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Trump’s Visit to China - The Atlantic

Sun, 17 May 2026 04:05:19 +0000

Trump’s Visit to China

Panelists joined to discuss what the summit in Beijing may mean for the U.S. and China.

Courtesy of Washington Week With The Atlantic

May 16, 2026, 11:59 AM ET

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

Donald Trump met with Chinese President Xi Jinping for a high-stakes summit in Beijing this week. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss potential takeaways from the visit, and more.

“There was an enormous amount of trepidation looking in advance of the summit on the part of America’s allies,” Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker argued last night. “What Donald Trump has made very clear is that no matter what’s written on paper, no matter what laws are passed by Congress, there’s no permanent commitments or alliances, as far as he’s concerned.”

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Glasser; Mark Mazzetti, a Washington correspondent for The New York Times; Nancy Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Watch the full episode here.

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Donald Trump, People's Republic of China, Susan Glasser, The New York Times

Xi Jinping Was Only Humoring Trump - The Atlantic

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

Spare a moment, please, for the lame-duck superpower. It calls itself the leader of the free world, but the free world no longer believes it. When it extends its hand, nobody rushes to accept. When it threatens, nobody trembles.

After President Trump arrived in Beijing this week, Xi Jinping showered him with pomp befitting a summit of great powers. Yet the Chinese leader permitted potshots at his guest to go viral on his country’s internet rather than suppressing them, as some observers expected he would during a state visit. Xi answered Trump’s lavish praise by sternly lecturing him about meddling with Taiwan. In the end, Xi offered nothing of great substance—no solutions to the war in Iran, no sweeping trade deals, no promises of access to rare earth minerals. Xi used the visit to humor the lame-duck president, waiting for his time to pass.

Michael Schuman: A checkers player meets a three-dimensional-chess master

During the first Trump administration, foreign leaders flattered and accommodated the president out of deference to American power. They feared it; they relied on it. During the second administration, and especially since the beginning of the Iran war, their calculus has quietly shifted—not because the strategy of obsequiousness has failed, but because it’s no longer worth the trouble. Like many of his counterparts around the world, Xi has begun to assume that it’s not just Trump who is term-limited; it’s also his nation.

Trump’s war in Iran was meant to showcase American power. It did the opposite. In the course of failing to remove a much weaker regime or eliminate its nuclear threat, the United States blew through its arsenal—so much so that allies in the Pacific reasonably wonder whether enough munitions remain to protect them. According to The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon is now worried that it lacks the firepower to execute contingency plans for defending Taiwan.

Supporters of the war argued that it would deal China a severe blow by eliminating one of its most potent allies. But the Gulf nations most threatened by Iran have actually turned to China. As first reported by The Washington Post, an intelligence assessment prepared for the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned that those countries have begun acquiring from Beijing the systems needed to protect their oil infrastructure and bases. Trump didn’t just fail to weaken China’s position in the Middle East. He strengthened it.

Without exerting itself much, Beijing has profited from America’s self-immolation. China’s petroleum reserves and its investments in renewable energy have allowed it to offer Thailand, the Philippines, and Australia relief from the energy crisis that the United States instigated. Instead of applying diplomatic pressure on Iran to cut a deal, China has let the conflict linger, so that the United States continues to bear the blame for the disruptions to shipping. Meanwhile, China poses as the faithful steward of the rules-based order—the cooler head, the power on which even the U.S. must now rely.

By patiently waiting out this moment, by letting the United States exhaust itself, China has bought time to pursue what Xi calls “national self-reliance”—time to catch up with the West technologically and to fortify itself for the point when competition takes a harsher turn.

That very same strategy is guiding Iran. Trump repeatedly signals his desire for a deal to end the war, by wishfully exaggerating how close he is to reaching one. But Iran keeps responding to his offers with outrageous demands, including for reparations for the destruction the United States wrought.

Robert Kagan: America is now a rogue superpower

In the meantime, Iran has been able to dig out weapons systems buried in the rubble caused by American strikes on bunkers and caves. According to intelligence assessments, The New York Times reports, the Iranians have restored access to 30 out of 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz. Across the whole of the country, Iran has regained roughly 90 percent of its underground missile storage. Without having to purchase a rocket or launcher, it has bounced back.

American history is rife with the perils of lame-duck leaders. As their time in office grinds to a close, presidents grow eager to write a final chapter worthy of their saga. They reach for the grand gesture; they attempt to solve the intractable problem. But in their mad dash to assert their relevance, they manage merely to prove how little they matter to the rest of the world. Trump is now living that fate, and the consequences extend far beyond his presidency. Every failed deal, every summit that yields nothing, every boast that goes unfulfilled, confirms what adversaries already suspect. A lame-duck superpower exhausts itself in full view of the world, and the world moves on.

How to Read Like a Child Again

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

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

Growing up has become associated with outgrowing certain pleasures: picture books, fairy tales, stories that speak openly about wonder and fear, villains and heroes. But adulthood does not actually require abandoning the things that first shaped how we experience the world.

Recently, Anna Holmes wrote about moving across the country in 2020 and donating boxes of adult literary classics but refusing to part with the children’s books she owned. Those stories were not just sentimental objects; they preserved a way of engaging with the world that adulthood often trains out of us.

The children’s author Mac Barnett argues that “when we dismiss children’s books, what we’re really doing is failing to recognize the potential of children.” Holmes extends the thought: “In dismissing children’s books, adults fail to recognize the potential of people.”

Children approach stories with a flexibility that many adults lose: They tolerate nonsense and accept strange rules, as long as the story can delight them. As adults, we often replace that openness with efficiency and skepticism, flattening delight into something more practical.

Maybe rereading children’s books is not really about returning to childhood. It is about recovering a way of moving through the world with a little more curiosity, a little less certainty, and a greater willingness to be surprised.

On Children’s Books

What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books

By Anna Holmes

Grown-ups who dismiss literature for kids aren’t just snobbish—they’re missing out.

Read the article.

What Rereading Childhood Books Teaches Adults About Themselves

By Emma Court

Whether they delight or disappoint, old books provide touchstones for tracking personal growth. (From 2018)

Read the article.

65 Essential Children’s Books

Illustrated titles that teach kids to love literature

Read the article.

Still Curious?

Will children’s books become catalogs of the extinct? “As an environmental journalist and a parent, I worry that the animals in my son’s bedtime stories will disappear before he learns they’re real,” Tatiana Schlossberg wrote in 2022.
What parents lose when they don’t read to their kids: Sharing books with my children was about a lot more than literacy, Ilana Kurshan wrote last year.

Other Diversions

Courtesy of Vanessa H.

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan, is pure magic. I live on a Tulip Lane (which means there are thousands of planted tulips for all to enjoy) and I literally never get over the beauty of it all. I constantly find myself saying, ‘Oh, WOW!’” Vanessa H., from Michigan, writes.

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

— Rafaela

The Art Lover’s Dilemma

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

The forced excitement accompanying each new iteration of the Venice Biennale, I’ve heard it said, is akin to a faked orgasm—at some point, it’s probably better to stop. Yet among this magical city’s spells, as the novelist Mary McCarthy once wrote, is “one of peculiar potency: the power to awaken the philistine dozing in the sceptic’s breast.” McCarthy had in mind “dry, prose people” who object to “feeling what they are supposed to feel, in the presence of marvels.” This, then, is the art lover’s dilemma whenever the Biennale comes around: Do you marshal skepticism or let the feelings flow?

Whatever your preference, you’ll get a lot of practice. The Biennale, which opened last week and will remain up through November, has frequently and misleadingly been called “the Olympics of the art world”—and it’s certainly a competition of sorts (primarily for attention), but no one seems to care much about who’s winning. More accurate, it’s an everywhere-all-at-once phenomenon. You try to account for it all, but it’s virtually impossible to tell a clean story about it.

This year, the buildup to the Biennale was dominated by responses to the decision by its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, to allow the Russian and Israeli Pavilions to mount exhibitions. Accusations of complicity with pariah states and counteraccusations of censorship flared during the festival’s early days. In other corners, opinions ran hot about rampant nudity in the Austrian Pavilion. Yet the fervor, whether consequential or minor, in some ways has little to do with the actual physical experience of being in Venice, scouring the city for art.

There is so much of it. I saw thousands of artworks in dozens of locations for five straight days and still missed a good deal of what was on offer. The whole thing is frankly preposterous. But what reliably happens at the Biennale is that you, at some point, see something unexpected that slows you down—that makes you conscious of tiny changes in your breathing, maybe even draws a tear. It might happen in a church: in the Frari, for instance, home to Titian’s Pesaro Madonna altarpiece, the first painting I seek out every time I visit Venice. Or in a darkened room along the Grand Canal, while watching Arthur Jafa’s devastating collage of mostly found footage, Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death. You don’t, in other words, know when it might happen. But if you want it to happen, you have to remain susceptible.

On the morning of the opening day, I set off early so I could duck into the Scuola Dalmata, a small 15th-century building only minutes from the Biennale’s main entrance, to see a cycle of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio. The most famous of these shows Saint George slaying a dragon whose human victims—reduced to skulls, amputated limbs, and severed heads—litter the ground beneath them. The dragon’s jewellike, fanned-out wing, the colonnade of receding palm trees, and the architectural backdrop are all sublime. But when you get up close, the painting is shockingly macabre.

Saint George and the Dragon, 1502, Vittore Carpaccio (Save Venice Archives. Photograph by Matteo De Fina.)

Another painting in the cycle had been replaced by a yellowing photographic reproduction. The original was only yards away in a small room, illuminated by studio lights. Standing in attendance, like doctors in a teaching hospital, was a team of conservators funded by Save Venice, an American organization that works with local experts and authorities to preserve Venice’s artistic heritage. They welcomed me in, suggesting only that I mind my umbrella. Scuffed and pockmarked, the painting looked stoic but stripped of dignity, like an old aristocrat in a hospital gown.

A short walk away in the Giardini are the pavilions of the Biennale. As I was inspecting Carpaccios, diplomats, collectors, and press were mentally preparing for an art-viewing marathon punctuated by endless dreary speeches about the importance of art in a turbulent world. When I arrived at the Russian Pavilion, Aleksei Paramonov, the Russian ambassador to Italy, was being led through the building by the exhibit’s commissioner, Anastasia Karneeva. (Karneeva, I learned later, is the daughter of Nikolay Volobuyev, the deputy chief executive of Rostec, the state-owned Russian defense corporation.) Suddenly, all hell broke loose.

Dozens of women dressed in black clothes and pink balaclavas had gathered outside the pavilion. It was raining. They began setting off smoke flares—pink, blue, yellow. They chanted slogans (“Blood is Russia’s art!”; “Disobey! Disobey! Disobey!”), danced to loud music, climbed the pavilion’s external structures, and bared their chests to reveal more slogans. This, of course, was Pussy Riot, the performance artists and anti–Vladimir Putin activists who, since 2012, have disrupted a World Cup final, a Winter Olympics, and—most famous and at great cost—a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Moscow. For 20 minutes, they basically tore the place up. The Russian ambassador cowered inside the pavilion. A helicopter hovered overhead.

Important people speaking at exhibition openings will tell you that art is about communication. They’re not wrong. But because some crucial part of artistic expression is always slipping toward the incommunicable, the most powerful art is sometimes less a dialogue than a soliloquy. Pussy Riot’s performance felt this way: They crave justice, they’re willing to risk blacklists and prison, and they’re creative. They know how to communicate. But look past those pink balaclavas and into their eyes, and it’s clear that their hearts are broken in ways that they’ll never truly communicate to us in the crowd, clutching our cellphones.

The performance represented a rare vital moment at the center of the otherwise-lackluster exhibitions in the Giardini and the adjacent Arsenale. But the satellite exhibits spread across the city have, in recent years, become the best reason to visit the Biennale. These are high-quality, reputation-making shows, and they’re installed in some of the city’s most beautiful churches, palazzi, and museums.

Many of this year’s exhibits address war and suffering. Michael Armitage, a British painter born in Kenya, updates old-style history painting with fresher, journalistic impulses to produce compositions—of chicken thieves, migrants crammed on rafts, crowds facing COVID-era curfews—that feel strangely dreamlike. All reveal his extraordinary flair for color: lilac and dull greens undergirding local outbreaks of yellow, turquoise, and red.

Raft (i), 2024, Michael Armitage (Michael Armitage / David Zwirner. Photograph by Kerry McFate.)

Armitage’s show, at the Palazzo Grassi, contains allusions to the etchings of Francisco Goya, so it complements Nalini Malani’s dazzling, large-scale animations projected in darkness at the Magazzini del Sale. Malani, an Indian artist in her 80s, uses a fast-paced collage aesthetic, layering her own imagery over appropriated artworks, including Goya’s Disasters of War etchings, all accompanied by her own anti-war voice-over. Her sequence of animations forms a colonnade of colored light in this narrow, high-ceilinged former salt warehouse. Both the Malani and Armitage shows left Jenny Saville, the British painter of magnified bodies and faces, with a solo show at the prestigious Ca’ Pesaro, looking mannered and lost. (If competition is not the point in Venice, comparisons are nevertheless inevitable.)

Another superb show featured Matthew Wong, a painter of intimate, hauntingly lovely figurative works inspired by van Gogh and Matisse. Wong died by suicide at the age of 35, in 2019. Seeing his smaller, brightly colored, sometimes heavily patterned works in the rooms of the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, their walls painted tomato red or pale green, with shafts of light coming through the pale-curtained windows, was my favorite experience of the Biennale. While I was there, everything seemed to rhyme, both within and beyond the paintings: the patterns, the colored light, the interiority, the intimacy.

Installation view of Matthew Wong: Interiors, 2026, at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi (Matthew Wong Foundation / Artists Rights Society, New York. Photograph by Roberto Marossi.)

The Biennale is best understood as a massive, citywide festival of art in three parts: the national pavilions, in which countries choose their own artists to show; the main exhibition (a curator, with a vague theme in mind, selects work by international artists—110 of them this year); and, finally, those satellite exhibitions staged all across Venice.

The national pavilions and main curated exhibition have been steadily getting worse over the more than two decades I’ve been attending. “In Minor Keys,” the main exhibition this year, was to have been organized by Koyo Kouoh, an admired and beloved curator who was born in Cameroon and educated in Switzerland. Kouoh died a year ago, days after being diagnosed with liver cancer. Several tributes to her are visible in Venice—most notably a giant mural by the American artist Derrick Adams on the facade of a palazzo near the Arsenale.

Kouoh was only months into the job, but she had come up with an outline, and after a meeting in Dakar, Senegal, shortly before she died, a five-person committee was charged with carrying out her vision. Sad to say, but perhaps unsurprising under the circumstances, it’s a flop—an avalanche of slapdash assemblages, clumsy painting, human figures morphing “surreally” into bouquets of found objects, and random-looking installations. Elaborate wall labels drum relentlessly on themes of identity politics, the ecological crisis, colonialism, and wellness. No artist, it seems, can stick to a single medium. One, we are told, “has developed an interdisciplinary practice that spans painting, drawing, sculpture, tattoo, poetry and sound.” Throughout the show, wall labels repeatedly refer to each artist’s “practice,” cant designed seemingly to encourage an endless unspooling of arbitrary-looking art “product” and to repress a basic reality of art making—the struggle to create objects with their own unique resonance and autonomy.

A few works did stand out. I loved a giant embroidery by Thania Petersen, a South African of Afro Asian Creole descent. A fantastical map tracing the migration of Sufi music in Africa, it superimposes Sufi iconography over a 17th-century South African coastal landscape, features a rich array of plant life, and is populated by whirling dervishes riding on flying fish. I was seduced, too, by a four-channel video installation by Cauleen Smith, a Los Angeles–based artist. Her work is a very private-feeling meditation on what it’s like to live in that city. It includes footage of softly lapping ocean waves, wheeling birds, the Watts Towers, freeways, protests, and the city center at night. It’s all set to gorgeous music that Smith commissioned, and keyed to the writing of the great L.A. poet Wanda Coleman.

Close-up of Cosmological Offerings for a Drowning World, 2026, Thania Petersen (La Biennale di Venezia. Photograph by Marco Zorzanello.)

Meanwhile, the national pavilions this year tended toward the embarrassing, the way that only committee-driven, compromise-riddled projects can be. One exception (it’s embarrassing precisely because the artist didn’t compromise) was the aforementioned Austrian Pavilion, converted into what the artist, Florentina Holzinger, calls “Seaworld Venice.”

Holzinger is a performance artist working in the taboo-breaking tradition of the Vienna Actionists, who used blood, meat, and naked bodies to incite disgust and test the endurance of the audience. Visitors enter the pavilion beneath a giant bell into which a naked woman climbs via a rope before flipping upside down and turning herself into a living, swinging clapper. Inside, another naked woman on a Jet Ski does circles in a turbulent body of water. Out back, a small sewage-treatment plant converts bodily waste from two flanking portable toilets into purified water, which is piped into a large tank in which yet another unclothed woman, wearing a scuba mouthpiece, floats for four hours at a time. All of this is presented as a critique of mass tourism and ecological devastation. But it’s exactly what it looks like: a desperate bid for attention.

[Read: A very pretentious form of propaganda]

By comparison, the United States Pavilion, displaying abstract sculptures by Alma Allen, a Utah-born artist living in Mexico, seemed refreshingly modest. Unfortunately, Allen’s work is frictionless, and so polite that it’s hard to distinguish from interior decoration. It’s the sort of work you see in commercial galleries on the manicured main streets of Palm Beach and Santa Barbara. Allen’s last-minute selection came after another artist, Robert Lazzarini, was chosen and then summarily dropped. The U.S. Pavilion has always been one of the most hotly discussed shows in the Giardini, but at this year’s opening, people were leaving the building with blank expressions.

The Biennale has been presenting art in national pavilions for more than a century, and although I can recall great exceptions, there’s something dismal about most of them. The tradition endures even as most people quietly agree that art probably shouldn’t be co-opted by the agendas of nation-states. In this day and age, soft power is no joke: It can help you get away with murder, as the Saudis have demonstrated. Their pavilion, created by the Saudi Palestinian artist Dana Awartani, re-creates beautiful floor mosaics from sites in Syria, Palestine, and Lebanon, all destroyed over the past 15 years. The tiles are designed to crack over time, a reminder that everything is fragile and fleeting, including Venice.

Back on the Grand Canal, Christie’s International Real Estate was trying to gin up interest in a 15th-century palazzo (asking price: more than $20 million). The Ca’ Dario, as it’s called, was painted by Claude Monet; praised by John Ruskin in his three-volume architectural study, The Stones of Venice; and likened by Henry James to “a house of cards that hold together by a tenure it would be fatal to touch.” In Venice, the Ca’ Dario is legendary. It has remained unsold, its interior rarely seen, for more than two decades because it is thought to be cursed: At least seven past owners and guests have died, sometimes violently.

During the Biennale’s opening week, however, invited guests were able to enter, and for thus risking our lives, we were rewarded with a display that was, on the one hand, shameless marketing—a classic auction-house flex—but on the other, pretty dazzling. It included a stunning portrait by Titian, a rare Édouard Manet painting of Venice, and works by, among others, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol. Prices range from $500,000 to $50 million.

Great art can be attached to stupid sums of money; it can also be political in nature. But it is above all about inner life. It allows you to escape the trap of your self, enabling you to absorb what is unknown and incommensurable. Some works achieve this through untrammeled beauty; others, very often, do so through expressions of acute pain.

T1982-U1, 1982, Hans Hartung (ADAGP / Fondation Hartung Bergman and Perrotin. Photograph by Tanguy Beurdeley.)

On my final afternoon in Venice, I went to see The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, a Titian painting I’ve been trying to view for years. Every time I try, the church is closed. But this time, I got lucky. Titian painted Saint Lawrence—a third-century church deacon who was slow-roasted for defying Roman authorities—bound to a palette over a sizzling fire, while a man thrusts a long, forked skewer into his torso. The painting, surrounded by scaffolding while the church undergoes repairs, is full of thrusting diagonals and shadowy figures, a meditation on both extreme suffering and pointed indifference to it.

Art that’s anchored in real pain almost always leaves open a channel to beauty—or at least some more richly humane response to life. I realized this in “Still Joy,” a vital show about the experiences of young Ukrainians since the Russian invasion, and I sensed it again in the abstract, technically masterful art of Hans Hartung, a German artist who lived through two world wars, lost his leg fighting in the French Foreign Legion, and had much of his early work destroyed in the bombing of Dresden.

Hartung hated silence. He couldn’t tolerate sudden loud noises and couldn’t create without music. The Hartung show at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia is about Hartung’s relation to music, and it includes the most beautiful modern painting I saw all week: an abstract arrangement of hovering fields of dark and light blue, a large patch of black, and a lozenge of light seemingly stolen from the middle of a Venetian cloud an hour before dusk. In his work, the unfathomable is what most powerfully involves us—some private kernel of feeling that resists interpretation, and always remains out of reach.

They Don’t Make Celebrities Like Michael Jackson Anymore

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

A few years ago, Magic Johnson told a story about Michael Jackson that seems almost unimaginable today. In the 1980s, the former Los Angeles Lakers superstar invited Jackson to a Lakers game, an invitation the singer was initially hesitant to accept because he was worried that his presence would create too much of a frenzy. As it turned out, those fears were justified. “He sat down; people went crazy,” Johnson recalled to Variety. “They were running from upstairs, the sides. We had to stop the game to get him out.”

As popular as Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Drake are, all have attended sporting events without causing a stoppage in play. But Michael Jackson, after he became famous, was different. He existed on a truly singular plane of stardom—and nearly 20 years after his death, he still inspires a unique level of obsession, devotion, and curiosity from fans, even those who weren’t alive to see him in the flesh. The enormous success of Michael, the recently released biopic about Jackson’s life, is a testament to that staying power. Already, the movie is the second-highest-grossing biopic of all time, and there’s serious speculation that a sequel will be produced, given that the movie’s timeline stops in the late 1980s.

Audiences haven’t been deterred by the critics largely panning the film for being shallow and offensively commercial. The flurry of headlines about what was left out of the film—most obviously, the 1993 lawsuit that accused Jackson of molesting a 13-year-old, and subsequent lawsuits alleging similar abuse—also haven’t mattered. (Jackson settled the 1993 lawsuit and denied wrongdoing; in 2005, he was acquitted in a lawsuit brought by a different accuser. Jackson, who died in 2009, was accused of sexually assaulting four children in a new lawsuit filed against his estate in February. The estate has denied the allegations.) Regardless of any prior negative buzz, the Michael filmmakers were counting on nostalgia overpowering the controversy about the movie’s moral footing—and they were right.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I fell for it too. As I watched Michael in the theater, I was flooded by my own memories of Jackson. One of the movie’s core plot points revolves around the tensions that cropped up during the planning of the Jacksons’ Victory Tour in 1984, where the adult Michael reunited with all of his brothers in the Jackson family. I was 9 years old when my mother took me to one of these dates; tickets were almost impossible to get, but my stepfather at the time won a pair from a radio promotion. Our seats were so high up in the Pontiac Silverdome, which is just outside of my hometown of Detroit, that it was a wonder my ears didn’t pop. Not that I would have cared. Although I can’t remember every song the Jacksons sang that night, I still vividly remember how electric it felt to be in that audience.

This is the exact emotional manipulation the Michael filmmakers seem to have been going for. They wanted me to remember how I’d kissed the poster of Jackson on my wall every day before school; the soap-opera-esque love triangle I’d manufactured between my Barbie, Ken, and Jackson dolls; the way I’d treated the debut of the “Thriller” video like it was the moon landing; how I’d prayed fervently for Jackson after his hair had caught on fire during a video shoot for a Pepsi commercial. In fact, a friend of mine from Los Angeles recently shared that she and her mother drove down to the hospital that treated Jackson for his burns to hold vigil. Even though those are specific memories, the millions of people around the world who’ve watched the movie may very well relate; for better or worse, it seems that many of them have chosen to take a trip down memory lane rather than deal with the complicated reality of Jackson’s life.

[Read: The glaring omission of the Michael Jackson movie]

It probably doesn’t help that, today, the famous are no longer that famous. Modern superstars certainly seem much more accessible than Jackson ever did, because of social media and the demand from fans and business partners for more visibility. But even younger fans who never got to experience Jackson the way I did enjoy his music and imitate his dance moves; his mythology never lessened over time. It’s more than just nostalgia driving people to the theaters. Jackson has existed as a foundational piece in music history, and no fan wants to feel as if they’re missing out on understanding one of the most consequential figures the industry has ever produced.

This isn’t to dismiss concerns about the movie’s quality or the complete elimination of the child-sex-abuse allegations. (Scenes about the 1993 lawsuit were filmed, but legal issues led to millions being spent on reshoots.) But the gulf between what Michael delivers and what some people think it ought to be couldn’t be wider. Fans don’t want to feel uneasy about Michael Jackson. They want to see the poster on their bedroom wall. It’s worth thinking about why that is.

*Illustration Sources: Zak Hussein / PA Images / Getty; Sonia Moskowitz / Getty; Ron Galella / Ron Galella Collection / Getty; John MacDougall / AFP / Getty; Lynn Goldsmith / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Toshifumi Kitamura / AFP / Getty; Bettmann / Getty.

The Warnings I Almost Didn’t Heed

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

Last fall, in the sunroom where we eat our meals, my 11-year-old son and I sat at the dining table—he on one side, I on the other. Because of my low immunity, I sat apart from him, by an open window.

Six months before this, a doctor had phoned me with the news: suspicious for malignancy. For quite some time, my body had been sending signs—fatigue, bloating, light bleeding—but I had dismissed them for various reasons. I’d been raised to diminish my needs; my doctors didn’t seem concerned; I’m a mother working two jobs and didn’t have time to be sick. The official diagnosis came shortly thereafter, during surgery: ovarian cancer.

Dinner was quiet. I was usually the one who started the chitchat about school, swim team, and chemo side effects. But that evening, I was consumed by visions of other tumors, growing undetected in other bodies. “The silent killer” is ovarian cancer’s nickname. My cancer was so silent that two gynecologists hadn’t considered it as a possible diagnosis, and at least one radiologist had entirely missed my tumor—as wide as a peach and as long as my hand.

While I was on tour for my first book, a work of fiction, many readers asked if it was autobiographical. I would answer that it was 1 percent based on real life and 99 percent imagination, without saying which was which, because I like my privacy, and I am essentially made up of tiny lockboxes, some of which are hidden even from me. Now all I could think about was real life—and the urge to write about it. But I felt conflicted. So, while stirring my bowl of bone broth, I asked my son for his thoughts. He kept his eyes down and didn’t speak for a long time.

Ovarian cancer is the deadliest of all gynecological cancers. The American Cancer Society estimates that more than 21,000 women in the United States will receive a new ovarian-cancer diagnosis this year, and about 12,450 will die from the disease. Its five-year relative-survival rate is about 50 percent. By comparison, the rate for prostate cancer is more than 98 percent. The rate for breast cancer is just over 90 percent.

The symptoms of ovarian cancer can be frustratingly unremarkable: abdominal pain, bloating, irregular bleeding, painful intercourse, pelvic discomfort, changes in appetite, changes in bowel and bladder habits, fatigue or loss of energy, unusual weight gain or loss, upset stomach, heartburn, back pain. Indicators can be so subtle and nonspecific that doctors tend to misattribute them to other, more common, ailments—which can delay diagnosis, sometimes for years. Many people who experience symptoms also find endless alternative explanations for them: It was something I ate. It’s a fact of midlife. It’s perimenopause. Or simply: This is just what women go through.

[Read: The activism of oversharing]

A depressing truth is that by the time doctors order blood tests or imaging, ovarian cancer is typically at an advanced stage. Nearly 80 percent of cases are diagnosed at Stage 3 or 4, meaning the cancer has metastasized to distant locations. Eighty percent. The five-year relative survival rate for late-stage ovarian cancer is about 30 percent. Even if the disease is diagnosed at an earlier stage, the survival rate depends on multiple factors, not least of which is the type of ovarian cancer one has (it’s estimated that more than 30 types exist).

Andrea Gibson, the poet whose struggle with ovarian cancer was chronicled in the award-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, and who died last year, was diagnosed at Stage 2B. To put this all another way: It means that if your best friend gets diagnosed and has a son in seventh grade, she is unlikely to see him graduate from high school. It means that your mother will most likely expire before your car warranty. It means that the stuff in your freezer may outlive your sister.

The first more-than-unremarkable symptom came while I was delivering a lecture on the art of revision to my college writing students. “Being a good reviser is not unlike being a good person,” I told them. “A good person puts aside their own needs for the sake of others. A good writer puts aside their own needs for the sake of the reader, for the sake of—” and there, right there, was when I felt it. A tiny blowtorch in my stomach, just below the sternum. I sat down to finish my sentence, quickly invented a small-group discussion prompt, and escaped into the hallway.

I had never been so happy to see a bench. Bent over, head to knees, I considered my options: (1) Get to the restroom; though what if I were to faint in a stall? (2) Cancel class and go to the ER; but in 20 years of teaching, I’d never canceled class—not when my parents died weeks apart, not even when I miscarried. (3) Self-diagnosis; it could be an ulcer, or maybe stomach cancer (the cause of my father’s demise), or maybe it didn’t matter what it was, because I needed to get back to my students. Put aside your needs for the sake of others, I’d just told them, and my survival instinct kicked in: You’ve been through worse. That was pain. This is not pain. I decided it was acid indigestion and got back to work.

