conference attendance is having an immediate impact. Only after the policy was announced did Pentagon officials realize how many conferences military personnel attend, leading to a scramble to draft formal guidance across the force, defense officials told me. A DOD spokesperson was unable to tell me when such guidance will be released, and responded to a request for comment by pointing me to Parnell’s statement about the review. In the meantime, military personnel are preemptively canceling their attendance at conferences. Some inside the Pentagon have even canceled internal meetings, fearful of running afoul of the new ban on “events” and “forums” not approved beforehand. National-security experts at think tanks, which often host security conferences, told me they are now unsure how much they can engage with American service members and the civilians working alongside them.

Also unclear is whether the policy applies to industry-related conferences, some of which are sponsored by private companies that spend millions of dollars to host them. Adding to the confusion, it was not initially clear whether the policy applied to one of the services, the Coast Guard, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, not the DOD; a Coast Guard spokesperson told me that the service is working to align its policy with current DOD guidance.

Some military leaders dislike attending conferences and think-tank events, of course. Appearing in public forums can mean facing political questions and potentially giving a career-ending answer. Moreover, some leaders argue, think tanks are not always the best source of new ideas, particularly given that so many of their staff members once worked in government themselves. To tackle national-security threats, generals and admirals should be focused on warfare, not speaking to those who have never been on the front lines, the argument goes.

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

But the U.S. military has had a symbiotic relationship with think tanks for years. While government employees and military officers are mired in day-to-day operations and focused on tactical warfare, outside scholars have the time and space for engaging in strategic thinking and coming up with solutions to thorny problems. Some think tanks have created positions for serving officers, and the Pentagon has also created internal positions for think tankers, in part to facilitate an exchange of ideas. “So often in government, you are choosing between awful options. You think you have found the least-bad options, and places like think tanks allow you to test that conclusion,” Mara Karlin, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for strategy, plans, and capabilities, told me.

Several real policy changes have emerged from that arrangement. Scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, produced a proposal that served as a blueprint for the 2007 surge in Iraq, at a time when the security situation in the country was deteriorating. A 2022 Center for Strategic and International Studies war-game exercise found that, in a hypothetical situation in which China invaded Taiwan, the United States would be in grave jeopardy in a matter of weeks—the Chinese could successfully sink an aircraft carrier, attack U.S. bases in the region, and bring down American fighter jets. The exercise spurred Pentagon officials to reassess the military planning for a potential conflict in the region.

American officials have also made important statements and announcements at security-focused conferences. In the days before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, then–Vice President Kamala Harris appeared at the Munich Security Conference to outline U.S. fears of imminent war. Earlier this year, Vice President J. D. Vance also attended the Munich Security Conference, where he blasted American allies and cast doubt on the idea that the United States would remain Europe’s security guarantor. This year, Hegseth himself appeared at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Shangri-La Dialogue, in Singapore, where he outlined U.S. strategy to combat threats from China. (Breaking with long-standing military norms of nonpartisanship, Hegseth also spoke to young conservatives at Turning Point USA’s Student Action Summit last month.)

Later this year, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum will host a major national-security conference that usually draws Cabinet secretaries, industry leaders, and America’s top generals and admirals. Several past defense secretaries have delivered the keynote speech. A phrase often invoked at the conference is peace through strength, which Reagan introduced into the modern lexicon during the 1980 presidential election, and which became a mantra of his administration’s defense policy. It has also become one of Hegseth’s favorite phrases for describing the military under Trump. And yet, by Hegseth’s own directive, no one knows whether he or the troops he urges to embrace that approach will be able to attend the conference that celebrates it.

*Illustration Sources: Marat Musabirov / Getty; Javier Zayas Photography / Getty; cveltri / Getty; Svetlana Ievleva / Getty.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

One common explanation for why children spend so much of their free time on screens goes like this: Smartphones and social-media platforms are addicting them. Kids stare at their devices and socialize online instead of in person because that’s what tech has trained them to want.

But this misses a key part of the story. The three of us collaborated with the Harris Poll to survey a group of Americans whose perspectives don’t often show up in national data: children. What they told us offers a comprehensive picture of how American childhood is changing—and, more important, how to make it better.

