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Soviet dissidents have long admired the United States and its Founding Fathers for their attachment to a moral core, the basis for individual human liberty. So what happens when American power is used not for moral interests but for solely pragmatic ones?

Host Garry Kasparov is joined by George Friedman, founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a firm that analyzes foreign policy and forecasts global events. George’s view of the world—drawn from the experience of his family fleeing Nazis in Eastern Europe—echoes Henry Kissinger’s geopolitical philosophy: realism, not idealism. Garry and George consider whether realism is realistic, and what the future of American foreign policy means for democracy at home.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Garry Kasparov: The tradition of Soviet dissidents, those brave souls who spoke out against the totalitarian Communist regime, was based on morality. They often sacrificed their freedom, and even their lives, to call out the evils of a government that mentally and physically enslaved its own citizens and waged imperialistic wars abroad.

Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet H-bomb who later won the Nobel Peace Prize for his criticism of the Communist regime, was banished for speaking out for human rights. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature, was exiled for documenting the Stalinist Gulag system of prison camps and torture.

Their legacies inspired me, as did the great foe of the U.S.S.R. I grew up in: the United States of America. Solzhenitsyn in particular was a great admirer of the U.S., where he toured to huge audiences, speaking about the horrors of the Communist system. He spoke about the genius of the American Founding Fathers. He praised them for not becoming detached from a moral core, the basis for individual human liberty.

Ironically, the most powerful American foreign-policy voice of the second half of the 20th century largely disagreed with this high praise. It was the heavily accented voice of Henry Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s secretary of state, who spoke not about good and evil, or even right or wrong, but about pragmatism, rational actors, and national interests. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

Kissinger’s belief in realpolitik defined a generation of U.S. foreign policy. I often find it too cynical. Is realism really realistic? How can American power be used only for U.S. interests if America’s leaders cannot agree on what those interests are? Will we defend our allies against aggression as promised, or pragmatically decide on what suits us at the moment?

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

The space between crusading global policeman and “America First” isolationism is where my guest this week plants a flag of analysis and concrete interests. George Friedman is the founder and chairman of Geopolitical Futures, a firm that analyzes foreign policy and forecasts global events. And he is something of the intellectual successor to Kissinger’s view of the world: realism, not idealism. George’s life of strategic analysis provides unique insight into what drives U.S. foreign policy—at least when it’s not being driven by Donald Trump’s social-media posts.

[Music]

Kasparov: George, hello.

George Friedman: Hello.

Kasparov: Thank you very much for joining our show. I was looking very much to talk to you about, of course, geopolitics, about the issues where you are one of the great experts. But before we dive into this discussion of the intricacies of geopolitics, I wondered if I might start with a more personal question. You were born in Hungary, and you left Hungary. Very early age.

Friedman: Yes.

Kasparov: You have no memories of Hungary, but your parents did. And how much did it affect your upbringing—the memories of Hungary, the war, and all these tragedies surrounding the war? Did it make a contribution to your views of the world? So just tell us a bit more about it.

Friedman: Well, I certainly grew up in a house where both my parents were in the Holocaust. My father was in Mauthausen, my mother in a little camp of Lichtenburg. They came back devastated. Then the Communists wanted to arrest my father because he had been a social democrat in a previous life. He was on a list. We escaped by taking a boat across the Danube to Czechoslovakia. And then we were to Vienna, where an American charity took us, gave us dinner, gave us a shower, gave us clothes and a room to live in. Until we got a visa to the United States. But also one of the defining points was 1956, when the Hungarians rose up on the same night my sister was married. And at that marriage everyone was Hungarian, and everyone was looking at the newspapers and the pictures trying to pick out which houses they lived in.

Kasparov: Very interesting. What was the mood in the room?

Friedman: Deep but controlled fear. Everyone in that room had been in the Holocaust. Everyone understood fear. Everyone was able to subdue it, control it. Everyone was watching what would happen. What they thought would happen would be a devastation of Hungary and the people they left behind, but also a possible devastation of Europe again. And these things were all their past. The Hungarian Revolution came very fast and went very fast, in a matter of days. The panic was there, but a clear understanding was not there in my family. Everybody was concerned only about whether this aunt or that uncle or that cousin was safe. It became a very personal event here in the United States for the Hungarian community, rather than an ideological one or anything like that.

Kasparov: Now you talked about your family’s tragic experience with Nazis. And now you’re talking about another tragic page in Hungarian history. It’s the Soviet invasion and brutality of Soviet troops. I assume that you are not feeling uncomfortable being both anti-fascist and anti-communist.

Friedman: Well, how could I like either one? One almost destroyed my family. The other was planning to destroy my family.

Kasparov: But what do you tell people that now, these days, are trying to separate these two?

Friedman: Well, one of the things I have learned is not to have many opinions. We have opinions, and then we wish for things to be the case. Then we shape our vision of the world based on those opinions. And the world usually doesn’t work that way. So in my life, when I asked a question about fascism, I’m more interested in what it was and why it emerged. I look the same way at the Soviet Union, at Communism. For me, the foundation of what I’ve learned is to avoid passions and to avoid opinions.

I want to understand why they do this. I don’t think that nations simply decide to be evil or good, or any of these things. Certain forces occur within nations. It is simply the way in which geopolitics, which is my field, emerges. Hungary was Hungary. Its position was its position. It was perpetually the victim. Russia was perpetually large, powerful, capable. Each nation had its fundamental definition, and that definition pivoted around power—the ability to be a nation, to make decisions for yourself and not have other countries impose them on you, so on.

So I try to understand the process that takes place. And that I am anti-Nazi does not mean I don’t want to understand very clearly why the Nazis arose, and I cannot do that unless I’m willing to put my head in the head of the Nazis, of those who supported them. But to me, the emergence of communism, the emergence of the Nazis, this is what I try to understand. Because I grew up in a house full of opinions. Hungarians, Jews living in one house. You have many opinions, many different ones going all over the place, and they think it matters. Yet in their lives, all the opinions they had didn’t matter. Had they been able to analyze the situation to understand what was happening, to put themselves in the other person’s monstrous position, they may have been safer. So from my point of view, opinions cloud understanding of what is going to happen. It can be very dangerous and really make it impossible for you to realize just how terrible they are or how not so terrible or whatever, and make decisions based on that.

Kasparov: Hmm. As an expert both from theory and from practice, having faced the horrors indirectly of Nazism through your family experience and also indirectly from communism, though you have been dealing with this as an American expert for many decades. Many people thought that fascism has ended in 1945. Many, myself included, thought that communism was decisively defeated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. It seems to me now that both ideologies are just very much around; they are even thriving. How do you explain that?

Friedman: Well, I don’t see Nazism thriving. I see authoritarianism thriving in the sense that in many cases it is seen by people that democracy, liberal democracy, is a failure. So I don’t see fascism, which had a particular ideology, being what’s at stake here. The fundamental question is whether liberal democracy in the way it is practiced now binds people together or drives them apart.

Authoritarianism, historically, is far more the norm than liberal democracy. Liberal democracy opened the door to the idea that people with very different beliefs—both in how governance should take place, how they should live their lives—could live together. It is a great experiment, but it’s a very difficult experiment. If you are a fundamental moralist—if you believe that the way you think things should be, or that the way you should live, is a moral imperative—then it is very difficult to have a liberal democracy.

Kasparov: Let’s for a moment jump back to Russia. Does Putin’s rule qualify to be called fascist dictatorship?

Friedman: Well, I think he is a Russian ruler in a very strange position. The czars had a history of this sort of rule and an ideology. The Soviet period had an ideology that justified the ruler. He has no visible ideology but nationalism, and he has no legitimate ideological validation. He has power, but even looking at his power, it’s very strange. Around him there seems to be no orderly structure, so that if tomorrow he died of a heart attack, it is not clear what the succession would be, what the process would be. So it’s a very odd governance, even for Russia. Because Russia to me has always been a place of deep ideology, of belief of something, of orthodoxy or of Marxism or what have you. Now it is a place without beliefs beyond the idea that Putin is in charge.

Kasparov: Going back to the decades of the Cold War, you were an American, and I understand you had a few people that listened to you. And you already had a massive reputation backing your expertise. But what is your view of the Cold War? Because for many, myself included, it was an ideological battle. Do you think that ideology played a crucial role or even an important role? Or ideology was simply a cover-up for other interests that were based, as we already discussed, on historical predetermination, and some patterns that have been established over decades, if not centuries?

Friedman: Well, we have to look back to the beginning. I don’t see the Cold War as a stand-alone war. It was what followed the Second World War, which in turn follows the First World War, which in turn follows the Napoleonic Wars. So Europe and the world is a place of a continuity of struggles. When I look at the United States, there is something unique about the United States. The fundamental interest of the United States, of the two oceans—the Atlantic and the Pacific—that is our barrier. We did not enter World War I until the Germans started sinking American ships and British ships with Americans on board. We did not enter World War II until the Japanese attacked us in the Pacific. And then, remember, the Germans declared war on us. We didn’t declare war on them. When the war ended, the United States had one fundamental geopolitical fear: that the Soviets would reach the west coast of Europe, and Cherbourg and Bremen and others would become Russian ports and challenge us in the Atlantic. From the American point of view, the problem of the Cold War from the United States was certainly the love of democracy, but it was also the fear of another war forced on us by an attack in the Atlantic. So if we could keep the Russians far back, this was essential.

So when I look at the Cold War, I look at the American imperative to keep the Russians away from the Atlantic. I look at the American imperative to forge out of Europe a defensive phase, and I look at the issue of the fight for the inheritance of the European empires, which took place between the Russians and the Americans and the third world, all over the place. So I see in an ideological element, which is a very good justification for what we ruthlessly did. And I see ideology as a moral imperative, but life and death is also a moral imperative.

And from the American point of view, what happened in Pearl Harbor, what happened in World War I and World War II, was the only thing that could threaten our existence. And therefore there was certainly a moral dimension to it. But there was also a geopolitical force that drove this. And I think we cast it as a moral imperative because that’s more persuasive to people. So by pitting it as a question of liberal democracy versus suppression, it was an added dimension. And I think American policy makers profoundly believed that—that this was the only issue. So there were two modes of thought about the Cold War. There was an American view that was very coldly geopolitical. There was the other moral dimension of the war, in the sense that liberal democracy was a more moral system than communism, and therefore we were also engaged in a moral system. And I think that was true about liberal democracy being more moral. But I don’t think it was a fundamental thing that drove the United States where it went.

Kasparov: We’ll be right back.

[Break]

Kasparov: You have written about Trump’s diplomatic model. And you seem to find some coherence in what, to me and many others, is a very incoherent set of events. Can you explain the pattern you are witnessing and describing in that analysis?

Friedman: First, understand what he sees. Since 80 years, the United States has been continually involved in warfare with essentially communism, in a certain way, but also in wars such as in Afghanistan. A war such as in Vietnam; it was a moral war. It was against the communist regime, but it was unwinnable. What he came in to do is to say, Look, it’s been 80 years in which a norm has developed of two things. One that the United States is the military force that must be there first and best to combat the Russians. The second was that we have to build an economic system that weakened the Soviet Union and strengthened us. So what I approach these matters with is simultaneously a moral dimension—which is very real and binding people together—and a geopolitical reality, which shifts.

So I see him, at this point, as trying to do the same thing [Franklin D.] Roosevelt did with the banking system in the Depression—issuing executive orders, closing down the banking system and recovering it, restructuring it, and trying to put more people on the Supreme Court because the Supreme Court kept knocking down his rulings. So this is what happens when we have an institutional crisis. And this institutional crisis that we’re having right now is: Do we want to remain as exposed to the world, militarily and economically, as we were? And Trump has come in very openly saying it, but not being believed that this is what he wanted. He asked the question about Ukraine: This is a European war. Why aren’t they fighting it? Why are they looking at us, at what we’ll do? And that’s a very shocking moral thing to do, because the United States is seen as the guarantor of liberal democracy.

And from his point of view, we have paid the price for 80 years of being the guarantor. And so you see a different economic system emerging. The free-trade system emerged out of World War II as part of the Cold War, as a way to strengthen other nations, to some extent at the expense of the United States. Foreign aid emerged as a weapon in the Cold War. And his argument is, Look, the Cold War is over. Russia could not even take Ukraine. How is it gonna take Europe? That’s not the issue any longer. The issue is to restructure the world to see that the 80-year cycle that was created after World War II is obsolete and try to do it.

Now, you do not violate a norm without being considered a tyrant. Roosevelt, interestingly, was called a dictator for doing what he did, which is very similar to what Trump did, which is very similar to what Andrew Jackson and Lincoln did. This happens. But I’m less interested in whether we like or hate Trump. But the way we lived in the last 80 years—and I was in the Army, and my daughter was in the Army fighting in Iraq for what I don’t know, and my son was in the Air Force. And the question was: We were fighting all of these wars, deploying all over the place; do we still need to do that? And the second question comes up: The economic system that was created in order to help us in this Cold War—is it still relevant? Is it still in the American interest?

So what you see happening is where the United States took responsibility for the entire global system, in a sense, for 80 years. It’s not unnatural for it to want to go back to a place where its primary interest is its own interest. So I don’t see Trump as anything but a very obnoxious man personally, and also a man who appears reckless because he’s deconstructing the previous system and opening the door for a new one.

So when I look at the situation here, I see a normal geopolitical shift taking place. The recognition that Russia is no longer a military threat to Europe—and therefore the ability to disengage. This violates all the norms of the last 80 years, but it’s an inevitable process.

Kasparov: I have to give you credit for seeing very early what so many people did not: that Putin’s Russia would become more belligerent and would cross the border, attacking Ukraine. So indeed you even wrote it in your book back in 2008—that not just Russia would attack Ukraine, but also you predicted it would not succeed. So what did you see back then? And just, you know, now could you give us a little bit of insight into the future? So if you are so accurate predicting it, though, I also have to you know, boast, I also made the same prediction. Though more intuitively, not from the same strategic perspectives as you did. But what do you expect to happen now in Russia? What is the end of this war? So just if you combine your analysis of the past, present, and the future.

Friedman: First, why did they have to invade? The northern border of Ukraine is 300 miles from Moscow. The Russians remember Napoleon. The Russians remember Hitler. When the Maidan Square rising happened, the U.S. made a big mistake by involving itself in the future of Ukraine. The Russians took this to mean that they were going to integrate, somehow, Ukraine into its structure. And if I were a Russian leader, and I looked at the map, I would say I can’t live with that. And so I said, the Russians would rationally choose to create a buffer zone between NATO and Russia. But they failed to understand that the border would then be on Poland, so that the Russian army would now be on the border of NATO. And they miscalculated that the United States, which did substantially intervene, would allow that to happen.

Putin has failed. The Russian army has failed. It is not a force to be threatened with. It is now descended to terror bombings in Kyiv. Now the problem is that if the war ends at the current terms, Putin is a dead man. The problem is Putin has no organized opposition. He’s not surrounded by a central committee or a presidium that will look at him and say, You have to go. There’s no way that another leader can emerge, and Putin is fighting for his life. He cannot allow the war to end on the terms it is. It cannot allow the war to cost a million Russian lives, and this is all they have.

