Roastidio.us in webspace https://www.theatlantic.com/

The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC and its subsidiaries own and operate digital products including: www.TheAtlantic.com and other websites; newsletters and other content we deliver via email; social media pages; and The Atlantic iOS and Android mobile apps (collectively, the “Sites”). Together, The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC and its subsidiaries are referred to below as “The Atlantic,” “we” or “our”.

Your use of the Sites, as well as your attendance at The Atlantic’s events, and associated products and services, regardless of media, is subject to the terms, conditions, and disclaimers set forth below; to our Online Privacy Policy; and to all applicable laws and regulations. In addition, The Atlantic reserves the right to terminate access to the Sites or events for any reason, and to take any other actions that The Atlantic, in its sole discretion, believes to be in the interest of the company and some or all of its users and customers. The Atlantic reserves the right to modify these disclaimers, terms, and conditions of access, without advance notice.

BY USING THESE SERVICES, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THIS AGREEMENT AND WAIVING YOUR RIGHTS TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT OR CLASS-WIDE ARBITRATION, AND YOU AGREE THAT ALL DISPUTES BETWEEN YOU AND THE ATLANTIC WILL BE BROUGHT ON AN INDIVIDUAL BASIS ONLY. PLEASE CLICK HERE FOR FURTHER INFORMATION.

Please note that our Sites are under constant development. This Agreement may therefore be modified and updated on an ongoing basis. Please check back to this page regularly.

Access

Access to the Sites is provided free of charge (although some content may only be available to paying subscribers). For The Atlantic specifically, readers may access a set number of articles (subject to change) free of charge; access to additional articles requires a subscription. Subscribers enrolled in the automatic subscription renewal program can opt out or cancel their subscription at any time by contacting our Customer Care team at [email protected] or calling (855) 940-0585. Please read our full Terms of Sale here.

Access to the Sites (including TheAtlantic.com) does not create a professional services relationship or any other relationship with The Atlantic. The Sites are provided solely for your personal, non-commercial use.

You may not develop or derive for commercial sale any data in machine-readable or other form that incorporates or uses any substantial part of the Sites nor transfer to or store any data residing or exchanged over the Sites in any electronic network for use by more than one user unless you obtain prior written permission from The Atlantic. Specifically, unless explicitly authorized in these Terms & Conditions or by the owner of the materials, you may not modify, copy, reproduce, republish, upload, post, transmit, translate, sell, create derivative works, exploit, or distribute in any manner or medium any material from the Sites. For more information about requesting permission to reproduce or distribute materials from the Sites, click here.

Access to and Use of iOS App

If you download our iOS or Android app (the “Atlantic App”), we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license to install the Atlantic App solely on the devices you will use to access the Services. You agree that we may provide you from time to time with automatic upgrades of the Atlantic App, which you will accept for installation. Please note that if you elect to download the Atlantic App from the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store you will also be bound by Apple’s sales terms or Google’s sales terms, respectively.

For users in the United States, the Atlantic App is a “commercial item,” as that term is defined in 48 C.F.R. 2.101, consisting of “commercial computer software” and “commercial computer software documentation,” as such terms are used in 48 C.F.R. 12.212. Consistent with 48 C.F.R. 12.212 and 48 C.F.R. 227.7202-1 through 227.7202-4, all U.S. Government end users acquire the Atlantic App with only those rights set forth herein. Your use of the Atlantic App must comply with all applicable import and export control laws and regulations of the United States and other countries.

Event Code of Conduct

The Atlantic is committed to creating a safe and welcoming environment at our events. To facilitate this, all event attendees must adhere to our code of conduct. Attendees are expected to remain polite, considerate, and respectful at all times. Abusive, derogatory, discriminatory, disruptive, harrassing, or threatening behavior will not be tolerated. Engaging in any kind of unacceptable behavior may result in your removal from the event and/or being barred from future events. If necessary, we will contact law enforcement.

Recording

The Atlantic’s events may be photographed, videotaped, or otherwise recorded. By attending an event, you agree to be recorded and grant The Atlantic permission to use such recordings for editorial, publicity, or other purposes.

Event Ticketing

All ticket sales for The Atlantic’s events are final unless otherwise stated.

Account Credentials and Security

Use of some of our services, including registration for an account and/or subscription for TheAtlantic.com, requires the creation of an online account log-in and password (the “Credentials”). You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your Credentials, and you are solely responsible for all activities that occur during use of your account. You agree to immediately change your password and notify us at [email protected] if you suspect or become aware of any unauthorized use of your Credentials or any other breach of security related to the Services. We reserve the right to require you to alter your Credentials if we believe that they are no longer secure. You agree that we will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your failure to adequately safeguard your Credentials.

Intellectual Property

The Atlantic and the Sites, and all other text and images contained on the Sites and in The Atlantic’s products are protected by United States trademark and copyright law and other applicable law and are the property of The Atlantic, except as otherwise identified. All copyrights and trademarks not the property of The Atlantic that are used or referred to in the Sites and The Atlantic’s products are the property of their respective owners. Nothing contained in the Sites or other products shall be construed as granting any license or other rights to any copyright, trademark, patent or other property of The Atlantic or any third party, whether by implication, laches, estoppel or explicit grant. Because the content is proprietary, any unauthorized use of materials on the Sites or other products may violate the law. If you are a copyright owner and believe infringing material is present on any of the Sites, please refer to the procedures outlined below in the section titled “The Atlantic Sites DMCA Copyright Infringement Claim Policy.”

The Atlantic’s products, including third party and licensed materials on the Sites, may not be modified, reproduced, republished, retransmitted, or displayed except for personal use. Any use for a commercial or public purpose requires specific written permission from The Atlantic.

User Submission Policy

Some of the Sites may allow users to upload, submit, and/or post images, text, video, profile information, comments, letters to the editor, e-mails, or other data and information (“User Submissions”). By uploading, creating, or submitting User Submissions to or on the Sites, or to The Atlantic through any other means:

You affirm, represent and warrant that you own the right to utilize, to license and to sublicense the User Submissions;
You grant to The Atlantic, and anyone authorized by The Atlantic, a non-exclusive, worldwide, paid-up, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual license, including right of sublicense, to use, copy, assign, display, distribute, perform, reproduce in whole or in part, and modify the User Submissions in any medium or any manner, in whole or part (whether now known or hereafter developed), without any restrictions to you, for the sole intended purpose of the Sites and/or services provided;
You grant to each user of the Sites a non-exclusive license to access the User Submissions through the Sites and to use, reproduce, distribute, display and perform such User Submissions as permitted through the functionality of the Sites and under this Agreement; and
You acknowledge and agree that The Atlantic may elect, without notice, to distribute or make available the User Submissions via RSS or other automated or programmatic means.
You acknowledge and agree that User Submissions may be permanently maintained on The Atlantic’s servers.
You acknowledge that The Atlantic is not responsible for, and cannot prevent, the publication or use of your User Submissions by any third parties who copied your User Submissions during the time in which it was displayed on the Sites.

For any User Submissions you post that you do not own, you guarantee to us that you have the legal right to post such User Submissions and that it will not violate any law or the rights of any person or entity. IN OTHER WORDS, AND AMONG OTHER THINGS, YOU WILL NOT POST USER SUBMISSIONS ON THE SITES YOU DO NOT OWN WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE OWNER OF THE USER SUBMISSIONS, INCLUDING WRITTEN, PHOTOGRAPHIC, MUSIC AND VIDEO USER SUBMISSIONS.

Acceptable Use Policy

You are solely responsible for any and all acts and omissions that occur during or relating to your use of the Sites, and you agree not to engage in unacceptable use of the Sites, which includes, without limitation, use of the Sites to:

Harm or threaten to harm users or members of the general public in any way, or “stalk” or otherwise harass any other person or entity;
Post or transmit any User Submission that is unlawful, false or misleading, grossly offensive, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, pornographic, libelous, invasive of another’s privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable;
Disseminate or transmit “spam,” unsolicited messages, chain letters, any advertisements, solicitations, pyramid schemes, investment opportunities or other unsolicited commercial communication;
Purchase, sell, or offer to purchase or sell any equity or security or market instrument; provide information designed to manipulate any equity or security or market; or disseminate or transmit any material, non-public information about companies without authorization to do so;
Collect, use, or store any personally identifiable information about other users, or otherwise violate the personal privacy rights of others;
Impersonate any person or entity (including a Site agent, user, or moderator), or falsely state or otherwise misrepresent your affiliation with a person or entity;
Post any unsolicited or unauthorized advertising, promotional materials, or any other form of solicitation except in areas that are expressly designated by the Sites for such purpose;
Disseminate or transmit any User Submission that infringes or violates any party’s copyright, trademark, trade secret, patent or other proprietary right; or use or distribute third-party information (whether or not protected as a trade secret) in violation of a duty of confidentiality, fiduciary duty, or similar duty;
Violate any law (whether local, state, national, or international), whether or not intentionally;
Forge headers or otherwise intentionally disguise the origin of any content or communication; interfere with or disrupt the Sites, or servers or networks connected to the Sites; or disobey any requirements, procedures, policies, or regulations of networks connected to the Sites;
Make any User Submission related to partisan political campaigning or fundraising.
Express or imply that any statements you make are endorsed by us;
Modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Sites;
Obtain, copy, monitor, index or data mine through the use of a robot, spider, any automated device, or any manual process, the Sites or the contents (except as expressly permitted by The Atlantic);
Remove any copyright, trademark or other proprietary rights notices contained in the Sites;
”Frame” or “mirror” any part of the Sites; or
Engage in any other activity deemed by the Atlantic to be in conflict with the spirit or intent of this agreement or that might violate the rights of others or give rise to liability.

You understand that by using the Sites, you may be exposed to content that may offend you or challenge your beliefs. Your remedy is to avoid such content by discontinuing your access.

Content and Non-Endorsement

Opinions and other statements expressed by users and third parties are theirs alone, not opinions of The Atlantic. Content created by third parties is the sole responsibility of the third parties and its accuracy and completeness are not endorsed or guaranteed. The Sites and third parties may provide links to web pages, web sites, and various resources or locations on the web. The Atlantic has no control over the information you access via such links, does not endorse that information, and shall not be responsible for it or for the consequences of your use of that information.

Use of RSS Feeds

Some of the Sites may provide an RSS feed (the “Feeds”). Individuals may use the Feeds free of charge for their personal, non-commercial use only. When using the theatlantic.com feeds, we ask that you provide attribution to theatlantic.com including at a minimum a linked logo, a link that returns to the original URL and that you set the canonical tag to The Atlantic. The Atlantic reserves the right to disable, to change, or to cease distribution of Feeds at any time, and reserves the right to require individuals to cease any and all use of the Feeds at any time for any reason. To request permission to make commercial use of the Feeds, please contact us at [email protected]. The Atlantic will consider such submitted requests, but is not obligated to grant any specific permission request.

Use of Associated Press Materials

Some of the material available on the Sites is provided by the Associated Press. By using the Sites you agree and acknowledge that (1) you will not publish, broadcast, or rewrite for broadcast or publication, or redistribute directly or indirectly in any medium any Associated Press text, photo, graphic, audio, and/or video material, and (2) no Associated Press materials nor any portion thereof may be stored in a computer except for personal and non-commercial use. The Associated Press will not be held liable for any delays, inaccuracies, errors or omissions in its materials or in the transmission or delivery of all or any part of its materials, or for any damages arising from any of the foregoing. In addition to those set forth in this paragraph, the Associated Press may impose other terms and conditions on the use of its materials.

Employment Opportunities

The Atlantic may post employment opportunities on the Sites and/or invite users to submit resumes to it. If you choose to submit your name, contact information, resume and/or other personal information to The Atlantic in response to employment listings, you are authorizing The Atlantic and its service providers to utilize this information for all lawful and legitimate hiring and employment purposes. The Atlantic also reserves the right, at its sole discretion, to forward the information you submit to its parents, subsidiaries, affiliates, vendors and service providers for legitimate business purposes. Nothing in this Agreement or contained in the Sites shall constitute a promise by The Atlantic to interview, hire or employ any individual who submits information to it, nor shall anything in this Agreement or contained in the Sites constitute a promise that The Atlantic will review any or all of the information submitted to it by users.

The Atlantic Sites DMCA Copyright Infringement Claim Policy

The Atlantic respects the intellectual property of others, and requires that our users do the same. You may not upload, embed, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any material that infringes any copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret or other proprietary rights of any person or entity. The Atlantic has the right to prohibit infringers from using our Sites.

If you believe your work has been copied and posted on or through the Sites in a way that constitutes copyright infringement, please send The Atlantic’s Copyright Agent a notification of claimed infringement with all of the following information:

(a) identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed, or, if multiple copyrighted works are covered by a single notification, a representative list of such works;

(b) identification of the claimed infringing material and information reasonably sufficient to permit us to locate the material on the Sites (providing the URL(s) of the claimed infringing material satisfies this requirement);

(c) information reasonably sufficient to permit us to contact you, such as an address, telephone number, and, if available, an email address;

(d) a statement by you that you have a good faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law;

(e) a statement by you, made under penalty of perjury, that the above information in your notification is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the copyright owner’s behalf; and

(f) your physical or electronic signature.

The Atlantic’s Copyright Agent for notification of claimed infringement can be reached as follows: Office of General Counsel, The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC, 610 Water Street, SW, Washington, DC 20024, (202) 266-7000, fax: (202) 266-7157, [email protected].

Upon receipt of a Notification of Copyright Infringement from a copyright owner that contains the required information described in (a) through (f) above, The Atlantic will notify the user, if known, of the alleged infringement and remove or disable access to the material that is alleged to be infringing if hosted on the Sites. No personal user information is shared with the copyright owner unless required by law.

If The Atlantic receives more than one Notice of Copyright Infringement concerning a user, the user may be deemed a “repeat copyright infringer.” The Atlantic reserves the right to terminate the accounts of “repeat copyright infringers.”

Procedure to File a DMCA Counter-Claim

If you have received a notice of copyright infringement and you believe that a copyright holder has accused you in error, you may file a DMCA Counter-Claim with The Atlantic’s designated agent.

To be effective, a Counter-Claim must be a written communication provided to The Atlantic’s designated agent and must include the following information:

(a) A physical or electronic signature of the user;

(b) Identification of the material that has been removed or to which access has been disabled and the location at which the material appeared before it was removed or access to it was disabled;

(c) A statement under penalty of perjury that the user has a good faith belief that the material was removed or disabled as a result of mistake or misidentification of the material to be removed or disabled; and

(d) The user’s name, address and telephone number, and a statement that the subscriber consents to the jurisdiction of Federal District Court for the judicial district in which the address is located, or if the user’s address is outside of the United States, for any judicial district in which the service provider may be found, and that the user will accept service of process from the person who provided notification or an agent of such person.

Upon receipt of a DMCA Counter-Claim, The Atlantic will provide the complaining party with a copy of the DMCA Counter-Claim. When The Atlantic receives a Counter-Claim that meets the requirements of the DMCA, The Atlantic will process the Counter-Claim in accordance with the requirements of the DMCA.

Class Action Waiver — BY USING THESE SERVICES, YOU ARE ENTERING INTO THIS AGREEMENT AND WAIVING YOUR RIGHT TO FILE, JOIN, OPT-INTO, CONSENT TO, INTERVENE IN, OR OTHERWISE BECOME A PARTY IN ANY COURT CASE OR ARBITRATION THAT IS BROUGHT OR MAINTAINED ON A CLASS, COLLECTIVE, REPRESENTATIVE, OR AGGREGATE BASIS. YOU MAY BRING LEGAL CLAIMS AGAINST THE ATLANTIC ONLY IN YOUR INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY (NON-CLASS, NON-COLLECTIVE, NON-REPRESENTATIVE, AND NON-AGGREGATE BASIS), AND YOU MAY NOT PARTICIPATE IN ANY JOINED OR CONSOLIDATED CLAIMS.

Limitation of Liability and Us

The Atlantic has worked to ensure the accuracy of the information it provides through its products and services, including through the Sites. This information frequently relies on data obtained from many sources, however, and The Atlantic cannot guarantee the accuracy of the information provided or any analysis based thereon.

YOU EXPRESSLY AGREE THAT THE USE OF THE ATLANTIC’S PRODUCTS AND SERVICES, INCLUDING THE SITES, IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. SUCH PRODUCTS AND SERVICES ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” BASIS AND THE ATLANTIC MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, AND DISCLAIMS ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. THE ATLANTIC DISCLAIMS ANY WARRANTY THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE OR ERROR FREE. NO ADVICE, OPINION OR OTHER INFORMATION OBTAINED THROUGH THE SITES OR FROM THE ATLANTIC, ORALLY OR IN ANY MEDIA, SHALL CREATE ANY WARRANTY FROM THE ATLANTIC NOT EXPRESSLY STATED IN THIS AGREEMENT.

EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE STATED, THE ATLANTIC MAKES NO WARRANTY OR REPRESENTATION REGARDING OF CONFIDENTIALITY OF ANY COMMUNICATION OR INFORMATION TRANSMITTED ON THIS SITES OR ANY WEBSITE LINKED TO THE SITES. YOU AGREE THAT NEITHER THE ATLANTIC, NOR ANY OTHER PROVIDERS OF PRODUCTS OR SERVICES RELATED TO THE SITES, ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONFIDENTIALITY OF ANY INFORMATION, (INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION CREDIT CARD INFORMATION, PERSONALLY IDENTIFIABLE INFORMATION, INCLUDING EMAIL ADDRESS, PHONE NUMBER, ETC.), AND NEITHER THE ATLANTIC NOR ANY OTHER PROVIDERS OF PRODUCTS OR SERVICES RELATED TO THE SITES ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY DAMAGES THAT MAY ARISE FROM DISCLOSURE OF SUCH INFORMATION.

THE ATLANTIC AND ITS DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, CONSULTANTS, AGENTS AND OTHER REPRESENTATIVES SHALL NOT BE LIABLE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE OR OTHER DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOST PROFITS OR COSTS OR ATTORNEY’S FEES, UNDER ANY LEGAL THEORY INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO BREACH OF CONTRACT, BREACH OF WARRANTY, NEGLIGENCE, OR STRICT LIABILITY, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY WAS INFORMED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

IN STATES THAT DO NOT ALLOW THE EXCLUSION OR LIMITATION OF CERTAIN CATEGORIES OF DAMAGES, THE ATLANTIC’S LIABILITY, AND THAT OF ITS SUBSIDIARIES, AFFILIATES OR PARENTS AND THEIR RESPECTIVE OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, REPRESENTATIVES, BUSINESS PARTNERS, INFORMATION PROVIDERS AND LICENSORS AND THEIR RESPECTIVE HEIRS AND ASSIGNS IS LIMITED TO THE FULLEST EXTENT ALLOWED BY SUCH STATES’ LAWS.

The Atlantic assumes no responsibility or liability arising from the content of the Sites nor for any error, defamation, libel, slander, omission, falsehood, obscenity, pornography, profanity, danger or inaccuracy contained in any information within the Sites or accessed through the Sites. The Atlantic also does not warrant that the functions or informational materials contained in or accessed or downloaded through our Sites are free of computer viruses or other harmful components. In addition, although we make a good faith effort to update the content of our Sites periodically, we do not have a duty to update information contained in our Sites, and we will not be liable for any failure to update such information.

You agree to comply with all applicable laws and local rules regarding the transmission of technical data, acceptable contents and online conduct.

Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend and hold The Atlantic, its affiliates, licensors, suppliers, advertisers and sponsors, and its and their directors, officers, employees, consultants, agents and other representatives, harmless from and against any and all claims, damages, losses, costs (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) and other expenses that arise directly or indirectly out of or from (a) your breach of this agreement, including any violation of these Terms & Conditions; (b) any allegation that any User Submissions infringe or otherwise violate the copyright, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property or other rights of any third party; and/or (c) your activities in connection with the Sites.

Special Agreement on Fee-Shifting and Choice of Law

If you attempt to bring any legal action against The Atlantic based in any way on its products or services, including the Sites, you agree that, in the event you do not prevail or The Atlantic does prevail, you will reimburse The Atlantic for any costs and attorneys fees associated with their defense of the action.

The use of the Sites and any claim or dispute relating to the Sites shall be governed by the laws of the District of Columbia, without regard to its conflicts of law principles. Exclusive venue for any claim shall be in the state and federal courts located in the District of Columbia.

Severability

If any provision or portion of these Terms & Conditions is held in whole or in part to be unenforceable for any reason, the remainder of that provision and of the entire agreement will be severable and will remain in effect, to the fullest degree consistent with the intent of this document.

Privacy Policy - The Atlantic

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:53:47 +0000

Date Last Updated: June 4, 2026

The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC and its subsidiaries (referred to throughout this policy as “The Atlantic,” “we,” and “our”) cares about your privacy and the security of your information. This policy details our practices in connection with our print, digital, and live event products and services, including The Atlantic magazine, theatlantic.com, our mobile applications, newsletters, and any other content we provide (collectively, the “Services”) as they relate to your data. It describes the kinds of personal information we gather about you in connection with the Services, how we use that information, to whom we disclose it, and how you can manage it.

By using our Services, you accept the practices described in this Privacy Policy, including our use of cookies and similar online tools. If you do not agree to the terms of this Privacy Policy, please do not use our Services.

Our services are constantly under development, which may cause our data practices to change from time to time. We will update this policy with any changes we make, so please visit this page often to stay current. Any changes to this policy will become effective as of the date “last updated” noted above. Your continued use of our Services following the posting of changes to these terms will mean you accept those changes.

If you are located in the European Economic Area , United Kingdom, or Switzerland, please see the Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom section of this policy.

If you are a resident of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia please see the Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions section of this policy.

If you are visiting via our Free Access for U.S. Public High Schools program, please see the Information for Free Access for U.S. Public High School Users section of this policy.

*Information for Free Access for U.S. Public High School Users

Information Collected
How We Use Your Information
How We Share Your Information
How Long Your Information Is Stored
Tracking Technologies and Privacy Choices
Statement on No Children’s Data
Contests, Sweepstakes or Games
Contact Us
Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom
Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions

*Information for Free Access for U.S. Public High School Users

This section is for those visiting The Atlantic from a school participating in our free access for U.S. public high schools program (a “Participating High School”). When you access The Atlantic’s website while connected to the wi-fi of a Participating High School, we collect limited information that may be considered personal information in some states. The following explains what information we collect and how we use and share it. Please be aware that this only applies when you visit our website without logging into a pre-existing Atlantic account. Accounts are not required for high school access, and are only intended for those 18 and older. If you visit theatlantic.com while logged into an Atlantic account, the numbered sections of this Privacy Policy apply to how we may collect, use, and share your personal information.

So long as you access The Atlantic’s website without logging into an account, all information we collect is tied to the device you use to access it (e.g. a computer or phone). Please read below to find out what information we collect, how we use it, and who we share it with:

IP address - We collect the device’s IP address to verify that it matches the IP address of a Participating High School.
Precise geolocation - Since IP addresses are linked to their corresponding Participating High School, we are able to tell that the device, and you, are present at that school during your visit to our website.
Usage Information - We collect information about how you use our website, such as the parts of the website that were visited on the device, how long was spent on the website, and search history on the website. We use this information for research and analytics purposes, and to improve our website. To assist us with our research and analytics, we share this information with third-parties such as Google Analytics.

Atlantic Accounts and Targeted Advertising

Accounts are intended for users 18 years of age and older, and no account is required for our free access for U.S. high school users. Simply visit our website while connected to a Participating High School’s wi-fi and you will have access to our current stories and archives. If you opt to create an account or use a pre-existing account, please be aware that the numbered sections of this privacy policy apply to how we collect, use, and share your personal information. However, if you create your account while connected to a Participating High School’s wi-fi, that account will automatically be opted out of targeted advertising. If you are using a pre-existing account or create an account while not connected to a Participating High School’s wi-fi, you can visit our data opt-out page to opt out of targeted advertising where eligible.

1. Information Collected

Information You May Provide
When you use our Services, you may voluntarily provide us with certain pieces of information about yourself, including the following.

Contact Information - When you create an account on our website or mobile app, subscribe to the magazine, register for one of our live events, or participate in one of surveys or contests we ask you for your contact information, which may include your name, email address, phone number, and physical address.

Billing Information - When you purchase one of our products or register for certain live events we collect your billing information, which may include your name, email address, and billing address. While you may enter your credit or debit card information on an Atlantic website or mobile app, we do not have direct access to or possession of that information beyond the last four digits of your card. Instead a third-party payment processor is responsible for the processing and storing your payment information.

Demographic information - When you register for a live event or participate in one of our surveys we may ask you to tell us more about yourself, such as your job title and level, the name of your employer, the industry in which you work, your household income, your age, your race or ethnicity, or your gender. Some of this information may be considered sensitive personal information under applicable laws. Questions inquiring about your sensitive information are always optional.

Communication Information - We collect information about you when you communicate with us, such as by contacting our Customer Care team, including the content of the communication and any contact information you provide.

Business Information - If you have a professional relationship with The Atlantic we may collect information such as your job title, employer’s name and contact information, and your business email address, physical address, and telephone number.

Profile Information - When you create or use an account on our Services, we may collect information such as your username, password, photographs, interests, preferences, and any other information you choose to provide. When you link an existing account from a third-party platform, we may additionally collect information such as that account’s ID information and associated preferences.

User-Generated Information - If you elect to participate in Discussions, please be aware that all comments are viewable by the general public. We encourage you to be cautious about any personal information you include in your comments. The Atlantic has no responsibility for nor control over how others may use the information you publicly disclose. To learn more about Discussions, please visit our FAQ.

Information Collected Automatically
By default, we automatically collect certain pieces of information about you when you use our Services, including the following. Much of this information is collected via cookies, pixels, and other tracking technologies. Please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more about how they function and how to turn them off.

Device Information - This lets us know how you are accessing our Services and includes information such as the kind of device you are using, your operating system, your browser, your mobile carrier, certain device settings, referral URLs, your IP address and other unique device identifiers.

Usage Information - This lets us know how you are interacting with our Services and includes information such as which parts of the Services you visit (e.g. page views and mouse clicks), how long you visit, your search history within our Services, and how you interacted with advertisements and emails. Usage information also includes how you participate in Discussions, such as your comment, recommendation, and moderation history.

Location Information - As previously mentioned, we collect your device’s IP address when you use our Services. Your IP address may disclose or allow us to infer the general location of your device at the time you access the Services.

Inferred Information - In order to better understand our user base, we may infer some information about you, such as your age, gender, education level, and household composition, based on your survey responses.

Information Collected from Third Parties

Other Individuals - We may receive personal information about you from other individuals such as when someone purchases you a gift subscription to The Atlantic magazine.

Social Media and Other Third-Party Platforms - If you interact with our pages or accounts on social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc.), we may collect personal information about you available on that platform. This includes your social media account ID, username, user ID, profile picture, cover photo, networks to which you belong, friends, connections, and contact information Additionally, you may choose to log-in to our Services using your account on certain social media or other third-party platforms. If you do so, we and that platform share certain information about you and your activities, including but not limited to page visits and mouse clicks on our Services. You can read more about your choices with regards to data sharing in Section 5 of this policy.