In March, the Harris Poll surveyed more than 500 children ages 8 to 12 across the United States, who were assured that their answers would remain private. They offered unmistakable evidence that the phone-based childhood is in full force. A majority reported having smartphones, and about half of the 10-to-12-year-olds said that most or all of their friends use social media.

This digital technology has given kids access to virtual worlds, where they’re allowed to roam far more freely than in the real one. About 75 percent of kids ages 9 to 12 regularly play the online game Roblox, where they can interact with friends and even strangers. But most of the children in our survey said that they aren’t allowed to be out in public at all without an adult. Fewer than half of the 8- and 9-year-olds have gone down a grocery-store aisle alone; more than a quarter aren’t allowed to play unsupervised even in their own front yard.

[Jonathan Haidt: End the phone-based childhood now]

Yet these are exactly the kinds of freedoms that kids told us they long for. We asked them to pick their favorite way to spend time with friends: unstructured play, such as shooting hoops and exploring their neighborhood; participating in activities organized by adults, such as playing Little League and doing ballet; or socializing online. There was a clear winner.

Children want to meet up in person, no screens or supervision. But because so many parents restrict their ability to socialize in the real world on their own, kids resort to the one thing that allows them to hang out with no adults hovering: their phones.

Since the 1980s, parents have grown more and more afraid that unsupervised time will expose their kids to physical or emotional harm. In another recent Harris Poll, we asked parents what they thought would happen if two 10-year-olds played in a local park without adults around. Sixty percent thought the children would likely get injured. Half thought they would likely get abducted.

These intuitions don’t even begin to resemble reality. According to Warwick Cairns, the author of How to Live Dangerously, kidnapping in the United States is so rare that a child would have to be outside unsupervised for, on average, 750,000 years before being snatched by a stranger. Parents know their neighborhoods best, of course, and should assess them carefully. But the tendency to overestimate risk comes with its own danger. Without real-world freedom, children don’t get the chance to develop competence, confidence, and the ability to solve everyday problems. Indeed, independence and unsupervised play are associated with positive mental-health outcomes.

Still, parents spend more time supervising their kids than parents did in the 1960s, even though they now work more and have fewer children. Across all income levels, families have come to believe that organized activities are the key to kids’ safety and success. So sandlot games gave way to travel baseball. Cartwheels at the park gave way to competitive cheer teams. Kids have been strapped into the back seat of their lives—dropped off, picked up, and overhelped. As their independence has dwindled, their anxiety and depression have spiked. And they aren’t the only ones suffering. In 2023, the surgeon general cited intensive caregiving as one reason today’s parents are more stressed than ever.

[From the February 2025 Issue: The anti-social century]

Kids will always have more spare hours than adults can supervise—a gap that devices now fill. “Go outside” has been quietly replaced with “Go online.” The internet is one of the only escape hatches from childhoods grown anxious, small, and sad. We certainly don’t blame parents for this. The social norms, communities, infrastructure, and institutions that once facilitated free play have eroded. Telling children to go outside doesn’t work so well when no one else’s kids are there.

That’s why we’re so glad that groups around the country are experimenting with ways to rebuild American childhood, rooting it in freedom, responsibility, and friendship. In Piedmont, California, a network of parents started dropping their kids off at the park every Friday to play unsupervised. Sometimes the kids argue or get bored—which is good. Learning to handle boredom and conflict is an essential part of child development. Elsewhere, churches, libraries, and schools are creating screen-free “play clubs.” To ease the transition away from screens and supervision, the Outside Play Lab at the University of British Columbia developed a free online tool that helps parents figure out how to give their kids more outdoor time, and why they should.

More than a thousand schools nationwide have begun using a free program from Let Grow, a nonprofit that two of us—Lenore and Jon—helped found to foster children’s independence. K–12 students in the program get a monthly homework assignment: Do something new on your own, with your parents’ permission but without their help. Kids use the prompt to run errands, climb trees, cook meals. Some finally learn how to tie their own shoes. Here’s what one fourth grader with intellectual disabilities wrote—in her own words and spelling:

This is my fist let it gow project. I went shoping by myself. I handle it wheel but the ceckout was a lit hard but it was fun to do. I leand that I am brave and can go shop by myself. I loved my porject.

