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Photos of the Week: Tall Ships, Cool Catacombs, Bastille Day

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Steve Russell / Toronto Star / Getty

A swimmer checks out the smoke from Northern Ontario forest fires that has the Toronto skyline shrouded in haze, as viewed from Humber Park West, in Toronto, on July 15, 2026.

Anthony Soufflé / Minnesota Star Tribune / Getty

Plumes of smoke rise from the Camp Fire over Moose Lake as multiple wildfires burning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness prompted its closure and evacuation on July 14, 2026, in Ely, Minnesota.

VCG / Getty

A double rainbow hangs in the sky above the Gyantse Dzong fortress on July 16, 2026, in China’s Tibet Autonomous Region.

Jan Langhaug / NTB / AFP / Getty

Norway’s striker Erling Braut Haaland carries a taxidermic raccoon as he gets off the plane after Norway’s national soccer team landed at Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport on July 13, 2026. Norway was knocked out of the World Cup in its quarterfinal match, against England.

Thomas Trutschel / Photothek / Getty

A white-tailed eagle catches a fish in the Saltfjord, in Saltbrygga, Norway, on July 14, 2026.

Omer Urer / Anadolu / Getty

A close-up view of one of two owl chicks receiving treatment from veterinarians with the General Directorate of Nature Conservation and National Parks in Düzce, Turkey, on July 14, 2026. The chicks were found after falling from their nests when they were about a week old. Veterinarians are monitoring their physical and behavioral development to prepare them for release back into their natural habitat.

Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty

The German cycling enthusiast Dieter “Didi” Senft, nicknamed “El Diablo,” cheers as a pack of riders cycles past during the ninth stage of the 113th edition of the Tour de France cycling race, bound for Ussel, France, on July 12, 2026.

Joe Portlock / Getty

An E1 electric race boat speeds past during a practice session ahead of the E1 Series Monaco GP on July 16, 2026, in Monaco.

Joseph Prezioso / AFP / Getty

Tall ships make their way toward Boston Harbor during the Sail Boston Parade of Sail in Massachusetts on July 11, 2026.

Thomas Padilla / AP

Fireworks and drones illuminate the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, on the eve of Bastille Day celebrations on July 13, 2026.

Ludovic Marin / AFP / Getty

French Air and Space Force and German Air Force Airbus A400M aircraft perform a flyover during the annual Bastille Day military air show over Champs-Élysées Avenue, in Paris, on July 14, 2026.

Pablo Porciuncula / AFP / Getty

A great egret flies near the Paquetá-Barcas Rio ferry terminal on Paquetá Island, Brazil, on July 11, 2026.

VCG / Getty

An aerial view of hillside solar panels in an agrivoltaic power-generation project in Jinhua, Zhejiang Province, China, seen on July 16, 2026

Martin Mejia / AP

Residents play soccer alongside Belaunde cemetery, in the Comas neighborhood of Lima, Peru, on July 12, 2026.

Pierre Crom / Getty

A record number of visitors sought relief in the Paris Catacombs during a heat wave on July 15, 2026, in Paris, France. About 20 meters beneath the streets of Paris, the renovated sections of the underground ossuary maintain a constant temperature of about 57°F (14°C), making them one of the coolest publicly accessible places in the city.

Craig T Fruchtman / Getty

New Yorkers gather on 42nd Street near Times Square to see the “Manhattanhenge” solar spectacle on July 12, 2026, in New York City.

Manon Cruz / Reuters

The town of Die stands beneath an encroaching wildfire that has been scorching nearby mountains for several days, during a heat wave affecting a large part of the country, in Drôme department, France, on July 9, 2026.

Ethan Swope / AP

Wildfire engulfs trees in the Summit Fire in Llano, California, on July 10, 2026.

Hans Gutknecht / Los Angeles Daily News / MediaNews Group / Getty

A brush fire burns near Center Pointe Parkway, in Santa Clarita, California, on July 15, 2026.

Stephen Lam / San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers / Getty

An aerial view of homes in the Merced Manor neighborhood, seen at sunset, in San Francisco, on July 13, 2026

Leonardo Fernández Viloria / Reuters

A drone view shows damaged buildings in the aftermath of the June 24 earthquakes, at the Hugo Chávez housing complex, built under the Venezuelan government’s “Gran Mision Vivienda” initiative, in Catia la Mar, La Guaira state, Venezuela, on July 13, 2026.

Sebastian Kahnert / DPA / Getty

Visitors walk through a hedge maze in Kleinwelka, in Bautzen, Germany, on July 10, 2026.

Meng Delong / VCG / Getty

Tourists take a boat ride in the “Water Forest” at Luyanghu Wetland Park on July 16, 2026, in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province, China.

Matthias Schrader / AP

Four hundred gold-colored plastic Mozart sculptures by the German artist Ottmar Hörl stand for the 270th birthday of the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Salzburg, Austria, on July 15, 2026.

Lindsey Wasson / AP

Participants sprint to the finish line in the teen race during the T-Rex World Championship Races at Emerald Downs, in Auburn, Washington, on July 12, 2026.

Amy Harris / Invision / AP

Garrett Green competes in the Bull Riding Finals event during the 2026 Calgary Stampede on July 12, 2026, in Calgary, Alberta.

Ellen Schmidt / AP

A swimmer dives into Cedar Lake on a very hot day in Minneapolis on July 13, 2026.

Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Two women sharing an umbrella walk together in heavy rain in Beijing, China, on July 10, 2026.

The Attention-Span Class Divide

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Several months ago, during an Oscar campaign far more memorable than the movie it was promoting, the actor Timothée Chalamet offered up an observation: “I don’t want to be working in ballet, or opera, or things where it’s like, Hey, keep this thing alive, even though, like, no one cares about this any more.” Recognizing that he might have just offended some ballet or opera lovers, he added, “I just lost 14 cents in viewership.”

Chalamet went on to reference billion-dollar-grossing blockbusters, such as Oppenheimer and Barbie. Beloved as opera and ballet may be, they have a niche audience. I have never, for instance, witnessed gaggles of girlfriends dress like birds to catch a Swan Lake performance the way millions of women swathed themselves in pink to see Barbie.

But what people who were annoyed by the ham-fisted comment may have missed—what Chalamet himself missed—is that he is already working in a field of narrowing cultural relevance. Theatrical movie releases have been on the decline since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, dropping from 910 releases in 2019 to 670 in 2025. Box-office sales are shrinking. People are still streaming movies at home, but studios are worried. Feature films are getting longer overall, but scriptwriters are under pressure to keep acts short, with faster cuts designed to keep viewers focused. Chalamet’s comment came in response to the actor Matthew McConaughey, who was lamenting that studios have been trimming first acts to “get to the point,” at the expense of story building. Chalamet was saying that he sympathized with the impulse to adapt in order to keep drawing audiences to the movies.

[Read: The attention-span panic]

But it may be too late. The movies were once a working- and middle-class pleasure—cheap Nickelodeon theaters sprung up in the early 1900s in cities dense with immigrants. By the Jazz Age, “movie palaces” brought in wealthy patrons too, and for decades, the cinema was an all-American activity. But today, affluent people are the most likely to say they’ve gone to a movie recently, whereas low-income people are the least likely. In one survey, 78 percent of respondents said that they considered going to the movies a luxury. Meanwhile, millions of people have started watching micro-dramas on TikTok.

This may be less a matter of changing tastes than a matter of time and money. I don’t just mean the money it costs to pay for movie tickets and streaming services, at a time when Americans are stretching for gas and eggs. (Last year, the cost of streaming increased almost 20 percent, well above the 2.7 percent inflation rate.) I don’t just mean studios’ money-saving turn to generative AI, which will inevitably lead to a decline in the quality of films. I’m talking about what not having money does to your time, and your ability to spend it.

Who can and cannot sit down to watch a movie may seem like a low-stakes issue, but it’s not. Everyone is struggling to get off their phones and pay attention, but some are struggling more than others. The ability to focus is a class issue, and the attention span is undergoing a class divide.

The average American reports checking their phone nearly 200 times a day. Everyone—blue-collar moms, college students, CEOs—suffers from the distractions of carrying around the pinging, blinking pocket-size casinos that our phones have become. While our attention spans have shrunk, however, our brains have not fundamentally changed. Focus, it appears, is a recoverable asset that can be retrieved by shutting out the noise and leaving the casino. And that is much easier for high rollers to do.

Money offers the ability to buy expensive gadgets such as second, basic phones and “bricks” that can make smartphones temporarily dumb. But it also means access to resources that don’t look like resources at all: stable work, consistent schedules, chunks of leisure time, agency over how to structure your day. The ability to block out time to focus on emails, make to-do lists, or do in-depth work. To meditate, exercise, or go outside. To commit three hours to seeing a movie in a theater (or a ballet or an opera). These are things that economically stable individuals take for granted, but that evade many struggling Americans.

The unemployment rate is hovering around 4.2 percent. But if you add the “functionally unemployed”—which includes anyone making less than a living wage ($26,000 a year) and anyone who wants but can’t get 35 hours or more of guaranteed work a week—then that figure rises to about 25 percent. Nearly 30 percent of Americans are employed in gig work, which promises flexibility and freedom but is more commonly defined by a lack of steady hours and the need to constantly be on call.

Americans are spending their days hustling and waiting for the opportunity to hustle, their days broken up into unpredictable units of work and languishing. That’s stressful, and stress limits the ability to retain information and focus. In this way, precarity reduces attention spans. And the phone is always right there, whenever and wherever, offering a perfect form of mindless entertainment when your mind is on so many other things.

Enter: the micro-drama.

These soapy shows are made up of minute-long episodes meant to be watched vertically on your phone. They’re fast-moving and designed to hook viewers quickly. Relying heavily on tropes, they are more telenovela than Scorsese. Recently, one show titled Screen Time, from Issa Rae’s production company, garnered 75 million views in a week—on TikTok and on TikTok’s micro-drama app, PineDrama. The series, which has 57 parts, tells the story of two couples on a double date that descends into chaos after a mysterious figure hacks their personal devices and forces them to reveal their secrets to each other.

An estimated 28 million people are watching shows on PineDrama, and it’s one of many micro-drama platforms. Who are these viewers? Many are women, many are Gen Z, and many are people of color. While representation of women and minorities has declined in traditional films, a number of micro-drama platforms focus on diverse creators and casts. Two, Fanbase and Minivela, were specifically designed to showcase Black- and Latino-driven content.

In China, where micro-dramas quickly become a major phenomenon, producers have been explicit about whom they’re targeting: the working class. David Kwok, the CEO of the Singapore-based production company Tiny Island, told the BBC that the Cinderella and Horatio Alger storylines of many micro-dramas “feed people’s needs and fantasies, especially for the blue-collar crowd.”

[From the August 2026 issue: The end of reading is here]

The rise of micro-dramas coincides with the rise of AI, and in China, more than 95 percent of the micro-dramas released early this year were AI-generated. Screen Time is a human-led affair—human actors filmed by camerapeople. But PineDrama offers AI shows too, and they may become the norm here as well.

All of this makes me fear that we’re watching the creation of a cultural divide, a situation in which the art of film is created for the white and affluent, and everyone else is served up micro-drama kitsch—stories of women and Black and Hispanic people, relegated to coffee-break-length narratives cheaply churned out by AI.

I do see one bright spot to the micro-drama trend. It signals the persistence of the human desire to engage with narrative storytelling. Social media isn’t meeting this desire, but many people don’t feel like they have time to sit through a two-hour movie. A micro-drama can provide the satisfaction of a resolved story in an arc that lasts less than half an hour. And yet I doubt that satisfaction can match the pleasure of sticking with an epic novel or a movie to the end, a pleasure that is dependent on the investment of deep attention.

I grew up catching cheap matinees at the Angelika theater in New York, an art-house cinema in the Village. Sometimes we’d go to $3 movies at a second-run theater in Midtown—big blockbuster films that everyone in the country had already seen. Sometimes we’d spend the whole day in the dark cool theater, watching multiple films and escaping from the stress of working-class teenage city life. Across the country, other teenagers were doing much the same—participating in shared moments of monoculture, the exact kind that I suspect Chalamet wants to be a part of.

Few things are more American to me than the Hollywood movie. Ballet and opera were always art forms to entertain the wealthy. But for most of their history, the movies have been a mass-market enterprise. That will change if the attention span becomes a status symbol. The art form once enjoyed by many will be reserved for those who can—and can afford to—sit still.

The Researchers Who Want Dads-to-Be to Stop Drinking

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Pretty much everyone knows that women aren’t supposed to have alcohol while they’re pregnant. Even just a drink a day, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists warns, can cause lifelong problems with a baby’s coordination, behavior, and learning. Not all mothers-to-be follow this advice, of course, but the official guidance is clear: “There is no safe amount or type of alcohol use during pregnancy.”

Male drinking and its potential negative effects on a fetus have gotten considerably less attention. The ACOG does not have the same alcohol-related recommendations for men on its website, and doctors do not generally bring up the topic in prenatal appointments. A few years ago, however, Kara Thomas, then a graduate student at Texas A&M University’s veterinary school, suggested an experiment that would explore whether a father-to-be’s alcohol consumption could also pose risks. She wanted to see whether alcohol used by a male mouse before impregnating a female mouse might change the facial features of the resulting fetus.

The student’s professor, Michael Golding, was initially against the idea. He assumed that a fetus would need to be exposed to a toxic level of alcohol for its face to be affected—a level that typically comes from heavy drinking by the mother during pregnancy, not from drinking by the father before pregnancy. “When that was wrong, I was stunned,” Golding told me. The study results showed that when a male mouse drank alcohol, then impregnated a female mouse that was not given alcohol, their fetuses tended to develop facial changes, such as smaller jaws, similar to those seen in some human children with fetal alcohol syndrome.

[Read: Doomed to be a tradwife]

Since then, Golding’s team has found a variety of other ways that alcohol consumed by the father before conception can affect a fetus. Among the issues Golding has seen in the offspring of alcohol-using mouse fathers compared with children of control mice are higher inflammation, liver damage, accelerated aging, and changes in the retina. The team’s research has also found that male preconception alcohol use can result in problems with the placenta and worse IVF success rates. (All of Golding’s studies use mice because researchers cannot deliberately expose prospective human parents to alcohol. He noted that the alcohol-metabolism pathways in mice and humans are similar, and that therefore one could expect similar effects of preconception alcohol use between the two species.)

Other research has resulted in similar findings. Kelly Huffman, a psychologist at UC Riverside, has found changes in the neocortex, worsened coordination, and impaired motor learning in the offspring of mice whose fathers were heavily dosed with alcohol prior to their conception, compared with control mice. These findings have led Golding, Huffman, and others to recommend that men stop drinking if they’re trying to become fathers.

Golding said he thinks that the harmful effects happen because alcohol puts the mouse father into a state of oxidative stress, and that this may cause his sperm to dial down the mitochondrial and metabolism functions of any potential new embryo that it creates. Through a process called epigenetics, the alcohol-affected sperm may carry chemical instructions that alter the way that genes are expressed in the embryo, leading to an array of changes in the fetus. Some human studies point to a similar phenomenon at play: Along with his colleagues, Gregg Homanics, a molecular neurobiologist at the University of Pittsburgh, has found that, in humans, a parent or even grandparent’s alcohol-use disorder was associated with changes in gene expression in hundreds of their children’s and grandchildren’s genes, including in those related to cancer development.

As concerning as this research may seem, it remains rife with unanswered questions. Golding said that the precise dose of alcohol that’s harmful in humans is not clear, but chronic drinking is likely worse than occasional drinking because the former is more of a stressor on the body. In some of Huffman’s studies, the mice are held at a human equivalent of a .08 blood alcohol level, or the United States’ legal driving limit, but few people maintain that level all day, every day. (And researchers don’t yet know whether preconception alcohol use has any effect on a woman’s eggs, because eggs are harder to study than sperm and don’t regenerate.)

Also unknown is how long prior to conception a father’s drinking might matter, or whether alcohol poses a greater risk than other substances or behaviors. Work on paternal consumption of THC, the primary active chemical in marijuana, for instance, has so far produced small or inconsistent findings. But paternal obesity might be consequential: Sarah Kimmins, an epigenetics expert at the University of Montreal, has found that men with an elevated body mass index, or BMI, tend to have sperm with altered DNA methylation—chemical signals that could change the development of the embryo or placenta—in areas linked to neural development. This potentially provides one explanation for why some studies show that obese men are more likely to have children with autism.

I asked Golding and Homanics why, given their research, more kids don’t have symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome or other related problems. Most American men drink, after all, which might suggest that most American kids would have these issues. Homanics told me that not every man who consumes alcohol will cause harm to his future child; his genetic susceptibility and the amount he drinks might play a role. Golding said that fetal-alcohol-spectrum disorders are “grossly underdiagnosed,” and that therefore more children might have the condition than we think.

Perhaps the biggest caveat to all of this is that so many of the studies have shown effects only in mice. Several studies of human paternal drinking, which largely rely on retroactive reports of alcohol consumption, have found associations with fetal size, congenital heart diseases, birth defects, and infant-mortality risk. The evidence, however, is inconsistent and not necessarily causal. And some scientists are skeptical of the epigenetic mechanism that Golding and others describe: “To me, the idea that sperm mitochondria would pick up heritable defects and transfer them to the offspring is a stretch,” Adrian Bird, a genetics professor at the University of Edinburgh, told me. “There may be something going on here, but I would need to see it reproduced independently with larger numbers of animals before being convinced.”

[Read: The warnings I almost didn’t heed]

Still, Golding said that, given what he and others have found, men should avoid alcohol for about 90 days before attempting to get their partner pregnant. “The less you drink, the healthier you’re going to be,” he said. (However, some traces of past debauchery might be irreversible; Kimmins told me, ominously, that “we actually don’t know how much you can reverse damage done” from bad habits earlier in life.) Huffman had similar advice: If you’re “actively trying to have babies,” she said, “both the man and the woman should be abstaining” from alcohol.

Kimmins was even more expansive in her warnings: She argued that, for the sake of future generations, men should aim to live extremely healthy lives—not only in terms of their alcohol consumption but in every dimension. “Eating well is what men should be doing,” Kimmins said. “How a father lives his life will definitely impact the health of his sperm epigenome, his fertility, and then can impact the next generation.”

Just as I was about to point out to Huffman that occasional drinking is broadly accepted by society, she told me, “Biology doesn’t care what’s legal.” I worried aloud that this advice, even if warranted, might not be realistic. Birth rates are declining in much of the world because many people have become reluctant to start families. Telling men to completely stop drinking for months before they even attempt to become fathers doesn’t seem like it would help fertility. Huffman saw it differently: “We spend a lot of our lives sacrificing for our children,” she said. “I think it’s not a massive ask for us to get used to it early.”

Perhaps a gentler takeaway from this research is that doctors could do more to scrutinize the father’s health when a couple are planning a family or experiencing fertility struggles. Women are told to avoid deli meats, soft cheeses, and even a drop of alcohol during pregnancy, but Golding’s research and similar studies suggest that a prospective father’s health behaviors can also be important. If a couple struggle to conceive, for instance, the man’s diet or alcohol use could be affecting fertility. “I think the message definitely needs to get out that men also have a responsibility” for their children’s health, Kimmins said.

Maybe, then, the question becomes one of relative sacrifice: If the couple conceive, the pregnant woman will have to endure the better part of a year—a stretch of time that may be filled with awkward work parties and weddings of people she barely knows—without so much as a glass of wine. In solidarity, her partner can probably spend a few months cutting back.

Ukraine’s Dr. Strangelove

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Nations don’t always get to pick their heroes, especially not in a time of war. Most Ukrainians, given the choice, would probably not want a character like Denys Shtilerman to be the architect of their revenge against Russia. He studied in Russia, became wealthy in Russia, worked for a Russian military institute, and served two stints in Russian jails. Some of his close associates are wanted in Ukraine for corruption. Yet Shtilerman, a prolific designer of weapons, has earned admiration across Europe for his role in Ukraine’s defense.

His company, Fire Point, produces the bulk of the long-range drones that Ukraine has used to bring the war to Russian soil. Scores of them roll off the company’s production lines each day to be launched into Russia by night. Its missiles reach as far as Siberia, more than 1,000 miles away. The campaign of strikes, mostly targeting oil refineries and other energy infrastructure, has humiliated the Kremlin, snarled the logistics of its military, and forced many millions of Russians to suffer through rampant shortages of fuel.

For the first time in years, Ukraine appears to have Russia on the ropes, and no supplier of weapons, foreign or domestic, is doing more than Shtilerman to keep it there. His ambitions go far beyond Ukraine. In several interviews this year in Kyiv, he told me about his plans to change the global balance of power by developing cheap and effective missile technology. Above all, he wants to help Europe build its own missile-defense shield without relying on the United States. “What’s horrible is that America, even before Trump, was a completely unreliable partner and ally,” Shtilerman said this winter during a tour of his missile factory near Kyiv. “We want to be independent of all suppliers, especially the Americans.”

At a gathering on Monday in Paris, the leaders of nine European countries formalized their plans to build such a system alongside Ukraine: Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, all members of the NATO alliance. In announcing what they called their Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition, these nations said in a joint statement: “We acknowledge the unique experience of Ukraine, gained in defence against Russia’s war of aggression.” Ukraine, they said, would be a founding partner in the missile shield.

Shtilerman has spent more than a year laying the ground for this system; he prefers to use its code name, Project Freyja, after the Norse goddess of beauty, love, death, and war. In February, he showed me the missile, known as the FP-7x, developed to serve as the basis for Freyja. “This is what the very autonomy we’ve been talking about for years looks like,” Shtilerman wrote in response to Monday’s announcement in Paris. “It’s not America that decides whether Europe can defend itself. Europe is building its own shield.”

The project illustrates how Europe has reacted to President Trump’s threats against NATO, such as his desire to seize Greenland and annex Canada. Denmark, which has faced the most aggressive rhetoric from Trump of any NATO member, has also been the most intent on working with Ukraine and, in particular, with Fire Point. But it’s not alone. By developing their own arms industries and forming new defensive coalitions, many European states have sought to ease their reliance on the U.S. for their security. The shift has made Ukraine a valued partner.

[Read: ‘We are learning to bully back’]

It has also marked a dramatic reversal of fortunes for Shtilerman. Earlier this year, his company got mixed up in one of the worst corruption scandals in Ukraine’s recent history. Shtilerman has not been accused of breaking the law, but anti-corruption investigators are reviewing some of his contracts with the military. Amid the scrutiny, Shtilerman has continued signing production deals and joint ventures with European defense firms, which seem undeterred by all of the controversies.

Some of the points on Shtilerman’s resume, in particular his ties to Russia, would be enough to tank the career of another Ukrainian businessman. He told me, for example, that he worked in the early 2000s for the Moscow defense institute that produces Vladimir Putin’s “little nuclear suitcase,” which the Russian president would use in a crisis to authorize the use of nuclear weapons. When I asked Shtilerman why he would share this information with a journalist, he shrugged and said that, given his role in the missile industry, all of his secrets would come out eventually. It would be better, he said, for the public to get the dirt from him and not from Russian leaks and character assassins.

In that sense, his disclosures could give him some immunity from further scandals. But he also seems to believe that his success has made him indispensable, not only to Ukraine but also to the rest of Europe. “We have a chance right now, working together, to gain our independence from America and burn down the Russian empire,” he said. “We’re not going to miss it just because of all the crap people say about me.”

The last time we met, on a humid night at the end of May, Shtilerman had just returned to Kyiv from testing the guidance system of his Wunderwaffe, the FP-7x. A group of engineers from Fire Point had loaded the rocket into a long-haul truck and driven it down to the Black Sea coast that morning. Shtilerman had followed in a chauffeured van. In the evening, he sent me a video of the missile taking off from a dirt road surrounded by farmland, its engine leaving a trail of white smoke in the sky.

The test failed, he later told me, because Fire Point had neglected to control the work of its contractors. “Now we’re imposing those controls, and we’re installing cameras to watch what they do.” He did not seem all that disappointed. After the launch, he took off his T-shirt and went for a swim in the Black Sea before making the drive back to Kyiv. We met up that night for a walk in a city park, with Shtilerman’s bodyguards following along.

Calls to assassinate him have appeared on Russian state TV in recent months. “I sleep each night in a different place,” he said. It was close to midnight, and he claimed not to know where he would crash once we finished talking. “Wherever they take me,” he said, glancing around at the security detail, “that’s where I’ll go.”

None of the guards looked more intimidating than their charge. Tall and muscular, Shtilerman carries himself with a kind of impatient menace that makes his employees go stiff around him. Once, when I noted that his biceps must require a lot of time at the gym, he answered without hesitation: “People with a high IQ find that most things come easy. You get used to achieving your goals in no time. Exercise is the antidote. It teaches you that not everything can be achieved in a second.”

His achievements in the field of rocket science have come astonishingly fast. Fire Point emerged after the Russian invasion in 2022, when the company set out to design Ukraine’s most effective long-range attack drones. According to Shtilerman, it now churns out roughly 200 a day. Each one carries enough explosives to blast through a wall of reinforced concrete and, when launched from Ukraine, can hit any point in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

Last summer, Fire Point unveiled its first cruise missile, the Flamingo, and now produces up to three of them a day. Fired from the back of a truck, the weapon reaches roughly twice as far as its American counterpart, the Tomahawk, and carries a much larger payload. It also costs about half as much to produce, in part because Flamingos use jet engines repurposed from old Soviet airplanes. The design choice makes the missiles look strange, their rear end bulging. But Shtilerman doesn’t care about aesthetics. He uses the cheapest components available.