Days later, while dressing in the morning, I saw my torso in the mirror and froze. I looked about four months pregnant, except I was bulging from all sides, like a taut barrel. I snapped a photo, if only to share it with girlfriends (#joysofperimenopause), and slipped on an A-line dress that hid my middle. Running late, I called a cab, then logged on to an app to make an appointment with my general practitioner. She was booked four months out.

I almost didn’t make the appointment. In this, I’m hardly alone. A 2024 survey by the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions found that 50 percent of women respondents had skipped or delayed health-care services over the past year, and that women were 50 percent more likely than men to delay or skip an appointment because of a long wait time. So there I was—rationalizing that the bloat would resolve on its own, just as the torchlike pain had. But before giving up, I did one simple thing: I wrote a message to my GP.

I think of how easily I could have not done this. How I could have ignored my body and instead spent those spare minutes loading the dishwasher, mindlessly scrolling on social media, or waiting outside so as not to make the driver idle for 30 seconds as I exited my building. But this one simple thing took less than a minute: torchlike pain; barrel-like bloat; send.

In retrospect, I can see I had symptoms long before this. On two occasions, I’d had unusual bleeding, also known as spotting, a term I hate, as it sounds less like a medical concern and more like something that needs cleaning. Both times, the bleeding had been minimal—about three pomegranate seeds’ worth of red each day—but it lasted months. The first bleed had happened years ago. An ultrasound and a uterine biopsy came back negative. Call if the bleeding continues, I was told. Eventually, it stopped.

The second bout had occurred more recently, four months before the torchlike pain. The ultrasound again showed nothing unusual. Call if it continues, I was told again.

One day, on my walk to campus, I recalled all of the spot bleeds in my life, beginning with my first period, which came when I was 11, at a sleepover. Because I’d grown up somewhat cloistered, I’d never heard of menstruation and thought I was bleeding to death. The next day, when I told my mother about it, she seemed disgusted and walked out of the room. From then on, I learned to keep my mouth shut about my private parts.

Then there was the time when I was pregnant and visiting Connecticut, about to give a lecture. An hour before stage time, I sat in a hotel bathroom, staring at the dark dots on my underwear. I never made it to the lecture. Later, as I sat in a dank ER dreamed up by Lars von Trier, a young doctor informed me that my three-month-old fetus no longer had a heartbeat. The doctor left without another word, leaving me alone with the ultrasound machine that continued to not make a sound.

On the walk to campus, I connected all of the bleeds and the various ways in which each episode had led to silence, grief, and dismissal. Advocate for yourself was the battle cry of the American patient. Yet what had been whispered to me from birth was: Don’t complain; don’t trouble anyone. Now I told myself, Don’t worry about this spot bleed. I thought about how the word hysteria comes from the Greek for uterus. I thought: You don’t want to prove them right.

The day after I messaged my GP, I got a call from her nurse, who asked me to reiterate my symptoms. “Hmm,” she said, and offered a choice: Wait four months or make an appointment with the “overflow” doctor. Now it was my turn to hmm. I considered my work and parenting obligations and weighed them against the odds of this doctor, like others before her, telling me, Call if it keeps happening. (Deloitte reported that in another of its surveys, more than 40 percent of women respondents had delayed care because they were discouraged by previous experiences, including instances in which a provider had discounted their complaints or misdiagnosed a problem.)

[Read: How doctors take women’s pain less seriously]

While I was contemplating, the nurse discovered that the overflow doctor had an opening the next day. This tipped the scale to yes. “Sure” is what I actually said, casually, as if my life didn’t depend on it.

The overflow doctor had benevolent eyes and doughy cheeks, like fresh loaves of bread. Even her voice sounded like something just pulled from the oven. I liked her. She didn’t rush; she inquired about my symptoms, listened expressively, gathered intel for about 30 minutes. She asked if I’d been under stress, and I nearly chortled. What middle-aged working mom wasn’t under stress?

Her diagnosis: stress-induced gastritis. It sounded embarrassingly unserious. Wanting to crawl under something, I started gathering my things and looked forward to beating myself up at home. But then the doctor stopped me; she wanted to examine me. I lay down, and she poked around my torso. Does that hurt?

Never a fan of admitting pain, I told her not exactly; it was more like—and she poked again. I jolted. “Maybe I’m just ticklish,” I told her. She poked a third time. I jerked again. She told me it was probably nothing, but because it was on my right side, she wanted to order a CT scan to rule out appendicitis.

Sometimes, when I startle awake in the middle of the night, I think: If my tumor had been on my left—if there’d been no need to rule out appendicitis and therefore no need for the scan—what then?

Before the scan, I saw myself aging gracefully to 100. “Centenarian novelist” is something I’d actually said aloud. Before the scan, I easily imagined seeing my son graduate from middle and high school, and then seeing him off to college, where I would help him decorate his dorm room. I would see him fall in love, have kids, a career. Hubris or ignorance let me believe I would witness it all—the milestones, the good and the bad, though truthfully, I mostly imagined the good.

After the scan, the overflow doctor called. It was past dinner. I picked up and joked that this couldn’t be good news, because no doctor ever calls with good news, and certainly not this late. She did not disagree. Her silence made me dart to my bedroom, away from my son, who has bionic hearing. I’m sorry, she finally said, her voice falling an octave.

That night, a glass partition rose. My friend Aleksandar Hemon, in a devastating essay about his infant daughter’s cancer diagnosis, wrote, “I had a strong physical sensation of being in an aquarium: I could see out, the people outside could see me (if they chose to pay attention), but we were living and breathing in entirely different environments.” In the past, I had understood these words. Now I felt them. My old self lived on the other side of the glass. That version of me was sturdy. She lived and loved in a time of no disease. At first, I thought only she and I were divided by the before and after, but I soon realized that my family, my friends, maybe the entire world lived on that other side. After the scan, I bobbed in an aquarium of solitude. I felt alone, and somehow also exposed.

I told only a few people about the diagnosis. An elderly family member called to offer comfort and asserted that my son and husband would be absolutely fine if I were to die. After this, I refrained from telling anyone.

I was raised—by my family and my first and second cultures (Korean, American)—to either remain silent or speak in hushed tones about weaknesses and troubles. To discuss anything related to the pelvic region, especially menstruation, went against all norms. Maybe this explains why we have thousands of euphemisms for women’s cycles. (One Spanish phrase translates roughly to defrosting the steak.) With so much artistry, you’d think we’d be able to talk more freely about the monthly shedding of the uterine lining. But no. I myself have gestured to my pelvic area and called it “down there,” as if a cartographer were needed to name this uncharted region. I’ve heard myself say “lady parts” or “vagine” in a French accent, using humor to hide discomfort—and that’s with my closest women friends. As for men? The only time I’ve heard them talking seriously about the female reproductive system is when they’re trying to control it.

I was also raised to believe that pain was integral to being female. To complain about cramps was futile. (Even the word cramps makes the pain sound trite.) So, from an early age, I practiced silence—first about period pain, then about all pain.

[Read: Miscarriage and motherhood]

Case in point: After my CT scan, a radical hysterectomy was scheduled. If all went smoothly, it would take my surgeon about two hours to remove the ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, omentum, and 15 lymph nodes. But all didn’t go smoothly. My surgeon made an incision, froze a section of the tumor, sliced it, and sent it to pathology, where a speedy report confirmed its malignancy, which she expected. What she did not expect was endometriosis—a condition in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus, causing heavy and especially painful menstruation. The endometriosis was so extensive that my abdomen was drowning in lesions, scar tissue, and adhesions. Everything within was stuck together or to the bowels. For six hours, my surgeon (now hero) meticulously peeled off the glued organs, making sure to avoid spreading the cancer.

During post-op, I learned that I’d probably had endometriosis my entire life. For four decades, I’d lived with painful periods and bleeding so horrible that I once had to rush to the hospital to receive two bags of blood. For four decades, my body had screamed. But instead of listening to it, I had dismissed it. I’d downgraded the pain. Called it normal.

The size of the tumor suggested that it might have been growing for a long while. But in what I can describe only as sheer luck, some of that sticky endometrial filament had traveled to my fallopian tube and sealed the tumor in tight. My surgeon, who works in one of the top hospitals in the nation, said she had never seen anything like it. The endometriosis held me at Stage 1. It had stopped the cancer from spreading to my ovaries, where it tends to metastasize with great speed.

I had failed to take care of my body. And yet, in the end, it had chosen to take care of me.

That autumn evening in our sunroom, I waited for my son’s thoughts. He was a stone’s throw from puberty. He’d seen his mom transform from a strong, independent woman into a person who struggled to make meals and who, after three rounds of chemo, looked like a deflated monk. Cancer had provided an early exit out of his childhood. Yet through it all, he had complained not once. More telling, he had opted to not tell a single friend about the cancer, because he feared being pitied. I came to suspect that he was as private as I was, if not more. So in asking my question, I suppose, I was also asking for his permission.

He chewed his dinner more carefully than usual. I looked out the west-facing window. The sun was setting, and our cube of a dining room turned into a tank of gold. “If the essay puts some goodness into the world,” he finally said, “I think you should do it, Mom.”

And there, right there, was when I felt it—not pain but a twinge of sorts, his sentiment piercing me like an arrow, in a place that cancer couldn’t reach. My little boy was putting aside his own discomfort for the sake of someone else—for me—and with his generosity, my aquarium glass softened, just enough for me to push my hand through and reach for his.

Being private can be empowering; you get to decide which lockboxes to open and for whom. Self-silencing pain and allowing it to be silenced, however, had not served me well. It took a cancer diagnosis to break this habit, this inheritance, this other silent killer. It was not just endometrial luck that saved me. It was also the decision to believe my body, to turn up the volume a notch and let it be heard.

My Son’s Math Homework Is Essentially Just Pokémon

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:30:47 +0000

One afternoon earlier this year, my 11-year-old son was sitting at his laptop and working quietly on his math homework. At least, that’s what he was supposed to be doing. When I glanced at his screen, equations were nowhere to be seen. He was controlling a monster in the midst of battle, casting magic spells to outduel an opposing player.

“That’s not your math homework!” I told him. But it was. His fifth-grade-math teacher had told her students to spend time on Prodigy, a site that looks and feels like a video game. As my son indignantly showed me, Prodigy surfaces multiple-choice questions in between cartoon-monster attacks. Correctly identify an isosceles triangle or the square root of 49, and your “Aquadile” or “Bonasaur”—barely veiled rip-offs of Pokémon characters—gets a health boost that will help it fend off your opponent’s next salvo.

Prodigy is among a bevy of gamified tools that have gained a foothold in classrooms across the country by promising to make learning fun. (As Prodigy’s website puts it: “Kids no longer have to choose between homework and playtime.”) These platforms—which also include Blooket, Gimkit, and Kahoot—can seem like a win-win. Students’ eyes light up at math-and-vocabulary-review sessions that once induced groans. Teachers, meanwhile, can use the games to track which questions kids get right and wrong, helping them triage trouble spots.

But as I watched my son play Prodigy, it became clear there wasn’t much learning happening. In about 10 minutes of gameplay, he spent less than 30 seconds answering math questions. When he got one wrong, the game didn’t pause to diagnose where he went wrong or guide him to the correct answer. The only time he slowed down, grudgingly, was when Prodigy forced him to watch videos advertising its paid-membership plans. (Prodigy did not respond to a request for comment.)

Other popular ed-tech games also lean into gaming more than learning. Gimkit lobs occasional multiple-choice questions in the middle of live, multiplayer games that closely resemble popular commercial titles such as Among Us and Only Up. Blooket offers a single-player game similar to Plants vs. Zombies that can be used as a homework assignment and others, such as Gold Quest, that are designed to be played live by a whole classroom. While parents and teachers fret over students’ watching MrBeast videos during social-studies class, schools have embraced education software that has become hard to distinguish from Candy Crush.

Educational games have been around for decades; Millennials may remember playing Math Blaster and Oregon Trail in computer lab. Only recently have web-based, free-to-play platforms become a staple of daily lesson plans and homework assignments. Their rise has been abetted by the prevalence of school-issued Chromebooks and an incursion of technology into almost every aspect of education since the pandemic. For kids the age of my son, who attended kindergarten on Zoom, a school experience mediated by ed tech is all they’ve ever known.

Some of these platforms are now so compelling that students want to play them in their spare time. Blooket, for example, has a gambling-like feature that has proved popular throughout the gaming industry: Players earn an in-game currency they can spend on packs that offer a slim chance at rare prizes—in this case, special avatars, or “Blooks.” The site has spawned a cottage industry of YouTube streamers who share hacks for obtaining more currency and post screen recordings of their luckiest “pulls” from reward packs. “Oh my God, we pulled it,” one popular YouTuber raves in a video that has nearly half a million views. “One of, if not the, rarest Blooks in the game. And if this video gets 10,000 likes, I’ll give it away to one of you guys.”

Ben Stewart, who co-founded Blooket as a high-school student in 2018, told me that the company now has about 20 employees, millions of active users (he wouldn’t say exactly how many), and 23 game modes. He understands that some teachers and parents might have qualms with education software that mimics the addictive mechanics of mobile games. Blooket is designed not to supplant lectures or project-based learning, he argued, but rather to replace flash cards and worksheets as a way of reviewing facts that students have already absorbed. “In our mind, if you’re using Blooket for an hour in a class, something has gone wrong,” he said. Blooket aims to surface questions at least once every 20 seconds, he added, and limits the amount of rewards players can earn in a day (though they can spend money to unlock more).

Several teachers I spoke with agreed that Blooket and its ilk are best deployed in small doses and for defined purposes. Mashfiq Ahmed, a high-school-chemistry teacher in New York City, told me that he uses Blooket and Kahoot for review sessions at the end of a unit, and as filler for a substitute teacher when he’s out sick. Ed-tech games also allow kids who finish their in-class assignments early to work ahead on their laptop, keeping them quiet and out of trouble until the bell rings. And if nothing else, they can provide “a quick blast of competitive entertainment,” Jason Saiter, a high-school teacher in Dublin, Ohio, told me. “Sometimes teachers need things like this to get through the day. Sometimes certain types of students do too.”

But things can sometimes get out of hand. On Blooket and several other platforms, students can create their own quizzes from existing templates. Some have cleverly learned to design them so that any answer is designated as correct—they simply mash the first answer to each question as soon as it appears to maximize their in-game rewards. The internet is full of hacks for Blooket, Gimkit, Prodigy, and others—such as browser extensions that automatically answer every question correctly. When I ran this by Stewart, he flashed something between a smile and a grimace. “Kids are creative,” he said. “They try to cheat our games as many ways as they possibly can.” If there’s one thing that all of these years of tech-centered education has taught schoolkids, it’s how to game the system.

Over the past few years, districts across the country have enacted phone bans or restrictions in a bid to limit distractions. Schools have also blocked students from using their laptop to access sites such as YouTube and Roblox. But those measures don’t solve the deeper problem: Software has eaten the American school, and unwinding that will require more than a content filter or a Yondr Pouch.

Some parents now want to go further. Jodi Carreon, a mother based in San Marcos, California, told me that her younger child was in second grade when he began coming home begging her to pay for Prodigy’s premium service so he could get more rewards. Then she started getting notes from teachers that her son was getting distracted playing Prodigy in class. “I’m like, ‘You literally handed them this,’” she said. Carreon is now the national-expansion director for Schools Beyond Screens, a parent group that recently successfully pushed Los Angeles to become the first major U.S. school district to adopt sweeping restrictions on laptop and tablet use in classrooms.

Other experts argue that the problem isn’t games or technology per se—it’s the thoughtless way that schools are using them. A well-designed game “can be extremely effective in not just getting kids interested in the subject matter, but to help them understand why they’re doing it in the first place,” Jan Plass, a professor of digital media and learning sciences at NYU, told me. He cited a 2008 game called Immune Attack, developed in part by scientists, in which players must navigate a nanobot through a patient’s bloodstream to spur their immune system to fight off infections. He contrasted that with gamified tools such as Prodigy, which simply bolt multiple-choice questions onto unrelated game templates. It’s a lazy approach, but it’s cheap and accessible, and it dovetails with an education system geared toward standardized tests.

In other words, the status quo of ed tech is bleak. Screen time has become a default rather than an intentional choice for harried teachers and distracted students. That day I first encountered my son playing Prodigy, I noticed something odd after several minutes of watching him. He was learning how to divide fractions in math class, but the screen kept flashing addition problems. “Oops,” he said when I pointed that out. “I must have clicked the wrong lesson.”

Ben Markovits: ‘The Honor of the Layward Brothers’ - The Atlantic

Sat, 16 May 2026 14:22:43 +0000

It’s about a five-hour drive from Akron to South Bend. Things get a little tricky on the outskirts of Cleveland, but after that you just stick to I-80. I stopped for gas and a Subway sandwich and reached my brother’s apartment around two in the afternoon. He lived in an old hotel, which had been dolled up and turned into residential units. This was part of a compromise with his wife, who didn’t like the thought of their kids living downtown (in South Bend! that hub of degenerate America), so after they separated, he picked a supervised building to calm her down. But it meant he could only afford a two-bedroom; both girls had to sleep in one room. I had never been there before.

I don’t see my brother often but whenever I’m about to … I feel this onrush of eagerness. All day it came in waves, as the miles strung out behind me. The highway takes you north of the city, and I turned off and drove past Notre Dame, then nosed along, following my phone and staring out the window at every stoplight. South Bend is pretty wide open. The river is like another blue highway between roads. There are public gardens on street corners and low-rise banks and apartment blocks. It’s funny to think, we grew up in the same house, but this is where he made his life.

The Hoffman is opposite a Burger King, where I left the car. Later I had to move it underground—his apartment comes with visitor parking.

Eric’s working day is unpredictable. Sometimes he’s in the office, but he also spends a lot of time visiting schools, not just in South Bend but across St. Joseph County. When I spoke to him on the phone, he promised to leave a key with the super. It took me a while, but I found the super and got the key and let myself into his empty home, which was on the sixth floor and had a view of the river from the kitchenette. But the whole place still felt like a hotel, the carpeting, the furniture, the pillar holding up the living room, the windows that you couldn’t open. At least the girls’ room had toys on the floor and pictures on the wall—kid pictures in crayon and watercolor, stuck on with Blu Tack. What was nice about the apartment was that you got the feeling he didn’t care what it looked like to other adults, but that was also a little depressing.

I left my backpack on the floor and lay down for a minute in one of the bottom bunks. When I woke up, Eric was leaning over me. The curtains were closed; it was still sunny outside, and the glow of the afternoon came through in dusty lines.

“I didn’t know if I should wake you. It’s after five.”

“Hey.” Then I said, “That’s all right. I didn’t sleep much last night. It’s nice to see you.”

Eric and I are six years apart, the same age gap as my children. Whether you want to or not, you end up reproducing the structure of your childhood. In Eric’s case, that meant he didn’t really remember our father, I mean, remember him as somebody who lived with us. The guy we spent two weeks in the summer with, in his house in Orange County, where he had another two kids, much younger, and a new wife, and basically didn’t want us around … that guy, Eric knew well. But the other guy, on his first marriage, when Dad still thought, Maybe I can live a life where I haven’t made any unforgivable mistakes, where whatever we’re going through is just the normal headache—he didn’t remember him.

When Dad left, Eric started sleeping in Mom’s bed. Because he kept waking up with nightmares, she said, but really because she didn’t want to sleep alone. This was tricky, because Eric still wet the bed. Even at 7 years old; he had a bladder problem, and eventually my parents bought rubber sheets for him, so Mom didn’t have to keep washing his bedclothes. But when he started sleeping with her, the same thing happened. I was old enough to help with the household chores, which included laundry. So sometimes I had to deal with their wet sheets. Every night she put him to sleep in his bed, and then, when she went up a few hours later, carried him to her room. They had a relationship from which I was basically excluded, not that I really wanted any part of it. Eric had to absorb a lot of her craziness and unspent love.

The truth about Dad was, he didn’t like small kids. He just didn’t like them, which made it ironic that when he started an affair with Lisa, who was 20 years younger and worked in the L.A. office, he eventually moved in with her and had two more kids. But he didn’t mind teenagers, and that’s what I was when he left. He taught me how to play cards, not just basic poker, but old-school games like casino and bridge. He had a funny way of laying down a winning card. He didn’t say anything, but just set it down a little heavily, so you noticed. He could shuffle a deck in mid-air, which I spent hours practicing. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, he took me and Eric to Phillies games, but since Eric got carsick and generally made himself a pain in the neck, eventually he just took me. When he left, it was harder for me to say, the guy’s a jerk. Not that this was Eric’s point of view, but there wasn’t a big gap in his life after Dad walked out, as there was in mine.

It probably sounds like I resented my kid brother, which wasn’t the case. I felt sorry for him and guilty about him. He was one of those kids who always gets what he wants and isn’t happy about it. For one thing, he was a very fat kid until he hit puberty. I mean, fat enough that it was an impediment to certain activities. If I tried to talk to Mom about it, she just got stressed out. It was one more thing going wrong in her life. And she couldn’t say no to him, anyway, if he wanted soda for supper or another bowl of mint chocolate chip. Part of why I went to Pomona was to get the hell out of New Jersey; also, maybe, because I thought I might see more of my dad. But that didn’t really happen. Even though the campus is less than an hour’s drive from Newport Beach, maybe I saw him five or six times in the whole four years. But I didn’t know that when I went.

I felt bad about Eric, though, I really did. Leaving him alone with our mother, when she was in that state.

But he turned himself around. He lost a lot of weight. When I flew home the summer after freshman year, I almost didn’t recognize him. He used adolescence as a chance to make certain decisions about himself, and who he wanted to become. So, no to all the cookies and Cokes, which my mother found hard to take—it was like a rejection of her love. He never liked sports but started jogging in the mornings and lifting weights after school. Even as a fat kid, he’d had a kind of social confidence, he didn’t mind attracting attention, which he found ways of putting to good use. At some point I came home to a world in which my dumb kid brother was the star of the school play and reading Walker Percy on the pot, so you couldn’t get him out of the bathroom.

All of this came at a price, and not just for Mom. Somehow he didn’t seem comfortable with this new identity in front of me. For example, he’d made Mom join a church, St. Hedwig on Brunswick Avenue, just to get her out of the house, he said, so she could meet new people. But I think he also liked the idea of having a mission and a community, neither of which I’ve ever been a big fan of. So on Sunday mornings over the holidays I had to decide: Do I go along or not? Eric made it pretty clear, essentially saying to me, I don’t expect you to follow this new direction our lives have taken, which was reasonable of him. But I think he also meant, Leave us alone. So I left them alone. On the whole I was grateful that he’d found a way to turn his unhappy energy outward, even if it meant I didn’t get to play big brother. That’s fine, that’s okay, I mean, for eight months a year he was on his own. He couldn’t rely on his big brother very much.

Still, every time I was about to see him, I felt this rush of childish eagerness clutching my heart, which was replaced, when I did see him, with something more complicated. A feeling like, we both have to protect ourselves against this level of intimacy.

He wanted to know how long I planned to stay, if I could stick around and see the girls, who came after school every Wednesday. But I told him, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I have to get to Denver.”

“For what?”

“To see Brian Palmetto. But that’s a longer conversation; it can wait.”

I sat in his living-room area, on one of the low couches. He made me a cup of Celestial Seasonings. “What do you want to do?” he asked.

He took off his shoes and stood on the thick carpet in his socks. Because of all those years of acting, he had good physical balance; he moved like an athlete. He also looked too skinny, if you ask me.

“I don’t know, show me your life.”

“What does that mean?”

“We can drive around, I wouldn’t mind seeing the city.”

“You’ve been driving all day.”

“Well, you can drive.”

So that’s what we did, but first I had to move my car from the Burger King into one of the Hoffman’s visitor parking spots. So we got in my car, then we got in his car. Eric drove an old Camry. It was basically his office, he spent a lot of time on the road. There were papers on the passenger seat, which he told me to throw in the back. “You see how I live,” he said. But it pleased him, I think, to sit behind the wheel; it made the power relationship a bit easier.

We drove across the river to the girls’ school, which took up several blocks behind a spear-topped iron fence. “That’s where all my money goes,” he said. You couldn’t see much. There were trees in the way, and wide lawns, and vague collegiate-looking buildings in the distance. We parked for a minute on the other side of the street, in front of somebody’s house. It was 6 o’clock. People were coming home after a working day, and we watched a couple of cars pull out of the long school drive.

“But the girls are happy,” he said. “At least at school.”

“Is it a Catholic school?”

“More or less. Officially nondenominational. It’s where Terry went. They’re basically having her childhood … without the father.” He laughed; he had a sweet, unhappy laugh. Eric, unlike me, had lost most of his hair and cut what was left pretty short, so he looked like a monk or a long-distance runner. To me, he still looked like a kid, boyish and somewhat intense, but I realized that if I met him now I’d think, a middle-aged man.

“You want to see the house?”

“Sure. Won’t that be a little weird?”

“We can just drive by.”

“Maybe you could call and say their uncle’s in town.”

“I’ve learned it’s better if you stick to the script.”

Terry and the kids lived in Granger, about 20 minutes away, by the Michigan border. But first he took me past her parents’ place, which isn’t the house she grew up in but where they moved after retiring. It was on a cul-de-sac with a circular drive at the end, which was around a patch of green lawn with a flagpole sticking out of it and an American flag flapping around on the pole. “Can you believe it?” Eric said. “You couldn’t make it up. Thirty years ago, none of this was here, this wasn’t even a place.”

“What are they like?”

“Who? Terry’s parents? I don’t know. I can’t describe them and sound like a sane person. We go to the same church.”

“I didn’t know you went to church anymore.”

“Sometimes I take the girls.” He was circling the flagpole. Eventually he said, “They still introduce me to people as their son-in-law.”

In Granger, there were no other cars, the streets were wide and curbless. Most of the houses had extensive lawns, and sometimes at the end of a block, there was open grassland, dotted with trees, so you couldn’t always tell where one yard began and another left off. “That’s it,” Eric said, slowing down. “With the Honda in the driveway.” In fact, all you could see of their house was the gray metal door of the garage.

We turned a corner but the rest of it was screened by trees. I had a slightly creepy feeling of déjà vu.

“I can’t remember how long you lived there.”

“Three years. First we had an apartment in Edgewater. Then we moved out here. I actually have a job offer in Chicago, but if I take it, I’ll never see the girls. Except maybe like Dad, for two weeks in the summer. I don’t know. We can park and get out, nobody will see us.”

He pulled over by the side of the road, but we just sat there, under the trees. Eric turned off the engine.

“I may have walked out on Amy,” I said.

“You may?”

“About 10 years ago, she had an affair with a guy from … our synagogue. I told myself, when Miri leaves home, then I can go, too.”

“You waited 10 years?”

“It may have been more like 12.”

“Now you’re just showing off.”

One of the downstairs lights in the house came on; dusk was setting in. Eric said, “That’s the bathroom light.”

“I forgot to give them to you, but I bought a few things for the kids.”

“That’s nice.”

“Mostly candy, but I got them a Frisbee, too. In case they didn’t have one already. I don’t know.”

“That’s nice.” Then he said, “Terry always drives them to her parents’ house. It’s a 10-minute walk but she always takes the car. She won’t even let the girls bike over there.”

“Why not?”

“Traffic,” he said. We sat in the dark car by the side of an empty street. “She lives in a world of fear. I couldn’t take it anymore.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“The apartment isn’t really a place I want to be in the evening, if the girls aren’t there. So I drive around.”

“Listen,” I said. “I need to cut loose a little. Is there somewhere we can get a beer?”

So that’s what we did. He turned on the engine and we drove into Edgewater, his old neighborhood. Nothing seemed very far away in South Bend, it’s a shrinking city. We went to a place called Kelly’s, where it was easy to park. Just a small windowless building on the corner of a large lot. I said to Eric as we walked in, “Can you eat here?” and he said, “You can eat.” There was a pool table at the back, and a couple were playing pool. But other than that, it was fairly empty, it was Monday night. Just some people at the curved bar—guys in trucker hats and women in shorts.

“I come here because Terry never would,” Eric said. “They had a big shooting outside a few years ago.”

“Is this where you take all your dates?”

We sat down near the pool table; a waitress came over. I ordered a French-dip sandwich and an IPA with a stupid name. Eric went for the fish basket. We had a couple of pints before the food arrived. One of the things I forgot about my brother is that he giggles when he drinks, he gets happy pretty fast, until it turns into something else. We watched the people playing pool, the girl was better than the guy. He wore a Fincher Landscaping shirt, short-sleeved with a collar, and looked about 25. She was older, late 30s, early 40s, on the heavy side but well made-up, with straight dyed-black hair and bright-red lipstick. A little Goth-y, but, like, now she had a job.

Maybe they weren’t a couple, but he kept trying to flirt with her. He said, “Play me again. I gotcha this time, I’m just screwing around. Oh come on.” He kept putting quarters on the table.

“Terry says I have anger issues, but I think what I need to deal with is the stuff that makes me angry, that’s what I need to deal with.” Everything seemed funny to Eric. “I don’t know, I’m working on regulating my moods. Regulating my moods.” He repeated himself, too.

“Tell me about this job in Chicago.”

“The company I work for has headquarters in Evanston. It’s a step up the ladder, but it means not going into schools anymore. It’s a lot more money.”

“That’s great, that’s wonderful.”

“I don’t know. I need to do something different. But it’s not, like, back in college, I dreamed of working for an educational charity.” That made him laugh, too.

“Nobody ends up doing what they wanted to do.”

“Didn’t I sell you a house on Carroll Street?” It was the woman at the pool table; she was talking to me. “Come on, help me out here,” she said. Fincher Landscaping was looking over at us. He had soft brown hair like a loose shower cap, I don’t know why this image occurred to me. He was about 6 foot 4. “You had a little girl,” she went on. “I didn’t think the marriage would last.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“I’m just messing with you. How old is she now?” She rested her cue against the wall, which was covered in seven-inch singles around a framed Milwaukee Brewers Robin Yount jersey.