Other hopeful signs are emerging. The New Jersey–based Balance Project is helping 50 communities reduce screen time and restore free play for kids, employing the “four new norms” that Jon lays out in The Anxious Generation. This summer, Newburyport, Massachusetts, is handing out prizes each week to kids who try something new on their own. (Let Grow has a tool kit for other communities that want to do the same.) The Boy Scouts—now rebranded as Scouting America, and open to all young people—is finally growing again. We could go on.

What we see in the data and from the stories parents send us is both simple and poignant: Kids being raised on screens long for real freedom. It’s like they’re homesick for a world they’ve never known.

Granting them more freedom may feel uncomfortable at first. But if parents want their kids to put down their phones, they need to open the front door. Nearly three-quarters of the children in our survey agreed with the statement “I would spend less time online if there were more friends in my neighborhood to play with in person.”

[Stephanie H. Murray: What adults lost when kids stopped playing in the street]

If nothing changes, Silicon Valley will keep supplying kids with ever more sophisticated AI “friends” that are always available and will cater to a child’s every whim. But AI will never fulfill children’s deepest desires. Even this generation of digital natives still longs for what most of their parents had: time with friends, in person, without adults.

Today’s kids want to spend their childhood in the real world. Let’s give it back to them.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Don’t worry. Although content that INAPPROPRIATELY DISPARAGES AMERICANS PAST OR LIVING or that includes MATTERS UNRELATED TO THE BEAUTY, ABUNDANCE, AND GRANDEUR OF THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE has been targeted for removal at national-park sites, the caliber of park tours has not suffered! Here is a glimpse of the kind of information you can look forward to receiving at each of these historic sites.

Stonewall National Monument: One of the best places to admire the abundant natural beauty of New York City. The taxis, yellow. The skyscrapers, high! The luminous walk signs, with their flashing white gentleman composed of tiny stars, majestic! Here a community rose up in response to a police raid and sparked a revolution. We cannot say which community, but we hope there weren’t any LGBTQ people present. It seems unlikely; they did not exist before 1967, which was one of many things that made America Great at that time, and which we are trying our best to replicate today. We’ve been removing the movement’s patrons from the Stonewall website one letter at a time and seeing whether anyone notices.

Manzanar National Historic Site: This well-preserved internment-camp site from World War II is a chilling, gut-wrenching reminder of the stunning natural beauty of our flawless nation!

Mount Rushmore National Memorial: This incomplete statue of some presidents will be a wonderful place to contemplate America’s beauty soon, when it is beautified even further by the addition of the best president yet! We don’t need to say anything more about this site. Nice, uncontroversial place for some sculptures of white men, we’re pretty sure!

Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site: The National Guard liked this high school so much that it decided to sit in on classes here for a time in the 1960s. For some reason, only nine of the students who went here are singled out as heroes, but we think, actually, every student is a hero.

Redwood National and State Parks: These beautiful, large trees are big enough to fend for themselves, and the implication that action is needed on our part to protect them is, frankly, insulting. Trees eat carbon dioxide, you know!!!

Adams National Historic Park: President John Adams presided over the passage of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798! A great thing. Good legacy.

Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail: Some really scenic sights along here. Great place to hear birds. John Lewis marched across a bridge on this route, and some police marched out to meet him. Fun!

Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site: This site was set aside to commemorate a bunch of people who have been removed from Air Force training materials, so we are unsure what they did. As soon as these people are added back to the training materials, we can tell you! Just keep in mind that if it appears that any of the people who participated in United States history weren’t white, that is DEI.

Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park: This woman is famous for some reason, but we can’t say for sure what that is. Maybe the rare natural splendor of the surroundings of her home. Sometimes she led fellow Americans on long treks on foot, presumably to admire the breathtaking beauty of the environment up close. She did this many times. She must have loved nature!

Gettysburg National Military Park: It appears that lots of brave men fought and died here, but for what reason, we can’t exactly say. Not for us to take sides! We’ll refer you to President Donald Trump’s thoughts: “Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. It was so much and so interesting and so vicious and horrible and so beautiful in so many different ways; it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow. I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And, uh, the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor, did you ever notice that? No longer in favor. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys. Never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill. He said, ‘Wow, that was a big mistake.’ He lost his great general. And they were fighting. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys!’ But it was too late.”