For me, the fundamental question is—there are forces inside of Russia that are horrified by this war and what it, how it turned out, and what’s happening now. I don’t know how powerful the oligarchs are. I don’t know how the military is taking it. The military was savaged in this war. I do not understand the internal politics that allows Putin to keep his position.

So in this case, you have to look at the idea of true dictatorship—true fascism, if you want to call it that—where a single person has so destructed opposition forces and will act simply for the purpose of showing that he was not defeated. So I read this as turning out with Putin falling. When? How? I don’t know.

Kasparov: So, Taiwan—it’s another potential hot spot on the global map. It’s hypothetical, but many believe it could be an outcome of the war in Ukraine, that if Putin succeeds even partially, China might be emboldened. But you are quite adamant saying that in recent years the Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely. Why—why so?

Friedman: Well, firstly, you have to ask the question: If this so important, why didn’t they invade 10, 15, 20 years ago? They couldn’t. And they can’t. Now I’ll explain why.

Kasparov: Okay.

Friedman: The problem of invading Taiwan is this: It takes about 15 hours, 20 hours for a landing craft to move from a Chinese port to Taiwan. In that time, U.S. satellites would immediately pick up that they’re crossing the river. In that time, missiles that are loaded on all of these islands that they’re passing through, okay, would possibly destroy those ships. That would be not a difficult thing.

Secondly, if they did manage to land in Taiwan, how would they supply Taiwan—with the ability of the U.S., with drones and everything else that exists now? So the military reality is that the invasion of Taiwan is a much more difficult thing than it appears to be. And this is the reason why, for years and years, they have spoken of Taiwan as part of China but have never attempted a military action. In fact, it was easier to do so 15 years ago than it is now. So this is why they don’t do it.

Kasparov: But just for a moment, just for the sake of this very interesting conversation, imagine that your analysis is wrong, and—it happens to even the best of us—and there is an invasion. How should the United States under President Trump respond? And even more important, how would it respond?

Friedman: I think it would respond savagely. So if they somehow miraculously took Taiwan, we would blockade Taiwan completely. And I suspect, in some way, hammer it to death with drones or even invade. And when I talk about the difference in how I look at the world, I do not ask the question of: What would they do? I ask: What can they do? They have to remember that the United States is one-quarter of the world’s economy. The Chinese grew to what they are now by having access to that economy and simultaneously to investment. So if they went after Taiwan, that would mean some sort of war with the United States. It would mean something worse. Xi [Jinping]’s success in building China into an economic power at vast rates of growth depended on its relationship with the United States. If he cuts those lines, he needs to find alternatives, and there are no substitutions. Therefore, Trump singled [out] the Chinese with extraordinarily absurd tariffs that no one ever expects to be the ones that are there. And demanded a negotiation with China, which the Chinese have hesitated.

But there’s two problems. We have an economic relationship with China and a military relationship with China, and they contradict each other. In other words, we have a hostile military relationship in the Pacific with the Chinese navy; at the same time, an intimate economic defense. So I’ve likened this to the situation of when the Arab oil embargo took place after the 1973 war and left the United States in a very bad economic situation. It was catastrophic.

One of the questions you raised: What if they invade Taiwan? What will the Americans do where we’re in a quasi-military confrontation? This is irrational. What Trump, with his normal subtlety and explanation, has done was: He slammed the door of the Chinese, who now have to make some fundamental decisions. To make them understand that the United States has room to maneuver that China does not have, and try to create a very different relationship with China than exists. In a sense, it is the same strategy as Russia. It’s more likely to work with the Chinese than with the Russians.

Kasparov: Are you saying that Trump has strategy?

Friedman: I’m saying that he’s either the stupidest lucky man in the world or he knows what he is doing.

Kasparov: Okay. So if I understand correctly, it’s very much a reflection of America’s position vis-à-vis Europe during the Cold War.

Friedman: Precisely.

Kasparov: So make sure that our main geopolitical enemy could not get access to the harbors of the Atlantic or Pacific oceans.

Friedman: Yes.

Kasparov: Okay. So just a few words at the end of the conversation about the future. And I think that your vision of the American future is much more hopeful than mine or many others. So the floor is yours to end our talk with this vision of the future that will make us cheer up and sleep better.

Friedman: Well, first we have to remember the United States operates through internal crisis. So every 50 years—for no reason, I don’t know why 50 years—we have a massive crisis. The last one brought into office a president who basically changed the entire tax code. We also have institutional crises. The last time the two crises merged was with Roosevelt. And as we go through these cycles, and we look at the various presidents of various times, the re-engineering of the United States always has first a storm where the norms are being violated—and How can Roosevelt do this, and How can Lincoln do this, and all of these things, okay? And after that there comes a period in which there’s a radical calm that emerges in the country.

So after the Depression and after World War II, Eisenhower emerges and smooths away into the future. So what I see for the future is we are going through the storm before the calm. I was able to predict, I was very lucky—I said the election of 2024 would create the storm. And first we have to deconstruct all the norms, all the systems. And then we go into the period of rebuilding and regenerating. We are very used to getting rid of the norm and replacing it culturally with something new. So that terrific tension that’s within the United States today between the defenders of the ancien régime, if you’ll permit me, and the advocates of the revolution is normal. These happened before, and we had civil wars over them. So we are a very peculiar country. We are a very unique invention, and we build our lives on reinventing things. And so I see the future of the United States as reinventing our relations with the world, reinventing our internal structures, hating the president who did it. It’s a very unpleasant thing when the United States emerges as the superpower in the world to see it going through this performance. And it’s not happy in the United States either. But it’s the storm before the calm.

Kasparov: George, thank you very much for offering us this positive vision of the future. And I admire your belief in America’s ability to self-heal all the wounds inflicted by drastic measures by various presidents. And I hope that your predictions based on historical analysis and patterns will materialize, and America will emerge stronger than ever before. Thank you very much for joining us.

Friedman: And thank you for having me. And remember—we survived the Civil War.

[Music]

Kasparov: But it was a civil war first, so—yes? (Laughs.)

Friedman: First. Yes.

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

Next time on Autocracy in America:

Mathias Döpfner: I think it’s a very nice but slightly naive idea: that now the big historic opportunity is since America is sending a lot of disturbing and surprising signals, Europe could do it alone or could do it better. It’s not going to work. The challenges of China, the challenges of Russia are much too big in order to be solved by Europe alone. And I would even go that far—they are also way too big than being solvable by the United States alone.

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

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Yesterday evening, Sam Altman shared an image of the Death Star on X. There was no caption on the picture, which showed the world-destroying Star Wars space station rising over an Earth-like planet, but his audience understood the context. In fewer than 24 hours, OpenAI would release an AI model intended to wipe out all the rest.

That model, GPT-5, launched earlier today with all the requisite fanfare. In an announcement video, Altman said that the product will serve as a “legitimate Ph.D.-level expert in anything—any area you need, on demand—that can help you with whatever your goals are.” He added that “anyone, pretty soon, will be able to do more than anyone in history could.” In more concrete terms, GPT-5 is an upgrade to the ChatGPT interface you’re likely already familiar with: a model that’s now a bit better at writing, coding, math and science problems, and the like.

Of course, Altman has a penchant for hyperbole, and OpenAI—like the rest of the AI industry—likes to tout each new model as the best ever. But this particular release feels notable for a few reasons. First, it has been a long wait since the release of GPT-4 in March 2023, just a few months after ChatGPT’s debut in November 2022. And second, in that time, OpenAI has become a bona fide tech empire: As of this week, OpenAI now provides enterprise ChatGPT accounts to federal agencies at essentially no cost; its products are also used by nearly every Fortune 500 company; and today Altman announced that roughly 700 million people worldwide use ChatGPT every week. In terms of sheer reach, this is the company’s most consequential product announcement ever.

[Read: Big Tech’s AI endgame is coming into focus]

As OpenAI has ascended to the scale of a typical tech giant—it is reportedly in talks for a $500 billion valuation—the firm has also started to act like its corporate rivals. To attract new users and customers (and keep existing ones from turning to other AI products), OpenAI has doubled down on institutional partnerships and polishing its product lineup. Sure, the company still pushes the limits of AI capabilities, but its products are what keep most consumers and businesses coming back for more. For instance, OpenAI has partnered with Bain & Company, Mattel, Moderna, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Harvard. It has brought on Jony Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to spearhead the creation of physical OpenAI devices. (The Atlantic and OpenAI have a corporate partnership.)

GPT-5 achieves state-of-the-art performance on a number of AI benchmarks, according to OpenAI’s internal tests, but it is far from a clean sweep: On a few tests, competing products such as Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok outperform, or are just barely below the level of, OpenAI’s new top model. The GPT-5 announcement video and launch page also contained a number of errors—incorrect labels, numbers and colors that made no sense, and missing entries on charts—that made the program’s precise abilities, and the trustworthiness of OpenAI’s reporting, hard to discern (and led some observers to joke that perhaps GPT-5 itself had made, or hallucinated, the graphics). Yet that may not matter. OpenAI’s animating theme for GPT-5 is user experience, not “intelligence”: Its new model is intuitive, fast, and efficient; adapts to human preferences and intentions; and is easy to personalize. Before it is more intelligent, GPT-5 is more usable—and more likely to attract and retain users. “The important point is this,” Altman said, pinching a thumb and index finger together for emphasis: “We think you will love using GPT-5 much more than any previous AI.”

In some sense, OpenAI is learning from its greatest success. ChatGPT took off because it effectively redesigned an existing product: GPT-3.5, ChatGPT’s original underlying model, was months old by the time the chatbot came out, but it was relatively obscure. Placing essentially the same program within a conversational interface, however, made the model easy to use and obsess over. GPT-4 would eventually provide a new engine—smarter and more capable—but this was almost beside the point; to most people, the product was already firmly established as ChatGPT. And, like the original ChatGPT, GPT-5 is free, although nonpaying users have a limit on their usage of this most-advanced model—giving everyone a small taste of OpenAI’s ecosystem to open up the possibility that they will want, and pay for, more.

During the ensuing two-plus years of the AI race, OpenAI has kept up by releasing a slew of more minor models and new features. When Google released a version of Gemini that was extremely fast and cheap, OpenAI did the same; when DeepSeek launched a free and advanced model that could “reason” through complex questions, OpenAI publicly released a still more powerful reasoning system of its own; as Anthropic’s Claude Code seemed to corner the AI-coding market, OpenAI came out with the Codex tool for software engineers. The empire’s ambitions had no limits.

[Read: China’s DeepSeek surprise]

But these products were accompanied by a labyrinth of names and uses: GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini and GPT-4.1; o1-mini and o1-pro; o3 and o3-pro and o4-mini; and so on. This was a matter not only of poor branding but of poor design. Despite the numbers, for some uses o3 is better than o4. Users frequently complain that they don’t know how to select from OpenAI’s models. “We are near the end of this current problem,” Altman said on OpenAI’s podcast in June. “I am excited to just get to GPT-5 and GPT-6, and I think that’ll be easier for people to use.”

Now OpenAI has arrived at GPT-5, and indeed, the model might be best understood as providing easier and frictionless use—an amalgam of all of OpenAI’s disparate, discrete advances from the previous two-plus years. GPT-5 “eliminates this choice” among models and their specialties, Mark Chen, OpenAI’s chief research officer, said in today’s announcement, and that may be the new model’s core feature. GPT-5 modulates its approach to your query, using more or less “reasoning” power—doing the equivalent of selecting among the GPT-4os and o3s and o4s—depending on what is asked of it. OpenAI is now retiring a large number of its previous major models.

Alongside GPT-5, OpenAI also announced a number of other additions to the ChatGPT experience to “make ChatGPT more personalized,” Chen said, “so it’s more like your AI.” These new features are customizable color schemes, personalities (“cynic,” “robot,” “listener,” “nerd”), and access to Gmail and Google Calendar—all building on top of the recently added “Memories” feature, through which ChatGPT can pull information from previous chats. These add-ons have little to do with the bot’s engine—how “intelligent” or “capable” it is—but they will make ChatGPT more individualized, more useful, and perhaps more fun. Businesses can integrate their data as well. Just as the years of photos and notes on your iPhone make switching to a Google Pixel undesirable, or years of using Google Drive make migrating to Microsoft OneDrive hard, if ChatGPT morphs from a vanilla bot into your AI or your company’s AI, leaving for Gemini or Claude becomes not just burdensome but a downgrade.

At this stage of the AI boom, when every major chatbot is legitimately helpful in numerous ways, benchmarks, science, and rigor feel almost insignificant. What matters is how the chatbot feels—and, in the case of the Google integrations, that it can span your entire digital life. Before OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence—a model that can do basically any knowledge work as well as a human, and the first step, in the company’s narrative, toward overhauling the economy and curing all disease—it is aiming to build an artificial general assistant. This is a model that aims to do everything, fit for a company that wants to be everywhere.

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Activists and organizers like to say that the world is run by those who show up, so the fact that what Texas’s Democratic legislators need to do to further their agenda is not show up is inauspicious for them.

Those lawmakers, most of whom are currently holed up in Illinois, are seeking to prevent Republicans from drawing new, gerrymandered districts that would help them expand Texas’s GOP delegation in the U.S. House—and perhaps give the party a better shot at holding the House in the midterms, when the sitting president’s party tends to suffer (even with presidents far more popular than Donald Trump is currently). Democrats hope to deprive the legislature of quorum, thus blocking the passage of any new map.

Traditionally, states redistrict after the decennial Census, and those maps endure for a decade, unless courts order changes, as they sometimes do. Texas’s current maps were drawn by Republicans, and in the most recent election, they produced 25 GOP seats and 13 Democratic ones. That’s 66 percent of districts with 58 percent of the total House vote for Republicans—not bad. But under pressure from the White House, Texas Republicans are now trying to squeeze out a little more juice.

The attempt to redistrict is an unusual, brazen, and questionable move, though not entirely without precedent. In 2003, Texas Republicans redrew maps so as to give themselves a majority of the state’s House seats. Democrats, dubbed the “Killer Ds,” fled the state to prevent a quorum. They were initially successful, but a later attempt to prevent a quorum failed when a member broke ranks, and a new map passed. Texas Democrats are hoping they can learn the lessons of that attempt and win this time. They have a strategy, they have support from governors out of state, and, as Politiconotes, they have the chance to run out the clock on a new map before a December deadline.

Still, if Democrats had any better options, they’d take them. Maintaining caucus discipline for the next four months will be no easy task. And that’s assuming some of the more draconian ideas offered to break them fail. State Attorney General Ken Paxton wants to have the Democrats removed from office for their absence. (Experts say this is legally dubious, and the idea of Paxton enforcing rectitude and duty is grimly hilarious.) U.S. Senator John Cornyn, whose reelection hopes are teetering precariously in a GOP primary against Paxton, tried to one-up that by requesting that the FBI help locate the Democratic fugitives. (Never mind that they haven’t obviously committed any crimes.)

All things being equal, legislators skipping sessions to prevent a state government from accomplishing business isn’t a good thing. Oregon Democrats were so sick of state GOP legislators doing so that they enacted a law blocking chronic absentees from running for reelection in the next term. Then again, opportunistic mid-decade redistricting isn’t a good thing, either. Gerrymanders produce worse governance because they are less representative; they also feed polarization by making elected officials dependent less on the general electorate and more on primary voters.