“Who?”

“Your daughter.”

“Eighteen. I just dropped her off at college.”

“Wow,” she said.

“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

“Help me out here,” she said again. “Want to shoot some pool?”

So the three of us ended up playing cutthroat. I mean, my brother and me and this woman, Sharon Donnegan—that’s how she introduced herself. She worked for Wayman Realtors. Fincher tried to argue with her but she said, “I’m sorry, I ran into some friends,” and eventually he went over to the bar and watched us from there.

Eric never had much hand-eye coordination, that was one area of childhood he left to me. Even as a teenager, when he got in shape, he was a get-in-shape kind of kid and not really into sports. Sharon and I were roughly on the same level, but she won the first two games, which gave Eric a lot of joy. He was drunk enough that he said things like, Look at you, getting beat by a girl, which he wouldn’t have said sober. But he also liked calling her a girl, I think he thought it sounded flattering or flirtatious. “Where’d you learn to play like that?” he said, and she said, “My dad was in the Air Force. Every base had a table.”

“How’d you end up here?”

“I guess I’m just lucky,” she said.

I felt bad for Eric, I didn’t think she was interested. When he missed a shot, he asked her what he was doing wrong. “Your back stroke is all over the place,” she said, and he said, “Show me.”

The waitress came and he ordered three more beers. I told him, somebody’s got to drive us home, I don’t mind drinking Coke. And Sharon wanted a hard seltzer.

“I’m sorry, I drink like a girl.”

In the end, she took over the order, because Eric was having trouble making himself understood. He wasn’t that drunk but he was trying to manage too many interactions at once. So he had another IPA, and I had a Coke, and she had a Vizzy. It was about 10 o’clock at night, I’d been in the car all day, I wanted to go home—or at least, to my kid brother’s rented apartment, where I could sleep in my niece’s bottom bunk. Eric said we need to play again, to maintain the honor of the Layward brothers.

“Are you guys brothers? You don’t look alike,” Sharon said.

“He’s a lot older than me, he let himself go.”

I think Sharon liked me; it’s awkward to write this, but she gave me that impression. And maybe that’s why, when Eric said, “Show me,” she finally said, “All right, line one up,” and stood behind him with her hips against his ass and her hand on his elbow and slowly guided his cue. While giving me a look, maybe she wanted to make me jealous, I don’t know. Stir up some kind of fraternal rivalry for her attentions. I couldn’t tell if Eric was having a good night, letting off steam, or just descending deeper into unhappiness. He kept wanting to use my phone.

“Where’s yours?”

“I don’t carry a phone,” he said.

“You don’t carry a phone? It’s not like a gun.”

But he borrowed mine and started taking pictures—mostly of Sharon, bending down over the table. I won the third game. “So what are you doing here?” she said, when Eric went to the bathroom.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. Seeing my brother.”

“And then what?”

“Tomorrow I’m driving to Denver.”

“What’s in Denver?”

“A guy I used to play basketball with.”

“Aren’t you an open book.”

He was in the bathroom a long time. “You want another drink, or you want to go somewhere else?” she said. For a second I wondered what it would be like. She had a pale face, which the lipstick made look even paler, and I could see, when I stood next to her, the soft white skin of her scalp between the grains of her hair. She was younger than Amy and obviously less attractive, but you got an energy from her, like she was still interested in what might happen next, which I didn’t get from Amy anymore.

“I think I should take my brother home.”

“You think?”

But that’s what I suggested, when he came out of the bathroom. He looked pretty pale himself, he didn’t look good. But he didn’t want to go home. He said, “We can’t abandon Sharon to the vicissitudes,” in one of his theatrical voices. I don’t know who he was channeling. Some English actor. “You’ve got a pretty good accent,” Sharon said. “My mother is actually Scottish, at least, that’s where she was born.”

He tried a Scottish accent, but it wasn’t really coming.

“Who is this guy?” Sharon said.

“He used to work in Hollywood.”

“No kidding.”

“Come on, Eric. Time to go home.”

“You go, I’ll stick around with … Sharon. We’re having a good time. Everybody knows how to have a good time except you.”

“I don’t think she wants you to stick around.”

“She can say what she wants,” Eric said.

She looked at him, she looked at me. It was a Monday night in Kelly’s Bar, she probably had work in the morning. I don’t know who goes out on Monday night, or why.

“I think I should probably head out, too,” she said. “I just need to use …” and she did a little curtsy, “… the ladies’ room.”

“Are you all right to drive?” I asked.

“I’m fine, I’m just around the corner.”

“We can wait for you,” Eric said.

“That’s all right. You boys run along.”

So we left.

In the parking lot, we had an argument about who should drive. I’d had two or three beers, Eric probably had a couple more. They affected him more than they affected me, he was a very skinny, very nervy person. Eventually Eric gave me the keys but he wanted to wait until Sharon came out, to make sure she was okay.

“Don’t you feel a little creepy,” I said, but we waited a minute and then drove home.

The drive was only five minutes, we probably should have walked. Maybe it would have sobered Eric up. As soon as we started, his mood fell off a cliff. He sat hugging himself against the seat belt and looking out the window. I didn’t actually know the way, I kept saying, you have to tell me where to go. We crossed over the river and I tried to follow it into town. He said, “You didn’t have to put her on the spot like that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Everybody was having a good time.”

“Eric, I don’t think she was into you.”

“So why’d she ask us to play?” After a minute he said, “You always think women are hitting on you.”

“Come on, Eric.”

“You were always like that, even when we were kids. You always thought, other people were embarrassed by us.”

By us I guess he meant him and Mom. “That’s not true at all.” But I don’t know, maybe it was. He was 12 years old when I left for college, I didn’t really know him as anything other than a fat little kid. He was always whining about something; I felt bad for him. He just wanted and wanted and didn’t get, until Mom gave in. Sometimes I tried to redirect the conversation from their constant interplay. I tried to get Mom to teach him self-restraint. But he didn’t change until I left.

All that was 35 years ago. At a certain point with these family dynamics, you’d think the statute of limitations would run out.

We parked in the underground garage, which had an elevator. It was almost midnight, we were almost talked out. Back in his apartment, he said, “Do you need me to change the sheets? They’re pretty clean. Anyway, you already slept in them.”

“No, that’s fine. Hey, it’s nice to see you.”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry if I got it wrong tonight. I’m getting a lot of things wrong right now.”

We were in the girls’ bedroom. He sat down on one of the small chairs.

“I don’t meet many women these days. I’m spending a lot of time in my own head.”

“What about this job in Chicago?”

“How can I leave the kids?”

“They’ll be all right. We were all right.”

“It was all right for you,” he said.

“You turned into a totally different person. You got your shit together. I can’t tell you … how impressed I was, every time I came home. I thought, If he can do that to himself, he can … he’ll be fine.”

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “I just miss having a woman in my life. I miss having somebody to be nice to.”

“You’ve got the girls.”

“That’s pretty much my only function right now.”

“No. No.”

But I didn’t know what else to say. He let me use the bathroom first, and then I lay in bed with the lights off and listened to him moving around. Eric warned me he wasn’t much of a sleeper, he watched a lot of TV.

Lying there, in the kids’ bed, with the top bunk crowding down on me, I remembered something my dad once did. When I was about 12 years old, he took me out to Cadwalader Park to have a sex talk. We had just moved to Trenton, I thought he wanted to show me the neighborhood. But he explained about wet dreams, we talked about masturbation. Everything you think or want turns out to be normal, don’t worry about that, he said. I was 12, none of these biological changes meant much to me. Look, this is just a stage you have to go through. I’m sorry about it but there’s nothing you can do. You just have to go through it. I tried to concentrate on my jump shot. If I missed, at least it gave me a minute to chase down the ball.

I’ll give you some free advice, which you’re not going to listen to, my dad said. But I listened. At some point you have to learn to control the sex urge, otherwise you let yourself get bossed around.

Who was he talking to? Me? Two years later, he ran off to California and started a second family with the woman from the L.A. office. Maybe he had already been having an affair.

He died in February 2020, just before everything shut down. Complications from diabetes; I don’t really know what he died from. He had a stroke, then he went to the hospital and never came out. I always thought he looked after himself pretty well, for a man of his generation; his wife was somebody you could trust to be on top of things, medically. Despite the way he left us, he was basically a conservative person, always trying to protect himself against things going wrong. Walking out on Mom was the one big romantic gesture of his life.

Eric and I shared a hotel room, none of our wives or kids came to the funeral. We stayed at the Ramada, just off Route 55 and about 10 blocks from the beach.

It was a very alienating experience. Everybody else at the funeral—he was cremated and half his ashes were scattered off a boat deck into the Pacific—belonged to his California life, his second life. (Later they erected a gravestone in Pacific View Memorial Park, where Kobe Bryant is also buried, but that was after we left.) We had two half sisters we barely knew, who were now 30-something women and much closer to Dad than we ever were. The younger one, Sammy, wore a Philadelphia Eagles hard hat to the ceremony, the kind where you can strap a couple cans of beer or soda to the ear holes and drink them through a crazy straw without moving your head. It seemed inappropriate to me, Eric was very upset. It turned out Sammy had given Dad the hat for his birthday; he still rooted for Philadelphia sports teams and used to wear it in front of the TV on Sunday afternoons.

“What’d he drink?” I asked her.

“He didn’t really fill it up, it was just for shits and giggles.”

“I didn’t even know he was a football fan.”

“Oh he loved the Eagles, he watched every game.”

She was the kind of person who is determined to have a good time at a funeral, because it’s supposed to be a celebration of a happy life. Even if I had no personal connection to her, I don’t think I would have liked her.

Because of jet lag, Eric and I woke up early after the funeral. Maybe we were both hungover. The heavy hotel curtains made it hard to tell the time of day. Eventually I got up (my bed was nearer the window) and pulled them back. So from about half past four we watched the California light slowly grade into morning. The traffic noise increased. We dozed a little, I looked at my phone. It was a long night. Eric said, “From their point of view, I don’t think we ever really existed.” And I told him, which I probably shouldn’t have, the story of those last few weeks before Dad walked out.

“He told me he was going,” I said. “He wanted to tell you, but you were too little, he thought you might tell Mom.”

“But he knew you wouldn’t.”

“I guess he knew I wouldn’t.”

“What did you say?”

“I don’t know, I don’t remember. But I’ll tell you a terrible thing, I felt excited for him. He was very excited, that’s why he told me. He couldn’t keep it a secret anymore, from all of us. He had to tell someone. Maybe I was just excited because it was me. I was 14 years old. It just seemed like … one of those glimpses of adult life, which at that age … I wanted to know what was really going on. That’s how it felt to me, but I also don’t think … I didn’t think he’d actually do it. When he left I was so ashamed, I couldn’t even look at Mom. She thought I was upset because of Dad but really I just felt guilty. Have I told you this before? I don’t think I’ve told anyone, except Jill.”

“No, you didn’t tell me. I’m sorry,” Eric said.

“Why are you sorry?”

“That you had to deal with all that, it wasn’t fair.”

It’s not what I expected him to say. I thought he’d be mad or jealous.

Later he said, “Why Jill?”

“I don’t know. It just seemed like one of those things you tell your college girlfriend.”

We had different flights out—I was going to JFK from LAX, he’d flown into John Wayne. They had direct flights to Chicago, where he’d left the car. After that it was just a two-hour drive to South Bend. We had breakfast together in the hotel restaurant, then got different cabs. That was the last time I’d seen him, before now.

In the morning, I could tell the atmosphere had shifted. Whatever window of communication had opened up between us had closed again. It was just another working day, he liked to leave the house by 8 o’clock. I was still in boxer shorts when I walked in.

“What happened to you?”

He was making coffee in the kitchenette. The toaster popped.

“I don’t know. It’s just something that started happening.”

I guessed he meant my face, which was swollen and leaking water through the eyes—I had to squeeze them just to see.

“Have you been to a doctor?”

“Of course I’ve been.”

“What’d he say?”

“He thought I might be middle-aged.”

“That was his diagnosis?”

“Eventually. They ran a lot of tests. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“You need to do something.” He felt happier, showing his concern.

“I know.”

I drank some of the coffee he’d made and put another waffle in the toaster. There were a couple of stools under the kitchen counter. If you sat with your back against it, you could see the river. Funny how the eye is drawn to water—it’s just a very flat part of the view. But the surface shifts a little, slowly. Eric had disappeared into the bathroom. When he came out again, he looked like one of those people you meet whose job is to be friendly and helpful. With his pale, almost clean-shaven head, and his Adam’s apple sticking out.

He stood in the living-room area, and I got up to hug him but stopped a little short—he carried a messenger bag across his chest.

“Just close the door behind you,” he said. “Are you coming back this way?”

“What do you mean?”

“After Denver … presumably you’ve got to get the car back to New York.”

“I haven’t really thought that far in advance.”

“Well, if you do, you know where I live.”

“It’s good to see you, Eric. I hate to … I don’t know, I hate all the distances.”

“Well, this is America.”

“Where should I put the presents for the girls?”

“Just leave them in their room. If it’s candy their mother won’t like it, but that’s her problem.”

I wanted to say something else but didn’t know what.

After he left, I loaded the breakfast things in the dishwasher and showered. There were rubber letters stuck to the side of the tub. Then I stripped the bed and packed my backpack and left.

Driving out, I followed my phone for a while, but then, outside Waterford, I stopped for gas and turned it off. The route was pretty much just a straight shot west. I was thinking about Eric but at some point realized that I was talking to Amy about him. The whole time I felt like I was in communication with her. She said, How’s your brother, and I said, Not great. We went out to some bar and he got drunk. There was a pool table and we started playing pool with some woman. Eric got a little … he was very attentive, which I don’t think was appreciated. I didn’t like seeing that.

It’s fine, right? He’s single … he’s allowed to try.

No, but it feeds into this whole dynamic we used to have, where I was …

What? What were you? Did she want you instead?

I don’t know and I don’t really care; she wasn’t important. I’m just worried about Eric.

You worry because it makes you feel better about yourself. You always have to be the responsible one.

That’s not fair, that’s not true. I mean … look at me now.

This article has been excerpted from Benjamin Markovits’s new book, The Rest of Our Lives.

The Rest of Our Lives: A Novel

By Benjamin Markovits

When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Protein Shortage Is Coming

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

In retrospect, maybe the protein Pop-Tarts were a bit much. Americans, broadly speaking, are in a state of protein mania. We are eating it at breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and just about anytime in between. We like it in chips, candy, soda, water. We like protein so much, in fact, that we’ve been eating it all up.

Whey-protein prices are surging, and a shortage may be imminent. “Demand is strengthening,” the USDA warned in a recent report, and “inventories remain tight.” Some manufacturers have already sold their supplies for the full year. Since January, wholesale prices for food-grade whey powder have risen by more than 50 percent, to the highest level on record, according to the commodity-pricing experts at DCA Market Intelligence.

Retail prices are going up, too: Six months ago, a two-pound jug of Optimum Nutrition’s “delicious strawberry”–flavored whey protein powder went for about $40 on Amazon; now it’s $54.03. “We’ve absolutely felt it,” Stephen Zieminski, the CEO of the supplement company Naked Nutrition, said of the shortage in an email to me (though he noted that his company had not raised prices). “Demand is up and supply is tighter than it has ever been.”

[Read: America has entered late-stage protein]

Historically and currently, much of the protein that has made its way into packaged foods and smoothies and those big tubs of protein powder comes from whey. Raw milk is treated with heat, acid, or enzymes to coagulate it into two distinct substances: curds, which become cheese, and whey, which was, at least until recently, the cheesemaking process’s unlovely by-product.

Almost as long as industrialized agriculture has existed, the problem with whey wasn’t scarcity at all, but the opposite. Farmers did anything they could do to get rid of it as cheaply as possible: fed it to livestock, sprayed it onto fields (“although the smell and salt often proved to be troublesome,” as one food scientist put it), dumped it into rivers and sewers. For much of our nation’s history, any fish unlucky enough to be born in Wisconsin or Vermont had a good chance of being murdered by whey.

Then environmental regulation limited whey dumping, and technological developments made processing whey into powder much easier. Starting in the 1980s, whey was the food industry’s go-to source of supplemental protein: cheap, vegetarian, efficient, and already right there in abundance. Supply and demand were more or less in alignment, for a while.

But then came protein fever. Influencers started bragging about how many grams they got in a day. The government flipped the food pyramid around, placing protein at the top. People from every walk of life latched onto protein as a sort of one-size-fits-all superingredient, supposedly capable of giving anyone the body they want, as long as they eat enough of it (even though the reality is, obviously, more complicated). And food manufacturers responded to this new demand enthusiastically, cramming in America’s new favorite macronutrient wherever they could, usually in the form of whey.

Now the infrastructure can’t keep up. The North American dairy industry has pumped about a decade of investment into whey processing over the past four or five years, the University of Wisconsin at Madison agricultural economist Leonard Polzin told me—but it’s still not enough. “Consumer demand and consumer preferences can change faster than processing capacity can,” he said. “We’re in that lag situation right now.”

[Read: The most miraculous—and overlooked—type of milk]

Turning fresh, raw cow’s milk into the shelf-stable, scoopable, tasty-enough protein powder people want is a massively complicated process, one that requires space and time and huge, expensive machines. At one point while Polzin and I were talking, I suggested that one of these machines might cost, say, $100,000. Wrong, Polzin told me—try millions. A full processing plant can cost up to $1 billion to build, he said. “Everything is just big numbers.” Even if you had, theoretically, started raising capital for a dairy-processing facility the day the word protein-maxxing first appeared on Reddit—three years ago—it would unlikely be up and running today.

The higher the protein content, the more complex (and expensive) the processing. Whey protein isolate—the proteiniest protein available, the kind that makes it possible to stuff half a chicken breast’s worth of fuel into a candy bar—is the most expensive and, until recently, was a very small part of the market. The dairy industry just isn’t set up for it. “The processor decisions are long-run decisions,” Polzin said. “It’s really hard to make capital investments at the drop of the hat, based on whatever new shiny consumer preference there is out there.”

Polzin grew up on a dairy farm. He remembers the cottage-cheese craze of the past, when a fitness-fixated country set its sights on a different milk-based superfood that was supposed to make you healthier and thinner and more powerful. Trends come and go, was his point. They move quickly. Our appetites change faster than the systems that satisfy them. North America is currently building out about $12 billion of dairy-processing capacity. Projections suggest that the current shortage will be short-lived and that the dairy industry will catch up with demand in the near future. I just wonder what consumers will be demanding then.

Stephen Miller’s New Recusals

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

When Paramount CEO David Ellison wanted to throw a Washington dinner party last month “honoring the Trump White House,” he got a helping hand from Katie Miller, the MAGA podcaster and onetime White House strategist. She sent follow-up invites to top Trump aides to encourage attendance for the “intimate gathering” at the U.S. Institute of Peace ahead of the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on April 25.

The party turned a traditional celebration of the CBS News White House team into a high-profile corporate flex. Ellison, who is seeking federal approval for his company’s takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, ended up sitting at the same table as President Trump and in the same room as Miller’s husband, the Trump adviser Stephen Miller, and other senior administration officials, including acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whose department is currently reviewing the deal.

Katie Miller’s involvement was not entirely unexpected. For months before, she had been talking informally with Paramount brass about selling her media property, The Katie Miller Podcast, to the news-media giant as it expands its offerings, according to two people familiar with the plans who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the nonpublic information. Those talks, which were first reported by Axios, have yet to result in a finalized sale, the people familiar with the matter said.

But the conversations were serious enough that months earlier, Stephen Miller—who has a near-boundless role overseeing policy as deputy chief of staff—told the White House that he would recuse himself from all issues around Paramount’s efforts to win control of Warner, which he had not previously worked on, the White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told us.

Stephen also recused himself last year from matters involving artificial intelligence because Katie, a longtime adviser to Elon Musk, had maintained a part-time consulting contract with xAI, the owner of the Grok chatbot and the social-media company X. When SpaceX purchased xAI in February, Miller also recused himself from space issues, Jackson added.

“Katie Miller is an accomplished professional in her own right with over a decade of senior government and media experience—Stephen is incredibly proud of what his wife has achieved through her own hard work,” Jackson told us in a statement. “He fully complies with all ethics recommendations and rules and regularly consults with White House ethics officials to address any potential conflicts of interest.”

Stephen Miller has not recused himself from matters related to sponsors of Katie’s podcast, however, because the White House counsel has concluded that sponsorships differ from consulting arrangements. A White House official told us, when we inquired about this, that Stephen nonetheless makes a point not to interact with the sponsors of his wife’s podcast, including companies and trade groups that have been actively seeking favor from Trump and his team.

[Read: Stephen Miller in retreat]

Several people familiar with the operation, who spoke with us on the condition of anonymity, criticized Katie Miller, saying that her pitch to guests—who have included Cabinet secretaries and corporate leaders with interests before the White House—is inextricably tied to her marriage to Stephen, one of Trump’s most senior advisers. Some also charged that advertisers are coming to the show for similar reasons. People familiar with her pitch told us they felt like Miller was explicitly selling access.

Allies of Katie Miller contest this characterization. No evidence has surfaced that either of the Millers has done anything to help a podcast sponsor outside of the show. Another person involved in some partnerships told us that the podcast sponsorships reflected standard industry practices and terms, and did not include any services out of the norm.

Katie Miller, who launched the lucrative podcast in August after leaving work at the White House, has built her audience around unusually intimate conversations with top Trump administrations officials and their spouses, whom she knows socially and professionally. The podcast sponsors include the Southern Company, a major utility; the American Beverage Association, which represents the makers of sugary soda; Polymarket, an online prediction market; and the Merchants Payments Coalition, a group pushing for legislation to reduce credit-card swipe fees.

A purchase by Paramount would be a major win for Miller. She has made no secret of her affection for the company or her dislike of one of its major rivals, Netflix. When Netflix appeared to have an upper hand in acquiring Warner this spring, Miller took to X to accuse the Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings of overseeing “the push of sexualized & trans content to minors” on the streaming service; she also attacked the Netflix board member Susan Rice, a former adviser to President Biden, charging that the left is “hellbent on destroying our country and corrupting our kids.” (Paramount’s corporate team did not pay or ask for her social-media posts, a company insider told us.)

An acquisition would also bring Paramount’s growing network of news properties even closer to the inner sanctum of the Trump administration. Last year, Ellison appointed new leadership at CBS News that has revamped programming in ways that some insiders view as more sympathetic to Trump and his movement. CBS employees told The New York Times in April that they were taken aback by the existence of the “intimate gathering” honoring the Trump administration, which used the CBS logo on its invitation.

Ellison has met repeatedly with Trump, as has his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who is a major Republican donor and a financial backer of the media company. In July, Paramount agreed to pay $16 million, largely to the president’s future library, to settle a civil lawsuit by Trump over a 2024 60 Minutes segment that had been edited in a way he believed to be unfair. The settlement was widely seen as an effort to secure approval from the Trump administration for Paramount’s 2025 merger with Ellison’s company, Skydance.

The Ellisons’ vision for media has become a shorthand for the kind of coverage that the people inside Trump’s inner circle believe they deserve—and some have voiced their support for Ellison directly controlling CNN if regulators approve the pending merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. “The sooner David Ellison takes over that network, the better,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said earlier this year at a Pentagon briefing in which he criticized CNN’s coverage.

[Listen: Rupert Murdoch gets his Succession finale ]

Katie Miller, a veteran of the first Trump administration who once worked for Vice President Pence, began working again for Trump after the 2024 election, when she helped sherpa Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. through the Senate confirmation process. In the first months of Trump’s second term, she worked as a special government employee, primarily as an adviser to Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. She stopped working for Musk full-time in August but maintained a part-time consulting relationship with his company.

Miller launched her podcast by nabbing an interview with Vice President Vance, then had extended conversations with then–Attorney General Pam Bondi, then–Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Kennedy. She has also persuaded leaders such as FBI Director Kash Patel, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and Hegseth to make appearances with their partners. New York Stock Exchange President Lynn Martin, UFC boss Dana White, the Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby have made appearances, as have celebrities such as the former NBA player Tristan Thompson and the actor Jenny McCarthy.

Trump’s Latest Gaffes Could Hurt the GOP

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump deserves plenty of criticism for his serial dishonesty, but on the rare occasions when he speaks frankly, that causes problems too.

This week, a reporter asked the president whether the deteriorating economic situation has created any urgency for him to reach a peace deal with Iran. “Not even a little bit,” he replied. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody.”

Who can doubt that he was being sincere? Trump has conducted the war as though he is both uninterested in and unaware of the economic effects that it is having. He has reportedly mused about simply withdrawing from the field of battle and leaving the Strait of Hormuz closed, despite the disruption that has caused for global trade. He’s previously called talk about affordability a “hoax.” And with his own bank accounts growing fatter through corruption, he doesn’t feel the pinch of inflation himself.

Trump, a billionaire who inherited a real-estate fortune, has always been a curious sort of populist. As I have written, he managed to convincingly campaign as one by flaunting his genuine scorn for cultural and intellectual elites. This served him well for many years, especially during the 2024 presidential election, when inflation was a major concern for many voters. Once in office, however, Trump didn’t actually have any ideas for combating rising prices. He’s hardly unusual in this—elected officials have few good tools for fighting inflation, though most of them at least act sympathetic. Joe Biden tried a different path, trying to convince voters that they weren’t really experiencing high costs. (It didn’t work out well for him.) Trump’s decision to tell voters that he just doesn’t care is a novel strategy, but not a very promising one.

The sentiment that Trump was (apparently) trying to convey might be defensible in some cases. When the nation is at war, a president must at times call on the people to make sacrifices in the name of the greater good. Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt all did this. The conservative commentator Marc Thiessen, using tortured logic, argues that “if we cannot accept a few months of higher inflation and a few months of higher gas prices in order to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, we’re not a superpower anymore.” The problem is that Trump hasn’t definitively stated that ending Iran’s nuclear program is the goal of the war, nor has he laid out any reasonable path to achieving it. As a result, the president is asking Americans to suffer for no clear reason, and he is also suggesting that he doesn’t care about their suffering.

This was only the worst in a string of notable gaffes from Trump over the past few days. Over the apparent objection of First Lady Melania Trump, he said that the White House was a “shit house” when he arrived. Trump used to be celebrated for the creativity of his insults, but this week he kept it simple, snapping at a reporter who asked him about the ballooning cost of his planned East Wing ballroom: “I doubled the size of it, you dumb person.” The president also can’t get his story straight on whether he selected or even knows the contractor adding a garish cerulean hue to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

When a reporter asked the president how he’d respond to Black voters worried that changes to congressional districts—changes spearheaded by his GOP allies and urged on by his Justice Department—would reduce Black representation, he replied, “I think it’s been a wonderful process.” This may have been another moment of imprudent honesty, but at least he’s answering his 2016 question to Black voters: “What the hell do you have to lose?”

Will these remarks hurt Trump? One plausible answer is that they won’t. He’s been making outrageous statements for years, and it hasn’t slowed down his political career. Another possibility is that they will but that it doesn’t matter to him. His approval rating continues to decline steadily. CNN’s Harry Enten noted with amazement this week that Trump owns the five worst polls on inflation of any U.S. president in history. But Trump, who won’t face voters again, seems less concerned with poor polling than he was in his first term.

The catch is that although Trump won’t face another election, many of his fellow Republicans will in less than six months. Republicans have been pleading with the White House to formulate and stick with a consistent message for the midterms. Instead, they’re getting a president who is either nodding off in public or dismissing the concerns of the public.

The media have puzzled over Trump’s fixation on footwear this spring. The president has commented on aides’ choice of dress shoes, and he presented a visibly ill-fitting pair to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. But perhaps Trump cares so much about feet and what goes on them because he knows that, sooner or later, he will place his own in his mouth.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping ended a high-stakes summit in Beijing today. Trump said that the two discussed “in great detail” a delayed U.S. weapons sale to Taiwan but did not talk about tariffs; he also said that the United States did not ask China “for any favors” in resolving tensions over the Strait of Hormuz.
Colorado Governor Jared Polis commuted the sentence of Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk and a prominent 2020-election denier who is serving a nine-year prison sentence for tampering with voting machines during the 2020 election.
A judge declared a mistrial in Harvey Weinstein’s latest New York sex-crimes case after jurors said that they were deadlocked on a rape charge involving the former actor Jessica Mann. The case is the third trial tied to Mann’s allegations against Weinstein, who is serving a 16-year prison sentence after being convicted of rape in California in 2022, and whose original 2020 conviction in New York was overturned in 2024. Prosecutors have not yet said whether they will seek another retrial.

Evening Read

President Trump's portrait on display at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery in January (Rod Lamkey Jr. / AP)

A Cautious New Approach to Trump’s Impeachments at the Smithsonian

By Kelsey Ables

For the past year, the Smithsonian Institution has found itself in the awkward position of telling the nation’s story while being supported in part by a government that wants to narrow how that story is told. In December, the White House threatened to revoke funding to the institution if it did not hand over a trove of wall texts and exhibit plans for a review. So when a permanent exhibition of presidential portraits closed for a refresh earlier this spring, whether some important but unsavory facts about the current president would be there when it reopened was unclear.
Now we know: The “America’s Presidents” galleries at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., are back, and President Trump’s two impeachments are technically there. But they are mentioned without context, in a way that underlines the Smithsonian’s touchy relationship with an administration that has not hesitated to strong-arm the institution.

Read the full article.