At one of his factories, he showed me a stack of fuselages for his drones, pointing out that the wings were filled with what looked like Styrofoam. “They aren’t made to last,” he said. “They need to fly for 15 hours. Anything beyond that is a waste of money.” In another part of the facility, the screams of industrial machinery made talking difficult, and the fumes from hot epoxy filled the air. Most missiles, like the Tomahawk, are made of aluminum alloys and other metals. Here a team of engineers used strands of carbon fiber to form the body of a rocket, which looked like a mummy being wrapped in ribbons of plastic.

[Read: The Atlantic’s interview with Volodymyr Zelensky]

Various branches of Ukraine’s armed forces have launched thousands of Fire Point drones and dozens of its missiles. After several of the most dramatic strikes—against Russian oil refineries, military airfields, weapons factories—President Volodymyr Zelensky thanked the company and its engineers. But in some cases, Shtilerman told me, the military has kept quiet about the source of its missiles, not wanting to associate itself with him or his company. Following one strike in February, he said, “We had to convince them to announce that it was Fire Point.”

A lot of the controversy surrounding Shtilerman comes down to a question of fairness: Did he achieve success through hard work and ingenuity, or did he use his connections to gain an edge? Shtilerman admitted to me that a mix of these factors had allowed his company to pull ahead.

[Read: Building tanks while Ukrainians master drones]

By Shtilerman’s account, Fire Point got off the ground with a few million dollars of his own fortune, which he earned in Russia, mostly through real-estate deals. In 2023, during the second year of the war, he bankrolled the creation of his first long-range drone. The weapon, known as the FP-1, gained attention the following spring, when it earned top marks in a competition for drone makers. Various suitors then offered to buy the company from Shtilerman, he said, including some of the country’s wealthiest businessmen. Among them was Tymur Mindich.

Mindich, an old friend of Zelensky’s, is now a wanted fugitive in Ukraine, hiding out in Israel to escape arrest on charges of large-scale corruption. His ties with the president go back decades. During Zelensky’s early career in show business, Mindich co-owned the production company that made the future president’s movies and TV shows. They remained close after Zelensky took office, in 2019, and they stayed in touch after the Russian invasion.

Shtilerman knew about their relationship; it had been widely reported in the media. In the spring of 2024, when Mindich sought to invest in Fire Point, Shtilerman asked him for a political favor. He told me that he needed the state to grant him access to blueprints for Soviet-era missile technology, which was stored in classified archives in Ukraine. “I didn’t care how this got done,” he told me. “I just needed to get it done.” (Mindich’s lawyers in Israel did not respond to emails seeking comment.)

According to Shtilerman, Mindich used his political connections to pry open those archives in 2024, making them available to a group of Ukrainian companies, Fire Point among them. The files included instructions for how to make the S-300 missile system, a centerpiece of Russia’s air defenses inherited from the Soviet Union. Those blueprints proved useful to Fire Point in learning how to clone Russia’s more advanced missile system, the S-400, which formed the basis for the FP-7x.

By the end of 2024, Shtilerman said he agreed to sell half of his company to Mindich for $100 million, at a discount of 20 percent to its estimated value at the time. Before they could finalize the sale, Shtilerman told me, a foreign bidder appeared with a more enticing offer. Edge Group, a defense conglomerate from the United Arab Emirates, wanted to buy a third of the company for $780 million. Shtilerman maintains that neither sale went through.

While the talks were under way last year, Mindich was under investigation for serious crimes. The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, a law-enforcement agency known as NABU, had bugged Mindich’s apartment in Kyiv, and detectives picked up his conversations about Fire Point. In one intercepted call that was later leaked to the press, Mindich had told the defense minister about the proposed sale of a large stake in the company. Their conversation did not identify the buyer. But Mindich talked about Fire Point as though he already controlled it and stood to profit from its sale.

Not long after that conversation, police raided Mindich’s apartment. NABU accused him of masterminding a scheme to extort millions of dollars from companies in the electricity sector. The case had nothing to do with Fire Point, but anyone associated with Mindich suddenly came under suspicion. Hours before detectives came to arrest him, on the morning of November 10, Mindich fled the country. Ukrainian journalists later tracked him down in Israel. In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda filmed on a beach in Tel Aviv, he denied all of the charges against him, and he insisted that he never owned a stake in Fire Point.

When I asked Shtilerman about this, he stuck to the same story. Nearly all of the company’s shares—97.5 percent, according to corporate records—belong to Shtilerman. But the leaked recording of Mindich’s phone call created widespread suspicions in Ukraine that he secretly owns the company, and that Shtilerman is just a front.

Despite all of the damage that Mindich’s case has done to Fire Point’s reputation, Shtilerman holds no grudge against him. “I can’t say anything bad about Mindich,” he said. “First off, he loves his mom. He’s very charming. He helped us out, all the way to hell and back, without asking anything in return. He helped Fire Point.”

Since the end of last year, Shtilerman has faced the corruption scandal head on, addressing it on numerous podcasts and TV interviews. His strategy appears to be a kind of radical transparency, revealing details about his past in Russia that other businessmen might go to great lengths to hide.

His first stint in a Moscow jail, Shtilerman told me, resulted from his involvement in one of Russia’s most notorious financial schemes. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the state privatized many of its enterprises by handing out shares to the people who worked in them. Many of these workers sold their shares for pennies to a class of savvy entrepreneurs, who thus gained ownership of entire industries on the cheap. The deals defined one of the ugliest chapters of Russia’s transition to capitalism in the 1990s. The newly minted millionaires fought one another for control of the privatized assets. Many of these battles played out in fits of gangland violence. Some businessmen used corrupt cops and judges as weapons in their corporate wars.

Shtilerman, then living in Moscow under the name Denis Danilov, had earned a small fortune in the software business, and he told me that he had used it to buy up millions of dollars’ worth of shares in a privatized oil company. In 1999, he said, a rival oligarch tried to steal those shares from him. When Shtilerman refused to hand them over, he was arrested and spent the next two years in Butyrka, a crowded pretrial detention facility near the center of Moscow. “I’ve spent so much time in smoke-filled cells that cigarettes don’t bother me anymore,” he said about this period in his life.

Upon his release, his main asset in the job market seemed to be his diploma from one of Russia’s elite technical universities. It helped him find work at a defense institute in Moscow that, according to Shtilerman, develops computer systems and communications gear for the Russian military, including Putin’s nuclear briefcase. He worked at the institute until 2008, when he resigned in protest over the Russian invasion of Georgia, he said. For about a decade afterward, he invested in real-estate deals in Moscow, amassing about 12,000 hectares of land in its suburbs and another “few thousand hectares” in the city itself, he said. That amount of property would likely be worth billions of dollars.

One of these deals, involving the purchase of land from a bankrupt chicken farm, got Shtilerman locked up again in 2018, according to Russian court documents that he shared with me. He remained behind bars for about six months before the authorities agreed to release him without charge. The following year, he moved to Ukraine, the country of his birth, and started using the name Shtilerman. (The change, he told me, reversed a decision made by his father, who tried to protect the family from anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union by using a Russian-sounding surname, Danilov, rather than their Jewish name.)

Once settled in Kyiv, “I didn’t get involved in business,” Shtilerman said. “So that I would not have to pay bribes and deal with our local beau monde.” He said that his ex-wife and their two children remained in Moscow while he focused on passion projects and philanthropy in Ukraine. In 2021, he worked with a young architect named Iryna Terekh on a plan to develop and beautify public spaces in Kyiv. When the Russian invasion started the following year, the two of them became co-founders of Fire Point, and Terekh served first as the company’s chief technology officer and later became its CEO.

Shtilerman ran the operation from behind the scenes. To protect his ex-wife and children in Russia, he said, he hid his ownership during the first three years of the company’s existence. Journalists dug up his links to Fire Point only last summer. The Kyiv Independent reported in August that anti-corruption investigators in Ukraine were looking into whether Mindich owned the company, and it identified Shtilerman as an early investor in Fire Point.

[Read: What’s eating ‘Putin’s brain’? ]

The report forced him out of the shadows. After its publication, he rushed to evacuate his family from Moscow. Shtilerman feared that his ex-wife would be arrested and their kids placed in an orphanage if the Russian authorities discovered their ties to one of Ukraine’s top arms manufacturers. “I moved them elsewhere,” he said. “Bought them a house.”

Based on the offer from the United Arab Emirates, the value of Fire Point could be well over $2 billion. But Shtilerman declined to sell the stake, he told me, in part because of Project Freyja: He wagered that his collaboration with the Europeans could soon make his company even more valuable. No other arms manufacturer in Ukraine, let alone a start-up, has had nearly the same success. Some of Fire Point’s competitors in the defense sector have complained that through his political connections, Shtilerman had an unfair advantage.

“The stratospheric growth of Fire Point has two key reasons: the lobbying of senior officials who generously stuffed money into an unknown start-up, and the blatantly high prices that gave the company’s owners exorbitant profits,” Yuri Kasyanov, the developer of a rival drone, wrote in column published in May.

Shtilerman dismisses such attacks as bellyaching. His most basic long-range drone, the FP-1, costs the military about $55,000, within the same price range as its Russian counterpart. In a letter to Fire Point in May, NABU said the company’s owners are not suspects in any of the agency’s investigations. But, as part of a broader probe of defense contracts, the pricing of some of its drones remains under review, according to the letter.

Even amid the scrutiny, the Defense Ministry continues to do business with Fire Point. So do Ukraine’s European allies. In March, the Danish government partnered with Fire Point on the construction of a factory to make fuel for its missiles. To clear the way for another collaboration with the company last year, Denmark reportedly bypassed more than 20 of its own laws and regulations. Hensoldt, a major defense firm in Germany, announced a project with Fire Point last month to develop the antiballistic-missile system. On Monday, France agreed to license Ukraine to produce French-designed cruise missiles and air-defense interceptors as part of the coalition to develop a joint missile shield.

Last week, at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, Trump made a similar pledge. He told Zelensky that the U.S. would grant a license for Ukraine to produce Patriot interceptors, one of the most effective weapons in the world for shooting down ballistic missiles. The day of that announcement, Shtilerman told me that Fire Point would be ready to make Patriots in Ukraine. But the challenge could take years, and it will not distract him from working with the Europeans on a missile shield free of American components. “The principle is simple,” he told me. “Let’s make a missile shield that no one can shut off, that can make us independent and secure.” That is to say: secure from Russia, and independent of the United States.

The Odyssey Was Never About the Gods

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

If you lived in the Bronze Age and were sailing the wine-dark sea, you’d soon understand the need for gods. You don’t know about low-pressure systems or atmospheric circulation, about ocean currents or the contours of the seafloor. You know only that the sky has darkened, the wind has shifted, and the waters have begun to rise. The sudden appearance of thunder, lightning, and towering waves crashing against the hull demand an explanation: gods. Zeus and Poseidon are at it again—one hurling thunderbolts, the other whipping the sea into a frenzy. Or perhaps Athena has withdrawn her protection. You offered sacrifice before setting sail. Maybe one bull wasn’t enough?

The randomness and unpredictability of existence, the mindless violence of it, necessitated myth. This early religion was a kind of technology, an attempt to make order out of chaos.

There are so many reasons why the stories of ancient Greece endure, why they are some of the first narratives I remember from elementary school, why my daughter’s graphic-novel version of The Odyssey is so tattered. Yes, these stories have monsters in them, heroic adventures, and black-and-white morality tales. But they also plunge deep into a primordial place: into our essential helplessness, and the desire to conquer it with meaning.

The Odyssey is the greatest example of this in the Western canon; it is a story about a man whose heroic deed is survival—who simply wants to set right what has been upended. Odysseus longs to regain his place as a father and husband and leader. He wants to go home. His son, Telemachus, wants to correct the wrong that is occurring in Ithaca, where suitors have violated the codes of hospitality and are aggressively vying for his mother’s hand. Penelope, the queen, wants to return to a time of stability, when Odysseus ruled and her place was secure, and when everyone knew what was expected of them. “The worst thing humans suffer is homelessness,” Odyssesus says, and I don’t think he’s referring just to being lost at sea. (I’m quoting here and elsewhere from Emily Wilson’s translation.)

The Odyssey as a human-scaled story is clearly what the director, Christopher Nolan, had in mind for his new blockbuster version. In one interview about the movie, describing the process of beginning to write the script, he said that he’d put the poem away and written down just what he remembered of it, and what had come out was something “earthy and intimate and relevant and accessible.” This is how I’d describe the film. What stuck in his memory were the human characters and their personal struggles, and what he forgot were the gods.

[Read: An Odyssey deserving of the biggest screen possible]

For all the culture-war debates about the liberties Nolan took in his casting, his most radical deviation from the text has to do with agency and who has it. In the poem, the gods are forever manipulating the story. Athena is like Odysseus’s overbearing coach, offering hints about what’s going to happen in the future, egging him on, and occasionally cloaking him in disguises. Poseidon, upset that Odysseus blinded his son, the Cyclops Polyphemus, decides to make his return home difficult and long and wet. The gods do occasionally point out that humans have more choice than they think they have. “This is absurd, that mortals blame the gods!” Zeus kvetches. “They say we cause their suffering, but they themselves increase it by folly.” This may be true, but it is also true that the epic can sometimes resemble a game of foosball between Athena and Poseidon.

How does personal responsibility enter into this world of unfathomable dangers? On one level, this story—and every myth—is about the intervention of the gods in human affairs. But closer to the ground, we can understand that those gods represent all of the many forces outside our control, which means we still have some autonomy. You have to make moral choices despite all of the external pressures weighing down on you (call them gods, if you will). Odysseus is told by the sorceress Circe that he will have to sail through narrow straits that will force an impossible choice on him: on one side Scylla, a six-headed monster who will grab six of his men for lunch, and on the other Charybdis, a colossal whirlpool that might destroy his entire ship. He has to decide. And he chooses to sacrifice six men rather than risk losing them all.

In the film—which stars a steely-faced Matt Damon as Odysseus (one part Jason Bourne, one part Mark Watney from The Martian)—this moment is presented as something like the trolley problem in moral philosophy: Can the hero curb his instinct to be heroic and brave the whirlpool, and instead make a decision that will save the greatest number of people?

Nolan’s version of The Odyssey places significant weight on these questions, especially on what we do to maintain order and whether we act graciously toward one another—an ethic of hospitality referred to as Zeus’s law. In what I found to be the most striking sequence of the film, Odysseus, disguised as a beggar, is speaking with Penelope (played by Anne Hathaway) about the Trojan War and the disruptive technology he came up with to break the siege: the Trojan horse. In the classic tradition, this bit of strategic genius is the ultimate proof of Odysseus’s mētis, or cunning intelligence. But here, he talks about it with remorse. He played a trick on the Trojans by exploiting the culture of gift-giving. We’ve already seen the sacking of Troy in a heroic flashback, staged as a crafty trick, but now we revisit it—as a war crime.

Odysseus tells Penelope that, once the Achaeans finally breached the walls, he witnessed “10 years of rage” unleashed; under the glow of burning houses, we see women being dragged away to be raped, looting and wanton murder everywhere. Damon as Odysseus looks stunned as he sees the consequences of what he has wrought. To draw a parallel from the Nolan canon, he is J. Robert Oppenheimer reckoning with the unintended effects, physical and moral, of the weapon he has created. Odysseus even implies that his delay in getting home might have as much to do with a guilty conscience as with intervening gods or the enchanting sorceress named Calypso.

[Read: The absurd misunderstanding fueling the debate over The Odyssey]

In another famous episode, when Circe (Samantha Morton) turns Odysseus’s men into pigs, she explains her spell-casting by describing the men’s pillaging and abuses in war as piglike. She is giving them back their real identities, she says, and judging their character in ways that simply wouldn’t make sense if their fate were out of their own hands.

Where are the gods in all of this? They appear in the film the way they would appear to humans: through thunder and lightning, through the elation of triumph and the experience of pain and longing. Among the major gods, only Athena is personified (by an ethereal Zendaya), but she is not the warrior goddess of the poem. She is more like a projection of Odysseus’s own conscience, materializing the way an angel might land on one’s shoulder. She represents his desire for goodness, home, and order. (In the scenes of Troy’s sacking, we return to a repeated image of Athena’s statue being beheaded, the ultimate violation.) This is all very far from the dominant film depiction of Greek mythology that I remember from my own childhood, 1981’s Clash of the Titans, in which the gods hang out together in togas on Mount Olympus, with Laurence Olivier as Zeus dictating much of the action.

Nolan’s film has already been knocked by some critics for its psychologically modern portrayal of Odysseus as a man plagued by PTSD and haunted by that horse. And his version is undeniably meant to speak to us now as well as to avoid some serious turnoffs, such as Odysseus’s boasts about looting and taking slaves. Nolan’s anti-war message can also occasionally come off as anachronistic, as when Odysseus tells Penelope that the Trojan War is not really about retrieving Helen but actually about Agamemnon’s efforts to secure trade routes—I doubt I’m the only one who heard an echo of the troubles over the Strait of Hormuz.

And yet, for all that makes this a 21st-century Odyssey, Nolan has captured something essential about why the story still matters and always has. The gods were there only as a way for people to make sense of the senseless. Why does a child die? What causes natural disasters? Who brings on the cycles of violence that each side knows will lead only to more death and destruction? We can imagine that we have more sophisticated explanations for most of what affects our lives than the ancient Greeks did. But this is the false comfort we find in science; there is still so much outside of our power. The best we can do is what Odysseus does—try to keep it together, make decent choices, value our relationships to one another. Even with all of the gods and monsters, this is still just a story about whether one man will get to go home to his wife and son. If this means something after thousands of years, maybe that’s because the desire for solid ground in a baffling and chaotic world is unchanging.

Trump Has Only Terrible Choices With Iran

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Here we are again: Iran is shooting at traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, Donald Trump is ordering retaliatory strikes, and both sides have declared the latest cease-fire agreement “over” or “dead.” That Iran reportedly plotted to kill Trump—possibly in the new 747 given to him by the Qatari royal family—surely did not help. Now Trump is reimposing the American naval blockade. He also threatened to institute a 20 percent toll on all goods transiting the strait, to defray “any and all costs necessary to do the job of providing safety and security to this very volatile section of the World”—then promptly backed off of that.

Unfortunately, the United States has precious few options left for breaking the deadlock over the strait. And those it does have are neither appealing nor likely to succeed.

The June memorandum of understanding that paused the fighting between Iran and the U.S. was ambiguously worded. Each side chose the interpretation that would best support its claim to control the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian leadership reportedly considers command of the strait a strategic necessity; one official described it as “more important than dozens of atomic bombs.” The U.S. has made clear that it cannot accept a scenario wherein Iran retains long-term control. Hence, the two countries are at an impasse.

The Iranians likely believe that their best option is to stay the course and stick to their maximalist demands. They don’t need to damage many ships to effectively shut down the strait; the threat of attack is enough to persuade most ship owners not to attempt to transit, even if insurance is available. This means that Iran needs very few missiles, drones, or mines to close the strait down. And it can withstand the U.S. blockade: Its economy appears reasonably stable, as it has continued exporting oil sufficient to meet its needs throughout the war. It also has a captive population that has grown used to sanctions and economic pain.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

The U.S. is effectively left with four options. Each of them is terrible in its own way. It can stay the current course. It can make life in Iran impossible. It can declare victory and go home. Or it can launch a ground invasion.

Staying the course means continuing to rely on air strikes against Iran’s military, leadership, and infrastructure as a punitive tool to obtain concessions at the bargaining table. The administration has pursued this strategy for a few months now, and Iranian demands have not budged. A similar approach led to the incremental escalation of the American bombing campaign in Vietnam, which likewise failed to achieve its objective.

It may also mean continuing to expend munitions in the hope of completely eliminating Iran’s capacity to strike shipping targets. This is a Sisyphean task. Worse, it is draining U.S. stockpiles and leaving America ill-prepared for another conflict. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has concluded that replacing some of the most crucial weapons expended in this war will take at least three years of production.

The second option is to ramp up the bombing campaign to such an extent that life in Iran becomes unlivable. The U.S. took this approach to Japan at the end of World War II, through both bombing and a naval blockade. Millions of Japanese people would have died of starvation if the war continued into 1946. Concerted strikes on Iranian electrical and water infrastructure, such as dams and desalination plants, could create a similar humanitarian catastrophe.

Trump has previously threatened to bomb Iranian electrical and bridge infrastructure if Tehran did not agree to terms. This sort of ultimatum places Washington in an escalation trap. If attacks on roads and electrical infrastructure don’t bring Iran to its knees, water and oil likely will be the next targets.

Iran’s leaders understand that water is one of their country’s greatest vulnerabilities. They have made clear that if the U.S. strikes the infrastructure needed to keep their people alive, they will retaliate in kind against the Gulf States. The U.S. would struggle to defend them against that sort of attack.

Of the four options available to the U.S., targeting electrical and water infrastructure is the one that cuts most cleanly through the Gordian knot of the Iranian conflict, potentially providing a decisive win at the lowest cost to the U.S. Given that Trump seems to believe that Iran’s leadership tried to have him killed, and that he has threatened to “decimate and destroy” Iran if it tries again, this possibility may be on the table.

But such actions would lead to mass death and a flood of refugees, and they would turn the world against the United States. Under previous administrations, U.S. military leadership and legal experts could be trusted to balk at such a monstrous option. However, the Trump administration has purged military leadership of those it considers “woke,” including many of the senior lawyers who might previously have prohibited such war crimes.

[Read: Who really controls the Strait of Hormuz?]

Another option is for Trump to simply give in to Iran’s demands, declare that he has solved the problem and gotten the best deal imaginable, and walk away. The memorandum of understanding appeared to enact this option. But Iran cleaved to a maximalist interpretation of that agreement, continued to strike shipping, and allegedly plotted to assassinate Trump. A way back to another memorandum of understanding is hard to see at this point, but the administration could decide that this is the least damaging option and hope to sell it as a win.

Finally, the U.S. could choose to put troops on the ground. However, it lacks the manpower and logistical support to mount a land campaign into Iran. Even seizing tiny Kharg Island would be an exceptionally risky move that might not have the intended effect if it succeeded. As the defending nation, Iran has the “home court” advantage.

The U.S. has so far avoided putting boots on the ground except to rescue downed pilots. But at the outset of the war, Trump told the New York Post, “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground—like every president says, ‘There will be no boots on the ground.’ I don’t say it.” He added, “I say ‘probably don’t need them,’ [or] ‘if they were necessary.’” The option, however unlikely, can’t be categorically ruled out.

The U.S. and Iran are locked in a stalemate where neither can neutralize the other’s advantages, nor forcibly compel the other to accept unfavorable peace terms. We have seen a similar dynamic playing out in Ukraine. The U.S. does not have the munitions to continue the current bombing campaign indefinitely. The Trump administration appears to face an unpalatable choice between accepting Iranian hegemony over the strait—or initiating cycles of escalation that cannot end well.

A Perfectly Crude Solution to America’s Housing Shortage

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Just about every effort to solve America’s housing shortage runs into the iron law of NIMBY: “not in my backyard.” Whenever a development is proposed in a place where people already live, existing residents erupt in opposition, claiming the new homes will alter “neighborhood character,” increase traffic, and hurt property values. Those who would benefit the most from new housing, meanwhile, don’t yet live in the community and thus have no say in the political process. This creates an asymmetry that’s hard to overcome. Even reforms passed at the state level to override local building restrictions keep failing, because NIMBYs find clever ways to work around them.

But a new approach might finally offer a way out of the impasse: If you can’t beat the NIMBYs, pay them.

In recent months, several Democratic Party–aligned think tanks have released proposals that share the same basic structure: If a local community approves enough new homes for construction, then each resident of that community receives a check from the federal government worth thousands of dollars. The theory is that the allure of a cash payment would soften the position of the most ardent NIMBYs, while inspiring residents who otherwise might not care one way or the other to become advocates for new development. This would give political cover for local officials to propose new pro-housing reforms, while forcing anti-development politicians to explain to residents why they shouldn’t get cash payments. “The idea is to shake up the local political economy,” Chad Maisel, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who has co-authored multiple proposals on this subject, told me. “You are simultaneously trying to weaken some very entrenched interests while creating a new political constituency that doesn’t currently exist.”

[Henry Grabar: High-end construction really does help everyone]

Paying the NIMBYs has never been tried, so no one can say for sure that it would work. But a forthcoming paper by the political scientist Michael Hankinson and the economists Edward Glaeser, Joseph Gyourko, and Morris Davis provides some reason to think that it could. The team conducted a survey in which they asked about 1,700 residents of expensive areas, including New York City, Los Angeles, and the Philadelphia suburbs, to consider a series of hypothetical proposals to build housing in their neighborhood. Alongside each proposal, the respondents were offered (again, hypothetically) various amounts of cash, from $250 to $9,000, and then asked whether they would vote yes or no on approving the project. By aggregating those answers, the researchers were able to estimate the “willingness to accept” price: the amount of money needed to persuade the median voter in a community to shift from opposing a project to supporting it.

The results, which the researchers shared with me, suggest that almost everyone has a price. More than 80 percent of the respondents accepted at least one of the proposals they were offered. But the amount of money they needed to be offered ultimately depended on the density of the neighborhood they lived in. Participants who lived in the most densely populated places (think downtowns full of apartments and high-rises) generally required, at most, only a few hundred dollars to support new development; many were willing to approve housing even with no payment attached. The price went up to the low thousands for moderately dense places (urban neighborhoods with a mix of single-family homes, townhouses, and small apartment buildings) and reached well above $5,000 for the most of the places with low density (suburbs full of detached single-family homes). People in wealthier places also required higher payments than those in poorer places, although the difference was not nearly as stark as the one based on density.