And what’s happening in Texas has already spread further. As soon as Republicans began talking about a Texas redistricting effort, Democrats in states including California and New York threatened to redraw maps to retaliate and push out Republicans. Now the GOP is looking at other red states, including Indiana and Missouri, to gain more seats. This is a disheartening example of what I’ve called total politics, in which officials try to use every legal tool to gain any advantage, no matter the long-term consequences. In this worldview, what matters is what’s possible, not what’s wise.

How successful these efforts outside Texas will be is not clear. Hoosier State Republicans appear unenthusiastic about redistricting, though the White House seems to believe it can twist their arm. Democrats, meanwhile, have challenges of their own. By some measures, the U.S.House map over the past two elections has had a slight Democratic advantage.

Moreover, as my colleague Russell Berman reports, Democrats have spent the past decade pushing good-government reforms such as independent redistricting commissions that are designed to make extreme gerrymandering more difficult. People such as former Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been the leader of Democratic advocacy for fairer districts, are now embracing the tactics they shunned and trying, somewhat painfully, to rationalize them. The explanations really come down to this: Democrats believe that they are losing an existential battle and must do whatever they can.

But what they can do is limited. Gerrymanders that use race as a basis are unconstitutional, but gerrymanders that use partisanship are not—although, in the South, Democratic affiliation is often a good proxy for Black voters. Chief Justice John Roberts has written that partisan gerrymanders are unfair, but the Supreme Court ruled that it has no authority to do anything about them. Roberts recommended that states handle the issue on their own.

This is where gerrymandering becomes a devilish, self-perpetuating problem. Voters who want to stop gerrymanders at the state level find their path blocked by … gerrymandering. Take North Carolina, which went from a 7–7 split in the U.S. House to a 10–4 GOP edge under a new map enacted ahead of last year’s elections. State legislators have also gerrymandered their own maps, so that although Democrats won narrow majorities of all the votes cast for both the state House and state Senate, they hold only two-fifths of the seats in both chambers.

For decades, the Voting Rights Act has provided a path by which Black voters are guaranteed representation, through the drawing of majority-minority districts that would be otherwise considered unconstitutional racial gerrymanders. (Texas has one of the highest proportions of Black voters among states.) Yet as the law professor Richard Hasen writes in Slate, the Supreme Court now appears to be considering throwing out majority-minority districts as unconstitutional.

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the VRA, but after years of hollowing out by the Roberts Court, the VRA seems to be nearing irrelevance. The Trump administration has indicated that the Justice Department will move away from prosecuting racial discrimination in voting and toward pursuing bogus allegations of voter fraud, while the Court may soon eliminate the ability of individuals and outside groups to bring claims under the law.

President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Texan who signed the VRA into law, once said, “This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless.” If the shameless use of total politics to game districts is successful, it threatens to strip the meaning from that right.

Related:

How Democrats tied their own hands on redistrictingRepublicans want to redraw America’s political map.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Jonathan Lemire: Things aren’t going Donald Trump’s way.Does the stock market know something we don’t?Israel’s settler right is preparing to annex Gaza.

Today’s News

President Donald Trump’s new tariff policy took effect at midnight, raising the overall average effective tariff rate to more than 18 percent, the highest since 1934. Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday that “billions of dollars” will begin flowing into the U.S., largely from countries he says have “taken advantage of the United States for many years.”

Trump has directed the Commerce Department to change how the U.S. Census Bureau counts the population, aiming to exclude undocumented immigrants.A federal judge ordered a two-week pause on construction at Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center after a lawsuit raised concerns about its impact on the Everglades ecosystem.

Evening Read

Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic.*

My Brother and the Relationship That Could Have Been

By Liz Krieger

The day my brother died, the dogwoods were in bloom. I sat by my bedroom windowsill, painting my nails. Junior prom was just hours away. I was 16. My brother, Alex, was 18—just 22 months older than me.

The car accident happened on a highway in upstate New York in the early morning. My brother was driving a group of his college classmates to an ultimate-frisbee tournament. Over time, my family has settled on the theory that he fell asleep at the wheel, though for a while my parents thought it was mechanical failure. They couldn’t bear the alternative. The car flipped, and the roll bar above the driver’s seat broke his neck. Everyone else walked away.

This May marked 33 years after his death. Since it happened, I’ve been thinking in numbers: days, months, eventually years. It’s a compulsion, really, this ongoing tally. My own private math. I have just turned 50, an age unimaginable to that 16-year-old girl, and I will have been without him for more than twice as long as I knew him. Here’s a story problem: If I live to 80, what percentage of my life will I have spent as someone’s sister? What percentage as no one’s sister?

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Nancy Walecki: “My father, guitar guru to the rock gods”Trump just did what not even Nixon dared.The Epstein “client list” will never go away.Arthur C. Brooks: The power of politenessChildren’s health care is in danger.

Culture Break

Read. In 2020, Myles Poydras recommended books about kids for adults.

Explore. Last summer, Alan Taylor compiled photos of people keeping cool in the heat.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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A Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agent wore Meta’s AI smart glasses to a June 30 immigration raid outside a Home Depot in Cypress Park, Los Angeles, according to photos and videos of the agent verified by 404 Media.

Meta does not have a contract with CBP, and 404 Media was unable to confirm whether or not the agent recorded any video using the smart glasses at the raid. Based on what we know so far, this appears to be a one-off case of an agent either wearing his personal device to an immigration raid, or CBP trying technology on an ad-hoc basis without a formal procurement process. Civil liberties and privacy experts told 404 Media, however, that even on a one-off basis, it signals that law enforcement agents are interested in smart glasses technology and that the wearing of smart glasses in an immigration raid context is highly concerning.

“There’s a nonzero chance the agent bought the Meta smart glasses because they wanted it for themselves and it’s the glasses they like to wear. But even if that’s the case, it’s worth pointing out that there are regulatory things that need to be thought through, and this stuff can trickle down to officers on an individual basis,” Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Center for Democracy and Technology’s security and surveillance project, told 404 Media. “There needs to be compliance with rules and laws even if a technology is not handed out through the department. The questions around [smart glasses are ones] we’re going to have to grapple with very soon and they’re pretty alarming.”

The glasses were worn by a CBP agent outside of a Home Depot in Cypress Park, Los Angeles during a June 30 immigration raid which happened amid weeks of protests, the deployment of the National Guard and the Marines, and during which immigration enforcement in Los Angeles has become a flashpoint in the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign and the backlash to it. 404 Media obtained multiple photos and videos of the CBP agent wearing the Meta glasses and verified that the footage and videos were taken outside of the Cypress Park Home Depot during an immigration raid. The agent in the photo is wearing Meta’s Ray Ban AI glasses, a mask, and a CBP uniform and patch. CBP did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

0:00/0:15 1×

In the video, a CBP agent motions to the person filming the video to back up. The Meta Ray Ban AI glasses are clearly visible on the agent’s face.

Meta’s AI smart glasses currently feature a camera, live-streaming capabilities, integration with Meta’s AI assistant, three microphones, and image and scene recognition capabilities through Meta AI. The Information reported that Meta is considering adding facial recognition capabilities to the device, though they do not currently have that functionality. When filming, a recording light on Meta’s smart glasses turns on; in the photos and brief video 404 Media has seen, the light is not on.

Students at Harvard University showed that they can be used in conjunction with off-the-shelf facial recognition tools to identify people in near real time.

💡Do you know anything else about this? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co.

Multiple experts 404 Media spoke to said that these smart glasses qualify as a body worn camera under the Department of Homeland Security’s and Customs and Border Protection’s video recording policies. CBP’s policy states that “no personally owned devices may be used in lieu of IDVRS [Incident Driven Video Recording Systems] to record law enforcement encounters,” and that “recorded data shall not be downloaded or recorded for personal use or posted onto a personally owned device.” DHS’s policy states “the use of personally owned [Body Worn Cameras] or other video, audio, or digital recording devices to record official law enforcement activities is prohibited.”

Under the Trump administration, however, enforcement of regulations for law enforcement engaging in immigration raids is largely out the window.

“I think it should be seen in the context of an agency that is really encouraging its agents to actively intimidate and terrorize people. Use of cameras can be seen as part of that,” Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU, told 404 Media. “It’s in line with the masking that we’ve seen, and generally behavior that’s intended to terrorize people, masking failure to identify themselves, failure to wear clear uniforms, smashing windows, etc. A big part of why this is problematic is the utter lack of policy oversight here. If an agent videotapes themselves engaging in abusive activity, are they going to be able to bury that video? Are they going to be able to turn it on and off on the fly or edit it later? There are all kinds of abuses that can happen with these without regulation and enforcement of those regulations, and the prospects of that happening in this administration seem dim.”

When reached for comment, a Meta spokesperson asked 404 Media a series of questions about the framing of the article, and stressed that Meta does not have any contract with CBP. They then asked why Meta would be mentioned in the article at all: “I’m curious if you can explain why it is Meta will be mentioned by name in this piece when in previous 404 reporting regarding ICE facial recognition app and follow up reporting the term ‘smartphones’ or ‘phone’ is used despite ICE agents clearly using Apple iPhones and Android devices,” they said. Meta ultimately declined to comment for this story.

Meta also recently signed a partnership deal with defense contractor Anduril to offer AI, augmented reality, and virtual reality capabilities to the military through Meta’s Reality Labs division, which also makes the Meta smart glasses (though it is unclear what form this technology will take or what its capabilities will be). Earlier this year, Meta relaxed its content moderation policies on hate speech regarding the dehumanization of immigrants, and last month Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth was named an Army Reserve Lt. Colonel by the Trump administration.

“Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a press release announcing the deal with Anduril. “We’re proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American servicemembers that protect our interests at home and abroad.”

“My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that,” Anduril founder Palmer Luckey said in the press release.

In a recent earnings call, Zuckerberg said he believes smart glasses will become the primary way people interact with AI. “I think in the future, if you don’t have glasses that have AI or some way to interact with AI, I think you’re kind of similarly, probably [will] be at a pretty significant cognitive disadvantage compared to other people and who you’re working with, or competing against,” he said during the call. “That’s also going to unlock a lot of value where you can just interact with an AI system throughout the day in this multimodal way. It can see the content around you, it can generate a UI for you, show you information and be helpful.”

Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has recently gained access to a new facial recognition smartphone app called Mobile Fortify that is connected to several massive government databases, showing that DHS is interested in facial recognition tech.

Privacy and civil liberties experts told 404 Media that this broader context—with Meta heavily marketing its smart glasses while simultaneously getting into military contracting, and the Department of Homeland Security increasingly interested in facial recognition—means that seeing a CBP agent wearing Meta AI glasses in the field is alarming.

“Regardless of whether this was a personal choice by this agent or whether somehow CBP facilitated the use of these meta glasses, the fact that it was worn by this agent is disturbing,” Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Information Privacy Center told 404 Media. “Having this type of technology on a law enforcement agent starts heading toward the tactics of authoritarian governments who love to use facial recognition to try to suppress opposition.”

The fact is that Meta is at the forefront of popularizing smart glasses, which are not yet a widely adopted technology. The privacy practices and functionality of the glasses is, at the moment, largely being guided by Meta, whereas smartphones are a largely commodified technology at this point. And it’s clear that this consumer technology that the company markets on billboards as a cool way to record videos for Instagram is seen by some in law enforcement as enticing.

“It’s clear that whatever imaginary boundary there was between consumer surveillance tech and government surveillance tech is now completely erased,” Chris Gilliard, co-director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute and author of the forthcoming book Luxury Surveillance, told 404 Media.

“The fact is when you bring powerful new surveillance capabilities into the marketplace, they can be used for a range of purposes including abusive ones. And that needs to be thought through before you bring things like that into the marketplace,” the ACLU’s Stanley said.

Laperruque, of the CDT, said perhaps we should think about Meta smart glasses in the same way we think about other body cameras: “On the one hand, there’s a big difference between glasses with a computer built into them and a pair of Oakleys,” he said. “They’re not the only ones who make cameras you attach to your body. On the other hand, if that’s going to be the comparison, then let’s talk about this in the context of companies like Axon and other body-worn cameras.”

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Some of the first reviews ever written for the original Legend of Zelda and Super Mario Bros. have been digitized and published by the Video Game History Foundation. The reviews appeared in Computer Entertainer, an early video game magazine that ran from 1982 to 1990. The archivists at the Foundation tracked down the magazine’s entire run and have published it all online under a Creative Commons license.

Computer Entertainer has a fascinating history. It was one of the only magazines to cover video games during the market crash of the mid 1980s. “Simply put, there weren't other video game magazines in this era, at least in the United States,” Phil Salvador, the Library Director at the VGHF, told 404 Media. “In many cases, this is the only American coverage we have for this period.”

“If we want to understand video game history, we need more than the games themselves. We need to understand how they were talked about and how they were made. Primary sources from the early years of the video game industry like Computer Entertainer are scarce. They give us insight into the story of video games that there's no way to reproduce,” Salvador said.

Image via VGHF.

Computer Entertainer was the newsletter for the Video Take-Out, a company that sold video games through the mail. “Because they were focused on retail products, they kept on top of the video game release calendar in a way that no other enthusiast magazine did in the 1980s,” Salvador said. “This magazine is one of the only reliable sources of American release dates for computer and console games during this era. Look up any console game from the 1980s on Wikipedia, and chances are, the American release date in the article comes from Computer Entertainer.”

Digging through the archives, I found the original Legend of Zelda review and read through a year’s worth of hype and handwringing leading up to its release. Computer Entertainer was on hand at CES to talk to the unproven Nintendo in February 1987. Zelda was already out in Japan, where it ran on the disk-based Famicom system.

The CE write-up noted that the NES was a cartridge system and that Nintendo had to make unheard of adjustments to make the game work right. “A Nintendo spokesperson told us that they have included a lithium battery with a 5-year life span in the cartridge to allow it to save information you need, so the disk drive is not needed,” CE wrote.

Image via VGHF.

Convincing Americans to buy a Famicom-style disk drive after they’d already bought the NES was thought to be a hard sell. “We do feel, however, that it is just a question of time before Nintendo introduces the disk drive in the U.S,” CE said. “Also, for the avid long-term gamer (count all our raiders in that category!), the 5-year battery could prove frustrating as, when the battery dies, so does all the character information that has been stored on the cartridge.” CE needn’t have worried. Many of those batteries are still working today, almost 40 years later, and there’s a robust aftermarket in replacement parts when they fail.

Legend of Zelda finally came out in August of 1987 and CE gave it a glowing review, rating it 3.5 out of 4 stars. In the same issue, it gave Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards a perfect 4 out of 4 stars. “There’s certainly no socially redeeming value to the game, which is what makes it so much fun,” CE said of the adventure game that would have nowhere near the cultural or social impact of Link and Zelda.

Image via VGHF.

“It's a totally different perspective to see someone trying to wrap their head around the original Super Mario Bros., or expressing skepticism about the idea of Nintendo selling a game console in the United States,” Salvador said.

The 1980s was a different era of games writing. “[Computer Entertainer] covered video and computer games as a function of their retail business to help customers better understand the game market,” Salvador said. “Being able to look back on what retailers thought about the game business back in the 1980s is a huge historical boon, but today, there's understandably more questions about the role of game criticism. Does it still make sense to cover games the same way Computer Entertainer did 40 years ago?”