Publicly or Commercially Available Sources - We may obtain contact details and other personal information of media contacts and influencers from a variety of publicly or commercially available sources/databases.

Information for Media Contacts and Influencers - We obtain contact details and other personal information regarding media contacts and influencers from a variety of sources including Cision. If you wish to know more about how such information is collected and used, please refer to Cision’s privacy notice.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information for the purposes described below.

Providing the Services - Your personal information helps us to provide you with our Services such as giving you access to the Services, fulfilling your subscription, maintaining your account, processing your payments, providing you with customer support, and allowing you to participate in sweepstakes, contests, or other promotions.

Personalizing the Services - Your personal information allows us to give you a customized experience with our Services including offering you content recommendations, promotions, and advertisements that are more relevant to you.

Communicating with You - Your personal information, such as your contact details, allows us to communicate with you in a variety of ways. We may send you The Atlantic magazine, newsletters, and updates; inform you about content, products, and promotions that may be of interest; provide you with invoices and payment reminders; send you surveys and other research material; and provide you with customer support.

Advertising - We use your personal information to deliver advertisements that are of interest to you, both on our own behalf and on that of third parties. We also use this information to measure the effectiveness of a given ad campaign (for example, by measuring the number of unique viewers for that advertisement). To find out more about your personalized advertising choices, please review Section 5 of this policy. We may also email you on behalf of our advertisers or event underwriters to inform you about their products or services and offers that may be of interest. You can opt out of such communication at any time by emailing us at [email protected] or contacting our Customer Care team as detailed in Section 8 below.

Social Media - We may use your personal information, including information provided to us by social media or other third-party platforms to enable you to log into our Services, to connect your social media account to our Services, or to enable you to interact with our social media accounts and activity. We may also use your information to help us determine what content or advertising to deliver to you on those social media platforms.

Providing Services to our Business Customers - We may use your information to facilitate the provision of services to business customers by our business-focused divisions, including without limitation Re:think, our sponsored content studio.

Analytics, Research, and Development - We use your personal information, including information that may be considered sensitive, to learn more about who uses our Services and how they use it. This helps us to make business and marketing decisions, improve our current products and develop new ones that will be of interest to you.

Maintenance & Security - We use your personal information to assist us in maintaining and securing our Services, including evaluating our security systems, debugging, detecting security incidents, preventing malicious, fraudulent, and illegal activity, enforcing our terms of service, and protecting the rights and safety of The Atlantic and others.

Compliance with Law - We may use your personal information when we believe it is necessary to enforce our Terms & Conditions, Terms of Sale, or to comply with laws and regulations.

3. How We Share Your Information

We share your personal information with third parties. In general, the reasons we share your information falls into one or more of the following categories.

Affiliates - We may share your personal information with our corporate parent, subsidiaries, and affiliates, for purposes consistent with this Privacy Policy.

Service Providers - We share some of your personal information with service providers who perform functions on our behalf to help us to offer our Services and manage our business. This includes:

Processing payments
Fulfilling purchase orders
Managing email communications
Providing customer service
Storing data
Building and distributing surveys
Conducting research and development
Running analytics
Serving advertisements and measuring their performance
Discussions moderation assistance
Maintaining the safety and security of our Services

Content or Advertising Partners - Third parties that provide content, advertising, or functionality to the Services collect or receive information about you and/or your use of the Services, including through the use of cookies, pixels, and similar technologies (please review Section 5 of this policy to learn more). These third parties use your information to provide you with advertising that is based on your interests; to measure and analyze ad performance on our Services or other websites or platforms; and combine it with information collected across different websites, online services, and other devices. These third parties’ use of your information will be based on their own privacy policies.

Event Partners and Underwriters - When you register for or attend one of our Live events, we may share some of your registration information, such as your email address, with our event partners or underwriters. They may use this information to let you know about their products and services. We will only share your information with your permission and you can opt out at any time.

Social Media - If you log into our Services via a social media service or if you connect a social media account with our Services, we share information about you or your activities on that social media service, including what you view on our websites and applications, with that social media service and/or its users Social media services will use that information based on their own privacy policies If you do not want your information shared in this way, do not connect your social media service account with our Services, or log out of your social media service before using our Services.

For Legal Compliance or Public Interest - We may share your personal information when we believe it is necessary to comply with the law or legal process; to protect and defend our rights or to prevent misuse of our Services; or to protect the personal safety of our employees, agents, partners, the users of the Services, or the public.

Corporate Transactions - In the event that we sell or transfer our business, merge with another entity, or engage in another sort of corporate transaction, we may share your personal information with the acquiring entity.

At Your Direction - We may also share your personal information with third parties when you instruct us to do so.

4. How Long Your Information Is Stored

There is no singular retention period for personal information we hold about you. In general, we store your information for as long as needed to fulfill the purpose(s) for which we collected it. We typically keep personal information considered sensitive under applicable laws for no more than a year from the date it was collected, but may keep it (and other information) for longer when it is necessary to fulfill a legal obligation.

5. Tracking Technologies and Privacy Choices

Unless you’ve opted-out, when you visit our website or use our mobile application (our “Services”), we and our third-party partners use online tracking technology such as cookies, pixels, SDKs, and other similar technologies to analyze your use of our Services and your engagement with advertisements, and to serve you interest-based advertisements. The following explains tracking technologies in greater detail and provides you with information on how to opt out of them. For more information on what we do with the information these tracking technologies provide, please review Section 2 and Section 3 of this policy.

Types of Online Tracking Technologies

Cookies - Cookies are small text files stored in your device’s browser when you visit a website. They make it possible to recognize you as the same user across one or more browsing sessions, and across one or more websites. We and our partners use cookies for a variety of purposes, including remembering your sign-in credentials and preferences so that you do not have to input them each time you use the Services; allowing us and third parties to customize your experience using the Services, including by determining the most relevant content and advertisements to show you on our websites and elsewhere online; and allowing us and third parties to monitor site traffic and performance, so that we may improve our Services and your experience. For more information on cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set on your device and how to manage and delete them, visit www.allaboutcookies.org.
Pixels - Pixels (also called “web tags” or “web beacons”) are tiny graphics or scripts that communicate information from your device to a server. Pixels can be embedded in online or mobile content, videos, advertisements, or emails. They allow a server to read certain types of information from your device, such as when you viewed content that contains the pixel and the IP address of the device on which you viewed it. We and third parties use pixels for a variety of purposes, including to analyze the use of our Services and to provide content and ads that are more relevant to you.
SDKs - SDKs are third-party computer code that we incorporate into our mobile applications that can be used for a variety of purposes, including to provide us with analytics regarding the use of our mobile applications, to integrate with social media, to add features or functionality to our app, or to facilitate online advertising.

How to Opt Out

There are a number of ways to opt out of having your online activity and device data collected by third parties, which we have summarized below. We hope you find this information to be a helpful reference. Please note that using these tools to opt out of tracking and targeting does not mean that you will receive no advertising while using our Services. Instead, you will cease receiving advertisements tailored to your interests.

On Your Browser
- Changing your browser settings - Most web browsers automatically accept cookies by default, but typically allow you to change your settings to disable or reject them. You can usually find these settings in the Options or Preferences menu of your browser; links to instructions provided by several of the most common browsers are below. You can also learn more at www.allaboutcookies.org. Note, however, that if you reject or disable cookies, some features of our Services may not work or may not work as designed.
- Using Privacy Plug-ins or Browsers - You can block our websites from setting cookies used for interest-based ads by using a browser with default privacy features, like Brave, or installing browser plugins like Privacy Badger, Ghostery or uBlock Origin, and configuring them to block third party cookies/trackers.
Advertising Industry Opt Out Tools Many of the third party advertisers that use tracking or targeting tools in connection with our Services offer you additional choices regarding the collection and use of your information You can learn more about the options available to limit these participating third parties advertisers’ collection and use of your information by visiting their websites:
- On Your Browser:
  - Opt Out of Interest Based Advertising (National Advertising Initiative)
  - Your Ad Choices (Digital Advertising Alliance)
  - Your Online Choices (European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance)
- On Your Mobile Device:
  - Mobile app users may opt out of receiving targeted advertising from participating members of the Digital Advertising Alliance by installing the AppChoices mobile app, available here, and selecting the user’s choices
Platform-Specific Opt Outs If you choose to connect to our Services via a third-party platform or social media network, you may have the ability to limit the information that we obtain from the third-party, either at the time you login to our Services or subsequently via your settings on the third-party platform or network. Additionally, some third-party platforms or social media networks have features that allow you to opt-out of interest based advertising. Below are links to further information on platforms that integrate with our Services.
- Facebook - About Facebook Ads and Facebook Privacy Policy
- Google - Our Services deliver advertising using the vendor DoubleClick, a Google company. You can read about how DoubleClick uses cookies, use Google’s controls for blocking certain ads, or use Google’s ad settings page to control how DoubleClick personalizes your ad experience The Services also use Google Analytics to track your usage, including the stitching of authenticated and unauthenticated sessions (which allows for the combination of data from your use of the Services while not signed in to your Atlantic account with your use of the Services while signed in to your Atlantic account). If you wish to opt-out of Google Analytics’ tracking, use this browser add-on provided by Google.
On Your Mobile Device
- Block Advertising ID - Your mobile device settings may permit you to limit use of the advertising ID associated with your mobile device for interest-based advertising purposes.
- Opt-Out via Advertising Networks - You can learn about your options to opt-out of mobile app tracking by certain advertising networks through your device settings. For more information about how to change these settings visit the links below:

6. Statement on No Children’s Data

The Services are not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect information from children under 13 (under 16 for those located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland) and we do not target the Services to such children. If you are under 13 years of age, or if you are under 16 years of age and are located in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland, do not provide personal information to The Atlantic without providing us with consent from your parents. If we discover that any child under the age of 13 or a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 has provided us with personal information and we do not have parental consent, we will delete that child’s information as soon as reasonably practicable. If you believe that we have been provided with the personal information of a child from the EEA, UK, or Switzerland under the age of 16 without parental consent, or have been provided with the personal information of any child under the age of 13 without parental consent, please notify us immediately at [email protected].

7. Contests, Sweepstakes or Games

When we run a contest, sweepstakes, or game relating to the Services, it will be accompanied by a set of rules. The rules for each contest, sweepstakes or game will specify how the information gathered from you for entry will be used and disclosed if it is different than as described in this Privacy Policy. In conjunction with your entry in such contests or sweepstakes, personal information will be collected only if you voluntarily submit it.

8. Contact Us

If you have an account with www.theatlantic.com, you may review and change your information by logging into your account and editing your account profile.

If you have questions about our Privacy Policy, please contact us at:

ATTN: General Counsel

The Atlantic Monthly Group LLC

610 Water Street, SW

Washington, DC 20024

Phone: +1 (202) 266-7000

Email: [email protected]

If you have questions about subscriptions to The Atlantic, please contact us at:

Atlantic Customer Care

PO Box 37564

Boone, IA 50037-0564

Phone: +1 (855) 940-0585

Email: [email protected]

9. Additional Information for Users in Europe and the United Kingdom

The following information is provided for and applies to those located in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (“GDPR”) and other similar laws.

Legal Bases for Processing

We process your personal data consistent with the ways described previously in this policy. When we do, we rely on one or more “legal bases” to do so. The legal bases we rely on are:

With your consent, such as when you accept cookies;
To perform our agreement to provide you with Services, such as to maintain your account or to fulfill your subscription; or
For our “legitimate interests,” such as maintaining the security of Services, preventing fraud, or marketing. We only engage in legitimate interest-based processing where it has little to no impact on your data privacy-related fundamental rights and freedoms.

International Data Transfers

We may store your personal information on servers located outside of Europe or the United Kingdom, including on servers based in the United States. When you access our Services from Europe or the United Kingdom, your personal data may be subject to an “international data transfer” as defined in the European Data Privacy Laws. In order to protect the security of your information when making such transfers, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and/or the United Kingdom’s International Data Transfer Agreement/Addendum depending on the source of the data and the specific circumstances of the transfer.

Your Rights and How to Exercise Them

You have certain rights related to our processing and retention of your personal information, which are described below. To exercise these rights, please visit our Help Center or contact us at [email protected] and include as complete a description of the request as possible.

Access - This Privacy Policy describes the personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it. If you would also like to know the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you, we will provide you with a copy upon your request.

Correction - If you believe that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate you may request that we correct it. You can update some information, like your contact details, yourself by visiting your account page. For other corrections, please contact us as described above.

Deletion - You may request that we delete the personal information we hold about you. Please note that we may need to retain limited amounts of personal information after completing your request for legal compliance purposes.

Objection/Restriction/Withdrawal of Consent - You may object to, restrict, and/or withdraw your consent to our processing of your personal information if you believe our processing (i) uses inaccurate information; (ii) is unlawful; or (iii) when our processing is based on your consent or our legitimate interests. You may also opt out of receiving marketing communications from us. You may do so by (i) following the unsubscribe link in the footer of any email you receive from us; (ii) altering your communication settings on your account page; or (iii) emailing us as described in the Section 8 of this policy above. If you are withdrawing consent to our processing of special categories of data, you may alternatively fill out our Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information form on our data opt-out page.

Right to Lodge a Complaint

If you believe that we have processed your personal information in violation of a European Data Privacy Law, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the supervisory authority in your country of residence. You can find a list of supervisory authorities and their contact information on this website.

10. Additional Information for Users in Certain U.S. Jurisdictions

This section only applies to residents of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. Residents of these U.S. states are afforded additional rights in accordance with their respective state data privacy laws. It describes how we collect, use, and share personal information in operating our business as well as your individual rights with respect to your personal information.

How We Collect, Use, and Share your Personal Information

We collect some or all of the following categories of personal information about you:

Identifiers (e.g., device identifier, IP address, unique browser ID, cookies, beacons, pixel tags, account login, other unique identifiers, name, site log-in, email address, mailing address (or state / province and country of residence), phone number, images of yourself you provide us for your account page you are creating and completing in order to attend an event we are hosting.

Commercial information (e.g., subscription records, site engagement).
Internet or network information (e.g., browsing and search history, site and advertisement interactions, audience research data).
Geolocation data (e.g., location derived from GPS-enabled services).
Professional and employment-related information (e.g., your job title, income level, and the name of your employer.
Financial information (e.g., your financial account numbers or payment card information; please note that a third party payment processor is responsible for all collection, processing, and storage of your Financial Information and we do not have direct access to or possession of any payment card information.)
Education information (e.g., highest level of education attained).
Protected classification characteristics (e.g., age and gender)
Inferences (e.g., information about your interests, preferences, and favorites).

The sources from which we collect information and additional details on the information we collect are described in Section 1 of this policy; the business and commercial purposes for which we collect this information are described in Section 2 of this policy; and the ways in which we may share this information are described in Section 3 of this policy.

Your Privacy Rights and How to Exercise Them As a California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oregon, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, or Virginia resident, you have certain rights related to your personal information, which are detailed below. We encourage you to invoke these rights if you wish. Rest assured that we will not discriminate or retaliate against you for doing so.

Except where otherwise noted, you can exercise these rights by visiting our Help Center or by contacting us at [email protected]. If you opt to email us, please include as detailed a description of your request as possible.

Upon receiving certain types of requests, we may ask you to verify your identity before we can move forward. Typically this will involve asking you to confirm information we already have on file about you. We will never ask you for sensitive information such as your credit card, driver’s license, or social security numbers for verification purposes.

You may also allow an “authorized agent” to submit a request on your behalf through the same means outlined above. Unless your agent has been given power of attorney, we will additionally need the following items to honor your request: (1) written authorization, signed by you, allowing them to act on your behalf; (2) proof of your identity; and (3) direct confirmation sent from you to us (without the authorized agent as an intermediary) affirming that the agent is authorized to act on your behalf.

Types of Rights

Access This policy describes the categories of personal information we may collect about you, and how that information is collected, used, and disclosed. We will also provide you with the specific pieces of personal information we hold about you upon your request. Oregon residents may also request to know the specific third parties to whom your personal information has been disclosed.
Correction If you believe that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate you may request that we correct it. You can update some information, like your contact details, yourself by visiting your account page. For other corrections, please contact us as described above.
Deletion You may request that we delete the personal information we hold about you. We fulfill these requests by erasing the data or by anonymizing it such that you can no longer be identified. We will not attempt to re-identify anonymized data. Please note that we may need to retain limited amounts of personal information after completing your request for legal compliance purposes. Additionally, we may postpone completion of your request when your personal information is necessary to fulfill our obligations to you. For example, if you are an active subscriber we may wait until your subscription expires before fulfilling your request.
Right to Withdraw Consent for or Limit the Use and Disclosure of Your Sensitive Personal Information When you participate in one of our surveys, we may ask you about information that could be considered sensitive under applicable privacy laws. The question will always be optional, but you also have the option to withdraw your consent to our use of this information or to limit our right to use or disclose your sensitive personal information after you’ve provided it to us. If you do so, we will delete it entirely; only use it as necessary to provide our Services to you; or as otherwise permitted by law. To opt-out, you can visit our data opt-out page or email us at [email protected].
Opt out of “Selling,”Sharing, or Using for Targeted Advertising You have the right to opt out of the “sale” of your personal information, or the sharing/use of it for targeted advertising. Under some of these state laws, the word “sale” means our disclosure of your personal information to a third party in exchange for money or any other thing of value, while others only consider it a “sale” if money was exchanged. For the purposes of this policy, when we say “sale,” “selling,” or “sold,” we mean in the broader sense: the exchange of personal information for money or any other thing of value. However, “selling” does not encompass disclosing your personal information to a third party for other purposes, such as those that enable us to provide our Services. We do not sell your personal information in the conventional sense (i.e., for money), but disclose certain details to our business partners and underwriters.

Sharing or using your personal information for targeted advertising means our disclosure of your personal information to a third party in order to serve you interest-based advertisements. Likewise, it does not encompass disclosing your personal information to a third party for other purposes.

To opt out of one or both of these practices, please visit our data opt-out page. You may also opt out by enabling a legally-recognized, opt-out preference signal (such as the Global Privacy Control) on your device. Please review Section 5 above for more information on how to enable these signals. We recognize the signal on an account level, so your opt out request will be applied across your devices as long as you are logged into your Atlantic account. Please note that after opting out you will continue to see non-targeted advertisements on our Services.

Additionally, when residents of California opt out of “sales,” we also treat your request as one made pursuant to California’s “Shine the Light” law to opt out of the disclosure of your personal information to third parties for their use for direct marketing.

If your request related to any of the rights detailed above is denied, you may appeal that decision by emailing us at [email protected].

Information We Disclose To Third Parties

The chart below details the categories of (1) personal data we disclose to third parties, (2) third parties we disclose that information to for a business purpose, and (3) third parties we “sell” or share it with for targeted advertising. It reflects these practices over the 12 months prior to the day this policy was last updated. As a reminder, our service providers enable us to deliver our Services to you. For example, we use service providers to process your payments, to manage our email communications with you, and to maintain our Services’ safety and security. Please note that the lists below are likely to be overbroad for any single person. Similarly, not every data point that falls into the categories below is necessarily shared with all of the third parties listed. For more information on the categories used in the following chart and the reasons why we share personal data, please review Section 1 and Section 3 of this policy, respectively.

Category of Personal Data

Third Parties to Whom it is Disclosed for a Business Purpose	Third Parties to Whom it May Be Sold or Shared/Used for Targeted Advertising
*Identifiers* (e.g, name, email address, postal address, other contact information, IP address, online identifiers)	Service Providers, Business Partners	Underwriters, Business Partners, Advertisers
*Demographic Information* (e.g, age or gender)	Service Providers
*Commercial Information* (e.g, purchase history)	Service Providers, Business Partners	Business Partners, Advertisers
*Payment Information* (as needed to fulfill your purchase orders)	Service Providers
*Internet or Network Information* (e.g, browsing history on our Services and interactions with our Services)	Service Providers, Business Partners	Business Partners, Advertisers
*Geolocation Data* (inferred from your IP address)	Service Providers, Business Partners	Business Partners, Advertisers
*Professional and Employment-Related Information* (e.g, your job level and industry)	Service Providers	Underwriters
*Inferences* (e.g, inferences about your location and preferences)	Service Providers, Business Partners	Business Partners, Advertisers
*Sensitive Personal Information* (e.g. race or ethnicity)	Service Providers

Additional Information for California Residents

The following information applies to California residents only.

Notice Regarding Financial Incentives for California Residents - From time to time, we may offer the opportunity to participate in user research surveys, which may be emailed to you directly or publicized on our social media accounts. As a part of these surveys we may collect Personal Information, including but not limited to demographic information and information about your experiences with our Services. We use this information to help us gain further insight into and to improve our Services. In some instances, participation in a survey may make you eligible to win prizes, e.g, gift cards, in a sweepstakes. Under California law, this may be considered a financial incentive in exchange for Personal Information. We may also occasionally contact you about other opportunities to earn gifts or prizes from us. These too may be considered a financial incentive in exchange for Personal Information under California law. The value of a given gift or prize is reasonably related to the value of the information provided. We assess the value of your Personal Information by considering, without limitation, details such as the cost to us of providing you with the gift or prize, the potential revenue or improvements to the Services made possible by the direct or indirect use of the information.

Participation in any survey is voluntary. You may opt out of receiving surveys from us by emailing [email protected]. For more information regarding a sweepstakes linked to a particular survey, please refer to that sweepstakes’ official rules.

Notice Regarding California Residents We Know to Be Under the Age of 16 - California residents we know to be younger than 16 years of age will by default be treated as though they have exercised a request to opt out of the sale or sharing of their personal information with respect to information provided directly to us (as opposed to information automatically collected from them through technical means). We do not permit such users to opt-in to the sale or sharing of their Personal Information, unless they provide proof that they are no longer under the age of 16. To do so, please email us at [email protected].

What Trump’s bizarre posts are teaching us about AI

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 06:53:47 +0000

The Editors

One Story to Read Today highlights a single newly published—or newly relevant—Atlantic story that’s worth your time.

Trump’s recent Truth Social barrage of fake images reflects the dangers that the AI mirror presents to all of us, Gal Beckerman argues.

(Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic. Sources: Getty; Alamy.)

What Trump’s Bizarre Posts Are Teaching Us About AI

By Gal Beckerman

Here is a selective list of the dozens of images the president has recently disseminated on Truth Social: Donald Trump on a horse next to George Washington on a horse, in the body of Hulk Hogan, beating Hogan in arm wrestling, standing between General George Patton and General Douglas MacArthur in a World War II uniform, hovering menacingly with a hockey stick over the Canadian prime minister, commanding the deck of an aircraft carrier, nuking parts of Earth from space, gleefully dancing to “YMCA” as he replaces a sign for Lake Ontario with one for Lake America. Maybe most surreal (though, admittedly, kind of funny), he posted a video of a squad of “Donald Ducks” with his signature hair, armed with machine guns, waddling in formation to protect said lake.

Read the full article.

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Sign up for This Week, our editors’ Sunday-evening selection of stories that are sparking conversation right now.

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Trump’s Signs Are Coming to the Smithsonian - The Atlantic

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:20:28 +0000

Donald Trump has not forgotten his midsummer promise to publicly shame the Smithsonian. The Trump administration is currently preparing temporary signs that will accuse the National Museum of American History of ideological bias, according to a letter I obtained sent by Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. The September 3 letter, which Burgum sent to Senator Jeff Merkley, says that the National Park Service is planning to add about a dozen signs outside the museum at an estimated cost of $84,000. Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, and Senator Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, requested information about the initiative after Trump signed an executive order in July calling for the signs to be added.

A person familiar with the plans described some of the preparations to me. Although the Park Service has an idea of the physical structure of the signs, what the signs will actually say and who is writing the text remains a mystery to people in the agency working on them, said the person, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The letter from Burgum says that the signs are not finalized, but it offers a preview of what they might look like, describing a number of things “visitors should know” before they enter the museum. Burgum, whose department includes the Park Service, extensively quotes the museum’s director, Anthea Hartig, and criticizes outgoing Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch, seeking to frame both as ideologues. The letter also calls out exhibitions and materials that have touched on groups the administration has gone after, such as undocumented immigrants and transgender Americans.

“The informational signage therefore will provide visitors with important context about the exhibits they are about to encounter and the personal viewpoints that the curators of the exhibits are seeking to advance,” the letter says. It goes on to justify the move, echoing a 162-page report on the museum released by the White House and asserting that the museum is pushing “ideologies that distract from a coherent and accurate presentation of America’s story.” Burgum adds, “This may be the first instance in which executive branch intervention of this nature has become Necessary.”

The Smithsonian, which is partially federally funded, has historically operated independently, has its own governing body, and is regarded in the wider museum world as measured in its approach. The institution has been heading off threats and criticism from the Trump administration since March 2025. Recently, the administration’s attention has turned to the American-history museum, which Trump made a number of curatorial demands of on social media this past Friday, including insisting that it remove an abstract sculpture and erect a 30-foot-tall George Washington statue in its place. Although the Trump administration has accused the Smithsonian, and specifically the American-history museum, of not being patriotic enough, the museum’s leadership has pointed to the abundance of patriotic material on display inside—368 objects and 340 labels on the founding era; 54 George Washington mentions, according to Hartig—and has maintained that telling the American story in its full complexity is a crucial part of its role.

“Our work is governed by the Smithsonian’s standards of scholarship, accuracy, independence, and nonpartisanship,” Hartig told two House committees this summer. “The museum does not take sides in America’s political debates. We preserve and document the evidence of American life in all its breadth, so that the public can encounter the past and draw their own conclusions.”

Trump’s executive order calling for the displays also ordered the Park Service to direct visitors to White House–approved resources on history and include a temporary exhibit about the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The order was unprecedented, pitting two prominent American institutions against each other.

Before this presidency, few might have imagined a showdown between park rangers and history curators on the National Mall. But the White House has had to get creative in trying to control the Smithsonian. Unlike the Park Service, the museum complex is insulated from the executive branch’s whims. The signs will attempt to put a frame around the Smithsonian’s work before visitors even reach the door.

The Burgum letter suggests that the signs will be direct in their criticism of Smithsonian leadership and materials. It points to comments Hartig has made during her tenure on topics such as the scope of U.S. history, whether the museum should have an “America First” mentality, and the acknowledgment of Native American lands—and suggests that these comments are necessary information for museum visitors. The letter says, “A commitment to public transparency means that visitors should be informed about Director Hartig’s and other Smithsonian leaders’ history of racial focus” and quotes Hartig acknowledging white privilege in a November 2020 lecture during the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. The letter further asserts that visitors should be informed about “Secretary Lonnie Bunch’s history of invidious discrimination and anti-white animus,” quoting from a 2000 essay the secretary wrote discussing racial discrimination in the museum profession.

The letter goes on to call out a handful of exhibits mentioned in Trump’s report, including three that touched on transgender themes. It also mentions resources that discuss why educators should use terms such as undocumented immigrant instead of illegal alien.

After the announcement about the signs this summer, I was curious to know who might be working on the text for the displays and contacted some of the Trump administration’s go-to history experts. PragerU and Hillsdale College both helped create the Freedom Truck mobile museums touring the country this year as part of Trump’s Freedom 250 celebrations, but a PragerU spokesperson told me that the right-leaning edutainment nonprofit is not working on the Smithsonian signs, and a Hillsdale spokesperson told me that the conservative college is not “institutionally” involved. “When the College works with the administration on educational projects (the Story of America video series, for instance), we’re glad to say so,” a spokesperson wrote to me in an email.