Are You Enjoying Your Girl Rights Yet?

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

Did you enjoy constantly checking the news this week to see whether you would suddenly lose access to mifepristone, despite decades of evidence showing it to be safe and effective? Do you just love America having a patchwork of confusing laws that vary from state to state and deny you what until 2022 was guaranteed bodily autonomy? Well, get used to it, ladies!

We saw how much you loved girl math and girl dinners, and we cooked up something extra special (the last time anybody but you will cook, because cooking is your job): girl rights! They’re like regular rights but skimpier.

Everyone knows what a pain it is to have too many rights. Tiny but somehow not-so-portable girl rights solve that problem.

With great power comes great responsibility, and great responsibility sounds exhausting! You might have to dress up as a spider in an unflattering spandex outfit and fight crime. Girl rights are designed just for you and your tiny, delicate hands. Picture the Constitution! Now imagine it’s pink! Also, the Fourteenth Amendment is missing. But more important, it’s pink!

Girl rights exist to solve the many problems that you didn’t realize you had, such as “too much bodily autonomy, ”the epidemic of “male loneliness” (this is your problem to solve, ladies!), and being “under-babied” (our cool, totally not creepy term for when you have fewer children than we want you to have!). To answer your questions: We want 2.1 babies for every fertile vessel, but currently we get only 1.5! No, immigration is not a clear, obvious solution to the demographic issues facing this country, and, yes, we were counting only white babies in those stats! Good catch! The point is: You have the girl right to fix those things.

Don’t you dare be fooled into thinking you’re a person. Real people don’t have to keep checking the news to see if their rights are getting taken away! See also: what the Supreme Court is doing to the Voting Rights Act. Girl rights are just one of many special new categories of cuter, smaller, more delicate rights that people can now enjoy.

Remember, it’s the Bill of Rights, not the Jill of Rights. Are you sure you need access to birth control? I just talked with someone who doesn’t understand science very well, and he said that birth control is getting into our water supply and is the reason his children don’t talk to him anymore. We’d better get to the bottom of this. Are you sure you need to vote? Maybe we should just vote as a household. Are you sure you need to serve in the military? How can you possibly hope to reach the high standard set by Pete Hegseth? (Remember, the most important part of war is pull-ups. This is why things in Iran are going so well.)

Boy rights sound hard. So much grueling voting (if you’re white) and executive power!

None of that stress for you. Just sit back, relax, and—smile, of course. Don’t forget to smile. You look much prettier when you do.

A Checkers Player Meets a Three-Dimensional-Chess Master

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

In the centuries when dynasties ruled China, kings and chieftains across Asia sent “tribute missions” to the imperial court to pay homage to the emperor in exchange for access to the empire’s riches and favors. Donald Trump’s trip to Beijing this week recalled those missions. The United States president arrived hat in hand, seeking money and promises from China’s latter-day emperor, Xi Jinping. The visit, meant to establish stability after a decade of trade wars and acrimonious one-upmanship, instead highlighted how the balance of power is tipping away from Washington. Despite America’s economic, military, and diplomatic heft, Trump’s missteps have put him and the country on the back foot in dealings with the far more disciplined Xi.

Trump opened the proceedings with his usual kowtowing. “You’re a great leader. I say it to everybody,” Trump told Xi at a welcoming ceremony yesterday at the Great Hall of the People. “Sometimes people don’t like me saying it. But I say it anyway because it’s true.” The fawning didn’t get him very far. In the meeting that followed, Xi promptly issued a stern warning about Taiwan, which Beijing claims as its own. Stressing that the “Taiwan question is the most important issue in China-U.S. relations,” Xi warned the U.S. to handle the matter with “extra caution,” according to a summary of his comments from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. If not, Xi said, “the two countries will have clashes and even conflicts.”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio later told NBC News that the administration’s policy on Taiwan has not changed, but Trump himself—who still needs to sign off on plans to sell $14 billion in weapons to Taiwan—seems less committed. Trump said today that when Xi asked him whether he would send troops to defend Taiwan, he did not offer an answer. Washington’s position on defending Taiwan has long been ambiguous, but Trump added to reporters that “The last thing we need right now is a war that's 9,500 miles away.”

Trump’s sycophancy didn’t change Xi’s mind on Iran either. Trump had delayed his trip to China by six weeks for fear that the Iran war would overshadow what he hoped would be a big diplomatic win. But the unresolved conflict still intruded on the dealmaking. The U.S. has been troubled by China’s support for Iran through supplies of weapon components and as the top buyer of the country’s oil. Shortly before the summit, Trump’s team turned up the pressure on Xi to curtail this aid by sanctioning refiners and companies in China and Hong Kong involved in these deals. Yet Xi ordered the refiners to ignore Trump’s edicts, uncowed by a president who often folds under pressure.

[Vivian Salama and Jonathan Lemire: The hippocratic summit]

In a Fox News interview yesterday, Trump crowed that Xi had promised not to arm Iran. But Trump had said in April that Xi had already assured him that Beijing wasn’t sending arms to Iran, yet the findings of U.S. intelligence officials suggest otherwise. Instead of pressing Xi on Beijing’s arms sales or oil purchases, Trump said that he was considering lifting sanctions on the Chinese oil companies in question. He even seemed to defend Xi’s position. “Look, he’s not coming in with guns. He’s not coming in with rifles. They are not coming in shooting,” Trump said. “He’s been very good.”

Perhaps Trump has merely recognized that expecting Xi to help solve his Middle East mess is a nonstarter. Tuvia Gering, a fellow at the Atlantic Council who tracks China in the Middle East from Jerusalem, told me that Xi’s geopolitical vision “imposes a definitive ceiling on China’s willingness to facilitate Trump’s objectives in Iran.” China’s goal seems to be to weaken U.S. power in the region, so helping “to secure a decisive U.S. victory would be strategically self-defeating.”

Trump made only slightly more progress on trade. He came to Beijing as a traveling salesman, hawking American products in pursuit of his long-running goal of closing the U.S. trade deficit with China. Though he didn’t get the firm purchase commitments he wanted, he did not leave empty-handed. Trump said that Xi pledged to purchase about 400 General Electric jet engines and 200 “big” Boeing airliners, though the details remain hazy and no formal agreement seems to have been set. This is far less than the deal for 500 737 Max jets that Trump had been touting, but if the orders do come through, they’d be Boeing’s first major order from China in about a decade.

These pledges have allowed Trump to spin this summit as a success, but Xi has an emperor’s appreciation of the role a few choice gifts can play in securing leverage over a foreign power. What Xi offers, he can threaten to take away. Xi has already exploited American dependence on Chinese rare earths and supply-chain components to keep Trump in line. Last year, he halted purchases of soybeans from American farmers, a key Trump voting bloc, to pressure the president to stand down from his trade war. Getting more American businesses and constituents hooked on Chinese cash promises to be yet another way to assert China’s power over the U.S.

These tough tactics seem to have taught Trump that China has become too powerful to push around. “The U.S. has realized that China has achieved mutually assured deterrence status,” Wang Huiyao, the president of the Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank, told me. He argues that this has brought about “a big paradigm shift” in Washington’s approach to China, and has curbed the hawkishness of Trump’s messaging. Wang suggests that a new pragmatism may now prevail between the U.S. and China, one in which U.S. leaders no longer try to get China to adopt Western values but “respect the differences and find a way to work together.”

Trump seems to have embraced this change of heart. “Having a good relationship is a good thing, not a bad thing,” Trump told Fox yesterday. “It’s great when you have good relationships with very powerful countries.”

The disputes over Taiwan, Iran, and trade suggest that a more stable U.S.-China relationship rests mainly on Trump’s reluctance to press Xi too hard. Trump has duly brushed aside a number of contentious issues that have soured relations, such as China’s continued support for Russia’s war in Ukraine and its export-heavy economic policies that threaten U.S. industry. This could prove politically risky. China hawks in Washington still advocate for a tougher line on Beijing to protect American interests, and the midterms could usher in a more hawkish Congress. But watching Trump swan around Beijing with an entourage of prominent American CEOs, including Elon Musk and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, left the impression that the American president sees China as a business opportunity rather than as a security threat.

Despite being at war with a China partner, Trump seems content to simply sell some Boeings and beans. The Trump administration doesn’t have “any great ambition for this relationship,” Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, told me. Trump has set his priorities to merely “keeping the relationship from going off the rails” and “ensuring that America’s needs are met,” at least when it comes to trade.

[Michael Schuman: Trump’s head-scratching turn toward China]

Xi, however, has great ambitions. Trump may now see China as a mutually beneficial economic partner, but Xi’s policies are designed to change the world order at America’s expense. Beijing is working to engineer China’s technological and industrial dominance, backing Russia in a destabilizing war in Europe, and generally setting the stage to achieve global supremacy when the United States flames out. Trump, with his disdain for global alliances and liberal values, doesn’t seem interested in contesting Xi on these fronts. “Xi Jinping has the long plan, about dominating the world and putting the United States in its right place,” Joerg Wuttke, a partner at the consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group, told me. “Donald Trump doesn’t look that far.”

A couple of trade deals have apparently made Trump happy enough to step aside and let Xi pursue his global agenda. Like the Chinese emperors of old, Xi has used the lure of Chinese wealth to reinforce China’s power. Beijing has sought to find “the minimum price point to keep Trump invested in the process,” Jonathan Czin, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me. This is how a U.S. president who has long insisted on American strength and a tough line on China consigns the country to a weaker future.

What’s the AI Endgame?

Fri, 15 May 2026 23:17:45 +0000

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube

How should you feel about the AI boom? In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel speaks with Chris Hayes about how to emotionally calibrate our response to this dizzying AI moment. Hayes describes why AI gives him “The Bad Feeling,” and how it led him to report on AI like an anthropologist would. The two discuss why AI is described as “the jagged frontier,” and they explore the distinction between using AI for creative thinking versus grunt work.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Chris Hayes: If you’re having it do your brainstorming, like, your brainstorming muscles are going to get weaker. And my livelihood, my career is coming up with stuff. I gotta keep that. I gotta keep that sharp. Now maybe in five years, they’ll just have an AI do my show. And the AI will generate all the takes, and the AI will talk, and I’ll be out of a job. Fine. But until that happens, I don’t want the AI doing that.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re going to calibrate our feelings about artificial intelligence.

There’s this phrase that’s coined by AI researchers that I can’t get out of my head these days: It’s called “the jagged frontier.”

The phrase is meant to describe how AI can be extremely and unexpectedly good at some human tasks and then also extremely and unexpectedly bad at others. Individually, this can mean that it’s useful or even transformative for some people, while others see it as unnecessary, or even more akin to snake oil. For example: Large language models and especially coding agents have transformed the job of many programmers, making them more productive. That’s not true of all industries though, especially creative ones, where there are moral or financial or creative reasons to object to its use.

“The jagged frontier” is meant to apply to use cases and industries. In some ways it’s an echo of the old cliché: “The future is here, but it’s not evenly distributed.”

But lately I’ve been thinking about the jagged frontier as it applies to the broader AI moment and the discourse. This moment that we are living in—the AI boom, the hype cycle, or revolution, you choose your own language—it’s a weird one. If you try to keep up with industry news, it’s easy to feel just instantly overwhelmed. There’s the obvious, existential stuff: Will AI replace all white-collar workers? Is AI making us dumber or lazier? There’s also a lot of what’s being described as “AI malaise.” It’s this ambient feeling that there’s too much happening, too fast, and without most people’s say.

On places like X, there’s all kinds of breathless chatter—about people setting up swarms of bots to run their computers and monitor their personal lives, or of people creating vibe-trading platforms that can make, and lose, money while they sleep. CEOs aren’t just talking about job loss—they’re writing 14,000-word essays about a future where “our current economic setup will no longer make sense.” Now, if you are a regular person—the type of person who is more worried about the price of gas right now—these conversations can sound like they’re coming from another planet. And they’re also making a lot of people ambiently anxious. If you’re at all skeptical of the AI industry and the men who lead it, then you’d be right to be concerned about the future that these companies are outlining.

So, how do we calibrate our anxiety and our expectations about AI in this moment? How is AI going to impact our politics in the coming years? Should you be scared? Excited? Angry? Sad? Some unholy mix of all of that?

Chris Hayes has been asking these kinds of questions for the last few months. Hayes is the host of All In on MS Now and the host of the podcast Why Is This Happening?; he’s also written a great book on the attention economy called The Siren’s Call. Chris has this new podcast series out about the AI endgame, and in it he does something that I think is crucial: He tries to make sense of this moment with an almost anthropological perspective. So many people in the AI discourse are just in so deep that it can be really, really hard to see the big picture. And so, I brought on Chris to do just that.

[Music]

Warzel: Chris, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Hayes: It’s great to be here, man. Thanks for having me.

Warzel: So you’ve described your feelings about AI in the first episode of this short-run podcast series that you’re doing about it. The whole generative-AI revolution, the discourse, the whole thing as having, I thought this was great, like a bodily, somatic effect on you.

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: So tell me about this feeling. I want you to describe it. What happens when you encounter the news or discourse about AI?

Hayes: There’s this feeling that I’ve come to describe or think of as The Bad Feeling, like capital T, capital B, capital F, which is just a feeling of kind of like anxiety, doom, shutdown that I get from a lot of things. Some certain political news will give me The Bad Feeling. And basically the AI discourse gives me The Bad Feeling, usually because it feels like the end of something. It feels like it’s going to destroy things I love, or maybe lead to the end of human civilization. Some high-tech version of nuclear winter that we can only sort of hardly imagine.

And I think because of that, it puts me in this kind of fetal position, defensive crouch. And I think also it’s the case, one of the goals here is … there’s a world of people who are very in the AI discourse. And that world is very fertile and intense, and it’s largely happening on X still. But it’s also like its own kind of bubble, you know?

Warzel: Totally.

Hayes: And I think people outside of it find it scary and alienating. And I think that’s actually like a huge amount of people. That’s most people, at this point.

Warzel: Yes.

Hayes: And so part of what I’m trying to do is penetrate that from the outside, because I had not really been in that discourse intensely. Try to penetrate it in a way that I can be a kind of guide for other people that are outside of it, if that makes sense.

Warzel: It does. I have this theory, essentially, that we all have AI psychosis, right? Like, we’ve been using that term to describe this problematic relationship that some people have with chatbots. It’s an informal, nonmedical term, but like broadly speaking: AI driving folks, you know, informally insane. It’s like your boss has AI psychosis, and they will only accept marketing summaries that go through Copilot, right? Like, programmers have it, because they’re getting this competency high of like 10X-ing their productivity. And I feel like you have these people on X who definitely are marinating in this like micro-discourse. That’s very similar to the way that, like, Twitter weirdened politics, right? And then the skeptics, I think, also have a version of it.

Hayes: Absolutely.

Warzel: Because you either have skeptics who are like, I’m putting my fingers in my ears, I’m waiting for this to pass—or you have people who are like, I believe that this is very dangerous. I’m curious: Why do you think we can’t have a regular conversation about AI?

Hayes: It’s a great question. I mean, I think probably all discourses around transformative technologies tend to be a little berserk, so I think that’s part of it. I think we have an attention economy that is particularly inclined toward psychosis, because the crazier things are, the more attentionally salient they are. The bolder the claims, the more attentionally salient.

Warzel: It also moves so fast, like the speed of it. Which I saw someone the other day saying like, “We don’t talk about Claude Code anymore, because we talk about Codex.” Like Claude Code was last week’s thing. It is no longer like relevant to this thing. And I’m like—if you are moving in the broad, everyone needs to be paying attention to our conversation. If you are moving at the speed of, “If you weren’t paying attention on a daily, weekly basis, you don’t belong in this conversation anymore,” it almost feels to me like it’s supposed to be a little bit exclusionary, in that way.

Hayes: And that’s fine too. I mean, specialist discourse is a thing that you find in all sorts of domains and realms. And, you know, I don’t even begrudge that. One of the things I’m trying to do is just open up to people that are inside the conversation. And not again, I’m trying to do it not in the hothouse. Like, very intentionally coming to it from the outside. Because I think it’s not like there’s a shortage of people who are making AI and doing AI, are all doing each other’s podcasts like constantly. It’s just this entire discursive engine that’s just churning out, you know, code and content and models.

I’m trying to find a way in as a kind of Virgil-figure guide for people that are outside of that. Because it is alienating. I got to say—you know, it really is. It has a very cultish, hothouse, you know, true-believer feel in there.

Warzel: And in the same way too, like I can see it radicalizing people. And again, that’s why I think the politics thing is so salient.

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: Okay, so I love this idea. You’re coming at it from the outside. And since you’ve been doing this, and you’ve had this experience, I would love if you could kind of give me the optimist take and the skeptic take as you see it.

Hayes: So one concept I’ve been playing with is: Let’s think about a normal distribution of outcomes. A probability curve, a bell curve. I think a lot of the discourse ends up focusing on like tail outcomes, as opposed to like the center of the bell curve.

And I think partly that’s because that center has moved so quickly that people are pulled towards the tails. And I think partly that’s because we’re inheritors of an entire mythic superstructure that, again, I think the AI people think is nonsense, liberal-arts-major craziness, but is clearly structuring the way everyone thinks about this. The myths of Gollum and Frankenstein are obviously massively influential in the narrative structure people are imposing on this.

Warzel: Yes, and the Terminator.

Hayes: Yes, and HAL. Everyone will—again, there’s a reason that our technology is ape science fiction, and it’s not because science fiction was so prescient. It’s because it’s literally the thing that was consumed by the folks that are making the technology. Like, that’s why it happens. It’s not like, Wow, how did they predict that?; it’s like, No, there was no future. We got those messages about what technology should look like. Everyone grew up with it, and then they made the thing, right? So I keep coming back to this idea of: Let’s think about it as a normal technology.

Warzel: Right.

Hayes: Like, what does it mean for it to be a normal technology? And what that means is like, okay: automobile, personal computer, the internet, cell phones, radio, television, the telegram, electrification. These are all normal technologies—massively revolutionary, enormous consequences. Like huge, huge costs and huge, huge benefits.

But fundamentally, human life went on. Like it wasn’t the end of us. And so I think that’s my way into it. And so in some ways I think that’s kind of the optimistic take, right? Is that it’s a normal technology, with dislocations, costs, and benefits that we can reason together around. And try to find ways to distribute the benefits broadly and mitigate the costs.

The pessimistic take I have is similar to the way that, say, industrialization functioned. Right? Which required a sort of creation of wage labor and a concentration of capital, and a kind of extractive relationship from the beginning. That there is an inherent sort of pro-capital bias to the technology, and that it basically becomes a tool for accelerating the concentration of wealth and power in smaller and smaller hands. And I think there’s a lot of reasons to think that’s the case, unfortunately.

Warzel: I love pairing the normal version of this also with it being almost, in some ways, less revolutionary, you know, than put forward. The thing that sticks in my head, as like the “keeps me up at night” part of this is not, you know, the paper-clip maximizer, “we’re all going to die” human-extinction theory. And it’s so much more like: Look at the money that is being invested into this thing. Sort of an unfathomable, unprecedentedly quick amount of spend into the infrastructure and backing of this technology. All those people expect a return on an investment at a level sort of never before seen. Which would then mean it works really well, which would then mean probably a lot of economic displacement. In a way that we have no way of dealing with in the short term. And it’s like: That’s the thing that scares me.

Hayes: There’s two options, right? I mean, a lot of people put it this way, so this is not a unique insight of mine at all. But like—there’s the success, which is all of that investment is rational and is producing a technology that is paying for itself with productivity gains. In which case, if that’s the case, it’s a dislocation unlike anything we’ve seen. Or, it’s irrational—and there’s an enormous bubble that goes bust. And that has enormous financial consequences that leak out into the real economy and end up hurting a lot of people who had nothing to do with AI. It’s probably one of the two.

And the railroad example. Everyone keeps coming back to it, but I do think it’s useful. I didn’t know this until I was going back in it—that the railroad was both transformative and also an insane gold rush of overinvestment and too much capital that ended up going bust multiple times in the last few decades of the 19th century. Producing some of the worst cataclysms—including a Great Depression in 1893—that the U.S. economy had ever gone through.

We didn’t have a central bank. Thank you, Andrew Jackson. There was no FDR figure. It was just like, whoopsies, now we’ve got a Great Depression, everyone’s out on the street, and your family might be starving because we devoted too much capital to the railroads.

Which, again, what I think is useful about that example is that doesn’t mean the railroad was bullshit. It turns out the railroad actually was a pretty transformative technology. It can be the case that a transformative technology is also the subject of an irrational bubble and overinvestment.

Warzel: I also think—to add another layer of confusion to all this—there is the fact that the markets are behaving so extremely irrationally right now. Narrative may be more important than actual reality.

Hayes: Yeah, and the other thing I would say about the way the markets are acting—there’s a lot to say about that. I think there’s really, really incredibly smart, sophisticated people who are making bets that are totally defensible bets, okay? But A, it’s been 18 years since people got wiped out. And there’s a whole group of people who are working in this world who never came into the office to watch everything go boom. And let me tell you, that changes people. Like, it just does.

Again, these are all human beings doing this. These are human beings, the subject of culture and group thinking. And I know this personally from people. Coming into work every day and watching your portfolio just absolutely get annihilated day after day while everyone’s getting annihilated is an experience that is a generational experience. That a lot of the people haven’t had in a long time.

Warzel: Yeah; we can’t keep anything in our heads for more than like four seconds.

Hayes: Exactly.

Warzel: Like, we’re not even talking about the assassination attempt on the president that happened like two weeks ago.

Hayes: Even when you just said that phrase, I was like, what? The what?

Warzel: Yeah, when did that happen, huh?

Hayes: So I think that’s part of it. But I also think the other thing I would say is there really is a lot of radical uncertainty, you know? So everyone’s kind of, you know, making these bets about a future that is really is quite unclear. Since we came out of the caves, people want to know the future. And you can’t know the future. That’s the fundamental human condition.

You can look at the—go down trails, you can consult the Oracle of Delphi, you could look at Polymarket and Kalshi, you can subscribe to Nate Silver’s Substack. None of it will get you the thing you want, which is knowing the future. And everyone is making bets on the future, but the future is unknown.

Warzel: So part of what I hear you grasping for in these pods—and part of what I think we’re all grasping for again—it’s not just the unknown part of the future, but it’s also trying to calibrate for how powerful is this technology, right? And you had an episode with Alison Gopnik, the cognitive psychologist, philosopher, that I thought is really illuminating because it’s exploring human intelligence and the ways that large language models are really working very differently than say, you know, humans’ minds.

You’re hanging out with someone at a bar; they’re asking you, like, “Are these models, you know, alive? Are they reasoning or whatever?” How do you think about human intelligence versus what’s being marketed as artificial intelligence? And how are you talking to people about that?

Hayes: That’s a great question. I guess my feeling about it is: It’s built extremely differently than human intelligence. Largely because of the sort of experiential stuff that Alison talks about, the way a child learns. But it may turn out that it is at a sufficient level of computation and sophistication; like enough power and enough weights and enough complexity. Things converge on each other is kind of the way I think about it. And one of the things I’ve found useful is—we just do a lot of patterned behavior ourselves. And I think if you take a step back to think about that, it’s actually really illuminating that a big part of what we’re doing is stimulus response off of pattern triggers.

And that doesn’t mean we’re not conscious, and it doesn’t mean that we own our free will. And there’s a bunch of interesting philosophical questions. But I always start with people when literally they’re like, What is this thing? I’m like, you know how you write. Someone invites you to a party, and you say, “I’d love to, but I can’t ...” And the last two words are “make it.” Like, we all know that. Why do we all know that? Well, that’s just a pattern response. It’s like, well, you can train a computer to figure that pattern out using a bunch of weights of words. And then you start building out from there. There’s a fair amount of human behavior, right? That’s working off of that kind of computation.

Warzel: Totally. People are always trying to, if not actually impress … it’s trying to relate to somebody in a way that makes sense, right? Which is taking all the cues, all the things you’ve known. Trying to make yourself intelligible to another person is, in some ways, your brain saying, “What comes next?”

Hayes: Yes; what comes next?

Warzel: What is the most normal, rational, smart, funny, provocative, next phrase? Right? Based off of everything that I know. And so, I do like that a lot. What I found comforting is this idea that: Yes, we can throw as much compute, and as many weights, and as much pretrained data. And it gets a little bit better or maybe a lot better, right? It starts to do something emergent that feels powerful. And yet, at the same time, the fundamental human thing is, like, being a sack of meat walking through the world, getting sunburned…

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: You know, seeing a baby cry. Doing whatever, right? And that feeling. Like, there’s nothing in the pretraining or the training or the whatever that can actually get to the physical, “you have senses” feeling that impacts reasoning—more than I think a lot of people are talking about or thinking about.

Hayes: Totally, yes. I think Yann LeCun has this big point about this, right. Like: Unless it’s got human vision and human touch and human smell, just even at a kind of empirical level, the amount of data you’re giving it is nothing compared to the amount of data that a human gets through their senses, right? You could read the whole internet. It doesn’t touch like a year in the life of a two-year-old, right?

Warzel: Right.

Hayes: But what I think is interesting about that, to me that’s interestingly a double-edged sword. And this comes out in the conversations I have with Michael Pollan and David Chalmers about consciousness. Which is like—this has made me more humanist in some ways. This whole moment. But it’s also like, if we keep pushing on that, right? If the big difference is that it’s not the embodied meat sack that we are, and it doesn’t have the senses—it’s also not clear to me that’s a theoretical limit, as opposed to just a limit right now.

Warzel: Say more about that; sorry.

Hayes: Well, I don’t know. If you build the robot that’s got vision and some version of hearing, and it’s got some sort of olfactory sense, and you build sensors, and you give it a model, five years from now. And unleashed on the world? Like, things that I thought would only be “us” have fallen in very quick order—which is both scary but also, I think, creates a little humility about what is that thing, you know.

I mean, you already see it in the way people move the goalposts on AI, particularly when they’re skeptical of it. Like, Well, it can’t do this—and then it does it. Well, can’t do this. It’s like, Well, it can’t love. It’s like, Okay, well, it can’t love. But it just went through my entire inbox and told me I should respond to these three emails. And it was right about that.

And six months ago, it couldn’t have done that. So like … I don’t know if it’s gonna be a little love in six months.

Warzel: Well, one thing that I think about with this, as a positive offshoot that sort of bridges the two gaps, in that is what I love about the consciousness research and the research of all that, is not like, “Is the AI conscious? Let’s prove it. Let’s give Anthropic another thing to stand on.” Or something. I don’t really care about its corporate utility. What is awesome to me is when scientists are like, “We’re starting to ask different questions than we wanted to ask in 2019, because of the way that we don’t understand how these things are doing this. We also don’t know how this thing is doing it. So now we get to do a different course of study.”

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: And I think to the extent that this revolution could impact other areas. Of like, Let’s figure out how this stuff works. We actually know nothing about consciousness. You know, that to me is like really inspiring and interesting and cool.

Hayes: And I agree. And I think actually the place that this is, that’s at the expert level. But to me at the folk level, at the level of just ordinary people, it’s like … one of the reasons I did the podcast is my background as an undergraduate in philosophy. I’ve always loved philosophy. It prompts a question of like: What makes us human? What is special about us? What is distinct about being human? Why is that important?

And I actually think we’re in a moment in our politics where, you know, it is so much trench warfare. And it is such an intense national emergency, and an emergency I feel very deeply, obviously, and spend most of my waking moments devoted to trying to figure out these sort of grounding, foundational values. Like, it’s scary to think about a challenge from machines to my own personhood.

But it also is doing something useful and important, which is for all of us to think about: What do we have in common? What does make us human? What do we care about? Where do our values come from? And why should you treat people with kindness? Again, the glory and the difficulty of philosophy is: Ask very, very basic and simple questions that have incredibly elusive and difficult answers. And we don’t have a lot of opportunity in our normal navigation of the world and the news cycle to have those. But if anything prompts it, it’s this.

Warzel: Yeah; I feel that so much. And I also feel the opposite part of that, which is like: I don’t really want like Elon Musk and Sam Altman being the people who are forcing me to answer these questions. Or like Mark Zuckerberg. What I’m still grappling with in my day job—and I think we’re all societally grappling with—is all of the stuff that they built and the mess that has been left in the wake. And it’s like, Okay, no, we’re going to … it’s almost, there’s a toddler element to it. Where it’s just like, “We’re moving to the other room. We’re gonna make more Legos, and it’s gonna be another mess.” You’re like, “But you gotta put away the mess. Aw.”

Hayes: The Tom and Daisy line from The Great Gatsby, which is now one of those kind of clichés, you know, like the party told you to disbelieve the evidence your eyes. That’s just everywhere on the internet. But, you know: “They were careless people.” And they broke things and left other people to clean up the mess. I mean, it’s just so true. I saw, you know, I saw a clip of the all-in dudes who are, you know, they’re talking about, you know, R-word maxxxing very like, self-satisfied with their like, transgressiveness. And like, just do stuff, and try. It’s like—yeah, well, you know, things have worked out for you. But the person that used to handle baggage for Spirit Airlines. Like, the “just do stuff, like, let’s start a war with Iran” didn’t work out for that person.

Warzel: Right.

Hayes: Nor did it work out for the families of the children that were killed on the first day. So certain people in certain positions can just try stuff and have a boundless risk appetite and never experience the downsides.

And what happens is other people experience the downsides. And this has been true forever. If you read the history of the wars of Europe—of who’s starting the wars and who’s dying in the wars, you know—that’s that sort of “ever has it been thus.” But it really feels that way right now in a way that I find kind of intolerable, actually. And pretty, pretty radicalizing.