“It makes sense if you just think about it intuitively,” Michael Hankinson, a political scientist at George Washington University who co-authored the paper, told me. “Suburbanites surrounded by nothing but single-family homes are probably going to be more sensitive to new development than an urbanite who already lives near lots of high-rises.” In low-density suburbs where the average income is above $150,000, not even the maximum amount the researchers offered, $9,000, was enough to persuade the median resident to support a new project. (Hankinson cautioned that though these figures are directionally correct, the exact dollar amounts are still preliminary, as he and his co-authors have not yet finalized and published their analysis.)

The upshot is that the same policy will have very different results depending on where it’s implemented. For instance, a proposal from the Center for American Progress would offer a flat $1,000 to residents of places that hit certain housing-production targets. Only in dense urban areas would that likely be enough to tip the scales. Another version, from the Searchlight Institute, would reward residents with a check equivalent to the average annual rent increase in their city the year prior. For Los Angeles in 2025, for example, that would have been about $3,900. Such amounts might not move the needle in the wealthiest suburbs, but they could inspire housing production in a range of places beyond just urban cores. “The message to voters is: Support new housing and we’ll essentially freeze your rent,” Aaron Shroyer, one of the co-authors of the Searchlight proposal, told me. “I think something like that is the best chance we have at getting more communities to a ‘yes’ on new development.”

A second implication of the research is that the type of project being proposed matters a lot. The relatively low dollar amounts cited above represent the payment required for residents to accept a market-rate development at the edge of their existing neighborhood built at a similar scale to the homes around it. When the new project was instead proposed on a plot of land directly next to a respondent’s current home, the necessary payment doubled. When the project was considerably more dense than the surrounding buildings—like a row of townhouses in a single-family neighborhood—it quadrupled. If residents were told that the new development would be reserved exclusively for low-income residents, they demanded five times more money. Paying the NIMBYs, in other words, might require working with people’s existing aesthetic and spatial preferences, not trying to overcome them. “So much of NIMBYism is the product of a deep status-quo bias,” Will Poff-Webster, the director of infrastructure policy at the Institute for Progress, a think tank, told me. “That’s a really hard thing to change, no matter how much money you throw at the problem.”

[Rogé Karma: The whole country is starting to look like California]

Even with these caveats, paying the NIMBYs still seems like a better strategy than the currently favored policy approach, which is to offer financial incentives to local governments that approve new housing. The bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act that recently became law, for instance, offers federal funding to cities that meet certain housing-production targets, which they can then use to pay for things such as parks, road improvements, and new infrastructure. That is better than nothing, but the evidence suggests that it is far less effective at getting residents to support new housing. Hankinson and his co-authors found that when the compensation package was offered to residents in the form of a parks-and-streets fund, they required 10 times the amount of money they would have required if offered cash.

For more than a decade, housing advocates have done everything in their power to combat what they see as the selfishness of local NIMBYs. They have tried to convince local homeowners of the economic benefits of new housing. They have filled town-hall meetings with YIMBY activists who support development. They have lobbied for state-level laws that override local authority altogether. None of it has made a significant dent in the housing shortage. Perhaps it’s time to stop fighting the NIMBYs and instead make housing development worth their while.

When Did Sports Get So Loud?

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

On May 26, the New York Mets were doing terrible (generally) and really terrible (acutely). They were at the bottom of their division and down six runs to zero against the Cincinnati Reds, a team whose payroll and—if I may—swag levels were dwarfed by the Mets’. The pitcher for the Mets had recently been booed off the mound by his own fans. Things were, by any objective measure, not going super well at Citi Field. But that night, like every other night this season, the stadium looked, sounded, and felt like a European nightclub on New Year’s Eve: flashing lights; booming music; an in-game announcer taking to a 17,400-square-foot screen and imploring fans to make some noise, with fans happily obliging. If you were a time traveler or even just someone who hadn’t been to a game in a few years, you would have been very, very confused.

I am 38, which means I’m old enough to remember when live baseball was largely devoid of artificial sound. This was when you could hear an entire stadium go silent for a particularly high-stakes at-bat, when big crews of in-game producers did not take any spare moment as a chance to play a pop song or advertise some inscrutable financial-services company, when stadium screens displayed the score and not a series of vaguely baseball-related TikToks. These days, baseball is wall-to-wall stimulation, from before the game starts until well after it ends. A few years ago, about 50 percent of the empty air at the Rogers Centre, where the Toronto Blue Jays play, was occupied by music cues and other sound; now that figure is closer to 95 percent. The Yankees play a sound effect from Star Wars every time the strike count reaches two, and they have since 2021—four years before they allowed their players to have facial hair. Thirty years ago, the walk-up song was a new phenomenon, and it was played only at the beginning of every at-bat; now many stadiums pipe in music between every pitch.

In this way, baseball is explicitly following other sports, which were earlier to invest in state-of-the-art multifactor sound systems, huge screens, and sophisticated lighting schemas. (“It’s about time baseball caught up with the NBA,” Aaron Boone, the manager of the Yankees, recently told a reporter who asked about being “suddenly deluged” by noise at games.) The previous time the New York Knicks won an NBA Final, in 1973, in-game sound was basically unheard-of in basketball—too distracting for players and fans. Now multimillion-dollar speakers blast music virtually every minute, and spectators wear ear protection as though they’re at a concert, which they effectively are. Meanwhile, SoFi Stadium, where the Los Angeles Rams and Chargers play, is watched over by the Infinity Screen, a rubber band–shaped video monitor that weighs well over 1,000 tons and is in fact bigger than the football field it hangs over. Many stadiums now give away sensory kits (headphones, fidget spinners) just so neurodivergent fans can survive the game. Attending a sports game is twice as expensive as it was a quarter-century ago, but at least there’s no arguing that you’re not getting something for the money.

Sports have always been entertainment, fundamentally. But over the past few decades, new technology has enabled more constant stimulation, and the new economics of sports management have encouraged it. Many organizations are focusing not on season-ticket-holding die-hards but on more casual fans who want a big night out, are willing to pay for it, and may need to be guided through a game with aural or visual cues about how to feel at any given moment. Teams have amassed big data on their fans and developed sophisticated market-segmentation strategies: Moms who spend on food, say, might lead stadiums to add more vendors to attract them. Stadiums and arenas are looking more like theme parks. Mascots, once an afterthought, are celebrities—Gritty, the beguiling ogre that represents Philadelphia’s hockey team, the Flyers, has significantly more Instagram followers than any of the team’s players.

Even the food is weirder, more outrageous, more photogenic. A vendor at Citi Field sells a novelty egg roll filled with local delicacies from every visiting team: hotdish for the Minnesota Twins; Cuban sandwich for the Miami Marlins; clam chowder, unfortunately, for the Boston Red Sox. The Indiana Pacers and its affiliated WNBA team, the Fever, have also experimented with “unique culinary items,” Joey Graziano, the teams’ chief commercial officer, told me, “so that you can have that Instagrammable photo with that incredible piece of cake shake that you want all of your fans to be able to see that you acquired only at a Fever game.” Right!

Any given team is competing for attention with other teams, sure—but really, it’s competing with concerts, and restaurants, and social media, and Netflix. Everything is opportunity cost, and we have so many more opportunities. Graziano told me that the coronavirus pandemic taught stadiums that people want to do less—“but what they want to do, they want to do with more intensity,” he said. “You could really argue that it’s a completely irrational decision to ever get off your couch.”

Intensity: Last year, when Russell Kovshoff started working for the Whitecaps, Vancouver’s major-league soccer team, production was “very minimal,” he told me. By the time he’d remade the team’s programming, a year later, he had introduced flags, pyrotechnics, drag queens, a 50-person dance crew, a 100-person choir. His goal, he said, was to take soccer, a centuries-old sport with strict rules about in-game noise, and find ways to “fill it with entertainment.”

In 1971, the great baseball writer Roger Angell observed that “more and more, each sport resembles all sports; the flavor, the special joys of place and season, the unique displays of courage and strength and style that once isolated each game and fixed it in our affections have disappeared somewhere in the noise and crush.” He was lamenting sports’ televised age, which was still relatively new and which he believed had helped usher in an era of “excessive excessiveness,” one that threatened to “lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention.”

[Read: Goodbye, Coliseum]

Angell believed that baseball would survive all of this, mostly because baseball was a little boring—inherently slow; immune to spectacle; “rustic, unviolent, and introspective”; the only of the major team sports whose events were unhurried by any external clock.

Baseball people like baseball because it is baseball. We like that it is specific, and we like that it rewards noticing. In San Francisco, you can hear the seagulls, and in good seats at any stadium, you can hear the thump of a fastball as it hits leather, if you listen closely enough and no one is playing a DJ Khaled song.

A few years ago, Louisville’s minor-league baseball team, the Bats, instituted a new themed night: “No ad reads, videos or on-field promotions, just baseball in its purest form.”

Vincent Zielen, the Bats’ director of marketing, has been working in baseball for a decade, and he told me that Nothing Night was a response to something he’d been noticing more and more over the past few years. “There’s definitely a push for more entertainment, constant engagement,” he said. Nothing Night is both a reaction to the trend and an example of it—just another themed night, one where the theme is “baseball.” Zielen’s job is to do whatever it takes to bring in new fans, especially young ones. The sport “needed to get more energetic, more youthful,” Zielen said. “And with today’s generation, the way to do that is with constant engagement. The Savannah Bananas have kind of proven that.”

There it is. Zielen wasn’t the only person to mention the Bananas, the barnstorming exhibition team whose slogan is “We Make Baseball Fun!” and that is often described as baseball’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters. Bananas players do backflips, perform skits, and dance on the field. (Not at all surprisingly, many are also TikTok celebrities—similar skill set.) Last season, the Bananas sold 2.2 million tickets, which would have made them the 20th-most-popular major-league baseball team if they were a major-league baseball team, which they absolutely are not. Not that that seems to matter much: “All these kids are now expecting that Savannah Bananas–type engagement,” Zielen said.

And so the question that he and his team are trying to answer is: “How do we create that vibe from the onset, when folks get out of their car in the parking lot to when they leave? We don’t want it to be dull at any point.”

Dullness is the essence of baseball, but it may also be the enemy of people actually watching baseball. From 2007 to 2022, annual game attendance dropped nearly 20 percent. In 2023, Major League Baseball introduced a raft of changes designed to make the game faster, zippier, more lucrative, more exciting, more broadly appealing. Most notably, the league added, for the first time in history, a clock.

Angell, the baseball writer, had died the year prior; we will never know what he would have made of this change to the game’s basic nature. But plenty of baseball people were grumpy about it. (The only thing baseball people love more than being slightly bored is being grumpy about baseball.) They are grumpy about the Bananas too, and about the noise. But baseball attendance has been shooting up. In 2024, I spent a lot of time complaining about how irritating it was to be at a game these days, but I also did something that I previously had not thought was possible: I watched my toddler sit through an entire nine innings, utterly delighted by all there was to hear and see.

The Bats hosted their first Nothing Night of the season on May 15. It featured no flashing lights, no scoreboard animations, no ads, no music other than that from an organ. The idea went properly viral. But, Zielen said, “we didn’t get the butts in seats that we wanted”—the weather wasn’t great.

The next night was Star Wars night. Zielen’s team rigged up special sound effects, dressed the players in themed jerseys, gave away 2,000 “space swords,” and had 30 people walking around the stadium dressed as various characters, taking selfies. There was a costume contest between innings, a drone show afterward, and, as Zielen put it, “that constant engagement.” The stadium was full.

Trump Still Hasn’t Found What He’s Looking For

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Since President Trump returned to office a year and a half ago, he has dispatched investigators and analysts from across the U.S. intelligence community to search for evidence of foreign interference in an election that he lost but claims he won. In an address from the White House tonight, the president sought to reveal proof for his baseless assertions of a 2020 vote marred by fraud. But once again, he came up empty.

The president spoke for nearly half an hour, tendentiously connecting reports of stolen voter records to software vulnerabilities in voting machines to fake voter-registration drives. But he never claimed that a foreign power had actually changed any votes, and all signs indicate that it didn’t happen. Earlier in the day, a White House official told us that after an exhaustive examination of “millions” of documents that had been collected, a team of investigators had found no evidence to support such claims.

Former intelligence officials expressed bewilderment at the president’s characterizations of what’s in those documents. “I have never seen raw, unverified reporting pushed out this way: harvested for the pieces that fit, fashioned into a weapon against American elections,” Julia Curlee, a former intelligence officer who was among those who provided Trump’s daily briefing in his first term, told us.

Toward the end of a speech laden with more innuendo than fact, Trump insisted, “We can never watch a stolen election again.” But he announced no steps that his administration would take to prevent further meddling, other than sharing more information with state governments, something that the United States used to do routinely before Trump gutted election-security initiatives at the start of his second term. Trump also announced no plans to try to commandeer the authority to run elections that are, under the Constitution, overseen by the states. Many of the election deniers who have fueled Trump’s false claims had hoped he would declare a national emergency to somehow seize control.

Trump made clear that he believes the U.S. voting system is insecure. The president’s core claim rests on what he says is newly revealed reporting by U.S. intelligence agencies, which have found that China has obtained more than 200 million Americans’ voter records in 18 states. Those are startling numbers. But they are hardly news.

During Trump’s first term, U.S. intelligence analysts reported that Chinese intelligence had analyzed “election voter registration data ” from multiple states. Former U.S. officials told us that they were aware that China was stealing or otherwise acquiring voter-registration data, which might include a person’s name, address, and political party. Those kinds of data are often publicly available online.

China’s harvesting of voter-registration information is not news. It was spelled out in an intelligence assessment of the 2020 election and presented to Trump and his senior advisers, then declassified and released publicly after he left office.

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

That assessment was unequivocal on the consequences of foreign interventions, including by Russia and Iran: “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to interfere in the 2020 US elections by altering any technical aspect of the voting process, including voter registration, ballot casting, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

This is not to say that China’s harvesting of American voter data is benign. As U.S. officials reported in 2020, it was part of an effort by China to “predict electoral outcomes and to inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China under either election outcome.” U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence officials and cybersecurity experts have acknowledged for years that China has pursued aggressive and wide-ranging efforts over several decades to collect personally identifying information and other data about American citizens. The goal, officials say, is to strengthen China’s geopolitical position by collecting as much data as possible that can be used for espionage purposes. Current and former officials have spoken openly about their assessments that the Chinese government has obtained data on almost every American. But that does not mean the data were used to subvert the election.

It was only after he lost that Trump appeared to have become convinced that the 2020 election was insecure. In February 2020, for instance, senior intelligence officials briefed him on efforts to protect elections from foreign interference and ensure that voting machines were trustworthy. According to a person familiar with that briefing, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share a private interaction, the president was so pleased that he wanted to call a press conference and tell the American people that their elections would be secure. The event never took place. In his White House address tonight, Trump adopted a mocking tone as he parroted what officials had told him and have said publicly—that the 2020 election was well protected.

[Read: Trump is getting tired of losing election cases]

Former officials also told us that if Trump was not told every detail about stolen voter rolls, that was because such activity was just one component of China’s broader efforts to influence politics in the United States. Trump now appears to claim that because he wasn’t informed of every piece of intelligence, biased officials were trying to hide the truth from him. But it’s routine practice to inform the president of the top-level findings of intelligence analysis and spare him many of the details.

Some of what Trump claimed was at odds with the documents that he had declassified. He said that U.S. intelligence uncovered a plot “to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela” and had conspired “to digitally rig their own country’s elections in 2020.” But the declassified CIA report he referenced, dated June 29, 2026, said that while Maduro’s regime did develop techniques to electronically manipulate vote totals, U.S. intelligence “did not definitively confirm that large-scale electronic fraud was successfully executed in specific Venezuelan elections.”

In fact, the CIA cited a redacted source who “judged the regime did not need to resort to gross fraud to win the December 2020 National Assembly elections, given that virtually the entire opposition boycotted and the regime had already co-opted opposition party leadership.”

Trump’s history of false election-related statements prompted ABC and NBC to decide not to broadcast his speech live, despite the White House’s requests to do so. The president suggested that that editorial choice amounted to a crime by the broadcasters. “Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses,” he said. “All we want is honesty in our elections and honesty in reporting.”

In the lead-up to Trump’s remarks, his online allies had primed their audiences for seismic news, setting expectations that he would fundamentally upend the way elections are conducted. Mike Lindell, the pillow-company executive who has long espoused election falsehoods, told us this week that he expected Trump to announce evidence of foreign manipulation of election equipment used to run American elections. “The voting-machine world is crumbling,” he said. “Won’t that be something? Are you going to write a big article that ‘Mike Lindell Was Right?’”

[Read: MAGA thinks Maduro will prove Trump won in 2020]

Seth Keshel, a former Army intelligence captain, wrote on social media that “all hell is going to break loose” after Trump’s remarks, which he hoped would create pressure for Congress to pass Trump’s long-touted SAVE America Act. The bill, among other things, would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and photo identification when casting their ballot. Trump called on lawmakers tonight to pass it—saying, “the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat”—though the prospects of success appear dim. Election experts say the bill will make it harder for people to vote and do little to curb fraudulent ballots that they say are already extremely rare.

Cisco Aguilar, Nevada’s secretary of state and the chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, summed up his reaction to the president’s remarks in four words: “That was some bullshit.”

The reception around Trump was markedly different. After he finished his speech, those in attendance—which included senior members of his administration and the intelligence community—burst into applause.

Trump Just Did More Damage to American Elections Than China

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

President Trump addressed the American people tonight and told them that their elections are at the mercy of foreign actors—especially China. He called the current situation a “crisis” and vowed to prevent any future elections from being “stolen.” He directed the public to a website where people can peruse documents that he says prove not only that bad actors have influenced U.S. elections, but that all of this was kept from him by “deep state” malefactors during his first term.

Foreign powers do, in fact, try to influence American elections, but that was about all that the president—who seems shocked that other nations have preferences about who wins elected office in the United States—got right. The rest was a mishmash: Much of the previously classified material that Trump just splattered on the internet does not support his accusations, and in some cases, these declassified documents actually undermine and refute his charges.

Trump’s speech tonight rested on a few solid facts submerged in wild, and even somewhat paranoid, extrapolations. It’s true that bad actors have accessed basic data about the names and addresses of voters in several states. It’s also true that China has some pretty strong views about Trump and probably didn’t want him to be reelected in 2020. (The Chinese wanted him out because, Trump said, “I was wise to them,” which does not explain how he was nonetheless hoodwinked.)

From there, however, we slip the surly bonds of Earth and head into the dark and cold of the space of conspiracy theories. Trump strongly implied that in 2018, China was on the attack and trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election, and that American intelligence operatives plotted to keep that from him while he was in the Oval Office. He said that attempts to rectify all of this have fallen “catastrophically short” but that he will take “swift” action in the coming days.

The documents he offered tonight, though, tell a different story—so different that they raise the question of whether Trump, or anyone else in the White House, actually read them.

For example, one of the memos from the National Intelligence Council (the analytical group within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence) said in 2020 that the group in charge of cyberissues and threats to U.S. elections “assesses that Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the President’s reelection chances by denigrating him and shaping voter perceptions.”

That sounds pretty bad. Except that (as often happens in the intelligence community) this group was representing a minority view, as it says in the very next sentence: “Their assessment differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.”

So, which is it? The IC (shorthand for intelligence community) seems to have reached a pretty firm judgment in these documents: “The IC,” one of the memos says (with some passages redacted),

has seen no evidence that Beijing is engaged in an effort to influence the outcome of the presidential election, nor has it observed activity that it assesses is likely the result of such an effort by Beijing. While we have seen Beijing develop other options that could be used to influence the election, we have not seen these capabilities deployed.

Note that what these documents discuss are influence operations—propaganda, proxies who speak for foreign interests, fake stories, and so on—rather than interference, which would involve actual manipulation of data or sabotaging of electoral infrastructure. These classified revelations, despite Trump’s assertions, show that the intelligence community didn’t even agree that China was fully engaged even in these more limited influence operations.

One document says, with more firmness, that the Chinese were attempting to undermine Trump’s chances and to pressure business partners into withdrawing support for the president’s reelection. This is perfectly plausible behavior from a U.S. adversary. Of course, Trump skipped over the part about other nations, including one where “senior officials” and their leader were seeking to “covertly influence US politicians’ and political candidates’ thinking” about the election.

That nation? Turkey.

On one point, however, the declassified reports are clear. One country, more than any other, actively engaged in operations against the 2020 election: Russia. And the Russians had a clear preference:

We assess that Russia is using a range of measures to denigrate former Vice President Biden and what it sees as an anti-Russia establishment. For example, it is directing or encouraging proxies to spread claims about Vice President Biden. Some Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.

This isn’t news, but Trump carefully cherry-picked his way around it. In charts provided by the White House itself that compare Russia, China, and Iran, only Russia is judged to be actively involved in such efforts.

Trump not only ignored these multiple (and much more categorical) judgments; he interpreted the normal in-house fighting that goes on every day in the intelligence community as evidence of some sort of plot against him. He made much of a comment in a group email—these conspirators were pretty relaxed about sending their nefarious ideas around to everyone—about “massaging” the President’s daily brief to take out references to the 2020 election. But the conversation was clearly about which product would include such issues, and how strongly the minority view would be stated. Like so much else in the speech and the documents, Trump threw everything he could find at the wall in the hope that some of it would stick.

So what, then, was the point of Trump’s speech? First, he is almost certainly trying to soothe his wounded ego over the 2020 election. He is obsessed with his loss to Biden and wants to blame it on foreign manipulation. But Trump might also have a darker motive, attacking the integrity of American elections because he wants to delegitimize the coming midterms—and perhaps even create the predicate for interfering in them.

The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians, the North Koreans, and many other enemies of the United States clearly hope to undermine the faith of every American citizen in their own elections. But no regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight.

Trump Dooms His Own Party

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

In early 2021, Republicans were poised to win a majority in the U.S. Senate. Had they won, they could have stalled President Biden’s agenda and forced him to govern on Republican terms. All they had to do was win the two Senate seats in Georgia headed to a runoff in January.

Then Donald Trump opened his yap. He had just lost the presidency. To assuage his own ego injury, Trump attacked the election as fake and rigged. TheAtlanta Journal-Constitutionreported the effect of this talk in Georgia. In rural and conservative areas of the state, 752,000 Georgians who had voted in November stayed home in January. Turnout rose by 228,000 in Democratic-leaning areas. Trump had discouraged his own voters and energized his foes. His party lost both seats and any hope of retaining the Senate.

Tonight, Trump repeated his self-destructive behavior.

If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.

[Read: A serious senate debate about an unserious bill]

If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?

When presidents face tough election environments, they typically look for ways to rally wavering voters to the cause. In October 2010, President Obama promised supporters, “If everybody who showed up in 2008 shows up in 2010, we will win this election.” Trump’s message was one of futility, as if to say: It doesn’t matter how many of us show up, because of all the sinister plots against us. We’re doomed almost no matter what we do.

That message makes psychic sense for Trump. He’s probably going to lose at least one congressional chamber in November, perhaps two, and he desperately needs an explanation as to why it’s not his fault.

But the message makes no sense for the Republicans who are actually on the ballot in 2026. There are marginal Republican-held seats that might be saved by an exciting message about Republican themes, by an economic plan to curb inflation, by some good news about the war in Iran. Instead, Trump is serving dismalness. Even the people credulous enough to believe that Trump lost the presidency in 2020 because he got outsmarted by crafty Venezuelans cannot be too eager to return to the polls so he can be outsmarted again.

We’ll know soon enough just how many Americans watched the speech, how many heeded Trump’s call to demand that their representatives pass his SAVE America Act. But among those who watched for sure—the hard-pressed Republican candidates begging for Trump to throw them a frickin’ bone on some issue of concern to voters—how mad are they tonight?

Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.

Your Odyssey Might Be Cropped

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +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.

An IMAX-film-camera system looks like the kind of device that could give you an X-ray. Weighing hundreds of pounds, it emits a constant, deafening mechanical roar that must be muted with a large encasement known as a sound blimp. The complete setup is big enough to block actors’ line of sight, sometimes preventing them from keeping eye contact with their scene partners. Shooting a movie this way is a cumbersome, expensive process; no filmmaker undertakes it lightly.

Christopher Nolan’s big-budget adaptation of The Odyssey, opening this week in thousands of movie theaters across the United States, is the first commercial feature shot entirely with these cameras. But only about two dozen domestic theaters are playing the movie the way its director intends it to be seen. The rest will be showing slightly different versions, which may be cropped into smaller aspect ratios or projected without the clarity and texture of the original film stock. As contemporary filmmakers and studios continue to push premium formats, some audiences are ending up excluded.

Marketing for The Odyssey has relentlessly emphasized the fact that the movie was shot in IMAX. During the 2023 rollout for Nolan’s Oppenheimer, which was partially shot with IMAX cameras, the director made clear that the IMAX 70-mm format represented the “best possible experience” of the film. This time around, IMAX is being touted as the way to see Nolan’s creation. Matt Damon, who stars as Odysseus, says in a short advertisement that IMAX 70 mm offers the “full impact of how it was shot.” One of the themed popcorn buckets tied to the movie is a miniature IMAX camera with a light-up viewfinder. And IMAX 70-mm viewers get an exclusive perk not shown in other theaters: a glimpse at footage from Dune: Part Three,another upcoming film shot with IMAX cameras.