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was called by Republicans to testify about the Smithsonian at the hearings this summer, declined to comment on any involvement, writing to me that “any conversation I have with any level of government, from local dog catcher to the top of the federal level is private and confidential. Otherwise, why would they trust me?” He added, “And, no, you shouldn’t take that as a confirmation of anything.” He told me by phone that he thinks the signs are clever and that “at best, it’s a medium-term solution or a short-term solution.”

Even under pressure, the Smithsonian has continued to tell the American story. On a recent afternoon at the National Museum of American History, staff sat in a small room behind tables dotted with objects from 9/11 and spoke directly with visitors. Some museumgoers left the exhibit moved to tears, staff told me.There was no descriptive wall text, no glass, just the museum in its purest form—a conversation between historians and the public.

A Shouting Match and an Ultimatum at the Kennedy Center

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:20:27 +0000

Donald Trump has given the federal judiciary an ultimatum: Let him put his name on the Kennedy Center, or he won’t save it.

That threat came after a federal judge, Christopher Cooper, today blocked yet another effort to add the president’s name to the building. Moments later, Trump virtually joined a Kennedy Center board meeting, at which he slammed Cooper’s decision and lashed out at Representative Joyce Beatty—the ex officio board member challenging his overhaul of the institution in court—according to a person with knowledge of the meeting, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal proceedings.

Later, Trump posted on Truth Social that the center’s “Renovation and Reconstruction, which is a very large and complex job, cannot begin until such time as the D.C. Circuit rules on the Board’s approved name,” adding, “If the ruling is a negative one, which it should not be, and is not overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Reconstruction and the Renovation of The Kennedy Center will not take place.”

After months defined by empty theaters and canceled shows, the Kennedy Center has become a shadow of the premier performance venue it was just over a year ago. A Washington Post report this week revealed that the center’s finances are on the brink of collapse and that it could face bankruptcy. But while the institution has diminished, its leaders—and Trump’s allies on the board—have continued to push his plans forward, repackaging their oft-repeated claim that the only way to save it from financial ruin ahead of a two-year renovation is to emblazon it with Trump’s name. The crisis at the Kennedy Center is entangled in a larger effort by Trump to control what Washington looks like—a fight that has taken on higher stakes as his administration evades federal procedures designed to protect historic places from the whims of any one president.

The immediate outcome of today’s events adds more confusion. General trustees voted in favor of closing the center, and two staffers told me that leaders subsequently announced through the building’s broadcast system that the Kennedy Center was closed to the public. It was unclear if that announcement meant that employees would also be barred from the premises, according to one of the staffers, both of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Cooper issued a preliminary injunction in May to temporarily block the center from closing; if he does not lift or amend that ruling, the announced closure will put the board in violation of the court’s orders.

[Read: Trump’s Kennedy Center shakedown]

“The Board’s decision today reflects sound judgment and a clear prioritization of safety above all else,” the center’s vice president for public relations, Roma Daravi, told me in a statement. “As the main building closes for urgent renovations—long overdue and desperately needed to protect the safety of patrons, artists and staff—the Center remains committed to pursuing a safe and efficient renovation through all legal means.” The White House referred me to Trump’s post when I asked for comment on this story.

Meanwhile, the latest evidence of trouble at the Kennedy Center is scattered on the velvet carpet in the Grand Foyer, after a portion of its ceiling collapsed during a storm on September 4. The incident, which did not result in any injuries, has become the primary example for leaders describing the building’s urgent needs—and, as Daravi put it, debate whether “decades of neglect and deferred maintenance” are to blame. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick doubled down last night, posting security footage of the moment the chunks of ceiling suddenly fell to the floor. “If a performance had been underway, patrons could have been killed,” he wrote. The rubble and the hole in the ceiling are still on full display, while signs, ropes, and a yellow cone caution people against entering the foyer.

The fallen ceiling has become a key image of the Kennedy Center’s crisis. Trump’s allies say it’s proof that the building’s troubles predate this administration, and can be resolved only by the appropriately recognized intervention of the president-as-master-builder. But to some who oppose his overhaul, the center’s loud publicization of the problem underscores the board’s eagerness—perhaps overeagerness—to shut down the building.

In a filing this week, Beatty’s team alleged that the center was citing the ceiling damage as justification for closure, but pointed out that a similar problem in 1977 was addressed without shutting down the center. (Beatty’s lawyers told the court that further discovery could show that mismanagement under Trump led to the institution’s insolvency.)

Either way, after the board’s latest vote to close, the next step is to wait and see if Cooper will allow it this time. It’s unclear if anything he heard today will persuade him—including a lengthy assessment of the building’s conditions that a real-estate firm prepared for the board—given his previous statement that the initial closure plans were “ill-informed and seemingly preordained.” But a crumbling ceiling might just do the trick: During the hearing today, Cooper indicated that he would consider amending his preliminary injunction to authorize closure for urgent circumstances.

[Read: What I saw inside the Kennedy Center]

The other emergency—the money—is even messier. The Washington Post reported on Sunday that Kennedy Center leaders are warning trustees of financial collapse within weeks, saying that the institution could soon be unable to make payroll or cover routine bills. The alarm follows an earlier Post report on internal financial records showing that the center could face a deficit of $23 million—even amid its drastic spending cuts this year.

To keep Trump’s plans for the center alive, the board has already appealed today’s ruling against adding his name to the facade, and Beatty revealed in a court filing to Cooper that leaders had been weighing 10 different ways in which Trump’s name could be added back to the center’s edifice. “The Board seeks to provide multiple options so that President Trump can be legally and appropriately recognized and acknowledged on the facade of the Kennedy Center so that he agrees to carry the burden of managing the renovation and provides the Center with a much required financial rescue,” a resolution that the board had prepared for this week read, though it was later dropped from the board’s agenda so trustees could focus exclusively on closure.

In his ruling today, Cooper reiterated the conclusion he had already reached four months ago. “Simply put, Defendants cannot install memorials for President Trump or anyone or anything else at the Kennedy Center without Congress’s blessing,” he wrote, adding that the latest renaming plan “bucks a federal court order and a statute Congress enacted.”

Trump’s reaction today to Cooper’s decision—both online and before the board—underscores the bargain that has defined his stewardship of the Kennedy Center. Its leaders say that it is nearing financial and structural collapse, and that Trump is uniquely capable of raising the money and overseeing the work to turn the institution around. Today’s hearing brought up new questions about those claims, including what bankruptcy would even mean for a charitable trust organization created by Congress. If its finances are truly as bad as leaders and reports say, the court might eventually need to consider placing the center under the control of an independent receiver. For now, the venue is trapped between self-inflicted crises and the conditions that have been attached to solving them. But saving the Kennedy Center may ultimately require something its leadership has gone out of its way to resist: separating the future of the institution from the wishes of the president.

The Only Thing Capable of Uniting Bernie and Bannon

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 05:20:27 +0000

If there was any question over whether the concept of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is still operative in Washington’s hyper-partisan political environment, the answer may be found in the budding coalition of progressives and MAGA-friendly activists who have united in recent days to speak out against artificial intelligence. Which is how Senator Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon found themselves speaking on the same stage today.

With warnings that the technology could cause mass economic displacement and even human extinction, political figures who once wanted nothing to do with one another are suddenly joining forces, scrambling the political landscape just weeks before the midterm elections. The odd couples, who would have been hard to fathom just weeks ago, are also reshaping the legislative agenda. Republican Senators Ted Cruz and John Thune have teamed up with Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar on an AI-safety bill; progressive Senator Richard Blumenthal joined forces with conservative Senator Josh Hawley to push a bill requiring AI companies to obtain approval from the Department of Energy before deploying new systems.

Nearly a decade ago, Sanders urged then-President-Elect Trump to reverse his decision to hire Bannon, a pugilistic architect of the MAGA movement, and called him “a racist individual.” Last year, Bannon called Sanders a “pussy” for not going after Hillary Clinton hard enough in 2016. But the two were able to put all of that aside today to deliver the same message: If AI has the potential to wipe out humanity, Americans should have a say in how it operates.

[Read: Trump’s see-no-evil AI policy]

“If the lives of every man, woman, and child are going to be fundamentally changed by this technology, then the people of this country must make the decisions about AI, and not just a handful of oligarchs,” Sanders said at the all-day “Pro-Human Assembly.” Bannon sounded pretty much exactly the same. “The American citizens are not going to be supplicants to the oligarchs anymore,” the MAGA strategist said in what easily could have been a continuation of the Vermont socialist’s remarks. “We can’t do it.”

Standing decidedly outside of this spirit of cross-party cooperation is Trump, who has downplayed warnings about AI’s risks and called the concerns over the rapidly advancing technology a “hoax.” Trump made a surprise appearance at an AI-friendly event yesterday by placing a phone call to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and making clear that he does not believe the doomsday warnings that have circulated in recent days. “The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” he told Huang, who took the call while speaking at a summit in Los Angeles and put it on speakerphone for the crowd to hear. “That’s not going to happen.”

Bannon and Sanders, speaking back-to-back, essentially agreed to disagree about Trump. Sanders said that Trump’s “ignorance regarding this issue is truly embarrassing” and suggested that the president is not taking the technology’s risks seriously enough.

“Obviously, he and I have a quite different opinion of the president of the United States,” Bannon told the crowd. “But we’re trying to raise above partisanship, and we have to.” That line received applause. But overriding Trump’s opposition to AI regulation in order to make meaningful policy changes could be a heavy lift. In several social-media posts yesterday, Trump dismissed those concerned about AI’s dangers as “Conspiracy Theorists, Treasonists, Traitors, and Leakers.” He suggested that AI and the data centers that power it could represent the greatest economic opportunity in American history. “Don’t kill the Golden Goose!” he wrote. Some lawmakers and activists, including Trump supporters and detractors, are now attempting to create a formal coalition to push for stronger guardrails around AI. Sanders plans to host a closed-door, bipartisan briefing on AI tomorrow in Washington.

Today’s event in Washington was branded by organizers as an opportunity to create a “more human-centric path for AI development.” Speakers, including lawmakers, labor officials, and faith leaders, leaned heavily on the idea that the battle to slow AI’s advance should transcend traditional partisan or ideological divides.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

The event was organized by the Future of Life Institute, a nonprofit that was primarily funded by a donation of more than $650 million in 2021 from Vitalik Buterin, a wealthy cryptocurrency entrepreneur. (The donation was delivered in crypto.) Politicoreported in 2024 that the small organization’s hefty war chest put it in the same league as organizational behemoths such as the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and the Brookings Institution.

Today’s event featured free merch that included Carhartt shirts, yellow hoodies, and camouflage hats featuring mottos such as Keep the future human and Pro-Human. A video booth, fully decked out with stage lighting and a single chair, offered attendees the chance to answer the prompt When did you feel most human? Not, apparently, on video: When I walked by it a few times, it was not being used.

A parody news report on nearby television screens played a staged interview with “Dan X,” who appeared to be a stand-in for an AI executive. The CEO of a fictional company called Replacement.AI was described by the faux journalist as “a walking paradox” who “loves people but isn’t crazy about humans.” Wearing a Patagonia vest and a smartwatch, the Millennial-coded CEO ended the interview by offering this advice: “Live every day as if it is your last, because one day soon, very soon, it might be.”

Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor and the president of the International Association for Safe & Ethical AI, told the crowd that his private discussions with AI-company officials included even more dire predictions about the technology’s dangers than what they have discussed publicly. But organizers seemed eager to push the event beyond dystopian warnings and move toward solutions.

“There is no better testimony to how united we are than the mind-blowing ideological diversity that you’re going to see onstage today,” Max Tegmark, a co-founder and the chair of the Future of Life Institute, said at the assembly’s opening. In addition to lawmakers, the event featured clergy who spoke about AI’s impact on faith, parents whose teenage children had committed suicide after engaging with chatbots, and economists concerned about the mass displacement of the workforce. Attendees attempting to navigate the event website had to first agree to “Standards of Conduct” requiring participants to “practice active listening” and refrain from personal attacks.

Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who is retiring from Congress, was the only elected Republican to appear onstage. He told me that organizers had encouraged him to avoid politics in his remarks but that he predicted that political differences will inevitably intrude as the debate over what to do about AI continues. “I doubt Bernie’s solutions are going to be my solution,” he said.

Still, there were signs that figures on both sides of the aisle seemed ready to at least have an honest conversation. “I don’t think you could find any two harder partisans than Bernie Sanders on the left and Steve Bannon on the right,” Bannon said during his remarks. “This is a hinge in history. We have to handle this correctly. To handle it correctly, No. 1, we can never trust what an oligarch says.”

Sanders was by then out of sight, but on that much, he surely agreed.

Math Can’t Go On Like This - The Atlantic

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:10:40 +0000

In late July, one of the world’s most famous mathematicians issued a warning to his field. Math is entering a “turbulent period,” the UCLA professor Terence Tao said in front of a packed lecture hall at the International Congress of Mathematicians. AI is getting so good at math, he said, that it’s causing a “crisis in our mathematical values and practices.”

Earlier in the same week that Tao gave his talk at math’s most prestigious conference, a researcher at Anthropic had used Claude to disprove an 87-year-old math conjecture. Still, when I asked mathematicians at the conference about their experiences with AI, most hadn’t thought deeply about the topic. Many seemed a little surprised that a journalist was asking them about it at all.

Now mathematicians are paying attention. Last week, OpenAI announced that its bots had cracked the Navier-Stokes problem, one of the seven Millennium Prize problems regarded as among the grandest challenges in the field. Navier-Stokes has stumped mathematicians since the 1930s: “It’s a career-killing problem—you can spend all your career doing it and never get the solution,” David Dritschel, a mathematician at the University of St. Andrews, told me. OpenAI said its swarm of 10,000 AI agents solved the problem in less than four days.

In the math world, the initial shock over OpenAI’s result has morphed into something of an existential reckoning for the discipline. Although OpenAI was able to solve the Navier-Stokes problem only by pulling from nearly a century’s worth of human efforts, academics are realizing just how much power the AI industry now has over math. “We’re seeing how swiftly an entire field can be ravaged by AI,” Max Weinreich, a math professor at CUNY Baruch, told me.

OpenAI’s breakthrough is as notable as how it was achieved. The night before OpenAI announced its solution, the NYU mathematician Tristan Buckmaster released a statement alleging that he had been scooped by OpenAI. With the heavy assistance of AI tools, Buckmaster and his collaborator, Levent Alpöge (who works at Anthropic), had made major progress toward solving the Navier-Stokes problem. Buckmaster implied that OpenAI might have copied their approach by accessing his messages with OpenAI’s agents. “Almost nobody else I know of was working on it,” he wrote.

In an announcement the next day, OpenAI said that it had tasked its AI systems to work on all of the Millennium Problems after hearing rumors that Anthropic had solved two of them. OpenAI claims that it focused on the Navier-Stokes problem only after finding promising partial results, and that it never looked at Buckmaster’s inputs. In any case, OpenAI poured incredible resources into solving this problem—expending millions of dollars in tokens—all because it heard an unfounded rumor of a solution. (OpenAI declined to comment.)

This drama has underlined concerns many mathematicians have about AI developments within the field. AI companies are encouraged to solve problems in a way that generates good headlines for their bots—marshaling resources that academics never could—but those solutions won’t necessarily aid further discoveries or help humans understand mathematics. On Friday, 25 winners of the Fields Medal (sometimes called the Nobel Prize of mathematics) released a statement called “A Severe Misalignment of AI in Mathematics.” “The push by AI companies to solve mathematical problems as a benchmark is detrimental to the science of mathematics, and to the mathematical community,” they wrote.

All of this can seem obtuse. Isn’t the point of mathematics to solve problems? But there’s more to a problem than just knowing whether it’s true. Solving a major problem in pure mathematics is often like getting a man on the moon: symbolically meaningful but with little direct value. Even though the Navier-Stokes problem deals with one of the most important models in fluid dynamics—a topic of great interest to airplane designers, climate modelers, and many other scientists—knowing the actual result is basically useless.

However, with both a math problem and the moon landing, the process of reaching that goal can indirectly develop all sorts of useful tools applicable to other problems. As part of the Apollo missions, NASA engineers and contractors had to solve subproblems that ultimately proved useful elsewhere. The need for an onboard computer, for example, helped spark the nascent computer-chip industry. Perhaps more surprising, to ensure that astronauts did not get sick while in space, the Apollo program helped set food-safety standards that have since become standard in the industry.

Mathematicians hope that OpenAI’s Navier-Stokes proof will end up containing ideas that make it easier to study all sorts of other problems, inside and outside of pure mathematics. This has happened before. For instance, efforts to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem produced mathematical tools that now underpin the newest online encryption methods.

It’s still too early to tell what humans might be able to learn from OpenAI’s proof. The paper is 166 pages and “almost incomprehensible,” Dritschel said. Yet over the coming months and years, mathematicians will exert substantial effort to dissect and distill OpenAI’s proof until its central ideas are understood enough to (hopefully) be applied elsewhere.

Humans won’t be able to do that for most AI-generated math results, however. Already, there are AI proofs that no human understands, not because the ideas are impossible to grasp, but because no one has had the time to look through the solution carefully. It’s easy to imagine a future in which mathematicians use AI to prove ever more impressive results ever more quickly—but they don’t understand what they’re proving in much detail. AI systems can speed the rate of problem-solving, but they can’t make it that much easier for human mathematicians to grasp a proof.

So if the field as we know it is to survive, mathematicians need to figure out how to adapt. One idea is to give less credit for solving a problem and more credit for work that communicates the ideas behind a solution in a way that can benefit the broader mathematical community. Yet it’s hard to say exactly how that works in practice. Unlike solving problems, evaluating how well a mathematician has communicated with their peers has no clear metrics.

It will take time for mathematicians to figure out the best response. All the while, AI is continuing to develop incredibly quickly. In less than the time that it takes to complete a Ph.D., systems such as ChatGPT have gone from struggling with basic arithmetic to solving some of the most famous problems in the world. Math’s turbulent period, as Tao deemed it, isn’t ending anytime soon.

Trump Is Looking for Diesel in All the Wrong Places

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:10:39 +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.

Gasoline prices have been up all summer, as have jet-fuel prices, as have home-heating-oil prices—but nothing has jumped quite like diesel. The average price for a gallon of diesel in the United States just hit an all-time high of $6.27, almost double what it was in late February. It’s no secret that the Iran war is largely responsible for America’s energy woes. So far, Donald Trump’s strategy has been to downplay these increases as temporary side effects (a “little glitch,” he said in March) and remind everyone that oil prices were higher under Joe Biden (which is true). Lately, though, the president has been telling us to look away from Iran and toward a different war.

Over the weekend, he called on Ukraine’s president to stop striking Russian oil refineries, which he said was “causing a shortage of diesel.” And yesterday morning, he announced a partial energy cease-fire between the two countries, claiming that the “World’s Diesel price rise is mostly caused by the Russia/Ukraine War, not Iran.” (Although both Ukraine and Russia have signaled that they’d be open to such an agreement, they continued attacking each other last night.) Focusing on Eastern Europe may be a convenient distraction tactic, but the reality is that this war is ultimately less important for U.S. diesel than the one that Trump is waging in the Middle East.

Diesel’s rally has to do with how it’s distilled. Diesel, like gasoline, primarily comes from crude oil, which has been in short supply since the Strait of Hormuz was effectively shut down in February. Middle Eastern crude, which is sludgy and sulphurous, is particularly conducive to producing diesel. Making matters worse, many local refineries have been attacked or have preemptively gone offline, leaving the region less equipped to handle the crude that remains. Yemen’s Houthis attacked a major Saudi facility last week as a prelude to a broader offensive.

The refinery problem is global. At their summer peak, the world’s facilities were producing 4.2 million fewer barrels a day than they were last year. As Trump has pointed out, Ukrainian attacks on refineries in Russia—usually the world’s second-largest diesel exporter—have only compounded the issue. With Moscow maintaining its ban on diesel exports (meant to protect domestic supply), more countries are turning to the U.S. to make up the difference. American plants are now “running all-out,” per the American Petroleum Institute, using almost all of their processing power, and the U.S. is exporting more refined-oil products on average than it was last year. U.S. refineries typically shut down for at least a couple of weeks for maintenance around this time of year, too, which could potentially squeeze supply even more.

Still, Matt Smith, the director of commodity research at the data firm Kpler, told me that Ukrainian aggression “isn’t equally to blame, let alone the leading factor,” in America’s rising diesel prices. Even if Russia and Ukraine agreed to a cease-fire today, global refining capacity wouldn’t magically return right away. As I wrote in May, damaged facilities take time to repair and come back online once they’ve been shut down. Gregory Brew, an energy historian and a senior analyst at Eurasia Group, told me that for any détente to have an effect on diesel prices, “it would likely need to last several weeks at least.” Meanwhile, the situation in the Middle East remains unstable. The Saudi Arabian government recently shut down a crucial pipeline that was damaged in a strike by Iran-aligned militias in Iraq (the pipeline had been moving 4 to 5 percent of the global oil supply—several million barrels a day). Combine these risks with elevated seasonal demand for diesel, which in the U.S. tends to peak around the harvest season, and it’s clear that the European conflict is only one force among many behind this price spike.

Americans are feeling the effects. One gas station in San Diego has been selling diesel for $9.99 a gallon, which is as high as its three-digit physical display will permit. Groceries may become more expensive because farm equipment and refrigerated 18-wheelers tend to run on diesel. Trains predominantly use diesel, too, and railroads’ fuel surcharges on grain shipments have more than doubled over the past year. Nearly 5 million homes could be paying more for heating oil (which is chemically similar to diesel and subject to some of the same economic pressures) as well.

As everyday costs continue to climb, voters are growing more and more dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of the economy. And over the past few months, the president has been looking for someone—anyone—to share the blame. A speedy Trump-negotiated end to the Ukraine war is unlikely for many reasons. But even in the fantasy world where he pulls that off, it wouldn’t save him from a diesel spike of his own creation.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

A federal judge blocked the Kennedy Center from adding Donald Trump’s name to the building or its grounds. The judge ruled that such changes require congressional approval, reaffirming an earlier decision that led to Trump’s name being removed from the center.
In a hearing today, the House Financial Services Committee questioned Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent about inflation, national debt, and rising borrowing costs as he defended the Trump administration’s economic policies. The 10-year Treasury yield briefly reached 5.04 percent this morning, its highest level since 2007.
Russia and Ukraine launched new attacks on each other’s energy infrastructure overnight, shortly after Trump said the two countries had agreed to halt such strikes. The Kremlin described the halt as a proposal still under discussion, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine would stop its attacks if Russia did the same.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Trump’s position on AI makes no sense, Rogé Karma argues.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic

Sons and Mothers

By George Packer

When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?”
“Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?”
Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my mother, my sister, and me, I was troubled by a sense of profound relief. Unable to understand, let alone forgive, myself, I went searching for insight on the shelves of my parents’ narrow, high-walled study. Books offered a way to replace real self-knowledge with an official version—the idea of “guilt” instead of the intolerable feeling itself. In a volume called Oedipus: Myth and Complex, amid thickets of psychoanalytic jargon, I found what I was looking for.

Read the full article.

Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 23:10:39 +0000

The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.

A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants. The Graham bill would turn those sanctions into law: If Trump wanted to end them, he would need Congress’s approval. It also targets a few Russian officials and companies by name, further reducing Trump’s discretion. These provisions help explain why the late Senator Graham, one of Ukraine’s strongest defenders in Congress, originally championed the bill. President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has urged legislators to pass it, as have more than 30 national-security and foreign-policy experts who argue that it’s in Kyiv’s best interest.

But the bill is not what it seems. The legislation would impose no significant new sanctions on Russia, and it would allow Trump to waive any of its measures simply by claiming that doing so is in the national interest. In other words, a law that appears to handcuff Trump would offer him a key to free himself. What’s more, its most important provisions are about not sanctions per se, but tariffs. The bill could provide Trump with the same kind of sweeping authority to impose tariffs that the Supreme Court took away from him in February, allowing him to intensify his trade war with many of America’s allies and partners.

The legislation would give the president authority to impose levies of up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and the five largest importers of Russian natural gas, which include China, India, France, Japan, Hungary, and Slovakia. It also allows him to impose tariffs on the five countries that are deemed to be the biggest facilitators of Russia’s evasion of oil sanctions—a vague provision largely subject to presidential discretion. (There are a few carve-outs for the natural-gas category, but not for the others.)

[Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe]

Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer who served in the Biden administration, told me that the bill “gives Trump much more flexibility on tariffs than traditional tariff laws. There are no guardrails or restrictions.” The simplest reading of the legislation suggests that Trump can impose tariffs on only the countries that appear in the various top-five lists. But Harrell noted that Trump’s second-term track record suggests that he might try to interpret the law more expansively, perhaps by treating the European Union as a single country and imposing tariffs on the entire bloc all at once. Harrell also warned that the administration might use the law as a pretext to impose tariffs on countries that have little or nothing to do with Russia evading sanctions.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Trump has employed such a pretext. Consider his 25 percent tariff on India, which the Supreme Court has since struck down. The levy was ostensibly meant to punish the country for importing oil from Russia. But reporting suggests that the decision had more to do with Trump’s annoyance that Prime Minister Narendra Modi didn’t give him credit for the cease-fire that India and Pakistan signed last year.

Going beyond the letter of the Graham bill could well result in litigation for the administration. But Trump would still have ample reason to take an aggressive approach. For one thing, the legal process takes a long time—most trade lawyers think that the February ruling came at warp speed, even though it was a year in the making. While the case was moving through the courts, they consistently allowed the Trump administration to continue collecting tariff revenue in the meantime. In all likelihood, Trump would be free to use the tariff tool expansively for most of the rest of his term.

Trump is evidently less worried about Russia evading sanctions than he is about oil prices. At the start of the Iran war, he waived some sanctions on Russian oil in an attempt to keep prices from going up. There is little reason to think that he will act more forcefully against Russian energy now, because oil prices remain high and the midterms are just a month away. Indeed, he has failed to update and enforce sanctions that are already on the books, despite bipartisan support. Moreover, Trump recently sent Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff to Moscow to dangle the prospect of sanctions relief in exchange for some modest steps toward deescalating the war.

[Read: The warrior-witches of Ukraine’s resistance]

Still, supporters of the bill believe that the benefits outweigh the risks. Eric Ciaramella, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who served on the National Security Council as an adviser on Ukraine policy in the first Trump administration, told me, “If Trump wanted to hurt Europe, he has lots of ways to do that already. This is just a marginal increase in that risk, and it adds some political pressure on him to get tougher on Russia.” Whether such pressure would get Trump to change, however, is another question.

Perhaps the strongest argument in favor of the bill is simply that the Ukrainians want it. The legislation would no doubt serve as a symbol of Congress’s support. But Ukraine needs material, not symbolic, support—particularly weapons such as air-defense interceptors and greater economic assistance to survive the winter. Trump has the power to provide both, but he has chosen not to. Turning the Graham bill into law isn’t likely to give him a sudden change of heart.