Warzel: I want to talk about the actual what it’s doing to us right now. Also in relation to—you wrote this wonderful book on attention and the attention economy. One of the salient parts in it is, even just talking about our own capacity for boredom, the ways that, you know, all of the internet, all these tools are playing with our mind, how that’s that idea of boredom, that sitting with your thoughts has been eradicated from most kids. Most adults even.

And as I was thinking about this, and how to frame it to you, I came across a Wired piece that came out about this survey from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Oxford, UCLA. Top-line takeaway—it’s really good for a headline—is using AI chatbots for even just 10 minutes may have a shockingly negative impact on your ability to think and problem solve.

Hayes: I saw this.

Warzel: I’m wondering how you are thinking about this, also coming off of the social media. You know, the deepening and fracturing of our attention. Our ability to attend to other things and ourselves. And then it being turbocharged by AI on this scale in ways that we can’t even grasp. What’s the sirens’-call analysis of this, of just like AI use right now?

Hayes: My first cut at the answer is that it’s obviously going to make people dumber. I mean, I just think it’s clearly, and here’s a distinction that I have made in my own AI usage. And I think it’s an analog to a distinction I talk about in Sirens’ Call about how people use technology. I put texting with your friends in a totally different category than scrolling vertical video. Texting with your friends is a thing that you’re using the medium to do something that’s like a human thing. I used to talk to my friends on the phone every night. Vertical video is doing some other thing algorithmically to your attention sensors. And yes, it’s both the screen—but to me, they’re actually quite distinct. And I feel this way strongly about AI in this respect.

People do really like the idea of AI doing the thinking. Brainstorm ideas, generate. I never use it for that. I don’t want it doing that. I use it a lot to be like, Can you help me find this stuff? Can you go through my emails? Like this distinction to me between like generative and creative thinking, and like basically what I would call grunt work. I really think there’s a distinction between that.

And I think one of the weird things also about the way AI got marketed from the beginning was like: We’re going to do all the thinking now. We’re going to do all the generation. We’re going to make the paintings. And then it’s like, well, what am I going to do? I want to do that stuff. I want to come up with the title for my show. I don’t want AI to come; I want to do that. I do want AI to, like, tell me which emails I missed that I need to reply to.

One of the things they talk about in that paper, which I was reading earlier today, is like brainstorming. You know, I just think, man—that is a dangerous, dangerous road to go down. Because if you’re having it do your brainstorming, your brainstorming muscles are going to get weaker. And my livelihood, my career is coming up with stuff. I gotta keep that. I gotta keep that sharp. Now, maybe in five years, they’ll just have an AI do my show. And the AI will generate all the takes, and the AI will talk, and I’ll be out of a job. Fine. But until that happens, I don’t want the AI doing that.

Warzel: What’s so frustrating is there’s always this … first you have the reality that the new thing that’s supposed to make you more productive is just going to free up time for more work, right? Like, “email kills the memo”; no it doesn’t. “Slack kills emails”; no it doesn’t. Whatever. Like, all these work-productivity tools. They just—I think it’s called Parkinson’s law —just fill the time.

Anyway, you had this conversation in the first episode of the podcast where you’re talking about writing. And you posit, like, maybe writing is similar to being handy, right? When everything was analog, and you had to know how to fix your sink, your lawnmower, your car, whatever. A lot of people had those skills. Things became less analog, harder to fix. It was easier to get things fixed; fewer people are handy in that way that my grandfather was handy. Maybe that’s like writing, and that technology. And it’s absolutely terrifying, because writing—it’s not just a skill. And I don’t say this just because I’m a writer. It’s the same as brainstorming.

Hayes: Yes.

Warzel: The creative act, whatever it is, those constraints of the mind and thinking and creativity are just how you do everything else. Like, it’s the building block for whatever. It doesn’t have to be writing. And I just think, if you get rid of that, like that’s the paper-clip maximizer to me. That’s the society. That’s like, Okay, we don’t have anything to do here anymore. Like we’re doing WALL-E now, you know?

Hayes: Yes. I mean, I feel the same way. And I think this sort of question—of like, “Are humans even necessary?”—at a certain point is the question you end up sort of barreling toward, in a world of AI-increased automation and declining birth rates. It’s like, what do you need us around for anymore?

The handy analog, I got a lot of feedback to that. Because I think it’s sort of a useful one. The reason that I said it to myself was you know—the context, in that conversation Derek is like, “I’m a writer.” Like, I have encountered handy people in my life who have remarked, as I mentioned something that I’d hired someone to do, a little like, “Why do that? You can do that. You can figure that out.” And it’s like, “Yeah, I probably could. But you know, life’s short. And I’ve devoted myself to a bunch of other skills.”

And maybe I’m just precious about writing, because that’s what I do. But I totally agree that it’s in “writing is thinking; brainstorming is thinking.” And I think, you know, it’s interesting to come back. You’re talking about programmers; Anil Dash made this point that I thought was really useful. It’s actually surfaced in conversations I’ve had with my my good friends who are software engineers. You know, we all have in our jobs the stuff that’s like the fun stuff and the drudgery. All of us have some version of that, right? And the the reason programmers are so insane about Claude Code is because it’s doing the drudgery, and they’re doing the fun stuff.

Like in the world of programming, it perfectly does—partly, I think, because the models are built by coders. Again, to come back to the embodied sociological reality of this technology, which was not just like handed down from heaven.

Warzel: Right.

Hayes: You know, my friend even said this to me. He said, “A session of work used to be like, fun stuff, drudgery, fun stuff, drudgery, fun stuff, drudgery. You’d sort of be toggling back and forth. It’s like for you and me, it’s like if you’re doing footnotes. It’s now just like: fun stuff, fun stuff, fun stuff, fun stuff, fun stuff. And then in parallel sequences, someone’s just doing the drudgery. And it’s awesome. I’m more productive. It’s better.”

And it’s like, when you describe it to me that way, that does sound awesome. But again, the question is how it’s gonna be deployed. Is how people adopt it. When we talk about fun stuff—we have fun jobs, we won the lottery doing intellectually stimulating work. A lot of people don’t, and a lot of people also aren’t lucky enough to have been introduced to thinking or writing in these endeavors in a way that is fun and is creative or does make them feel good about themselves. It is drudgery to them. And so you do really worry about this kind of mass automation, and then this just mass atrophying of people’s brains. Similar to what we saw happen to people’s health and fitness in the dawn of like modern “supersize-me” capitalism.

Warzel: Yeah. Well, and also like Ethan Mollick, I think, has the phrase “the jagged frontier” of AI, right? That this is like what you’re saying with coders—like seeing this unbelievable, How could you not; how could this tool not be handed down from heaven, because of look what it does for me? Right? And llook how transformative it is. Versus somebody who paints all day and is like, What are we doing? This is just stealing my paintings, and letting people make paintings and not pay me for the paintings. Like, what have we done?

Hayes: Yeah, exactly right.

Warzel: And there’s part of that. But I do think in that sense, if the people on the frontier part of it, that have achieved that start making the decisions. And this is why the discourse on X and these types of things freak me out sometimes. It’s like: You get to make the decisions about how the rest of the people, whose lives and careers and jobs haven’t caught up, they get to make those decisions. And then, before you know it, the people who really can’t need to object. Who are like, “No, no, no, no; this is actually the foundation of creativity. We need to maintain this.” It’s like, “No, it’s just not economically viable anymore.” Or “No, you can’t have a job that way.” And that to me is a scary proposition.

Hayes: Yeah. And when I think about the sort of backlash to it, and I think about the resistance to it, like—I don’t want the backlash and the resistance to go away. Even though it’s interesting. Because at one level, I want to sort of say to people that are on the political left, or sort of share my values, like, “This actually is an incredibly meaningful and transformational technology. It actually does have really clear use cases”.

There are ways in which it might make the world better, like 100 percent. Also, you don’t have to use it, and you don’t have to swallow the Kool-Aid. If you want to go to protest the local data center, good on you. I sort of feel both those things.

But once I think people grapple with the reality of it, I think there has to be a kind of productive synthesis between how different people are encountering exactly that jagged frontier. Like, why should a painter be psyched about this?

Warzel: This is a great way to segue into the politics of this. Because, as you said, and as I believe, AI is on a collision course with electoral politics that I think is going to be very meaningful. NBC News did this survey that’s so staggering, I thought: 26 percent of voters say they view AI positively, 46 percent negatively. AI ranks less favorably than U.S. immigration, customs enforcement, Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, the Republican Party. It feels pretty notable to me that it’s just incredibly unpopular, or people have these strong skeptical feelings. That grassroots opposition to data centers is really kicking up, and it feels like it’s gonna be a thing.

Tell me how you see the battle lines that are being drawn here. You know, as we approach the midterms, but also as we approach ’28.

Hayes: Yeah, again—I don’t have anything more prophetic than the observations that we’re all dealing with. I mean, obviously there’s a growing backlash. I think it’s a rational assumption on the part of most people that a thing being built by billionaires who say, every time they’re in front of a microphone, “It’s going to put millions of people out of work” is not going to be great for most people. Which is not to say, like, sometimes masses of people are wrong. Sometimes the majority is wrong about stuff. And sometimes backlashes are built out of nothing. I’ve seen it happen. But this, to me, I think people have good reason to be fearful and to be skeptical and wary.

One of the things that I think is inescapable about the technology is how concentrated it is. Right. So think about; take a step back for a second. It requires enormous, nearly unprecedented amounts of capital to be invested to deploy nearly unlimited amounts of compute. Now compare that to the structural nature of the internet, which was created in a noncommercial environment in which there was zero profit motive. In which it was created purely for continuity of government purposes, at first, and then communication between research agencies and whose entire guiding, structural-engineering philosophy was distribution and nonconcentration.

And now compare that to a technology whose entire inherent philosophy engineering is “as much power in as concentrated hands as possible.” That’s a challenge, man.

Dario [Amodei] says this the other day in a podcast, about thinking about it the way cloud computers are. This is naturally a concentrated industry. And it’s naturally concentrated in people that are going to be the companies, that are going to be some of the most powerful that exist.

What will be the levers under those conditions that produce benefits for ordinary people? And people don’t get steamrolled. So I think that’s the way I think about it in terms of political economy. Now, the question is: Well, how do you operationalize that? It’s really complex. And I’m going to just admit that I don’t know. I don’t know the right answer. What’s the right regulatory framework? The two examples I keep thinking of are the Fed and the FDA, right? Which is like—

Warzel: Oh, interesting.

Hayes: We don’t want Congress voting on every drug to come to market, and we don’t want Congress and the president deciding interest rates. It’s just the way that I don’t think we should be—“the president gets to decide what models get released,” right?

There are areas that we’ve had to build institutions in the modern regulatory state to deal with a very technically complex area that we still want democratic control, in which we create mediating institutions. Which, by the way, are under attack from both this conservative Supreme Court and the Trump administration.

Like precisely this kind of institution: the FTC, the FCC, the CFTC, the SEC, the Fed, the FDA, right? All of these are created for the same purpose. There’s some really important technical, powerful, high-risk, high possible cost, high-reward area of activity the modern state needs democratic control and accountability of. But you do not want to just have, like, plebiscites on or Congress voting on. You got to create this kind of mediated-technique, technocratic space that’s sort of halfway in between.

Warzel: It seems like the opposition to this is relatively bipartisan in an interesting way, with different quirks and whatevers. I’m just curious, like, do you see anyone, party wise, in a better position here? Does anyone seem poised to deal with this in a way that’s going to be fascinating, or is it a jump ball?

Hayes: You know, right now it’s jump ball. This is the word, you know. Ben Collins—The Onion, my former colleague—was talking about a jump ball the other day. And, you know, [Ron] DeSantis had some populist rhetoric about it the other day. Bernie Sanders has been doing some interesting stuff. One of the things he’s calling for is national data-center moratorium. I’m not personally sure if that’s the right policy. But it’s like, at this point, people are trying stuff.

Warzel: Somebody doing something; yeah.

Hayes: Yeah. I think it’s totally a jump ball. And I also think it’s one of those places where the distance between the power elite—the richest people in the world, the most powerful people in the world—and the rank and file is so enormous. And you’re going to see this crazy cross pressure, because these politicians are in rooms with their donors and at fancy conferences with all the people making the models, all the stuff, or telling them all this stuff about it.

And then they’re going to go back home and get yelled at about electricity prices and data centers. And they’re going to be totally pulled in two different directions. So the political economy of this is really, really interesting. And I think it’s going to be very interesting to see who navigates that, and how and which parts of those win out

Warzel: I think Silicon Valley is in for like a really interesting reckoning with this, in the sense too. That like the people who are really into this technology are also a lot of the people who were like, Get your hands off my social-media moderation. Like, “I don’t like the free speech, whatever” thing. And yet what they’re doing is building like three companies that have taken all of the world’s information and just consolidated it, and put a bunch of opaque, unknown weights and references. To then spit out convincing, canonical answers about every fact ever. And it’s like dude, it’s coming for you.

Hayes: Here’s the frontier, man. Here’s the frontier. How are people going to go find out about politics and the candidates? And what answer is that model going to spit out? And who is going to be in the wiring of that model? À la, Elon Musk and the weird thing that he did to the model around white South Africans that made Grok talk about the Boer War.

Warzel: I mean, you know, it’s real cynical of you, Chris, to go after the guy who is responsible for the Mecha Hitler stuff. To suggest that there would be any weird nefarious meddling here, okay? I think that’s real disingenuous of you.

Hayes: I mean, I should say, for the purposes of journalistic rigor, I can’t prove that he did that. Something weird happened to the Grok model. He owns a company whose model started spitting out, reliably, answers that aligned with his politics. But the reason I say this is: This is replacing what for you and me was Google, right? And it’s going to be the portal for information.

Warzel: It’s true. He just owns the company. That’s all. He owns the company. That’s it.

Hayes: And imagine the power of being able to control what that information was. About who’s running for office, and what they stand for, and who you should vote for. That to me is a frontier that we haven’t breached yet. And again, I think the models are so emergent at this point that I don’t think anyone’s doing anything along those lines, like in the wiring of the models. But that’s a real possibility.

Warzel: And it’s also the kind of ominous note that we like to end Galaxy Brain on, so that people can go and shift from whatever they’re watching or listening to this. To just staring into the middle distance.

Hayes: Yeah, to give you The Bad Feeling, exactly.

Warzel: Yeah, we’re back at The Bad Feeling.

Hayes: Yeah. The somatic response.

Warzel: Amazing. Chris, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain. I appreciate it so much.

Hayes: I really, really enjoyed it.

[Music]

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you again to my guest, Chris Hayes. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, or on Apple or Spotify or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

America Is the Land of Opportunity—For White South Africans - The Atlantic

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:13:52 +0000

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Updated at 6:35 p.m. ET on May 13, 2025.

When the welcome ceremony was over, and the Trump officials drove off in their black SUVs, a dozen or so newly arrived South African refugees stepped out into the parking lot of a private terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport yesterday afternoon, still carrying little paper flags they’d been handed. Now it was time for a smoke.

Will Hartzenberg, a tall, sunworn 44-year-old farmer from the Limpopo region in the country’s north, was on his way to Idaho with his family to start a new life. “Relief,” he told me, when asked what he felt. “We are really relieved.”

Hartzenberg said his wife, Carmen, had teased him for worrying whether it was safe to leave their young children inside the building while they stepped out for a cigarette. He needed to learn to let down his guard, he figured. “This is not South Africa, where you have to take your children with you wherever you go,” he said.

A U.S. official came over to hurry the group back into the terminal. They smoked faster. Hartzenberg’s parents and sister had been shot during an attack on the family farm in 1993, he told me as he walked. They survived, but he said he didn’t see a future for his children in South Africa, or at least not a prosperous one.

Adam Serwer: Afrikaner ‘refugees’ only

The country’s white minority—descendants of British colonists, and Afrikaners from the Netherlands and other European countries—once dominated South Africa through the apartheid system of legalized discrimination, confining the country’s majority-Black population in slums. Three decades after that system’s defeat, the plight of white South Africans has become a cause célèbre among white-nationalist groups. American President Donald Trump says they are victims of racial discrimination and genocide—claims that South Africa’s government calls “completely false.”

Hartzenberg and his family will be resettled in a state that is 92.5 percent white. When he researched Idaho’s landscapes online, he liked what he saw: “We come from a farm that is surrounded by mountains. So I was quite excited when I Googled to see where we are going.”

Will Hartzenberg at Dulles International Airport (Julia Demaree Nikhinson / AP)

Hartzenberg’s mix of bewilderment, relief, and optimism has been shared by generations of refugees as they set foot in the United States for the first time. Few have enjoyed the kind of support the South Africans are receiving from the Trump administration, which has all but frozen refugee admissions from other nations and cut off resettlement funding. That has stranded at least 12,000 refugees, many from conflict zones, who had flights to the United States booked after they were extensively vetted and approved for resettlement—only to learn that they were no longer welcome in the United States, according to aid groups suing the Trump administration.

One resettlement agency affiliated with the Episcopal Church said yesterday that it will not help resettle the Afrikaners as required under its federal grant. The church’s presiding bishop, Sean W. Rowe, sent a letter to members of the Church saying it was terminating its four-decade-old partnership with the government. The bishop said Trump’s resettlement plan crossed a moral line for the Church, which is part of the global Anglican Communion and whose leaders have included the late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

“It has been painful to watch one group of refugees, selected in a highly unusual manner, receive preferential treatment over many others who have been waiting in refugee camps or dangerous conditions for years,” Rowe wrote. They include “brave people who worked alongside our military in Iraq and Afghanistan and now face danger at home because of their service to our country,” he added.

The Trump administration said yesterday that it will end temporary immigration protections for some Afghans who are already in the United States on July 12, leaving about 9,000 immigrants at risk of being deported back to the Taliban-controlled nation.

The White House’s grand welcome for the white refugees came as the Trump administration is waging a deportation campaign, aimed at removing millions of immigrants from the United States. Trump has depicted recent waves of immigrants, particularly from Latin America, as an existential threat to the United States that is “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Hartzenberg and his family and the other refugees were warmly welcomed after their chartered flight landed in Northern Virginia around midday. They were greeted by Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Troy Edgar and Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, who connected their own lives to those of the new arrivals. Landau said his father fled the Nazi takeover in Europe and found safety and freedom in the United States. Edgar told the group his wife is an Iranian Christian who fled persecution in her homeland.

“A lot of you, I think, are farmers, right?” Landau said. “When you have quality seeds, you can put them in foreign soil and they will blossom. They will bloom. We are excited to welcome you here to our country, where we think you will bloom.”

Edgar told the South Africans they would receive the officials’ personal contact info—a gesture that seemed to underscore the newcomers’ special status.

Refugees are in a distinct category among U.S. immigrant groups and are selected because they face persecution or harm in their home countries resulting from their race, religion, nationality, political views, or membership in a particular social group. In years past, the United States has welcomed Vietnamese fleeing a Communist takeover, Soviet émigrés, and Christians from across Africa and the Middle East. Refugees submit to a U.S. vetting and screening process, then endure waits that may stretch for years. They arrive with full legal protection and a path to citizenship, and they receive assistance from resettlement organizations, which are generally affiliated with faith groups and have long enjoyed bipartisan political support.

The South Africans were processed by the Trump administration in a matter of weeks. Asked by a BBC reporter why they were fast-tracked into the United States at a time when other admissions from applicants in Afghanistan or war zones are frozen, Landau said Trump had made an exception based on the dire situation in South Africa. He and Edgar took only two questions in the tightly controlled press event (I was not allowed in) and left without speaking to reporters outside.

South Africa has one of the world’s highest crime rates, and land conflicts have fueled violence in rural areas. Crime data show that a few dozen white farmers are killed each year, but their deaths account for fewer than 1 percent of the country’s homicides. “Farmers are being killed,” Trump told reporters at the White House yesterday. “They happen to be white. But whether they’re white or Black makes no difference to me; but white farmers are being brutally killed and their land is being confiscated in South Africa.”

During his first term Trump slashed the number of refugees admitted to the lowest levels since the 1980 Refugee Act went into place. He went even further after he retook office this year, issuing an executive order that suspended refugee admissions. But within weeks he made an exception. White South African farmers have protested vigorously against a law adopted in January that allows courts to take land without compensation in some cases. Officials in South Africa say its purpose is to address inequalities that were lethally enforced during decades of apartheid rule. Although white people make up about 7 percent of South Africa’s population, they own about 75 percent of the farmland, according to a South African government land audit.

George Packer: ‘What about six years of friendship and fighting together?’

“The South African government has treated these people terribly—threatening to steal their private land and subjected them to vile racial discrimination,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote on social media yesterday.

The Biden administration resettled about 100,000 people last year. None were from South Africa. Now about 8,000 South Africans have expressed interest in applying for U.S. resettlement, according to U.S. officials.

U.S. visa statistics show that South Africans have been coming to the United States in greater numbers to work as temporary farm laborers—often to operate machinery or perform other skilled tasks. More than 15,000 South Africans came on temporary visas to perform farm labor last year, U.S. data show.

Hartzenberg told me his family grew vegetables on their farm in South Africa. He hoped to return to farming in Idaho, he said, but he wasn’t sure what work might be available. The caseworker assigned to his family hadn’t told him yet. With one last draw on his cigarette, he hustled back into the hangar to gather his children and board a bus to a hotel with the others.

This article originally misstated the first name of the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop.

Is Elon Musk Right About Big Government? - The Atlantic

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:13:51 +0000

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In politics, compromising with one’s ideological opponents is like walking a tightrope while both your allies and foes jeer at you. Democrats, now the out-group facing a Republican trifecta, will have to decide when to fight nominations, laws, and executive orders and when to step into that circus ring.

Jennifer Pahlka, a former Obama administration official and an author of a new report on government reform, kicked up a storm some weeks ago when she encouraged Democrats to work with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“We do need to talk about government reform, and while I’m sorry the conditions are quite a bit less than ideal, I think it’s time we admitted they were always going to be. Democrats did not do this work,” Pahlka wrote.

Pahlka was in part responding to arguments by people like Leah Greenberg, a co-founder and co-executive director of the progressive group Indivisible, who scolded Democrats for promising to work with DOGE: “Democrats should be planning to fight these corrupt plutocrats, not offering to work with them.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I explore whether liberals can actually find any common ground with DOGE and whether Pahlka’s focus on what she calls “state capacity” actually explains government dysfunction. (This episode was recorded earlier this month and references Vivek Ramaswamy’s involvement with DOGE, before it was reported that he would no longer be a part of it.)

“It’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have a crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge. And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction,” Pahlka tells me.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: While 75 percent of Democrats tell Pew that they prefer a bigger government providing more services, fewer than a quarter of Republicans say the same. This divide is a persistent feature of modern American politics and can make it seem like government-reform efforts—like civil-service reform and getting rid of costly, inefficient regulations—are the purview of the Republican Party.

Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy certainly think so. They aim to cut $2 trillion from the roughly $6 trillion federal budget under the banner of the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. This could be a nearly impossible feat, seeing as discretionary spending by the federal government was only $1.7 trillion in 2023. Perhaps realizing this conundrum, Musk and Ramaswamy have negotiated against themselves and revised the number to $1 trillion or $500 billion. We’ll see.

[Music]

Demsas: I’m a bit tired of how reasonable-sounding concerns around government efficiency and effectiveness get shoehorned into a witch hunt for government waste. There are serious problems with how the federal government’s processes and regulations harm economic growth and the effectiveness of important social-welfare programs. I’m skeptical that focusing on budget cuts does much to change that, but I’m also frustrated that it seems the only political actors talking about this seriously are on the right.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

My guest today is Jennifer Pahlka, a senior fellow at the Niskanen Center and founder of Code for America. She worked in the Obama administration as deputy chief technology officer, and her recent book, Recoding America, argues that the federal government is hobbled by its inability to implement its stated priorities.

Jennifer has a message to people across the political spectrum: If you want government to work, you need to reform it. In that vein, she’s much more optimistic than I on the potential for good-government types to work with DOGE and the Trump administration.

Demsas: Jen, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Pahlka: Thanks so much for having me.

Demsas: I am so excited to have this conversation. I feel like me and you—our work has been in conversation for years now, and we’ve been at some of the same conferences and things. So I’m really excited to dive in.

Pahlka: Me too.

Demsas: So you’re someone who has worked in government and now works trying to make government better. Give us the liberal case for government reform.

Pahlka: Well, I feel like liberals talk about government reform. I’m not sure they necessarily need to be sold on it so much. I think the kind of reform that we need today is a little bit of a hard pill for liberals to swallow, because we need government to sort of be faster, a little bit less process oriented and more outcome oriented. And there has been a pattern, I think, of liberals being very fond of process, of additional rules and regulations, for all the right reasons.

And with great success, right? I mean, the environmental movement really cleaned the air and our water, and that was through regulations. The civil service went from being a place where you would get a job because you were someone’s friend or you’d given money to a campaign, to a professional place. And those are all rules and regulations that have made government better and fairer and made our country better.

But we’re kind of at a point where there have been so many of them, and they’ve stacked on top of each other so much that we’re just moving very slowly. And so the kind of reform I’m talking about now does involve some things like maybe reducing, especially, regulation on government itself—reducing procedures and moving a little faster. And that is the part that liberals need to be convinced about, let’s say.

Demsas: You have a new report out with the Niskanen Center called “The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond.” What’s the main takeaway? What are you trying to solve here?

Pahlka: We’re really trying to help people understand that when you think about government reform, it just seems so big and impossible. So we’re trying to break it down and say, Actually, there are specific things that you could do if you want a government—and this could be, you know, we wrote it for federal government, but you could use it for state or local government as well—if you want government to be able to do what it says it’s going to do, to achieve its policy goals.

And so those things come in four buckets, you know—four pillars. The first thing is: You need to be able to hire the right people and fire the wrong ones. The second is: You have to reduce the procedural bloat. We’ve also talked about that as reducing the administrative burden on public servants—in addition to on the public, but we’re really talking about on public servants—so that you get more public servants focused on outcomes and less on process and compliance. The third thing is: You need to invest in digital and data infrastructure to enable all of this. And there’s a bunch the federal government could be doing at the start of the Trump administration to do that, including getting the United States Digital Service funded again and the Technology Modernization Fund funded again.

And then last, and the one I’m most interested in, is that we need to close the loop between policy and implementation. And what I mean by that is: Right now it functions as this sort of waterfall process, where you have a law, and then maybe it gets handed off to an agency to write regs, and then, you know, into the implementation phase. And it doesn’t ever sort of circle back and say, Is this working? What are we learning? What needs to be adjusted?

And especially in the era of Loper Bright, this decision from the Supreme Court that’s really going to change how the executive-branch agencies relate to Congress, we have kind of an opportunity to rethink that relationship. And I think we should rethink it along the lines of creating feedback loops that let us adjust along the way so that we actually get the outcomes that the laws and policies that we pass intend.

Demsas: I think you’re right when you talk in the abstract. Like, most people, liberal or conservative, would say, Yeah, you know, red tape is bad, and the government should definitely update technology, and, you know, it’d be good if we had a government that worked efficiently. And then when you get into the actual policy prescriptions and the trade-offs, things become more controversial, particularly when you’re talking about civil-service reform and regulatory reform.

So one of the third rails has long been hiring and firing. I want you to talk to us a little bit about what’s broken in that space and how you would change it, and I’d also like you to talk to us about the story of Jack Cable.

Pahlka: Oh, gosh. Jack, yeah. Well, first of all, what’s not broken? So, you know, we had the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, which established these Merit System Principles. They are very good. If you read them, you are very likely to agree with them. They talk about integrity and fairness and, you know, promoting people on the basis of merit. They’re called the Merit System Principles. And I think they are a strong foundation for our civil-service system.

The problem is that (A) that was 1978, and so we’ve had many years now for those things to be operationalized with a lot more ornaments that have been attached to them, right? It’s not just those principles. It’s the regulation and the guidance and the operating manuals and the processes and the forms that have derived from those that have really, I think at this point, kind of perverted their intent.

So for instance, we say we’re going to hire on the basis of merit. We also say we’re going to hire in a way that’s nonbiased. Well, what happens is that you have HR managers who kind of control the process of selecting a candidate. What they do—I’ll give you sort of the very specifics of how this works in 90 percent of cases. This is not the accepted services, and it’s not political appointees, but open-to-the-public, competitive jobs. They get, like, a big pool of resumes, and they have to down select. The first down select they do is by looking for exact matches between the language on the resume or cover letter and what’s in the job description.

Demsas: So if you copy-paste the job description into your resume, that’s, like, points?

Pahlka: Yes, and I have a friend of mine who’s in my book—I actually originally interviewed her about this. I didn’t put that in the book. But she was looking at a resume that had not just been copied and pasted, but copied and pasted and not reformatted. Like, that part was in a different font.

Demsas: Oh my god.

Pahlka: Like, the same font, right? And she points this out to the HR manager, and they’re like, Yeah, that means that this person’s the most qualified, because it’s the exact same language. And she’s like, This person is clearly unqualified because they didn’t even know to reformat. And this is not an outlier. Like, this happens a lot.

So first they’re looking for these exact matches. And then they take everybody who was really close in language—and also, by the way, who has something called a government resume, which is different from a private-sector resume, and you have to know that somehow, magically, before you apply. Then from that pool, they send everyone a self-assessment questionnaire, and everybody who marks themselves as master, and I literally mean master—I think that’s the top rating in a lot of these—they make the next down select, so they move on to the next pool.

Demsas: Wait—so if you just say that I’m a master at this, like, without any double-checking, you just get to move forward?