This insistence on the primacy of IMAX can send the message that there’s only one trueway to see the movie. Some filmgoers feel like they’re losing out on the full experience. The Odyssey is intended to be projected in IMAX 70 mm’s 1.43:1 aspect ratio, a far squarer format than the typical widescreen. Just a few dozen theaters in the world are equipped to show the movie in these dimensions, with this exact film stock. When a movie with those measurements is projected onto a different-size screen, theaters excise parts of the frame. Exactly how much is cropped out depends on the screen: Some theaters dispense with as much as 40 percent of the image. Many viewers won’t care, especially when most of the action is happening in the middle of the frame, but they also might not realize what they’re missing. At a key moment in last year’s Sinners, some viewers watched the screen slowly elongate, transitioning from widescreen to a taller aspect ratio. How tall it got—and how dramatic that moment felt—depended on whether the theater was equipped with an appropriate IMAX projector.

In the United States, IMAX 70-mm projectors are concentrated in a few metropolitan areas, and availability is even more limited in other countries—there’s only one of these projectors in the entire Southern Hemisphere. IMAX obsessives are reportedly flying cross-country to see The Odyssey at certain theaters; others are paying high premiums for resale tickets (some have been listed on eBay for hundreds of dollars). Then there are screenings that aren’t true 70-mm, 1.43:1 experiences but that nevertheless carry the IMAX branding. These have been annoying moviegoers for years, and today’s film buffs have a name for them: LIEMAX.

The scarcity of IMAX-projection setups stems from a real logistical challenge. The screen must accommodate these specific dimensions while retaining their characteristically epic feel, and many theaters’ ceilings aren’t high enough. Only certain projectors can show The Odyssey in its intended format, and IMAX CEO Richard Gelfond has recently said that there aren’t enough of them to meet demand. On top of that, the reels weigh hundreds of pounds and need to be loaded with a forklift. Projectionists need to be trained to use the equipment. Still, this system works for IMAX: Because some filmgoers believe that these screenings are a way to get closer to the art, the tickets can command higher prices. Last year, IMAX ticket sales reached a record high of $1.28 billion globally.

Not everyone is insisting on seeing The Odyssey in 70 mm. The standard experience—a digital version, presented in a traditional widescreen aspect ratio—suits many people just fine. The fans who care a little more can pay to upgrade to a bigger screen. The ones who don’t care enough to pay for a movie ticket can wait to see it at home, or on an airplane as they fall asleep.

The movie industry has been finding ways to accommodate aspect-ratio shifts for generations. When talkies usurped silent films, in the late 1920s, theaters scrambled to adapt to a new, squatter format. In the ’50s, when Cinerama and CinemaScope introduced new formats to mainstream filmmaking, Hollywood started trying to replicate the effects—a phenomenon that became known as “ersatz widescreen.” These aren’t the kinds of substantive trade-offs we typically associate with other kinds of visual art—if the Louvre decided to crop the Mona Lisa, museumgoers would probably want their money back.

The Odyssey won’t be the last movie to tie its marketing strategy to IMAX. As these cameras are adopted by more and more auteurs, discussions around formats and aspect ratios are being built into how today’s big-budget films are advertised. Dune’s director, Denis Villeneuve, has said that IMAX is “the future of cinema,” and Ryan Coogler, the director of Sinners, affirmed that the 1.43:1 aspect ratio offers “the full impact of every image how we intended to see it.” When so few theaters can deliver the true IMAX experience, that language can start to chafe. If this is cinema’s future, not everyone will get to share it.

Related:

Here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

President Trump is expected to deliver an address tonight at 9 p.m. eastern time on election security and voting machines, in which he is likely to revive unsupported claims about election fraud and reference newly declassified documents.
At least one person has died as flash flooding sweeps through Texas Hill Country, where rivers rose rapidly following heavy rainfall and rescue operations remain under way.
Wildfire smoke from Canada is expected to worsen air quality across the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic through tomorrow, potentially exposing more than 115 million people to unhealthy conditions. Smoke has already reached the Washington, D.C., area and parts of North Carolina, and is expected to increase and spread farther south.

Dispatches

Time-Travel Thursdays: The point of a classical education is to teach you something about being human, Elias Wachtel argues.

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Evening Read

Martin Parr / Magnum

The Sports Overload Is Here

By Jacob Stern

If it feels like there are more sports to watch than ever before, that’s because there are. This year’s World Cup is the biggest ever, the tournament having jumped from 32 teams to 48. It may come around only every four years, but the sports calendar no longer stops. The MLB, NHL, and NBA have all added games over the past few years. In 2020, the NFL tacked on two extra playoff games; the following year, the league added an extra regular-season game for the first time in nearly 50 years. Since then, it has colonized ever more calendar territory, rescheduling games from its standard Sunday slate to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Christmas Day, and a number of late-season Saturdays …
If you’re a sports fan like me, more games to watch can seem like a good thing. You don’t get the tiny African island nation of Cape Verde holding out for a miraculous draw against the mighty Spain without a 48-team World Cup. When leagues expand their playoffs—as, say, the MLB did in 2022—they give more teams a chance to qualify and more fans something to root for. But the glut of games can also be overwhelming, even if you aren’t someone who binges three different leagues. There’s simply too much.

Read the full article.

Explaining Sex to an Anthropologist

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Last week, the president of the American Anthropological Association weighed in on one of the most polarizing subjects in her field: biological sex. Some anthropologists believe that biological sex is binary, and that it is a necessary and useful category; others believe that this position is at odds with settled science and is a threat to people’s “safety and dignity,” as the AAA put it in an official statement. In 2023, organizers of a large anthropology conference canceled a panel that sought to defend the importance of biological sex to the field.

Anthropology scholars, in particular, should be unusually adept at accurately reconstructing human beliefs that they do not share. But the AAA’s president, Carolyn M. Rouse, says that she’s baffled by the whole debate.

Rouse, who is also a tenured professor at Princeton, addressed the question during a lengthy interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education. “The idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect,” she stated, arguing that “all you need to do is literally type into Google” to see that we know “there are different types of ‘sexes’ and ‘genders.’” In a curious aside, she added, “You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.” In Rouse’s telling, scholars who believe that biological sex is a useful analytic category are not only wrong but engaging in “nonsensical” speech that is no more fit for consideration in their field than astrology is fit for astronomers. “I still don’t know what people mean” when they assert that sex is binary, she said, or “why that matters to people so much.” She called the belief “very strange.”

Rouse’s comments reveal that she does not even understand the position that she is dismissing. Anthropology is the study of humanity, and scholars in the field are charged with understanding our species, past and present, in all of its diversity. Their ambit includes our belief systems. And a belief in two sexes is one of the most common in human history. That a belief is common does not make it correct, but it is jarring for a leader representing anthropologists to talk about a position held by billions of humans in wildly different times and places as if it is both “very strange” and beyond comprehension.

Scholars are well within their rights to reject the notion that sex is binary—many anthropologists share this view, including Princeton’s Agustín Fuentes, who explains his logic in Sex Is a Spectrum. But instead of a fair-minded appraisal of the matter, Rouse showed conspicuous incuriosity about other scholars’ work. It is striking how little she seems to know about the particular reasons that many fellow scholars believe that biological sex is binary. Just as striking is how she responds to not knowing. She could apply her scholarly tool kit to understand what others think and why. Instead, she treated their view as unworthy of debate and said that academics might be right to keep it out of conferences. She doesn’t “know what people mean”––yet she is certain that their wrongness is settled.

Her interviewer, Stephanie M. Lee, reacted by pointing out that in 2022, in a survey of forensic anthropologists, 42.4 percent of respondents expressed the belief that sex is binary, implying that the question simply isn’t settled in the field. Lee said, “I was wondering how you explain that.” Rouse responded, “I don’t believe in opinion research,” then added, “Not to disparage them, but a lot of forensic people, they’re coroners, they’re doing it in a practicing level, where they’re actually asked on forms to determine whether this body is male or female, oftentimes they haven’t had advanced schooling.” In fact, the journal Forensic Anthropologypublished data on the respondents: 57.9 percent had a doctorate, and another 25.7 percent had received a master’s degree; the most common degree concentrations among respondents were forensic anthropology and biological or physical anthropology. Just 20.5 percent worked in a coroner’s office. And flimsy claims aside, these attacks on survey respondents’ credentials evaded the substance of the matter.

All of this seems contrary to the spirit of anthropology. If the goal of the field is to understand humans, what kind of scholar professes ignorance of a common viewpoint andwhy its adherents value it, and rejects surveys, panels, and debates that clarify what others believe?

Granted, like many coroners, I lack advanced education in anthropology. But even journalism can add clarity here. Rouse stated, “Binary means two. So, what are the two? One is XX and one is XY, but we know that there are more than that. That’s not binary.” She alluded to the fact that although most humans have either XX or XY chromosomes, there are some cases in which a person’s chromosomes are XXY, XYY, or XXX, and rare cases in which they are XXYY, XXXY, etc. If a scholar were to define every variation as a different sex, then sex would not be binary.

But scholars who believe that sex is binary do not define sex based on chromosomes alone. Typically, their position goes something like: Human reproduction is organized around two types of gametes and two corresponding reproductive roles: small gametes, or sperm, produced by males and large gametes, or ova, produced by females. In this important sense, sex is binary. There is no third type of gamete, just the male and female gamete.

Carole Hooven, an evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D. in biological anthropology, had been slated to appear on the American Anthropological Association panel that got canceled. She is a proponent of the “gametic view.” Far from denying the complexity of life, her account of binary sex acknowledges it. In her telling, its usefulness is due in part to the fact that “it applies across sexually reproducing animals and accommodates all the complexity and variation within the sexes. It holds in nonreproductively viable animals—like postmenopausal me—that don’t produce gametes,” she writes; “it holds in male seahorses that get pregnant; in clownfish who change from male to female (first producing sperm and then eggs); in females who identify as male (trans men) and take male levels of testosterone and have a deep voice and a thick, bushy beard.” As for how it maps onto humans in particular, she writes, “Traits associated with sex—like chromosomes, hormones, brain, feelings, or behavior—are not binary; nor do they define sex. However, there are two, and only two, sexes.”

After understanding the gametic view, one can explore any number of challenges to it––a proponent of it, Colin M. Wright, who holds a Ph.D. in evolution, ecology, and marine biology from UC Santa Barbara, summarizes many of them in his article “Why There Are Exactly Two Sexes.” For example, some people argue that sex is not binary, because some people are intersex. “A person might be born appearing to be female on the outside, but having mostly male-typical anatomy on the inside. Or a person may be born with genitals that seem to be in-between the usual male and female types,” the Intersex Society of North America explains. “Or a person may be born with mosaic genetics, so that some of her cells have XX chromosomes and some of them have XY.” (This last point resembles one of the arguments that Rouse employed in her recent interview as if it was a decisive rejoinder to the notion of two sexes.)

Wright’s response to that line of argument is that “the sex binary does not entail that every individual can be unambiguously categorized as male or female.” The claim is that “there are only two gamete types, sperm and ova, and thus only two sexes. Sexual ambiguity is not a third or intermediate sex because developmental variation does not correspond to producing new gamete types.”

Both Wright’s position and the counterarguments are easy to understand, whatever view one holds. Neither side is “nonsensical.” And the point is not to pick a side. It is, rather, that the AAA and its president have an obligation to understand all relevant positions and convey them accurately––and to eschew ad hominem rhetoric such as denigrating coroners and speculating that people who think sex is binary may want to kill babies.

In popular discourse, one can doubtless find many weak and flawed arguments for why sex is binary. What hope does anthropology have for understanding those beliefs––which its scholars should try to do, given their overall mission of understanding people––if the field can’t even give a fair shake to scholars with the steelman version? These academics have presented a coherent, internally consistent, scientifically grounded case for sex as binary that many scholars share.

Anthropologists would do their discipline’s reputation some good if they collectively signaled that they have no confidence in leaders who behave this way. To understand humans, anthropologists must be able to understand the humans with whom they disagree.

Canada’s Forests Will Burn and Burn

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.

Many people simply don’t grasp the sheer magnitude of the boreal forest or what it would take to manage fires across its enormous area, Jed Kaplan, a professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary, told me: “You can’t control these fires. You cannot put personnel, fire engines, over an area that is the size of the entire American South, or something like that. It’s just way too big of an area.”

And so the fires spread, pouring out smoke that washes over the residents of faraway cities. The “Ontario Armageddon” (as one wildfire newsletter called it), along with several large fires burning in northern-Minnesota forests, has left Toronto with some of the worst air quality in the world this week and has shrouded New York City in a sickly gray haze. Canada has 869 active fires at the moment, and most are burning in wilderness areas where authorities monitor them but don’t try to put them out.

Although these boreal forests have evolved to burn and are adapted to fire, the size and intensity of the wildfires have increased as the atmosphere warms. Two of the worst wildfire seasons on record in Canada, in terms of acreage burned, occurred in the past three years, the worst of which was in 2023, when smoke crossed the border to cover East Coast cities and turned New York’s sky a deep, eerie orange. Smoky summers have become a familiar reality in Western Canada and the western United States, but eastern cities are now dealing with the same problem more often, Anabela Bonada, the managing director for climate science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, at the University of Waterloo, told me: “It’s slowly becoming a fixture.”

The smoke rolled into her area, outside Toronto, yesterday and quickly reached the worst level on Canada’s air-quality health index. The fires also prompted the closure of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in Minnesota, this week. First Nations communities in Ontario have been forced to evacuate. And in one particularly harrowing incident, caught on video, the crew members of a freight train in rural Ontario were surrounded by flames. They managed to escape.

Canada’s wildfire season had been off to a slow start, but now more than 6 million acres have burned so far this year, on pace to become the third-highest total on record. “What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years,” Werner Kurz, a retired senior research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, told me. “That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

In the particularly bad stretch from 2023 to 2025, some 8 percent of Canada’s forests burned, Bonada said. Repeated, large fires have caused a decline in the predominant species of conifers, the black spruce, shifting what vegetation regrows. These enormous swaths of boreal forest from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador—more than 1 million square miles—act as massive vaults for carbon, which is locked away in billions of trees and the forest floor. But so much of those forests is going up in smoke that they have become their own notable source of greenhouse gases in recent years. A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.

When these forest fires really get going, they can generate a destructive power that is hard to fathom. A notorious 2016 fire, known as “the Beast,” destroyed much of Fort McMurray, in an oil-producing region of Alberta, and burned across nearly 1.5 million acres. Such huge fires can generate hurricane-force winds and towering pyrocumulus clouds; when the smoke gets high in the atmosphere, it can drift across oceans and continents. Many of these fires coincide, as this week’s blazes in Ontario have, with heat waves. The town of Lytton, in British Columbia, was nearly wiped off the map in 2021 the day after it endured Canada’s hottest temperature on record, 121 degrees.

“Having these temperatures in forested areas, it’s just impossible. The forests don’t remain,” John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has studied the effects of climate change, told me. He is based at a research lab in the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta. Last week, the whole area was blanketed in smoke, he said, from wildfires in British Columbia. In addition to causing harmful health impacts, wildfire smoke also darkens glaciers in the mountains. Those darker glaciers absorb more sunlight, which causes them to melt faster. The world is caught in these loops, and they’re only going to keep repeating.

J. D. Vance’s Own Alien Abduction

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Well, thank you very much, J. D. Vance. Because of the vice president’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, I found myself googling photos of Joe Biden licking an ice-cream cone to pass judgment on whether, as Vance claimed, they look “suggestive.” I will save my final ruling for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.

Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither. And that’s before we get to the awkwardness of knowing that Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—has voluntarily lobotomized himself in the pursuit of power and attention. Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his dignity to be Donald Trump’s lackey.

Vance was allegedly on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his second memoir, Communion, which I haven’t read. (He fooled me once by presenting Hillbilly Elegy as the sincere output of a thoughtful writer, and I won’t be fooled again.) Luckily, that doesn’t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on weightier matters, such as alien abductions and which foodstuffs risk making you look gay. When Jesse Watters of Fox did the latter bit a few years ago, his suggestions were at least excitingly left-field—soup, plus anything drunk through a straw—but Vance and Rogan just went with the obvious corn dogs and bananas. “Anything that looks like a dick,” Rogan helpfully explained.

[Vivian Salama: The conversions of J. D. Vance]

Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran—which, as you might have noticed, have not turned out particularly well. The people criticizing his efforts, he said, want America “to bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they do not actually have a solution.” He added: “They’ll say things like, ‘Well, just bomb them to oblivion.’” Madness! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his very own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who began the war by promising to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Perhaps Vance’s amnesia is political genius: He simply picks his favorite of the nine conflicting opinions that Trump has expressed on any given subject, and enthusiastically agrees with it.

The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. “He was funding a ton of scientists, but like when he died it’s almost like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.

The other explanation for this hey-I-wonder approach is that Vance is dealing with the cognitive dissonance between his own self-image as a smart guy and the constant requirement to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by hallucinating that he is not really part of this administration, but instead a mere interested bystander. Vance treats the vice presidency the way that Instagram influencers approach a vacation in the Maldives: It only truly exists when converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said that he felt like he had “made it” when he was satirized on South Park, rather than at his inauguration.

Rogan was, by his usual collegiate standards, pretty tough on Vance over U.S. support for Israel, probing whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu’s lobbying. But then the podcaster swerved into suggesting Trump had been blackmailed over the Epstein files, a connection that made no sense until he asked whether Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the interview’s most viral moment, Vance joined Rogan in a kind of shrugging speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.” Vance had asked for any relevant documents and came up with nothing, he said, “but if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”

Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a vast alien conspiracy, one of Rogan’s animating obsessions: “I’ve said that I’m going to, like, I’m going to look into the UFO thing,” the vice president said, “and I’ve been saying for a year and a half, and I haven’t done it yet because I haven’t had the time.” Sir, you had time to fill in as host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast after he died. You can take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the words: Roswell fake Y/N?

Vance often feigns ignorance for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called the “overreaction” to the fighter Josh Hokit taking the mic at the White House UFC event to shout that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to explain that it might be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make baseless insinuations about a former first lady for attention. “If he said Michelle Obama’s a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it’s like, okay, less of a story,” said Rogan, adding: “Not the best thing to say at the White House.”

[From the October 2024 issue: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]

Vance took a similar wide-eyed approach with his criticisms of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom he disdained as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now like that word. “There’s a real populism that I’m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people,” he said, recovering, “but there’s like a faux populism of: The way that I’m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they’re idiots and acting like they’re idiots.” Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying these things out loud?

Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began to talk about whether there’s “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.” Rogan suggested that his guest should hurry up with Iran-war negotiations and get on with the real business of the government, such as finding out whether the government is secretly hoarding extraterrestrial corpses. “I’m skeptical that it’s true that we have the physical remains,” Vance said, before promising that he would take a photograph of them if he found them. Show it to the “ladies of The View,” suggested Rogan—“the intellectual leaders of our world.” The ABC show’s hosts may look like philistines to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE custody, not Area 51.

The final half hour of Rogan’s interview dealt with Vance’s book, his surprising support of labor unions, and the effect of immigration on wages. But I know what you’re thinking: Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that really be as unbearably erotic as J. D. Vance made out? The answer is no. As is the answer to the question, “Does J. D. Vance have the capacity to feel shame?”

Pete Hegseth’s Questionable Testosterone Plan - The Atlantic

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

Updated at 1:38 p.m. ET on July 16, 2026

Pete Hegseth wants a manly military. And he really, really wants you to know how badly he wants a manly military. In his 2024 book, The War on Warriors, Hegseth worried that the military risked becoming “effeminate, and apologetic”; he insisted that what liberals really want is “soft men, and a weak military,” and he scolded “Pentagon pussies” who refuse to stand up for soldiers on the battlefield. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has blocked the promotion of female military officers, removed the first woman to lead the Navy, and ordered a review of women’s “effectiveness” in ground-combat roles. He has also used the Defense Department’s social-media channels to post a steady stream of tougher-than-thou videos.

The latest entry in this genre came earlier today, when Hegseth announced that he is requiring every service member over 30 to have their testosterone tested annually. He let this be known in a video posted on X captioned “The High-T Department of War.” In the video, he tells soldiers that if they’re found to have low testosterone, they might be recommended for testosterone-replacement therapy but that it won’t be mandatory. Then again, given what he then says about testosterone “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities,” it sure seems like he believes that everyone should partake. How much this new initiative will cost taxpayers, and the question of whether the military health system’s labs even have the capacity for such testing, is unclear. But the bigger question is whether this is in any way a good idea.

The military’s interest in testosterone predates Hegseth’s tenure. For years, the idea that low testosterone might be a problem for Special Forces personnel in particular has been flagged by both researchers and members of Congress. Representative Jimmy Panetta of California has called for a study of the “link between the stress of military service and decreased testosterone levels.” A 2020 paper cited low testosterone as one possible contributor to so-called operator syndrome, a cluster of conditions including depression and cognitive impairment among Special Forces.

But when Army researchers have examined whether taking testosterone might help soldiers recover more quickly following the physical demands of combat, they’ve found mixed results. A 2019 paper, for example, found that civilian men who received testosterone injections during a 28-day period of intense exercise and restricted diet—meant to simulate the rigors of training and combat—held on to more muscle than those who received a placebo, but the extra testosterone didn’t improve their strength or endurance. A follow-up study three years later reached similar conclusions. Crucially, both of those studies focused on short-term use under specific circumstances, not on the broader screening and routine therapy that Hegseth is advocating.

At least within the general population, universal testosterone screening for men is not considered standard practice. The Endocrine Society recommends against testing for hypogonadism—the medical term for when the body doesn’t produce enough testosterone or sperm—unless a man has symptoms such as erectile dysfunction. The American Urological Association’s guidelines say that a low-testosterone diagnosis shouldn’t be made based solely on a test. That’s because testosterone levels can vary widely, and a man with a lower-than-average number might still be perfectly healthy. The threshold for diagnosing low testosterone remains a matter of debate even among medical organizations. Many of those who favor testosterone “optimization” argue that the cutoff has been set too low and that even men with hormone levels in the normal range would benefit from replacement therapy. A Department of Defense official declined to say whether it had settled on an acceptable baseline.

In the video, Hegseth notes that testosterone levels go down with age. That’s true of everyone; in men, levels usually start to decline around age 40. But they don’t fall off a cliff: They tend to dip about 1 to 2 percent a year. Other factors, such as maintaining a healthy weight and getting enough sleep, can also play a significant role.

Testosterone therapy is the only treatment Hegseth cites in the announcement video. But even if a man’s testosterone level drops below what’s considered normal, doctors don’t automatically recommend testosterone-replacement therapy. For starters, non-pharmaceutical interventions might work. It’s not obvious that, say, a 33-year-old man with low testosterone levels needs to start getting shots. It might be that he needs to start taking the stairs and going to bed at a reasonable hour. Cutting back on drinking could help too: Excess alcohol consumption is known to lower testosterone.

Testosterone-replacement therapy also comes with real side effects. Hegseth and other proponents of testosterone therapy, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sometimes talk about the drug like it’s just another supplement. (Kennedy has acknowledged using testosterone himself; the Defense Department official didn’t respond to a question about whether Hegseth, who is 46, takes the steroid.) But taking testosterone is not the same as popping a vitamin for a B12 deficiency. Testosterone therapy suppresses a man’s natural production of the hormone and decreases sperm count. That’s why experts caution against its use by men trying to conceive. In 2023, a large study published in The New England Journal of Medicine alleviated decades-old fears that middle-aged and older men who take testosterone might be at increased risk of having a heart attack. But last year, the Food and Drug Administration added a warning to testosterone’s label noting that it can increase blood pressure.

The new edict doesn’t apply just to men. In response to a question about whether women will have to have their testosterone tested, the DOD official wrote that “everyone over 30 years old will be tested annually.” Although women do produce the hormone, albeit usually in much lower amounts than men, replacement therapy is rarely recommended except in cases of low sexual desire after menopause. (In practice, middle-aged women have recently been flocking to testosterone to alleviate all sorts of symptoms of menopause and perimenopause.) What women are supposed to make of their test results, and what it has to do with turning them into more effective soldiers, is unclear. Hegseth has made a point of emphasizing the differences between the sexes and of questioning the ability of women to serve in combat. But in this instance, he has inexplicably opted for a gender-neutral policy.

Checking the testosterone levels of military members isn’t necessarily going to hurt anyone. But it also isn’t supported by current medical guidelines. Neither, for that matter, was Hegseth’s decision in April to make the annual influenza vaccine optional. (After a flu outbreak at a base in San Antonio, Texas, last month, the military reinstated the mandate for some new recruits.)

Although Hegseth insists in his video that the new order is about keeping soldiers on “the leading edge of lethality,” it’s hard to see how requiring a blood test they probably don’t need contributes to military readiness. Instead, like Hegseth’s chest-thumping workout videos, his fat-shaming of generals, and his denouncement of anything he deems weak or woke, it is an exercise in projecting a masculine image. His announcement comes at a moment when the Iran war is once again heating up, which is certain to put more strain on the military’s already depleted missile stockpiles. Maybe that’s the number Hegseth should be worried about.

The Lessons About Ebola the U.S. Wants to Forget

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:57 +0000

The Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is now the third-largest Ebola outbreak ever recorded. It will likely pass the second largest, an outbreak in the same region of Congo from 2018 to 2020. Already, the current outbreak has grown past 2,000 cases and to 754 deaths; according to the World Health Organization, it is likely to reach more than 8,000 cases and 1,400 deaths by mid-September. The CDC’s worst-case scenario projects more than 20,000 cases by mid-August.