Yesterday, Democrats tried but failed to introduce amendments that would exempt the EU from being treated as a country, tighten the national-security waiver, and scrap the broad allowances for tariffs on countries other than Russia. Without those measures, the bill amounts to little more than a permission slip for Trump to restart his trade war with America’s allies and partners. That’s not a price worth paying just to give Ukraine a symbolic victory.

Trump’s Position on AI Makes No Sense - The Atlantic

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:32:22 +0000

The AI panic has arrived. Tech CEOs are practically begging the government to make them slow down. But Donald Trump isn’t buying any of it. On Sunday, he dismissed calls for AI regulation on the grounds that doing so would surrender America’s position in the global AI arms race. “Look, we’re leading China in AI,” the president told reporters. “We’re the most sophisticated country in the world. And frankly, I want to keep it that way, because whoever wins AI wins.” He repeated the sentiment less decorously in a Truth Social post yesterday describing the calls for regulation as “a SICK conspiracy going on against AI,” adding that “the only one that is happy about it is China.”

But if Trump is truly concerned about staying ahead of China in the AI race, he hasn’t been acting like it. Late last year, his administration lifted export controls on advanced chips made by the American company Nvidia. These chips are the most crucial input to AI development. The policy is the equivalent of declaring that the United States must remain ahead of Russia in the nuclear-arms race, while allowing American firms to sell uranium to the Kremlin.

Indeed, America’s monopoly on advanced computer chips might be the biggest reason the U.S. has kept ahead of Chinese AI companies so far. Experts generally agree that China is level with or ahead of America when it comes to engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a top AI model also requires highly advanced computer chips capable of performing trillions of calculations a second. Nvidia is the only company in the world that can produce such chips at scale.

Read: What really happens if China wins the AI race?

That’s why, in October 2022, the Biden administration announced that it would ban Nvidia from selling its most advanced semiconductors to China. The aim of the policy was to slow China’s AI development by withholding the one resource that it did not have. When Trump took office in January 2025, the policy seemed to be working. Experts estimated that the leading American AI models were well ahead of the best Chinese models, and Chinese AI companies were citing export controls as one of the biggest obstacles to their growth. “Money has never been the problem for us,” Liang Wenfeng, the CEO of the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, told a Chinese media outlet in 2024. “Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

But over the course of 2025, Trump began loosening the restrictions. In May, the administration halted the implementation of a Biden-era rule meant to prevent Nvidia chips from being smuggled into China via third-party countries. Then, in July, it lifted controls on the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chip. Finally, in December, the White House went even further by removing the ban on the far more powerful H200, Nvidia’s second-best chip, which is estimated to be nearly six times more powerful than any chip China had direct access to previously.

Experts immediately warned that lifting the ban was a bad idea. The Institute for Progress, a think tank focused on science and technology policy, estimated that the U.S. would have had access to roughly 20 to 50 times more compute power than China by 2026 if it had kept full chip restrictions in place; unrestricted H200 exports could shrink that gap to almost nothing. “Compute power is the only reason we’ve retained our advantage so far,” Saif Khan, who co-authored that report, told me at the time. “And we’re about to just give it away.”

Chinese companies have indeed begun to catch up since the controls were lifted. Over the first half of this year, multiple Chinese AI firms released models that perform nearly as highly as Anthropic and OpenAI’s top models, most of them at a fraction of the price. Experts now believe that the AI gap between the U.S. and China is about six months and closing fast.

Rogé Karma: Data centers are a distraction

Some of this progress seems to be the result of Chinese firms taking advantage of the Trump administration’s loose policies. The most advanced Chinese model to date, Kimi-K3, appears to have been trained by remotely accessing a cluster of Nvidia’s most advanced chips via a data center in Thailand—a loophole that was made possible when Trump rolled back restrictions on chip sales to third-party countries. An analysis by Epoch AI, an AI-focused think tank, found that up to 59 percent of China’s total AI-chip stockpile at the end of 2025 had been smuggled into the country.

Now that China has legal access to Nvidia’s second-best chip, however, Chinese companies won’t need to rely on whatever compute power they can scrape together through the black market. They can simply buy the chips that they need. A few months ago, Liang, the CEO of DeepSeek, lamented that his company had “relatively little” access to chips last year, but that “this year we’re very aggressively expanding this compute” with chips that are “basically all Nvidia.” All of which means that the next generation of Chinese models will likely be even more powerful.

Trump is right that a unilateral AI slowdown would create a serious risk of the U.S. being overtaken by China. But the solution is not a perpetual anything-goes AI arms race. Instead, the U.S. should pursue a nonproliferation agreement with China in which both sides agree to a mutual deceleration of AI progress. Trump wants to use the threat of Chinese AI development as an excuse to keep the U.S. industry accelerating—even as his own policies make that threat worse.

Emily St. John Mandel Imagines What Comes After America - The Atlantic

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:21 +0000

Emily St. John Mandel writes science fiction, with the accent firmly on fiction. Imagination, not technical verisimilitude, is her strength; she wisely disregards the scientific in favor of the human. Her indifference to plausibility is a measure of her confidence as a storyteller, and helps snare readers like me, who have a mild allergic reaction to postapocalyptic settings and outer-space odysseys. Her previous novel featured time travel, interplanetary travel, and a cosmic glitch; now, in her challenging new novel, Exit Party, we have accidental teleportation between parallel universes. The underlying theme, though, is irresistible: how shockingly little humanity understands about the sudden swerves and reversals that shape a life—or end it. The new book also offers a prescient invitation to consider the human toll that a world of chaos or repression can exact.

Explore the October 2026 Issue

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Exit Party’s stunning first sentence leaps ahead to 2031 and peeks into a woman’s soul: “In the first spring after the collapse of the United States, the blossoming of the jacaranda trees felt to Ari like grace.” Newly released after 18 years in prison, 48-year-old Ari Waker is just getting used to a Los Angeles that has seen vicious internecine violence. Although international peacekeeping troops have been withdrawn and the city’s curfew has been lifted, nothing like normalcy prevails. Ari walks with her roommate from their apartment in Echo Park (note the locale) to a party in Silver Lake. There, the incomprehensible happens: Two people from a parallel world materialize at the party, and another person (the host) is teleported in the opposite direction—all by accident.

The inexplicable appearances and disappearances are as disorienting for the reader as they are for Ari, who wonders whether she has a brain tumor or is having a stroke. For the three teleported individuals, the experience is a disaster: instant, complete, and irreversible dislocation. In the alternate universe, we soon learn, the “United State” has become a fortress, “closed like a fist,” where the national doctrine is “Harmony at any cost.” There we encounter, among other characters, Ibari, an enforcer of the brutally repressive social order.

Exit Party: A Novel

By Emily St. John Mandel

Abrupt cataclysm is a signature of Mandel’s recent work. Before Exit Party came Sea of Tranquility (2022), The Glass Hotel (2020), and Station Eleven (2014)—all of them ingeniously splintered narratives involving many protagonists, zigzagging timelines, and some kind of shattering event. It’s never clear until the end that the shards of narrative can be assembled to form a coherent story. The big picture that at last emerges in Exit Party features paired life stories of doppelgängers, genetically identical sets of characters who have made decisions in their divergent worlds that move them along radically different paths. Ari and Ibari are the principal “twins.” Though at first they seem utterly dissimilar, they are, as Ibari recognizes late in the novel, “two sides of the same coin.”

From the March 2020 issue: Ruth Franklin on Emily St. John Mandel’s ‘Station Eleven’ and ‘The Glass Hotel’

Repeatedly drawn to criminality (which she associates with freedom), Ari has had more than her share of “hinge moments,” the term she prefers for dramatic, world- and life-changing twists. She launched one criminal enterprise—selling luxury goods bought with stolen credit-card numbers—as a teenager, while living in Brooklyn with an aunt and uncle who dealt in stolen antiques. Soon enough, helped out by her cousin, she was selling U.S. passports. When the Russian Mafia lured her into smuggling people, her cousin, beset by moral qualms, balked. So she hired an assassin to kill him. That’s how she landed in prison.

Sprung from jail and hoping to find her footing, Ari drifts instead. She works as a dishwasher and in warehouses, and then becomes, in dizzying succession, a gunrunner, a trophy wife, a philanthropist, an art collector. Arriving in Paris in a car with bulletproof windows (another hinge moment), she wonders, “How many completely separate lives am I going to get to live before I run out of chances.” Mandel makes this resilient character—a serial transgressor with a pragmatic code of ethics, uncannily accurate premonitions, and a touching capacity for regret—sympathetic and compelling. Her last name, Waker, is a clue to her essence: She’s awake, aware. She will always notice the jacarandas.

A meticulous observer by profession, Ibari is 79 when we meet her, and has risen to a high rank in the Internal Security Service. She’s as frank about her complicity in the disappearance of rule-breaking fellow citizens as Ari is about her weakness for criminality. Ibari has nonetheless imagined a scenario in which, instead of running surveillance operations for the State, she became a criminal; like her twin, she felt there would be “freedom in that.”

The door that swings open at the party remains thereafter obdurately shut. Appalled, puzzled, fascinated, Ari and Ibari (in their parallel worlds) try their best to comprehend what has happened. They investigate, quizzing the accidentally teleported. Eventually, they (and the befuddled reader) learn enough about each other and the different worlds they inhabit to have some thoughts about “entanglement”—about how doubles in their respective universes intersect. Which they do, eerily. Even before she knows anything about Ibari and her career in the secret police, Ari wonders why she herself hadn’t “just become a detective, instead of turning to crime.” She can see the appeal of a life played out in the ranks of the NYPD. She yearns for a homeland where she would be spared the “permanent unease” of encroaching anarchy, where armed fighters aren’t forever shooting at one another on the edge of town.

In Exit Party, those who diverge nearly converge, and every echo resonates.

When they were young girls, Ari and Ibari each read the same children’s detective novel and both latched on to the same sentence: “True diligence means following the improbable path.” While in prison, Ari had TRUE DILIGENCE tattooed on her left wrist; to judge from the improbable path that Ari and Ibari’s creator has followed, it’s Mandel’s motto too.

After growing up in western Canada, mostly homeschooled, Mandel graduated in 2000 from the School of Toronto Dance Theatre. Nine years later, at 30, having abandoned her dream of dancing professionally, she published her debut novel. Like her next two books, it was a noir thriller; all three slipped by more or less unnoticed. Her fourth, Station Eleven, about a flu pandemic “that exploded like a neutron bomb over the surface of the earth,” killing almost every human, won prizes and much-deserved critical praise, and sold remarkably well—before getting a big bump six years later during COVID. Sales of the book passed the 1 million mark shortly after the first episode of an HBO adaptation aired, in late 2021.

Station Eleven was Mandel’s own hinge moment. In addition to introducing what has since become her fiction’s hallmark fracturing of time and lives, the novel displayed her calm authority and her easy way with ambitious imaginative gambits—one world erased, another fighting to be born—carried off with barely a trace of writerly flourish: “The caravans had once been pickup trucks, but now they were pulled by teams of horses on wheels of steel and wood.” In Mandel’s work, unadorned realism is at the service of baroque invention, and everything, including the prose, is subordinate to the story.

Like all the best stories, hers are character-driven. In Station Eleven, Kirsten Raymonde, a child actor before the pandemic and afterward a skilled warrior, is canny and resourceful in the face of catastrophe. Eight years old when her familiar world ended, and a semi-feral teenager when she hooked up with a ragtag troupe that stages Shakespeare plays and orchestral concerts, Kirsten is permanently traumatized, ferocious when necessary, and somehow still capable of tenderness. She’s a sturdy hook for the reader.

Mandel holds tight to some of her characters: She teleports a few between the parallel worlds of her novels. Ari made her debut in The Singer’s Gun (2010), where she was already mercilessly pragmatic and minimally sentimental. An important prop in the new novel is a painting by a minor but vivid character in The Glass Hotel, Lucas Alkaitis, a heroin-addicted artist, talented and doomed, “on the run from mediocrity and Brylcreem and grey flannel suits.” Lucas himself also reappears, still an addict, still committed to his art, in a curious coda to Exit Party set in his Manhattan studio in 1960—a final, wrenching narrative swerve.

In Sea of Tranquility, you’ll find a Mandel stand-in: a newly famous writer in the year 2203 who has left her moon-colony home for planet Earth to embark on a globe-spanning book tour. Separated from her family, she finds herself unmoored, homesick. An interviewer in Estonia asks her what it’s like to have published a tremendously successful book. She answers, “I wrote three books that no one noticed, no distribution beyond the moon colonies, and then … it’s like slipping into a parallel universe.” She continues, “I somehow fell into a bizarre upside-down world where people actually read my work. It’s extraordinary. I hope I never get used to it.”

One of the projects of modernism (and postmodernism) is to unsettle our confidence in the coherence of the self and thereby reveal the truth about our disjointed identity, so often sabotaged by an unruly unconscious. The so-called neomodernist novelist Rachel Cusk has declared that she is “not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” It seems to me that Mandel, who merrily jettisons narrative conventions and plays cunningly with timelines, nonetheless insists on the essential coherence of her fictional creations. How many completely separate lives can Ari live and still track as a character? “I took out a contract on my cousin,” she says to the host of the Silver Lake party. “It was a mistake and I’m not that person anymore.” I don’t believe her. Though she probably would not now pay to have a close relative murdered, she remains the ruthless person who once did.

Read: Emily St. John Mandel’s writing advice

All of the doubling that powers the plot of Exit Party prompts us to consider how we recognize ourselves and others—whether we believe in the integrity of our persona and theirs. What is the essential stuff of our identity? What makes us whole? In The Singer’s Gun, Mandel has Anton Waker, the cousin Ari thought she wanted dead, provide an answer: It’s details, “small and personal and utterly beautiful and mundane, that make up the fabric of a person’s life.” Hinge moments may matter less than humdrum daily doings. We change tack, break free, and start over, yet we carry with us the stubborn imprint of all our old habits, the jumbled storehouse of memory, and a long trail of sensory data so familiar that it goes unnoticed. We endure.

And we suffer, due to circumstances beyond our control. This is where the doubling of the radically different nations comes in. Which is less awful, the calm and sinister surveillance state that Ibari serves with growing reluctance, or the “fracturing continent” that Ari yearns to escape? At first Ari reacts to chaos with a rueful calm—“You don’t notice the supply chain till it collapses”—but after years of “flashes of gunfire at night” from militia skirmishes that “stopped just short of all-out war,” a bone-crushing weariness sets in. As she knows, “Societal breakdown is exhausting.”

The “malevolent weight” of a tyrannical government is similarly sapping. When the secret police is everywhere, Ibari wryly notes, “anyone can be surveilling you at any time, including the person whom you are yourself surveilling.” To live peacefully, you make believe everything’s fine, ignoring “black cars moving too slowly down sunlit streets, unsmiling plainclothes agents in pairs, drones gliding quietly through the air.” At the academy where she trained to join the secret police, Ibari was told, “A harmonious society comes at a price.” The instructor added, “And we are not just the ones who exact that price, we are the ones who pay it.”

Mandel declines to identify any specific ideology in either world. No dictator is referred to in the totalitarian regime; no feuding warlords are named in the failed state. In both places, the status quo has evolved without recognizable human agency. That’s simply how it is—for now.

Ibari comes to treasure the phrase “No country lasts forever,” because “there was such hope in that.” A bitter sort of hope, but one that chimes with the spirit of the novel as it winds down, attuned to fluid time as well as fluid space. With Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “famous little poem” about burning the candle at both ends in mind, the artist Lucas Alkaitis (soon to die of a heroin overdose) reflects, “The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night. Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.”

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “What Comes After America.”

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What Trump’s Bizarre Posts Are Teaching Us About AI

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:20 +0000

Trump has never been shy about his proclivity for self-aggrandizement (daydreaming about having his face chiseled onto Mount Rushmore or printed on a $250 bill). But his recent spate of social-media posts—almost all products of AI—has him living in an expanded fantasyland. His supporters are likely to just giggle; more fun and trolling—so what? His critics might roll their eyes at the extravagant immaturity but almost can’t be bothered anymore (unless they’re Iceland). After a decade of Trump shenanigans, getting worked up either way is hard. Also, these images might come across as just a little sad—the projections of a man who is losing power and virility but desperately needs to see himself as powerful and virile.

The absurd cartoons are worth pondering, though, and not for the sake of getting to know Trump better (I believe that onion has been thoroughly peeled). Because what AI can do to exaggerate and aggrandize Trump, it can do to everyone. For the president, this may be just one more level up on his escalator of self-regard, but for those without Napoleonic degrees of narcissism, the mental terrain opened up by these quick-prompt chimeras is new.

When the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan wanted to understand how the ego takes shape, he thought of mirrors. Sometime from six to 18 months of age, he theorized, a baby begins to recognize their reflection, and experiences what Lacan—abstruse French structuralist that he was—described as the “jubilant assumption of his specular image.” In plainer words, the baby realizes, That’s me! This is significant because the child at this point is otherwise a fragmented mess, experiencing the world through disconnected sensation. Lacan thought the mirror provides an idealized perception of wholeness when, really, inside it’s all a scramble, and through this illusion of coherence, a proper ego—a sense of self—begins to bud.

[Read: Trump’s giant face is everywhere]

Lacan didn’t believe that we ever really outgrow this reliance on our reflection, whether seen above a bathroom sink or in the ways other people look at us. But the mirror he had in mind could show you only the person who stands in front of it—the image is always tethered to physical reality. The AI mirror is something else. It asks what we’d like to see and produces it.

In the past, only kings and emperors could indulge their most exalted, exaggerated picture of themselves. They could commission heroic, larger-than-life representations—though even these were limited by available materials and plausible realism. AI image-making has now democratized this kind of statue-building. I know because I just asked ChatGPT to create an image of me astride a bronze horse in the center of a city, and I’ve never looked more commanding. But AI can do so much more: The ideal self has escaped the confines of the mirror and even the gilded sculpture; it can now inflate to unimaginable dimensions.

In this new world, our insecurities are not obstacles; they are starting points. Take my modest height. I can conjure up what I would look like in Victor Wembanyama’s stretched-taffy body—though I’d settle for something one foot shorter. I’m fully aware that this is just an image, and a bizarre one, but it engraves this taller me—a version who walks into a party and looks down, not up, at everyone—into my brain. It creates a gulf between reality and such a picture. This fantasy made manifest can either delude or taunt me. It exists, and I can’t forget it. Conversely, I should say, it also reveals what I’m most self-conscious about—exactly as AI does for Trump. The puffed up, dominating, victorious man with the six-pack is what the AI mirror shows the president, because that is what he prompts it to show him. (In most cases, of course, he is reposting images prompted by supporters, who are thereby exposing their own displaced fantasies.)

To give Trump a little credit, he seems vaguely aware of the idea that AI is, like the Mirror of Erised in Harry Potter, showing us what we most want. One of his posts has Barack Obama looking into a mirror and asking: Mirror mirror on the wall who’s the greatest president of them all. No surprise, it’s Trump, who is staring back at him.

[Read: Let Trump keep building monuments to himself]

What I see in the AI mirror is greater than I could ever be—and infinitely editable. Instead of feeding a desire for coherence, as Lacan imagined, it creates a bottomless hunger for the unachievable. I can keep tweaking it with more prompts: “Give me thicker hair. Make my jaw more chiseled.” Start down this road, I’m afraid, and you’ll encounter unhappy young men using hammers to shape their actual faces so that they can come closer to the digital simulacra.

Not all people are narcissists, and certainly not all are like Trump. But we are all susceptible. Who doesn’t dream occasionally of evading reality or the truth of the body you are stuck living in? On the scale of human history, it has been only about a second since we got photography (and the inevitable selfie) to augment what for so long only a pond’s surface or a piece of glass could show us: our own face. What will come from finding, instead, Supermen, kings, popes, and Jedi staring back at us?

Without AI, Trump might be forced to look around him, perhaps at the portraits of other presidents in the White House—just like Richard Nixon did. In their book The Final Days, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein recounted what became a famous story: As Nixon’s presidency was crashing down around him, he began talking at night to these dead former presidents. (One of his sons-in-law denied this claim.) Oliver Stone dramatized the moment in his 1995 film, Nixon: The defeated, haggard president focuses on a painting of John F. Kennedy and says, with startling self-awareness, “When they look at you, they see what they want to be. When they look at me, they see what they are.”

Fiction, I know. But this is the kind of reckoning that can happen when you have no choice but to see what is in front of you. Trump is also very aware of the presidents who came before him. In another recent post, he ranks them all in a tiered chart from Great (Lincoln, FDR, Jefferson, and so on) to Failures (Biden, Obama, Carter, and so on). And atop the entire graphic in a box roughly four times the size of all the others, Trump’s severe, unsmiling face looks out under a label that reads back to him: The Greatest.

A Diagnosis for Social Conflict That Gets Lost Along the Way

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:20 +0000

Weddings, famously, create conflict. Before I got married, my parents and I fought over the guest list. A friend of mine struggled with adding some of her husband’s Protestant traditions to their otherwise Jewish ceremony. Another friend had to decode, and then manage, complicated tensions among her future aunts- and uncles-in-law.

All of these issues got resolved, and according to the conflict-resolution facilitator Priya Parker, the process of figuring them out made our weddings more successful expressions of our values. Parker explored the group creation of meaning in her 2018 best seller, The Art of Gathering. In her new book, The Art of Fighting, she writes that arguments are crucial to a group’s ability to do just that. What’s more, in American society—which Parker describes as bothconflict averse and low on big rituals—high-stakes events such as weddings are among the “last remaining collective mechanisms to help us have the fights we need to have to figure out who we are now.”

The Art of Fighting is predicated on Parker’s conviction that without confrontation, no group can work well. “Fighting,” she writes in her prologue, “is not the death of community. It is its lifeblood.” Parker considers Americans far too willing to focus on themselves rather than their communities, in large part due to a widespread fear of confrontation. A lot of loneliness, in her view, originates from the all-too-common decision to exit a challenging situation instead of dealing with its simmering disagreements. It’s a smart diagnosis, one that’s as relevant to small-bore social scenarios as it is to interactions within religious organizations, schools, and workplaces. The choice to hide from conflict is, to Parker, in many situations, a choice to be alone.

Parker’s idea that conflict is inherently a social good is intriguing and counterintuitive. But The Art of Fighting is not nearly as communitarian a book as its setup would suggest. Although its more abstract passages describe healthy confrontation as helpful and worthy, its examples tell another story. Parker presents The Art of Fighting as a “group-help book” buttends to take a side in her case studies—and in most instances,her side wins.

[Read: A wedding reveals how much help is really available to you]

Her own life serves as illustration, too, and often provides the book’s most revealing moments. By way of arguing that everyone needs to get comfortable with disagreement, she mentions a clash she and her father had after the latter got upset that Parker hadn’t invited her stepbrother’s wife to her baby shower. As Parker relates it, their discussion of her reasoning—she and her stepsister-in-law just aren’t close—ends not with compromise or reconciliation but with the blunt lines: “He wasn’t getting it. And that was OK.” Such a one-sided resolution suggests a disinterest in compromise and an interpretation of fighting as an individualistic act. Facing conflict may very well be a social good—I believe it is—but her book more often seems to urge readers to wade into arguments to get what they want.

The Art of Fighting is full of stories of conflict. Some appear only once, and some are threaded throughout the book. The quarreling groups that Parker features, many of which she worked with in her role as a facilitator, range in size from an extended family to a percussion ensemble to a large architecture firm. Parker uses every case to ask a variation of her central question: “How do you fight with those to whom you want to belong?”

In the book’s most moving example, she writes about a church that, in the mid-1990s, deliberated about and then voted on whether it would perform and recognize gay marriages. Its pastor, Martin Copenhaver, understood that they couldn’t make a decision that might lead to division if his church were to survive. “In the political arena,” he tells Parker, “if you win by one vote, you win. In this arena, you win by one vote, you don’t win.”

Hoping to forge meaningful consensus, he hosted four meetings to discuss the subject; only those who attended were allowed to vote. After the election—the church decided, not unanimously but with “no great division,” to allow gay marriage—he asked everyone to reconcile in person with someone who voted differently. In essence, Copenhaver organized the entire conflict to prioritize congregants’ investment in the church, not to lead them toward a certain outcome.

I wanted to learn more about how other sorts of disputes, especially less orchestrated ones, might bolster a sense of community. But Parker is surprisingly blurry about the variety of incentives for confronting or ignoring tension that exist in one setting or another. Some strategies for managing conflict—waiting to engage until no one has steam pouring from their ears; ensuring that the arguing parties’ grievances and goals are clear; creating the right conditions for a tough conversation—may apply to all kinds of groups.

[Read: Why are we so spiteful?]

But the book doesn’t do enough to acknowledge that different sorts of conflicts have different stakes. Starting a fight for the good of the group may be wise among relatives but foolish if doing so could also mean losing your job. And a values-based argument may not be worthwhile in a corporate context where the overall goal is to maximize profit. One of Parker’s recurring examples is a debate that took place within a law firm about whether the TV in its common space should show World Cup games played in Qatar. It begins with an intern objecting, on Slack, to the “human rights abuses of workers in the lead up to the World Cup and the horrific status of rights for LGBTQ people and women in Qatar.” The managing partners invited employees to what Parker characterizes as a too-wide conversation about the World Cup. It was, she writes, “the wrong fight with the wrong assemblage of people in the wrong room.”

Parker uses this argument to underscore good and bad ways to navigate conflicts, especially ones that arise online—certainly an important issue in our screen-heavy times. But missing from this analysis is any real engagement on Parker’s part with the substance of the conflict itself. Readers never learn how the issue was resolved: Did the World Cup get shown or not? Was there ever a meaningful discussion about the objections the intern had raised? The book uses this example to describe strategies for handling internal dissent, focusing on how the managing partners could best have reestablished peace among their employees. It becomes a story about conflict management rather than conflict as a potential social good.

Some of Parker’s personal anecdotes more vividly illustrate her not-quite-communitarian approach to fighting. In one, she describes enrolling her children and their cousin in a small soccer camp one summer. Initially, the kids report hating camp and getting bullied by their counselors. Parker speaks with the camp director, who talks with his employees and establishes that Parker’s children and niece, who started on the eighth week of camp, are unfamiliar with both the established cohort’s “teasing culture” and the basic rules of soccer. Parker suggests that the camp’s coaches “give our kids a Week One experience, orient them, do the things you did with all the other kids when they were new.” They comply, and the camp—which Parker needs for child care—works out.

Parker’s reaction to the situation is entirely reasonable; what parent wouldn’t try to help a kid who’s being picked on, or scramble to rescue a child-care setup that seems about to fail? It is not, however, an illustration of confrontation as community service. She shows herself engaging in conflict to get her kids special treatment rather than nudging the kids to advocate for themselves or asking how the camp might better help them settle in despite their latecomer status. Another way to put this is that no compromise is on offer here, and we get no sense of a group working together. Parker, as the customer, gets to be right.

Throughout The Art of Fighting, individuals prevail in this way. A woman named Rebekah, exhausted by attending her family’s Passover seders—too much cooking, too much disruption to routine, too much airtime for her right-wing uncle—gives them up. But Parker never writes about what Rebekah’s parents, siblings, or children might lose when she and her nuclear family stop coming, or how her continued, if conflicted, attendance might have led her relatives to create more sustainable traditions. Just as some therapists prioritize clients over the other people in their lives, Parker prioritizes the subjects of her anecdotes over those with whom they fight.