This is what happened here, and we hope you have no further questions.

Women’s Rights National Historic Park (Seneca Falls): Here a bunch of women got together and asked for something they did not really need! Most important: There’s a waterfall nearby.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Park: Here was born a president who did something that was important to do, and especially at that time. One of the lesser presidents, he came to guide the nation through the Civil War, which was fought over nothing. The Seinfeld of wars.

Trail of Tears National Historic Trail: This scenic route takes you through nine states, starting in Georgia and continuing to Oklahoma! Along this path, you can see a lot of foliage. A fun trail to walk voluntarily.

Reconstruction Era National Historic Park: Things have always been good in this country. Look—a bird. Wow! Check out all the waterfowl around here!

Boston National Historic Park (Freedom Trail): To describe the historic significance of this site would require us to disparage King George III of England. Which we are loath to do! There’s no shame in being a king.

President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home: Did you know that Bill Clinton and Andrew Johnson were the only two presidents ever to be impeached? Fun fact!

Statue of Liberty: For years, people have made a big deal about how good she looks as you approach, but imagine how nice she’d look if you were leaving. Please disregard the poem; we are trying to remove it.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

How do the small birds        in the street know how not to die—

that whatever        they gather, hunger for, is never

enough to keep them        in the road when our wheels bear down

upon them? They feast on        what I cannot see then fly away

& sing.

This poem appears in the September 2025 print edition.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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Technocratic management, no matter how brilliant, cannot unwind structural inequalities. (From 2020)

By Daniel Markovits

Homes Still Aren’t Designed for a Body Like Mine

Why is it so hard for disabled people to find safe, accessible places to live?

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The Week Ahead

Greetings From Your Hometown, a new album by the Jonas Brothers (out Friday)People Like Us,by the National Book Award winner Jason Mott, a novel about two Black writers trying to live a world filled with gun violence (out Tuesday)Ted Bundy: Dialogue With the Devil, a new Ted Bundy docuseries that features newly uncovered interviews and recordings (out Thursday on Hulu)

Essay

Illustration by Joshua Nazario

Memoir of a Mailman

By Tyler Austin Harper

“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home. “An occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.” What to call Grant’s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.

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In August 1775, nothing particularly dramatic was happening among the roughly 14,000 soldiers of the Continental Army besieging the British army in Boston. Indeed, nothing particularly dramatic happened for the next six months. And then, in March 1776, the British suddenly evacuated Boston. Which is why the months of apparent calm deserve a close look.

The semiquincentennial of American independence has begun: The anniversaries of the battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill are behind us; the reenactment of Ethan Allen’s Green Mountain Boys’ storming Fort Ticonderoga was a smashing success. Other big moments await, culminating, no doubt, in a big party on July 4, 2026. One hopes and expects that there will be plenty of hoopla, because that is the American way.

But 250 years ago today, the real and unspectacular work of American independence was under way. The Continental Army, created in June of 1775, had warily welcomed its new leader, George Washington, without much fuss. A slaveholding Virginia gentleman and loosely religious Anglican was going to lead an army that was mainly made up of New Englanders—including both psalm-singing, Bible-quoting descendants of the Puritans and dissenting freethinkers. For his part, Washington was appalled at what he saw: militia units that elected their own officers and called them by their first names, free Black men carrying weapons, money-grubbing Yankees (as opposed to land-grubbing Virginia gentry), and general squalor. “They are an exceeding dirty and nasty people,” he told his cousin Lund Washington.

[Lindsay Chervinsky: The ‘dirty and nasty people’ who became Americans]

What happened that summer outside Boston was of monumental importance. If this was to be an American army and not just an assembly of colonial militias, then Washington would have to be the first American general, and not just a provincial. He would have to create a system out of chaos, and hold together a force against a dangerous enemy. Although slightly outnumbered and bottled up in Boston, which connected to the mainland by only the narrowest of peninsulas, the British army was tough, cohesive, professional, and eager to avenge its unexpected defeats and Pyrrhic victories.