I worked as a physician and epidemiologist in Guinea during the outbreak in West Africa that began in 2013. In 2014, I survived Ebola myself. I’ve followed every outbreak since, and this one worries me more than any other of the dozen that the world has undergone in the past decade.

Certainly, the world is better at containing and controlling Ebola than it was when I worked in Guinea. Much of that knowledge now lives in Kinshasa and Kampala and at the Africa CDC, in institutions that didn’t exist or weren’t ready a decade ago. When this outbreak is stopped, it will be stopped largely by people who learned what the previous outbreaks taught. Yet this outbreak is also revealing how much the United States, once the backbone of the response to crises like this one, seems willing to forget.

One of the earliest challenges in the 2013 West Africa epidemic was the monthslong delay in detecting initial cases in Guinea, where Ebola’s presentation was unfamiliar to health-care providers. In Congo, too, cases were likely occurring for months because testing was looking for the Zaire species of the virus, not the less common Bundibugyo species that was circulating.

Despite this delay, detection has improved in the past decade. The number of Ebola outbreaks is increasing: Climate change and more frequent contact between people and the animals that carry the virus mean more chances for it to spread. But most outbreaks are picked up far earlier than they once were. In 2017, for instance, an outbreak in DRC was detected at just eight cases.

And when an outbreak is declared, the ability to quickly start testing for Ebola has scaled up dramatically. In West Africa, testing often took days, during which infected people were exposing other patients in treatment centers to the virus. At the start of this outbreak, two months ago, Congo had essentially no ability to test for the Bundibugyo strain; today, capacity exists for thousands of tests a day.

Performing research and clinical trials during outbreaks is more possible than it was a decade ago, too. While treating Ebola patients in 2014, I had no vaccine or specific treatment to offer. Trials during that epidemic were slow to start, and poor methods meant that few produced conclusive results.

Since then, research has yielded a vaccine and antibody treatments for the Zaire strain. Now that a vaccine stockpile is in place, doses can be quickly deployed when an outbreak is declared. Trials are also moving faster. In a 2022 outbreak in Uganda, caused by the Sudan species of Ebola, an investigational vaccine was ready to test within three months. By then, cases were waning, but by preparing protocols and prepositioning vaccine candidates in the country, Uganda was able to launch a trial in four days when the next outbreak emerged, in 2o25. Multiple organizations are now racing to manufacture vaccines for the Bundibugyo strain; one trial to evaluate potential treatments has already kicked off.

What ultimately determines the trajectory of outbreaks, however, is the speed and scale of the response. In 2014, the world did not take the outbreak seriously until Ebola threatened Western countries. An international emergency was declared within days of the first Americans getting sick, a coincidence that didn’t escape my colleagues in West Africa who had been watching the outbreak expand for months. The WHO declared the current outbreak an emergency within two days of Congo’s and Uganda’s own declarations. Community mistrust and widespread conflict still makes the work of finding the sick and persuading them to come in for treatment difficult. But the machinery is faster and is now being run together by the WHO, the Africa CDC—an organization started in the aftermath of West Africa’s Ebola outbreak—and the Congolese government.

If in 2014 the international community was slow to respond to Ebola’s threat, it did eventually respond at scale. The U.S. committed billions of dollars in funding and extensive logistical support to ending the outbreak; USAID helped with essential tasks, such as training burial teams and setting up airport screening.

Since then, much of the capacity to find outbreaks early—whether for Ebola or other pathogens—was built with international investment, especially from the United States. The U.S. helped construct the infrastructure that now catches the sparks of what would otherwise become larger outbreaks, bankrolled much of the research and development for Ebola vaccines and treatment, and has played a central role in responding to nearly every Ebola outbreak—until the one declared in Uganda in February 2025.

For that outbreak, the CDC didn’t send specialists, USAID wasn’t deployed, and Elon Musk’s DOGE canceled multiple contracts dedicated to responding to the outbreak. The response to the current outbreak is a partial correction. The Trump administration has committed more than $700 million and has requested another $1.4 billion from Congress. It deployed a group of highly trained specialists and has finally filled the long-vacant top role at the Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response. The secretary of state is reportedly considering appointing an Ebola czar, as the Obama administration did in 2014.

But these actions reflect deep reflexes, triggered by a big outbreak. A strong, successful response to an outbreak relies on not just quick responses, but systems that require maintenance and constant training. And the U.S. appears to be forgetting the lessons about those systems.

This amnesia is reflected in where the U.S. has aimed its effort—on keeping disease “over there” at all costs. Americans infected with Ebola have been transferred to Germany, rather than specialized treatment centers built in the U.S. after 2014; soon, Americans exposed to the virus may quarantine at a quickly constructed center in Kenya. These actions are part of a broader bet that the virus can be kept out of the U.S. It can’t. Ebola has many ways to cross a border; as we learned a decade ago, the only reliable way to protect Americans is to end the outbreak.

That work has been made harder by the Trump administration’s deep cuts to global health funding and disinterest in international coordination. After 2014, the U.S.—along with the rest of the world—spent years building a more nimble, operational World Health Organization. Now the U.S. does not appear to be fully engaging with the WHO, despite the organization’s role in leading this response. The Trump administration has also been trading disease-specific programs for transactional deals struck country by country, and a proposed plan at the State Department would remake the CDC’s overseas work along the same lines. Countries would pay à la carte for the agency’s help and skip whatever they choose to forgo, including surveillance designed to catch an outbreak like this one. The plan could close roughly a third of the CDC’s 60 overseas offices within a few years. This country-by-country approach may be advantageous politically, but it will lower our defenses against pathogens.

The world’s capacity to control infectious disease has never been fully self-sustaining. It lives in lab technicians and community health workers detecting outbreaks, in stockpiles that expire and need replenishing, and in institutions whose budgets can go up or down each year. It was built over decades, with American support and expertise, and once that support is withdrawn, the gains of the past decade are not guaranteed to hold.

American leaders are betting that the rest of the world will keep doing the work we taught it to do, with less and less help from us. White House spokesperson Kush Desai said as much in response to a request for comment, arguing that bringing global health functions once housed at USAID to the State Department “has made our Ebola response efforts more effective” and that “nothing is stopping other wealthy nations from also stepping up and contributing more to these and other efforts.” (A spokesperson for the State Department emphasized the speed of the U.S.’s response to this outbreak and said that its current strategy is still focused “on building the capacity of national and regional actors.”)

For a while, that bet may pay off. But the weakness of the systems that do exist are already showing. The health workers on whom so much of this response depends recently went on strike: They report not being paid and working without the supplies needed to safely do their job—so far, 112 health-care workers have been infected, and 35 have died. Some version of this has occurred in nearly every outbreak over the past decade, and it erodes the trust needed for a response to function successfully. When communities hear that money is pouring in, and watch Western aid workers speed by in expensive Land Rovers while local workers go unpaid, they stop believing the help is for them. Treatment reaches them just as unevenly. Since the Zaire drugs were approved in 2020, only a third of Congolese Ebola patients have received them, even though one was developed from the blood of a Congolese survivor and both were approved after a trial in Congo. The doses exist, but their manufacturers control them and most sit in American stockpiles.

Rather than work to close those gaps, the United States is testing how much stress the system can take before breaking. The outcome of the next outbreak will rest not on what we know, but on what we’ve bothered to keep.

The Truth About AI’s Water Use

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

Updated at 3:41 p.m. ET on July 16, 2026

There are two competing schools of thought over just how water-intensive AI is. In one, the technology is horribly thirsty. Data centers will exacerbate droughts throughout the country and “drain the great lakes,” as one popular Reddit thread puts it. The former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has taken up the issue, sarcastically posting at one point: “How dare the peasants complain about data centers stealing their water and driving the cost of electricity!!”

The other school, populated by Silicon Valley types, holds that “The Data Center Water Crisis Isn’t Real,” as an article in the right-wing publication Pirate Wires argued in December. The issue with water “is totally fake,” “insane,” and has “no connection to reality,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said a few months ago.

As with so many debates around AI, the arguments are not always presented in good faith. But unlike, say, the ambiguities over how much work a chatbot can or should be trusted to do, water use seems like it should be measurable, with clear facts supporting one side or the other. That is not the case. Does AI waste a ton of water? Not necessarily. Sometimes. It really depends. “We don’t have the real ground-truth numbers on data-center water use to put everyone on the same page,” Eric Masanet, a sustainability researcher at UC Santa Barbara who studies data centers, told me. Neither data-center operators nor utilities provide much insight; what public information exists can be contextualized, recontextualized, and distorted to suggest basically anything.

[Read: Generative AI is an engineering disaster]

Yet the water issue is tremendously consequential—not only for the well-being of residents in all of the counties where new data centers are popping up but also for the future development and regulation of AI itself. Just this week, when New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed the nation’s first statewide data-center moratorium, her office cited the “massive amounts” of water that hyper-scale data centers could require. In a drought-stricken county or during a heat wave, a data center may seriously burden local water supplies. Where water is abundant and utilities can afford new infrastructure, data centers may pose little issue.

Outside of water-stressed regions, “it’s not really a major concern for now,” Fengqi You, an energy-systems expert at Cornell, told me. “But as the sector grows, who knows?” Turning any particular case into a sweeping pronouncement produces little but heightened emotions and confusion. As ever, the truth is far more nuanced and conditional than activists or tech executives admit.

The problems start with the framing. How much water do data centers use? is not a particularly useful question. On a national scale, these buildings do not use an alarming amount of water. In 2023, data centers used slightly more than 17 billion gallons of water for cooling, as much as about half a million Americans collectively use in a year. This may seem like a lot out of context, but it’s less than a tenth of a percent of the total amount of water used by U.S. farms that year.

Things can look different at the county level. A Meta data-center campus under construction in Lebanon, Indiana, could, at its peak, demand 8 million gallons of water a day: This would be a drop in the bucket in New York City, but it’s more than double the peak demand of the town. Every data center demands a distinct evaluation, and the picture can quickly shift. Water use depends on the local climate, the local water supply, and the makeup of the regional electrical grid, as well as on the design of the actual data center. For Meta’s Indiana data center, city officials have said that planned upgrades mean there is “nothing to indicate” that they will run out of water. Meanwhile, in Newton County, Georgia, a local official has said that “we just don’t have the water” for all of the data centers trying to move in and that the county must “race” to improve local water-recycling facilities.

Rather than worrying about the quantity of water, it’s best to ask how a particular data center uses water. In general, water is always used for the same thing—to keep the computer chips inside these buildings cool—but there are many different methods for doing so. Broadly speaking, data centers can either expel the heat those chips generate with cooling towers, which evaporate water, or with air-cooled chillers or similar technologies that use electricity to vent away hot air. Think of cooling towers as human sweat, which passively cools us down as it evaporates, and chillers as car radiators, which use a chemical coolant and then blow air to physically push out the heat.

The AI industry has settled on the car-radiator approach for many of its biggest, most controversial data centers. They run water directly into the servers to pull away heat, cycle the water down through an air chiller, and then—crucially—reuse it. That’s how OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Texas, Meta’s Hyperion data center in Louisiana, Microsoft’s Fairwater data centers across the country, and many other enormous facilities operate for most of the year. Such closed-loop systems don’t lose water to evaporation, which is likely what Altman was referencing when he called concerns over water “insane”: Once these data centers have water, they don’t need more of it, in theory, because it’s never used up.

The real incentive for closed-loop systems is convenience. Building out local water infrastructure or tapping into a reservoir can take years, using groundwater is controversial (groundwater doesn’t replenish quickly, and using it can pollute the environment), and you can’t realistically bring water from Lake Michigan to your data center in dusty Arizona. Water availability can be a serious bottleneck to new data-center construction. A closed-loop system with air chillers bypasses these problems.

[Read: AI is taking water from the desert]

So why doesn’t every data center just use chillers? For starters, air chillers require substantially more electricity compared with cooling towers to expel the same amount of heat. “Can data centers use zero water? Yes, that’s very easy,” Shaolei Ren, an AI and sustainability researcher at UC Riverside, told me. “But the downside, the cost they have to pay,” is using more electricity—10 to 65 percent more, by various estimates. One nine-gigawatt facility being considered in Utah would require nearly as much power as New York City.

Data centers’ almost surreal power demands are largely being met by combustion turbines, many of which are built by the tech companies themselves (to avoid waiting on upgrades to the local grid). And generating electricity—including from these private power plants, which burn fossil fuels—needs water too. In 2024, Meta’s “indirect” water consumption—referring to the water used during power generation—was 19 billion gallons. That’s 23 times its direct water consumption, and most of it went to data centers.

[From the April 2026 issue: Inside the dirty, dystopian world of AI data centers]

Few industries consistently report indirect water use, in part because many of the estimates are flawed. Indirect use comes from averaging the water footprint of all the power sources on a regional grid—which includes hydroelectric plants that consume huge amounts of water due to evaporation from dams and lakes. In other words, indirect water-consumption figures can arguably under- or overestimate any individual plant’s contributions. Paradoxically, the AI industry’s decision to avoid using water to dissipate heat from inside its data centers might expand some facilities’ overall water footprint. “If you use water to make your cooling more efficient on-site, you will use less electricity,” Jonathan Koomey, a data-center and sustainability researcher, told me. “It’s not a simple matter of water use bad on-site.”

It might be possible to design data centers that use both less electricity and less water. In cooler climates, for instance, data centers can pump in outdoor air; this is what Amazon does at its mega data center in northern Indiana. In summer, spraying small amounts of water into the outside air can bring down the temperature enough to do the same. Data centers are also beginning to experiment with allowing the chips to run at higher temperatures, which reduces the overall cooling demands. And, of course, the rather obvious way to build data centers that put less strain on the environment is to opt for renewables—which consume almost no water—instead of natural-gas turbines.

Until these approaches are the norm, people will understandably worry about the effects these sprawling facilities will have on their communities. Assessing how any data centers will affect nearby reservoirs ultimately requires the scarcest resource of all when it comes to these facilities: accurate and precise information. Tech companies want data centers up and running quickly, so they contract with shell companies that negotiate behind closed doors and under nondisclosure agreements. Residents might find out about new construction only after shovels are in the ground.

Already, rising temperatures and prolonged droughts are out of any individual’s control; now a big industrial facility arrives, under the cover of night, that may or may not exacerbate many problems caused by the climate crisis. This sense of confusion goes a long way toward explaining why data centers’ environmental impacts have become one of the key battlegrounds in the AI backlash—the primary issue, in many cases, is not lack of water so much as lack of control.

This article originally referred to a facility under construction in Utah. In fact, that proposal is still being considered, and construction has not begun.

The Ancient Texts That Teach You to Be Human

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.

Late one night in 1925, a classics professor named Carol Wight came across “one of the most interesting men” he’d ever met. In an Atlantic essay, Wight recalled finding a mechanic reading Thucydides on the grimy floor of his shop, a bare bulb illuminating his page. The worker said that he read the ancient historian “because he makes me think.” As though testing him, Wight asked the question every student of the classics hears at one time or another: “What good will that do you?”

I was a classics major in college, which means I got this question a lot, sometimes from concerned adults, often from teasing friends. Unlike Wight’s mechanic, I don’t have a trade, and it didn’t help that my second degree was in philosophy. If college is an investment, then what I did—spending four years reading ancient Greek—seems like burying gold in the backyard.

By the time I graduated last year, though, something strange had happened. AI’s speedrun was rendering once-marketable skills obsolete. Graduates in “practical” fields such as economics and computer science heard warnings of a job apocalypse. Suddenly, everyone was asking what their education was for. The doubt sounded familiar—at least to those of us who had always been told that we were studying something “useless.”

In 1955, the acclaimed scholar Gilbert Murray wrote a defense of classical education in TheAtlantic. Many critics found it absurd, he wrote, to dedicate so much time to learning ancient Greek and Latin—“two languages which you never mean to speak, and would nowhere be understood if you did.” What good will that do you? Students were urged instead to study “practical technology,” as Murray put it: “Learn nuclear fission, learn medicine and surgery, learn modern languages, learn at least something new, and you will have some chance of meeting the most urgent needs of your generation.”

It wasn’t always this way. When The Atlantic was founded, in 1857, the classical languages dominated education. You could hardly get into college without knowing them, and once there, you’d likely study little else. In 1866, an unnamed writer complained in the magazine that “almost everything else has been subordinated in our college course” to those languages—including history, chemistry, and English.

But things were changing fast. In the late 19th century, American higher education was becoming more liberal and more accessible, and advancements in scientific research meant there were more subjects than ever to study. In 1883, Albert S. Bolles wrote that any professor still clinging to the primacy of the classics was “dreaming in the moonlight of the Middle Ages.” Students could still choose to study classics, but, as Bolles put it, “the complete curriculum of knowledge” had been “rearranged so as to serve a more useful purpose.”

And as considerations of “usefulness” came to dominate conversations about higher learning, the study of classics fell further and further from grace. Charles W. Eliot, a pioneer of the modern university, argued in these pages in 1917 that Latin should no longer be a college-admissions requirement, because knowledge of classical languages was of “little use” to modern people. It wasn’t enough that new fields be added to university curriculums—they should also replace the old.

These charges have haunted classicists ever since. In response, “the advocates of the classics have often tried to defend them on the ground of practical utility,” A. Lawrence Lowell wrote in 1941. But this is like “comparing the practical utility of a poem and a postage stamp,” he explained. Arguing that learning Plato and Sophocles is as tangibly beneficial to the world as medical research will always be a losing strategy.

Which brings us back to the AI age. Today, arguments about the usefulness of various human skills focus on whether AI can do them as well as we can. To hear the true AI evangelists tell it, human knowledge itself may soon be like Latin and ancient Greek: an important part of our history and a quaint intellectual exercise, but otherwise thoroughly unnecessary.

I’m sure that a large language model could be trained to parse aorist-passive verbs and third-declension nouns in ancient Greek better than I can. But the point of a classical education isn’t to develop a rarefied skill. As the literary critic Irving Babbitt wrote in 1897, “In the classics more than in other subjects, the fact should never be forgotten that the aim proposed is the assimilation, and not the accumulation, of knowledge.”

I remember a particularly late night in the spring of my freshman year. I was cursing myself for taking ancient Greek, because my friends were at a bar and I was in a library struggling to memorize some irregular verbs. It felt like a futile exercise: There were already countless translations of these ancient texts, and there were adaptations and summaries of those translations. So what was I doing?

Restless, I took an ancient-Greek copy of TheOdyssey off the shelf and began stumbling through its opening lines. I knew them by heart in English, but seeing the true, original words was something different. I thought about the generations of people—schoolchildren and great thinkers alike—who had read these words before me. It sounds strange to say, but in that moment, I felt more human than I ever had before. I wasn’t learning anything new, I realized; I was learning something very old indeed.

Aristotle wrote that every line of inquiry aims at some good. But usefulness is only one type of good. There is a kind of learning that helps you do something, but there is also a kind of learning that helps you become someone. Perhaps this is what the mechanic had in mind when he answered Wight’s question:

“What good will that do you?”
He had risen to his feet by now, and said, tapping his lathe: “I can shape steel with this; and with this,” holding out the small chunky volume, “I can shape men.”

The Biggest Takeaway From Todd Blanche’s Confirmation Hearing

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

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The most stunning exchange of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing to serve as attorney general came in response to an amiable question. Senator John Kennedy from Louisiana, a Republican who appears favorably inclined toward Blanche, asked the nominee whether he considered himself to be the president’s friend.

Blanche, who is currently leading the Justice Department in an interim role, responded: “I’m his lawyer.” Then, perhaps, realizing his mistake, he corrected himself. “Was his lawyer,” he said. “And now I’m the deputy attorney general.”

In politics, this is what is known as a Kinsley gaffe, a phenomenon described by the journalist Michael Kinsley: an instance where a political figure says something true that he didn’t intend to admit. Blanche’s day job may no longer involve working as President Trump’s private attorney, but his conduct at the top of the Justice Department has left little doubt that his primary loyalty is not to the United States or the Constitution but to the man in the White House. Blanche’s willingness to twist the law to Trump’s advantage has unnerved even some usually quiescent Senate Republicans, and he may face a tight confirmation vote in the weeks ahead. But whether or not Blanche secures the top job, yesterday’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee made clear that Trump has demolished everything but the occasional pretense of an independent Justice Department.

For Blanche, the confirmation process is essentially a formality. Even if the Senate rejects his nomination, he can likely continue to lead the department as acting attorney general—as he has already done for three months since the departure of Pam Bondi. Trump fired Bondi after becoming frustrated with her inability to adequately implement his plans for revenge, and Blanche, it seems, has made up his mind that he will not be subject to the same fate. He has already applied himself single-mindedly to the project of making Trump happy, wielding the skills he developed while leading Trump’s criminal-defense team prior to the 2024 election.

[Read: Does Todd Blanche have a red line?]

Under Blanche, the Justice Department has launched investigations and brought a series of laughably weak criminal cases against a handful of Trump’s enemies, including felony charges against former FBI Director James Comey for posting an Instagram picture of seashells spelling out “86 47.” Additionally, in May, Blanche unveiled an agreement that ended any IRS audits of the president and seemingly purported to immunize Trump and his family from any other government investigation into their past actions. That was paired with the announcement of a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which would use taxpayer money to pay supposed victims of persecution by the Biden administration. News of the fund was greeted with outrage from both Democrats and Republicans on the Hill, and Blanche quickly backpedaled. But he still managed to secure the coveted marker of status: Trump’s nomination for the permanent role of attorney general.

Until very recently, this sycophancy would have been obviously disqualifying for the role. After the abuses of Watergate, DOJ refashioned itself to resist political interference by the White House in the name of dispensing impartial justice. This tradition, hard-won, has been treated by the second Trump administration as a faintly ridiculous artifact of bygone times, and most Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee appear unconcerned by Trump’s meddling in the Justice Department’s work. To the extent they addressed the issue, it was largely to suggest that Blanche’s relationship with Trump was not out of line with historical practice. After Blanche’s slip, Kennedy went on to point out that previous attorneys general had included the brother of one president and the former law partner of another. (The senator did not mention that John F. Kennedy’s appointment of Robert Kennedy was hugely controversial at the time, nor that the law partner in question—John Mitchell, appointed by Richard Nixon—would go on to be criminally charged and lose his law license for his involvement in Watergate.)

As the saying goes, hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue. Blanche did pay at least a few pennies of tribute to the notion of a Justice Department not entirely subsumed to presidential power. DOJ is “part of the executive,” and “Article II of the Constitution gives the power of the executive to President Trump,” he told Democratic Senator Chris Coons, before adding, “We certainly operate with integrity.” Later, he hedged once again when questioned by Coons’s Democratic colleague Alex Padilla, who recalled Blanche telling him in a private meeting that “the independence of the department was a misnomer in the context of the Department of Justice.” Blanche said, “I definitely did not say that, but nice try.” Instead, he clarified, “My obligation is to the American people and the rule of law. That being said, I am a member of the Cabinet of the president of the United States.” In the absence of any significant demonstration of integrity or independence, this is a slender reed on which to rest a distinction.

[Jonathan Chait: William Barr’s dangerous endorsement of Todd Blanche]

Blanche’s feigned outrage at Padilla may have been born of necessity. The GOP cannot afford to lose a single vote on the Judiciary Committee if Blanche’s nomination is to move forward—and the committee includes two lame-duck Republicans, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, who could conceivably buck the party line. Tillis, who spent much of his time at the hearing complaining about the Biden administration, seemed positively inclined toward Blanche. Cornyn, though, questioned Blanche closely on the Anti-Weaponization Fund and DOJ’s immunity agreement with Trump. Blanche insisted that the fund was “not moving forward,” but acknowledged that the president had not agreed to forgo the program in writing and could potentially sue DOJ for breach of contract over the failure to put the fund in place. Later, he dodged a question from Padilla about whether, even in the absence of the fund, DOJ could pay January 6 rioters through a preexisting process under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

After the hearing, Cornyn told reporters that he remained undecided on Blanche’s nomination. Tillis said he was “leaning yes” but wants the Justice Department to endorse legislation that would kill the fund once and for all. If the senator sticks to that demand, then Blanche’s chance of getting confirmed will depend on his ability to secure this small marker of autonomy while retaining Trump’s confidence that Blanche can be relied upon to carry out his dirty work.

Traditionally, Senate-confirmed officials are considered more independent from White House interference than temporary appointees, having made commitments to Congress as well as the president. Here, though, there is little reason to believe that a Senate vote will alter Trump’s demands for absolute fealty from the Justice Department. Blanche may have exaggerated his displays of loyalty in order to secure his nomination as attorney general—but Trump rarely accepts less after he is given a taste of what he wants.

The Opening After Netanyahu

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

Last week, Rahm Emanuel traveled to Tel Aviv University to deliver an unusually blunt warning: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is jeopardizing Israel’s long-term alliance with the United States. Emanuel, the former Obama White House chief of staff, urged Israel to pursue what he called a “23-state solution”: an agreement in which movement toward Palestinian sovereignty would be embedded in a larger normalization deal between Israel and the Arab world.

For decades Washington has oscillated between trying to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and trying to sidestep it. The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel exposed the limits of both approaches. The Palestinian question cannot simply be bypassed, but neither is another round of final-status negotiations likely to succeed. Emanuel is right that the only realistic path now is to embed the Palestinian issue within a broader regional strategy. Such a strategy can give Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the United States a way to reverse the region’s dangerous trajectory amid the wars in Gaza and Iran.