What these storiesadd up to, ultimately, is a much less surprising take on conflict than the book tries to lay out. Parker provides a useful guide to having arguments in good faith without hurting anyone’s feelings unnecessarily or creating a corporate crisis. But arguments can be so much more than that. Alone in the book, the story of Copenhaver’s church demonstrates that even enduring and loaded disagreements can, if handled with enough care and respect, strengthen the bonds between parties—in other words, they can be productive, not just nondestructive. Many readers will have experienced this in intimate relationships. I, for one, have grown closer to some friends after air-clearing arguments and have drifted from others who weren’t willing or able to talk through issues when they arose.

But as Parker points out, public life in the United States isn’t set up for healthy conflict. Meaningful group fights are rare experiences. Aside from my wedding planning, I haven’t been part of one. I believe, in theory, that such a dispute could be transformational for both a community and its individual members. But in order for Parker’s book to have taught me how to navigate one, she would have had to truly let go of the old idea that the reason to fight is to win.

Sons and Mothers

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:20 +0000

Photographs by Amy Elkins

1.

When I was 13, not long after my father had committed suicide, I asked my mother, “What’s the Oedipus complex?”

“Why?” she replied at once. “Are you afraid you’ve got it?”

Maybe. I wasn’t aware of wanting to murder my father, but in the four years after he suffered a massive stroke at 43, he’d been a volatile presence in our house, given to bursts of rage and tears, or rendered ominously mute by his paralysis. When he disappeared on December 6, 1972, leaving my mother, my sister, and me, I was troubled by a sense of profound relief. Unable to understand, let alone forgive, myself, I went searching for insight on the shelves of my parents’ narrow, high-walled study. Books offered a way to replace real self-knowledge with an official version—the idea of “guilt” instead of the intolerable feeling itself. In a volume called Oedipus: Myth and Complex, amid thickets of psychoanalytic jargon, I found what I was looking for.

So why did I ask my mother the question, if I already knew the answer? To show off my new command of the term. To set her up for the unreturnable ping-pong smash I must have known was coming at me—to prove I could take it. I shared everything with my mother: Stanford’s football triumphs, the Democratic Party’s defeats, every Little League at-bat, every dream of glory on the stage or page. Why not my Oedipal anxiety?

A few days later, she handed me her copy of Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence’s autobiographical novel about a sensitive young man who is shaped and crushed by the love of his domineering mother. “Read this,” she said. “It might help you understand our relationship better.”

She was a small-boned, freckled, quick-tempered redhead with ironic blue eyes and astounding energy. She wore her hair short and had no interest in feminine things, or perhaps in being a woman at all. She preferred the company of men, while bitterly resenting their dominance. “I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister, and I’m somebody’s wife,” she told a Stanford oral historian in 2014. “Am I somebody?” People said that she spoke in the accent of Birmingham, Alabama, where she grew up in the 1930s and ’40s, but I couldn’t tell. It was just my mother’s voice—gruff, tender, amused, the voice that’s left a hundred indelible maxims in my head: “Ninety percent of tears are self-pity.” “Push down, lick around” (on how to eat an ice-cream cone). “You’re too sensitive and you’re not sensitive enough” (on my character). “There’s no such thing as casual sex.” “Loyalty is my favorite virtue.” “I wasn’t a very good mother, but I was a pretty damn good father.”

She loved to spar, and I made an ideal partner: Win or lose, her narcissism was satisfied. She championed me and competed with me—built me up, then knocked me down, then built me up again. At my 50th birthday party, she rose to make what I expected would be affectionate remarks and delivered a scorching roast. I was the recipient of her unending love, her unstinting attention, and her unvarnished judgment. She taught me how to throw a football and swing a bat, shave and tie a tie, and she taught me how to write. I have the scars.

For a year or two after my father died, my mother and I went to see a lot of movies together in the art houses of downtown Palo Alto: Chinatown, Scarecrow, Swept Away, Cries and Whispers. This was the early ’70s, before anyone called my hometown “Silicon Valley,” and the movies, in addition to being great, were mortifyingly explicit. Sometimes my mother offered to sit several rows away, which would have made it easier for me to watch the teenage boy in Amarcord fail to satisfy the buxom tobacconist. But my mother was more fragile than ever before or after—some nights I still heard sobbing from her bedroom down the hall—and I always sat next to her, postponing my adolescent rebellion, as it turned out, forever.

Except for the black-and-whites of her youth, my mother actually disliked movies, with a contempt that was both aesthetic and moral. Halfway through The Godfather she gave my shoulder a backhand swat: “Aren’t you about ready to leave?”

“No, I’m enjoying it.”

“Gratuitous violence.”

Those hours in darkened cinemas following my father’s suicide always puzzled me, until my wife explained: “It was a way for her to be with you and be alone at the same time.”

The problem with movies was that they weren’t literature, and literature was the closest thing in our family to religion. My mother’s sect was the short story. Chekhov reigned supreme, followed by Joyce, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Wallace Stegner (my mother’s mentor), and lesser deities. A moralist in a universe without God, she believed that human beings were the alpha and omega of existence, which made her a severe judge of people’s frailties, especially those of people she loved: “Affairs don’t jump at you as you are innocently walking down the road—you have to go in the woods looking for them.” But the writer’s duty is to see the full human truth and tell it as well as possible. In life, a lonely divorcée’s disappointing one-night stand with a sailor half her age whom she met on a plane might have elicited a terse “Pitiful.” But in a short story my mother wrote called “Small Moments,” she gives this character all the ruthless and compassionate understanding of her humanism.

She published several small-press collections, the first at age 50: spare, witty, “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display. “Frances Benedict’s husband, Emery, was a lawyer. Successful. Frances herself might yet become anything, having tried nothing,” begins a 1967 story called “Early Morning, Lonely Ride.” But every attempt at a novel defeated my mother, and all her life she suffered from writer’s block. Rather than sit in the study at her Underwood manual typewriter, she would weed the backyard, refinish a table, shop for dinner—“Anything not to write, apparently,” she wrote her mother in 1966. A decade later, in a letter to her sister-in-law: “I don’t seem to have much drive to write anymore. I spent the summer trying but I never finished anything. I’d go to bed on, say, Monday night with eight pages of a story, go to bed on Tuesday with only six pages and by Friday I wouldn’t have any.”

No one who spent 30 seconds in her presence could imagine that she lacked self-confidence, but inside the ego drive of any writer lurks the threat of falling silent. You believe you’re a singular talent—your parents, your teachers, your ambitions all say so—but the slight chance of finding out that you’re not is unbearable, and part of your vanity is being honest about your own work. All the while, the child in you who craves attention won’t shut up. The whole drama is contained in a few lines my mother wrote me when I was 19, about a story she’d just published: “The story is not much, in fact is kind of a phony. The woman’s motivation needs beefing up but I guess I wasn’t that interested in it. Nonetheless, I’ve gotten a lot of praise—well, not a lot but a couple of spontaneous responses from readers.”

The success that my mother desperately wanted as a writer came to her from teaching. She trained several generations of Stanford students in the craft of fiction, including Scott Turow, Tobias Wolff, Michael Cunningham, Jeffrey Eugenides, and Akhil Sharma. She was unsparing but generous with her students. “They’re all human beings, they all have a capacity to grow, and they all have feelings, and never forget those facts,” she told the oral historian. “No matter how silly the story was, there’s always something in it.” She won several awards and retired in the mid-’90s, a sort of local legend. By then the university was becoming the tech juggernaut that it is today, Stanford Inc., squeezing the English department into irrelevance. She lived three more decades as a reminder of another time, a reproachful ghost of humanities past, until her death last year, one month short of 100.

I doubt any of my mother’s students bore greater expectations or suffered more under her criticism than her son. I was the only one who could live out her thwarted dreams.

2.

Nancy Huddleston was the fifth of five children—born from 1918 to 1925—in a rambunctious, intensely political family. She came into the world battling for attention and prestige. When the dinner conversation ignored her, she threw her bread at a sibling or stood on the table and speechified. In a screwball comedy about her youth, she would have been the wisecracking little sister of the glamorous lead. She wore boys’ clothes and played boys’ sports, started smoking at 13, drinking and joyriding a year or two later. “I was a real happy tomboy,” she once recalled. “I always played with my brothers. My sisters were nonexistent for me.”

Her father, George, was a pale, taciturn patriarch who dispensed unquestioned justice to his boisterous clan. In old photographs he is never smiling. He died at age 90, in 1960, a few months before I was born, and I was named for him, but he seemed so ancient that I could never quite believe he was my mother’s father. George Huddleston represented Birmingham in Congress from 1915 to 1937. He was a populist in the mode of William Jennings Bryan and a racial moderate by the standards of the South, which meant that in the 1920s he denounced the Klan while voting against an anti-lynching bill. Throughout his career Black people were denied the vote in Alabama, allowing him to take radical positions on behalf of Birmingham’s white working class while avoiding the true test of courage in southern politics. He had a diminutive southerner’s resentment of bigness, a political philosophy he called “Jeffersonian,” and he spent his whole career on the losing side—against America’s entry into World War I, against banks and railroads in the ’20s, and against the New Deal, which led to his defeat in 1936. He retired, bought some property, and became a hard-core Dixiecrat. “He sold out all his principles and became very reactionary,” my mother said in 1947, when she was 22 and still living under her father’s roof. When the historian Richard Hofstadter observed that progressivism and reaction can exist together in a certain American political type, usually from the South or West, he might have had my grandfather in mind.

[From the November 1998 issue: Richard Hofstadter’s tradition]

In 1917, at 48, George married his secretary, Bertha, a warm, vivacious woman almost half his age. “Huddlestons don’t gush,” he would insist, and she would retort: “No, they just dry up and blow away.” She escaped from her repressed and repressive husband in bathtub gin and infidelities. He took out an ad repudiating his wife’s debts. She was arrested for driving drunk with one of her lovers, and the incident landed on the front page of several national newspapers. The marriage was “a horror,” their oldest child, my aunt Mary, told me.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

Huddleston-family photos: Nancy stands at the center of the rear photo, and sits atop a horse in the photo at left. At right, with her father, 1940s.

From her father my mother inherited her moralism, dislike of pretension, and sympathy for the underdog. Her mother gave her an enthusiasm for life that allowed her to thrive after tragedy. From the unhappiness of her parents’ marriage my mother acquired a habit of withdrawing into reading and a desire to write. Loyalty being her favorite virtue, she elided all the misery from stories she told about her family. They became comical southern yarns about a squabbling father and mother; a wild but loving tribe of siblings; their Great Dane, Duke, who survived a policeman’s bullet; the legendary incident in the 1936 election when her father, knowing he was going to be defeated, uncharacteristically lost his cool and demolished his opponent’s straw hat with a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.

As a child I never questioned this picture. I glamorized the big, raucous Huddleston family, especially after my own turned so grim with my father’s stroke when I was 8. If only there were more of us; if only we had a heroic dog; if only my mother were still a cheerful tomboy instead of a tired, irritable parent; and if only my father fell silent when he was unhappy instead of bursting into tears. It was years before I learned the deeper truth about my mother’s childhood, and I found it in her fiction. Her most moving characters are children, desperate to feel secure in the love of an unreliable mother and remote father. The combative, vulnerable child remained alive in her all her life. At 99 she could still seem like the 3-year-old girl who yanked a pearl necklace off the neck of a family friend who said she was going to vote for Herbert Hoover.

My mother came of age in the city that Martin Luther King Jr. called “probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States.” Through her teenage years she took Birmingham’s racial order for granted. “I was extremely prejudiced at this time and very conservative,” she later said. “Mrs. Roosevelt, for example, was an abomination on the face of the world.” But when she was 17, in the fall of 1942, something happened that changed her life.

[From the August 1963 issue: Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’]

She had just enrolled at Birmingham-Southern College, a Methodist school that all her siblings had attended. Her two brothers were now in the military, and the campus was nearly empty of male students. One day, one of the few still around (“some thug”) recounted an incident: At a small-town carnival in southern Alabama, a Black boy had grabbed the side of a whites-only merry-go-round and held on until he lost his grip and fell under the spinning platform, which crushed him. A group of white boys, including the narrator, tied the Black boy to a tree and beat him with iron pipes as punishment for crossing the color line, leaving him paralyzed.

This incident, and the casual pride of the thug describing his own participation, so shocked my mother that she wrote her first college English paper about it. She began arguing with her sorority sisters over race. Looking for a way to act on her new liberal consciousness, she signed a membership card of a left-wing organization called the Southern Negro Youth Congress. Without telling her parents, she joined a series of clandestine conversations between Black and white students at local colleges. But Birmingham’s racial hierarchy was inescapable, and it insulted the humanity of everyone it touched. When my mother made a point of sitting at the back of the bus on her way to campus, the Black passengers would stand up for the young white lady. Her attitude toward the Black students she met at the interracial dialogues mixed idealization and condescension: She was awed by everything they said, while hoping they wouldn’t make pronunciation errors.

In 1947, an Illinois sociologist conducted a study of 50 or so white liberals in Birmingham on the subject of race. Among those interviewed was 22-year-old Nancy Huddleston. Strict confidentiality was promised, but a few years ago my mother’s transcript fell into my hands and exploded.

As if self-lacerating honesty could cleanse her racial sins, she eagerly confessed to them all. She said that she had been a conventional racist until 17, “probably to gain my father’s affection,” and an enlightened one after that. Richard Wright was the only Black writer she had read. She had never entered a Black home, and other than servants she knew only three Black people in Birmingham. Her student meetings had smacked of noblesse oblige and accomplished nothing, and she despised her own righteousness. Her liberalism was merely “selfish”—she didn’t want to be deprived of the intellectual and artistic talents of Black people. Her views on race were “acquired attitudes whose urgencies I can ignore at times,” and she had promised not to embarrass her parents by breaking Jim Crow laws. What really got under her skin was the unfairness of “patriarchy,” because it hurt her personally. Her approach to race was sentimental, maybe moral, but not political. That would have demanded real sacrifice.

Decades later, I asked what more she could have done. “I could have thrown a bomb, or at least not enjoyed myself quite so much,” she said. “My racial experiences are littered with shame.”

In 1945, my mother left Birmingham to study for a master’s in theology at the University of Chicago. She was not even slightly religious, but she wanted to develop her mind, and the only professor at Birmingham-Southern who had taken her seriously (she credited him with saving her from a life of aimless drinking and partying) taught religious studies. Most of all, she wanted to get out of the South.

My mother was not a classic beauty, but in Chicago she felt irresistibly attractive. Female-deprived men were coming back from the war, and she could have gone out 10 times a day. She briefly dated a Black man just to prove to herself that her reluctance to get involved with him had to do with his wife and children in Washington, D.C., and not with prejudice: “I would never have tolerated such freshness from any white man.” Her bridge partner and close friend was Morteza Sprague, Ralph Ellison’s literature professor at Tuskegee. Her friendships were intellectual. She studied Reinhold Niebuhr and William James and wrote a thesis on John Dewey. Her time in the university’s more equal and free atmosphere was the happiest of her life.

In 1947 she returned to Birmingham with her master’s and stayed a decade.

Why did she waste her 20s marooned in her parents’ volatile house, in a rigid and cruel society that she had come to despise and that had no place for a young woman except as a homemaker? She always said that her mother and father needed her, that an unmarried woman was expected to live at home, that back then middle-class white girls didn’t have “careers.”

These were conventional excuses, and growing up I didn’t question them. Children don’t see their parents as people with complex, unconscious motives, or as individuals at all. Now I can imagine a story that my mother never told, perhaps not even to herself. It has to do with being a woman and a writer.

She would bring armloads of books home from Smith & Hardwick, in downtown Birmingham, and spend her days in her parents’ house reading the great modernists—Kafka, Proust, Mann, Koestler, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe. She began to write autobiographical stories in a sharp, knowing voice. To see the hidden and unlovely truth about everything, especially oneself, with a mid-century-American dose of Freud, was the mark of literary sophistication. She also exchanged flirtatious, barbed letters with several men whom she had met in Chicago. And in both fields, art and love, she was plagued by fear of failure: rejection of her stories, surrender of her independence. If she was attracted to someone, she would turn the affair into a competition for dominance, win, and lose interest, or else find herself succumbing and end it. “Returned from France to receive your thoughtful morsel of intellect and Huddleston voodoo for which I thank you from my heart—but what badinage,” wrote a suitor who signed as “R.” “You know, baby, if you don’t hurry up I’m going to marry somebody else and you won’t have anything but those old books and hair lockets.”

R. did marry somebody else, which Nancy learned on the same day in January 1950 that she received her first rejection slip, from this magazine. She had counted on success that winter with either R. or The Atlantic, then decided that she could have both, before coming up with nothing. She wrote to a friend: “Thinking that it was possible for me to have love and creativity, that there could be a both/and, I see that there can also be a neither/nor.”

Rejections piled up—hers of the men, the magazines’ of her. Within the confines of the yellow house at 2816 Rhodes Circle, her confidence would soar, crash, rise again. “I’ve gotten six rejections for my hard efforts, have relinquished literature seven times, and have a divine plot for a wonderful story which I hope to start tomorrow,” she wrote to the same friend. “I sharpened my razor at one point, summed up my life as a total failure, and convinced myself there was never such a genius in the long years of civilization.”

If she wasn’t a writer, who was she? Her aging father’s last daughter, under his roof and thumb. But if she turned out not to be a genius, she would have to submit to another male authority in the form of a husband who would gradually lose his awe of her and sink into careerism, alcohol, and affairs (this was the 1950s). In Birmingham, where the family name gave her a certain local fame, she could sustain her fantasies without having to test them against life.

One persistent and disgruntled beau finally let fly a harsh analysis. “Let’s get on the ball, Nancy, and face a few facts,” he wrote. “You don’t dare admit that you haven’t the courage to face the world, so you take refuge in having to take care of Mummy & Daddy. Because you’re too ‘young’ to accept anything but top-notch success and you’re afraid you don’t have enough of what it takes for that, you withdraw from the world and stay home in your mother’s womb, where it’s a little stifling & quite crowded for one of your size, where you’re not wanted and whence you’ve already been ejected, but where it’s warm, not too uncomfortable, and safe.” He also accused her of being afraid of sex.

This was a misguided strategy for conquering such a heavily defended stronghold. I don’t know what happened to the guy, but Nancy didn’t marry him (though she saved his letters). She did see a psychiatrist, but he was unable to solve her other problem: Almost nothing she started got past three pages. The one story she did finish—“Povera Baby,” a Hemingway imitation about a spoiled American woman on board an ocean liner to postwar Italy whose infected foot exposes her to the realities of poverty and war—was published in 1953, in Harper’s, no less, alongside an essay by James Baldwin. But success was a curse, and my mother’s struggle to repeat it produced an impasse that lasted the rest of the decade.

Writer’s block is different from depression, to which my mother was almost psychologically immune. She had too much energy to sink into torpor—who knew, she might still be a genius. In 1954 her father’s old seat in Congress came open, and she considered running for it, almost as a lark—she was, after all, a woman. Then her older brother George decided that he wanted it. I’m somebody’s daughter, I’m somebody’s sister. My mother snuffed out her own ambition and became the manager and speechwriter of her brother’s winning campaign. Politics was a natural arena for her abilities, and she did some work for the Democratic National Committee. She wasn’t very interested in policy, but she saw ideas in vivid moral colors, she loved a fight, and she had become a passionate Adlai Stevenson liberal.

That was how she got to know the man she finally married.

In early 1956, on his way to California to start teaching at Stanford Law School, a Jewish lawyer and World War II Navy veteran named Herbert Packer passed through Birmingham to visit a friend, who invited him to a dinner party where another guest was Nancy Huddleston. These two 30-year-olds spent the evening talking about the coming presidential election. For the next two years they exchanged infrequent visits and frequent letters.

I never really knew my father. When I was a little boy, before the stroke, he was a kind, overworked, rather distant presence; afterward, he was a person I pitied and feared. But his correspondence with my mother reveals someone unimagined. This is why letters are among the many things whose passing from our lives we will regret. After my mother died, a cardboard box full of them came into my hands, the airmail envelopes covered in stamps and postmarks, and without them I couldn’t tell this story. Letters have a humbling effect on memory. They reveal those closest to us without our distorting presence. They let other people come back to life and have their say.

“You are so entirely desirable to me that nothing will ever be the same again for me unless I win you,” my father wrote in 1957, after a visit to Birmingham that left him palpitating. “So it’s my health as well as yours that’s at stake.” Who was this passionate lover? “I am not so moonstruck as to suppose that the doubts of a lifetime can be dissolved in a day. And I know that you will have your bad days, when there is no hope, no belief, just doubt and black despair. But through it all, remember this Nancy: I want you, I need you, I love you.”

No wonder she married him—he knew how to talk to her. He pursued, but without coyness or aggression, cards on the table. He gave space and time, but not too much. He understood her resistance and waited it out. This dark, handsome Jew was exotic in Birmingham (her nearly senile father violently opposed him), more than her intellectual equal, but not a man who wanted to dominate her or ever could. He was offering to take her to California, 2,000 miles from the yellow house that had become her prison. By 1958, at 32, marriage might have been now or never. “I went into it with absolute blindness,” she told the Stanford oral historian. “I just knew it was an opportunity to get out and stop being a slug.” So she made what she called, in a letter written a few weeks before the wedding, “the most difficult decision of my life.”

In California she was nobody. She had no one to talk with all day except grocery clerks and nothing to do but shop and receive furniture deliveries and wait for her busy, conscientious husband to come back from campus to the apartment in Menlo Park so she could cook dinner or go out with him and his colleagues. Herb volunteered to make breakfast and wash the dishes every Sunday so she could sleep in. Her reading was reduced to cookbooks; she wasn’t writing at all. This was the nightmare of losing herself, and she wondered if she had made a great mistake.

And it turned out that she had bound herself to a fragile man. Herb was having trouble finishing a book he’d been contracted to write about the case against Alger Hiss and other American Communists. He was drowning in documents and had lost interest. His writer’s block sent him into a depression that became alarmingly suicidal. When Herb’s new wife returned to Birmingham to see her dying father, his letters, which before the marriage had been so sure, so persuasive, sounded self-pitying and reproachful. On a phone call, he broke down in tears. His inadequacy made him ashamed: He wanted her to need him as much as he needed her. But that would never happen.

With his wife’s encouragement and force of will, my father finished Ex-Communist Witnesses. The marriage survived, and two changes allowed my mother to embrace her new life. One day, Herb ran into Wallace Stegner, the novelist and director of Stanford’s highly regarded creative-writing program. Knowing that his wife was sinking into bitterness with her stalled vocation, my father asked if she could take a class. Studying under Stegner, alongside talents such as Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Wendell Berry, gave my mother the confidence that she could hold her own. Her block lifted; she began to write stories again, and to publish them in quarterly magazines. She felt more like a real writer than ever before. When a rising young star named Philip Roth withdrew his acceptance of a Stanford lectureship, she was asked to fill in and found that she liked teaching more than writing and was better at it.

It did not escape her notice that she had ridden into Stanford on her husband’s back. She was somebody’s wife, and she would spend the 1960s in his shadow.

One day in 1959, the walls of Stegner’s classroom began to shake. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Packer,” he said. “You’re not having the baby. It’s just an earthquake.”

That was the second change: motherhood.

3.

My sister, Ann, whom we called Annie, was born in March 1959. I arrived 17 months later. Almost every week for a decade, until my father’s stroke, my mother typed out a long, single-spaced letter on onionskin paper to her widowed mother in Birmingham. The letters create a montage of our California childhoods, sun-drenched scenes shot at close range by a sharp-eyed camerawoman who’s interested in everything about the subject—tedious to most viewers, endlessly engrossing to me. Could you replay that swimming-lesson sequence where I refuse to put my head underwater, then brag to my friends that I dove off the board, only for my mother to expose my lie?

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

Packer-family photos from the 1950s and ’60s, including pictures of the author as a baby and a young boy;
his sister, Ann; and his parents, Nancy and Herbert, on their wedding day

She was too ambitious and resentful, too masculine, to adore motherhood. She had no use for baby showers, and the thought of breastfeeding disgusted her. She complained about how hard it was to find good babysitting so that she could get her work done (unlike the white ladies of Birmingham, most suburban-California mothers did without help). To put me, and herself, on a better sleep schedule, she gave me phenobarbital and Serpasil, a blood-pressure medication also sometimes used as an antipsychotic. (Apparently these were normal treatments for infant insomnia.) When I came down with a cold in my eighth month, she wrote to her mother: “He can almost sit up, almost crawl, and almost hold his bottle. He is the almost wonder of the world. And if that sounds a little hostile, I guess I have to admit that for the first time since he was circumcised, his having this cold is causing me anxiety and therefore hostility.”

But the overwhelming fact of the letters is how much fascinated, puzzled, delighted, annoyed attention she paid to her children. Like every parent she failed us in a thousand ways, some of them barely forgivable, but her attention was a gift, the foundation on which I could grow up without the fear of abandonment that had haunted her as a child. Of course, I was completely unaware of it—that was part of the gift. She spared me the burden of having to become conscious. I was free to live in my own mind, except when she was angry with me, which I found intolerable—then I would do anything to win back her favor.

One of my mother’s favorite quotes, usually a dig at someone’s lack of self-awareness, was from Robert Burns: “O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us / To see oursels as others see us!” Can I see myself in her letters? A greedy feeder, cheerful, volatile, wildly curious and easily frustrated, “clinging and adventurous,” indifferent to clothes, unshy because unconcerned with others, so competitive that I have trouble keeping friends? And if this is who I am, how did I get that way? It seems my character was already formed at six months. “Undiscriminatingly friendly, and yet so happy for a little attention”: I admit that sounds familiar. Compared with my hyper-observant sister at the same age, I was noisier, grinnier, and “not as individually aware of people.” All these traits would have consequences.

My mother absorbed herself in both her children, but in different ways, with different levels of intensity. She regarded my sister with a sort of objective admiration: so bright and verbal, self-toilet-trained, good at everything she did, “incorrigibly social.” My mother’s investment in me was of another kind: “I must say that I am beginning what promises to be quite a love affair with the little boy.” But a love affair comes with a price, and the letters describe her efforts over the years to shape me after an ideal, constantly adjusting my levels of toughness, sweetness, wildness, self-control. She liked to say that her parents’ generation approached child-rearing as taming savages, her children’s generation saw it as nurturing flowers, and for hers it was like molding clay figures (one of her hobbies).

In a letter written in 1968, my mother describes her children’s attitude toward reading. My sister read all the time, a new book every day, simply for the love of it. On the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Annie said that life in prison wouldn’t be the worst fate for the killer as long as there were books—in fact, she’d sort of like to go to prison and read all day. But my reading came from some internal pressure to know everything about a subject. Over breakfast I read the backs of Cheerios boxes because they displayed capsule biographies of the presidents, and presidential history—especially of the assassinated ones—was one of my obsessions in that year of political violence. My other interest was the NBA, mainly the Los Angeles Lakers. Sports was a passion I would share with my mother for the rest of her life. I barely registered that it left my sister out.