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

In the annals of the American presidency, Donald Trump has almost certainly complained more about journalists than any of his predecessors have, maybe more than all of them combined. So when Trump deemed a query “the nastiest question” he’s ever gotten from a member of the press, it was a notable distinction.

The moment came back in May, when CNBC’s Megan Cassella asked Trump about “TACO,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.” The phrase had gained popularity in the financial sector as a derisive shorthand for the president’s penchant for backing down from his tariff threats. During an otherwise routine Oval Office event, Trump sputtered angrily at Cassella, claiming that his shifting tariff timelines were “part of negotiations,” while admonishing, “Don’t ever say what you said.”

Trump’s appetite for confrontation is being tested again this week, with the arrival of two of the most important self-imposed deadlines of his second term, related to the tariffs and the conflict in Ukraine. Both present fraught decisions for Trump, and they come at a time when he faces a confluence of crises. A president who, less than a year ago, staged a historic political comeback and moved to quickly conquer Washington and the world now confronts more obstacles than at any point since his inauguration. Three central campaign promises—that he would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and boost the economy—are in peril. And for the first time in his 200 days back in office, the White House has begun to worry about members of the president’s own party defying him.

Tomorrow, the clock runs out on the two-week window that Trump gave Russia to reach a cease-fire with Ukraine. The president has been upset by his inability to end the war. Without an agreement, he has said that he will impose sanctions on Russia. But doing so would represent the first time in his decade in politics that he truly punished President Vladimir Putin. Trump likewise has grown exasperated with Israel’s prosecution of the war in the Gaza Strip, a conflict that could soon escalate; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu said today that his military plans to fully occupy the famine-plagued Strip.

[Tom Nichols: Putin’s still in charge]

The other deadline is Trump’s latest vow on tariffs, which go into effect today for 60 nations, with rates ranging from 10 to 41 percent. This time, Trump appeared to relish declaring that there would not be another TACO moment, writing on social media last night, “IT’S MIDNIGHT!!! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TARIFFS ARE NOW FLOWING INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” Since the panic triggered by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April, Wall Street has learned to shrug off Trump’s scattershot statements. But the economy has shown new signs of weakness, with stubbornly high prices potentially set to rise again because of the tariffs and, most potently, a recent jobs report poor enough that Trump lashed out against the bureaucrat who compiled it; last week, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, claiming, without evidence, that the jobs numbers were bogus. That unprecedented act of petulance risks undermining Wall Street’s confidence in the economy and undercutting Trump’s campaign pledge to give the United States another economic “golden age.”

Those geopolitical and economic headwinds have been joined by forceful political ones. Since going out on August recess, Republican lawmakers have been heckled at town halls while trying to defend the president’s signature legislative accomplishment, the One Big Beautiful Bill. And some of those same Republicans, in a rare act of rebellion, have questioned Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, a scandal that the president, try as he may, simply has been unable to shake.

The mood in the White House has darkened in the past month, as the president’s challenges have grown deeper. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has become intensely frustrating for Trump, two White House officials and a close outside adviser told me. The president had truly believed that his relationship with Putin would bring about a quick end to the conflict. But instead, Putin has taken advantage of Trump’s deference to him and has openly defied the president—“embarrassed him,” one of the officials told me—by ignoring his calls for a cease-fire and ratcheting up his strikes on Ukrainian cities. Trump has sharply criticized his Russian counterpart in recent weeks as he mulled what to do.

Yesterday, Trump said that his personal envoy, Steve Witkoff, had a productive meeting with Putin in Moscow, leading the U.S. president to return to his original plan to end the war: a summit. A third White House official told me that Trump has informed European leaders that he wants to meet with Putin as soon as next week in a new effort to get a cease-fire. A Kremlin spokesperson accepted the White House offer but said its details needed to be finalized. Trump also told European leaders that he would potentially have a subsequent meeting with both Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, but the Kremlin did not immediately agree to that.

One of the officials told me that Trump is still considering how and whether to directly punish Putin if Moscow doesn’t hit tomorrow’s deadline. The U.S. does little trade with Russia, so direct levies would be useless, and the West Wing is divided as to the merits of slapping secondary sanctions on nations that do business with Moscow. Trump signed off on sanctioning India this week because, the official told me, he was already annoyed at the lack of progress on a trade deal with Delhi. But he is far more leery of sanctioning China—another major economic partner of Russia’s—for fear of upending ongoing trade negotiations with Beijing.

Witkoff’s visit to Moscow came just days after he had been in Gaza to urge Netanyahu to ease a blockade and allow more aid and food to reach Palestinians. Although Israel agreed this week to allow some more food in, the humanitarian crisis has not abated. Trump, who badly wants the conflict to end, believes that Netanyahu is prolonging the war and has told advisers that he is wary of Israel’s new push to capture Gaza. Even so, officials told me that Trump is unlikely to break with Netanyahu in any meaningful way.

Any president, of course, can be vexed by events outside his nation’s borders. Trump’s superpower at home has long been to command intense loyalty from fellow Republicans. Yet that power might be hitting its limit. He was able to pressure the GOP to pass his One Big Beautiful Bill last month, but some Republicans, seeing its shaky poll numbers, have already tried to distance themselves from it; Senator Josh Hawley, for instance, has said he wants to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts that the bill, which he voted for, included. And lawmakers who are trying to defend the bill are facing voter anger. Representative Mike Flood was loudly heckled by a hostile crowd at a town hall in his Nebraska district on Monday. One of the White House officials told me that the West Wing has told House leadership to advise Republican members against holding too many in-person town halls.

Then there is Epstein. Trump has desperately wished the story away. He feels deeply betrayed by his MAGA supporters who believed him when he intimated during the campaign that something was nefarious about the government’s handling of the case, and who now have a hard time believing him when he says their suspicions are actually bogus. The president has snapped at reporters asking about Epstein, told House Speaker Mike Johnson to send Congress home early to avoid a vote on whether to release the Epstein files, and sued his on-again, off-again friend Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion after The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had sent Epstein a lewd birthday card in 2003. Murdoch hasn’t backed down. Neither have a number of MAGA luminaries and Republican lawmakers who keep demanding to see the files.

[Read: Inside the White House’s Epstein strategy]

Trump’s own efforts to manage the story have only fed it. His account of why he and Epstein had a falling out two decades ago has shifted multiple times. One of the White House officials and the outside ally told me that advisers have told Trump repeatedly to stop saying he has the right to pardon Epstein’s former partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking and related offenses, to avoid drawing more attention to his previous friendship with Epstein. Despite hopes that the story would dissipate over the August recess, the White House is preparing for Trump to take more heat from Republicans in the weeks ahead.

Some Trump allies still believe that the president, even as a lame duck, will keep Republicans in line. “Having survived Russiagate, Hillary Clinton, two impeachments, four trials designed to put him in jail, and two assassination attempts,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told me, “it’s unlikely the current situation will be much of a problem.”

The White House also pushed back against the idea that Trump is in a perilous moment. “Only the media industrial complex and panicans would mischaracterize this as a challenging time. They simply haven’t learned anything after covering President Trump for the last 10 years,” the spokesperson Steven Cheung told me in a statement. “The successes of the first 200 days have been unprecedented and exactly what Americans voted for, which is why this country has never been hotter.”

But others in the party sense signs of trouble. “He’s spending the political capital he’s accumulated for a decade,” Alex Conant, a GOP strategist who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and on then-Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, told me. “Below the surface of the Republican Party, there’s an intense battle brewing over what a post-Trump GOP looks like. And that surfaces on issues like Israel, the debt, and Epstein. How Trump navigates that fight over the remainder of his presidency will be a big test.”

There was a time, years ago, when August could be counted as a slow news month in Washington. That’s now a distant memory, in no small part because the current president has an insatiable need to be in the news cycle. In August 2017, while Trump was vacationing at his golf club in New Jersey, I asked one of his senior aides why Trump had declared that he would deliver “fire and fury” on North Korea. The aide told me that Trump was looking to intimidate Pyongyang—but that he was also annoyed that he hadn’t been the central storyline on cable news. The bellicose rhetoric worked: Suddenly, Trump had changed the news cycle.

[Read: The desperation of Donald Trump’s posts]

In this particular summer of his discontent, Trump is now again trying to regain control of the political narrative. But his efforts have been more haphazard and less effective: a threat to strip Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship, a revival of the “Russia hoax,” an announcement of a new White House ballroom, even a walk on the West Wing roof. None of those things changed the news cycle, and instead they only reinforced that, at least to some extent, he is at the mercy of events outside his control.

Trump has long believed that he can create his own truth, often by telling the same falsehood over and over again. He seems to be trying that tactic again, too, especially with the economy. Trump’s response to the disastrous July jobs report was to assert, with no evidence, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics had incorrectly reported the statistics to hurt him politically—and then fire the commissioner. That sent a chill through the markets and the business world, which need reliable statistics to function, and sparked fears that Trump will try to bend other government data to his whims.

When it comes to his own political standing, Trump is also trying to create his own reality, seeming to will away the challenges he faces. In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, he insisted that he has “the best poll numbers I’ve ever had,” claiming his approval was north of 70 percent. But that number represented his approval among Republicans, the interviewer told him. In fact, his overall approval rating is hovering at just about 40 percent. When corrected, all Trump could do was call the whole thing “fake.”

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

“Is it Goldstein again?” Richard Nixon demanded.

In July of 1971, the president was infuriated that an unnamed official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics had seemed to downplay the administration’s progress on reducing unemployment while briefing reporters. His suspicions fell on Harold Goldstein, the longtime civil servant and BLS official in charge of the jobs numbers, who had attracted his ire for other comments earlier in the year. Nixon ordered his political counselor, Charles Colson, to investigate. If it had been Goldstein, he said, “he’s got to be fired.”

When three hours elapsed without Colson reporting back, the president called Colson twice within the span of two minutes, insisting that Goldstein had to be guilty. “Give Goldstein, the goddamn kike, a polygraph!” he yelled into the phone.

By the next morning, Nixon’s animus toward Goldstein had hardened into the conviction that the inconvenient numbers from the BLS reflected a problem much larger than one civil servant. He asked his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, to conduct a review. “I want a look at any sensitive areas around where Jews are involved, Bob,” he said. “See, the Jews are all through the government, and we have got to get in those areas. We’ve got to get a man in charge who is not Jewish to control the Jewish. Do you understand?” Haldeman affirmed that he did. “The government is full of Jews,” Nixon continued. “Second, most Jews are disloyal.”

What had started as a fit of pique over jobs numbers was swiftly metastasizing into an extraordinary abuse of presidential power.

Students and survivors of the Nixon era can be excused for feeling a little déjà vu when they heard the news at the end of last week that President Donald Trump had fired Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner. Trump claimed that the bureau’s latest jobs report was “a scam” that was “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.” As the first federal director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, I quickly thought of the summer of 1971.

[James Surowiecki: What’s holding Trump back from firing Powell]

For most of its history, the BLS has been as professionally obscure as it has been essential. The bureau’s economists produce the respected and strictly nonpartisan numbers that the White House, Congress, investors, and American workers rely on to know how the enormous and complex U.S. economy is doing—and how likely their next wage increase, job opportunity, or pink slip might be. For presidents to be unhappy with the numbers they get from the BLS is commonplace. But it’s not normal for them to take their disappointment or rage out on the economists who compile them.

In the summer of 1971, Nixon was in the grip of dark conspiratorial thinking. He had been looking forward to positive press from his daughter Tricia’s June White House wedding. Instead, The New York Times published the Pentagon Papers—a classified multivolume compendium of national-security materials pulled together for Lyndon B. Johnson’s secretary of defense Robert McNamara to explain why the United States had gotten into the quagmire of Vietnam. When the former Johnson-era national-security analyst Daniel Ellsberg announced that he was the papers’ leaker, Nixon became convinced that his administration was under assault from smart, well-connected enemies of his Vietnam strategy. So when the BLS official told reporters that a drop in the unemployment rate from 6.2 to 5.6 percent was “a statistical fluke,” Nixon became convinced that Jews within the government were out to sabotage his administration.

Haldeman, although himself an anti-Semite, worried that Nixon’s rage could cause chaos across the government. He decided to try to satisfy the president by focusing only on the BLS. He asked a White House staffer named Frederic Malek to determine how many Jews were in the BLS, and to recommend what to do with them. Knowing that White House documents should not reflect what this investigation was really about, Malek and his assistant used the code word ethnics in their memos as they counted Jews. In February, during Nixon’s earlier bout of rage, Malek had determined that Goldstein had not acted in a partisan manner. But now, instead of questioning his partisan loyalties, Nixon fixated instead on his faith.

The president didn’t get all that he wanted. Although Labor Secretary James Hodgson refused to subject Goldstein to a polygraph test, Nixon didn’t fire Hodgson for his defiance. He also didn’t immediately force out the head of the BLS, Geoffrey Moore, who worked for Hodgson. When Malek found that there were 19 “ethnics” among the 52 top officials working at the BLS, Nixon respected the civil-service protections that shielded most of them, including Goldstein, from dismissal. Instead, he had a supervisor placed above Goldstein and removed some of his responsibilities. Peter Henle, another Jewish economist in the bureau, was transferred out.

After winning reelection in 1972, Nixon required resignations from all of his political appointees. Nixon ignored most of them, but he accepted Moore’s, and the BLS commissioner left a few months shy of the end of his four-year term in 1973. Moore—who wasn’t even Jewish—was the only person to lose his job because of Nixon’s anti-Semitic paranoia.

Nixon’s motives were worse than Trump’s. But in most other respects, the events of the past week provide a vivid illustration of how much more dangerous attempts to abuse presidential authority have become.

Unlike Trump, who lashed out publicly against McEntarfer, Nixon was afraid to own his bad behavior. He did not force out his BLS commissioner in 1971, instead waiting for the chance to accept his resignation two years later. Not wanting his hands to be dirty—as defined by the presidential norms of his era—Nixon constrained himself to abuse power only indirectly. He had no desire to risk public disapproval by firing bureaucrats for specious and explosive reasons.

[David Frum: Sorry, Richard Nixon]

Moreover, the Haldeman system for running the White House that Nixon first authorized and then tolerated sought to control an impulsive president, not fully empower him. Nixon lacked perfect instruments to carry out his desires; his environment wasn’t greased for enabling. Although he was clear that he wanted to fire a large number of government workers because of their religious background, he proved unwilling or unable to follow through.

Trump exhibits no such constraints. The loyal voters who give him his grip on Congress don’t seem to care what norms he violates. Neither Trump’s Cabinet members nor his White House staff are willing to serve as a check on presidential bad behavior. And so last week, Trump did what not even Nixon had dared, becoming the first president ever to fire his BLS commissioner.

When he is seized by his dark passions, our current president doesn’t even have a Haldeman.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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“A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness,” wrote Robert Heinlein in his 1982 futuristic novel, Friday. “A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.” What, 40 years ago, were the science-fiction adventures of a technologically enhanced “artificial person” turned out also to be prophecy when we consider today’s digital networks of anonymous humans and bots, conversations between people and humanlike artificial intelligence, and a cratering of courtesy. This loss of gentle manners at almost every level is attributable, at least in part, to our adoption of these technologies.