Pahlka: I mean, somebody could send me a self-assessment saying, Are you a master programmer in Python? And I would just be like, Yes, and I would move into that pool. Nobody checks it. It’s actually worse—not just that no one checks it; it’s that the HR people will tell you that subject-matter experts (SMEs) are not allowed to be in that part of the process.

I mean, there are processes that do include them, and I can get to that, but you can’t have SMEs look at these resumes and exert their judgment, because they may introduce bias into the process. Now, again, I think the idea of keeping bias out is something I agree with, and I’m going to assume you agree with, and most people agree with. But that’s not actually keeping bias out, right? That’s what I mean about sort of a perversion of the intent.

But anyway, so you have this now smaller pool of people who are great at cutting and pasting and great at, you know, self-aggrandizement—or really what it is, is they just know what to do. They know how to play the game. And then from that list, you apply veterans’ preference. In other words, any veterans in that pool float to the top, and that’s the “cert,” which is just the name for the list the HR manager gives to the hiring manager. That’s the cert that the hiring manager is supposed to choose from. So this is not consistent, to me, in my mind, with Merit System Principles of fairness, and not bias, and certainly not merit.

And so what you are looking at when you see that kind of behavior is a system that’s designed to be completely defensible from the critique of your judgment, because you have exercised no judgment at all. And I understand why people defend them and do these processes to be defensible, but I think, in the end, they come up actually indefensible.

So I learned about this process, in part, through a young man named Jack Cable. I was on the Defense Innovation Board at the time, and he won the Hack the [Air Force] contest. So all these security researchers from around the country come together, and, you know, they’re looking at bugs and security bugs and Pentagon software. This young man wins the whole contest. He’s the best out of the group.

And of course, you know, the people at the Defense Digital Service and other parts of the Department of Defense say, Great. We need this guy on our team. He applies with a resume that lists his programming languages and the frameworks that he is expert in, and he is cut in the first batch because he did not cut and paste. And the people reviewing his resume see this sort of gobbledygook of programming languages—they’re not technical people. They’re not even sort of supposed to know what those are, and so he gets cut.

And it’s not just that—then the Pentagon folks intervene and try to get him hired something like 10 different times. He does eventually get hired, but even with these interventions from people in power, and sort of as it escalated with increasing levels of power in the Pentagon, this very talented security researcher continues to get cut from the process before hiring managers ever see his resume.

Demsas: Wow.

Pahlka: Oh, and one more thing: He’s told by the HR people along the way—he’s quite young—they say, Go work at Best Buy selling TVs for a year, and then you’ll be qualified for this job.

Demsas: Wow. And I feel like in that time period—obviously, this is an exceptional case where a lot of people took effort to try to get him hired. But, you know, private-sector processes are much faster than this. And what’s most likely to happen is you get all of these top performers going into the private sector.

Pahlka: Oh absolutely. And I mean, it’s just a testament to his commitment that he stuck through it. And that young man has actually stayed in government. It’s amazing. He’s done some really wonderful work.

Demsas: So there’s that part of the government reform that you talk about, which is about hiring and firing. I mean, obviously, we only touched on it a little bit. But the other part of it that you focus on a lot is around regulatory reform. And one of the laws that you’ve pointed out is the Paperwork Reduction Act. Can you walk us through how that act hobbles government?

Pahlka: Yes. I will say, we’ve had some good progress on PRA, and I should also mention that we’ve had some good progress on that assessment problem. The [Fair] Chance to Compete Act passed both houses of Congress, and it actually directs agencies to stop using those self-assessments.

I have high hopes for it, but I also will say: There was an executive order saying that under Trump. Biden renewed that executive order. And it hasn’t really gotten the agencies to change their practices yet. So there is an implementation issue, I think, and we’re going to really have to watch if the [Fair] Chance to Compete Act does what we hope it does.

Demsas: Wait—if both Trump and Biden issued the executive orders, why aren’t the agencies doing it?

Pahlka: It’s very hard to change the practices of agencies, even under direct order.

Demsas: Yeah. Mechanistically, though, what’s going on? Are there people who are just refusing to change? Or, like, what’s happening?

Pahlka: Well, it wasn’t in statute. I don’t think there was a timeline or a deadline for it. I think if you really read the language and translate it into, you know, what’s practical, it’s sort of more encouragement. I mean, it does direct them, but there’s sort of very little teeth in it.

Government moves slowly. HR people move particularly slowly. I mean, until you fix some other problems—like how detailed it is, how many rules you have to comply with in order to use a subject-matter expert in that process—it actually is, like, enormous amounts of time to run a hiring process using real assessments.

Demsas: So tell us about the Paperwork Reduction Act. What is it doing, and how is it preventing government from acting quickly and nimbly?

Pahlka: So there’s sort of the general level of it, which is just: It’s a lot of work to comply with. So imagine you’re charged with implementing the CHIPS and Science Act, for instance, and you want to stand up a form to allow companies to express their initial interest or even apply. You want to know early on what kinds of projects might companies, you know, bring to the Department of Commerce, to apply for funding under CHIPS.

Well, you can design the form. There’s going to be a lot of process and a lot of stakeholders that want to look at it. You don’t get to write something up and throw it up on the internet. But once you’ve done all that work for your internal agency stakeholders and sometimes cross-agency stakeholders, then your form, because it’s an information collection, is subject to review by the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the White House.

And so you’ve got to sort of do all this pretty heavyweight documentation of your form and why you’re asking these particular questions, and you submit it to them. And because that process needs review by people—there’s only so many people in OIRA, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs—and because the process requires two separate times that you post it to the Federal Register, get comments from the public, respond to those comments, then potentially do a revision, then post it again, get comments, respond to those comments. And those time periods are designated in statute—I think it’s 30 days the first one and 60 days the second one—like, right there, that’s at least a month, but more because you have to do all the lead-up and then follow-up.

The average time to get through—or actually, I think it’s the minimum time to get through—a standard PRA review is nine months. And that’s just to get one form up. And it can be longer. Now, there is a fast-track process. If you get a fast-tracked application, that runs out in six months. So in six months, you’ll have to do it all over again. When you’re supposed to have moved on to the next phase of your project, you’re kind of going back to zero.

And there’s certainly value in a centralized office knowing all the things that agencies are asking the public, or companies, or anybody who would be filling out a form. And there’s absolutely value in knowing, like, Oh we have this data here. Maybe we shouldn’t be asking for it. Maybe we can get it from another agency. That would be, like, the best use of this kind of centralized function. But we have let this become quite a heavyweight process that really slows agencies down.

Demsas: You’ve outlined quite a few things in your public research and writing around how you think government—both whether we’re talking about Congress but also the executive branch—should reform in order to make things more efficient. You know, some of these things are just common-sense requirements to make hiring practices align with things that people think are good, like merit.

But most people who are talking about this, I think, are often on the right. And increasingly, I think this conversation is being brought up by people like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who are heading the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, for President-Elect Donald Trump.

You wrote, recently, a piece for your Substack called “Bringing Elon to a Knife Fight,” where you said that you support Democrats, like Congressman Ro Khanna, for pledging to work with DOGE. Why is that?

Pahlka: Well, I did say that until we know more about what they’re going to do, I think we should take an open stance. It’s very hard to know what they’re going to do. But ultimately, I said that because, as much as I may disagree with the policy goals of the administration that Musk and Ramaswamy are serving, there is so much work that needs to be done to subtract from government instead of constantly adding to it, to make it easier to get stuff done in government. I mean, people talk about regulation always as, you know, we’re regulating companies so they can’t, you know, pollute a stream. That’s wonderful.

There’s also enormous regulation on government itself, like the Paperwork Reduction Act, or like these hiring practices that really keep us from being able to serve the public in the way that we need to. And so it’s an uncomfortable position to be in because it’s not like I have any crystal ball to know what Musk and Ramaswamy are going to do. And I may disagree with some of what they do, or maybe a lot of what they do, but they’ve really kind of moved the Overton window and the conversation about this inefficiency, the sludge.

And I think that’s valuable, frankly, and I want Democrats to kind of get in the game of that reduction. And I think that if some of what they do is the wrong thing to do, but they shake government up in a way and maybe even pull some stuff out, we may be able to build back things that are kind of right-sized, the right-size procedures—not no procedure, not no process, but maybe not the heavyweight process that we have today.

Demsas: The thing I hear you saying here is, sort of, what I hear from people who have given up on their own side doing the right thing. And this is, I guess, reflected in the end of your piece, where you write, “We can wish that the government efficiency agenda were in the hands of someone else, but let’s not pretend that change was going to come from Democrats if they’d only had another term, and let’s not delude ourselves that change was ever going to happen politely, neatly, carefully.”

So, I mean, part of what it sounds like you’re saying is, Yeah, nobody wants this version of government efficiency, but there’s no other way it’s going to happen. Why is that the case? Like, why do you think the Democrats have been so unwilling to engage on this issue? I mean, you’re a Democrat. You worked in a Democratic administration, and you’ve talked to many other Democrats who have very similar views to you. Why is this such a third rail for them?

Pahlka: I’m not sure I know the exact answer to that. I think if you want to look at the Biden administration, in particular, you know—they went in with a big set of policy goals, and they actually achieved a lot of them. The four big bills are legislative accomplishments, significant legislative accomplishments. So they went for the what, but they neglected the how. And I think in their minds, it’s like, You’re going to do one or the other.

I think they should have paid equal attention to the how, to cleaning out the pipes so that the what could get through them faster. And that speed has clearly been a real problem. I mean, we’re writing now about the amount of money that could be clawed back because it didn’t get through those pipes, so really, really reducing Biden’s legacy. The frustration of not having that many electric-car chargers that were promised under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—all that stuff is due to this lack of focus on the how, and I don’t think it was a binary choice. I think Biden’s team could have said, We’re going to spend as much energy on the how as we are on the what.

But I do think there’s something about the way the Democrats, of course, want to be thoughtful and considered and hear all voices. And if you are thoughtful and considered and hear all voices, you tend to add policy and procedure and ways of looping everybody in. And that, actually, you know, adds instead of subtracts. Just naturally that’s sort of what happens. And in some ways, the destruction from which you can hopefully rebuild kind of needs to be done by somebody who kind of doesn’t care about that, in a certain way.

Demsas: I wonder, though, because it feels that, you know, two different theories of government reform—I worry about being [them] conflated, right?

So let’s take the DOGE theory, the Vivek-Elon theory. They presuppose that there are all these bureaucrats that are not really needed and all of these wasteful programs. And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, they essentially have this idea that the executive branch has wildly overstepped its small-d democratic authority by being allowed to interpret laws that Congress passes as they’re implementing them.

And if that’s your theory of government reform—if your theory of government reform is that there’s just all these people who are dead weight, who are clogging up the process—then their answer, which is “mass head-count reductions across the federal bureaucracy,” is reasonable.

But as I understand it, your theory of government reform is very different. It’s that you need a capable and nimble executive branch in order to deliver on priorities like—I don’t know—providing health care to poor children. But in order to do that, you actually need a highly competent, well-paid, expensive labor pool and a good deal of it.

And so to me, it feels like, while both of these things can call themselves government-efficiency complaints—while they’re both motivated by a concern about the costs put on both private actors, individual citizens, and other government entities—they’re actually, fundamentally, two different political projects. So how do you see these things working together?

Pahlka: I agree. I have a very different view of it, and there’s some part of me that just thinks that if Elon and Vivek come in and spend any amount of time, if they don’t just get bored or frustrated and wander off, they’re gonna learn this. And they may have a different set of values, but I think it’s hard to miss it when you get into government that there are a lot of incredibly smart, talented, creative, dedicated people doing really amazing work. And you just fall in love with them once you actually get in the door. It’s from a distance that they look like, you know, these unaccountable, lazy bureaucrats. Up close, they’re pretty impressive.

But I think where I would put a little nuance on what you just said is that I do think we need this incredible workforce. And I think we’ve done a bad job of balancing between what I, in my very fancy language, call “go energy” and “stop energy.” So you have more people doing various forms of compliance and safeguards than you have the people trying to build something and get it out the door. And somebody I worked with at one point said, It’s like we’ve got six people building this product and at least 60 people telling us all the things we can’t do.

Now, those people who are saying, You can’t do that, are not dumb. They are not lazy. I mean, there are, of course, a few bad apples in government, and we can talk about that. I’m not saying everyone’s perfect. But you have people who, in fact, are—because they’re good, and because they really know the law, and because they really feel like it is their job to protect the public using this law, policy, and regulation—are very zealous in telling builders what they can’t do. And you have the very well-intentioned stop energy that overwhelms the people who have sort of go-energy jobs.

And I’m a little biased because I work with people a lot who do technology. They’re doing things like trying to get that form up, you know, trying to make sure that veterans can get their benefits. They are focused on, Can we get this application up so they can apply? Can we get the check to them? Can we get them their health care? Like, the actual outcome.

And a lot of people’s job isn’t to focus on the outcome but to make sure that all these things have been complied with, and they can do their job very well, and it slows the people who are outcome focused down. And it’s not their job, necessarily, to—you know, they’re not supposed to do their job less well. It is the job of leadership, of [the Office of Personnel Management], of the White House, of Congress, to look around and say, Why do we have so many people saying no, no, no? Oh because we put all these rules in place, and we’ve developed a culture of risk aversion that means we’re really, really focused on making sure nobody breaks any rules, at the expense of getting the job done. Leadership needs to balance the workforce between go energy and stop energy, and really take a hard look, if you’re going to add a regulation, you’re going to add a rule, Okay, what is the cost of adding that to the actual outcome that the American public expects?

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: Jen and I hash out the difference between political will and what she calls state capacity.

[Break]

Demsas: One phrase that you use a lot, and this is included in your recent report with the Niskanen Center, is state capacity. Can you define that for us?

Pahlka: Well, I didn’t even know the term until after my book came out and people were like, This is a state-capacity book. But I have since learned it’s an academic term that simply means the ability of a government—at any level and any government—to achieve its policy goals. So it is essentially, like I said, the how to the what.

Demsas: Yeah, this is a term that I think I first heard in the development-economics, development-political-science space. And it’s most commonly used to talk about the ability for these developing nations to effectuate their political priorities.

So for instance, like: Can a country collect taxes? Can it maintain the monopoly on the use of violence? These are core questions of state capacity because if you can’t collect taxes, you can’t run programs, you can’t have a police force that enforces laws. Like, there’s very little you can do on top of that, right? You can’t run a CHIPS program if you can’t do those things to begin with.

Why does this sort of idea—and how does this sort of idea—apply in the American context, where we have the ability to collect taxes? We have, relative to the rest of the world, like, a high degree of monopoly on the use of legitimate force. It’s contained within the state. What is the purpose of applying this term here?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, since you brought up applying taxes, the individual master file at the IRS, which holds all of the data about tax returns from individuals and families since the ’60s, is written in assembly code. There are vanishingly few people in the world who know what that code looks like. And it’s pretty robust. It’s lasted a long time. But, like, you’re going to run out of the human understanding of how that thing works, and you’re going to have a crisis at some point.

That’s not a crisis now, but we also don’t collect a lot of taxes. We have a serious unenforcement policy. We’re leaving a lot of money on the table because we have not empowered the IRS to be very successful. So we’re certainly not like a third-world state or an emerging state in that regard. But we are kind of going backwards in some areas.

And there’s a million examples of this, but I think that it is sort of shocking to people that state capacity is now a big concern for the United States, when it used to be that we only thought about it in relation to the countries that we would fund through the World Bank, or whatever. But national defense is a really great example of this. I mean, we keep spending more and more money, and it is not at all clear that we are getting more deterrence or more security. In fact, my thesis there is that we’re just spending too much money, not because—we shouldn’t cut spending because we want to be less secure.

But go talk to anybody in the Department of Defense. Pretty much everyone will tell you, like, unless there’s some shock to the system, we’re not going to change how we do stuff. And the way we do stuff takes decades, and we have to be able to move faster because, you know, we’re spending, I think it’s, like—what are we up to—almost a trillion dollars on national defense. And yet we seem to get less secure every year because the more money you put in a system like that, the more people double down on these very heavyweight ways of operating that are not what we need today.

Demsas: So I want to push you here a bit because this is a place—I’ve brought up to other people: I feel like the application of state capacity sometimes doesn’t feel like it fits well, and that, sometimes, what’s actually happening is that this is just a question of political will. It’s not that the government can’t accomplish what it tries to do. It’s that it actually has competing priorities, and there are trade-offs it’s unwilling to make.

One place where people have talked a lot about regulation that is holding government back is the National Environmental Policy Act. This is a piece of legislation from the 1970s that requires that the government study the environmental impact of its major actions. And it’s often talked about that it takes years to compile an environmental-impact statement, so it can take years and years in order to get a permit for, you know, a big energy project.

But something interesting happened, and this is a stat that was surfaced by Brian Potter in his Substack, “Construction Physics.” I’m reading from it: In 2009, after the Great Recession and Congress passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, there were “over 190,000 projects, totaling $300 billion worth of stimulus funds, [that] were required to have NEPA reviews before the projects could begin. After the passage of [the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act], categorical exclusions were completed at a rate of more than 400 per day, and 670 environmental impact statements were completed over the next 7 months.”

So essentially, these EISs, the environmental-impact statements that often take years to complete, all of a sudden are being completed over the course of a few weeks—670 over the course of seven months is just astronomical compared to what we usually see.

And this is an example where nothing changed about the state capacity. They didn’t change anything about the legal environment. They didn’t change anything about the number of people working in government and whether they were more qualified. The HR processes didn’t change in this time period.

What happened is that the federal government was like, We’re in an emergency space. We need to get a bunch of stimulus dollars out the door, because we’re in a free-fall recession, and we’re worried about mass unemployment. And then, all of a sudden, all of these things that seemed like state-capacity issues, that seemed like these big constraints on government, actually just disappeared, because everyone wanted them to happen.

So is it the case that the government can’t do what it wants? Or is it that there’s a lot of competing priorities, and in times of nonemergency, we’re actually not aligned on what government wants to do?

Pahlka: Well, I mean, I think COVID is another good example of when government just does it, right? Or Josh Shapiro’s getting I-95 open again. I can’t disagree with you on that. Absolutely. I will say, I remember that too, and we just looked into it, and it’s not exactly apples to apples there, so I’d just like to put a little bit of an asterisk on it.

But I think your point is valid, but it does, then, beg the question, right? So we only have 47 electric-vehicle chargers out of the money that came out of the, you know, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. I guess it was also a bill that funded the BEAD Program for broadband-internet access, and we have zero connections from that.

Are you saying, then, that Democrats didn’t want to see those things implemented? Because I do think it is a matter of will. But we are seeing places where the political will seems to be there, but it seems to sort of stop after the law is passed.

I think I’ve also shared this with you before, but, like, I got into this through working with cities and states on benefits delivery, and we were looking at SNAP uptake. And I was in California, and it was just shocking to me that California, which had a ton of money and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on IT systems for people to apply for SNAP online, had the second-lowest rate of participation in the program in the entire country. Only Wyoming was worse than California.

Is that a political-will problem? It’s, like, a really blue state, very pro-welfare. But it kind of couldn’t get out of its own way. It so overscoped these systems that it took about almost an hour to apply online. You couldn’t do it on a mobile phone. It’s just all these ways in which they created a system which is hard to use. But it’s really clear to me that they didn’t intend to do that. They just had too much process in the way and less of a focus on the outcome.

So I do think it’s a political will, but it has to be political will to follow the thing all the way through to the outcome, to care as much about the implementation as you do about the legislative win or the money that you put into it. We’re really good at money and rules, and those things do not necessarily translate to the outcomes that we promised people. So that will has to move.

Demsas: Yeah. But I think what I’m saying is: I think this may be a case of revealed preferences, right? Like you asked me, Does this mean that Democrats didn’t really care about getting broadband out? And I don’t want to make that kind of a strong claim. I think if they could push a button, and there was rural broadband for every single person in rural America, they would have pushed the button.

But the question government asks, and government policies ask, which you’ve written about extensively, is not just: Hey—do you wish this thing existed? It’s, When you’re forced to make trade-offs between whether to push out broadband or make it easier for contractors that are different from the ones you usually go to to get access to this program, which do you choose between? If you’re going to choose between actually getting out broadband and following the most onerous environmental regulations that exist, which thing are you choosing?

And over and over again, you see, as you mentioned before, liberals choosing this process, choosing this kind of way of delaying implementation in order not to follow some shoddy or quicker, maybe more error-prone system. And in doing so, they end up not getting to the outcomes. And to me, I feel like that actually is a situation where we’re seeing what Democrats actually want, which is really clear when you look at infrastructure projects.

I mean, this is what I think is the story of California high-speed rail, where you talked to so many people, where I bet a lot of people would love for there to be high-speed rail between San Francisco and L.A. I don’t think they’re lying about wanting that to exist. But when you talk to people who are working in that program or who are working trying to implement it, and you say, Okay, well, you need to not let every single local government fleece this project for whatever priority they have on the ground, and no one wants to do that. So I’m left with the conclusion that yes, they want high-speed rail but not if it means angering a single person within the Democratic Party.

Pahlka: I completely agree with that. It’s a little bit what I was saying about, like, you kind of need a big disruptor, someone who doesn’t care, to get stuff done sometimes. I wish it weren’t Elon, necessarily. But if you’ve created a system in which you have to make everybody happy, eventually people will be so frustrated they’ll let somebody, you know, give the job to somebody who doesn’t care if he makes anybody happy.

Demsas: One of the objections I hear sometimes from liberals about making government more efficient is that all of these layers of procedure are to protect and prevent against authoritarian impulses. So yes, it’s frustrating and annoying that we have to follow all of these rules, and that there are all these government watchdogs that might sue if you don’t cross your t’s and dot your i’s. And that is annoying when you’re trying to get good policy done. But when you have someone like Donald Trump, for instance, get elected, you’ll be really happy that all of these procedures and layers of government exist. How do you respond to that?

Pahlka: Well, they’re not wrong, of course. And we just talked about trade-offs. This is exactly a trade-off conversation. The reality is that I believe that our lack of results and the slowness of government played a part, maybe not be the leading part, in driving people towards wanting someone who claims, I alone can fix it, right? Who claims to be able to bust through all that red tape.

Now, in reality, did he bust through a lot of red tape in his first administration? Well, he claimed to roll back a lot of regulations, but his team really didn’t do that much on that front. But it is a trade-off you make. I am not extreme on either end, but I do think we need a middle ground where we are looking at where safeguards and processes and procedures and the ability to sue are kind of right-sized, where there are some protections.

But where we are right now is: The extra-extra-large version of protections, which has slowed us down enough that it has driven this force in our society for, like, none, which is the pendulum swinging. I just wish the pendulum would settle a little bit in the middle. But that’s a trade-off we need to make. And we have to, as you say, piss some people off in order to get that, because you’re gonna have to say no to some people to get the job done.

Demsas: I feel like the analogy I’ve used a lot is to the filibuster—

Pahlka: Yes.

Demsas: —which I think that a lot of liberals were worried about when this was being debated more openly. If you get rid of the filibuster, that means Republicans will be able to pass their policies as well.

And I think the thing that’s interesting about this is, one, it’s the question of democracy—like, small-d democracy. Do you want the government to be able to do things such that the public can actually evaluate them? Versus someone who gets into office, and they can’t actually enact a bunch of their priorities. So it’s actually quite unclear what signal you’re supposed to be sending as a voter.

But also secondly, I think there’s, like, an asymmetry here, where if you are a small-c conservative, versus a lower-l liberal, you have different sorts of desires from government. Like, there are a lot more active policies that are trying to be passed by people who are liberal, who are progressive. And so there’s kind of an asymmetry of what gets constrained in that kind of a paradigm.

And so I think that it’s hard because you look at the looming potential changes in a Trump administration, and you think, like, Well, it’s really good that there are all these different ways of constraining this. But in the long run, there’s just this larger question here about whether it’s democratic at all to have that happen. Like, if people are electing an executive, how exactly are we supposed to evaluate that work if after four years, so many of the policies that they promised, whether they’re harmful or whether they’re good, don’t actually get passed?

Pahlka: It’s such a hard question. And yeah, I kind of want to stand on—as uncomfortable as this is—if you think state capacity is important to the country, you kind of have to be okay with people who you, let’s softly say, don’t agree with having it. But we’re in this sort of thermostatic nature of elections right now, and I have no crystal ball, but if the Democrats were to get the White House back in four years or even take back Congress in two years, you really don’t want them to be dealing with this huge incapacity once again, or at least I don’t. And that’s just a tough pill to swallow, but I think it’s one we have to swallow, again in the sense of making trade-offs. I agree—it’s much like the filibuster.

You could also say the Administrative Procedures Act is a lot like the filibuster. It needs to be reformed for all the reasons you mentioned when you talked about NEPA to be able to get these, you know, big infrastructure projects built, because it creates such a huge surface area for attack by minority interests. And if you were to do that today, you would really empower Trump to do a lot of what he couldn’t do last time, and that’s really problematic.

But the reality is it’s not going to get repealed today. Like, if you started working on that now, maybe it would happen at the end of the administration and benefit the Democrats. Now, I know that’s sort of like a Pollyannaish view of it, but at the end of the day, it kind of just does need to get reformed if we’re going to be able to govern at all.

And you used the word democracy, right? If we have the system in which we vote for elected officials, and then they go through that messy political process to say—well, let’s use the example of housing, right—to say, This area needs more housing. We’re going to build more housing, and then a bunch of people who have an interest in having that housing not be built can stop it, is that democracy? We have thwarted the will of what the democratic process actually came up with.

Demsas: Well, Jen, always our last and final question: What is an idea that you had that you thought was good at the time but ended up being only good on paper?

Pahlka: I love this question. You asked it of a guest a couple of episodes ago who answered, “small plates,” which just made me laugh so hard. And now I’m just not ever going to order a small plate at a restaurant again. So I’m just co-signing that.

But I guess my more original answer would be: When I started working with local governments, I really had this sense that more data was better. It was kind of shocking. Sometimes you’d go in there, and you were just like, You’re not making decisions based on data. How awful. We need more. We need more. And then over time, I realized there’s a human aspect to this that we neglect. So there became this whole trend of doing data dashboards for local governments. And then, like, no one looks at them really. They were sort of a lot of work for, in some cases, not much return, depending on the human and cultural and, you know, organizational infrastructure into which they were inserted.

But I also really saw, when I was working on the unemployment-insurance crisis during the pandemic, the ways that a lot of leaders see data as a grade that they’re getting, not a compass that they can use to steer the ship where they need to go. And I really changed my view on, like, what kinds of data are good in, like, a governing context, in a performance-management context, and really now sort of see it as good only if it’s introduced in the right ways and if the people who are supposed to be using it as a compass actually are empowered and encouraged to do that.

[Music]

Demsas: Well, Jen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Pahlka: Thank you so much, Jerusalem. This was fun.

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

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A New Theory of American Foreign Policy - The Atlantic

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A national mood disorder afflicts America, causing wild swings between mania and despair, superhuman exertion and bruised withdrawal. We overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments, never pausing in between, where an ordinary country would try to reach a fine balance. American exceptionalism has two faces, equally transfixed with a sense of specialness—one radiant with the nation’s unique beneficence, the other sunk in its unrivaled malignity. These extremes, confounding friends as well as enemies, are unrealistic and unsustainable.

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Until the early hours of February 24, when Russian tank columns crossed the Ukrainian border and airborne troops targeted Kyiv, the United States was a chastened and declining superpower. The Biden administration seemed to have picked up where the Trump administration left off, accepting the harsh diagnosis of critics: After 20 years of failed wars, the age of intervention was over. Any thought of using force to transform other countries met the definition of insanity. A wave of recent books—Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Andrew Bacevich’s After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed, Samuel Moyn’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Luke Mogelson’s The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible—portrays a country so warped by endless war, white supremacy, and violence that its very nature now drives it to dominate and destroy. Ackerman concludes that it is “increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.”

The best that such a country can do for the world is as little as possible. After the fall of Afghanistan, Moyn, a law and history professor at Yale, told Vox: “The most remarkable fact about liberals today is that, aside from a few, they’ve all learned their lesson.” What lesson? That “humanitarian intervention” is a contradiction, and war itself almost always wrong; that the U.S. cannot change other countries and does a lot of harm trying; that Americans are willing to accept far too much violence in the name of “security” and “democracy”; that the period of American global hegemony was a disaster best consigned to history.

In the past half decade, this deep skepticism has led to an odd convergence of views. From opposed starting points, the pacifist, anti-imperialist left and the nationalist, “America First” right have arrived at a common position: restraint. They have been joined by geopolitical “realists” from the center—mostly academic experts—who view international relations in terms of national interests and security, holding that the goal of foreign policy should be stability among great powers, not the spread of democracy and human rights.

The old labels have lost their predictability. Progressives now call for a return to “spheres of influence,” and conservatives denounce the U.S. military; The Intercept and Fox News sometimes sound alike; Noam Chomsky recently praised the statesmanship of Donald Trump. The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (named for John Quincy Adams, who warned the young American republic not to go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy”) emerged in 2019 as a stronghold of restrainers from across the spectrum. It draws experts from the staff of former Vice President Dick Cheney, the Nation Institute, the oil industry, and the CIA; they’ve been paid by both George Soros and Charles Koch.

Beneath the restrainers’ views lies a shared hostility to what they often call “liberal elites”—the policy makers and plugged-in experts and pundits who never listened, and whom they despise for continuing to see America as a benevolent power. How could anyone still believe that fairy tale? For restrainers on the right, liberal zeal threatens national sovereignty and traditional values around the world and at home. For those on the left, democracy is the pretty lie that hides the brutality of capitalism and imperialism. These views are at bottom antithetical: The right wants more national power without international rules, and the left wants the nation-state to disappear. But the two sides have made a temporary marriage at what they see as liberalism’s sickbed.