“She is doing great in school,” my mother wrote, as if to reassure herself that her commitment to evenhandedness still held, “and has a lot of other interests, cooking and scouts, that aren’t intellectual but are perfectly fine.” Obviously, they weren’t perfectly fine. She found her daughter’s interest in the feminine arts of baking, sewing, clothes, and hair disturbing enough to use an adjective I’ve never heard from anyone else: “Annie is the most fixey child I’ve ever seen.” This was not criticism meant to inspire improvement, because my sister’s fault—being a girl—was irreparable. In turn, Annie disapproved of our mother’s short haircut and slacks. She became a caustic preteen, and a gap opened between them.

During the ’60s my father was an important figure at Stanford. Amid the endless cocktail parties and business trips, he was named a top administrator just in time for the anti–Vietnam War protests that nearly destroyed Stanford and other universities. He took the students seriously, which meant that, unlike many of his colleagues, he refused to appease protesters when they occupied an administration building. Force was the opposite of reason, and reason lay at the heart of his philosophy, and his sense of betrayal made him a hard-liner and a lightning rod. He wrote brilliantly in defense of liberal education, but he was not psychologically equipped for a fight like this.

My mother shared his values but not his high-mindedness, and she was better suited to do battle: “I wish I had his proxy sometimes, just so I could have some fun socking some people. Not Herb, though. All he wants is what’s generally best.”

She was stronger than her husband but much less important, even after she was made assistant professor. Instead of pouring her resentment into her letters, she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” perhaps her best story, so tense with marital vitriol that reading it constricts my breathing. Emery, a successful lawyer, and Frances, his restless, unhappy wife, attend a party in San Francisco, where he commands attention and ignores her, provoking her to throw verbal darts his way. When they leave, he insists on taking the wheel even though he’s drunk too much. On Bayshore Freeway they get a flat tire, and Emery is incompetent to change it. A car pulls up with three tough young men inside; it isn’t clear if they intend to offer help or commit rape. Their leader immediately senses the balance of power that favors Frances, and he orders Emery to sit in the back of the car while they change the tire. Frances tells her husband to comply. The leader comes on to her; she angrily rebuffs him. The story ends with Frances at the wheel and her humiliated husband in the back. She imagines how, later, at home, they will console each other by reducing the encounter to an amusing anecdote in which nothing important was at stake. “But for now, as Emery wept silently in the back seat, she drove the car and she was exhilarated.”

Jesus! What the hell did my father think when he read this? And yet, around the same time that she wrote “Early Morning, Lonely Ride,” on their eighth anniversary she told her mother, “I believe I could not possibly have done better.” Loyalty, her favorite virtue, made her somebody’s daughter, sister, and wife.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The author with his father, mother, and sister, late 1960s

Our life as a family ended in March 1969 when my mother woke up in the middle of the night to find my father lying beside her stricken by a blocked cerebral artery. She would always blame stress from “the radicals,” but she knew better than anyone that her husband was fragile. In the years that followed he fought valiantly to recover speech and movement, but he had always lived through his rational mind, and it would never be his again.

A memory from the early days of the catastrophe: My mother is driving me to the San Francisco airport—I’m flying alone for the first time, to spend a week with a friend’s family in Seattle. At 8 I’m too young to understand that my mother needs some respite and I’m the more exhausting of her children. We’re late, and the airport garage is nearly full. At last she finds a spot and starts to park, when two men in a fancy car sneak in front of her and steal it. My mother, now carrying the entire burden of our wounded family, makes a wide circle around the garage; comes onto a straightaway, at the far end of which the men are getting out of their car; and floors it. As we hurtle toward them their terror looks to be even greater than mine. My mother swerves away in time to avoid committing murder. For a moment she must be exhilarated.

She would always say, “When your father got sick …” and this seemed to me an odd phrase. He didn’t have an illness—he was struck down as if someone had given him a blow to the head. In all the years I lived at home, I knew my mother to be sick only once, when I was 5 and a blood clot in her leg turned into deep-vein thrombosis that required her to wear knee-high, flesh-colored compression stockings for the rest of her life. But she didn’t refer to this as her sickness: “I call it an accident, because I don’t like the idea of having an illness.” It was as if getting sick suggested some deeper, probably fatal condition. Better not to get sick at all.

Memory needs a story, and the one I tell myself about the period after the stroke—those years when my father grew a silver-flecked black beard because shaving was too hard, and limped along with a cane in his good left hand and a metal brace on his bad right leg, and drove an orange golf cart to campus, and cursed or wept when he couldn’t make himself understood, and my mother was often, in a favorite word of hers, “irritable,” and my sister withdrew further into herself—is a story of unrelieved misery. But my mother’s letters, less frequent than before, less full of energy and humor, tell a different one. They show me plugging away at one obsession after another: presidents and assassinations at 8, basketball and the Greek myths at 9, Stanford football at 10, Little League and World War II at 11, Shakespeare and girls at 12.

Memory is notoriously selective, but so are the perceptions that adults have of children. Parents easily miss the secret grievances and torments their children carry inside themselves without the language or license to express them. “The children are in their prime,” my mother wrote a year after the stroke. “They’ve never been dearer, sweeter, more interesting.” She didn’t see any more than I did that the intensity of my interests, and her absorption in them, allowed me to live through the unhappiness of those years without having to experience it. But this left an empty, unformed space where inner resources never developed. So when my father checked into a San Francisco hotel and took an overdose of barbiturates, and when soon after that I decided to be a writer, I was unequipped for either.

“I no longer burst into tears when anyone speaks to me of Herb, and in fact was able to sit through the memorial without shedding very many tears,” my mother wrote to my father’s sister in January 1973, eight weeks after his death. “I’m working hard and my friends are loyal and sustaining and the children are always entertaining and occupying, sometimes in ways I’d as soon avoid, but all in all I am being drawn back into life.”

Her attachment to life: That’s what saved her. At 32, she had escaped her father’s old Birmingham house and released her energy in writing, teaching, and raising children. Our new California house had filled with cocktail parties for 30 and dinners for 15. Then, with my father’s paralysis, it became empty and silent; my mother stopped writing. His death when they were both just 47 ended her life as an adjunct to men. She never remarried, or even dated much, refusing to compromise the independence that had come to her through loss. She raised two teenagers by herself, got dinner on the table every night, published her first collection, transformed Stanford’s freshman-English program, became a legendary teacher, filled our house with her students and colleagues, and walked our dog, Frank, twice a day.

I was too busy being a self-absorbed teenager to understand that, no longer somebody’s daughter, sister, or wife, she was now somebody’s mother—somebody she could shape to her will.

Shortly after my father’s death, I took a seventh-grade typing class. The practice of touch-typing got into my head in a way that we would now call obsessive-compulsive: I acquired a mental habit of moving imaginary fingers over imaginary keys, typing out my thoughts as I thought them and my words as I spoke them, which made me conscious of what I was thinking or saying in an almost physically distressing way. Around the same time, I began systematically reading through the titles listed on the back of a CliffsNotes guide to Hamlet, checking them off one at a time, as if CliffsNotes was the ultimate authority on what a writer should read. I tried to sum up each book’s theme in a single sentence, which allowed me to resolve some inner tension caused by all the ambiguities of literary experience and move on to the next title. When the theme eluded me—this happened with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio—I could reduce myself to tears.

I can see now that the compulsive touch-typing and overwrought checking-off of titles were evidence of an anguish whose deeper source eluded me. At the time, all I knew was that I wanted to be a writer and that wanting to be a writer hurt.

I showed my mother everything I wrote. The verdict was always good but not good enough, leaving me in agonies of frustration. My adolescent literary efforts are covered with commentary that might as well have been scribbled in my blood. It never occurred to me that my mother’s opinion was that of just one very overinvolved reader; however much it upset me, what she said was Truth. She would hunt down every labored metaphor and mark wherever a story inadvertently shifted point of view (a careless sin). She returned a maudlin stab at Romantic poetry with this observation: “Don’t try to write like Keats. I want you to try to write like Eliot.” Another forehand winner. Eyes burning, I said that I’d write the way I wanted to write—as if being my mother’s prize project didn’t make that impossible.

Writing was far from the whole of our relationship. We watched hundreds of hours of TV sports; talked endlessly about politics; bickered over grades (“Why an A–?”), chores, and late nights out. On trivial matters I stood up for myself, and on important ones I thought I was living a life of my own making. In the same way that I couldn’t hear her southern accent or question her criticism, I never associated my desire to be a writer with my mother’s vocation. An idea of greatness that at 9 meant an NBA career like Jerry West’s, and at 12 had me performing onstage like Laurence Olivier, inspired me at 15 and 16 to write like Dickens, then Fitzgerald, then Joyce, then Faulkner. The results were predictably absurd.

My mother liked to quote a piece of literary advice from Henry James: “Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost!” Unfortunately, I was one of the people on whom a lot of things were lost, including myself. (I was too sensitive and not sensitive enough.) Nor did I follow James’s other famous advice—to write from experience. One of my characters was a British schoolboy who was looking forward to “Michaelmas,” a word whose meaning I didn’t know but I probably borrowed from Dickens. My imagination didn’t brim over with stories. I wasn’t a stylistic prodigy. I had nothing urgent to say. Everything I wrote, even journal entries and weekly letters home from college, carried a grating note of falseness. The words were meant to be overheard and admired.

I published stories and poems in my high-school literary magazine because I was the editor, but in college I ran into failure after failure. A classmate in a fiction-writing course wondered why I wrote such formal, convoluted sentences—was I trying to sound like James? Everyone else was trying to sound like Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, who, in the instructor’s opinion, were more appropriate models. In his office I tried to wheedle an assurance that I was one of the students who would make it. The instructor was crushingly noncommittal. I was doing well at just about everything I tried, except for the thing that mattered most.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The short-story collection published by the author’s mother in 1976 was spare, witty, with “no fancy dancing,” as if the worst literary sin was self-display.

My sister was a year ahead of me at the same college. One day, when she was a senior and I was a junior, she informed me that she had won a fiction-writing prize. The news surprised us both. She was the one who read to read, not to write. Growing up around writers had made her want to be anything else, because they all seemed unhappy. Our mother was so destroyed by rejection that she never sent her stories to The New Yorker, only small magazines—The Kenyon Review, Southwest Review. This was the sort of detail that my sister, on whom nothing was lost, noticed and I, distracted by my own performances, did not.

My sister’s story was based on an episode I knew well. Her best friend in junior high, a brilliant and charismatic girl, had fallen in with an older scene of boys and drugs, shattering her parents. “Jessica at Fourteen” appeared in the campus literary magazine that had rejected every story I submitted. Reading it, seeing the way my sister transformed experience with imagination, the story told from the first-person viewpoint of the girl’s father, the work done through details, the lack of straining for meaning, even the simplicity of the title: I knew that this was what fiction should be. All those years of reading and watching in our mother’s shadow and mine had made my sister the real writer, later a celebrated novelist. She had become what I was supposed to be.

My apprenticeship had given me an arduous training in prose style and left a hollow space where a writing self failed to emerge—until, out of college and living in a West African village 8,000 miles from my mother, I was visited by unfinished business from the past.

4.

In the summer of 1982 I went to Togo as a Peace Corps volunteer because I didn’t know what else to do. I was vaguely aware that being an undiscriminatingly friendly boy who was happy for a little attention had led me into a dead end, and that I was due for a reckoning. If I wasn’t a writer, who was I? I couldn’t have said this at the time, but I was afraid that the hollow space would become the whole of me. To avoid that, I wanted to put myself through something new and hard. In another time or from a different background, I might have joined the Army.

My mother was troubled. Perhaps she knew that the person from whom I needed so much time and distance was herself. Our last days together before I went away for two years were tense, more so because my college girlfriend joined me for a few of them. “I’m sorry I was a bitch so much of the time you were home,” my mother wrote after I was gone, in the first of dozens of letters she sent, each taking three or four weeks to arrive at the local post office. She had been “an, at best, intermittently difficult hostess who is obviously jealous of her son. I think that usually I would control my feelings better.” She did not want to alienate me or separate me from happiness, “even when it doesn’t involve me.” She assured me that I was doing something important and right.

As a going-away present, my girlfriend had given me a gold Cross pen. I planned on using it to fill letters and notebooks, to make the strangeness around me meaningful. I might have given up the ambition to be a writer, but I still felt an impulse to write. During my first week in Africa, I lost the pen. Its disappearance was a bad omen that rattled me, as if one of the strands connecting me to my past had been broken, and I might never make it back.

In those first days, during training with other volunteers and Togolese English teachers in a small village up-country, a change came over me. It affected my body first: lightheadedness, a dry mouth, a suddenly racing pulse that I started monitoring with two fingertips on my wrist. I should have known that anxiety and even suicidal thoughts are among the potential side effects of chloroquine, the antimalarial medication we had to take. But I had no concept of them; I had never experienced real psychological trouble. The son of a suicide, I didn’t know what depression meant.

Instead of locating what was happening to me in neurochemistry, which would have at least provided some rational comfort, I associated it with a change in the outside world. The crowing of roosters in the midday heat; the doughy texture of pounded yams; the children chanting “Yovo, yovo, bonsoir! Ça va bien? Merci ! ” whenever they saw an American—these were normal features of village life, but in bad moments I experienced them as not just strange but sinister. And I already knew that nothing would ever be the same, even if I went home, because this change that had begun in my head extended beyond the village to the whole universe. I looked at the humid sky and saw only emptiness. Whatever once gave meaning to being alive had drained away, and the loss brought panic.

With such long intervals between letters, I tried to keep mine indirect to protect my mother, and perhaps to conceal my weakness from her. But desperation rid my words of the old falseness, and the letters must have alarmed her. “Sometimes when I think how out of touch we are, I feel that I can’t breathe and then I know I can,” she wrote. “Two years is a long time and you are right not to want to view it as an endurance test. If it is that, then you shouldn’t stay. I mean that.” She hardly knew how much trouble I was in, because I kept my darkest thoughts from her.

I turned to a practice that had almost always worked in the past and tried to read my way back—to master chaos and fill emptiness with literature. Just as Sons and Lovers was supposed to help me understand my relationship with my mother, I asked her to send books to Africa that I hoped would explain the sudden vacuum of meaning: Kierkegaard on faith and despair, Mann on illness and love, Jung on the shadow, Conrad on the heart’s darkness. In my free time I searched for answers by kerosene lamplight under my mosquito net, taking feverish notes in the schoolboy copybooks I had bought for my lesson plans. All this effort made no difference; reading changed nothing. Instead, it mastered me, as if an insulating layer of intellect had been stripped away and for the first time in my life I was reading undefended, raw. A single sentence had the power to terrify me.

[From the December 2024 issue: George Packer on how ‘The Magic Mountain’ saved his life]

Once, on an hours-long bush-taxi ride north to Togo’s sandstone plateau, I came to a passage in Moby-Dick about the whiteness of the whale: “By its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation,” Melville writes. “Pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper.” My fellow passengers might not have noticed the American dissolving in front of them as he closed his book and put it away.

Amy Elkins for The Atlantic. Source: Courtesy of the Packer family.

The author during his Peace Corps stint in Togo, 1983

I found myself thinking of my father. Thinking is too rational: His ghost had taken up residence on my side of the cinder-block, iron-roofed dwelling I shared with a Togolese family of eight. I wanted him to speak to me, but he couldn’t. For the first time in my life I felt close to him, sorrowful for his suffering, wishing I could bring him back from where he had gone, and frightened that I would join him there. I had believed myself untouched by his darkness. Now it was all around me and within me.

“I hadn’t realized how closely you had identified with him and how much to heart you would take the knowledge that he had serious problems, and had known despair,” my mother wrote me. “It’s good for you to know that, I think, I hope. And perhaps it is good for you to work through the identification and get to the great difference. But it’s painful, treacherous, overwhelming. And of course trying to understand all that—all the anger you felt, all the love, all the loss—in such difficult physical circumstances and without anyone to help you is really dreadful. Dread. Is that a Kierkegaardian word?”

I had always been an achiever among people who loved and admired me, she wrote. Now that I couldn’t be who I really was, “it was almost inevitable that you would begin to unravel a little.” Self-knowledge would set me free, but please go easy. With all of her intelligence and love, and none of her vanity, my mother tried to save me. But I had put myself in a place where only I could do it.

I forgot the heartless voids and immensities of the universe long enough to spend hours after class sitting and talking with villagers, in their limited French and my minimal Ewe. The old chief, whose memory went back to the German colonizers before the First World War, told me the history of the village. I recorded his words and the words of others on the Sony Walkman I’d brought to Togo so I could listen to the Police and Bob Marley. I found that I had a knack for talking with people with whom I had almost nothing in common. These sessions provided an escape from myself that completely absorbed me while they lasted, but they had no clear purpose. They gave me nothing I recognized as subject matter for writing. I was hardly using the Olympia manual typewriter I’d brought to Togo; my literary efforts had come to an end. I didn’t know until much later what my life in the village had to do with being a writer—the kind of writer I would become.

At the start of my second year, my mother came for a visit. She charmed the children next door with gifts of toy trucks and Winnie-the-Pooh View-Masters, ate pounded yams in pepper sauce with her fingers, and learned a few words of Ewe from the market women. But the life here disturbed her: the torpid afternoons, the evenings without electric light, the sense of stagnation. She advised me to buy more candles and fill my free time with projects. “The people are so kind and hospitable,” she said. “But don’t the Togolese want to make their lives better?” Her readiness at almost 60 to stay in the village should have made me proud, but her company exasperated me. We argued about abstractions like underdevelopment and cultural differences because I couldn’t articulate the real trouble. Her presence was splitting me into two selves: the son she had done so much to create—loving, confident, at ease in the world—and the lost soul with a racing pulse.

At the end of the week, I accompanied her down to Togo’s capital for her flight home. When I got back to the village, my brain was swimming and a lump seemed to have formed at the base of my skull. I spent an hour studying the Peace Corps medical guide, Where There Is No Doctor. By nightfall I was so sure that an occlusion in my carotid artery was about to cause a stroke that I asked a bewildered neighbor to drive me to the provincial hospital, half an hour away. In the car I waited for the paralyzing blow to fall, while the mother of the family next door held my hand and tried to reassure me.

I was kept overnight and woke up feeling better. The German doctor on duty asked a few questions, barely suppressing his irony, then discharged me with advice to have a drink in a nice hotel from time to time, a packet of anti-anxiety pills, and a piece of paper that said: “Beg. nervous breakdown.”

This blunt diagnosis shouldn’t have come as a shock, but until that moment I hadn’t understood my trouble in personal terms—that it might have something to do with my relationship with my mother. In her letter replying to my account of the misadventure, she wrote: “Dear George, please try to be easier on yourself, a better friend than you have been. Don’t be ashamed of limiting the demons, of avoiding them if possible. Don’t be ashamed of finding some new purposes there so that you will be able to achieve/perform/be comfortable with yourself.”

What else could a frightened mother say? You’re not your father—don’t do what he did. But this pleading to go back to who I was before seemed dangerous. Anyway, it was too late.

At Christmas I traveled through Burkina Faso to Europe for a short visit. In Barcelona everything went wrong. The faces in the Museu Picasso were so grotesque that I could hardly look at them. The girl I had come to see didn’t know what to say to me. One day, I resisted an impulse to jump in front of a city bus and realized that, if I went back to the village for my last six months, I probably wouldn’t make it. For a year and a half I had been barely hanging on.

In an English-language bookstore, looking for something to read on the plane back to the States, almost at random I bought a Penguin edition of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. The cover image showed a bolt-action rifle with brass cartridges, a crumpled red flag, and an old Spanish newspaper. I knew nothing of the Spanish Civil War, and I knew Orwell only as the author of 1984, a book assigned in high school. I hadn’t read any of his essays, or any writing of that kind at all. I had never thought of nonfiction the way I thought of novels and poems—as literature.

Crossing the Atlantic I was overcome with a sense of utter failure. By leaving early, I had failed my students and friends in the village; and everyone back home, above all my mother; and most painfully I had failed myself. Disgrace and defeat were written on my face, and I avoided eye contact with other passengers. I felt that at 23 I would have to start over, with no idea how.

I opened my book and began to read: “In the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona, the day before I joined the militia, I saw an Italian militiaman standing in front of the officers’ table.”

Something about this sentence struck me: its lack of fuss, its plainness and strength, the way “I” led quickly and easily to a scene, a view of the world. As I read more, the book started to give me courage. This might be a way of going on: by facing the truth and getting it all down, simply and clearly.

First I had to face my mother. In the house where she had raised me, full of the books that had made me want to be a writer, we mostly avoided the subject of why I was home early. Instead, at dinner that first night, we got into an argument about literature. We were talking about Heart of Darkness, one of the books in which I’d searched for answers by kerosene lamplight. My mother thought that the narrator, Marlow, was kept sane by his devotion to work and duty—by repression. To me, Marlow could avoid Kurtz’s fate only by immersing himself in Kurtz’s madness. Of course, we were talking about why I was home early, and what it meant for me, for us. My mother spoke gently, with none of the old sparring, because she knew that she stood to lose something precious. I argued with growing fury, as if not just a literary disagreement but my whole life was at stake.

Forty-one years later, as my mother lay dying in the same Stanford hospital where I’d been born, she emerged from dementia long enough to squeeze my hand and tell me: “I love you. I’m proud of you. Now go on about your business.” But that night in January 1984 she was still trying to hold on to the boy she had made. At last, as if admitting defeat, she said: “I thought you were steel tempered in fire.”

That was the last time we spent more than a few days together. I went to Boston, for no good reason, and found a job on a construction crew. In the evenings after work, I sat at the Olympia manual typewriter that had gone silent in Africa and started to write. I wrote about the village, and I wrote about my father.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Sons and Mothers.”

‘Feminism Is the Consequence of the “Man Problem,” Not Its Cause’

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 13:44:20 +0000

The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote

A virulent form of misogyny has become the single most important force holding together the American right, Helen Lewis argued in the June issue.

Helen Lewis’s “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote” is the most important thing I have read this year. My husband has said that Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election because of the misogyny that exists in America; Lewis’s article proved him correct, with just a teaspoon of humor mixed into an otherwise very frightening topic.

Amy Crist
Gettysburg, Pa.

Upon finishing “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote,” I found myself equal parts stunned and galvanized. Lewis has an extraordinary ability to illuminate what so many of us feel but struggle to articulate, and this article was no exception.

The MAGA movement contends that feminism is to blame for American decline. But feminism didn’t emerge from nothing. Feminism is the consequence of the “man problem” Lewis identifies, not its cause.

The Bible passage that anti-feminist commentators love to cite is from Ephesians: “Wives, submit to your husbands.” But that’s where they stop reading. The verse goes on to say that a husband must provide for his wife, and love her as he loves his own body. This is not a “do as I say or else” arrangement; it is a covenant of mutual care—her health and happiness are meant to be as important to him as his own, and vice versa. When men forget the instruction to care for their wives as they care for themselves, women have no choice but to learn to care for themselves.

I was recently at the pharmacy, and the man ahead of me—trying to pick up a prescription for his sick wife—answered the pharmacist’s questions with “I don’t know; my wife takes care of that.” When a husband utters, “My wife takes care of that,” the word that means “everything.” It means knowing the passwords, the medications and dosages, the appointment schedules. It means knowing what to say to assuage a teenager’s broken heart, whom to call at the school, how to manage a crisis. It means caring for sick husbands and aging parents—sacrificing for the people you love.

I am the breadwinner in my family. My husband stayed home and raised our three daughters. The plan was for him to return to work once the girls were in elementary school. But we all know what happens when we make plans—God laughs. My husband now lives with a neurological condition that complicates our lives in ways neither of us anticipated. Does working to provide health care for my children and husband make me less of a woman? Would my husband be mocked in the manosphere for not working? Is staying home to raise children noble only when a woman does it?

Erika Jackson
Gilbert, Ariz.

I worry that “The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote” misses a crucial component of the rise of masculinism. I stand in vocal opposition to misogyny and the idiocy of the far-right masculine media sphere. I teach my daughters that they control their bodies and that they should never miss a vote. But I do think that a large cohort of men is struggling with issues that have been ignored, or sometimes even mocked, by the mainstream media. Many men try to be good husbands and parents, only to hear mantras like “We don’t need men” and “There are no good men out there”; on social media, people discuss whether they’d prefer to be trapped in the woods with a man or a bear. Meanwhile, American men are nearly four times more likely than women to die by suicide. The manosphere discusses that issue frequently, as Lewis notes; the mainstream media do not. When men hear negative messages about being a man from the mainstream media but see the manosphere addressing their struggles, they will gravitate toward it. I hope society can learn to address male issues without mocking them. Otherwise, I fear, the extremism will continue.

Ben Rodriguez
Suffield, Conn.

A significant number of men are never fully socialized. These men have few if any friends—and certainly no female friends. Deep down, they may not hate or fear women; they just don’t know how to interact with them. They never learned how to work with or cooperate with them. If one accepts that, then quixotic attempts to repeal women’s suffrage or strip women of social and political freedoms should not surprise anyone.

Virgil Jose
Apple Valley, Calif.

Helen Lewis makes a convincing argument that the noisy, often lewd misogyny of the MAGA right is no longer fringe and presents a real danger to women. This sexist worldview reflects and interacts with patriarchal systems across the world.

Examining more than 350 variables across 176 nations, the scholars Valerie M. Hudson, Donna Lee Bowen, and Perpetua Lynne Nielsen have demonstrated that “the fate of nations is tied to the status of women.” Their 2020 book, The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide, shows that nations that subordinate women tend to be more fragile, autocratic, corrupt, and impoverished. The subordination of women appears to produce the kind of governance that leads to worse outcomes for everyone. The sexual political order is, as they write, the “first political order”—what starts in a family shapes a broader community’s politics.

Eleanor H. Klauminzer
Olalla, Wash.

Helen Lewis replies:

As you might imagine, this article prompted a large and varied mailbag. I heard from grandfathers—happily married for decades—who couldn’t understand how society seemed to have gone backwards, from middle-aged men who felt overlooked because their problems weren’t fashionable, and from parents who worried about what their sons were watching online. I came away thinking that screen-time limits are good, that schools should do more to accommodate rambunctious boys as well as conscientious girls, and that the Democrats need to develop their own, positive visions of masculinity to compete with those of Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

Some of the likely 2028 presidential contenders have started to do that: Gavin Newsom talks regularly about men’s problems, and signed an executive order aimed at improving mental-health services and reducing male suicide rates in California. Pete Buttigieg has learned how to bro out on podcasts such as Andrew Schulz’s Flagrant—the kind of spaces where Donald Trump did so well during the 2024 campaign. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez waded into the debate over the looks-maxxer Clavicular (the guy who claims to have achieved a better jawline by hitting himself with hammers) by highlighting the pressures on young men to conform to unrealistic beauty standards. The conversation is definitely shifting.

Behind the Cover

In this month’s cover story, “Empire of Grift,” Anne Applebaum examines how hardened ideologues and opportunistic profiteers are bending American diplomacy to advance an antidemocratic agenda—and their own financial interests. For our cover, the illustrator Ben Hickey created an ominous image of figures in shadow arrayed around a map of the world, evoking the war-room scenes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

Corrections

“The Great Romance Slump” (September) stated that birth control was legalized for married couples in 1965. In fact, in 1965 the Supreme Court held that the government couldn’t restrict a married couple’s access to birth control. “Confessions of a Token Black Professor” (September) described a sign affixed to the wall of a former mill in Lewiston, Maine, as neon. In fact, it is a marquee sign.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Commons.”