Virtually everyone agrees that people are becoming ruder, especially online. But do you see this tendency in yourself as well? Even if you’re not a sociopathic troll who feeds on incivility and conflict, you might all the same have noticed that you’re less polite than you once were, and that online environments have contributed to this. You may have observed the passing of such small niceties as addressing others by name in your messages and signing off with your own name. Quite possibly, you find yourself adopting a harsher, more sarcastic tone on social media than you ever would in real life. And why bother saying “please” and “thank you” when communicating with what is, or might be, an AI bot?

This coarsening, even toward nonhuman entities, is not harmless. Indeed, it is probably hurting your well-being. When you become less polite, the alteration in your conduct can make you less happy, more depressed, and angrier about life. You may not be able to fix the broader trends in society, but you can—and should—fix this in yourself.

[Read: How please stopped being polite]

Politeness can be defined in four ways. The first two are: etiquette, which governs basic manners and speech, and conduct, which involves actions such as holding open a door for someone to pass. The other two are a pair: positive politeness, which refers to doing courteous things for others, and negative politeness, which involves refraining from discourtesy. Social scientists define these forms of politeness not just as a set of behaviors but as part of personality. Specifically, one of the Big Five Personality Traits—agreeableness—is made up of compassion and politeness. One well-regarded study from the 1990s estimated that the heritability of agreeableness is about 41 percent genetic, allowing us to infer that you inherit some politeness from your parents partly through your genes, but more through how you were brought up. This also implies that you can become more polite with good influences and by cultivating positive habits.

Some aspects of courtesy are fairly universal, such as saying please and thank you, as well as listening while others speak (positive politeness) without interrupting (negative politeness). Other courteous values vary around the world: Shaking hands is good manners in London but not in Bangkok; tipping a taxi driver is a common courtesy in New York but not in Tokyo. Some demographic variation in politeness also occurs, and gender norms can play a part too. For example, experiments show that American women generally receive more politeness than men do, and show less courteous behavior to men than vice versa.

None of us wants to be treated rudely, online or in person. The finding in studies that when someone is discourteous toward you they lower your well-being is so commonsense as to make citation scarcely necessary. Even witnessing rudeness toward others can lower your happiness, as experiments have shown: When media content contains sarcasm by the author and the comment sections are uncivil, readers become unhappier—even if they agree with the snarky writer or commenters. Rudeness just brings you down.

More surprising, perhaps, is the effect that your being courteous toward others has on your own mood. Researchers in 2021 showed that being polite to others raises happiness and lowers anger. This might be counterintuitive at first, because we may at times feel a powerful urge to be snippy—so doesn’t that mean that snapping at someone should make us feel better? The reverse is the case: Being impolite is more like scratching at your poison-ivy rash. Giving in to the urge makes things worse. I doubt you’ve ever felt great when you’ve known, deep down, that you’ve been a jerk, whereas you’ve almost certainly felt better when you’ve been your better angel. Being prosocial, even when you don’t feel like it or the object of your courtesy doesn’t deserve it, has been proven to raise your mood.

The effect is so powerful that you benefit from being polite even when your courtesy is extended toward nonhumans. Psychologists writing in The Journal of Positive Psychologyset research participants a task to perform alongside a helping robot named Tako: Those who had a stronger urge to thank Tako for its help afterward were more likely than others to behave in a prosocial way in a subsequent task. This finding suggests that even being civil to an AI bot or other nonhuman interface matters; yelling at Siri or being curt with ChatGPT will lead you to behave worse with other people, and lower your well-being.

[Read: Three rules for politeness during a confusing social transition]

In short, be polite for your own sake. And be aware that if tech-mediated interactions are making you less polite, that can still hurt your happiness. Quitting the internet or returning to a world without AI is impractical, so the solution to this challenge of courtesy lies in how you consciously decide to behave. Here are three rules for your conduct that I can suggest.

1. Make courtesy a habit, even when other humans are not involved. My late father had impeccable manners, and I have no doubt that if he were still alive, he would start every request to AI with please and finish it with thank you. Years ago, I would have made fun of that—Dad, the bot doesn’t care!—but I’m sure he wouldn’t have paid any attention, because I now understand that his good manners were a demonstration of decent behavior to himself, about himself. And they would have protected him from some of the unhappiness we see all around. So today, I try to imitate him, online and in person, whomever or whatever I’m interacting with.

2. Renounce snark, whether you’re witnessing it or using it yourself. As noted, media sarcasm can lower your well-being as its consumer. Yet mockery of others seems an integral part of modern communication, especially among people who wish to seem sophisticated. I try not to participate in this, because even if, in the moment, it can feel satisfying or make me laugh, I know the cost to my soul. I no longer read comment sections in publications, and when an author throws out an impolite barb, I stop reading altogether.

3. Respond to rudeness not with rudeness, but with courtesy. If your happiness correspondent got into social-media spats or angry public battles, that would be a bad look and very off-brand. So I always refrain. But I try to go further than self-restraint: If I need to react to a rude in-person remark or mean online comment, I try to see it as an opportunity to improve my well-being by responding with courtesy and dignity. This gets easier with practice, and I have never once been sorry for passing on the opportunity to retaliate with a nasty zinger. I’m only sorry when I fail to make use of the opportunity to do the right thing and feel good about it.

[Arthur C. Brooks: How to get the most happiness from your social life]

One last thought about Heinlein’s “dying culture” claim: Is it true that our culture is dying, given all the rudeness? And if so, are we too far gone to turn it around? On many days, things do look bleak, as online nastiness seems to become the dominant style. But my personal defense mechanism also aims to act as a countercultural force: I see politeness as today’s punk rock because it so transgresses the spirit of our times. And like punk rock, when you empower yourself with politeness, you feel exhilarated. It is the ultimate exercise in freedom: the freedom to be the person I want to be in the face of a cultural tyranny.

Thank you for reading this column.

Want to learn more about leading a life that feels full and meaningful? Join Arthur C. Brooks and The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, on Monday, August 11, at 2:30 p.m. ET as they discuss Brooks’s new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. Learn more about the event here.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

A researcher has found that more than 130,000 conversations with AI chatbots including Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and others are discoverable on the Internet Archive, highlighting how peoples’ interactions with LLMs may be publicly archived if users are not careful with the sharing settings they may enable.

The news follows earlier findings that Google was indexing ChatGPT conversations that users had set to share, despite potentially not understanding that these chats were now viewable by anyone, and not just those they intended to share the chats with. OpenAI had also not taken steps to ensure these conversations could be indexed by Google.

“I obtained URLs for: Grok, Mistral, Qwen, Claude, and Copilot,” the researcher, who goes by the handle dead1nfluence, told 404 Media. They also found material related to ChatGPT, but said “OpenAI has had the ChatGPT[.]com/share links removed it seems.” Searching on the Internet Archive now for ChatGPT share links does not return any results, while Grok results, for example, are still available.

Dead1nfluence wrote a blog post about some of their findings on Sunday and shared the list of more than 130,000 archived LLM chat links with 404 Media. They also shared some of the contents of those chats that they had scraped. Dead1nfluence wrote that they found API keys and other exposed information that could be useful to a hacker.

“While these providers do tell their users that the shared links are public to anyone, I think that most who have used this feature would not have expected that these links could be findable by anyone, and certainly not indexed and readily available for others to view,” dead1nfluence wrote in their blog post. “This could prove to be a very valuable data source for attackers and red teamers alike. With this, I can now search the dataset at any time for target companies to see if employees may have disclosed sensitive information by accident.”

404 Media verified some of dead1influence’s findings by discovering specific material they flagged in the dataset, then going to the still-public LLM link and checking the content.

💡Do you know anything else about this? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co.

Most of the companies whose AI tools are included in the dataset did not respond to a request for comment. Microsoft which owns Copilot acknowledged a request for comment but didn't provide a response in time for publication. A spokesperson for Anthrophic, which owns Claude, told 404 Media: “We give people control over sharing their Claude conversations publicly, and in keeping with our privacy principles, we do not share chat directories or sitemaps with search engines like Google. These shareable links are not guessable or discoverable unless people choose to publicize them themselves. When someone shares a conversation, they are making that content publicly accessible, and like other public web content, it may be archived by third-party services. In our review of the sample archived conversations shared with us, these were either manually requested to be indexed by a person with access to the link or submitted by independent archivist organizations who discovered the URLs after they were published elsewhere across the internet first.” 404 Media only shared a small sample of the Claude links with Anthrophic, not the entire list.

Fast Company first reported that Google was indexing some ChatGPT conversations on July 30. This was because of a sharing feature ChatGPT had that allowed users to send a link to a ChatGPT conversation to someone else. OpenAI disabled the sharing feature in response. OpenAI CISO Dane Stuckey said in a previous statement sent to 404 Media: “This was a short-lived experiment to help people discover useful conversations. This feature required users to opt-in, first by picking a chat to share, then by clicking a checkbox for it to be shared with search engines.”

A researcher who requested anonymity gave 404 Media access to a dataset of nearly 100,000 ChatGPT conversations indexed on Google. 404 Media found those included the alleged texts of non-disclosure agreements, discussions of confidential contracts, and people trying to use ChatGPT for relationship issues.

Others also found that the Internet Archive contained archived LLM chats.

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

Jeffrey Epstein’s “client list” is the conspiracy theory that may never die. A secret document detailing all of the elite clients that Epstein allegedly sex-trafficked minors to—it’s something of a grail for QAnon adherents, TMZ watchers, and serious news readers alike. There is no proof that such a thing exists.

Yet President Donald Trump himself suggested that it did during his campaign, and pledged to release it before a disastrous backtrack from the Department of Justice last month. Now, in a poll released Monday, nearly two-thirds of Americans said they believe that the Trump administration is hiding something, and 71 percent said they still believe that the list is real. Meanwhile, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has demanded that the list be released, Democrats are pushing the narrative that the Trump administration is orchestrating a cover-up, and yesterday the House subpoenaed the DOJ for additional files related to the case.

To be clear, many unanswered and valid questions remain about Epstein. Before his death, he was charged with trafficking and abusing, as it read in the indictment, “a vast network” of dozens of underage girls. Many still wonder why he was permitted to carry on with his crimes for so long, whether other people who were complicit in them have escaped justice, and how much President Trump may have known while the two were friends. Trump’s name reportedly appears in files that have been redacted by the FBI, though he has repeatedly denied personal knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and says their relationship ended in 2004.

[David A. Graham: Donald Trump doesn’t want you to read this article]

The specific idea of a client list, though, has taken on a life of its own. No one can demonstrate that the list doesn’t exist, so people will continue to insist that it does—that it is being kept from them. There’s a certain logic to their belief, because a similar document has been seen already. In 2015, Gawker published Epstein’s address book, which was full of names of celebrities and politicians. He apparently kept meticulous records and liked putting all of his famous contacts together in one place. And so the idea of a client list feels plausible to many people because they’ve had a mental image of it for 10 years now.

Moreover, Trump has created a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” effect in the past several weeks. The president has vacillated among suggesting that he has no obligation to talk about Epstein, speculating that political foes may have fabricated parts of the Epstein file, attempting to placate his supporters by ordering the release of grand-jury testimony about the case (which cannot be unsealed, a federal judge ruled), and deflecting (“you ought to be talking about Bill Clinton”).

There’s a useful parallel between the government’s handling of the Epstein case and its investigation into the John F. Kennedy assassination. That assassination, of course, launched a million conspiracy theories: Most Americans still believe that the shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, did not act alone. One theory holds that the CIA was somehow involved, which has led people to search for hidden evidence within the government’s own records—much as we’ve seen with the Epstein case.

In 1967, Jim Garrison, the district attorney of New Orleans, ended up going down this road. He was re-investigating the case after receiving tips that Oswald, a New Orleans native, had worked with locals in a plot to kill the president. Long and complicated story short, Garrison would eventually subpoena CIA Director Richard Helms, demanding that he produce a photograph that purportedly showed Oswald with a CIA officer in Mexico City in 1963—cementing a link between the killer and the intelligence agency.

There was only a slim reason to think such a photo might exist. Garrison was extrapolating from an existing controversy over a photo that the CIA had provided to the Warren Commission years before. That photo showed an unknown man in Mexico City; it was labeled as a photo of Oswald but was clearly not him. Garrison’s theory was that there had been a swap. “It’s perfectly clear that the actual picture of Oswald and his companion was suppressed and a fake photo substituted,” he said. The government had no way to prove that he was wrong—to prove that there was no such photo. Garrison took his accusations all the way to a highly publicized trial in 1969. His theory of the case fell apart in court for unrelated reasons, but his many notions linger to this day. (He is the hero of the 1991 blockbuster film JFK.)

The Kennedy assassination still features many unknowns, and information is still being released about it in drips and drabs—previewing, perhaps, the future of disclosure around the Epstein case. Last month, the CIA released assassination files that researchers had been requesting for more than 20 years. They pertained to a specific CIA officer who some think may have known or worked with Oswald in New Orleans. In the 1970s, the same CIA officer was assigned to work with the House Select Committee on Assassinations and help them in their re-investigation of Kennedy’s death. He was using a different name by then, and the committee did not know it was the same person. He blatantly deceived Congress and actually thwarted their efforts to understand whatever had happened in New Orleans. The latest batch of files still didn’t reveal a direct connection between this officer and Oswald, but that hasn’t put the issue to bed.

[Read: Conspiracy theorists are turning on the president]

That the CIA maintained its secrecy around the officer for decades is what has made curiosity linger. The historian Gerald Posner was one of the public figures (along with the novelist Don DeLillo and the writer Norman Mailer) who’d signed an open letter asking for the release of these files back in 2003, a decade after he wrote a definitive book affirming the theory that Oswald acted alone. He recently told me that he’s disgusted with the CIA for taking so long to provide them—not because he thinks they shed new light on the Kennedy assassination but for just the opposite reason. He thinks they really don’t, but that hiding them encourages people to speculate ever more darkly. The CIA drags its feet, and when the documents are finally released, they usually have “nothing to do with the assassination,” Posner said. “But it’s often too late to explain that.”

This dynamic—in which defensiveness and reflexive secrecy lead to prolonged struggles over information that may or may not be important—has been a recurring problem throughout modern U.S. history. In her 2008 book, Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War 1 to 9/11, the historian Kathryn Olmsted argues that selective opacity is one of the key reasons that Americans distrust their government. The passage of the Freedom of Information Act in 1966 democratized access to information, she argues, yet also left citizens baffled and frustrated when documents were refused to them or granted only with heavy redactions. The government’s “ambivalence” about providing information “sometimes had the effect of frightening citizens rather than reassuring them,” Olmsted writes.

There are good reasons that not all of the Epstein files can be released—chief among them, the privacy of victims—but Americans are not wrong to think the government is being less transparent than it could be. The administration could release more than it has, which Congress is currently pressuring it to do. Within that context, why would people believe Trump or the FBI when they say that a client list doesn’t exist? I posed this question to Mark Fenster, a professor at the University of Florida’s law school who often writes about government transparency and conspiracy theories. Can you ever convince people that there is no list? “No, you can’t,” he said. “You can’t convince people that all of the pertinent JFK-assassination documents have been released. You can’t convince people who believe otherwise that all the truth is out on Jeffrey Epstein.” (Especially because it currently isn’t.) “That’s just a flat no,” he went on. “Rarely do I say flat nos, but that’s just a flat no.”