Washington did the work in many ways—by organizing the army in divisions and brigades, inspecting the troops, regularizing discipline, hammering home the importance of digging latrines, and quarantining soldiers who had smallpox. It helped that he looked the part of a military leader: tall, well turned out, graceful, and the best horseman in the colonies, by most accounts. No less important, he was able to transcend his aversion to those strange New Englanders.

Two men utterly unlike his social set in Virginia quickly became his most trusted subordinates: Nathanael Greene of Rhode Island, a Quaker with a talent for organization, and a tubby Boston bookstore owner, Henry Knox, who became the chief of artillery. The former was eventually made quartermaster of the army and then commander of the southern army, where he displayed a flair for field command. The latter brought 59 heavy-artillery pieces from Crown Point and Fort Ticonderoga to the army outside of Boston in the dead of winter, before developing the artillery arm into the equal of its British opponent.

Washington quickly realized that his most talented military leader was a third New Englander, the Connecticut merchant Benedict Arnold, who, until he committed treason, was the best field commander on either side of the conflict. In the autumn of 1775, Washington sent him off on a daring march through the Maine wilderness that very nearly wrested Quebec from British control.

The commander in chief needed a headquarters guard—what we today call a personal security detail—and so in March 1776, the army created a unit known as the life guard. Washington selected men from each army unit, which meant that the life guard’s personnel skewed in favor of New Englanders; as its first commander, he chose a Massachusetts man, Caleb Gibbs, who lasted until 1780. He chose southerners, too, for crucial positions, and not all of them gentlemen—Daniel Morgan of Virginia, for example, was a roughneck leader of riflemen who formed an elite corps. The point was clear: This was an American army, and talented men, no matter their background, could win their leader’s trust and rise up the ranks.

Washington remains in some ways the most remote of America’s national heroes; he is more distant from us than Abraham Lincoln because of his greater austerity and reserve. He mastered his volcanic temper; prudently handled both his subordinates and his superiors; and knew the value of dignity and a certain distance in exercising command. He was brave but not particularly gifted as a tactical leader, and he was prone to devising overly aggressive and complicated plans, but these did not matter as much as the larger leadership qualities that he had brought with him to Boston. Small wonder that many years later, men who were his intellectual superiors—Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams—worked for him. His story shows why character and good judgment are far more important in a leader than mere intelligence.

Despite wonderful writing about Washington in recent books, including Ron Chernow’s 2010 biography and the first two volumes of Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on the history of the Revolution, Americans do not value him as we once did. The fault lies across the political spectrum. For some (think of the 1619 Project), the fundamental sin of slavery overwhelms every aspect of biography. Washington controlled several hundred enslaved people on his Mount Vernon estate; he often treated them badly, and as of 1775, he felt no shame about that.

Being a plantation owner was part of his identity, but not all of it, and more important: Like some of the other Founders, he became uneasy about reconciling the ideals of the Revolution with the practice of holding men and women as chattel—which is why he manumitted all of his slaves in his will.

At a deeper level, this view of American history cannot help but crush patriotic pride in what remains, in retrospect, an astounding achievement. The Revolution culminated not in despotism but in a new political order based on liberty and self-government, built on ideals that, described with exceptional eloquence by another slaveholder, Jefferson, eventually blew up the evil institution on which their way of life rested.

[George Packer: A view of American history that leads to one conclusion]

A different form of relentless present-mindedness afflicts the current administration, which seeks to purge national parks and museums of references to the darker sides of American history, beginning with slavery but also including the slaughter and dispossession of American Indians, and various forms of discrimination and persecution thereafter. In everything from signage to artwork, the Trump administration reaches for pabulum and kitsch, a false and unidimensional depiction of the American past.

As for academic historians, although some exemplary ones are at work—including Gordon Wood and David Hackett Fischer—the contemporary trend is to shun great individuals in favor of subaltern history. There is not much place for a commanding general in a pantheon composed of people overlooked by previous generations.

That summer and fall in Cambridge and the other towns surrounding Boston, George Washington’s work made a difference. It reminds us that American independence was won by dramatic deeds, to be sure, but also by mastering—slowly and painfully—the undramatic things, such as insisting on rank insignia and saluting, managing gunpowder production, and digging latrines properly. It reminds us that there is such a thing as individual greatness, and that it can make all the difference. And particularly in an age of self-righteous scorn, we would do well to recall how Washington’s lifelong struggles with himself—his prejudices, his emotions, his upbringing and background—contributed to final victory. We can still profit by the example.