From the March 2022 issue: George Packer on the betrayal of Afghanistan

With the withdrawal last year of the final troops from Kabul, restraint appeared to have won an uncontested victory. It lasted six months.

In February, as more than 130,000 Russian troops massed on the Ukrainian border, restrainers refused to believe the Biden administration’s warning that Vladimir Putin was about to invade. A war would upend their fixed views of international politics: that states pursue rational interests, not mad dreams of ancient glory; that U.S. leaders manufacture intelligence for their own ends; that imperialism is a uniquely American sin. Therefore, a war wasn’t possible. When it came anyway, restrainers found ways to place the blame on the U.S.:

“Emulation of the American way of being in the world is largely complete with Putin’s shock and awe assault.”

“The neocons on the right ... they’re power drunk, they are bloodthirsty, and they cannot be trusted ... Joe Biden is sleepwalking us towards war.”

“At first Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had at least the morally instructive quality of showing what a humanitarian intervention looks like from the other side.”

“It’s very important to understand that we invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine.”

These statements could all have come from the left, right, or center. As it happens, in order they’re from Pankaj Mishra, a left-wing anti-imperialist; Joe Kent, a pro-Trump Republican candidate for Congress in Washington State; Thomas Meaney, whose career has spanned the Claremont Institute and the New Left Review; and John Mearsheimer, a realist international-relations scholar. They give neither Russia nor Ukraine any agency—only the U.S. drives history. The war is not about Putin’s fantasy of a restored empire, or Ukraine’s determination to remain an independent democracy. It’s simply one move of a long game in which America is the aggressive player, Russia a threatened opponent capable of being restored to reason, and Ukraine a hapless pawn. Putin was only reacting to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders.

From the October 2022 issue: Ukrainians are defending the values Americans claim to hold

None of this analysis held up. The NATO alliance has always remained a defensive one, posing no military threat to the Russian Federation, never seriously considering Ukrainian membership, and guilty of no historic betrayal, either, as the Johns Hopkins historian M. E. Sarotte shows in Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate. The book argues that both superpowers squandered the chance for cooperation after the Cold War, but it refutes the Russian claim that expansion broke an explicit American promise to advance NATO “not one inch eastward.” In any case, Putin had offered an entirely different justification on the eve of the invasion: Ukraine was part of Russia. Ukraine didn’t exist.

In the months following February 24, a few restrainers quietly changed their minds on Ukraine; others fell silent about one of the most important geopolitical events of the century. Most persisted with the conviction that American arms would achieve nothing, that a doomed Ukraine should find the quickest way out of pointless bloodshed by negotiating away territory and human beings for neutrality and peace. When I went to Ukraine this past spring, Oleksandr Sushko, the executive director of a prodemocracy foundation in Kyiv, told me that some progressive American colleagues recoiled when Ukrainians like him spoke of fighting for liberal values. “Don’t say the word freedom,” Sushko was warned, “because ‘freedom’ was used to intervene somewhere in the world.” In an essay, Samuel Moyn advised the West to follow the example of countries in the “global south” and criticize the invasion without doing a thing to stop it—which would have left Ukraine a Russian-occupied wasteland and encouraged future aggressors around the world.

This restraint is not a hard-won prudence in the face of tragic facts. It’s a doctrinaire refusal, by people living in the safety and comfort of the West, to believe in liberal values that depend on American support. The restrainers can’t accept that politics leaves no one clean, and that the most probable alternative to U.S. hegemony is not international peace and justice but worse hegemons. They can’t face the reality that force never disappears from the world; it simply changes hands.

Meanwhile, the war has reduced their position to rubble. U.S. intelligence turned out to be accurate. Putin has rejected any serious negotiations, both before invading and since. His purpose is not to neutralize or “liberate” Ukraine, but to annihilate it for the dream of Greater Russia. Occupying troops have committed atrocities on an unimagined scale. NATO weapons have allowed Ukrainians to defend themselves and eventually regain lost territory in a conflict they understand to be a fight for survival. European support has not disintegrated under Russian blackmail. American leadership has proved decisive in holding the West together in defense of collective security and democratic values. The war is about freedom. Russia is likely to lose.

But we should pause before closing the book on the post-9/11 years and never listening to the restrainers again. The war has kindled hope, at times bordering on triumphalism, for a renewal of liberal democracy, not just as a guide to foreign policy but as a mission at home. In September, the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama told The Washington Post, “If Ukraine is able to defeat Russia, the demonstration effect is going to be really tremendous. It’s going to have domestic political consequences inside every democracy that’s threatened by one of these populist parties … I do think that we could recover a little bit of the spirit of 1989. Ukraine could trigger something like that in the United States and Europe.”

Imagining that a Ukrainian victory would have a decisive effect on the internal politics of Western democracies is unwarranted exuberance. Illiberal populism continues to thrive in countries whose governments support Ukraine—Poland, the U.K., France, Italy, Sweden. The major non-Western democracies—India, Indonesia, Brazil, and South Africa—have stayed more or less neutral on the war; India began to criticize only when Russia began to lose. In the U.S., arming Ukraine still has bipartisan backing in Congress and from the public, but a Republican win in the midterm elections could allow the party’s Trumpist wing to block military aid; and if Trump is reelected in 2024, the U.S. might well switch sides. In that case, American politics would transform Ukraine, not the other way around.

From the January/February 2022 issue: George Packer on how to fend off Trump’s next coup

In 1989 it was possible to believe that Europe would lead the way toward a more integrated, cosmopolitan world under an American security umbrella; it was easy to discount the force of nationalism. That ceased to be true a long time ago, as Fukuyama knows: It’s the subject of his latest book, Liberalism and Its Discontents. He argues persuasively that liberalism—individual freedom, equal rights, rule of law, consent of the governed, open markets, scientific rationalism—is in retreat around the world, not because of “a fundamental weakness in the doctrine,” but because of “the way that liberalism has evolved over the last couple of generations.” The causes of its decline run deep: globalization, rapid technological change, inequality, mass migration, institutional sclerosis, failures of leadership. In the past few decades, an exaggerated emphasis on freedom has driven polarization in democracies, including ours: radical egalitarianism on the left, reactionary authoritarianism on the right. Both forms of illiberalism seek to forge group identities—exclusive, intolerant ones, steeped in resentment—to replace the national identities that have become corroded in an era of globalization.

Fukuyama believes that liberalism can recover and thrive again through “a sense of moderation,” by toning down its individualistic extremes—sensible advice, but not exactly an antidote to a global crisis that has reached even Sweden. When writers like Fukuyama and Robert Kagan—in his 2018 book, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World—call for liberalism’s renewal, they often assume its self-evident appeal. They downplay the erosion of American legitimacy and will, and they gloss over a question that doesn’t interest the restrainers but that has returned in full force with a new European war: Can America still lead? And if not, can the liberal order survive?

The institutions and rules of the postwar era, which enabled a historic expansion of freedom and prosperity around the world, depended on not just U.S. power but the American example. It doesn’t seem possible for liberal democracy to remain healthy abroad but not at home, and vice versa. Its decay in the U.S. has coincided with the rise of authoritarianism globally. The likely successor is not, as the left wishes, world government and international law under the aegis of the United Nations, but rival nationalisms, including Trump’s “America First,” with “might makes right” in every neighborhood.

The Biden administration, while disavowing the term cold war, is already waging one—invoking a global contest between democracy and autocracy, using industrial policy to gain strategic advantage over China in areas such as microchip production. In The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us About Great-Power Rivalry Today, Hal Brands, a historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, revisits the U.S.-Soviet contest for its now-forgotten lessons on how to conduct “high-stakes, long-term competitions.” But a new twilight struggle would be far murkier than the Cold War’s stark ideological contest between two systems across the globe. China, a totalitarian state that delivers the goods, is the obvious peer adversary today, but Brands also includes Russia, though he was writing before Putin and Xi Jinping announced a friendship with “no limits” between their two countries on February 4 at the Beijing Olympics. Their statement featured the terms multipolarity, polycentric world order, and civilizational diversity , but its real message for the U.S. and the West was blunt: You had your turn—now butt out. Three weeks later, Putin gave the world a look at the multipolar future.

American policy in the original Cold War was to contain Soviet communism until it finally altered its character or collapsed. This time around there’s no universal ideology to combat, only brutal, cynical dictatorships. Illiberalism today is entirely negative. In place of utopia, it offers resentment—of American power, Western elites, decadent globalists. Putin gives the Russian people nothing they’re willing to die for. When he declares a national emergency, they flock to the airports and borders rather than risk their skins in defense of the motherland.

Brands is concerned with “winning a long-term rivalry,” but what this would mean today isn’t clear. Maintaining military and technological supremacy? The fall of authoritarian regimes? Limitless expansion of the free world? Or something more modest, like improved behavior from Moscow and Beijing? Brands is well aware of flaws in the Cold War analogy, but he doesn’t reckon with the most important difference. When the last twilight struggle began, the U.S. had just emerged from the ruins of World War II energized and unified by victory, the world’s dominant country by far. Today we can’t hold an election without fear of civil war. Any thought of winning a new cold war has to start from this dismal fact.

Rather than relearning the lessons of the Cold War, or overlearning those of the post-9/11 years, we have to escape the old pattern of wild swings by facing what is new. We’re left to resolve two hard and conflicting truths: Autocratic regimes will exploit American restraint to enlarge their power at the expense of their own people, their neighbors, and the international order. But American action will stoke illiberal reactions when it brings domination, not freedom.

One way out of this dilemma was proposed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821, when, after warning against going abroad to destroy monsters, he added: America “is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.” The best thing we can do for the world’s disrepair is to fix our own collapsing house. That sentiment is becoming more and more common today, expressing a prudent sense of limits. Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently wrote that “democracy promotion at home rather than abroad should be the focus of U.S. attention,” because there’s more at stake here and a better chance of success.

But separating these projects is a lot harder to do in the postwar, post–Cold War world than it was two centuries ago. Striving to be an exemplary bystander, for all the urgency of our own problems, is too narrow an approach, either abroad or at home. The American-led order lasted three-quarters of a century, and people struggling for democracy in other countries are less eager to see it end than the Quincy Institute is. Even when they resent our interference, they also want our support. And in this country, invocations of “national interest” and strategies for “long-term rivalry” absorb experts more than they move ordinary people. As American history shows, we’re loath to sacrifice for an international cause that has nothing to do with freedom.

Russia’s war has demonstrated that a decent world isn’t possible without liberalism, and liberalism can’t thrive without U.S. engagement. Ukraine shows one way for America to use its power on behalf of freedom: Instead of sending troops to fight and die for democratic illusions in inhospitable countries, send arms to help an actual democracy repel a foreign invader. No U.S. troops, no meddling in civil wars, no nation building, no going it alone. Collaborate closely with allies and take measures to avoid catastrophe. Call it the Biden doctrine—it’s been remarkably successful.

Do its principles extend beyond this war? For example, what can the U.S. do to support Iran’s democratic protests that wouldn’t ultimately undermine the cause and, eventually, bipartisan backing at home? Broader sanctions would further the destruction of Iran’s middle class. Withdrawing from nuclear talks during this brutal crackdown, though the right thing to do, would not affect the regime’s behavior. The Biden administration—unlike the Obama administration during an earlier surge of protest in 2009—has chosen to give Iran’s brave young demonstrators strong rhetorical support and practical help in the form of access to satellite communications as a way around the regime’s internet blackout. Any deeper U.S. involvement in an internal struggle as dramatic and enduring as Iran’s—for example, arming insurgents or trying to manipulate regime change—would be destructive, and it would stir up the kind of domestic battle that precludes steady, reliable support for democracy abroad.

This recognition of limits would make a foreign policy founded on liberal values more persuasive abroad and more sustainable with the American electorate, holding off the next oscillation toward grandiosity or gloom. Where democracy exists, strengthen it and defend it against foreign subversion, if necessary with arms. Where it doesn’t, take care to understand particular movements for change, and offer only support that preserves their legitimacy. Align U.S. policy with the universal desire for freedom, but maintain a keen sense of unintended consequences and no illusions of easy success.

Liberalism suffers from inherent weaknesses that Putin and other autocrats shrewdly exploit. Championing borderless values such as freedom and equality, it falls prey to a kind of imperialist zeal (in his September speech announcing the illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin held up Russia as a bulwark against Western colonialism). Declining to affirm any transcendent moral order, liberalism loses its attractive power when it offers a flat world with a smartphone in every pocket and nothing meaningful to live for. And it triggers bitter reaction when it fails to grasp the abiding appeal of nationalism.

In the age of Putin, Xi, and Trump, liberalism and nationalism seem to be mortally opposed. The first is universal (“globalist,” in the derisive phrase of nationalists), the second particular; the first ennobles the individual, the second exalts the community. But in a healthy society, liberalism and nationalism coexist; in fact, they’re inextricable. Without shared identity and strong social bonds, liberty atomizes citizens into consumers, spectators, gamers—easy targets for a demagogue. But national solidarity can’t endure if it’s coerced. A people kept compliant with lies of national greatness, shopping, and police roundups will turn on one another in the face of crisis.

When I asked Ukrainians what the war was about, they inevitably gave two answers in a single phrase: survival and freedom. “Patriot war and democratic war—you cannot distinguish,” Denys Surkov, a crew-cut, scowling doctor, told me. “It’s the same war.” Ukraine is fighting for its existence as an independent nation, and for the right of Ukrainians to choose their own way of life, their own form of government—which is democracy. These two causes are inseparable and reinforce each other. Without a sense of nationhood, Ukrainians wouldn’t have the unity and collective will to resist at such a steep price. Without liberal values and a democratic government, Ukraine would likely divide into ethnic and regional factions.

Something similar is true here in the U.S. Our national identity has always been rooted in democracy. Nothing else, not blood and soil, shared ethnicity or faith, common memories or moneyed pursuits, has ever really held Americans together—only what Walt Whitman called “the fervid and tremendous idea.” It’s as fragile as it is compelling, and when it fails, we dissolve into hateful little tribes, and autocrats here and abroad smile and rub their hands. Don’t imagine that America can bring the light of freedom to the world, but don’t think the world will be better off if we just stop trying.

This article appears in the December 2022 print edition with the headline “America Can Still Lead.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Blob Meets the Heartland - The Atlantic

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:13:50 +0000

For most of my three and a half decades as an American diplomat, the foreign-policy establishment (known unaffectionately in some quarters as “the blob”) took for granted that expansive U.S. leadership abroad would deliver peace and prosperity at home. That assumption was lazy, and often flawed.

Riding the waves of globalization and American geopolitical dominance, we overreached. We deluded ourselves with magical thinking about our capacity to remake other societies, while neglecting the urgent need to remake our own. Unsurprisingly, the disconnect widened between the Washington policy establishment and the citizens it is meant to serve.

Globalization and the deregulated flow of goods, services, and capital didn’t lift all boats. Instead, much of the American middle class—the engine of our country’s historic rise—wound up shipwrecked by income stagnation, automation and outsourcing, economic inequality, educational debt, and crippling health and housing costs. The coronavirus pandemic has only deepened these dislocations, making a reset of U.S. foreign policy’s relationship with the middle class even more urgent.

By the time I left government several years ago, well before the pandemic broke, it was already well past time to reconnect foreign policy to domestic renewal. Now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, I share my colleagues’ interest in playing a part in this effort. The result is a new report, “Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class,” the culmination of a systematic, two-year survey of three heartland states—Ohio, Colorado, and Nebraska.

William J. Burns: The United States needs a new foreign policy

Led by a bipartisan task force of seasoned policy makers and experts, our team sought to determine what changes to U.S. foreign policy are needed to advance the well-being of America’s middle class. The group’s starting point was something of an unnatural act for Washington’s foreign-policy elite: listening—rather than preaching—to middle-class citizens.

The Carnegie Endowment is a venerable institution, but it is better known in foreign capitals and the Acela corridor than in most parts of America. Mindful of the old Ronald Reagan adage that the most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” we partnered with researchers at public universities to conduct hundreds of interviews across all three states. The team talked with state officials and labor leaders, with small-business owners and mayors. We analyzed the economy and different trend lines. We were well aware that the middle class in each of those states is hardly monolithic, and that economic realities, social structures, and political attitudes vary widely across all of them.

The conversations we had showed more nuance, pragmatism, and common sense in the heartland than the hyperpolarized and partisan policy debates display in Washington. People appreciated being asked their views about how foreign policy could serve them better, but many also expressed frustration that reaching out had taken so long. As one straightforward Nebraskan put it, “We didn’t really expect anyone from Washington to pay attention, especially after you folks have screwed things up so badly.”

Many of the ranchers and soybean farmers our team interviewed in Nebraska applauded efforts to push back against the predatory trade and investment practices of China, but worried about the damaging impact of tariffs and the loss of overseas markets. Manufacturing workers in Ohio didn’t necessarily see how foreign aid affected them in the abstract but appreciated the importance of U.S. support for Japan after the 2011 tsunami, which badly disrupted the supply chain on which Honda—the biggest manufacturing employer in the state—depended. Many of the Coloradans and Ohioans our researchers spoke with accepted the need for greater restraint in military spending, but people in Colorado Springs (the home of three military bases and the U.S. Air Force Academy) and Dayton (near Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio’s largest single-site employer) saw cuts to the defense budget as existential threats to their local economy.

Most of those we interviewed saw the value of America’s allies and our country’s active global leadership, but they expected other countries to invest more in their own military and contribute a greater share of the costs of securing peace. They were also skeptical of Washington’s foreign-policy extremes—its episodic crusading impulses as well as its bouts of isolationism.

At a time when nearly 60 percent of Americans expect their children to be worse off financially than they are, the middle-class citizens we spoke with sought practical solutions. They saw the opportunities created by expanded trade and foreign investment, and felt the inevitable effects of technology and automation on traditional manufacturing. What they sought was a level playing field to help them compete. As one woman in Marion, Ohio, put it, “We will do what we can to reinvent ourselves and look to the future, but just let us have a fighting chance.”

Jim Tankersley: We killed the middle class. Here’s how we can revive it.

The Carnegie task-force report offers an array of detailed recommendations to help ensure that U.S. foreign policy delivers for the middle class. Three broad priorities stand out.

First, foreign-economic policy needs to aim less at simply opening markets abroad, and much more directly at inclusive economic growth at home. For decades, the economic benefits of globalization and U.S. leadership abroad have skewed toward big multinational corporations and top earners. This needs to change.

The U.S. government has to help ensure that the advantages of globalization are distributed more equitably, by supporting industries and communities disadvantaged by market openings. A crucial step is to create a National Competitiveness Strategy to guarantee that government—at all levels—plays a more active role in helping our people and our businesses thrive in the 21st-century global economy. Rather than focus simply on reducing the costs of doing business in the United States, we ought to emphasize enhancing the productivity of our workforce, investing in education, and reinvigorating research and development in biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and other key pillars of our economy in the decades ahead.

Another important dimension of this new approach is to think beyond the manufacturing sector—as important as it is—and also address the concerns of the majority of middle-class households whose members work in other sectors, including services. We need to modernize trade enforcement tools to ensure that we can take earlier, faster, and more effective action against unfair trade practices, and put the onus on government—not small and medium-size businesses—to initiate enforcement measures. The objective should be a far more resilient middle class, served by a foreign policy that helps it compete better, and cushions it against the impact of economic shocks overseas.

U.S. foreign policy should also look beyond trade and prioritize other issues whose economic and social impacts are acutely felt at home. Diplomacy and international partnerships ought to be the first line of defense against the looming threats of climate change, cyberattacks, and future pandemics. A crucial component of immigration reform is active diplomacy that aims to help ensure border security, create safe gateways for the workers and immigrants who add dynamism to our economy and society, and anchor people in Central America and Mexico to a sense of security and economic possibility.

Read: Immigrants give America a foreign-policy advantage

Second, this is not a time for restorationist fantasies or grand bumper-sticker ambitions in foreign policy. The people interviewed in the Carnegie study had little appetite for a new, all-consuming cold war with China, or a cosmic struggle pitting democracies against authoritarian states. Those impulses would be the best way to widen, not narrow, the disconnect between Washington’s foreign-policy establishment and Americans beyond the Beltway.

What the Americans we talked with seem to be looking for is a humbler foreign policy, more restrained about using military force and more disciplined about employing diplomacy first. Values and human rights matter, from their perspective, and America ought to invest in rebuilding the power of its example. But the U.S. should adopt a temperate agenda, forthright in standing up against repression, while honest about the limits of its capacity to transform other societies.

Finally, accomplishing this agenda will require breaking down the silos in which domestic and foreign policy have long operated. That will demand organizational and cultural shifts. It will take time and effort to build a generation of practitioners with the fluency in both domestic- and foreign-policy making to manage their interaction effectively. And while efforts to integrate the security and economic dimensions of foreign policy have made some progress, they need to be accelerated and better fused with domestic-policy making.

For individual agencies, such as the State Department, opportunities exist to deepen partnerships with state and local governments on global economic issues, as well as on problems of climate change and public health. A State Department urgently committed to diversity and reflecting the society it represents will deepen its domestic roots. And it can further strengthen its connections to its constituents through assignments in the offices of mayors and governors, and in businesses across America.

Many years ago, when I was a young diplomat, Secretary of State George Shultz used to invite outbound U.S. ambassadors for a brief, predeparture chat. He would gesture to the large globe in his office and ask the new ambassador to “point to your country.” Inevitably, their mind on their new assignment, the ambassadors would put their fingers on the country to which they were headed. Shultz would gently steer their fingers back across the globe to the United States. He’d remind them never to forget where they came from, or whose interests they served. Not a bad reminder then, and even more important now.

William J. Burns: A Letter to America's Discarded Public Servants - The Atlantic

Fri, 15 May 2026 22:13:43 +0000

Sign up for National Security, a newsletter featuring coverage of rising authoritarianism, military intelligence, and geopolitical conflicts.

Dear Colleagues,

For three and a half decades as a career diplomat, I walked across the lobby of the State Department countless times—inspired by the Stars and Stripes and humbled by the names of patriots etched into our memorial wall. It was heartbreaking to see so many of you crossing that same lobby in tears following the reduction in force in July, carrying cardboard boxes with family photos and the everyday remains of proud careers in public service. After years of hard jobs in hard places—defusing crises, tending alliances, opening markets, and helping Americans in distress—you deserved better.

The same is true for so many other public servants who have been fired or pushed out in recent months: the remarkable intelligence officers I was proud to lead as CIA director, the senior military officers I worked with every day, the development specialists I served alongside overseas, and too many others with whom we’ve served at home and abroad.

The work you all did was unknown to many Americans, rarely well understood or well appreciated. And under the guise of reform, you all got caught in the crossfire of a retribution campaign—of a war on public service and expertise.

Those of us who have served in public institutions understand that serious reforms are overdue. Of course we should remove bureaucratic hurdles that prevent agencies like the State Department from operating efficiently. But there is a smart way and a dumb way to tackle reform, a humane way and an intentionally traumatizing way.

If today’s process were truly about sensible reform, career officers—who typically rotate roles every few years—wouldn’t have been fired simply because their positions have fallen out of political favor.

If this process were truly about sensible reform, crucial experts in technology or China policy in whom our country has invested so much wouldn’t have been pushed out.

If this process were truly about reform, it would have addressed not only the manifestations of bloat and inefficiencies but also their causes—including congressionally mandated budget items.

And if this process were truly about sensible reform, you and your families wouldn’t have been treated with gleeful indignity. One of your colleagues, a career diplomat, was given just six hours to clear out his office. “When I was expelled from Russia,” he said, “at least Putin gave me six days to leave.”

No, this is not about reform. It is about retribution. It is about breaking people and breaking institutions by sowing fear and mistrust throughout our government. It is about paralyzing public servants—making them apprehensive about what they say, how it might be interpreted, and who might report on them. It is about deterring anyone from daring to speak truth to power.

I served six presidents: three Republicans and three Democrats. It was my duty to faithfully implement their decisions, even when I didn’t agree with them. Career public servants have a profound obligation to execute the decisions of elected leaders, whether we voted for them or not; that discipline is essential to any democratic system.

Many of your fellow officers purged at the State Department were doing just that—faithfully executing decisions that ran contrary to their professional advice and preferences. They may not have supported the cancellation of Fulbright scholarships, the resettlement of Afrikaners, the expulsion of the Afghan partners who fought and bled with us for two decades, but they implemented those policies anyway. Still, those officers were fired.

Tensions between elected political leaders and career public servants are hardly new. Each of the presidents I served harbored periodic concerns about the reliability and sluggishness of government bureaucracy. Although individual officers could be remarkably resourceful, the State Department as an institution was rarely accused of being too agile or too full of initiative. There is a difference, however, between fixing bureaucratic malaise and hammering professional public servants into politicized robots.

Good on Paper: Maybe we do need DOGE

That’s what autocrats do. They cow public servants into submission—and in doing so, they create a closed system that is free of opposing views and inconvenient concerns. Their policy making, their ability to realize their aims, suffers as a result.

Vladimir Putin’s foolish decision to invade Ukraine in February 2022 offers a powerful example. Putin operated within a tight circle in the run-up to the war. He relied on a handful of long-serving advisers who either shared his flawed assumptions about Ukraine’s ability to resist and the West’s willingness to support it, or had learned a long time ago that it was not career-enhancing to question Putin’s judgment. The results, especially in the first year of the war, were catastrophic for Russia.

For all its flaws and imperfections, our system still allows disciplined dissent—and it’s better for it. Just as it is the duty of public servants to carry out orders we don’t agree with, it is also our duty to be honest about our concerns within appropriate channels—or to resign if we can’t in good conscience follow those orders. Sound decision making suffers if experts feel like they cannot offer their candid or contrary insights.

I could not have done my job as an ambassador, as a deputy secretary of state, or as the CIA director unless my colleagues were straightforward about their views. When I led secret talks with the Iranians more than a decade ago, I needed the unvarnished advice of diplomats and intelligence officers to help me navigate the complex world of nuclear programs and Iranian decision making. I needed colleagues to question my judgment sometimes, and offer creative, hard-nosed solutions.

There is a real danger in punishing dissent—not only to our profession, but to our country. Once you start, policy can become an extension of court politics, with little airing of alternative views or consideration of second- and third-order consequences.

Like some of you, I’m old enough to have lived through other efforts at reform and streamlining. After the end of the Cold War, budgets were cut significantly, and the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the U.S. Information Agency were absorbed into the State Department. Years later, when I was serving as the American ambassador in Moscow, we reduced staff by about 15 percent over three years. None of those was a perfect process, but they were conducted in a thoughtful way, respectful of public servants and their expertise.

Long before any of us served in government, amid the escalation of the Cold War, in the 1950s, McCarthyism provided a vivid example of an alternative approach, full of deliberate trauma and casual cruelty. A generation of China specialists was falsely accused of being Communist sympathizers and driven from the State Department, kneecapping American diplomacy toward Beijing for years. Today’s “reform” process—at State and elsewhere across the federal government—bears much more resemblance to McCarthy’s costly excesses than to any other era in which I’ve served. And it’s much more damaging.

We live in a new era—one that is marked by major-power competition and a revolution in technology, and one that is more confusing, complicated, and combustible than any time before. I believe the United States still has a better hand to play than any of our rivals, unless we squander the moment and throw away some of our best cards. That’s exactly what the current administration is doing.

We cannot afford to further erode the sources of our power at home and abroad. The demolition of institutions—the dismantling of USAID and Voice of America, the planned 50 percent reduction in the State Department’s budget—is part of a bigger strategic self-immolation. We’ve put at risk the network of alliances and partnerships that is the envy of our rivals. We’ve even gutted the research funding that powers our economy.

If intelligence analysts at the CIA saw our rivals engage in this kind of great-power suicide, we would break out the bourbon. Instead, the sound we hear is of champagne glasses clinking in the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai.

Of course we should put our own national interests first. But winning in an intensely competitive world means thinking beyond narrowly defined self-interest and building coalitions that counterbalance our adversaries; it requires working together on “problems without passports” such as climate change and global health challenges, which no single country can solve on its own.

At our best, over the years I served in government, we were guided by enlightened self-interest, a balance of hard power and soft power. That’s what produced victory in the Cold War, the reunification of Germany, the coalition success in Operation Desert Storm, peace in the Balkans, nuclear-arms-control treaties, and the defense of Ukraine against Putin’s aggression. The bipartisan PEPFAR program is a shining example of America at its best—saving tens of millions of people from the deadly threat of HIV/AIDS while also fostering some measure of stability in sub-Saharan Africa, establishing wider trust in American leadership, and keeping Americans safe.

We weren’t always at our best, or always especially enlightened, as we stumbled into protracted and draining conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, or when we didn’t press allies hard enough to contribute their fair share. Criticism of the current administration should not obscure any of that, or suggest a misplaced nostalgia for an imperfect past.

From the December 2022 issue: George Packer on a new theory of American power

The growing danger today, however, is that we’re focused exclusively on the “self” part of enlightened self-interest—at the expense of the “enlightened” part. The threat we face is not from an imaginary “deep state” bent on undermining an elected president, but from a weak state of hollowed-out institutions and battered and belittled public servants, no longer able to uphold the guardrails of our democracy or help the United States compete in an unforgiving world. We won’t beat hostile autocrats by imitating them.

Many years ago, when I was finishing graduate school and trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my professional life, my father sent me a note. He was a career Army officer, a remarkably decent man, and the best model of public service I have ever known. “Nothing can make you prouder,” my dad wrote, “than to serve your country with honor.” I’ve spent the past 40 years learning the truth in his advice.