Like the Epstein case, Kennedy-assassination skepticism demonstrates two opposing impulses. The first, to speculate wildly. The second, to doggedly pursue more and better information, sometimes so stubbornly that it approaches irrationality in itself. These past few weeks have also brought to mind the Kennedy researcher Harold Weisberg, whose early books were a countercultural phenomenon and who was known for his diligent, insistent filling of FOIA requests. He wanted a specific report that he thought must exist about the spectrographic testing used on the Dallas crime-scene bullets; he was told that the FBI had looked for such a report and couldn’t find anything. He appealed four times before the D.C. Circuit ruled in 1983 that he had to stop. The decision stated that if an agency could prove it had conducted a thorough search for the requested material, it did not also have to prove the negative—that the material never existed or had previously been destroyed. Yet, of course, the court couldn’t compel him to stop wondering.

Nobody can make Americans stop wondering about a “client list” either. It can’t stay on the front page indefinitely, but people won’t forget about it. Epstein will become part of the American cultural backdrop, like Hunter Biden’s computer, 9/11 trutherism, Kennedy, chemtrails, Roswell, and QAnon. At certain times, such conspiratorial thinking and refusal to accept the evidence will become dangerous—people will spin up fantasies that result in acts of defamation or threats of violence. At other times, it will just be part of the daily chatter.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Can anything stop the stock market? The U.S. economy recently weathered the worst pandemic in 100 years, the worst inflation in 40 years, and the highest interest rates in 20 years. Yet from 2019 through 2024, the S&P 500 grew by an average of nearly 20 percent a year, about double its historical average rate. Despite President Donald Trump’s erratic economic policies, which include the highest tariffs since the 19th century, the market is already up by about 8 percent in 2025.

As the stock market soars ever higher, the theories of why it rises have suffered the opposite fate. One by one, every favored explanation of what could be going on has been undermined by world events. The uncomfortable fact about the historic stock-market run is that no one really knows why it’s happening—or what could bring it to an end.

According to textbook economics, the stock market’s value reflects what are known as “fundamentals.” An individual company’s current stock price is derived from that firm’s future-earnings potential, and is thus rooted in hard indicators such as profits and market share. The value of the market as a whole, in turn, tends to rise and fall with the state of the broader economy. According to the fundamentals theory, the market can experience the occasional speculative bubble, but reality will bite soon enough. Investors will inevitably realize that their stocks are overvalued and respond by selling them, lowering prices back to a level that tracks more closely with the value justified by their fundamentals—hence the term market correction.

The fundamentals story held up well until the 2008 financial crisis. Within six months of the U.S. banking system’s collapse, the market fell by 46 percent. In response, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to almost zero and pushed money back into the economy by purchasing trillions of dollars in securities from financial institutions.

The Fed’s goal was to get the economy going again quickly. This didn’t happen. For most of the 2010s, corporate earnings were modest, GDP and productivity growth were low, and the labor market remained weaker than it had been before the crisis. In other words, the fundamentals were not great. Yet the stock market soared. From 2010 to 2019, it tripled in value.

[Rogé Karma: The Federal Reserve’s little secret]

This gave rise to what became known as the “liquidity” theory of the market. In this telling, the force driving the ups and downs of markets was the Federal Reserve. As long as the central bank was willing to keep flooding the financial system with cash, that money would eventually find its way into the stock market, causing valuations to rise regardless of what was happening in the real economy.

The apotheosis of the liquidity theory came in early 2020: The stock market crashed when the coronavirus pandemic hit, and the Fed once again responded by turning on the money taps. By mid-summer, unemployment was still above 10 percent, but the stock market had already rebounded past its pre-pandemic peak.

But the liquidity theory’s run was short-lived. In 2022, as inflation replaced unemployment as the economy’s biggest problem, the central bank reversed course, quickly raising interest rates and selling its securities. As the liquidity theory would predict, the stock market took a nosedive, falling by close to 20 percent. Then something strange happened. The Fed continued to raise interest rates over the course of 2023, to their highest levels in two decades, and kept them there in 2024. It also drained about $2 trillion of liquidity from the financial system. Yet the market took off once again. The S&P 500 rose by nearly 25 percent in both 2023 and 2024, making it the market’s best two-year run of the 21st century. “Between 2008 and 2022, the view on Wall Street was we were experiencing a liquidity-driven market,” Mohamed El-Erian, an economist and the former CEO of the asset-management firm PIMCO, told me. “That wasn’t at all the case in ’23 and ’24.”

The stock market’s performance in those years was unusual for another reason. More than half of the S&P 500’s total growth in 2023 and 2024 was driven by the so-called Magnificent Seven companies: Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, and Nvidia. During those two years alone, Tesla’s value rose by 286 percent, Meta’s by 355 percent, and Nvidia’s by 861 percent. The biggest firms have always been responsible for a disproportionate share of the market’s growth, but never had the gains been so acutely concentrated. The phenomenon couldn’t be explained solely by superior business performance; the Magnificent Seven’s stock prices had begun to exceed earnings by record amounts, implying that their valuations had more to do with expectations about future growth.

This gave rise to a new theory: The stock market was being supercharged by the coming AI revolution—or, at least, by belief in it. The Magnificent Seven’s extreme surge began in early 2023, shortly after the release of ChatGPT, which kicked off a wave of interest and investment in the AI sector. The seven companies seem especially well positioned to prosper from the emerging technology, either because they provide crucial inputs to the development of AI models (Nvidia), are investing heavily in building their own models (Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet), or stand to benefit significantly from automation (Amazon, Tesla, Apple).

To some experts, the situation has all the markings of a speculative bubble. In a recent blog post, Torsten Sløk, the chief economist at the asset-management firm Apollo, pointed out that the top 10 companies in the S&P 500 today are more overvalued—meaning their stock prices exceed their earnings by larger factors—than the top 10 companies at the height of the 1990s dot-com bubble were.

Take Nvidia, the chipmaker that recently became the first company in history to hit a $4 trillion valuation. Historically, the average price-to-earnings ratio for a company in the U.S. market has been about 18 to 1, which means that to buy a share of stock, investors are willing to pay $18 for every $1 of the company’s yearly earnings. Nvidia’s current price-to-earnings ratio is 57 to 1.

AI boosters argue that these valuations are justified by the technology’s transformative potential; skeptics respond that the technology is far from being adopted at scale and, even if it eventually is, that there’s no guarantee that these seven specific companies will be the ones to rake in the profits. “We’ve seen this story play out before,” Jim Bianco, an investment analyst, told me, pointing to the dot-com crash of the early 2000s. “Just because there’s a truly revolutionary technology doesn’t mean stocks are correctly pricing in that reality.”

If the current market froth is indeed an AI bubble, then a day must come when the bubble bursts. For a moment, that day appeared to have arrived on April 2, when Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs. Over the next week, the stock market fell by 12 percent, and the Magnificent Seven took even steeper hits.

But then, on April 9, Trump backed down from his most extreme tariff proposals and, a few weeks after that, de-escalated what seemed like an imminent trade war with China. The market swiftly recovered and launched into a bonanza even wilder than those of the previous two years. The S&P 500 has risen nearly 30 percent since its post–Liberation Day low, setting all-time records, and the Magnificent Seven have come roaring back. This gave rise to the concept of the “TACO trade,” as in “Trump always chickens out.” The idea is that Trump hates falling stock prices and will back off from any proposal that puts the market in jeopardy. So rather than sell their stocks every time the president threatens to impose crippling trade restrictions, investors should continue to pour money into the market, confident that the proposals Trump ultimately leaves in place won’t do much damage.

The flaw in the TACO theory is that Trump hasn’t completely chickened out. Tariffs are the highest they’ve been in more than a century, and the president is announcing new ones all the time. Still, the market appears largely unfazed. When Trump announced “trade deals” with the European Union and Japan that set the tariff on most goods arriving from those places at 15 percent, the stock market actually rose. Even last week, when the president announced a sweeping new set of global tariffs—an announcement immediately followed by a brutal jobs report suggesting that tariffs were weakening the economy—the market suffered only a blip. As of this writing, it is higher than it was before the announcement.

This leaves a final theory, one that has nothing to do with Trump, AI, or the Federal Reserve.

Thirty years ago, almost all of the money in the U.S. mutual-fund market was actively managed. Retirees or pension funds handed over their savings to brokers who invested that money in specific stocks, trying to beat the market on behalf of their clients. But thanks to a series of regulatory changes in the late 2000s and early 2010s, about half of fund assets are now held in “passive funds.” Most retirees hand their savings over to companies such as Vanguard and Fidelity, which automatically invest the money in a predetermined bundle of stocks for much lower fees than active managers would charge. The most common type of passive fund purchases a tiny share of every single stock in an index, such as the S&P 500, proportional to its size.

[Annie Lowrey: Could index funds be “worse than Marxism”?]

Some experts believe that this shift is the best explanation for the otherwise inexplicably resilient performance of the stock market. “The move to passive funds is a radical shift in the structure of financial markets,” Mike Green, the chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, told me. “To think that wouldn’t dramatically impact how those markets behave is just silly.”

Active investors are highly sensitive to company fundamentals and broader economic conditions. They pore over earnings reports, scrutinize company finances, and analyze market trends, and will often sell at the first sign of an economic downturn or poor company performance, which causes markets to “correct.” Passive investors, on the other hand, typically just pick a fund or two when they set up their retirement accounts and then forget about them, meaning they are automatically buying stocks (and rarely selling), no matter what. In June 2020, for example, Vanguard released a statement bragging that fewer than 1 percent of its 401(k) clients had tried to sell any of their equities from January to the end of April, even as the economy was melting down.

Thus, whereas a market dominated by active investors tends to be characterized by “mean reversion”—in which high valuations are followed by a correction—a market dominated by passive investors is instead characterized by “mean expansion,” in which high valuations are followed by even higher valuations. “When there’s a constant flow of passive money coming in, betting against the market is like standing in front of a steamroller,” Green said. “You’d be crazy to do it.”

A market dominated by passive investors also naturally becomes more concentrated. Active investors tend to avoid larger stocks that they believe might be overvalued, but the opposite is true for passive investors. Because they allocate funds based on the existing size of companies, they end up buying a disproportionate share of the biggest stocks, causing the value of those stocks to rise even more, and so on.

The explosion of passive funds over the past 15 years could explain why the market has become less sensitive to real-world downturns, more likely to keep going up no matter what, and dominated by a handful of giant companies. Or that theory could end up being disproved by unforeseen events. It wouldn’t be the first.

From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Photographs by Peyton Fulford

In August 2000, when I was 2 years old, my mother put me in a maroon velvet dress and stuck foam earplugs in my ears. She carried me through the backstage corridors of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium—the same venue where, in 1964, James Brown gave one of the most ecstatic performances of his career. It’s where, in 1972, George Carlin first listed the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television.”

My mother remembers the night in flashes. David Crosby—walrus mustache, smiling eyes—telling jokes. Bonnie Raitt’s aura of red hair. In the distance, the sound of Linda Ronstadt warming up. Sitting in a dressing room with Michael McKean and Christopher Guest, already in costume as Spinal Tap’s front men.

That night, the auditorium was hosting the Friends of Fred Walecki benefit concert. These friends included Crosby, Raitt, and Ronstadt. Also Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Emmylou Harris, and Warren Zevon. Three of the four original Eagles, who in this room in 1973 had performed their new album, Desperado, were there too.

One of the Eagles, Bernie Leadon, had helped put the event together. He had known Fred Walecki, my father, since they were teenagers, when Leadon started coming into Westwood Music, Dad’s musical-instrument shop in Los Angeles.

Dad had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 throat cancer and had undergone a complete laryngectomy. Surgeons removed his vocal cords and created a hole in his throat that he used to breathe; to speak, he pressed an electronic buzzer against the side of his neck. If people gawked at him, he’d joke that everyone on his home planet sounded like this.

When Leadon had learned that my father was sick, he called Glyn Johns, another of Dad’s close friends and a groomsman at my parents’ wedding. Johns is the English sound engineer and producer who worked with pretty much every major rock band of the ’60s and ’70s—the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Eagles. He and Leadon suspected that my family was struggling to pay Dad’s medical bills, so they contacted his other friends and asked if they’d play a benefit concert for him. Everyone said yes. Dad’s classmate from Emerson Junior High School, Jeff Bridges, who’d recently starred as “The Dude” in The Big Lebowski, would be the evening’s emcee.

I wish I had been old enough to remember this night of thank-yous to my father. He was 51 when I was born; I’ve only known Dad with gray hair, and I have no memory of his original voice. But Browne remembers my father’s impeccable Jimmy Stewart impersonations; he remembers Dad as the guy who turned him on to Gibson guitars. At the concert, he performed “My Opening Farewell” on a guitar that had been assembled at Westwood Music. Dad had spent hours polishing it to give it the rich hue Browne wanted.

Crosby thought of my dad as his “guitar guru,” and like many of the performers that night, he praised my father for his friendship. “Fred’s helped a lot of people when they really needed it. Really needed it,” he said. He and Nash then played their song “Déjà Vu.”

[Nancy Walecki: The house where 28,000 records burned]

Before the night could get too sentimental, Spinal Tap—who claimed that Dad had been the first person in the music business to ask them, *Do you have to play so goddamn loud?—*took the stage and gave an enthusiastic rendition of “Big Bottom.” I’m told I fell asleep sometime before the Byrds reunited.

After the concert, Rolling Stone declared that Fred Walecki had been “responsible for a night of music history,” even though his name “might not mean much, if anything at all, to music fans.” But my father has been there since the 1960s—doing his work so that some of America’s greatest artists can do theirs.

I. The Store

Dad never wanted to go into the family business, and his father, Hermann, didn’t want him to either. Hermann opened Westwood Music, a classical-instrument shop, in 1947, the year after Dad was born. But even as he taught my father to apply thin layers of shellac to wooden instruments until they were as reflective as still water, he’d say, This life is too small for you.

Maybe because no Walecki before him had lived a small life. Dad’s grandfather had been a cabinetmaker by day and a socialist revolutionary by night. His opera-singer aunt was the buxom blonde on The Three Stooges, and his sister, Christine—known as the Goddess of the Cello—was the first American musician to hold a concert in Castro’s Cuba. Dad’s brother, the only family member who wasn’t in the music industry, was one of the engineers behind the fastest jet-propelled aircraft in the world. Then there was Hermann, who spoke five languages, had a photographic memory, and was a world-renowned expert on and dealer of rare classical string instruments. As a young man, he’d trained to be a priest before getting recruited to play hockey for the Chicago Blackhawks.