I recently spent a week in Israel and the West Bank—my fourth time there—with a delegation of former policy makers organized by the nonprofit J Street. We met representatives of the Israeli military and political parties, Palestinian leaders, survivors of October 7, humanitarian workers, settler representatives, and activists. We spent time at the Kfar Aza kibbutz, where 62 residents, including children, were murdered by Hamas on October 7. We walked the streets of central Hebron, which resembles a ghost town because of severe restrictions on its Palestinian residents.

A couple of things were clear to me. The future of the U.S.-Israeli alliance may depend on the outcome of Israel’s next election. And the Middle East is in the early stages of a period of great instability and conflict. Many Americans may be tempted to wash our hands of it all and leave the region to its fate. But forthcoming elections in Israel and the territory controlled by the Palestinian Authority provide a glimmer of hope. A new Israeli government may not offer wholesale change or pursue peace on its own, but it could move the country toward accepting a regional bargain.

Israeli politics may be approaching a breaking point. National elections are scheduled for October 27. Polling has consistently shown the parties opposed to Netanyahu ahead of his coalition, though not necessarily with a clear path to the 61 seats required to govern. The leading challenger is Gadi Eisenkot, whose new centrist party has drawn even with or edged ahead of Netanyahu’s Likud party in some recent surveys.

Eisenkot should not be mistaken for a dove. As chief of staff for the Israel Defense Forces, he used force aggressively against Israel’s enemies but opposed all-out war, on the grounds that force should serve an achievable political objective. He was willing to oppose the far right when military professionalism was at stake, including in a 2016 case in which Elor Azaria, an Israeli soldier, was convicted of killing a wounded and incapacitated Palestinian attacker in Hebron.

Eisenkot has suffered personal losses that have given his criticism of the Gaza war unusual moral authority. His son and two nephews were killed in the fighting. Eisenkot served in Netanyahu’s war cabinet, but resigned when he concluded that the prime minister lacked a coherent plan for what would follow military operations and was allowing political considerations to shape the war’s conduct and duration.

Our delegation met with representatives of the opposition for discussions that made clear that, if elected, a new Israeli government would not embrace a two-state solution or fully reverse course on Gaza. Naftali Bennett, Eisenkot’s likely coalition partner, who also harbors hopes of becoming prime minister, has advocated that Israel pursue total victory in Gaza. He opposes Palestinian statehood and has previously championed settlements and other forms of permanent Israeli control.

Progressive critics of Israel argue that Netanyahu is less the source of Israel’s crisis than its most abrasive expression. They may dismiss a new government as a mere continuation of the old one and continue to pressure Washington to impose an arms embargo and disengage from the alliance. But this would be a mistake. A new Israeli government would not solve the conflict, but it might stop actively making the conflict insoluble. It might value relations with Washington and Riyadh enough to accept constraints that Netanyahu rejects. It would take some constructive steps to defuse tensions. That’s a limited opening, but limited openings are where diplomacy usually begins.

The deterioration of the situation in the West Bank makes such diplomacy a matter of particular urgency. Israeli efforts to exert control over the West Bank have reached new extremes under the current coalition, which includes far-right parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. This government has tolerated and facilitated settler violence against Palestinians. It has also turbocharged the expansion of settlements by accelerating approvals for new settlements, retroactively authorizing existing outposts, directing billions of shekels toward settlement infrastructure, and weakening the Palestinian Authority’s already limited powers and draining its finances.

[Jon Finer: The West Bank is sliding toward a crisis]

Our delegation traveled through the West Bank with the Israeli organization Breaking the Silence, which was founded by former IDF soldiers to raise awareness about the occupation. We moved swiftly along newly built highways, bypasses, and tunnels that connected settlements to Jerusalem and Israel proper. Then we switched roads to drive on a separate and far-inferior network for Palestinians—one that is poorly maintained, interrupted by checkpoints, and vulnerable to closure without warning. Palestinians struggle to get around and in some cities, such as Hebron, are confined to their houses for days on end.

Settler violence has also risen dramatically. The pattern includes shootings and attacks on farmers, as well as arson, property destruction, road obstruction, and the intimidation or expulsion of entire communities. Israeli soldiers and police seldom intervene, and prosecutions are exceptionally rare. A settler representative told our delegation that the incidents were usually acts of vandalism committed by undisciplined teenagers rather than part of a systematic campaign. That description does not withstand scrutiny.

October 7 cast an ominous light on developments in the West Bank. In the years before the attack, Netanyahu came to see Hamas’s continued control of Gaza as strategically useful. As long as Hamas governed Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlled the West Bank, there could be no credible negotiating partner for a two-state solution. Netanyahu apparently believed that Hamas was boxed in and posed no significant threat to Israel, whereas the Palestinian Authority could potentially create the conditions for a Palestinian state. Successive administrations tolerated his feed-the-beast strategy—not agreeing with it but also not bringing any pressure to bear. But his strategy of deferring problems instead of seeking constructive solutions to them eventually blew up, resulting in the invasion of southern Israel and the deaths of 1,200 Israelis. It also dragged the United States into a regional war that rages to this day.

Over the past four years, Yehuda Shaul, a co-founder of Breaking the Silence, told me, there has been a dramatic increase in isolated settler outposts, established illegally in Palestinian areas. At some point, Shaul warned, the situation could explode. In one scenario, a few young men might enter an outpost and slaughter a family. Settlers might then undertake large-scale reprisals; the Israeli military could get involved, leading to an outpouring of violence and the collapse of the Palestinian Authority, as well as putting enormous pressure on Jordan. The West Bank is a strategic time bomb for Israel.

Multiple opposition representatives told our delegation that if they were to form a new government, they would crack down on settler violence in the West Bank. They also told us that they would remain committed to ensuring that Hamas never again governs Gaza or threatens Israeli civilians. The Gaza goal echoes Netanyahu’s, but more than one approach to it is possible. Rather than insisting that every element of Hamas be dismantled and disarmed before any meaningful political transition can occur, for instance, a new government could accept a phased approach in which the Palestinian Authority, backed by Arab states, gradually assumes governing responsibilities, even while addressing Israeli security requirements in parallel. A new Israeli government could also provide immediate relief, for instance by facilitating humanitarian assistance in health care and education and allowing Gazan fishermen to operate again.

Under a new administration, Israel could find itself faced with a somewhat changed interlocutor, too. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has scheduled legislative elections for November, the first since Hamas won the vote in 2006. Presidential elections are supposed to follow in early 2027. Reasons for skepticism abound: Elections have been promised and postponed before, Hamas’s role remains unresolved, voting in East Jerusalem will be contentious, and Abbas presides over an unpopular and ever more authoritarian system. Nevertheless, holding a credible legislative election would be a significant step toward restoring political legitimacy.

The Palestinian Authority has also made some moves toward reform. For decades, it maintained a system that allocated stipends to Palestinian prisoners in Israel based in part on the length of their sentences (ostensibly rewarding those who had committed the most serious crimes). Critics labeled these payments “pay for slay,” and the United States, Europe, and Arab governments pressed Abbas to put an end to them. Last year, Abbas formally abolished the system, replacing it with a needs-based welfare arrangement, though Israel still has concerns about implementation. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has pressed Palestinian leaders to reform, helped stabilize the Palestinian Authority financially, and treated the creation of a more credible Palestinian governing structure as essential to any regional agreement.

But modest progress in the Palestinian Authority can achieve only so much. It does not guarantee that the group could truly negotiate a final status agreement, effectively govern Gaza, or credibly ensure that a Palestinian state would not become a platform for attack. It suggests only that the means to improve Palestinian governance have become available at the same moment that Israeli politics may be changing.

How to leverage all of this into a lasting settlement to the region’s turmoil is a bigger question—one that suggests a bigger, more regional solution. That’s what Rahm Emanuel proposed with his 23-state solution. The notion has a history. Emanuel’s critics point to the failed Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, which offered Israel normalization with the Arab League in return for withdrawal from occupied territory and an agreement on a Palestinian state. But that initiative arrived during the Second Intifada, when Palestinians were launching bloody attacks on Israel. It was presented to Israel largely as a settled Arab position, rather than as a negotiable process. And it appeared to require Israel to withdraw its forces and accept Palestinian statehood before receiving the full benefits of normalization.

A regional approach today could be different. During my time in the Biden administration, we were working on an ambitious deal that would normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel, provide U.S. security guarantees and a civil nuclear-enrichment program to Saudi Arabia, and secure closer U.S.-Saudi cooperation on China. The deal was also to include an Israeli-Palestinian-relations component. I remember talking with my late mentor, Martin Indyk, who had served as Middle East envoy and twice as ambassador to Israel, about this component and whether the overall deal was worthwhile. I still have the memo he sent me a couple of months before October 7.

Indyk wrote that inserting an international peace conference, or a resumption of Israeli-Palestinian final-status negotiations, into the deal was tempting but doomed to fail. The factors that had confounded such efforts remained in force and had worsened. “Simply put,” he wrote, “the game is not worth the candle.” Better, he added, to focus on the more urgent and tangible objective of changing the situation on the ground in the West Bank.

As Indyk saw it, the deal would have to include irrevocable commitments on Israel’s part to tangibly improve the lives of Palestinians, including by transferring control of some land in the Israeli-controlled part of the West Bank. This would be Israel’s bill for normalization. For their part, the Palestinians would have to publicly back the deal and continue making important reforms, such as ending “pay to slay.” Indyk believed that if such a package could be assembled, it could form the basis of a peace deal signed on the White House lawn. Out of that deal, he wrote, “could come a commitment to seek the resumption of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, not as a precondition for the Israeli-Saudi peace deal, but rather as its natural result.”

Indyk didn’t live to see whether that strategy would ever have another chance. The political conditions that he believed made a comprehensive peace impossible have become only more entrenched. But so has the logic of the alternative he outlined. The measures he described would not create a Palestinian state overnight, but they would halt the process by which such a state is being made physically impossible. And they would give Palestinians tangible evidence, for the first time in decades, that diplomacy can alter their daily lives by freezing and reversing settlement expansion, facilitating their freedom of movement, and empowering Palestinian self-governance.

For Israel, the strategic payoff would extend well beyond the Palestinian issue. After three years of war following October 7 and a war with Iran that most Israelis see as a failure, a regional deal could repair Israel’s fraying relationship with the United States, integrate Israel more fully into the Middle East through normalization with Saudi Arabia, and build a coalition capable of balancing Iran over the long term.

[Read: The Iran problem Trump can’t defer]

This approach will also be difficult for many American critics of Israel, on the left and the right, to accept, because it will require the United States to make commitments of its own. Riyadh has insisted that normalization will require a binding American security guarantee, regardless of how Democrats in Washington feel about Mohammed bin Salman. Indeed, the Saudis may be even harder to get on board with a regional deal after the Iran war than they were before. At the same time, the United States will need to recommit to its alliance with Israel if it embraces the regional pathway to peace.

There has been a clear recent push in both parties in the United States to punish Israel, but many of the proposed steps would be counterproductive. Broad arms embargoes on Israel or a hollowing-out of the alliance would make a regional settlement harder, not easier, to come by. Israel has legitimate security requirements against Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other armed groups. Targeted pressure—on people and organizations involved in settler violence and the seizure of Palestinian land—is another matter, and the U.S. could certainly show less deference to Israel when the two countries’ interests diverge.

Another round of final-status negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians is very unlikely to produce a breakthrough. The more promising path is a regional bargain that changes the strategic calculus of Israelis, Palestinians, Arab states, and the United States. It would not deliver peace overnight. But it could stop and reverse a trajectory that has made peace impossible.

The Unapologetic Crime Fiction of Colson Whitehead

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

Sturdy, steady, and as reliable as a well-tooled construction, Ray Carney, the “cool machine” that powers the third volume of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Trilogy, is a time-worn but still fully functional version of the man in the first two books. Carney, a furniture salesman who fenced stolen goods and navigated the consequences in Harlem Shuffle and Crook Manifesto, faces a few last scores in the new novel, Cool Machine. Although Whitehead is good at literalizing metaphors (as he did in The Underground Railroad, which won the first of his two Pulitzer Prizes), Carney is, of course, a machine only in the figurative sense. In reality, or in the fictive realm that Cool Machine occupies with palpably true-to-life resonance, he is a crook in his fragile, aging bones.

“It was in the man’s blood” to be a cool machine—“ruthless and cunning,” thinks Uncle Rich, a totemic elder of the Black underworld who lords with quasi-godly authority over the seriocomic goings-on of the second and third books. Uncle Rich maps out the setups and oversees the jobs—in Cool Machine, a series of heists that culminates in a byzantine plot to steal treasures from a vault in the Waldorf Astoria by way of abandoned secret train tracks under the hotel (another literal underground railroad). But only Whitehead gets to set up the larger questions that animate this multilayered conclusion of the Harlem Trilogy—what’s at stake, why it matters, and who’s really in charge.

The primary characters have aged over the course of the books; roughly a decade separates each volume. Transformations in New York during the years leading up to Cool Machine’s Reagan era have failed to deliver on the promises Carney and his circle had been given in both crime and straight life. On the night before a big operation, Uncle Rich reminisces with the crew about his first and only incarceration years earlier, for stealing piles of newspapers. His crime was to try to learn about the world and, somehow, by extension, himself. “I had to figure out what kind of crook I was,” he says. “I’m still figuring it out and I’m about to retire. It doesn’t matter what line you’re in, we all have that moment when you have to face yourself. Who are you now and who do you want to be? How are you going to live your life? What’s next?”

This is what the reader has been wanting to know about Carney since Harlem Shuffle. Is he just an engine of ruthlessness or something different, perhaps something more than what Uncle Rich wants him to be? These questions of identity and purpose, principles and value, are the core concerns of Whitehead’s genre device, a sleek crime novel with blood pumping from its fast-moving, smooth-running machinery into its brains.

Like each of its predecessors, Cool Machine tells three related but essentially free-standing stories in chronological sequence. The first, “City at Night: 1981,” finds Carney and his Harlem furniture store reborn after the devastation of an arsonist’s fire at the end of Crook Manifesto. He has not only rebuilt the showroom but also taken over the space next door and the former apartments on the second floor. Between books, Carney had also been busy broadening “his idea of himself, of what he was capable of. He had stared down recessions and mobsters and come out the other side. Expanded and broken through to a new space.”

[Read: What is crime in a country built on it?]

Carney’s store was established with seed money from his father’s low-level thievery, and its growth owes in part to his talent for moving stolen goods, but now he has all the trappings of the straight world. Whitehead handles the gratifications of Carney’s legit business success with a light touch—“heady furniture talk made his blood rush”—and holds back snickers, though just barely, as Carney celebrates being named Northeast Regional Dealer of the Month (August) by the Sterling Furniture Co. The honor had never before been granted to a Black dealer, notwithstanding one who might have been passing as white.

Although content with his stature in furnishings retail and proud of his wife Elizabeth’s parallel blossoming as the proprietor of a thriving travel agency, Carney gets wrapped up with Uncle Rich once more. This time, he is not a fence but an active player in an elaborate, multistage caper that takes the crew first to monolithically bland warehouses thrown up on New Jersey marshland and, last, with exquisitely paced crime-fiction drama, to a vault in a ritzy Manhattan hotel. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything by sharing that the big payoff at the warehouse is something I could not have predicted, and that the culmination of the hotel heist is beautifully moving. It lands on a matter that Uncle Rich and Carney had been debating: “‘There comes a time,’ Uncle Rich said, ‘when you have to ask yourself, What’s worth stealing? Truly of value.’” They find an answer through an act of moral repatriation, stealing something others had stolen once before—something that could not be recovered by legal means.

The subject of reparations, more prominent today than it was during the 1980s, laces through the second section of Cool Machine, “Here Comes Sue Simmons: 1983.” The story centers on a lovably brutish old misanthrope first introduced in Harlem Shuffle: Pepper—no surname ever given. Once a small-time robber, Pepper is now crumbling from advanced age and damage inflicted by many malefactors, including Pepper himself. When an acquaintance of Carney’s wife needs to venture to an unfamiliar section of Lower Manhattan to buy a work of art—a rare, historic African mask—Elizabeth connects him with Pepper for protection, and the plot moves to the East Village, where everyone in the United States under 25 seems to have moved. I was living on East 11th Street and First Avenue in the early ’80s, and I can’t help seeing my sorry young self in Whitehead’s descriptions of the pretentious would-be bohemians in the after-hours clubs of Alphabet City. He has written knowingly about this world before, in his collection of impressionist essays, The Colossus of New York—“Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture,” he snarled. But the fuller consideration of the downtown scene in Cool Machine has a richer, more sordid majesty:

Every so often in the hustle and bustle of the city a newcomer, out on a late-night quest for roach killer, dawdled before the sidewalk bazaar and found themselves staring into the scabby face of a future self. Before and After, like in a TV commercial. Look at how much the city had debased this pilgrim in six months, a year.

[Read: Colson Whitehead loses the plot.]

In this second story, Whitehead pans out from considering the identity of his hero to asking what a whole city is all about. Enlarging his fire-scarred domain as aggressively as Carney did his refurbished retail operation, the author takes on the whole of New York from Harlem downward—and across, east and west, from the repurposed swamps of Jersey to the political swamps of Queens. “The city that year was true to its personality, as malformed across the centuries—a monstrous entity powered by innate miseries, operated by brute will, and held together by pluck, fury, and rebar,” he writes.

If writing fiction about New York in the 1980s invites comparisons with Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Whitehead should have the invitations embossed in gold relief. Cool Machine is definitive not only for its sweep but also for the rightness, the evocative precision, of the details that fill its paragraphs like the mystery mix inside the skin of a Gray’s Papaya hot dog. Whitehead conjures New York with the deeply experienced intelligence and acuity of Claude McKay in his exultant, picaresque novels of Black life in the early 20th century.

James Joyce’s Dublin is another parallel, not least for the allusive poetry in Whitehead’s language, which makes understanding all of the references a treat but not a prerequisite. It’s fun to pick up on the many details Whitehead employs casually, with no self-congratulation: H&H Bagels! Used to be the best in New York. Fowad! That was a dicey, run-down discount-clothing store on Broadway, around 96th Street. I went in once, and a salesman hit me up for a payoff before I had a shirt in my hands. Whitehead mentions the place in passing, with no explanation, and the sheer weirdness of the name, processed with our knowledge that it must mean something weird, is all we need.

In the third section, “No Radio: 1986,” a character from Crook Manifesto reappears—or fails to. Robert, the son of a more-like-a-brother cousin of Carney’s, disappears, and Carney sets out to find him, navigating the dual underworlds of Harlem crime and Queens politics. This detective-story setup feels something like an homage to Walter Mosley and his famous Black gumshoe, Easy Rawlins, a veteran of the missing-persons business in Los Angeles. In the climax of this final story, Carney finds himself challenged to combine his expertise in the criminal mind and his expert salesmanship. Whitehead, meanwhile, crystalizes his sense of what makes the city run, where Carney fits in, and how the straight and crooked worlds are entwined in one strange ecosystem with laws that only the lawless can enforce.

As any scholar of 1980s New York would recognize, the story’s title, “No Radio,” is a reference to the signs that car owners with removable stereo systems would put on their dashboard before leaving their vehicle parked on city streets. Carney finds the signs offensive, a mark of submission. “To join those sad little New Yorkers with their meek ‘don’t hurt me’ NO RADIO signs—it was degrading,” he thinks when he spots a specimen. “NO RADIO said, You can’t steal from me because I have nothing left.” Pepper, noticing another such sign just a few pages later, objects that they disrupt the moral order of criminality: He “shook his head, affronted by this attempt by the prey to communicate with the predator. It was best to be content with one’s place in the universe; to do otherwise invited imbalance.” Carney uses a sign that proudly taunts YES RADIO.

[Read: Nickel Boys is an audacious experiment]

Moral order is vitally important to both Carney and his creator. As Whitehead once said in a talk at a writers’ workshop, “The writer of fiction must embrace a moral vision, or else he is little more than a cheap Fleet Street haberdasher.” He stressed that this was an “aesthetic imperative,” and we find it resonating throughout Cool Machine—in the kinds of jobs that Carney and his associates choose to do (heists, not hits), in their obedience to weird old codes (who sits where at the bar where they meet), and in the fantasies they attach to their aspirations (long vacations far away). They’re not angels by any stretch, but they have hearts. After all, they are not actual criminals; they’re just imaginary. They do crime, but they’re fiction.

Whitehead has a reputation for hopping among genres—zombie horror, media satire, historical fantasy—with a flair for entertainment value. But in its subject matter, form, and style, the Harlem Trilogy is crime fiction without apology and little interest in irony or distancing effects. It’s not a cheeky parody of crime fiction or piercing commentary on crime fiction. It’s crime fiction: propelled by narrative; populated by colorful but believable characters larger enough than life to fit into life if only life were larger; and written in tight, muscular prose designed to entertain and, in the process of entertaining, provoke for the sake of a moral imperative. Whitehead could put a sign on the covers: YES CRIME FICTION.

How the Smithsonian Could Fall

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

Photographs by Caroline Gutman

The Trump administration wants to control the Smithsonian, but it won’t be so easy. When experts talk about the institution’s relationship to the federal government, the world’s largest museum complex can start to sound like a bureaucratic outcast. TheOffice of Legal Counsel has called the Smithsonian a “very unusual entity” and a “historical and legal anomaly.” A law-journal article describes it as “Quasi-Government at the Private Border.” One attorney told me that it resides in the legal “netherworld.”

The Smithsonian may occupy the governmental fringes, but its museums are hardly invisible to Americans, millions of whom visit them each year. With the Trump administration renewing its efforts to crack down on the institution in recent weeks, though, overlooked legal mechanisms and obscure funding pipelines have suddenly become crucial variables that could affect whether the Smithsonian’s independence crumbles or holds.

In a 162-page report published on July 4, the White House’s Domestic Policy Council claimed that the National Museum of American History has “failed to tell America’s story and adheres to a radical, activist ideology”; it also criticized the museum’s leaders for not being patriotic enough. By far the longest public White House censure of a Smithsonian museum yet, it arrived after more than a year of pressure and suggests that the Trump administration has designs to exert greater influence on the institution’s work. The report follows a March 2025 executive order that called for ridding the Smithsonian of “divisive narratives.” In a December letter, the White House suggested that it would withhold funds if the Smithsonian did not hand over documents for a content review.

Defenders of the Smithsonian, all the way up to its secretary, Lonnie G. Bunch III, maintain that the institution celebrates a complex and imperfect country striving toward worthwhile ideals. Still, the White House has repeated the same tune: The telling of American history should be overwhelmingly positive and never confused about, in the words of two officials, “the fact that the United States has been among the greatest forces for good in the history of the world.” That the Smithsonian, which trusts its audience to handle nuanced ideas about the nation, is practically bursting with examples of American greatness and achievement is apparently not enough.

Since the president returned to office with history as one of his newfound hobbyhorses, several institutions have already gone through Donald Trump–led transformations. For all the White House has said about the Smithsonian, though, actual changes to the sprawling system have been relatively limited. As the institution faces refreshed threats, its ability to hold the line will be tested again. Legally, conceptually, and even practically, “America’s Attic” can be hard to grasp—whether you’re an administration official trying to meddle with its exhibits or a tourist trying to find the Air and Space Museum and ending up next door at the Hirshhorn Museum. The institution’s quirks could end up saving it.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The National Air and Space Museum

Even the way it began was unusual. The British scientist James Smithson never visited the United States during his lifetime, yet he developed such an affinity for the nascent republic’s ideals (or such a frustration with British society’s confines) that when he died, in 1829, he bequeathed his estate to the country to create an institution for “the increase and diffusion of knowledge.” Established by Congress in 1846, the Smithsonian today is made up of 21 museums, a zoo, and 14 education and research centers that are administered by a board of regents, which appoints a secretary to run the institution. A public-private partnership, the Smithsonian describes itself as an “independent federal trust instrumentality.” Generally speaking, its private funds go toward things such as landmark exhibitions, innovative research, and new facilities, and federal money, about 62 percent of its resources, is for building operations, basic research, conserving collections, and administrative services. Federal appropriations literally keep the lights on.

Emily Sexton, a lawyer who specializes in the arts, told me that the Smithsonian and entities such as the Kennedy Center, where she used to work, “were set up to essentially be like government establishments of free expression.” It sounds a little paradoxical, she admitted, but “in a government that is confident in its power, that’s not a problem.”

The continued independence of the Smithsonian is most evident when you look at its peers. The March 2025 executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” also called for removing “improper partisan ideology” from sites overseen by the Interior Department; subsequently, Park Service officials, who are under the Department of the Interior, took down numerous signs dealing with topics such as slavery and climate change. (These directives are tied up in an ongoing legal fight.) Arts agencies were also quickly changed by the administration, as Trump fired much of the council advising the National Endowment for the Humanities last fall and reimagined the Institute of Museum and Library Services with grant guidelines that read like a Trump loyalty test.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The “America’s Presidents” exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery

Whereas these institutions all fall within the executive branch, the Smithsonian’s status is harder to ascertain. Sometimes, the Smithsonian qualifies as part of the executive branch—as in a 1988 opinion that said that it is an “executive agency” for the purposes of the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act. Sometimes it does not, as in a 1997’s Dong v. Smithsonian, which determined that the Smithsonian is not a federal agency under the Privacy Act.

This shape-shifting leaves room for interpretation. In its report, the White House acknowledges that the Smithsonian is not subject to many laws governing executive agencies but also quotes a 1997 Office of Legal Counsel document that says the Smithsonian is “so closely connected to the Government that the two cannot realistically be viewed as separate entities.” The White House does not mention the footnote in which the office reiterated its view that the Smithsonian’s legal situation should be discussed on a statute-by-statute basis and that “broad generalizations regarding the Smithsonian’s status are inappropriate.”