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When he learned one night this summer that the United States had bombed Iran, the content creator Aaron Parnas responded right away, showing what’s bad and what’s good about using TikTok for news. Shortly after 7:46 p.m. ET on June 21, he saw Donald Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the air strikes. At 7:52, according to a time stamp, Parnas uploaded to TikTok a minute-long video in which he looked into the camera; read out the president’s post, which identified the suspected nuclear sites that the U.S. had targeted; and added a note of skepticism about whether Iran would heed Trump’s call for peace. As traditional media outlets revealed more details that night, Parnas summarized their findings in nine more reports, some of which he recorded from a car.

Parnas wasn’t adding elaborate detail or original reporting. What he had to offer was speed—plus a deep understanding of how to reach people on TikTok, which may not seem an obvious or trustworthy source of news: The platform is owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, which lawmakers in Washington, D.C., fear could be manipulated to promote Beijing’s interests. TikTok’s algorithm offers each user a personalized feed of short, grabby videos—an arrangement that seems unlikely to serve up holistic coverage of current events.

Even so, according to a Pew Research Center poll from last fall, 17 percent of adults—and 39 percent of adults under 30—regularly get informed about current affairs on the app. Fewer than 1 percent of all TikTok accounts followed by Americans are traditional media outlets. Instead, users are relying not only on “newsfluencers” such as Parnas but also on skits reenacting the latest Supreme Court ruling, hype videos for political agendas, and other news-adjacent clips that are hard to describe to people who don’t use TikTok.

Last summer, after the first assassination attempt on Trump, one viral video fused clips of the bloody-eared Republican raising his fist with snippets of Joe Biden’s well wishes. Simultaneously, Chappell Roan’s ballad for the lovestruck, “Casual,” played, hinting at a bromance. On my For You page in June, as U.S.-Iran tensions flared, I saw a string of videos known as “edits”—minute-long music montages—on the general topic. One spliced together footage of zooming F-16s, Captain America intimidating his enemies in an elevator, and bald eagles staring ominously while AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” blared. Skeptics might wonder: When people say they get their news from TikTok, what exactly are they learning?

[Read: The internet is TikTok now]

Frequent consumers of current-affairs content on TikTok insist that they can decipher what’s going on in the world—that, even if they have to extrapolate facts from memes, the brevity and entertainment value compensate for a lack of factual detail. “A lot of things are in simpler terms on TikTok,” Miles Maltbia, a 22-year-old cybersecurity analyst from Chicago, told me. “That, and convenience, makes it the perfect place to get all my news from.” And as more and more users turn to TikTok for news, creators such as Parnas are finding ways to game the algorithm.

Parnas, who is 26, is a lawyer by trade. He told me that he monitors every court case he deems significant with a legal tracker. He was immersed in politics at an early age. (His father, Lev Parnas, gained brief notoriety as an associate of Rudy Giuliani during Trump’s first term. “I love my dad,” Aaron Parnas has said. “And I’m not my dad.”) C-SPAN is on “all day every day.” And he’s enabled X and Truth Social notifications for posts from every member of Congress and major world leader. When he decides that his phone’s alerts are newsworthy, he hits the record button. His rapid-reaction formula for news has made him a one-man media giant: He currently has 4.2 million followers on TikTok. He told me that his videos on the platform have reached more than 100 million American users in the past six months. His Substack newsletter also has the most subscriptions of any in the “news” category, and he recently interviewed Senator Cory Booker, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot, and this magazine’s editor in chief.

Still, Parnas’s TikTok model relies heavily on reporting by other outlets. And Parnas’s 24/7 information blitz may be jarring for those whose media-consumption habits are not already calibrated for TikTok. There’s no “Good evening” or “Welcome.” But he’s reaching an audience who other media don’t: Many of his viewers, he thinks, are “young people who don’t watch the news and never have and never will.” He added, “They just don’t have the attention span to.”