Hermann Walecki, who founded Westwood Music, circa 1934 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

But as I would half a century later, Dad grew up in Westwood Music. He loved it as I would; he memorized its smell of old wood and lacquer. When customers came in to have their violin bows rehaired, they’d sit beside Hermann and confess their problems while he worked. Hermann, still a devout Catholic who prayed on his knees every night, would listen, nod, and occasionally offer spiritual advice. The Walecki tract home nearby was decorated with harps and baroque instruments, and served as an artist’s salon of sorts: For a summer, the harpist Marcel Grandjany gave master classes in the living room and slept in the extra twin bed in Dad’s room. When my father was born, his parents received a year-long diaper service as a gift from their friend Harpo—whom Hermann knew more as a harp player than a Marx Brother.

Dad started working on Westwood Music’s sales floor in grade school. Once, he bragged to his father that he’d persuaded a man to buy more expensive strings than his cheap guitar required. Hermann made Dad chase the guy to his bus stop with his change and the strings he actually needed and could afford. When Dad was 12, he ran the shop while his parents traveled to Europe to find rare instruments. Sold $123 worth today, he reported in a letter to his parents, and added that he’d previously sold a piano, nine flutes, and a $350 drum set, and talked a guitar student into buying a banjo and learning that, too. As a teenager, he started a guitar-polish business, mixing his concoction in the garage with an eggbeater and a coffee percolator from Goodwill.

Westwood Music back then was a blend of old-world craftsman’s studio and museum. By the front door: a grandfather clock built by Hermann’s woodworker father. On the sales floor: trumpets displayed in antique jewelry cases, fine violins in velvet-lined cubbies. On the wall: violas da gamba (baroque cousin of the cello), violas d’amore (baroque cousin of the violin), an oil painting of Christine playing the cello as a child, a rare oud constructed when Istanbul was still Constantinople. And in a frame above the sales counter was one of Hermann’s favorite quotes, attributed to Goethe:

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

The store was the complete opposite of Ledbetter’s, the folk club that opened next door in the 1960s. Its idea of decor was putting a vintage Dodge truck on the roof. On its stage, against a brick wall, the then-unknown Steve Martin did his banjo-and-comedy routine and Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. gave one of his first performances in L.A. It was the owner of Ledbetter’s who suggested that Deutschendorf needed a stage name, which is how he became John Denver.

Chris Hillman, later of the Byrds, bought mandolin strings from Hermann when he was playing in what he described to me as a “horrible faux bluegrass band” for $100 a week at Ledbetter’s. Sixteen-year-old Bernie Leadon was in town to see Hillman rehearse when he spotted a National Tricone guitar in the window of Westwood Music. (These guitars, which have bodies made of metal, look like they belong to very hip aliens, but are a favorite of blues musicians.) My dad, also a teenager, was behind the counter, and Leadon thought he looked like a total prep: oxford shirt buttoned at the cuffs, dress slacks, penny loafers, brown hair neatly coifed. Leadon didn’t buy the guitar (he couldn’t afford it), but Westwood Music had made an impression.

Dad wanted to welcome the Ledbetter’s crowd drifting in and told Hermann that folk and rock were going to be big. But Hermann was hesitant about adding “that element,” as he called it, to the store while still accommodating violin buyers with white hair and season tickets to the symphony. He allowed Dad the National Tricone and some acoustic and electric guitars if he mostly tucked them away in a little-used music-lesson room. Dad paid Hermann rent for the space and furnished his mini guitar salon with an antique clock and table so that, he told me, “it looked kind of groovy.”

[From the May 2025 issue: Ringo Starr still believes in peace and love]

Dad ran Westwood Music alongside his father, with no designs to take it over. But then Hermann got lung cancer. Soon, suppliers were calling, asking why Westwood Music was so late on payment. Eighteen-year-old Dad told them that Hermann was on an extended trip to Europe. He ran the shop solo, and at night, he repaired instruments for extra money. He’d take cash straight out of the register to pay his father’s home nurses. The cancer spread to Hermann’s brain, and he died in 1967, when Dad was 20. Westwood Music was now his to run alone.

When he’d open the shop in the morning, Dad had no trouble with the lock at the top of the door. But when he’d bend down to undo the latch at the bottom, he’d get hit with a wave of nausea. The neon sign above the door still said Westwood Musical Instruments—Hermann Walecki, but the decal on the window now read Hermann Walecki & Son. He asked himself, How do you take your father’s place?

One day, a tour bus pulled up in front of the store and out walked the country singer Merle Haggard. He was a real-life outlaw who’d done time in San Quentin and a leader of the “Bakersfield Sound,” gritty country-western music that sounded nothing like the overproduced schmaltz Nashville was selling in the ’60s. “I’m here to get a really good violin,” he said. Dad took him to Hermann’s safe and brought out a centuries-old Carlo Antonio Testore. “Can you put steel strings on that?” Haggard asked. Hermann would have thought the request blasphemous, but Dad obliged. The violin went for $16,000; this one sale would cover much of the family’s remaining medical debt. Haggard was fiddling on the new strings when Marian, Dad’s mother, who’d taken over as the store’s bookkeeper, walked by.

“It sounds like that violin has steel strings on it,” she said. An accomplished classical violinist and wool-skirt woman of the old school, she was scandalized. But then Dad told her that Haggard was going to buy it. “It sounds marvelous,” she said.

Every time he sold one of his father’s violins, Dad would reinvest in new inventory—handmade guitars by the Spanish luthier José Ramírez; Traynor amps imported from Canada; and, for musicians who wanted their own sound system, Lamb Laboratories mixing boards from England (because Dad found that if he adjusted the board’s settings just right, it could “get you a really good Rolling Stones sound live”). Martin guitars, a favorite of folk musicians, had only a handful of authorized retailers in Los Angeles; Dad was one of them. As musicians started traveling more and more by plane, he found a man named Mark Leaf, who built fiberglass guitar cases on his kitchen table in Virginia. Dad told Leadon that a guitar in that case could fall onto an airplane tarmac without a scratch. (Leadon later learned this to be true.)

Dad would stock anything that delighted him—folk, rock, or otherwise. Dolmetsch, a company in England, made “the ultimate baroque recorders,” in his opinion, so he carried a full line of them. “If another music store sold it, then forget it, you know? But if it was the best and the coolest, then I would get it,” he said. He remembers a young guy dressed in jeans and a suit jacket coming into the shop one day and trying out the recorders. He’d take one out of the display case, play it, then slip it in his suit-jacket pocket before returning it. Again and again: out of the case, in the pocket, back in the case.

“Hey, man,” Dad said, and asked what the guy was doing.

“I wanted to see how comfortable it is, because I want to use it as a little traveling instrument,” Jackson Browne replied.

I met Browne at his recording studio in Los Angeles last summer. One of the first things he said to me was “You’re tall!” The last time we’d seen each other, I was 3 feet and still struggling to pronounce my r’s. He showed me his studio of vintage recording equipment and the ailing sunflower seedlings he was trying to grow on the windowsill for his grandson. “You are going to come back,” he told the slouching shoots. “Sorry I let this happen again.” We sat at a table in the studio’s kitchen while he made us a pot of coffee.

Browne has no idea what his younger self wanted to do with that recorder. “That was pretty harebrained,” he said. “I didn’t really learn to play recorder at all.” But back then, music was “the coin of the realm. The songs you could play or what you could do on a guitar was a kind of introduction to people and friends.” At little clubs like Ledbetter’s, musicians could listen to one another and ask, How do you do that?

All of them were so young. Browne was only 18 when he wrote “A Child in These Hills.” Linda Ronstadt was the same age when she moved from Tucson, Arizona, to Los Angeles. Crosby and Hillman were in their early 20s when, in 1965, the Byrds essentially launched the folk-rock genre with their cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” By 1970, Hillman and Leadon had fused country and rock together in the Flying Burrito Brothers. (Their pedal-steel player used Jimi Hendrix–esque fuzz distortion and was also an animator for The Gumby Show. His name was Sneaky Pete.)

Dad’s store had become part of a scene that was reshaping American popular music. But Dad was still trying to run a shop suitable for his father’s remaining violin clientele. Leadon took him aside. “Fred, you don’t need to dress like that, wearing a tie and white shirt and slacks,” he said. “These people that you’re dressing for are not the ones that are bringing in money. We are.” So Dad kept his father’s old instruments on the wall, his grandfather’s clock by the door, and the Goethe quote above the sales counter, but he placed his Martin guitars on stadium bleachers in the front window and started wearing Levi’s like the rest of them.

II. The Tools

In one of my favorite photographs of my father, he stands behind the counter of Westwood Music. A lute, a violin, and about a dozen guitars hang on the wall behind him, and the counter and cabinets overflow with papers. In his Levi’s and Waylon Jennings T-shirt, he is now the king of cool. And then there is his smile—the one I inherited—which takes up half his face. He looks at whoever is on the other side of the counter as though they are the center of his world.

Dad, in Levi’s and a Waylon Jennings T-shirt, behind the counter of Westwood Music (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

“People would come in and it was boom, that floodgate of stories would open,” Christopher Guest told me. Maybe Dad would launch into the one where he found himself in a Las Vegas greenroom with Elvis and women he took for “ladies of the night,” as he put it; or the time he dropped off a 12-string guitar at a recording session for Crosby, along with some regifted weed from a member of Ricky Nelson’s road crew, who’d cautioned that it was “one-hit dope.” The recording engineer called the next day to say they’d all ignored the warning, and when he drove home afterward, he couldn’t believe how long it was taking to get to his house, a few neighborhoods over. Then he saw the sign: Welcome to San Diego. Dad would follow customers to their car, just to finish a story.

My father was a competent musician, though never thought about doing it professionally. He learned some songs, including Browne’s “My Opening Farewell,” so he could show customers different aspects of a guitar’s tone. “He always really liked to show me that he could play it, which I felt very honored by, you know?” Browne said. “And that goes right along with him pulling out a guitar and saying, ‘I have to show you something. Check this out.’ And he would show you what invariably would be a phenomenal guitar.”

Check this out: the three-word portal into the Fred Walecki Experience. Check this out, and he’d hand John Entwistle his first-ever Alembic bass, a brand he would go on to use for many years with the Who. Check this out, and he’d pull out a guitar by Mark Whitebook or David Russell Young, luthiers he’d discovered in the mountains of Topanga Canyon, and whose instruments he sold to James Taylor and Gram Parsons. Glyn Johns bought a David Russell Young so he’d have a good acoustic guitar for the rock bands he worked with. (Johns showed me that guitar when I visited him at home last fall; he apologized for all the scratch marks. “Everybody’s played this,” he said. “Eric has played it; Jeff Beck’s played it; Jimmy Page has played it.”)

Guest does an imitation of my father rummaging around in his shop for the item he needs you to see. Wait, what’s this thing? he’ll say, as he unearths some treasure. My dad has been doing this for as long as I can remember. It was just over here [Dad lifts up a touring case, printed with B.D., from a Bob Dylan tour]. Maybe it’s under [peers behind a platinum record the Eagles gave him for One of These Nights]. I think it’s just [moves aside a priceless Spanish guitar by the 19th-century luthier Antonio de Torres Jurado]. Oh, here! The joy for my father is in watching other people check this out. This is why when he looks at me with pure excitement and asks me to try the soup he has made from three different types of Progresso, I accept the spoon from him.

I’ve tried to get my father to wax poetic about the music that his customers were making in the ’60s and ’70s. He was there for the birth of what is sometimes called the California Sound, a blend of country, bluegrass, folk, and rock that is utterly distinctive and nearly impossible to categorize. How to contain the Beach Boys and the Byrds, the Doors and the Mamas & the Papas, Bonnie Raitt and Joni Mitchell? Gram Parsons called his own sound Cosmic American Music, and maybe that’s a better term for the entire Los Angeles scene. The music, he said, would unite “longhairs, shorthairs, people with overalls, people with their velvet gear on.” Cosmic American Music, at least, captures the movement’s spiritual aspirations, while gesturing to the distance between its stars.

The Eagles. Don Felder is in the Westwood Music T-shirt. (Published in the Sydney Morning Herald)

Whatever you call it, this music defined an era, and it has stuck around since. On road trips, my friends and I, all under the age of 30, still roll down the windows and blast the Eagles. We act like Joni Mitchell wrote Blue just for us. I’ve asked my father to explain it to me, to offer a theory for why there, why then. How did so much good music come out of one place?

But he just shrugs. “I’m more of a jazz guy,” he says. This is true. My entire childhood, our car radio was under the tyranny of KJAZZ 88.1. His heroes are Bola Sete, Kenny Burrell, Johnny Smith, and Baden Powell. If I want to talk about the California Sound, he tells me, I should ask his friends who actually made it. So I brought the question to Browne, the bard of ’70s Los Angeles. What do you think did it?

“It was the guitars,” he said. “Anybody will tell you it’s the instruments.” He smiled and we both laughed. But then Browne stopped himself, considered. “I’m joking when I say it’s the guitars. But I’m also serious.”

Each instrument contains unwritten melodies and lyrics, he said. “They have personalities, and they will speak to you with those personalities.” (Dad likes to say that instruments have their own little souls.) Browne said, “Especially for a writer, you’ll get to play stuff that will unlock a way of playing, or a song that’s in that guitar that you might not write on another.”

Chris Hillman described Westwood Music to me as “the hardware store” of the L.A. music scene. Guest had a more romantic metaphor: Dad, he said, “was like a matchmaker,” a conduit between the human soul and the instrumental one. Where other salesmen might just tell you the price of a guitar, with my father, “it was about going so much further than that and thinking, I’m listening to you play, and it sounds like this might be a good guitar for you.”

When Joe Walsh brought in his Gibson J-200 to sell, Dad called up Emmylou Harris right away. “You need to have this guitar,” she remembers him telling her. It had that warm country sound he knew she’d like. “You play an A chord and it’s just like, pwah! ” Harris told me, miming fireworks. J-200s have been her signature guitar ever since. She added, “I sort of became the unofficial Gibson Girl.”

Early in her career, Bonnie Raitt was playing in little clubs and “wasn’t even expecting to do this for a living. It was kind of a hobby for me,” she told me. But Dad, she says, “showed me around and showed me the whole world of things that I could have.” He explained how different amplifiers could change her sound, and he took her to a trade show where he introduced her to the genteel, rather ancient chairman of Martin Guitar, C. F. Martin III.

Raitt has a mischievous, bawdy sense of humor. (As a kid, I understood I was never to repeat a Bonnie Raitt joke.) Dad told C. F. Martin that Raitt was a rising star and may be in need of a custom-made guitar. “What I really need is a custom-made IUD,” she said. Martin had no idea what she was talking about, so Dad jumped in: “Uh, it’s a lot like a Martin D-35.”

None of this could happen now. Today’s musicians don’t need Fred Walecki to call them up about a J-200 or broker a deal for a bespoke Martin. Like professional athletes, they have sponsorship deals and can get their equipment for free. But Dad “made it his business to know the latest on every single improvement of every keyboard, every amp, and every guitar,” Raitt said. “It’s not something I take for granted. We were all incredibly lucky to have someone on our side that had so much integrity.”

Dad never forgot having to chase down the man he’d upsold on fancy guitar strings; once the store was his, he kept prices reasonable—if anything, he charged too little. Warren Zevon once saw an antique harmonium in Westwood Music and asked Dad how much he wanted for it. “Fifty bucks,” he said. “Or nothing! Take your pick!” Zevon used to call them “Freddie’s Zen Prices.”