The recent Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Slaughter expanded Trump’s power to fire leaders across the executive branch, but that probably doesn’t mean Bunch is next. Although the Court found that Trump could dismiss a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, the justices also wrote that the FTC falls “well within the heartland of executive power” and that they do not have “occasion today to define the bounds of what such power entails.” Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford Law School professor who has studied boundary institutions, explained to me that the ruling applies only to those exercising executive power and, generally, reporting to the president. “You look at what the Smithsonian does, and it looks nothing like the Federal Trade Commission or other entities where President Trump has successfully fired people without court interference,” she said.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The National Museum of American History

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The National Portrait Gallery

The Smithsonian’s other safeguard is its leadership structure. Whereas the Kennedy Center’s board of trustees includes dozens of presidential appointees, the Smithsonian’s board of regents is a much smaller body. According to the Smithsonian bylaws, the board consists of 17 members: the chief justice of the United States (who has traditionally served as the Smithsonian’s chancellor), the vice president, three senators, three members of the House, and nine citizens.Senators are appointed by the Senate’s president pro tempore, and House members are selected by the House speaker. Currently, congressional members on the regents are evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.

Installing loyalists among the citizen regents would be the most obvious way for the White House to exert control over the Smithsonian. But there, too, Trump lacks a direct route.

Citizen regents are selected by the broader board and their nominations handed over to Congress, which appoints them through a joint resolution that then has to be signed off on by the president. The citizen portion of the regents has dwindled for months, a number of their terms expiring quietly without replacements being named. Currently, the board is down by either two or three citizen seats (Denise O’Leary’s first term ended in April, and her renomination does not appear to have gone to Congress, though she remains listed online and attended a meeting after her term’s expiration as a committee chair), and this fall, three more regent terms will expire. The New York Timesreported on Tuesday that Vice President Vance has been holding up sending nominees to Congress, because Trump wants to find ones better aligned with his vision —an effort that follows instructions in the March executive order calling for Vance to seek citizen members who are “committed to advancing the policy of this order.”

One person who is familiar with regents operations (and who spoke anonymously because they are not authorized to discuss these matters publicly) told me that it is highly unusual for such appointments to be delayed and that, in the past, candidates were quickly reviewed and approved by Congress. As “the ultimate and only fiduciary board” at the Smithsonian, the board has significant power, the person noted: “The hard decisions come back to the regents.” Amid the uncertainties, the person took comfort in Chief Justice John G. Roberts remaining chancellor, a role he has held since 2005. The justice’s “institutionalism applies here as well,” the person said, stressing that Roberts is invested in “the health of the institution over the long run for his kids and his grandkids.”

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The National Museum of African American History and Culture

Smithsonian staff similarly laud Bunch as a source of steadiness amid political turbulence. Known to be diplomatic and evenhanded, Bunch has become more direct recently, telling CNN’s Christiane Amanpour earlier this month that “it’s our job to tell an accurate, complex, and truthful history” and that “it scares me when people aren’t brave enough to face their history.”

No ground here is entirely solid, though. The chancellor of the Smithsonian is “traditionally” the chief justice, per the Smithsonian’s website, but the regents could, in theory, choose another from their ranks. And Bunch, after more than 30 years at the institution, may be nearing the end of his time in office, possibly leaving a void at the top. Trump has tried to force out a Smithsonian leader before; last year, he attempted to fire National Portrait Gallery Director Kim Sajet via social media, a post that was met with an unusually forceful statement from the institution that essentially asserted: That’s the secretary’s job, not yours. Any more attempted firings would likely bring a similar response, but last year, Sajet stepped down anyway, illustrating how political rhetoric can effectively function as policy.

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

Political signs on display at the National Museum of American History

Occasionally, when a budget impasse rolls around and the government shuts down long enough, visitors have been reminded that the Smithsonians are no ordinary museums. Last year’s shutdown forced the closure of public-facing galleries across the institution for more than a month.

This government-funding piece could be the Smithsonian’s weak point—and the White House seems to know it. The administration at one point inserted since-removed footnotes into budget directives conditioning the apportionment of funds on compliance with Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” order and, later, on compliance with Trump’s 2026-fiscal-year budget. In the December letter, the administration told the Smithsonian that its funds were available only for use consistent with the March 2025 executive order and an August 2025 letter that called for a more intensive content review of eight museums.

Although Congress has the final say when it comes to spending, experts told me that the Office of Management and Budget has some power to manage the disbursal of appropriations so that agencies don’t overspend or underspend. Funds cannot be held up for policy reasons, Philip Joyce, a public-policy professor at the University of Maryland, told me, so in this case, “I don’t think they’d have a leg to stand on.” That doesn’t mean the administration won’t try, though, he said: “A conclusion I have reached after 18 months or so of this administration is that a lot of the things that we thought were based on laws are really based on norms. And if people are not willing to follow the norms, then the laws don’t do you any good.”

David E. Lewis, an expert on public administration at Vanderbilt University, echoed that point, telling me that “if apportionment steps over into the realm of an illegal deferral or impoundment, that would be problematic, but it was sort of built on good faith.” Lewis doesn’t think the administration worries about winning in court anyway: “If they lose in court, they also win, because they’re seen as fighting against what they call radical leftist ideology.”

There is at least one way in which it actually loses, however. A trip to the National Mall shows you quickly enough that for all of the noise, the museums still draw visitors from across the political spectrum. Although the Smithsonian does have an endowment that could theoretically keep it afloat, the withholding of funding could bring about closures. When it comes down to it, what leader has ever won political points by keeping children from rocket ships?

Caroline Gutman for The Atlantic

The National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum

The Election Deniers Are in Charge Now

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

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Tonight, President Trump is expected to give a speech about what he claims is recently declassified intelligence about election interference. He is also expected to talk about potential vulnerabilities with voting machines, which has become a favorite topic lately among people who still think he won the 2020 election and who believe that fraud continues, unchecked.

Lately, as polls show Republicans losing the House in the midterms and uncertain to hold onto the Senate, Trump has gone into an election frenzy. The administration sent letters to election officials threatening to prosecute them if noncitizens who are ineligible to vote cast ballots. It threatened to cut off federal anti-terror funds if states don’t get rid of voting machines that use QR codes. And the president keeps pushing the SAVE America Act, which ups ID requirements for voting. All of this seems designed to lay the groundwork for the argument: If we lose the midterms, it can be only because someone cheated.

Ultimately, the president has little power over elections. The place to truly advance the argument that elections can’t be trusted is in the states, where officials have authority over the building blocks of elections. Luckily for Trump, he has inspired an informal but robust ground operation. The big change since 2020 is that people who mistrust election results are highly active, particularly in swing states. The even bigger change is that some of them have risen to positions of power in those states, where they can affect voter rolls, election machines, and county tallies. Nowhere is this more true than Georgia, where I recently visited to meet some of the election skeptics who are—wait for it—now helping run elections.

On January 28, when the FBI raided the Fulton County, Georgia, election hub and took hundreds of boxes of records from the 2020 election, two women who are now crucial to the future of Georgia’s elections watched the action from their cars. We have a contemporaneous record of how they felt that day because Steve Bannon called and asked them. “I’ve worked really hard to see this day coming, and it’s surreal,” Salleigh Grubbs said on the War Room podcast that day. “It’s very surreal. And it’s wonderful.

When the 2020 election happened, Grubbs worked at an industrial-fluid-systems company and read about election fraud on Facebook. Six years later, when she appeared on Bannon’s show, she was in a very different position. Grubbs is now on the State Election Board, whose members suggest rules, look into potential violations of election law, and make sure election officials are doing their jobs.

Grubbs’s appointment last year was historic, for the state and maybe also the country—not because she’s someone who doesn’t believe the results of the 2020 election, but because she was the third person with those beliefs on the five-person board, a majority who almost always voted as a bloc. Georgia is now a state where election deniers can influence who is eligible to vote, how ballots are cast and counted, and whether the vote tallies of millions of Georgians are legitimate.

On Radio Atlantic this week, we travel to Georgia, a once-red state quickly turning purple, where election skeptics are not just inside the building; they have taken over several floors, settled in, and put their feet up on the table, and now they are trying to change all of the locks.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: It’s May 19, primary day in Georgia. This Election Night party at the Renaissance Waverly in suburban Atlanta technically started half an hour ago.

[Music]

Rosin: But something is wrong. There are no balloons, no streamers, no excited fans hugging each other. The plates of antipasto are so untouched they look like a display.

The help—and I am including reporters in that—outnumber invited guests about 5 to 1. The only glimmer of light at this party comes from tiny candles flickering on every table—but given the mood—those little candles are giving “vigil.”

This is a party for Brad Raffensperger, who is currently the secretary of state and now running for Georgia governor—and who, six years ago, had a life-altering phone call with the president.

Donald Trump: I just wanna find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.

Rosin: And even when Trump amped up the insults—

Trump: They hate the state, they hate the governor, and they hate the secretary of state. I will tell you that right now. And the only people that like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right?

Rosin: Raffensperger stayed calm.

Brad Raffensperger: Well, Mr. President, the challenge that you have is: The data you have is wrong.

Rosin: That leaked phone call was one of the last moments when the world—if the world is American democracy propped up by free and fair elections—felt like it might hold steady. An established southern Republican calmly telling the fired-up president, No, I cannot help you find those 11,000-something votes.

Raffensperger: We have to stand by our numbers. We believe our numbers are right.

Rosin: And No, we do not agree that you won the state of Georgia.

Raffensperger: We believe that we do have an accurate election.

Rosin: Raffensperger was, to some, a hero of American democracy. He even won reelection as secretary of state two years after that phone call—a vote of confidence from the people of Georgia.

Now, an hour from polls closing, it seems maybe Trump was right, that not a lot of people like him. Early results show that Raffensperger has just over 14 percent of the vote.

I watch the local-TV reporters here awkwardly try and spin this lifeless party into an event worth covering.

Reporter: And they say it’s a very close-knit group and a fun group, they’ve described themselves.

Rosin: Outside this room, Raffensperger has a whole new reputation as a villain, hated by people in Georgia—and all over the country—who think the 2020 election was stolen and that elections are routinely rigged.

Mike Lindell: These people, Raffensperger I would put him up with the worst, the biggest criminal politician that ever lived.
Paul Harrell: Brad Raffensperger, or Ratzenberger, or however you say his last name—

Rosin: A few days before the primary, his campaign reported a “credible threat on his life.” A four-page manifesto that included a picture of him with the word boom scrawled over his face.

[Ambient event noise]

Rosin: Now it’s 9:30.

Raffensperger: Well, good evening, everyone—

Rosin: And Raffensperger shows up at his party with his wife, Tricia. He’s tall, silver-haired, with wire-rim glasses. He moves to the front of this still-way-too-empty room.

Raffensperger: We put on a good fight. But just remember, great quarterbacks like Tom Brady didn’t win every single game. And so sometimes, it doesn’t go your way. God bless you all. Thank you for coming.
[Applause]
Reporter: Is that it for you then? Is this it?
Raffensperger: Well, you know, life’s been good to us. You know, as long as I have Tricia, I am just doing fine.

Rosin: The defender of democracy has exited the building. Now a different kind of power is ascending.

[Music]

Rosin: I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic.

When Trump called Raffensperger that day in 2021, he was winging it, cobbling together rumors and stuff he saw on Twitter into a desperate script. Six years on, the operation has been professionalized. Those 2020 rumors from Georgia—that dead people voted, that drop boxes weren’t secure, that voting machines were rigged—have gelled into a semiofficial Republican strategy repeated by party leaders, packaged into legal briefs by groups like America First Legal, a conservative nonprofit founded by Trump adviser Stephen Miller that’s challenging election procedures in states like Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota.

And then this week on Truth Social, the president announced that today, at 9 p.m., he is making a special address to the nation. Early reports are that the speech is about “investigations into U.S. elections.”

Right now, polling suggests that Republicans could lose control of the House. And hanging on to the Senate is not guaranteed. In the run-up to November, the goal seems to be to seed the Trump logic from that phone call, but this time in advance: If we lose, it can only be because someone cheated.

Or—and here’s a new one—that the election was never legal to begin with. As an America First Legal brief reads, if the issues they are bringing to court don’t get resolved, quote, “it could threaten the legal validity of the election results themselves.”

In other words, if the issue is not resolved, the election results could be null and void.

Ultimately, though, the federal government has little power over elections. The place to really advance the argument that something is rotten with elections is in the states, where officials have actual authority over the ballots, the drop boxes, the voting machines—the building blocks of elections.

And here is the real, big change since 2020: People who tend to believe elections are rigged, they now have real power. They have since made their way into official positions: in advisory roles, state Senate, even onto election boards.

Which is why we traveled to Georgia during primary week, a once-red state quickly turning purple, where election skeptics are not just inside the building; they have taken over several floors, settled in, put their feet up on the table, and are now trying to change all the locks.

[Music]

Jason Frazier: I can find thousands of irregularities, in almost every election.
Salleigh Grubbs: Well, there’s always gonna be issues, ’cause you’re always gonna have, illegal voters, apparently.
Sara Tindall Ghazal: They were talking about Satan and demons that had taken hold of this, and I’m like, "You’re talking about me, aren’t you?”
Rosin: Are you currently worried about the security of the midterms, the 2026 elections?
Grubbs: Well, in Georgia, absolutely.

Rosin: The one who’s worried—that’s Salleigh Grubbs. Grubbs grew up in a northwest suburb called Marietta, before the sprawl of Atlanta crept in.

Grubbs: I’m one of those people when I see something wrong, you know, like if somebody’s choking in a restaurant, I’m gonna be the one going over there, you know, to do the Heimlich.

Rosin: The way Grubbs sees herself, she’s always scanning for who’s in trouble, and then she jumps in.

Grubbs: You know, one day I was driving up [Interstate] 985, and it was raining, and there was this guy laying in the emergency lane, just no car, no nothing.

[Music]

Grubbs: And I’m watching all these people drive by, and nobody’s stopping. I pull over, and I’m, like, out there frantically trying to flag people down because the guy looked dead. And it blew my mind that people didn’t stop and pull over.
That’s just kind of always been my mindset: You respond to situations where something seems wrong. And so once I saw that first process of that day, I’m like, “This is not right.”

Rosin: That “process” she witnessed back in November 2020 was a hand recount of every ballot cast in Georgia’s election earlier that month. It was called for by Raffensperger in an attempt to quiet suspicion about the election.

Grubbs had never been that politically engaged. But she was active on Facebook and a frequent listener of Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, she told Washington Post reporter Isaac Arnsdorf. She’d recently come across an article on a Bannon-approved site about how Democrats were cheating, trying to “flip” Trump’s landslide win in Georgia. She’d also seen videos online of people going to observe the count and being told to stand back—pandemic rules were still in place.

She and her friend Susan Knox had gone down to observe the recount at the local elections center in Cobb County, Georgia. They’d also been told to stand six feet back, which made her suspicious—What were they trying to hide? That day, she was just one in the suspicious crowd.

What happened the next day, November 20, made her really stand out. A friend called her up and said:

Grubbs: So-and-so’s at Jim Miller Park, and there’s a shredding truck there, and they’re shredding stuff.

Rosin: She grabbed her keys, jumped in her car, and raced over to the elections center. Susan Knox posted videos online of what was happening.

Susan Knox: November the 20, Friday morning.
Grubbs: And sure enough: I pulled up, and there’s a shredding truck, and they’re wheeling out these bins—
Knox: I’m watching all of these ballots being shredded now.
Grubbs: —and sucking it up into the truck and shredding it.
Knox: Un-be-liev-able.

Rosin: Knox and Grubbs tried questioning the driver of the truck, but he ignored them. When he started driving away, they took off after him. They later sat for interviews, and Grubbs started calling it her “Thelma and Louise moment.”

Grubbs: I have to think, If everything was on the up and up, why would he hide his face? Why wouldn’t he talk to me? And why would he try to lose us? So that was very suspicious.

Rosin: Eventually, the story made its way to Trump himself.

Trump: They are, uh, burning their ballots, that they are shredding, shredding ballots and removing equipment.

Rosin: —who brought it up in that phone call with Raffensperger.

Trump: And they supposedly shredded, I think they said 300 pounds of—3,000 pounds of ballots.

Rosin: Election officials in Cobb County said the truck was destroying routine election-office waste, namely empty privacy envelopes used for absentee ballots. Immediately after the 2020 election, the secretary of state’s office did a hand recount, a machine recount of all Georgia ballots, and a signature verification on absentee ballots. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation later joined them in looking into any allegations of fraud, such as ballots scanned twice or unsigned ballots. They found mistakes, but not at a scale large enough to change the results, and no evidence of coordinated fraud. The official conclusion about the shredding truck and the 2020 election in Georgia was that it was just an election.

But five years on, none of this has shifted Grubbs’s impression about what happened that day and, according to her, what keeps happening. I asked her about the truck. She answered in the same way she answers most questions these days about elections.

Grubbs: So when people start lying to cover things up, it’s like, Well, why would they do that? So they must have something to hide if they’re gonna start lying about things.
Rosin: Now, various state officials went over that story and said, That’s our standard procedure. Why doesn’t that answer the question for you?
Grubbs: No, absolutely not.
Rosin: Because?
Grubbs: Because they have no evidence in that, No. 1. No. 2, there were multiple different stories told.

Rosin: Grubbs continued to tell me the same story with the same details she told back then.

Grubbs: We called for the sheriff to come over, and they said, “Well, we don’t have jurisdiction.”

Rosin: Only, the person who talked that way five years ago was a citizen-activist who learned about so-called election fraud on Facebook. The person who is saying that now is in a very different position.

Grubbs: Good morning, everyone. My name is Salleigh Grubbs, and first and foremost, I would like to thank Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones for his confidence in appointing me to this position. I am grateful for the opportunity to serve on the Georgia State Election Board.

Rosin: Grubbs is one of five members of the Georgia State Election Board. Which are appointed and volunteer positions—there are no term limits. The board’s job is to suggest rules, look into potential violations of election law, and make sure election officials are doing their jobs. And if they find violations, they can conduct investigations and replace county election directors. Not every state has an election board, but among those that do, Georgia’s has uniquely broad powers. Traditionally, the board works together with the secretary of state’s office to oversee the elections process, although, with Brad Raffensperger in charge, it’s not so amicable these days.

[Music]

Rosin: Grubbs’s appointment last year was historic, for the state and maybe also the country—not because she’s someone who doesn’t believe the results of the 2020 election now sitting on the Georgia State Election Board, but because she was the third person with those beliefs on a five-person board, a majority that almost always voted as a bloc. Georgia has become a state where election skeptics can influence who is eligible to vote, how ballots are cast and counted, and whether any county’s voting tallies are legit.

Although, Grubbs herself told me she doesn’t see her new status as that big of a deal.

Rosin: It’s funny because you don’t trust the government, but you’re in government now.
Grubbs: Well, I’m a volunteer, and I’m doing it because I love my state, my community, and my country. And I’m not in government per se. It’s not like I’m in government. Like, I’m not a bureaucrat.

[Music ends]

Tindall Ghazal: Election work is incredibly granular. And I just, my brain really likes that kind of work. And it, I’m a nerd.

Rosin: This is Sara Tindall Ghazal. She’s a lawyer and the only Democrat on the State Election Board. Tindall Ghazal started her career monitoring elections in conflict zones around the world, like Liberia, Zimbabwe, Nigeria. In 2021, she was appointed by the Georgia Democratic Party to sit on the board.

Tindall Ghazal: So it was all a very granular, boring, tedious kind of work.

Rosin: Back then, the board was mostly Republican, mostly lawyers, and the atmosphere was collegial. They debated statutes, rule changes, whether the rule of lenity should apply in this case or that case (I don’t know what it means either; you can ask a lawyer friend). Most decisions were unanimous.

Rosin: What’s the first memory you have of that atmosphere changing? The very first seed of it.
Tindall Ghazal: You mean on the board? It was very specific. The GOP made a decision to have a new board member. And the first major statement that this board member made—

Dr. Janice Johnston: I call these people “vote predators.” They prey on the weak.

Tindall Ghazal: She talked about there being election predators out there, somehow stealing votes or committing fraud.

Johnston: Vulnerable voters must be protected, and vote predators should be hunted down and stopped.

Rosin: That new board member was Janice Johnston, who was appointed in 2022 by the state’s Republican Party. A retired ob-gyn who was the first on the State Election Board to start talking about widespread fraud. And then, a couple of years later, came Janelle King, a local media personality and frequent Fox News commentator.

Janelle King: Duplicate ballots, counts not adding up, pulling ballots from stacks and creating new batches. This is not okay.

Rosin: And then, finally, a year later, No. 3. Salleigh Grubbs:

Grubbs: This is reaching the level of insanity in the state of Georgia. And this is really a huge problem, and I appreciate you—

Rosin: In the beginning, probably it still felt a little fringe to you.
Tindall Ghazal: Oh, extremely fringe. Yeah, absolutely.
Rosin: What does it feel like now?
Tindall Ghazal: (Exhales.) Now I feel like I’m the fringe.

[Music]

Rosin: What used to be fringe is everywhere, and not just in Georgia. As the midterms get ever closer, Trump has been talking about cheating in elections more and more. And when we were on the ground in Atlanta in May, we could see the suspicion machine in action. Another version of the shredding truck being born, just in time for primary day.

Steve Bannon: Breaking news. Georgia’s 2026 election results will be aggregated on Election Night by the secretary of state from a secret emergency bunker, which is off-limits to candidates, the public, and even to the State Election Board, which has requested access.

Rosin: That is Steve Bannon, who closely tracks on his podcast all things election-related, with a particular focus on Georgia. The scandal of the week when we were there involved the secret emergency bunker.

It’s hard to explain these things without making them seem bigger than they are, but this one goes something like this: There is a room where the secretary of state receives the official vote tallies from all the counties. They add them up and post them online.

Bannon: Hang on for a second. We’re gonna go to break. Salleigh Grubbs is with us.

Rosin: Grubbs and the other election skeptics on the State Election Board—have asked for access to the room and been denied.

Grubbs: If you remember, Steve, our secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger said, you know, Georgia’s had the cleanest elections in the country and, you know, all the things are fine. There’s nothing to see here. Well, my question is: If there’s nothing to see, if there’s no issue, then why are you trying to keep us out? Why can’t we be there if the elections are perfect?

Rosin: For Grubbs, a closed door is never just a closed door. It means something is being deliberately hidden from view. I asked her about the bunker a few weeks later when we talked.

Rosin: What happens there—do we understand this correctly?—is that the state tallies come in. It’s not a ballot-counting thing. It’s just that on computer screens, all the state tallies come in. Is that what the room is?
Grubbs: Well, I don’t know, ’cause I’ve never been there.
Rosin: Do you have any guesses about why they don’t want you there? Like, is it a tiny room? Does it have to do with practicality?
Grubbs: No, because they, I mean, they have caterers that go, they have press that goes, they have vendors that go. So I really have no clue.

Rosin: The press is not allowed in, by the way—only upstairs in a press room. They do have food brought in because they are working, like, 12 hours straight on Election Night.

But again, I am being drawn into the details. The bunker is not real. I mean, it is a real physical space known as the Election Night Reporting Room. A spokesperson for the secretary of state said that having lots of additional people there jeopardizes the process because it’s detailed work that requires a lot of focus. And I got the sense they specifically did not trust these additional people—as one person from the secretary of state’s office told us on background—“This is serious work, and these are not serious people.” A judge later ruled the secretary of state did not have to allow access to Grubbs and the other board members.

The Election Night Reporting Room is not open for anyone to walk into, but it’s not secret the way things are secret in a covert-ops thriller. Although, with words like emergency and bunker—the skeptics have made routine election work seem like a covert-ops thriller. Like, in the movie version, the person playing Raffensperger might be fudging results while eating his catered lunch.

Rosin: I mean, the other issue is that when you said, “What’s the problem with people watching?” Of course, like, when you put it that way, there’s no problem. However, there were actual problems. Like, election workers were threatened by people who didn’t believe the election results. Brad Raffensperger, whatever else you think he’s done, have received huge numbers of death threats.
Grubbs: Yeah, so have I. I have had to have gun patrol put on my house, from a death threat.
Rosin: Maybe the point is that the rhetoric has a cost. Like, using words like bunker or using words like they’re secret—
Grubbs: I didn’t come up with that.
Rosin: But it does make people mad before there’s evidence of wrongdoing. There’s suspicion of wrongdoing, and it’s fine to ask a lot of questions, but the way that suspicion comes out on podcasts or in certain kind of language then kinda whips up a fervor, which you’ll see on X, and then leads to, you know, people showing up and yelling at election workers and disrupting what has previously been a fairly, you know, routine process.
Grubbs: So you think it’s totally okay to do it behind closed doors with no accountability because someone might threaten someone?
Rosin: No, I think it’s with accountability. There’s many people in the room—
Grubbs: Okay, who are the people?

Rosin: This is how my conversation went with Grubbs. There was always another door of suspicion to open. The idea that one could be too suspicious, that suspicion itself could be a problem, just never really landed.

In the constant stream of skepticism, it’s hard to pick out one thing that could really upend an election.

[Music]

Rosin: One good candidate might be the skeptics’ obsession with election technology and, specifically, QR codes.

Johnston: QR codes are not constitutional. They’re not compliant with law as a voter-verifiable ballot.
Grubbs: I’ve seen it from people on the right, on the left, in the middle that have no faith and confidence in the QR code.
King: The utilization of QR codes for ballot tabulation faces severe legal uncertainty.