Trump’s See-No-Evil AI Policy - The Atlantic

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:41:47 +0000

Not long ago, most of Washington was scrambling to be as friendly as possible to the rise of artificial intelligence. Lawmakers from both parties saw a chance to bolster the nation’s economy—and their campaign coffers. But rarely has public opinion flipped so quickly and so thoroughly as it has on AI in recent months. While AI was making some tech leaders unfathomably rich, many Americans in states both red and blue grew alarmed by the proliferation of loud, electricity-guzzling data centers, convinced that AI would first make life more expensive and then, for good measure, eliminate their job. In the past few days, some of the top voices in the AI industry have gone further, warning that unless development of the technology is slowed, and slowed soon, all of humanity could be made extinct.

These fears have rattled markets and galvanized a bipartisan set of leaders into calling for the government to step in. AI has now become a central issue in the midterm elections. But President Trump, who first came to power by closely reading the mood of the country and shifting his views to meet those of the electorate, seems to have his fingers in his ears, ignoring it all and continuing to embrace AI, confident that everything will be fine because he is in charge. Unless, of course, the human race ends first.

Trump would seem to have a perfect opportunity to try to contain this fast-moving political conflagration: Next week, he’s set to host China’s president, Xi Jinping, at the White House. The United States and China are the world’s leaders on AI and are in a race to develop the technology. The summit could be a venue, some in the industry hope, to order a pause in development or establish international safety guidelines. But Trump, at least for now, wants no part of a slowdown. AI growth has propped up Wall Street and sectors of the American economy for the duration of his second term, and the president has made clear that he doesn’t want to do anything that could burst that bubble.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” Trump wrote on Truth Social today, as he made half a dozen posts, each seemingly more frantic than the last. He later compared the concerns about the technology to his own impeachments, declaring that “AI taking over the World, destroying Humanity, and all other things bad, is a HOAX.”

As tech insiders offered warnings about the AI apocalypse, Trump was busy rallying the MAGA faithful in Texas and taking in rounds of golf in Ireland. The dire prophecies began last Tuesday, with a series of viral social-media posts by an AI researcher who said that the technology is advancing so quickly that it could bring about human extinction by the end of the decade. The threat of annihilation seemed to grab Washington’s attention as few other concerns have. By the next afternoon, after several other researchers had echoed the alarm, members of Congress were beginning to call for legislation, new agencies, hearings, and regulations to address the threat. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont told us on Wednesday that he had sent invitations to a bipartisan set of lawmakers for a closed-door briefing with AI experts. He said that the researchers had provided a wake-up call about a technology that poses an “extraordinary danger for the human race.” That night, Trump spoke for nearly two hours at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, but he did not mention AI once.

Read: AI is running laps around our political system

In the days that followed, more troubling evidence emerged. Anthropic released a report detailing the ways that individuals and nation-states have attempted to misuse its technology, including for sophisticated cyberattacks and research that could potentially support the development of biological weapons.

Trump decamped to Ireland, where he spent the weekend watching a golf tournament at one of his properties. He was dismissive of the Silicon Valley warnings, emphasizing the need to defeat China in the AI race and downplaying the technology’s risks. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote that a downshift in the pace of AI development “could greatly reduce the risk that something goes seriously wrong.” Other industry leaders joined in, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the sometimes–Trump ally.

One of Trump’s first moves upon returning to office last year was to revoke the executive order signed by his predecessor, Joe Biden, that imposed a series of regulations on the AI industry. Trump’s focus was business growth, and he reveled in the power he had over the nation’s tech titans. Many crowded the room at his inauguration, and he has hosted AI-industry leaders such as Altman, former Oracle CEO Safra Catz, and Nvidia President Jensen Huang.

Still, some of Trump’s advisers have had concerns since last year about the political impacts of the AI backlash, when figures as disparate as Sanders and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis began calling for more regulation. To head off the potential populist backlash, Trump announced the Ratepayer Protection Pledge in March, asking major developers of AI to “build, bring, or buy” resources needed for any new electricity-production and utility-infrastructure upgrades. Now the White House is working with House Speaker Mike Johnson to fast-track legislation that would put into law some of the pledge’s voluntary measures. A vote is scheduled for tomorrow.

From the March issue: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs

People close to the administration perceive some figures, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, to be supportive of additional regulation of the industry, two people familiar with internal White House deliberations told us, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Others, such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, have advocated for as little government interference as possible, while Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has demanded that Anthropic abandon ethical safeguards—such as rules against mass surveillance and autonomous lethal targeting—in its work for the Pentagon. (When Anthropic refused, Hegseth cut ties with the company.)

Trump has dug in on letting AI rip. He has watched as the industry has propelled the stock market, the president’s favorite indicator of a strong economy, keeping it high even amid challenges posed by the Iran conflict, stubborn inflation, and tariffs. Trump has expressed worry to those close to him that a halt to AI expansion could send the economy into a recession, one ally told us.

Some in the president’s orbit have raised suspicions about the AI executives’ warnings: Is this an attempt at market capture? (They worry that new regulations would freeze the industry and prevent would-be competitors from catching up to the industry giants.) Vice President Vance seemed to give expression to that idea by saying today that tech companies “begging the government to regulate them” feels “like a bit of a Trojan horse.” David Sacks, a co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, wondered on social media over the weekend why AI companies cannot just regulate themselves; he told tech leaders to “stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel.” (Top AI firms could work together to implement some safety standards, but antitrust law would likely prevent them from implementing any kind of reciprocal agreement to throttle the pace of development, unless Congress granted a waiver for that purpose, MacKenzie Arnold, the managing director of the Institute for Law and AI, a nonpartisan think tank, told The Atlantic.) Today, Trump called Huang while the CEO was onstage at an AI event to assure the Nvidia head that he will keep supporting the technology.

Read: J. D. Vance’s AI doctrine

The pleas for action have created unlikely political bedfellows. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, declared that “we need substantially more regulation,” while Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii, a Democrat, said that Congress needs to “move at the pace of the threat.” Tomorrow, Sanders will join the Trump adviser Steve Bannon at a “Pro-Human Assembly,” an all-day gathering in Washington, D.C., focused on ensuring that humans remain in charge of AI. Despite support for regulation from both the right and the left, there is little meaningful oversight of AI that can be implemented without the president’s approval. Sanders told us that he hopes the bipartisan outrage will ultimately get Trump’s attention. “Trump’s ignorance is extremely dangerous,” he said. “He has not a clue about the dangers inherent in this technology, nor do people in his administration.”

Trump is looking forward to next week’s summit with Xi, which follows a May meeting in Beijing. The U.S. president has stressed his strong relationship with the Chinese leader and has downplayed China’s efforts to thwart the United States. It seems unlikely that Trump will let AI fears fully derail the summit’s agenda. Trump has also minimized China’s chances of catching up to the U.S.—he green-lighted a sale of Nvidia chips to China late last year—even as he has played up the stakes. “Whoever wins AI wins,” he said this past weekend.

But Xi may come into the meeting with a new wariness of his own. China’s top intelligence official warned yesterday that AI could pose a direct threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s hold on power by enabling sophisticated hacking and disinformation campaigns. Many in the industry hope that the summit will be an inflection point. Nate Persily, a co-director of the Stanford Law AI Initiative, told us that “if ever there was an opportunity to get some kind of consensus on AI safety, this provides that opportunity.” And Altman, in an interview over the weekend, made a clever appeal to Trump’s vanity, suggesting that if he and Xi strike some sort of deal to create AI guardrails, the president could win his long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize.

Michael Scherer, Ashley Parker, Will Oremus, and Jack Rodriquez-Vars contributed reporting.

A Night for Actor’s Actors, Not Movie Stars

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:41:45 +0000

When the Widow’s Bay creator Katie Dippold accepted her Emmy for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series on Monday night, she joked that she was so proud of her win, she intended to display her trophy as prominently as possible in her home. The award would be mounted on a rotating turntable, she explained; mirrors would be set up around the space so visitors could always see it, wherever they were. “This is going to become my entire personality now,” she warned.

This year’s Emmys essentially turned Widow’s Bay into its personality, too. The Apple TV series about a haunted island town full of eccentric inhabitants swept the field, winning six categories over the course of the evening, including Outstanding Comedy Series. The show’s star, Matthew Rhys, even made Emmys history: With his win for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series, he became the first ever nominee to score a trophy in all three lead actor categories. (Earlier in the night, he was awarded for his work in The Beast in Me, a limited series; in 2018, he won for The Americans, a drama.) His achievements helped underline how much the ceremony honored true-blue actors such as him—and how television, despite years of movie stars dominating prestige shows, remains best designed for versatile performers and textured roles.

Consider Rhys’s fellow winners from Widow’s Bay, a series that married the chill of a Stephen King novel with the goofy humor of Parks and Recreation. Kate O’Flynn, who built her career in British theater, won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series for her spirited turn as Patricia, a lonely but resilient woman. Her co-star Stephen Root, who took home the trophy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series, is widely regarded as an actor’s actor—the kind of performer who adds depth to any story, no matter the genre. In his speech, he underlined how unusual it was for him to be recognized, pointing out that his son was shocked that he was in the same category as Harrison Ford.

The ceremony, of course, featured plenty of the movie stars: Michelle Pfeiffer, Nicole Kidman, Tom Holland, and Zendaya were all seated close to the stage. But many of the performers who took home awards were respected TV industry veterans who have spent most of their careers disappearing into their work rather than commanding the spotlight. Noah Wyle may now be an Emmys favorite after winning two years in a row for starring in The Pitt, but he beat out Mark Ruffalo and Gary Oldman for the honor. Allison Janney (who, to be fair, is an Oscar winner) expressed her shock about winning her first Emmy in 11 years, for her arresting supporting turn as a fictional U.S. president in The Diplomat.

[Read: The girls get to sit down]

The night also featured several satisfying, overdue wins: Rhea Seehorn, who led six seasons of the often-nominated Better Call Saul, finally took home her first Emmy, for her jittery performance in Pluribus. Hiro Murai, a director who has helped define the cinematic look of modern television through his work on shows such as Atlanta and Barry, won his first directing Emmy, for—once again—Widow’s Bay.

The Emmys producers seemed to know that many of its winners might not be household names. The show was frontloaded with the performance categories, which meant that all of the acting awards were finished halfway into the three-hour show. That’s unusual for a Hollywood ceremony, which normally tries to keep people glued to their screens by showing as many stars for as long as possible, and boosting viewer anticipation for their speeches. But then again, the night’s host was Mariska Hargitay, one of television’s mainstays; she’s led the cast of Law & Order: SVU for 27 seasons, with another on the way. To honor a slate of experienced pros only felt right.

The Girls Get to Sit Down

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:41:45 +0000

The actor Jean Smart began her acceptance speech at the Emmys tonight with a request: “Just the men stay standing,” she said to the applauding crowd before her. “The girls get to sit down.”

She had just won her fifth-straight award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series for her role on HBO Max’s Hacks,about the tender and testy friendship between an unfiltered comedy legend (played by Smart) and an apprehensive Gen Z comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder). As she clutched her statuette, Smart acknowledged the squeezing and taping and blister-inducing heels that had likely gone into her peers’ glamorous award-show getups. Her well-dressed colleagues in the crowd, she joked, must be muttering, “She’s not that good”—as in, not so talented as to merit a standing ovation that required maneuvering in uncomfortable gowns.

Smart’s downplaying of the moment recalled a move her Hacks character, the acerbic stand-up comic Deborah Vance, would pull. But it stood in sharp relief to the fact that the actor had just hit a milestone: She had not only tied for the most acting wins in Emmys history (eight), but she had also become the first actress to win for each season of a series. (Hacks wrapped its final season in May.)

Landing that achievement for a character such as Vance feels particularly appropriate. Smart played her as a gutsy, hard-headed, and occasionally vulnerable elder statesman of comedy, who’d erected walls around herself in her fight to be taken seriously in a male-dominated medium. Her win, for a role that embodied the difficulties of being a woman who refuses to placate those around her, parallels her character’s arc; it also calls to mind how tough it is for someone like Vance to earn that level of industry success.

Smart, notably, was not the only actor honored this evening for playing an uncompromising woman. Rhea Seehorn, who took home the award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, portrayed the fiercely self-reliant author Carol Sturka on Pluribus, whose stubbornness in a newly dystopian world is laced with grief. Kate O’Flynn won for her supporting role on the comedy series Widow’s Bay as Patricia, a government bureaucrat whose ill-advised attempts to fit in make her a town pariah. And Allison Janney clinched a Supporting Actress trophy for The Diplomat, on which she plays U.S. President Grace Penn as a particularly shrewd political operator.

[Read: The Emmys made Widow’s Bay its personality]

The actors that played these distinct characters are “linked, not ranked,” as Seehorn said in her speech, quoting the late Gloria Steinem—a nod to the women’s shared lineage as industry colleagues rather than awards competitors.

But Smart’s enduring charisma as Vance, and her character’s notable refusal to quit, also enabled her to make this history. In Season 1 of Hacks, much of the humor stemmed from the intergenerational mismatching between Vance and her new joke writer, Ava Daniels, who begin working together at an inopportune time in both of their careers: Daniels has been deemed persona non grata in Hollywood, while Vance is collecting checks from casino gigs in Vegas. Both of them eventually manage to find an uneasy rhythm together—but Vance’s professional drive, which often took precedence over the feelings of her closest collaborator, was the show’s engine.

Over the course of the next four seasons, Smart revealed Vance’s vulnerable side, even as her character kept up a steady stream of barbed commentary: In her many decades in the industry, Vance had huge opportunities wrenched from her hands—most dramatically her short-lived late-night show, which she spent decades striving for but ultimately abandoned amid studio pressures. But even that move was a testament to the comic’s devotion to her convictions, no matter how unpopular they might make her. By rewarding Smart several times over for this role, the Emmys seemed to recognize something deeper in her performance—and the worth of the woman she so impressively brought to life.

The Supreme Court Recognizes the Danger of Trump’s Election Plan

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:41:45 +0000

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor Donald Trump will stop the United States Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots in the coming midterm elections. Tonight, the Supreme Court handed down an emergency ruling blocking the Trump administration from implementing a new policy that would have made mail-in voting so onerous as to be effectively impossible for election officials to administer. The Court’s decision spares those officials from pointless chaos—and voters from potentially widespread disenfranchisement.

In the United States, election administration is carried out by a patchwork of local officials working state by state across roughly 10,000 different jurisdictions. Usually, USPS’s role in elections is clear: The Postal Service transports mail ballots to voters from state and local election offices; if voters return their ballot by mail, USPS takes care of that too. The nature of this responsibility has evolved in recent years, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic, as many states shifted toward encouraging voting by mail. The Trump administration looked at this system, which has been popular among voters, and decided to cause havoc by imposing new and arduous criteria for election officials to meet before USPS would commit to mailing ballots.

A number of states and several nonprofits, along with the Democratic Party, quickly brought legal challenges. Before the Court resolved the matter tonight, the cases zagged madly among district and appellate courts, then up to the Supreme Court and back down again. Many judges were skeptical both of the legal basis for the rule and of the speed at which the administration was attempting to implement it, with less than two months to go before the elections.

But despite this broad agreement in the lower courts, experts were uncertain how the Supreme Court would handle the case. The Court’s past friendliness toward even the most legally dubious of Trump’s policies cast into doubt whether the justices would stand against his efforts here, especially after the Court rejected an earlier iteration of the challenge on the grounds that it was premature. “The Supreme Court has made law totally unpredictable,” the election-law expert Justin Levitt told me last week, while the country waited for the justices to rule. “In a normal world, there would be a zero percent chance” that the Court would allow the USPS rule to go into effect. Yet, he went on, “we don’t live in a normal world anymore.”

Our world is still not a normal one. But this time, a majority of the justices on the Supreme Court decided not to make it worse. In a terse, unsigned paragraph, the Court declared that the Trump administration had failed both to make its case on the law and to show that a ruling in Trump’s favor would not upend the upcoming elections. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, in a brief concurrence, indicated that the Postal Service’s plan might have had firm legal grounding but that he’d agreed to block the policy because “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”

That final part of his assessment is obviously correct. USPS’s plan would have required election officials to upload lists of eligible voters through a Postal Service “portal”—yet the government has given no indication that the portal is operational. USPS would also have required election officials to receive Postal Service approval for the design of their ballot envelopes, but officials have already printed their ballot envelopes and do not have the money or time to create new designs. Last week, a Tallahassee, Florida, paper reported that USPS had rejected the envelope designs submitted by Florida’s Leon County on the grounds that the return address was 0.014 inches too close to other text on the envelope—about the thickness of four sheets of paper.

Election administrators prepare to send out ballots far in advance, and if the USPS rule had gone into effect, election officials might have found themselves unable to count on the Postal Service to mail ballots at all. However conservative the Supreme Court is, “there aren’t five votes for abject chaos,” Levitt wrote to me after the ruling.

Still, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the pair on the Court who most reliably tilt toward Trump, would have allowed the USPS plan to go forward. Alito’s dissent is strikingly unconcerned with the potential risks to the midterms if the Postal Service were to refuse to mail ballots, noting only that 12 states (all Republican-led) have “asserted that compliance at this time is practicable.” (Local election officials in some of those states disagreed with that assessment in their own court filings, but Alito does not address this.) Moreover, the federal government’s interest in detecting “election fraud” is compelling, Alito declares. As for the last-minute dash to shake up the midterms, Alito manages to blame not the government but the plaintiffs, the lower courts, and even his own colleagues on the bench for the litigation that—he claims—delayed USPS from finalizing its rule.

In a blog post, the UCLA law professor and election scholar Rick Hasen deemed Alito’s dissent “disingenuous.” Among other things, USPS continued working on the rule during the course of the litigation over the summer. And even if the Postal Service had finished the planning process earlier in the summer, state and local jurisdictions still might not have had enough time to rework their envelopes to comply.

Fortunately, officials won’t need to scramble to submit envelope designs to USPS to be measured down to fractions of an inch, or upload voter names into a portal that doesn’t exist. Election workers will likely face plenty of challenges in the month and a half before the midterms. Mailing ballots, though, will not be among them.

‘The Flood is the Point’

Tue, 15 Sep 2026 04:41:45 +0000

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Donald Trump loves a deal, even if, at times, it’s just the idea of a deal. The president’s trade dispute with Canada continues to drive one of America’s closest allies into a closer relationship with its chief competition. Although Trump is insisting that “Canada wants to make a deal very badly,” there is very little evidence that’s true, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—enjoying broad national approval for his combative response to the American leader—looks to strengthen its alliances in Europe and Asia.

Meanwhile, AI leaders are publicly calling for a slowdown. That was the gist of the message delivered by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei this weekend in an essay warning that the technological advances of AI are outpacing the ability to ensure that they are safe. His concerns were echoed by some of the biggest names in tech—OpenAI leader Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

But the president saw something else in their warnings: “There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China,” Trump wrote on his social-media site this morning.

This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Ashley Parker and Tom Nichols join me to discuss the president’s trade war with Canada, the Trump-centric Republican midterm convention in Dallas, and whether an aging Congress can regulate AI.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Ashley Parker: To be somewhat fair to Trump, or to anyone, is that this is just fundamentally incredibly complex. If you’ve ever watched these members of Congress—which is basically a gerontocracy—try to get to the bottom of Snapchat or Instagram or social media with teens, right, it’s like they’re speaking a foreign language, and those are table stakes, right? AI is a million times more complicated than posting a problematic video on YouTube or Instagram.

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris. Congress is back on Capitol Hill for the last time before the midterm elections, and they have a lot to think about—the burgeoning trade war with Canada and warnings from tech CEOs about the dangers of unregulated AI, among other things.

And when those lawmakers return to the campaign trail for the final stretch, the ones in competitive districts may have some company—members of the president’s Cabinet.

With me to discuss the news of the week are my colleagues Ashley Parker and Tom Nichols. Let’s get to questions.

Welcome to the show.

Parker: Thanks for having us.

Tom Nichols: Thanks, Adam.

Harris: Ashley, I want to start with you because you had a story that ran recently about something that people I think have become a little bit desensitized to, and that’s the potential violations of the Hatch Act, which limits the partisan political activities of federal employees. You and our colleague Michael Scherer reported on a competition among the Cabinet secretaries to travel to competitive electoral districts. Can you sort of walk us through that reporting?

Parker: Sure. So the first way we heard about this competition, which was not public, was almost inadvertently. We were speaking with a Cabinet secretary who said that there was an event in New York that they had kind of wanted to attend, but had declined because they didn’t want to get docked points in the competition. And we were immediately like, What competition?

And so it turns out that there is this unofficial travel competition in the Trump White House. It’s overseen by a woman named Meghan Bauer, who basically coordinates with all of the Cabinet secretaries, officially running between Memorial Day and Labor Day. And basically the goal is to encourage Cabinet officials, Cabinet secretaries to travel the country, particularly to swing districts or swing states that are competitive in the midterms. And each time they go to one of these areas, they get a point. And what this Cabinet official was worried about was losing points, although the official was mistaken. When we began reporting, many officials at the White House told us, Nobody ever loses points; you only accrue points. And they even said, Look, if someone is heading to New York to, say, do a hit on CNN, to talk about Trump’s policies, that still would count as a point.

Harris: We can talk about it in point systems, but we should also think of it in terms of the law, right? Like, is this a Hatch Act violation?

Parker: So, no, not inherently, but it brings Cabinet officials potentially quite close to the line, and it’s something they need to be careful of. So just to put it in a little historical perspective, this general thing of wanting your top officials, your Cabinet officials, out in the country selling the president’s policies, especially in the run-up to a midterm election, is incredibly common. [George W.] Bush did it; [Barack] Obama did it; [Joe] Biden did it.

And Biden, I remember, the most in-demand Cabinet official at the time, when he was president in the run-up to the midterms, was Pete Buttigieg. So Cabinet officials can go and they can talk about—especially if it’s related to their jobs, an agriculture secretary, for instance, or let’s just take Pete Buttigieg for an example. Pete Buttigieg could travel the country and talk about how this stimulus package that Biden and Democrats helped to pass had brought a bridge to your district, had brought new roads to your state, was responsible for huge construction projects over here that had created jobs. That’s all totally fine and not a Hatch Act violation.

If it becomes more overtly political—showing up in a district at a campaign stop with, say, a Senate candidate and just saying, Hey, vote for Ken Paxton in Texas—that is where you get into problems. And the Trump officials, some of them have gotten into problems.

Harris: Tom, how do you process the sort of flood, the stream of controversy, that comes from the administration?

Nichols: Well, I actually am intimately familiar with the Hatch Act because people filed complaints against me constantly when I was a federal employee, before I came to The Atlantic. I was a professor at the Naval War College, which meant I was a Defense Department employee, but I wrote articles and I wrote op-eds and I spoke my mind. And I always finish with, These are my personal views, speaking as an American citizen, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think Ashley’s description of, boy, right up to the line, is a great way to think of it. And the larger point, I think, is that, Adam, like you asked: Why does this happen? How do we cope with this flood? And I think that the flood is the point. The fire hose is the point, because at some point, you just sort of throw up your hands and say, Which of these, you know, 9 million things?

It used to be that, even in the first Trump term, somebody getting hit with a Hatch Act violation was a big deal. I mean, it made the news. Kellyanne Conway, there were couple of other—

Parker: Yeah, I remember the Kellyanne Conway one. And it stood out, right?

Nichols: Yeah, right. Because it was rare. And because it was so obvious. And I think it’s part of that whole fire-hosing strategy, where you just sit back and say, Okay, fine. I give up, because tomorrow there will be something else. And then the Hatch Act will seem relatively minor by comparison.

Parker: I was thinking about this as I was biking into work today, which is, if you even just look at today’s news, Hatch Act violations are comparatively quaint, right? I mean, I’m biking in, I see that ProPublica has reported that a Russian oligarch who’s very close to [Russian President Vladimir] Putin bankrolled Donald Trump Jr.’s intimate wedding a few months ago. And amid all these warnings that AI is going to kill us in a doomsday scenario, President Trump came out and said, We’re not slowing down;there’s no regulations. So if a Cabinet official says, Hey, vote for this Republican congressman, in the panoply of things that watchdog groups are worrying about, it’s not top of the list, to be frank.

Nichols: I know the broken-windows theory of crime has been more or less discredited, but there is a kind of feeling of this of, It starts with the Hatch Act. The Hatch Act is like turnstile jumping in the subway, but enough people do it enough times and pretty soon, you know, it’s people shooting at each other in the streets and robbing banks. And it kind of feels that way now. There are no guardrails.

I mean, the story that Ashley just mentioned, about Don Jr.’s wedding. Again, if you were a federal employee, if you even talked to a Russian, that was paperwork right there. I could not imagine saying, Oh yeah, and by the way, he paid for my wedding. But we’ve just kind of gotten used to it.

Harris: Republicans gathered in Dallas, Texas, last week for a sort of unusual midterm convention. What did we learn about where Republicans are right now, if anything, coming out of that convention?

Nichols: We learned that the party belongs to Donald Trump and that thousands of people will repeat every word he says if he tells them to. That, I think, tells you everything you need to know—about the party, not about the election, but about the party.

Parker: I think that’s about right, because a lot of Republicans did not think this was a good use of time or money. If you’re actually focused on winning the midterms, they wanted to be campaigning in their districts, in their states—let alone for some of them, depending on the district or the state, aligning themselves with a president who’s quite unpopular and whose policies are quite unpopular. But nonetheless, you still saw a number of them travel to Dallas despite not really wanting to, because as Tom said, Trump is the leader of this party and he demanded a midterm convention, so he got one.

Harris: I was, as I was watching it go on, thinking about what was driving the news as we were heading into the convention, which was this sort of burgeoning trade war with Canada.

Trump himself mentioned Canada briefly during the convention, saying—

Donald Trump: Canada very much wants to make a deal. They’re dying to make a deal.

Harris: Tom, that’s all well and good, but the reality is that the president has chosen to squabble with one of America’s closest allies. Where do things stand now between the U.S. and Canada? And is there any sense of a thawing? Or do you think things are continuing to heat up?

Nichols: Well, first, let’s always point out that the president’s default response to any controversy is that Country X is desperate to make a deal. It’s literally Donald Trump’s Mad Lib—one of the Mad Lib sentences. You know, What do you think about the controversy with Country X? The answer is always, Controversy will be over soon. Country X is begging to make a deal. They’re calling me every day, whether it’s Canada, Iran, the Houthis, you name it.

I think the Canadians have simply decided they’ve had enough of this nonsense. They are no longer partners; they are adversaries in the economic space. But I think that the Canadians have said, Fine.

A majority of the Canadians don’t want to pay for this Trump–Carney tariff war, but they support Carney standing up to Trump. And so my guess is this is not retrievable until Trump is gone from office, which is a real tragedy, even if Trump backs down from the tariffs, which he almost certainly is going to do sooner rather than later, I think.

Harris: Yeah. And as you mentioned, right, Carney’s approval rating is quite high. Ashley, how has he been responding to the president, and how has the back-and-forth been going in recent days?