My father became an angel investor of sorts. When the future Eagle Don Felder first came to L.A., he needed to learn mandolin for an audition, so Dad loaned him one. As Felder writes in his memoir, my father told him to take it “if you have a chance for a job,” and wished him luck. He got the gig. The Eagles landed their first tour before they had the money to buy all the necessary equipment. Dad gave them a charge account.

III. The Scene

As usual, I’m staying in the Blue Room, named for its cerulean rug and robin’s-egg walls. And as usual, when I come down the staircase, Linda Ronstadt is in her favorite armchair.

Her San Francisco living room feels like the inside of an Impressionist painting: pastel-hued, soft at the edges. It smells of cut flowers and the black tea she prefers to coffee. An icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe keeps watch from the mantel; a painting of her cat wearing a crown overlooks her shelves and shelves of books. Outside in the garden, fog cradles the roses she brought with her from one of her grandfather’s ranches in the San Gabriel Valley.

She has known me since I was born, when my parents were still trying to make my double name, Nancy Kathryn, catch on. When I began singing as a child, Linda introduced me to Brian Wilson’s harmonies and Maria Callas’s vocal placement, and, unbeknownst to me, paid for my lessons. Every time I visit, we talk about books (most recently, Anna Karenina) and boys (I talk, she listens). We watch TV and go to bed early. I’m just Nancy now to most people, but to Linda, I’m still Nancy Kathryn.

She has known my father since the 1960s, when she started coming to his shop as the lead singer in the somewhat bumbling folk-rock group the Stone Poneys. In a feeble attempt to sound like a rock band, they bought electric pickups for their acoustic guitars. Dad, she recalled, “gave us the same attention he gave to the Byrds.”

The two became friends, and whether she was looking for a new guitar or just some company, “he always showed up when he was needed. And he was always needed.” In the late ’70s, a powerful storm hit Malibu, washing away the glass-enclosed tearoom attached to Linda’s house. Dad arrived with sandbags, quick-dry cement, and a stockpile of Mexican food from Lucy’s El Adobe. Years later, he was the one who drove her home to Tucson after her breakup with George Lucas.

When Linda pictures Westwood Music, she thinks of an old line she loves: “Music is a conspiracy to commit beauty.” Someone was always fingerpicking, an electric guitar was always humming—musicians were always conspiring.

Jackson Browne, Glyn Johns, and Dad outside the store (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

People didn’t necessarily come to buy something. Westwood Music was a daytime clubhouse of the L.A. scene, Bernie Leadon said. Emmylou Harris called it “the watering hole.”

It “was a place where people saw people, made friendships, made connections, and it was all through your dad,” Harris told me. “He just put out that vibe—that sense of it was always about music, the musicians.”

This was an analog world, a world in which serendipity was still possible. “Sometimes you’d go in and you’d see Jackson or Ry Cooder and all these different people that were hanging out there, and suddenly it would turn into half a day, and you’d go in the back room and you could just sort of sit and jam together,” Leland Sklar, a bass player who has backed artists including Linda, Browne, and James Taylor, told me. Artists would catch up, talk about what they were working on, and then head off to their respective recording sessions, maybe at the Complex or Village Recorders nearby. Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso, would bring a six-pack and jam. Joni Mitchell popped by for pizza. Even Neil Young, known as something of a hermit, stopped in.

The store came with a bemused den mother, Marian, known to all as “Mrs. Walecki.” She’d do the store’s payroll while musicians in the adjacent guitar room tried out new instruments by playing “Stairway to Heaven.” (It was always “Stairway to Heaven.”) One time, Mick Taylor, the bony, long-haired guitarist for the Rolling Stones, asked Marian where the loo was. That depends, she said, with total sincerity. “Are you a boy or girl?”

Mark Bookin, the store’s senior salesman for decades, described Dad as the “master of ceremonies” at each day’s gathering. But Dad says he thought of himself more as the store’s maître-d’hôtel. Let me sit so-and-so here, near the producer from Asylum Records, he’d think. Or: These two guitar players might sound good together; let me introduce them. He connected Linda and Johns because he thought they might make a good record, and shortly after, they did—We Ran. “Music-store owners don’t do that,” Johns told me.

My father and his store, Guest said, “accelerated everything. It made everything better, because it provided a second home and a place where people could feel appreciated, and that’s a big thing.” When I asked Dad what time Westwood Music would close at night, he shook his head. It closed when its crowd wandered elsewhere—usually to the Troubadour, a West Hollywood club and the scene’s nighttime nexus. Dad remembers leaning against the bar and running through his celebrity impersonations: Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Kirk Douglas. “You know, really funny shit,” Browne said. Dad had to get up early the next morning to run a business, while the rest of them slept in. But Ned Doheny, a singer-songwriter and Browne’s former musical partner, said, “He was as much a part of that scene as anybody who ever made a record during that period of time.”

By the mid-’70s, “it was all happening,” Dad says. The Eagles and Jackson Browne were playing arenas around the world. Linda would rush home from one string of concerts, dump out the contents of her suitcase, pack for an entirely different climate, and head out on the road again. Dad sold her a portable, battery-powered Pignose amplifier, about the size of a lunch box, that she and her band could use for jamming between gigs. He sent the Beach Boys cases of Ricola cough drops to preserve their voices on tour.

[Read: Brian Wilson’s world of sound]

As his friends’ music moved deeper and deeper into rock, Dad phased out his remaining pure-folk inventory—ceding the folkies to a music store he’d been competing with nearby. Not long after, a roadie for the Rolling Stones called and asked Dad if he could come to a Warner Bros. soundstage, where they were recording. Keith Richards wanted a guitar with a B-string bender—a device that musicians put inside their guitars to emulate the sound of a pedal steel. Dad’s car was in the shop, so he hopped in his mother’s station wagon. When he got there, he mentioned that he was going to see the blues duo Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee at the Ash Grove, and asked if the Stones wanted to come. They piled into Marian’s station wagon. When they walked into the club, Dad saw that the other music store had set up a kiosk inside. “And here I come with the Rolling Stones,” Dad says, with that smile that takes up half his face.

IV. The Confidant

How do I describe my father, a man who, if he could, would crawl out of these pages and meet you himself? In my head, he comes with his own theme music—a rollicking kazoo melody with a boogie-woogie bass line. If he finds himself around someone he feels is taking themselves too seriously, he will hover his finger about one inch from their face and singsong, I’m not touching you! until they are disarmed into being nothing but themselves. When faced with adversity, he will say, God’s not on a coffee break. And if presenting a plan, work-around, or detour that will inspire the fear of death in his companion but ultimately be a lot of fun: Let me show you a cheatsy way to do that.

Dad was never one to say no to an adventure. Over the years, he went skiing with the band Poco and tuna-fishing with the Doors. Wix Wickens, the keyboardist for Paul McCartney, refused to join my father on his frequent trips to Mexico, because, “it being your dad, jaunts would turn into escapades would turn into incidents.”

It was on one such trip that he met my mother, who was sitting at the next table at a seafood restaurant. She was a Stanford grad and a celebrated Western-style horseback rider who had grown up on a Nevada cattle ranch about 100 miles from the nearest gas station. He was a very loud man wearing a hat that resembled a marlin. It had a fin.

Fred Walecki “incidents” were not necessarily fueled by drugs or debauchery. (Dad told me he smoked weed only between 1977 and 1979. He got it for free from Crosby’s dealer.) Instead, his adventures were inspired by what Wickens described as my father’s “benign chaos.” Dad’s policy: “If it seemed to me that a nice person wouldn’t hold it against me, I would do it.”

Jimmy Buffett once called and said he’d been offered a last-minute stadium gig. He asked if Dad could replicate his band’s entire stage setup—including the congas—in record time. Buffett’s box truck couldn’t fit all the equipment, so they loaded up Dad’s station wagon with gear and strapped the congas to the roof. They paused long enough to paint Freddy and the Fishsticks World Tour ’81 on the side.

People turn to folklore to describe my father: He’s the Pied Piper, the maven, or, as Ned Doheny calls him, the trickster—a mischievous entity who “tracks pollen all over the place, and all kinds of things happen.”

A publicity photo for Linda Ronstadt’s album Simple Dreams. Sunburn courtesy of Dad. (Alamy)

One day in 1977, he showed up at Linda’s house in Malibu with some fresh fruit and some excellent marijuana. Lulled by the strong weed, the sun, and my father, Linda stayed outside too long and got horribly sunburned. The next day, she had to take publicity photos for her album Simple Dreams. In the iconic shot of Linda (her ex George Lucas’s favorite, she says), she looks over her left shoulder, lips parted, a white flower in her hair—but whenever she looks at the photo, she sees the sunburn she got with Dad. My father and his pollen.

But then there is my father, quiet, beamed back down to Earth. When I was 18, I got a bad concussion that took me out of college for my first semester. My doctor didn’t want me to fly home for a while, so I called Dad one night from the other side of the country, panicked that my brain would never return to normal. “What are you looking at right now?” he asked. Pine trees, I said. Some shrubs. I’m sitting on a bench outside. “What’s the temperature like where you are?” It’s nice. Cool but not cold. It was early fall in the Northeast, a new sensation for a Californian. “What does the air smell like?” Wood chips. “I know it’s hard, but your only job right now is to stay in this moment and not future-trip. In this moment right now, the one God is giving you, the air smells nice, the temperature is good, you’re somewhere beautiful.” We kept talking and he slowly untangled problems that, before I called, had felt insurmountable. He signed off that night, as he usually does, by saying not I love you, but I’m loving you—love, active.

I know now that he had dozens of conversations like this, with dozens of musicians, decades before he became a father.

Anyone “can feel like the stowaway in the trunk of a great enterprise,” Browne told me. But an artist, maybe especially, needs someone who makes them believe that they’re worthy, that it’s all going to be okay, Mac McAnally, a singer-songwriter and longtime member of Jimmy Buffett’s band, told me. “Fred can make you believe it’s going to be okay.”

Freddy and the Fishsticks on the road, 1981 (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

Joni Mitchell stopped touring in the 1980s, and in the ’90s told Dad she was going to do her last-ever public performance, at the 1995 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Her songbook incorporates about 50 different tunings. “I’d tune to the numbers in a date, I’d tune to a piece of music that I liked on the radio, I’d tune to birdsongs and the landscape I was sitting in,” she said in a 1996 interview. “I’d work out these wonderful fresh harmonic movements, only it was a pain in the butt to perform and I felt like I was always out of tune.” She didn’t want to do it anymore.

But Dad told her he might have just the right tool: Roland’s new VG-8, which could electronically alter a guitar’s sonic output and, crucially, memorize tunings. Mitchell could keep her guitar in standard tuning, then push a button for “Big Yellow Taxi,” say, and the VG-8 would convert the sound of each string to match that tuning. Dad knew Mitchell had had polio as a child and still suffered from muscle weakness, so he built her a guitar from lightweight spruce (commonly used in violin making) and placed the VG-8 inside. He painted the guitar his favorite color, British racing green. She named it “Green Peace.”

What she thought would be her swan song “turned into the first performance in a whole new period,” she said in that 1996 interview. She used the VG-8 to make the guitar sounds on Taming the Tiger, giving her “access to all kinds of possibilities in keeping with the way I hear guitar, which is like a full orchestra, with the treble like a brass section and the lower strings like the viola, cello, and bass.” To another reporter, she said, “This instrument is going to be my savior.” She used my father’s name in one of the album’s lyrics—she calls him “Freddie”—and, in the liner notes, thanked him for “rekindling my desire to make music.”

[From the November 2017 issue: The unknowable Joni Mitchell]

Dad has always been “genuinely interested in people,” Linda told me in her living room. “And when they came in, he’d talk to them, and they confided in him.”

I leaned in, ready for a flood of rock secrets. “What would they confide in him about?”

“Well, I don’t know! He kept it secret.” She smiled. “He kept my stuff secret. But he always knew the undercurrents that were going on and band dynamics and stuff like that.”

And if necessary, “he’d tell them when they were full of shit. He had no reservations about that,” Bookin, the store’s longtime salesman, said. Once, at a recording session, Crosby played Dad a vocal track he’d just cut and was clearly proud of. “Your voice is great, but were you reading it?” Dad asked. Unmemorized lyrics are the height of laziness, in my father’s eyes.

“Oh fuck you,” Crosby said. (The two remained good friends until Crosby’s death.)

My father has a low tolerance for what he perceives as stupidity, and over time, drug use in the L.A. music scene got stupider and stupider. To hear my father and his friends talk about it, the era can be divided into B.C. and A.C.: Before Cocaine and After Cocaine. When Weed Guy showed up at the party, that could be fun. Mushroom Guy, too. Even Acid Guy. But when Cocaine Guy started coming to parties, Dad said, he drained the scene of its remaining innocence. The music got self-indulgent. People would talk over one another and think they were having a conversation.

Doing a line with someone “was like having a cup of coffee” with them, Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player, told me. It took everyone a while to notice the scene darkening. In June 1979, Dad’s friend Lowell George, of the band Little Feat, died of an overdose. Dad was an Eagle Scout by the scene’s standards, but he realized that “we couldn’t keep going at this pace” and got sober that August. “He was one of the first people I knew to really get sober and just draw the line,” Browne said. “The rest of us, it was years before anybody decided that was the problem.”

Dad still went to all the parties; he just brought IBC root beer to drink. Once, at a gathering at Crosby’s house, he was being so loud, so boisterous, cracking such awful jokes, that another party guest, Neil Young’s producer and recording engineer Niko Bolas, assumed he was high on some new drug they all needed to try. Raphael said that Dad’s particular brand of abstinence “turned a little light on with all of us, saying, Hmm, if Fred can do it, then maybe I can.” You could be clean and “still able to hang with the musos.” Dad would help heroin addicts detox at the little country home he and his father built together in the 1950s, and started a weekly gathering of the alcoholics he mentored, who nicknamed it “The Gol Darn Dingy Deal,” after my father’s catchphrase when facing a setback. (“What’s the gol darn dingy deal?” he will ask when, say, the car doesn’t start.)

In 1986, when Crosby was out of prison on drug charges and newly sober, Dad joined him on a white-water-rafting trip. That vacation, Crosby’s wife, Jan Dance Crosby, told me, was “really the first time we actually did something for fun after working so hard to get sober.” Dad was proof that life didn’t end—indeed, could become more joyful—after sobriety. “He wasn’t shy about sharing that joy, and he also wasn’t preachy,” she said. “All he was was a friend.”

A photo I took at the Newport Folk Festival in 2022, right before Joni Mitchell took the stage. Dad is holding Green Peace, the guitar he made for her. (Courtesy of Nancy Walecki)

Dad became a Christian around that time. This, too, started in the shop. When Larry Myers, a musician and pastor, came to Los Angeles, someone told him that if he wanted to meet people, he had to go to Westwood Music and meet my father. The two became friendly, and Myers invited Dad to hear his band at the Vineyard Church. Today Vineyard is an international body of churches, but at the time one of its only chapters met in Dad’s old junior high school. Members of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue made up the worship band; Myers had helped bring Dylan himself to Christ. As Dad listened to the band play that Sunday, “I realized I had tears in my eyes,” he recalled. “I realized that I really always—I always loved God, and it was time to make friends” with him.

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