Ashley Acosta, a rising senior at the University of Pennsylvania, told me she liked the fact that Parnas is his own boss, outside the corporate media world. She contrasted him with outlets such as ABC, which recently fired the correspondent Terry Moran for an X post that called Trump a “world-class hater.” Nick Parigi, a 24-year-old graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, also sees Parnas as a valuable news source. “You’re getting less propagandized,” he told me. “It’s not pushing an agenda.” Last year, Parnas explicitly supported Kamala Harris’s presidential candidacy, but he prides himself on delivering basic information in a straightforward manner. “I wish we would just go back to the fact-based, Walter Cronkite–style of reporting,” he told me. “So that’s what I do.” For Parnas to sound like the CBS News legend, you’d have to watch his TikToks at half speed.

If Parnas is a genre-defining anchor, Jack Mac is the equivalent of a shock jock. A creator with 1.1 million followers, he uses the term “journalisming” to describe his work, which amounts to commenting on stories he finds interesting or amusing—such as a “patriot” New York firefighter being suspended for letting young women ride in his firetruck.

“Do I think TikTok is the best source for news? No,” Olivia Stringfield, a 25-year-old from South Carolina who works in marketing, told me. But she’s a fan of Mac because he offers “a more glamorous way to get the news”—and a quick, convenient way. “I don’t have time to sit down and read the paper like my parents did,” Stringfield said.

Robert Kozinets, a professor at the University of Southern California who has studied Gen Z’s media consumption on TikTok, told me that users rarely seek out news. It finds them. “The default position is: Algorithm, let the information flow over me,” he said. “Load me up. I’ll interrupt it when I see something interesting.” On a platform where little content is searched, creators dress up the news to make it algorithm friendly.

The Washington Post is one established media brand that has leaned into the growing format of TikTok news skits. In one video about the Supreme Court, a Post staffer wearing a college-graduation robe wields a toolbox mallet as a gavel to channel Chief Justice John Roberts, and when she mimics him, her background turns into red curtains. “South Carolina can cut off Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood,” she says. Dave Jorgenson, who launched the Post’s TikTok channel in 2019, announced recently that he’s leaving to set up his own online-video company—a testament to the demand for this new style of content.

[From the January 2025 issue: The ‘mainstream media’ has already lost]

The Post’s embrace of TikTok has been unusual for an outlet of the newspaper’s stature. The prevalence of vibes-based content on the video platform raises obvious questions about truth and accuracy. Many users I spoke with trusted crowdsourced fact-checking to combat misinformation, via the comments section. I asked Maltbia, the analyst from Chicago, how he knows which comments to trust. “I’ll usually look at the ones that are the most liked,” he said. “But if it still sounds a little shady to me, then I’ll probably Google it.”

Parnas defended the integrity of TikTok news. “There’s no more misinformation on TikTok than there is on Twitter, than there is on Fox News, than sometimes there is on CNN,” he told me. That claim is impossible to verify: TikTok’s factual accuracy is under-researched. One assessment by the media watchdog NewsGuard found that 20 percent of TikTok’s news search results contained misinformation—but no user I spoke with bothers with the app’s search function.

Whether TikTok will continue to gain popularity as a news outlet isn’t yet clear. Citing fears of hostile foreign control over a major communications platform, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation aimed at forcing TikTok’s Chinese owners to sell. But Trump has now delayed implementation of the law three times since he took office.

In the meantime, users of the platform keep stretching the definition of news. On TikTok, “news is anything that’s new,” Kozinets, the USC professor, told me. Entrepreneurial creators who care about current events will keep testing delivery formats to gain more eyeballs on the platform. And even if TikTok is sold or shuts down, similar apps are sure to fill any vacuum. The challenge of packaging news for distribution by a black-box algorithm seems here to stay.

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

This week, Donald Trump broke with Benjamin Netanyahu over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Meanwhile, Trump fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the release of the latest jobs report. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this and more.

“Trump believes that he has the ability and leverage over Netanyahu,” Alexander Ward, a national-security reporter at The Wall Street Journal, said last night. But the reason that “there isn’t as much leverage as the Trump team believes is because Netanyahu has his own politics, too.”

Joining Atlantic staff writer Franklin Foer to discuss: Leigh Ann Caldwell, the chief Washington correspondent at Puck; Andrea Mitchell, the chief Washington and foreign-affairs correspondent at NBC News; Alexander Ward, a national-security reporter at The Wall Street Journal; and Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

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