Rosin: The QR Codes are an innovation of a company that was called Dominion Voting Systems. You may remember that name from the 2020 elections. Voters cast ballots by selecting their candidates on a touch screen, and the machine prints out a piece of paper with a QR code on it. Then that QR code is scanned as an official ballot.

For election officials, this is a more accurate way to record votes. The skeptics, however, do not like that you can’t verify your vote with your own eyes. And they’ve argued that the machines are easily hackable. Dominion, now called Liberty Vote, has defended its technology in court and has repeatedly insisted that its machines are secure and that they did not alter or delete votes in 2020 as some people claimed.

But the issue keeps coming up—in Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Ohio. And reportedly, it’s a theme of the president’s speech tonight. And in Georgia, the skeptics succeeded in writing it into law.

In 2024, the state legislature passed a law saying Georgia had to dispense with QR codes by July of this year. State lawmakers argued over what exactly they should replace their system with, and over the astronomical cost of doing that. Time passed, and then election officials said they wouldn’t have time to train poll workers on any new system. So instead, legislators kicked the can down the road, extending the deadline to 2028, a red flag for election skeptics.

Rosin: Are you currently worried about the security of the midterms, the 2026 elections?
Grubbs: Well, in Georgia, absolutely. We are still using these God-forsaken ballot-marking devices, which we don’t need. We shouldn’t be voting by QR code. And yeah, I think we have significant issues.

Rosin: Despite no evidence of fraud in 2020, QR-code paranoia keeps metastasizing. Last week, the Trump administration said all states had to transition to paper ballots or they would lose tens of millions of dollars of federal anti-terrorism funds.

[Music]

Rosin: After the break, what it’s like to be an American voter in a purple place where people who don’t trust election results are running elections.

[Break]

Rosin: We are recording this for a podcast and an article in The Atlantic. Is that okay?
John Egbert: Yes.
Rosin: Okay, great. What is your name?
Egbert: It’s John Egbert.
Rosin: And what do you do?
Egbert: I’m a police sergeant

Rosin: To be honest, I already knew what John Egbert did, because he’s easy to find online .

[Cheesy cop-drama music]

Egbert, on The First 48: So what do y’all think?
Captain Michael O’Connor, on The First 48: Just knock on the door and hope for the best, which I don’t think is a great idea.

Rosin: He appeared on a show called The First 48, which followed around Atlanta homicide detectives doing their homicide-detective work.

The First 48 voiceover: For homicide detectives, the clock starts ticking the moment they are called.

[Cheesy cop drama music]

Rosin: He first joined the police department in 1999. His unit has investigated gang activity, murders, abductions. He once saved a puppy from a storm drain.

This version of Egbert was hard to conjure now, as we stepped over Amazon packages and a watering can into his living room, which seemed to be mostly decorated with board games and musical instruments. But we weren’t here to talk true crime anyway.

Egbert: I received a notice in the mail from Fulton County that my status as a valid voter was being challenged by someone.

Rosin: Basically, in 2023 the county sent Egbert a note saying that Egbert was going to be removed from the voter rolls if he didn’t act quickly. And he found this odd. He and his wife had been voting at the same polling location for years. He started asking around—he’s an investigator after all—and discovered that his neighbors had also gotten a letter challenging their status as valid voters. He did some more digging and found out a clerical error had been made—he lives on a street with a similar name to a major road in the city. But that was not the end of the story. The county had not flagged the error or challenged his right to vote. It was someone else.

[Music]

Egbert: I’m Sergeant John Egbert. I’m here as a Fulton County resident. I was challenged by Jason Frazier.

Rosin: Egbert and dozens of other people had to show up at a hearing to defend their right to vote. And as far as “innocent until proven guilty” goes, this challenge to his rights did not meet his smell test.

Egbert: The only reason we’re still here is because this is a bad-faith challenge. This man is trying to suppress votes. And he’s happy to suppress as many as he can for any reason he can. So thank you. That’s all I have.

Rosin: What prompted you to actually go?
Egbert: I just took such umbrage at it. I lived here, you know, at the—I can’t remember how long I had lived here at the time. I had lived in this particular spot since 2011, so it was probably, lived here for 13 or 14 years. I worked for the police department here, so not only was I angry at being victimized, but I felt that it would be particularly poignant if I got up to speak as a police officer, a member of the, you know, the law-and-order crowd. So I wanted them to hear how it was affecting me.
Rosin: Do you remember anything about the guy who challenged you?
Egbert: No, not really. He was from somewhere in the suburbs. I don’t remember where. But I don’t know anything else
Rosin: Did you feel any animosity towards him?
Egbert: Yeah, quite a bit. He’s the one who accused me, and he’s the one who was trying to keep me from voting. And I feel that he knew he was doing it not because he thought I was fraudulently voting, but because he was literally trying to stop as many people from voting in Fulton County as possible.

[Music ends]

Frazier: So yeah, we’re standing outside of a mailbox store. Essentially, it’s just a pack-and-ship location, and they’ve got a bunch of little boxes that you can get your mail delivered if you travel a lot or just wanna have some privacy.

Rosin: This is Jason Frazier, the guy who challenged Egbert’s right to vote, trained as a mechanical engineer, now semi-retired. He carries a leather folio full of documents—printouts of voter rolls, letters from the election board, whatever backs up his cause. The mailbox store where we met him is in a strip mall in a suburb called Sandy Springs: majority white, historically Republican, and still technically in Fulton County. It’s close to where Frazier lives, but very far, both geographically and spiritually, from the heart of Atlanta, a more racially diverse and solidly Democratic city.

Rosin: This place we’re looking at, I mean, to me, it’s just a FedEx, DHL, UPS.
Frazier: Right.
Rosin: I’ve seen a million of them. Why is this relevant to your life, this place?
Frazier: Yes, yes. This is relevant because in the state of Georgia, you have to register to vote where you live. You can have your mailing address be somewhere else. And the reason that’s important is because, let’s say—we’re in Sandy Springs right now—let’s say we have a mayor race in Sandy Springs and it’s very close. I could have all of my friends from Roswell get the P.O. Box here, which is a neighboring town, and then we could easily win a race, and that’d be a whole lot cheaper than flyers or mailers or even radio.

Rosin: It is in fact not legal to register to vote at a P.O. Box, although sometimes people do it anyway, maybe because they don’t know that. Or maybe it’s their most reliable address. Or they have a specific circumstance—say, they are a judge or a survivor of domestic abuse who has some safety reason to keep their home address secret.

To be clear, Frazier has not uncovered any evidence of an intentional plot to subvert the Sandy Springs mayor race. He’s just saying it could happen. He says the Fulton County voter rolls are littered with people who are deceased, whose names are incorrect, whose addresses are wrong, whose birth years are impossible, and with people who are listed as living at P.O. Boxes like this one in Sandy Springs—all of which, to him, represent bad things that could happen. Here’s how he does his work:

Frazier: Every state’s a little bit different, but in Georgia, you can buy the entire state voter roll for $485 directly from the secretary of state’s office.
I challenged several people that, quote-unquote, “lived” in these little boxes in 2022, or maybe it was 2023, and they accepted the challenge, Fulton County admitting that nobody can fit in that little box, so they can’t be registered here.

Rosin: Frazier takes the voter roll he bought from the secretary of state and then sorts it by county and then by address. If he sees, say, 60 people at one address, he looks it up and voilà. Sometimes it’s a mailbox store, or maybe he finds someone like Egbert, with errors in his residential address. He does this by hand in Microsoft Excel and then alerts Fulton County.

By his own estimate, Frazier has made over 15,000 challenges. And he’s not alone. He’s part of a movement in Georgia that has filed more than 100,000 voter challenges since 2020, the vast majority of which—according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution—have been dismissed.

For every voter Frazier challenges, there’s a letter from the county, much like the one Egbert received back in 2023: Act now to disprove the challenge, or be removed from the voter rolls.

Frazier says he’s not trying to disenfranchise anyone. That he didn’t intend for John Egbert to have to defend his own right to vote. He told us several times that he just wants the Fulton County voter rolls to be clean—clean voter rolls and clean elections.

Rosin: I think in a pure sense everyone would agree, if I did a poll and I said, “Do you want clean elections?” 99 percent of people would say yes.
Frazier: I hope so.
Rosin: Unless they had nefarious purposes.
Frazier: Yes.
Rosin: So as a pure goal, that’s obviously a very defensible one. But do you see a cost to what you’re doing? Like, there is another side of the scale.
Frazier: Well there’s a cost to making it perfect. Absolutely, that would be incredibly costly, but there’s a cost in not doing it.
Rosin: I’m asking these questions because if math were the only consideration, that would be one thing, but there are people involved, and there’s a history of disenfranchisement—
Frazier: Oh, sure.
Rosin: —particularly in the South. I mean, when I looked at this list of people at this FedEx box—
Frazier: Yeah.
Rosin: the vast majority are Black.
Frazier: Okay.
Rosin: And so that taps into—just on your list.
Frazier: Sure, sure.
Rosin: So you can imagine someone would look at that and think, This feels like a way of trying to disenfranchise people whose lives are maybe not as stable as other people’s lives who can just have an address at a house somewhere and live at that address. I can’t accuse you of that, because, like you, I don’t have any evidence of your intentions, but I could put that pattern together.
Frazier: Yeah. And I don’t look at whether you’re male, female, if you voted Democrat, Republican. That’s not a concern of mine. And just like you had mentioned, if this is, you know, if there are more African Americans at this location, well, that might be more Black folks that live in Atlanta, but they’re voting in Sandy Springs for the wrong mayor and city council. They really wanted to vote for the Atlanta mayor. They really need to be registered where they live in Atlanta so they can make sure that they’re voting for the right people.

Rosin: Frazier has done all of this work purely as a volunteer. That’s his own $485 he’s spending on voter rolls. But as time went on, he aspired to a more official status.

[Music]

Rosin: In 2023, the Republican Party in Fulton County nominated Frazier to the county’s board of elections. It’s like the county version of the state board that Salleigh Grubbs sits on. But the Democratic majority on the county board has denied Frazier that chance—twice.

One Democrat who voted against Frazier’s appointment multiple times described him as having a, quote, “egregious record of voter suppression.” But in a world where the State Election Board is dominated by skeptics, Frazier found another way in.

Rosin: Do you have any relationship with the State Election Board?
Frazier: Funny you ask. So as of Monday, I just got hired as a part-time investigator with the State Election Board. Yesterday was orientation and getting the laptop, and don’t have the cellphone yet, but it’s coming. Got the badge.
Rosin: What does that say? “Jason Frazier state government, temporary.” Nice. Nice.

Rosin: Part-time investigator.

Frazier is one of two employed by the State Election Board. He’s tasked with looking into any complaints about people violating election rules. He had only just gotten the badge, but he was already putting it to use. Kind of.

On primary night, Frazier showed up to the Fulton County election hub with his badge clipped on and visible, though he claims he was just there as a guy observing. Producer Rosie Hughes talked to him:

Frazier: Right now, I’ll be an individual. I was going to come here and look at some things. People I’m talking to are telling me they’ve seen issues. But again, that’s in my personal capacity. I haven’t truly looked at things to understand how bad or good things were.

Rosin: In Georgia—especially Fulton County since 2020—there are often observers. Frazier was somewhere between civilian watchdog and official investigator.

Frazier: So a lot of times, it’s good to look at the closing tapes to see what the counts are. It’s good to look at the opening tapes to make sure that there were zero votes on the machines before they started. It’s good to see what’s going on, if there are hiccups. It’s just good to keep your finger on the pulse and see what’s going on. You just really never know what you’re gonna stumble into.

[Scene change]

Sherri Allen: He was asking for documents that we would use for precertification before precertification. He was asking for all of those on Election Night.

Rosin: This is Sherri Allen, a Sandy Springs attorney who’s the chair of the Fulton County election board. Frazier is well known to the Fulton County board from his tens of thousands of challenges and attempts to join the board. Here is how she describes Frazier’s presence at the election hub that night.

Allen: At 11:02 is when the polling place was closing. During that same time, we were being asked while we were trying to collect everything from elections, we’re in the middle of trying to do all of that, and we’re being asked for documents, for all kinds of things that I think that you have to let the department and the county do their work.
There wasn’t anyone saying anything was wrong. They were just interfering, and I think that’s disruptive to ask for things while we are still trying to conduct an election.
We don’t have a large enough staff to try to have someone to just answer their questions, while at the same time, we’re focused on trying to make sure that voters can find out that night what the tally is and what it looks like.
We don’t have any problem with providing things later. You know, send us a request, all that you want. We’ll supply that. But on Election Night, let us finish doing the work.

Rosin: After all the scrutiny following the 2020 election, after all of Frazier’s complaints, Fulton County made several changes. The entire election board has turned over, and a new elections director is in charge. They also hired 16 people whose full-time job is to comb through voter rolls and make sure they are accurate. Frazier, however, doesn’t seem satisfied with that.

Frazier’s view is that it should all be automated and simple. Why, for example, couldn’t Fulton County just input commercial addresses—like the mailbox store—and automatically reject them as voter addresses? I ran that idea by Allen.

Allen: That would be very unfair if all commercial addresses are blocked, because the issue is not that you cannot use a commercial address; it just has to be that your commercial address is, quote-unquote—and the law doesn’t say this, but, quote-unquote—“where you lay your head at night.”
Let’s say I park my car in a lot, and I sleep there every night. Does that mean that I cannot use the location of where I’m sleeping every night as my address if that’s where I’m living?

Rosin: Okay, so this accounts for people who lay their heads in places that don’t immediately come to mind when you think “home”—say, the back room of a business, which is technically a commercial address, a shelter of some kind, even a parking lot.

Still, I asked again, from Frazier’s perspective: Can’t this all be done quickly and efficiently? Why can’t people who don’t belong on the voter rolls be automatically kicked off?

Allen: I think you should be very careful. And the reason I think you should be careful: Think about someone who’s unhoused and registered, let’s say, at a shelter. Well, when you’re trying to feed yourself and figure out a place to lay your head, you may not have reported to that shelter for a week or two. Well, if you have a letter there and then somehow you miss it, and you also have to try to get to Fairburn, where you don’t have bus access, to have a challenge hearing to make sure you maintain your right to vote, I think we should be very careful how all of that is handled. And poverty shouldn’t determine whether or not you should get to vote.

Rosin: If you are looking for proof of whether these local officials could have any real impact, whether a volunteer from Marietta plus an ob-gyn could spark a whole new way to unsettle the elections process, you would find it on January 28.

The day the FBI raided the Fulton County election hub, taking hundreds of boxes of records from the 2020 election. Members of the State Election Board had sent multiple subpoenas to the county requesting access to those records. Grubbs and Janice Johnston, the ob-gyn, watched the raid from their cars. Steve Bannon called, and Johnston told him the board’s fight in court was, quote, “maybe a significant part of the reason the FBI is here.” Grubbs also appeared on Bannon’s show that day, and she said something striking right as Bannon was teeing up to a commercial break.

Bannon: Salleigh we’ve had on the show many times over the years.
Why does it take six years to get to where we are today? Why are these ballots kind of the holy grail about the 2020 election, ma’am?
Grubbs: Well, you know, Steve, it’s like I keep saying, is: If you have nothing to hide, you hide nothing.
And it has been a very long journey. And I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I’m now also on the State Election Board as well as being first vice chair of the Georgia GOP. So as you know, I’ve worked really hard to see this day coming and it’s surreal. It’s very surreal. And it’s wonderful.
Bannon: So I just want to make sure. We’re gonna go to break.

Rosin: It’s been almost six months since the FBI took those records, and so far, nothing. No announcement of a smoking gun or even a hint of a suggestion of where they might find one.

Salleigh Grubbs was happy for that moment she talked to Bannon, but now heading into the midterms, she and the skeptics are back at peak worry, about voter rolls and QR codes and bunkers and a whole host of other things.

Could any of what they’re worried about plausibly add up to fraud? After all, those QR-code voting machines are not perfect, and there was bipartisan support in Georgia for adopting a more old-fashioned pen-and-paper system.

Okay. So in 2024, experts at one D.C.-based think tank compiled a comprehensive list of instances of election fraud going back decades. The think tank came up with plenty of examples. But the total numbers represented a miniscule percentage of voters. For example, in Arizona—a state facing several lawsuits over alleged fraud—the list, which went back 25 years, came up with 36 instances of fraudulent ballots. The percentage that represents is—lemme see if I can get this right—.0000845 percent, and no election outcome was altered as a result. That think tank, by the way, was the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. authors of Project 2025.

It’s hard to speak to the motives of individual citizens who believe that fraud is ever present, easier to speak to the motives of officials in the Trump administration. Just this month, the administration has gone into an election frenzy. They sent letters to election officials threatening to prosecute them if noncitizens vote—which they legally cannot anyway. They threatened to cut off funds if states didn’t get rid of QR codes. They newly assigned 260 FBI analysts to do “records checks” on the 2020 ballots taken from Fulton County. Their deadline, by the way, is this Friday.

Of course, the president’s speech tonight reportedly about election interference and the potential vulnerabilities of voting machines, which could be yet another way to signal to voters: Don’t trust the results.

And the president keeps pushing the SAVE America Act, which ups ID the requirements for voting, the goal of all of this being—we’ll just let him say it:

Trump: But if we terminate the filibuster as we should do, and immediately vote for the SAVE America Act, then we will not lose an election for 100 years. We do that, we’re not gonna lose an election for 100 years.

[Music]

Rosin: By the way, Egbert, the police sergeant we talked to, got his voting rights back. It’s weird to even say that sentence, as if it’s an accomplishment. An American citizen taking a day off work to travel to a board hearing and argue to get back a fundamental right he never should have lost in the first place.

Voter rolls are not a data-validation challenge. They are lists of people. When Stephen Miller’s group files a brief declaring a voter list or a drop box or a machine invalid, if they one day succeed in declaring a state’s election results null and void—those are people whose votes are being invalidated, American citizens who may lay their heads in a parking lot or a suburban bedroom, but who all have exactly the same right to vote.

[Music]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Theo Balcomb. Sam Fentress fact-checked. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. We also had music from Breakmaster Cylinder. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists—like Tolu Olorunnipa and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez—two staff writers who do excellent reporting and writing on elections and democracy—when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.

I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.

Reading a 3,000-Year-Old Poem to a 3-Year-Old Boy

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 13:16:56 +0000

In Book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey, a band of war-weary sailors is navigating home when a narrow strait appears on the horizon. The ship, captained by their king, Odysseus, is blocked on one side by a high cliff where a six-headed monster named Scylla is waiting to devour those who pass beneath. On the other side lies a whirlpool called Charybdis that could swallow the ship whole. Odysseus orders his men to row on. Scylla pounces, snatching members of the crew between her jaws. As she consumes them, Homer writes, they shriek, stretching out their arms in “horrifying death-throes.”

It’s a gruesome scene, one of many in this confusing, archaic poem composed some 3,000 years ago. One night this winter, hearing Scylla’s tale read aloud to him for the first time, my 3-year-old son, bundled in his pajamas before bedtime, had a request.

“Read it again!” he said.

The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a children’s book. The poem’s structure can confound even an adult reader. It does not open with “Once upon a time,” but rather in medias res, as a committee of gods discusses a war that the author expects you to know about already. By the time the story gets to Odysseus’s plight—Homer assumes you’ve heard of him, too—his journey unravels like a Quentin Tarantino film: It starts near the end and then shifts back and forth in time. Some parts of the plot are also not especially kid-appropriate. Characters trip on drugs. A giant’s eye gets poked out with a red-hot stake. Odysseus is unfaithful to his wife. Goodnight Moon this is not.

Nevertheless, I have spent the past several months reading The Odyssey to my toddler. Part of my motivation is high-minded. Homer’s fingerprints are all over other epic tales: Classic characters who owe a debt to Odysseus include Dorothy on the yellow-brick road, Huck Finn floating on a raft, and Bilbo outsmarting Smaug in Middle-earth. This poem “is the ur-text,” Christopher Nolan, who directed the film adaptation of The Odyssey that is coming out this week, told TheNew York Times recently. Why not start with the source material? But also, I’m doing this because, some questionable content aside, The Odyssey is a great yarn. My son is young, but he’s not too young to appreciate bloody battles, man-eating monsters, and a side quest to hell.

[From the December 2017 issue: ]The Odyssey and the other

I eased in gently at first. Before reading the full epic, I introduced my son to the story of the Trojan War with picture books produced for children, including The Adventures of Odysseus. The illustrations showed him fleets of Greek ships sailing for Troy to recover Helen, and men being transformed into livestock. They taught him that a Cyclops has only one eye and that Sirens are alluring but dangerous.

When he seemed ready for the real thing, I chose the 2025 translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, who teaches a Homer seminar at Bard College. His language is luscious, full of detail, and lots of fun. (He describes Charybdis, for example, as being “like a seething cauldron / That bubbles up to the brim when it’s set on a roaring fire.”) When I read it aloud, my voice falls into a rolling cadence that propels the story forward. This is by design: Mendelsohn aims to replicate Homer’s original meter, which makes his version ideal for performance.

Mendelsohn also retains Homer’s repetitious epithets for characters that some modern translations—written for the silent reader of the 21st century—have slimmed down. We hear many times that Penelope is a “clear-thinking woman,” and that Athena is the goddess “of the bright owl-eyes.” When read aloud, the repeated descriptors serve as reminders to the listener of who each character is and the role they play. Which is especially helpful when that listener is someone who still takes afternoon naps.

The first time I opened the 549-page volume with my son, I read the first line using the most Homeric voice I could muster.

“Tell me the tale of a man, Muse—”

“Daddy, what’s a Muse?” he asked.

I explained that a Muse was a goddess who loved literature and art. “They help the storyteller recite the poem,” I said.

“What’s a goddess?” he asked.

“It’s a god who is a girl,” I said. “You know, like Mommy.”

He nodded, his eyes narrowing slightly.

“Keep reading,” he said.

I did as ordered, spending several minutes getting through the first seven lines. I told him of Odysseus’s “roundabout ways”—“What’s roundabout?”—and the sacking of “Troy’s hallowed keep”—“What’s hallowed?” I wondered if I’d made a mistake. At the current rate, I worried we might never finish the first book, let alone the entire poem. Then I read line 8, which tells of how Odyseuss’s men succumbed to their desperate hunger and ate the prized cattle of the sun god, Hyperion:

“Fools that they were, like children, who devoured the sun god Hyperion’s—”

“Cows!” my son interjected.

He knew the story. The prep had paid off.

We continued to read into the summer, line by painstaking line. Sometimes he’s refused to listen, thrusting a well-worn children’s book into my hands instead. I’ve also censored the story here and there: When things got a little too steamy inside the lairs of Calypso and Circe, I skipped ahead. As we approach the end of the epic, I’ll save a horrific scene where Odysseus orders the execution of a group of women whom his family keeps as slaves for another time. Despite these challenges, The Odyssey has been a constant in our lives that has brought us closer together. One day, when he fell ill with a stomach bug, he pulled out the book and crawled into my lap. For him, The Odyssey was a comfort read.

With a bit of prompting, my son has been able to notice some of the ways The Odyssey echoes in other beloved stories. In Book 5, Poseidon sends a storm that shatters the boat that Odysseus was sailing in, alone. Ino, a sea goddess, takes pity on Odysseus. She lends him a magical veil that keeps him from drowning and tells him to “use those hands to swim.”

“Ino is telling Odysseus, ‘Just keep swimming!’” I said.

“Like Dory in Finding Nemo!” he said.

“Exactly!”

Finding Nemo can, in fact, be seen as a modern children’s reinterpretation of Homer’s poem. The hero’s name, Nemo, is the Latin word for “no one”—which is what Odysseus calls himself as he attempts to escape the Cyclops.

Later on in Book 5, as Odysseus tries to survive in the ocean, he wails out a prayer for salvation: “Have pity on me, Lord.” His prayer is heard. The waves stop rolling and the storm ceases.

I asked my son, “Can you think of anyone else who was lost at sea and prayed for God to save him?”

He looked down, thinking.

I offered a hint. “Maybe someone who was swallowed by a fish?”

“Jonah!” he said.

I’ve loved helping him make these connections: As he gets older, I hope he’ll take solace in knowing that the newer stories he enjoys today are connected in a chain of humanity stretching back thousands of years. I have always found that link to the past reassuring.

[Read: The phrase I texted my kids 133 times]

For now, though, I’m delighting in how The Odyssey has unlocked my son’s imagination—something that the other, more kid-friendly books we’ve read together haven’t been able to accomplish.

The weekend after we read about Scylla, I took my son for a walk along a nearby river that passes through steep banks with cliffs above. At one point, he stopped and squinted toward a crevice high in the rock. “That’s where Scylla lives,” he announced. He lifted a stick and a stone from the ground: his sword and shield. “I’m Odysseus,” he shouted, and sprang up the bank. “Let’s get her!” A few months later, he used life-size chess pieces at an outdoor brewery to reenact the sacking of Troy. After finishing the battle with the help of a knight—the Trojan horse, he explained—he shoved a bishop standing in for Paris and wrapped his arms around the queen, who represented Helen. “I’m Menelaus,” he said, the name rolling off his tongue thanks to all the times he’s heard me read it to him. “Paris stole my wife.”

The world around him has become a stage filled with heroes, gods, and fantastical creatures. As he grows older, he’ll learn that plenty of those exist in the real world, too. Stories—especially myths—can give children context for the truth of life ahead. They can help children understand that they aren’t the first people in the world to face hardship or overcome obstacles. Others have come before, stood up to the monsters, and thrived. And so can they.

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