Parker: Well, I sort of understand Carney in his response going back to a speech he gave much earlier this year at Davos, where he basically said, The world order as we—I’m paraphrasing here—the world order as we know it is over. And all of these sort of smaller countries have always supplicated themselves to the United States for protection or for deals or for various reasons, and that’s no longer a good strategy for us. And so I think Carney’s response in this trade war is him sort of acting on those principles he laid out at Davos. And one thing that was so striking to me when you look at the back-and-forth—and it looks like both sides had issues; it’s hard to point specifically to which side blew up the most recent deal—but one thing that comes through is Trump has talked about wanting Canada to be a 51st state, and that mainly seems to be trolling, except not entirely; there’s always a kernel of truth with everything Trump does.

But in these negotiations, it feels like the American side has sort of internalized the idea that Canada is less a sovereign nation and more a 51st state. And when you look at the terms that Canada objected to, it was stuff the United States negotiators demanded, which would be reasonable if Canada was a state, but is not reasonable if Canada is a sovereign nation and an ally to our north. And it feels like that’s where things fell apart.

Harris: Tom, actually in your piece the other day, you talked about the way that the president doesn’t view other nations as sovereign nations. There’s just this idea that he can’t go in and extract things in the way that he would if it were just a part of something that he already owned. Can you sort of flesh out that idea a little bit?

Nichols: Well, I mean, not to psychoanalyze the president from a distance, but I think most people would agree the president’s a pretty narcissistic guy. He’s got to put his name on everything. He builds monuments to himself. Every sentence begins with I. And people like that don’t think of other people as real people; they think of them as players on the stage that surrounds them. And I think that’s very clear with Donald Trump.

This convention, going back to the convention we were mentioning, you know, he doesn’t really think of other people trying to win elections, and he doesn’t care. They’re supposed to come to his big party and wear a hat and bring noisemakers and that’s it. And that’s the extent of his interest. And I think that’s how he is with foreign countries, that he says they’re all kind of wholly or partially owned subsidiaries of Donald Trump Incorporated. He doesn’t think of them as real places with unique cultures or particular interests led by human beings who may not actually see the world the way he does or care about his interests as much as he cares about his interests.

And that’s partly why you always get these kind of stock answers of They’re gonna make a deal, because of course everybody makes a deal, because that’s what I want. And they’re gonna do what I tell them to do, because of course, all my life, everyone has done what I tell them to do.

It flummoxes him completely when a foreign nation says, We’re not going to do that. And one of the reasons—you know, I don’t want to extend this analogy by Canada too far—but I think that’s one of the reasons he’s having such a hard time with the war of choice he began in Iran. He just can’t imagine that—he says, I demand that you do X, Y, and Z. And the Iranians say, No and here’s a bunch of missiles and drones as part of that answer. And I think he totally unravels him, because he’s just never had to deal with that.

And I think when Mark Carney, you know, as Ashley was saying, Who is this uppity governor, to speak to the president in this way?, instead of the leader of a sovereign nation and place that’s part of NATO and has real interests in the world—one of our second or third biggest trading partners. He cannot internalize that. It doesn’t make it—it’s not like he rejects the idea. It’s like he can’t grasp the idea.

Parker: And just to briefly follow on Tom, I mean, Trump has such legitimate faith and confidence in himself as a dealmaker that he really can’t fathom that. You may recall that when he was campaigning, he said, On day one, the war between Russia and Ukraine will end, which is a sort of promise presidents make—day one signals it’s a priority. But in talking to Trump’s aides, they’re like, No, no; he actually thought that. Like, he actually thought that he was such a good dealmaker, it would end. And obviously it hasn’t.

Harris: When we come back, we talk about the danger of AI, and Ashley and Tom talk about what they’ll be reporting on in the week ahead.

[Music]

Harris: I wanna switch gears a little bit, speaking of the idea of things that people can and cannot control. Over the last several days, CEOs of leading AI companies have been sounding the alarm, really in a lot of the same ways that Bill Gates, when he was on the show with Hanna [Rosin] not that long ago, was talking about the growing risks of artificial intelligence and the products and the ways that people are using those products.

Trump doesn’t appear to be heeding those concerns and has responded that the U.S. has to, quote, “win AI.”

What is your reaction to this, to all of this?

Nichols: That’s a classic Trump answer. You know, We have to win AI. That’s the president’s way of saying, I didn’t understand the question. I don’t really know what this is, and so we just have to win it. Because that’s a good kind of standard. You could have filled in anything: What do you think about the, you know, international chocolate-milk market?

Well, we have to win that.

Parker: Yeah, is winning AI, we die first?

Nichols: Yeah. (Laughs.) What does that mean?

Parker: I will confess, I don’t fully understand all of the intricacies of AI either, but from what I do understand, to be somewhat fair to Trump, or to anyone, is that this is just fundamentally incredibly complex. And, you know, lawmakers, one problem you have is if you’ve ever watched these members of Congress—which is basically a gerontocracy—try to get to the bottom of Snapchat or Instagram or social media with teens, right, it’s like they’re speaking a foreign language. And those are table stakes, right? AI is a million times more complicated than posting a problematic video on YouTube or Instagram.

So first of all, a lot of the people in the United States responsible for possibly regulating this are like me, which is terrifying—can’t begin to possibly understand the nuances or the complexities. And the second thing is, even if the United States is willing to regulate, the question is you would sort of need a mutually-assured-destruction pact with China and with other countries. This is a sort of globalized problem.

Nichols: I understand the intricacies very well because I have seen all the Terminator movies. And I know that Skynet is going to become self-aware at some point, and we’re going to regret it.

But to go back to the president’s response, that would have been a more reassuring answer. So that’s a highly complex thing. We want to make sure that we’re handling it responsibly.

And I’m fascinated to know what happened that spooked all of the top, you know, that spooked Altman and Musk and all these other guys. But I’m less of a doomer about it—even if it does scare me. But I think that the first wave of damage, if something like this gets loose, will be economic. But I still don’t know. And, you know, to go back to where we were, I don’t know what it means to win that, other than to say that we will use it to capture more efficiencies than other countries will and put more people out of work faster or something. But I think the danger of this thing is real because the people handling it—I just don’t have a sense that they are looking at this with the kind of civic responsibility that they should have.

Harris: Ashley and Tom, I’m going to ask you to open your notebooks. What questions do you have going into this week? And, Ashley, I’m going to go to you first.

Parker: Sure. So I’m gonna be looking at—I think actually last time I was on your podcast, we were talking about the midterms and why the bottom hasn’t fallen out for the Republicans yet. And, you know, that that was August, but things really kick off after Labor Day. There’s October surprises; voters tune in. I mean, one thing that was fascinating is I talked to someone who does focus groups with swing-state voters who said, You hold up a picture of the Senate candidate in a state, and half the voters don’t even know who he or she is.

So I’m still gonna be asking those similar midterm questions, but at a time when everyone is tuning in and ads land harder; mistakes, gaffs land harder; trying to see where this heads in November.

Harris: And the Republicans are starting to put more of their money into their advertising now. They’re sort of using that war chest we were talking about the last time.

Parker: Yeah, because again, part of this is: They would have liked to have used it earlier. Trump has a lot of money; his groups have a lot of money. But he had to kind of release it. And even if they didn’t spend it, they wanted to get those TV reservations up early because you can get a cheaper rate if you book early.

But the other reason you spend now is because this is when people are paying attention. And Michael Scherer and I spoke to Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio, who said at the time when we spoke, he said, Look, yeah, things are bad for the Republicans, but that’s because we haven’t turned to the Democrats yet. The Democrats have a horrible brand, and you should expect to see a ton of contrast ads because elections, as Biden always says, and as everyone understands, They’re a choice.

Nichols: Ashley mentioned, or Adam, I think you mentioned October surprises. And I’m looking for one because when Trump—it gets panicky. I think one of the things I saw at the convention was that he felt very ebullient and energized, but also there was a lot of fear there. He clearly is deeply worried. And when he gets like that, you’re gonna get a surprise of some kind. He’s gonna. And it’s making me wonder what kind of thing will pop. So I guess I’m worried politically about a black-swan event, where he just does something to change the discussion.

The other thing I’m watching, though, is that both in Russia and Iran, these situations are not going away. They are aware that there’s an election impending. And I have to say I don’t know why this is, but late September, early October is always a very fertile time for an international crisis. And I’m concerned that that crisis could erupt either in the Pacific, in Russia, or in Iran, because they’re not on our timetable. They’re not gonna do things on Donald Trump’s timetable or do things based on his interests. And I think all of those places that we’ve stopped watching temporarily because of so much going on at home are percolating, and I’m concerned about what happens next in each of those three, especially in the Ukraine war and in Iran.

Harris: Well, Ashley, Tom, thank you so much for joining me today and helping me sift through the news of the week.

Parker: Thank you for having us.

Nichols: Thanks, Adam.

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson. It has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

Who Needs Regulation When Trump Is President? - The Atlantic

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:41:22 +0000

One consistent complaint against the Trump administration is that it is imposing personalist rule, in which the whims of the leader override the law. Now Donald Trump has come out forcefully against regulating artificial intelligence—and his argument is based almost explicitly on the superiority of his omniscience over any formal legal process. He is not so much refuting the charge of personalism as turning it into a promise.

“The only control or ‘guardrails’ that AI needs is a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” he wrote in a self-refuting post on Truth Social.

Even the most market-friendly economist will concede that government intervention is required when any private activity creates an “externality”—that is, a cost imposed on people who are not involved in a transaction. A factory dumping toxic waste into a stream has heretofore provided the textbook case of an externality necessitating regulation. But AI bots destroying human civilization—as executives are warning could happen—clearly represents a much costlier externality. This is, in fact, probably the strongest conceivable case for regulation.

The intense competitive pressure among AI firms, which have a much stronger incentive to innovate quickly than to ensure their innovations are safe, enhances the case further.

Skeptics have valid reasons to worry about poorly designed regulation that either entrenches the current industry leaders or permits Chinese AI to overtake the American version. Those are reasons to demand well-designed regulations, not to avoid any rules at all.

Read: The singularity is not what it seems

Against this overwhelming rationale, Trump offers, in place of any neutral standards, his characteristic faith in his own prerogatives. Trump tends to discount the need for laws even in areas where he favors government action. He opposed congressional authorization for war with Iran. He has not asked Congress to levy tariffs, preferring instead to raise or lower them and provide carve-outs to affected firms based on his whim.

If anyone needs it, the incumbent president’s behavior provides excellent evidence against personalist rule in general and, in the case of AI, specifically. For one thing, his decisions are not necessarily aligned with the public interest. Trump has formed a political alliance with a handful of wealthy men who have a strong personal stake in the development and shape of AI. The dual roles of David Sacks, Trump’s most important AI adviser and an investor in AI, have caused even some White House officials to express concern about conflicts of interest.

Additionally, Trump has a long-standing tendency to focus on short-term concerns over long-term ones. Trump’s preference for immediate gratification explains many of his decisions, including defunding scientific and medical research, accelerating fossil-fuel emissions, and denigrating American soft power globally. Pushing forward AI development delivers financial benefits to Trump allies who have plied his party with donations. Trump seems to believe that the AI build-out is driving the economy at the moment. It is difficult to imagine any long-term concern persuading Trump to forgo the short-term benefits of the AI boom.

Finally, on the IQ point, Trump is correct that a high level of analytic intelligence is necessary to regulate wisely. This is not, however, a reason to empower Donald Trump. Although he possesses a distinct animal cunning and an uncanny sense for human weakness, Trump isn’t the type to dig in and understand new problems in all of their complexity. He does not appear to read texts of any length or substance, and he is reportedly unable to tolerate briefings of any depth. His public remarks are rambling and error-filled, and rely on a shrinking pool of vocabulary terms.

Trump does have expertise in a handful of realms, such as construction, entertainment, and men’s discount shoeware. Artificial intelligence and technology in general are not among his fields of specialization.

There are many reasons the United States needs clear, stable regulations on artificial intelligence, rather than relying on the whims of a leader. That is true even if the leader is public-minded and deeply versed in policy intricacies. It is all the more true if the leader is Donald Trump.

How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:41:17 +0000

Every president likes to take credit for good news on their watch, but most of them have at least a little shame about it. Not Donald Trump.

September 10 is typically the peak of Atlantic Ocean hurricane season. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration expected a relatively restrained year, but as the meteorologist and hurricane specialist Michael Lowry writes, the season “has never gone beyond September 11th in the reliable records (since at least 1950) without a hurricane” in the Atlantic Ocean—until this year. There aren’t even any strong prospects forming.

Amid spreading violence in the Middle East, warnings of an AI apocalypse, and high fuel prices, it’s a rare piece of good news, and Trump wants credit. Over the weekend, the White House flagged the news, commenting, “Thank you, President Trump!” This is absurd, though maybe no one should be surprised that a man who believed that marking a map with Sharpie can change a hurricane’s path would take credit for a low-key storm season. (He also reportedly once suggested attacking storms with nuclear weapons, so perhaps, as the journalist Catherine Rampell jokes, this is deterrence in action.)

Better explanations than presidential benevolence exist. As my colleague Joshua Partlow has reported, this is an unusual year for the El Niño cycle. In the Pacific Ocean, it has produced very warm water, as well as a number of hurricanes. Hawaii, which is seldom hit, has been struck by two hurricanes so far this year. At least four deaths have been attributed to the storms, and power remains out on some parts of the island of Kauai. But scientists say that El Niño also accounts for the absence of major storms, so far, in the Atlantic. “It’s really staggering, just how inhospitable the Atlantic is to anything that could form a tropical cyclone right now,” Kristen Corbosiero, a professor of atmospheric science at the University at Albany, told PBS. The lull is especially notable because last year’s hurricane season was also astonishingly mild in the United States. Although parts of the Caribbean endured hurricanes, not a single one hit the U.S. mainland.

This is great news for the Americans who are otherwise often in hurricanes’ paths, and who have been slammed by a series of storms in the past decade—including 2024’s Hurricane Helene, the deadliest to hit the mainland United States since Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. It is also great news for Trump, who must be one of the luckiest people in history. Hurricanes can help or, more often, badly hurt a president. George W. Bush’s reputation never recovered from Katrina, whereas Barack Obama’s steady hand during Hurricane Sandy seemed to bolster his reelection campaign. Trump’s handling of storms during his first term was poor; he demonstrated little human warmth and, in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria, jarring coldness.

Trump’s personal behavior aside, his administration has been especially fortunate because under his leadership, FEMA appears to be in no shape to handle a major disaster. In the first months of his second presidency, Trump and then–Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced plans to dismantle FEMA entirely, devolving responsibility for relief to states, an idea panned by most experts. In the meantime, he seemed determined to slowly strangle it, appointing interim leaders with no disaster-relief experience. First came Cameron Hamilton, who was fired after telling Congress that he did not support liquidating FEMA. Next was David Richardson, who, shortly after taking his post in May 2025, acknowledged that he had no completed plan for the impending hurricane season and would reuse the previous year’s. (FEMA employees reported that Richardson said he didn’t even realize such a season existed; a FEMA spokesperson later said he was joking.)

Because no storms have since struck the mainland, these failures ended up having much less human and economic cost. FEMA appears to be on a somewhat stronger footing now. Trump has backed off plans to eliminate FEMA, Noem and Richardson are gone, and Hamilton is back as permanent administrator—and has won some tentative praise for working to learn more about disaster relief. He inherits serious challenges, though. A federal judge ruled on Friday that an administration order to lay off half of FEMA’s workforce was illegal. “Frankly, the FEMA staffing plan number appears as if pulled from thin air,” the judge wrote of the government’s proposal, which included cutting thousands of on-call employees who rush in with aid after a disaster.

A report released last month by the Government Accountability Office was even more scathing. The GAO found that FEMA’s personnel decisions had been made “without assessing whether it had the necessary staffing capacity to meet its mission,” including what it is required to do under law, and that “FEMA is not positioned to determine whether it has the right number of people with the right skills in the right positions at the right time to meet its mission.” Furthermore, the report said, “the agency has no overall strategic direction.”

Alas, the calm before the storms won’t last indefinitely. Experts who spoke with The New York Timessaid that it would be premature to assume that no major Atlantic hurricanes will form this year. If the president’s political luck continues, then perhaps the East Coast won’t see a really bad storm until after the midterm elections, or maybe even next year. Given his administration’s approach to hurricane preparedness and the travails of FEMA, though, ordinary Americans along the Atlantic coast and the Gulf Coast are likely to see their weather luck run out.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump rejected calls for new AI guardrails, saying that the technology instead needs “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT, and the U.S.A. has that, in spades!” His comments came after several AI executives called for stronger safeguards or a slowdown in development.
New York and 21 other states sued the Trump administration to block a new rule expanding what immigration officials can consider when deciding whether applicants qualify for green cards, visas, or entry into the United States. The rule, set to take effect on Friday, would likely make it harder for people to be approved if officials decide that they would possibly need benefits such as Medicaid, food assistance, and housing aid.
A second federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s new mail-ballot rules, finding that the Postal Service likely lacks the authority to impose them. The Supreme Court will weigh in on the rules ahead of the November elections.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what asking for help does for the people helping.

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Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani / The Atlantic

The Biggest Obstacle to Universal Child Care: Babies

By Kendra Hurley

Last year seemed like a pretty big one for breakthroughs in child care. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s promise of publicly funded care for young kids helped him win the keys to Gracie Mansion. Officials in Connecticut created an endowment to make care more affordable in that state. And New Mexico became the first state to commit to free child care for all of its residents. But as policy makers have begun hammering out the details of these ambitions, they’ve hit against a stubborn and formidable obstacle: babies.

Read the full article.

Trump’s Kennedy Center Shakedown

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:41:17 +0000

The saga of Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to slap his name onto the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will not go away. In May, Trump lost in court and was ordered to remove his name from the building. But now—according to a 57-page presentation by Trump’s hand-picked executive board obtained by The Washington Post—the Kennedy Center is warning that it will likely go bankrupt. Unless, that is, Trump gets to put his name back on the wall next to that of his slain predecessor.

The Post reports:

Trump’s support hinges on getting public credit for his involvement. The financial resolution says Trump has offered to “raise the necessary funds to keep the Center from bankruptcy” while the building undergoes a sweeping renovation. But it says Trump is unlikely to provide “fundamental oversight” of that project or lead a financial rescue without “appropriate recognition” of his role.

That’s not an offer of help; it’s a shakedown—or, in more direct terms, political blackmail. Two lawyers who have been fighting the Trump administration, Norm Eisen and Nathaniel Zelinsky, said in a statement: “Trump is taking the Center hostage and threatening to in effect kill it unless he gets his way.” The president is counting on the board’s civic spirit and affection for the institution—neither of which he evidently possesses—to strong-arm it into giving him what the law and courts would not allow.

Even more galling than Trump’s attempt to pressure the trustees is that his offer is a response to a crisis mostly of his own creation. It’s true that the Kennedy Center, opened more than a half century ago, needs investment and repairs. But the plummeting ticket sales are a result of Trump’s hostile takeover. Performers and patrons alike did not want to legitimize the obscenity of placing Trump’s name on an institution meant to honor Kennedy, and they voted with their feet and their dollars. This very public repudiation of Trump by a slice of the American cultural elite appears to have been an embarrassment to the president; Trump then claimed that he needed to close the center for two years (ostensibly for a complete reconstruction) rather than suffer further humiliation.

(Trump, apparently, could not submit to the public indignity of having his name removed from the building in June. He—or someone seeking to please him—ordered workers to cover the building’s wall with tarps at 3 o’clock in the morning so that no one would see the removal. The tarps remain in place.)

[Read: Dead-mall vibes at the Kennedy Center]

The only way to avert letting the center go bankrupt, according to the executive board, is to let Trump raise money—and heaven knows what kind of ethical issues that effort would entail—and then to add his name to thank him. The presentation to the board suggests 10 possible statements to place on the building, including “Renovation Restoration and Endowment overseen by President Donald J. Trump and the Trump Kennedy Center Fund.” Putting Trump’s name in front of Kennedy’s is an especially offensive touch, and would enshrine the idea that the center would no longer be named solely for Kennedy.

The American people do not support Trump’s mania for renaming things, of which the Kennedy Center is just one example. (The White House itself has become a public exhibit of Trump’s garish taste, including gold script identifying The Oval Office, as if it’s a function room at one of his resorts that needs to be labeled in case a tipsy wedding guest gets lost.) All of this architectural bombast and glitz are expressions both of ego and of insecurity: Trump wants to leave his mark—and his name—on a city that has never accepted him and that will almost certainly try to scrub away his influence when he is gone.

The president admitted as much recently, when the writer Ben Terris asked him whether he is building monuments to himself because he is worried that no one else will build them when he’s gone. “That’s true,” Trump said. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

The president’s admission suggests a way to deal with his attempted shakedown of the Kennedy Center board: take his dare.

[Read: The Kennedy Center has a problem that courts can’t fix]

The center’s top officials, the people who were supposed to be entrusted with the future of this cultural icon, have admitted their failure. They acknowledge that Trump will not support the institution unless his name is on it. Well, so be it. The trustees should let the center close, declare bankruptcy, and come to a sad end—all on Trump’s watch. Allow the Kennedy Center to fail in full view of the American public, and let them decide whether such things matter.

Otherwise, Trump will plow ahead and do something no one wants, because no one bothered to stop him.

The Kennedy Center can always be rebuilt and reopened. Indeed, the restoration of the center could be one of the items on the next president’s to-do list. Scrap the czarist-style ballroom. Rebuild the East Wing of the White House. Halt the fascist-flavored victory arch that will dishonor nearby Arlington Cemetery. Fix the Reflecting Pool. Chisel Trump’s name off the U.S. Institute of Peace. (If the president wants to land at Donald J. Trump International Airport in Palm Beach when he leaves office, that’s between him and the people of Florida.) Painful as it would be to see the Kennedy Center go bankrupt, it would be more painful to cave to Trump’s deeply cynical refusal to save a national treasure unless he gets his name on it.

In a famous 1911 poem that gave the world another name for blackmail—danegeld, a reference to the protection money that medieval English villages paid, often in vain, to Danish raiders—Rudyard Kipling warned powerful countries against caving to extortionary threats. The Kennedy Center board, and the American people, should heed Kipling’s advice:

We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!

A Bigoted Outburst Against Texas Sports Fans

Mon, 14 Sep 2026 22:41:17 +0000

On Saturday night, college-football fans in Texas were blessed with a moment of collective ecstasy. Their Longhorns were playing Ohio State, the nation’s No. 1 team, and trailed by 20 points. Then they improbably scored three touchdowns in the fourth quarter. A frenzy shook the stadium as more than 100,000 people, most in team colors, celebrated the stunning comeback. But Bo French, the Republican nominee for a seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, was upset by what he saw in the crowd.

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” he wrote yesterday on X, where he posted an image of a cluster of fans at the stadium who appeared to be of South Asian ancestry. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.” Dispelling any doubts about his meaning, he continued: “I weep for the families in Texas who can’t get into UT because they prioritize foreigners over Texans.” He added, “Like body-cams exposed criminals, social media is exposing how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”

In reality, there is no reason to assume that the students in the photograph are foreigners, and Texasdoes notprioritize foreigners over Texans. Quite the contrary. Ninety percent of slots for first-year students at UT Austin are reserved for Texas residents. Foreign students even pay higher tuition, which effectively acts as a subsidy for Texas residents at the college. But some people are so psychologically distressed by diversity and difference that their reactions have little to do with the facts on the ground.

Some prominent Republicans have objected to the latest––but not the only––bigoted remarks from French. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has held office since 2002, posted on X, “Are other Republican elected officials going to condemn the intolerance and racism, or look the other way while it becomes normalized.” He warned, “This is how great political parties self destruct.”

But others seemed more incensed by Cornyn’s critique than they were by French’s remarks. A Republican state legislator from North Dakota wrote, “Eat shit you fucking loser.” John Doyle, who has a show for the populist-right outlet Blaze Media, wrote, “For now we can ignore how unqualified you are to speak on behalf of ‘The Republican Party’ as someone who reflexively embraces liberal moralizing about ‘racism’ and ‘intolerance’ in response to a Patriot acknowledging that Texans didn’t ask for their state to become a playground for the third world.”

Changes to content moderation on X under Elon Musk’s ownership––not to mention rhetoric and actions within the federal government––have made clear how common bigoted identitarianism is in the GOP coalition. Republicans who believe in the values of Christianity, the creed of the Declaration of Independence, or the moral imperative to judge people as individuals need to confront the prejudice in their ranks.

The identitarian right’s rise has lessons for progressives too. First, seeking to raise the salience of race and ethnicity in American politics and culture was a mistake––as ought to have been clear by 2016, when Donald Trump exploited that heightened salience for his own ends. As the political scientist Karen Stenner argued in her 2005 book, causing people who are uncomfortable with difference to perceive it as a threat to social cohesion can activate a latent predisposition toward intolerance.

Second, not only was embracing race as a factor in university admissions unpopular with voters, so much so that it lost ballot initiatives even in left-leaning California; colleges’ discrimination against white people and Asians also stoked racial resentment by putting identity groups in a zero-sum competition.

And third, once the left began to treat mere departures from left-identitarian shibboleths as racist, it became harder to stigmatize actual racism or xenophobia, as surely as crying wolf at every shih tzu, tabby cat, and hamster would make it harder to warn against actual wolves on the hunt.

The Republican and Democratic Parties could do well in future elections to revive a straightforward, morally sound position: Judge others by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. That ethos needn’t foreclose all disagreements about immigration. And one needn’t pretend not to notice racial and ethnic diversity. But insofar as a diverse crowd cheering for a Longhorn victory implies anything about past or present immigration and its effects, it is this: People of all races and ethnicities have already assimilated into the quasi-religion of Texas football, one of America’s most distinctive cultural phenomena.

If, heaven forbid, this great multiethnic nation is ever invaded by a foreign power, there is evidence that the people in that Texas stadium could unite in common cause without regard to race or ancestry. Bo French, who feels distress at seeing his neighbors come together, may lack that ability––a weakness that makes him unfit for office in America.

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Trump’s Signs Are Coming to the Smithsonian - The Atlantic

A Shouting Match and an Ultimatum at the Kennedy Center

The Only Thing Capable of Uniting Bernie and Bannon

Math Can’t Go On Like This - The Atlantic

Trump Is Looking for Diesel in All the Wrong Places

Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

Trump’s Position on AI Makes No Sense - The Atlantic

Emily St. John Mandel Imagines What Comes After America - The Atlantic

Explore the October 2026 Issue

What Trump’s Bizarre Posts Are Teaching Us About AI

A Diagnosis for Social Conflict That Gets Lost Along the Way

Sons and Mothers

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‘Feminism Is the Consequence of the “Man Problem,” Not Its Cause’

The Men Who Don’t Want Women to Vote

Helen Lewis replies:

Behind the Cover

Corrections

Trump’s See-No-Evil AI Policy - The Atlantic

A Night for Actor’s Actors, Not Movie Stars

The Girls Get to Sit Down

The Supreme Court Recognizes the Danger of Trump’s Election Plan

‘The Flood is the Point’

Who Needs Regulation When Trump Is President? - The Atlantic

How Long Can the U.S. Escape an Atlantic Hurricane?

Trump’s Kennedy Center Shakedown

A Bigoted Outburst Against Texas Sports Fans