I am deeply proud to have served alongside so many of you. Your expertise and your often quietly heroic public service have made an immeasurable contribution to the best interests of our country. You swore an oath—not to a party or a president, but to the Constitution. To the people of the United States.

To protect us. To defend us. To keep us safe.

You’ve fulfilled your oath, just as those still serving in government are trying their best to fulfill theirs. So will the next generation of public servants.

All of us have a profound stake in shaping their inheritance. I worry about how much damage we will do in the meantime. There is still a chance that the next generation will serve in a world where we curb the worst of our current excesses—stop betraying the ideals of public service, stop firing experts just because their statistics are unwelcome, and stop blowing up institutions that matter to our future. There is still a chance that the next generation could be present at the creation of a new era for America in the world, in which we’re mindful of our many strengths but more careful about overreach.

There is, sadly, room for doubt about those chances. At this pivotal moment, there’s a growing possibility that we will inflict so much damage on ourselves and our place in the world that those future public servants will instead find themselves present at the destruction—a self-inflicted, generational setback to American leadership and national security.

But what I do not doubt is the abiding importance of public service, and the value of what you have done with yours. And I know that you will continue to serve in different ways, helping to stand watch over our great experiment, even as too many of our elected leaders seem to be turning their backs on it.

With appreciation to you and your families,

This article appears in the October 2025 print edition with the headline “You Deserved Better.”

The Classiest Late-Night Host

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:25:04 +0000

When a celebrity stops by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, they aren’t there to lip-synch to a pop song. Colbert’s approach has been marked, instead, by a sincerity that’s rare in the 11:35 p.m. block: He had Joe Biden on during the coronavirus pandemic to discuss how to handle grief, and a conversation with Dua Lipa about Colbert’s Catholic faith seemed to come out of nowhere, light but never flippant. Colbert, a veteran comedy performer, doesn’t always take himself so seriously, of course; he was just as eager to ask former First Lady Michelle Obama to do an impression of her husband, Barack, and was delighted to hear the actor Saoirse Ronan speak in her native Irish accent.

Colbert has never been shy about his intellectual bent. Whereas The Late Show’s prior steward, David Letterman, was happier to playfully bicker with guests, his successor took a surprisingly heady path. It ended up being the right one to chart: a calming counterbalance to Jimmy Fallon’s bite-size-clip harvesting and the more pointed political work being done by his peers Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver.

Colbert has sprinkled earnestness amid the gags since he took the reins of The Late Show more than 10 years ago. It’s a tack unlike any other in late night; it will be unmistakably lost when he departs on May 21—and missed by both his viewers and his guests. When the filmmaker Christopher Nolan presented the trailer for his new blockbuster, The Odyssey, on the show earlier this month, for instance, his appearance was a rarity for the press-shy Oscar winner. Even more distinctive was Colbert’s eagerness to discuss the Homeric epic that Nolan was adapting: “I know you don’t do this very often—don’t do the late-night shows,” Colbert told him. “Only you, actually,” Nolan murmured in reply.

Last July, The Late Show’s network, CBS, announced that the program would end its run the following May; CBS called the decision a purely financial one in the face of changing viewer behavior. No doubt, watching TV live is becoming a thing of the past, and the glitzy nightly talk show that used to be a network cash cow has become a trickier economic proposition. But Colbert’s forced departurestill raised many an eyebrow, given that CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, had recently settled a lawsuit with President Trump over a 60 Minutes interview and was angling for government approval of a potential takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The president has made it clear that he is no fan of Colbert, a frequent critic of his administration, and CBS seemed not to consider The Late Show valuable enough to defend it against any similar blowback.

[Read: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crown]

The Late Show’s final season has been slightly odd and funereal, but that’s largely just indicative of what the TV landscape is about to lose. What other comedian on the air would be able to, mid-interview, remind his guest that the poet Ovid actually went by his middle name? (“There you go—you’re pulling rank again,” Nolan replied to Colbert’s correction, adding, “You don’t have to tell me, because I wouldn’t know what the hell you were saying.”) Colbert turned a program defined by Letterman’s penchant for snark into something quite estimable: the classiest broadcast in late night, whose host was unafraid to embrace playfulness or throw a sharp elbow at the White House when necessary.

The most intriguing thing about Colbert’s Late Show, though, has been the way that it didn’t challenge the form. For decades, late-night TV has introduced trailblazers trying to break, or reinvent, the staid routine of stand-up monologues and celebrity chitchat. In the 1980s, Letterman caustically rejected the schmoozy style of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show with his follow-on program, Late Night. In the ’90s, when Letterman took that vibe to CBS to launch The Late Show, his replacement, Conan O’Brien, brought an anarchic, surreal approach that went on to influence a new generation of comedians. Colbert himself was the talk-show firebrand of the 2000s with The Colbert Report, where he metamorphosed the sharp political comedy of Stewart’s TheDaily Show into a never-ending parody, a cable-news satire that doubled as a nightly piece of performance art.

When CBS hired Colbert, I worried that the host of such a distinctly arch comedy show would be an odd fit for a bigger, more mainstream brand. Indeed, his early months on The Late Show were rocky; Colbert seemed uncertain about simply being himself after playing a character for so long. He brought back his Colbert Report persona,had Stewart pop up in surprise gags, and generally struggled with how to differentiate himself while his time-slot mate, Fallon, pumped out goofy interviews and games at The Tonight Show that produced viral clips. In 2016, CBS foisted a showrunner on Colbert’s program to give it more structure; around the same time, The Late Show started to lean more heavily on political humor. Later, Colbert recalled that his producer (and old friend) Paul Dinello had encouraged him in that direction, despite his trepidation to do so amid what he called in a New York Times interview “increasingly contentious public discourse.” According to Colbert, Dinello argued that topical jokes are “the part the audience wants to see.”

[Read: David Letterman’s long shadow]

Dinello was right, and The Late Show eventually became late night’s ratings leader—a throne that CBS is now voluntarily abdicating. But although Colbert’s performance frequently involved taking jabs at Trump and making pleas for common decency in America’s politics, to me, these weren’t what defined his tenure on the show. The clips I revisit the most speak to his empathetic nature, which revealed itself more and more as The Late Show went on. Take his exchange with Keanu Reeves, in which he asked the actor, “What do you think happens when we die?” (as part of a rapid-fire series), and Reeves pondered and replied, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” This moment of sweet profundity would have felt more jarring on Letterman’s or O’Brien’s show,but Colbert expanded it as a recurring feature: an existential questionnaire to pose to other celebrity guests, searching for an insightful peek into their brain; it’s a much more tender version of a viral segment.

I would love to see Colbert lean into his wackier side again once he is free of CBS; he remains an incredibly agile improviser who loves to go down the silliest rabbit holes when prompted. (His podcast appearances are a great example of that—such as this hilariously complex tangent about commuting in Chicago.) Possibly, he’ll follow the same route that O’Brien and Letterman have taken—the former with his podcast, and the latter on Netflix—doing long-form interviews with famous people that are unbound by the strictures of network TV.Notably, however, the first post–Late Show project he’s announced is co-writing a movie in the Lord of the Rings universe—one of his deepest, nerdiest interests.Losing The Late Show will not diminish Colbert in the slightest, but it will diminish the medium of late-night TV, which enters its true twilight as a profitable source of entertainment for the masses.

The Best Graduation Speech Is One Nobody Remembers

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:25:04 +0000

Congratulations. After four years of hard work, you—or your son or daughter, or grandson or granddaughter, or neighbor or niece, or other sort of ramen eater—are graduating from college. It wasn’t easy. It was probably also very expensive. You may have thought, I’m not sure I will make it. I thought that too. And I remembered that feeling when I dropped in, last night, for late-night custard at Famous Local Diner With Not-So-Secret Custard. But I did make it, and so did you. And here we are together, having made it. The sun is shining, and the rest of your lives are ahead of you.

That’s the structure and message of a commencement speech. An accomplished and maybe-famous person is probably giving a similar address right now to a sea of graduation caps spread across a green lawn and under blue skies. All of those hardworking graduates will probably forget the content of the address by tomorrow, if not earlier–and that’s fine.

A good commencement speech is not aimed at posterity, proffered to everyone for all time. Instead, it is a temporary moment in which a speaker brings a community together in the moment they share together, and which evaporates immediately thereafter.

Dispensing memorable advice is “good in concept,” David Murray, who runs the Professional Speechwriters Association, told me. But it’s a high-wire act that works on vanishingly rare occasions. Think Steve Jobs at Stanford (“Stay hungry, stay foolish”), David Foster Wallace at Kenyon (“This Is Water”), Toni Morrison at Wellesley (“True adulthood””), or John F. Kennedy at American University (“Not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”). But if the speaker isn’t Morrison (who among us has such a way with words?), these speeches are best when they are disposable.

[Drew Gilpin Faust: The strange ritual of commencement speeches]

An old quip holds that being a commencement speaker is like being the corpse at a wake: The event needs one to take place, but the person who plays the role doesn’t have to do much. But even doing very little can still go terribly wrong. Some speakers are chosen for bad reasons, such as their relationship to a donor. Others have no relationship to the school or town and come off as clueless. Other speakers do not prepare and just wing it. Still others go dark but ask for help at the last minute, when a speech can be only salvaged instead of prepared. Some commencement speakers even show up visibly intoxicated.

But even for the ones who do everything right, the graduation speech poses a tricky challenge. A commencement speech is less about the speaker than the audience and the reason they are gathered for the speech. Graduation speakers ought to be renowned, of course—otherwise, why would they get to make the address? But they must make themselves understood as a part of the group that is celebrating graduation.

And that act requires disappearing into the background. Graduation is a ritual that works more or less the same in all cases. And as Murray put it, “the ritual is the thing.” The University of Florida speechwriter Aaron Hoover even defined a formula for it: The speaker’s job is to carry out the celebratory ritual in a way that foregrounds the graduating class, the families, and the college itself. Cosmic wisdom is less relevant than the comforting sentiment that everything is going to be okay.

Seen from that perspective, the supposedly greatest speeches, like those delivered by Jobs and Wallace, actually violate the principles of commencement speeches by having a life after graduation. That seems weird. But “commencement speeches are weird,” Jim Reische, special adviser to the president for executive communications at Williams College, told me.

Hearing Reische explain the matter, I tried to recall my own graduation speaker. It was Bill Cosby, a name that seemed impressive back then, in the 1990s, but which has since been sullied. But neither Cosby’s former glory nor his present impurity caused me to recall anything the former pudding-pop spokesperson had actually said at my graduation. Instead, I simply recalled the fact of it—me being there, the event happening, and him being physically present for it, along with me. “Just give them a nice kind of homily, and then get them to the cocktail party and on their way,” Reische said.

This century has seen an arms race in commencement-address celebrity. In the past, a graduation speaker was most often a renowned scholar performing the act as an honor. In the early 2000s colleges and universities started using commencement speakers to compete for prestige, Reische told me. “Some of them were paying a lot of money,” he said, and like everything else, the honor became confused with opportunism (the University of Houston paid Matthew McConaughey $166,000 for a 2015 graduation speech; Katie Couric received $110,00 from the University of Oklahoma in 2006, although the news anchor reportedly donated the fee to charity). Carrying out the ritual in an effective manner took a back seat, at times, to landing a figurehead like Michelle Obama or Taylor Swift.

The process is made challenging by organizational politics. These days, most colleges and universities perform a complex process to identify and invite a commencement speaker, usually involving negotiations among a committee of students and faculty, and an administration seeking to acknowledge an alumnus, woo a donor, or outshine a competitor. Many commencement speakers are given honorary degrees, but the prestige associated with such matters has declined over the years; six-figure piles of cash surely seem more useful than an ersatz doctorate given to an accomplished alumnus or once-local homegirl.

Controversy surrounding campus speech of all kinds has complicated matters further. This week, a graduation speaker at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, got booed after praising artificial intelligence in her remarks. Rutgers University canceled a graduation speech by Rami Elghandour scheduled for Friday, after students reportedly complained about the tech entrepreneur’s pro-Palestine social-media posts. And New York University students took issue with Jonathan Haidt’s scheduled address, on the grounds that selecting the NYU social psychologist (and Atlantic contributor) and author of best-selling books such as The Coddling of the American Mind disregards “the very real-world crises and systemic hurdles that have defined our graduates’ experiences.” These examples might seem to highlight intolerance and suppressed speech on campus. But they also demonstrate that graduation remarks do not exist outside of that debate.

[Jonathan Haidt: Pay attention]

No matter how much one might favor free-speech absolutism on campus, the graduation ceremony is not really the place for such controversy. It is easy, if not always simple, to express one’s strongly held convictions on behalf of the self who holds them. It is harder to bring a whole community of differently minded people together around a shared accomplishment. “This is a really important day for a lot of people in that audience, and the goal is to make the day about them,” Reische told me.

The speechwriters I spoke with for this story, including Reische and Beth Bowden, a speechwriter at Washington University in St. Louis, where I am on faculty, told me that wrangling commencement speakers can be wearying. Few take up the offer for writing consultation—even if just to ensure that they aren’t saying something contrary to what another speaker, or the university chancellor, might have just said on stage. Some don’t even show up to sound check.

Conan O’Brien’s 2011 Dartmouth College speech might be the model commencement address. O’Brien allowed the place and the context to take center stage, rather than his own humor or fame. He said nothing worthy of anthologizing. He cited multiple examples of local Dartmouth and Hanover, New Hampshire, culture—a technique the former Al Gore speechwriter Eric Schnure calls the “howdahell,” a hook that connects the speaker to a specific audience in a specific place, such that they ask themselves, “How the hell did he know that?” O’Brien ranked Dartmouth over his own alma mater of Harvard, where he had also given a commencement speech a decade earlier. And once he established that trust, he delivered an earnest but essentially generic piece of life advice: “Whatever you think your dream is now, it will probably change.”

Such an effort requires humility, a virtue that feels depleted these days. Instead, righteousness rules. Last month, the former Barack Obama speechwriter Zev Karlin-Neumann urged the renowned individuals preparing to stand before the class of 2026 to engage with politics directly in their addresses. Given a “profound crisis in our democracy,” he argued, commencement speakers “owe” the graduates “more than recycled anecdotes.” But in light of that crisis, perhaps the most important work a commencement speaker can do is to rise above it, momentarily—to bring a community of people together through what they share in this fleeting moment, rather than to dwell on how they are being driven apart.

The World Cup Worry List - The Atlantic

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:25:04 +0000

On Saturday, Markwayne Mullin, the Department of Homeland Security secretary, used a speech at Kansas City International Airport to deliver an unusual message. Customs and Border Protection officers stood around him as a backdrop, and in his right hand, Mullin held the squishy pink ball he carries as a stress-management tool, gripping it as he spoke. The United States isn’t fully prepared to host the biggest, most expensive sporting event in world history—and, he wanted to make clear, it’s not his fault.

Kansas City, Missouri, will be one of 11 U.S. host sites for the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which starts June 11. The soccer tournament is the world’s most popular sporting event, and Mullin said the United States is expecting as many as 7 million international visitors. Although Mexico and Canada are co-hosting the tournament, more than three-quarters of the matches will be played in the U.S., and Mullin has likened the security challenge to protecting “78 Super Bowls.”

Mullin said that the 76-day DHS funding shutdown this spring put the safety of the World Cup in jeopardy, and he blamed “kamikaze Democrats” who “will do anything to destroy our nation as long as they can find a way to get back to power.” The shutdown—over Democrats’ demands to rein in ICE—ended April 30 when Republicans settled for a procedural work-around. “Can we still deliver? Yes,” Mullin said. “Were we able to be as proactive? No. Absolutely not.”

Mullin, who took over the department in March after President Trump ousted Kristi Noem, has acknowledged that he is not a soccer fan. But as a former wrestler, he knows how to set up a takedown. Although the stated purpose of Mullin’s speech was to promote a Republican proposal for an additional $70 billion to fund immigration enforcement, it also allowed him to pre-deflect blame if something bad were to happen during the World Cup. Mullin made appearances on Fox News this week to drive that message home.

Mullin has lots of reasons to worry. The war with Iran and its proxies. The presence of foreign leaders and top U.S. officials, including Trump, at the games. Lone-wolf attackers with innumerable possible grievances. In an era of heightened political violence, any high-profile public event is a potential target for extremists, and the country remains deeply polarized and heavily armed.

Mullin said he is especially concerned about “soft” areas outside the stadiums: Bars, restaurants, and public transportation will be packed with crowds. Missouri has mobilized its National Guard to help with those locations, and Mullin urged other states to follow. “Everybody remembers the correspondent dinner with the active shooter,” Mullin said in Kansas City, referring to the event last month in Washington, D.C., that was cut short by a gunman’s failed attack.

Read: The new anarchy

Each host city will be responsible for coordinating the security of its venues, and DHS, the FBI, and other federal agencies will provide logistical support. FIFA, which organizes the World Cup, has provided $625 million for additional security funding to the host cities through FEMA (which is part of DHS). The money was partly delayed during the shutdown, but checks have since gone out, Mullin said.

I asked a DHS official involved in the preparations what the mood was like at department headquarters with the event less than a month away. The shutdown, and Trump’s removal of Noem and her team, “definitely interrupted planning,” said the official, who is not allowed to speak with reporters. “There is confidence the team will rise to the occasion, but the challenges and the strain are real.”

The Transportation Security Administration is a main source of anxiety at DHS, two officials told me. The Trump administration is planning to deploy TSA officers to help screen fans at stadium entrances, and heightened attention will be paid to games attended by foreign dignitaries and U.S. leaders. The stadium work will divert officers away from U.S. airports that are expected to be busy with an influx of soccer fans. DHS declined to tell me how many TSA officers it plans to send to stadiums.

Mullin said on Fox News recently that TSA lost nearly 8 percent of its workforce when its staff went without pay during the shutdown. The agency has about 65,000 employees, including roughly 50,000 transportation-security officers. The DHS official I spoke with outside official channels told me that TSA officials “aren’t adequately prepared to manage the stadium work and the airport work.”

DHS’s digital defenses are even more ragged. On Tuesday, Mullin told Fox News that the U.S. cybersecurity agency, CISA, lost 1,100 staffers during the shutdown—a third of its workforce. “You can’t have connectivity with local law enforcement and emergency management without having secure cyber,” he said. “We are months behind.”

The DHS official I spoke with mentioned concerns about potential travel delays at land-border crossings with Mexico and Canada, especially between Seattle and Vancouver, British Columbia, where the two cities have several back-to-back games. CBP is preparing to temporarily reassign some airport officers to those land crossings. One agency official I spoke with said that new facial-recognition technology and other improvements will help speed up processing times, but visitors unfamiliar with CBP screening procedures could slow things down.

Seattle is preparing to stage a Pride celebration on June 26, the same day the city is scheduled to host a match between Iran and Egypt, two nations that criminalize homosexuality. Egypt’s soccer federation sent a letter to FIFA in December “categorically rejecting any activities related to supporting homosexuality during the match.” Amid their country’s ongoing war with the United States, Iran’s soccer authorities have also demanded a ban on rainbow Pride flags in the stadium.

Read: The quintessential Trumpian sport

Federal aviation authorities have banned unauthorized drone flights over the stadiums, and Andrew Giuliani, the director of the White House’s World Cup task force, has described drone incursions as a leading threat. DHS has been issuing grants to cities and states—not only those hosting World Cup games—to stop illegal drone flights, and Trump officials organized a conference last November for cities and states to meet with private companies that manufacture counter-drone technologies. But two DHS officials told me that the decentralized approach to drone response creates a risk that some stadiums will be better prepared than others.

Trump officials say they’re preparing for a possible surge in sex-trafficking cases during the tournament. On Monday, the Treasury Department issued a bulletin through its financial-crimes division warning that “individuals visiting or residing near host cities may be vulnerable to sex or labor trafficking” amid “the surge in economic activity” created by the World Cup. ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division, which leads anti-trafficking efforts and seizes counterfeit merchandise, is preparing to deploy around the games, but any mention of an ICE presence at the World Cup may leave some foreign-born fans on edge.

DHS officials say that ICE’s immigration-enforcement officers have no plans to target the tournament. “Routine immigration enforcement operations will continue consistently with longstanding DHS policy,” Lauren Bis, a department spokesperson, told me in a statement. “At this time, there are no plans for large-scale immigration enforcement operations specifically targeting World Cup venues or attendees.”

It is an irony of the “America First” era that the Trump administration gets to host the two biggest sporting events in the world within a span of two years. The 2026 World Cup has been talked about as a security test run for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but in many ways, the cup is the bigger challenge. It involves 11 cities, rather than one, posing a greater risk of stretching federal resources too thinly. The crowds at the stadiums will be much bigger, and the money will be too.

Some host cities seem to be preparing with the same degree of trepidation that Mullin has conveyed. Mike Sena, the executive director of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center—a fusion center for law-enforcement agencies—testified to Congress earlier this year that the delayed delivery of $51 million in grant funding to the Bay Area as a result of the shutdown left agencies little time to get ready. Both San Francisco and New Jersey have canceled plans to set up a large outdoor “fan fest” showing matches on giant TVs for thousands of spectators. Local organizers said they’re now planning to hold viewing parties at smaller venues, and although they did not specifically cite security concerns for the move, those outdoor “soft” sites can be challenging and costly to secure.

Read: Here’s another way America will choke at the World Cup

FIFA’s 2018 selection of Canada, Mexico, and the United States to host the World Cup was celebrated at the time as a crowning achievement of North American economic integration. Since then, Trump has scrapped the NAFTA treaty that was the foundation of that vision. Later this year, once the games are over, the three countries are due to renegotiate the USMCA, the successor to NAFTA. Trump is threatening to withdraw entirely and is feuding with Canada over tariffs and threatening unilateral military strikes on cartel targets in Mexico. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told me in a statement that Trump is “focused on ensuring that this is not only an incredible experience for all fans and visitors, but also the safest and most secure in history.”

Politics will loom over the games nonetheless. Immigrant fans, especially from Latin America and Africa, are pillars of the U.S. soccer-going public. They have also been prime targets for Trump’s mass-deportation campaign. Immigrants often root for the nation of their birth, even if they have little or no desire to live there again, and it seems safe to expect the matches to fire up culture-war battles over “divided loyalties” and what it means for immigrants to successfully assimilate.

The best scenario, and one that has played out in other host nations as anxieties increase during the countdown, is that the on-field drama of the games is compelling enough to keep attention on the players and their teams. That outcome will also require competent American security, and possibly some uncharacteristic deference from a U.S. president who enjoys being the center of attention. FIFA’s leaders have been cultivating Trump seemingly for this very reason, awarding him their inaugural “peace prize” last year. They’re hoping the American president will be happy as a successful host even if he can’t be the star of the show.

Michael Scherer contributed to this report.

Photos of the Week: Tractor Race, Rocket Festival, Drone Evacuation

Fri, 15 May 2026 15:25:04 +0000

Michael Probst / AP

A seagull catches a crab in the Baltic Sea in Burg on the island of Fehmarn, Germany, on May 14, 2026.

\Kuba Stezycki / Reuters

The Flowcopter FC100 heavy-lift unmanned aerial vehicle hovers with a dummy simulating an injured soldier during NATO’s Sword 26 exercise, as allied forces test drone-assisted casualty evacuation in Bemowo Piskie, Poland, on May 11, 2026.

Chalinee Thirasupa / Reuters

A man rides a modified farming tractor as he competes in an annual tractor race marking the start of the rice-farming season in Ayutthaya province, Thailand, on May 10, 2026.

Dario Belingheri / Getty

The peloton advances during heavy rain in the 2026 Giro d’Italia, Stage 5, from Praia a Mare to Potenza, on May 13, 2026, in Praia a Mare, Italy.

Punit Paranjpe / AFP / Getty

Flocks of flamingos congregate in a pond in Navi Mumbai, India, on May 12, 2026.

Guillermo Arias / AFP / Getty

Children play, climbing the Mexico-U.S. border wall during Mother’s Day celebrations in Playas de Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, on May 10, 2026.

Sanaullah Seiam / AFP / Getty

Afghan children walk home from a primary school in Khvajeh Atis village in southern Afghanistan’s Zabul province on May 11, 2026.

Rodrigo Abd / AP

People protest to demand more funding for public universities in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on May 12, 2026.

Lorne Thomson / Redferns / Getty

Khn de Poitrine and Klek de Poitrine of the band Angine de Poitrine perform during the Great Escape 2026 Festival on May 13, 2026, in Brighton, England.

Andy Wong / AP

An actress is silhouetted as she performs on a water stage in Langfang City, on the outskirts of Beijing, China, on May 9, 2026.

Martin Meissner / AP

Tamara Zivkovic, of Montenegro, walks on the signature turquoise carpet during the official start of the Eurovision Song Contest week at the town hall in Vienna, Austria, on May 10, 2026.

Jeff Pachoud / AFP / Getty

Lazare, a continental toy spaniel Papillon said to be the world’s oldest dog, born in 1995, sits for a photo in Villy-le-Pelloux, France, on May 12, 2026.

Feng Shufeng / VCG / Getty

Farmers harvest chrysanthemums on May 11, 2026, in Huaibei, Anhui province, China.

Joe Raedle / Getty

Smoke billows into the air behind a motorcycle rider as firefighters work to control the Max Road Miramar fire on May 11, 2026, in Pembroke Pines, Florida. The fire had consumed approximately 7,100 acres of brush at the time, and was about 45 percent contained. A drought in Florida is one of the worst in years, and the dry conditions are contributing to fires across the state.

Omar Al-Qattaa / AFP / Getty

Akram al-Fayoumi, a 13-year-old Palestinian amputee, performs a stunt while in-line skating past destroyed buildings with his prosthetic leg attachment along a street in Gaza City on May 13, 2026. Al-Fayoumi lost his right leg and left hand because of reported Israeli bombardment on the Abdel Fattah Hammoud School in the Tuffah neighborhood of Gaza City on August 8, 2024. He subsequently received treatment in Egypt and returned to Gaza at the end of April 2026.

Timothy T. Ludwig / Imagn Images / Reuters

Buffalo Sabres center Peyton Krebs takes to the ice before a game against the Montreal Canadiens in Game 2 of the second round of the 2026 Stanley Cup Playoffs in Buffalo, New York, on May 8, 2026.

Jorge Gil / Europa Press / Getty

Hundreds of people participate in the traditional transfer of the pilgrim image of the Virgin of the Forsaken in Valencia, Valencian Community, Spain, on May 10, 2026.

Zhang Weitang / VCG / Getty

A farmer harvests paeonia lactiflora, commonly known as the Chinese peony, on May 10, 2026, in Binzhou, Shandong province, China.

Travis Teo / Reuters

A floral installation features a face at Girona Temps de Flors, or Girona Flower Festival, in Girona, Spain, on May 9, 2026.

Mark Makela / Getty

A shack leans far to the right on an abandoned homestead with a Dust Bowl–era barn on May 10, 2026, in Two Buttes, Colorado. Two Buttes currently has a population of 30, down from a previous 2,000 residents. Baca County, ground zero of the catastrophic 1930s Dust Bowl, faces conditions eerily reminiscent of that era as Colorado Governor Jared Polis activated Phase 2 of the state’s Drought Response Plan in March 2026.

Deng Heping / VCG / Getty

An aerial view of intelligent tea-picking machines harvesting tea leaves in an ecological tea garden on May 8, 2026, in Ji’an, Jiangxi province, China

Atif Aryan / AFP / Getty

Afghan men carry bundles of barley across a field for threshing during sunset in the Chimtal district of Afghanistan’s Balkh province on May 13, 2026.

Ulet Ifansasti / Getty

An aerial view of a palm-oil plantation in Langkat, North Sumatra, Indonesia, on May 9, 2026. According to the media, Indonesia is advancing its biofuel program to B50 (50 percent palm-based biodiesel) by July 1, 2026. Indonesia is the world’s top palm-oil producer, supplying more than 50 percent of global demand and has aggressively pursued biofuel development in recent years, especially palm-based biodiesel, to boost energy sovereignty and reduce fossil-fuel reliance.

Kevin Frayer / Getty

A young girl climbs to look through a gap of the closed doors of the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests at the Temple of Heaven in Beijing, China, on May 12, 2026. In a rare occurrence, the popular historic site has been closed for the next three days in preparation for a tour by U.S. President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Enea Lebrun / Reuters

Bird-watching guide Serbelino Sanapi observes birds at dawn along the airstrip of Cana Station during the Global Big Day, an annual event focused on bird-watching and citizen science, in Darien National Park, Panama, on May 9, 2026.

AS1 Georgia Callaway / MoD Crown Copyright / Getty

In this handout image provided by the U.K. Ministry of Defence, a paratrooper from 16 Air Assault jumps in tandem with an ICU nurse from a RAF Atlas A400M, which took off from Ascension Island to drop medical support and supplies on the remote Atlantic island of Tristan da Cunha on May 9, 2026. A British national who lives on the island reported symptoms of hantavirus following his disembarkation from the MV Hondius cruise ship in mid-April.

Adryel Talamantes / Anadolu / Getty

Spectators watch a rocket launch during the annual Bun Bang Fai rocket festival on May 10, 2026, in Yasothon, Thailand. The festival draws on the traditional practice of launching rockets to hasten the coming of the rainy season in Thailand’s agricultural Issan region.

Borut Zivulovic / Reuters

Approximately 450 accordion players gathered at Lake Bled for a mass performance marking one of the country’s most recognizable folk traditions in Bled, Slovenia, on May 10, 2026.