By most measures, the new GLP-1 pills are underwhelming. Earlier this month, the pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly debuted a weight-loss tablet that is far less effective than its popular injectable counterpart, Zepbound. Oral Wegovy, which hit the market in December, can hold its own with the shot version—but it has to be taken on an empty stomach with fewer than four ounces of water. And both pills come with many of the same side effects as the shots, namely nausea and diarrhea.

As someone who’s currently on a GLP-1 injection, I still can’t wait to start taking the pills instead. No, I’m not afraid of needles. The injector pens that are used to administer GLP-1s are so quick and painless that sometimes I worry the needle didn’t actually go into my skin. But the shots are a nuisance nonetheless. They’re supposed to be taken on the same day every week, but I struggle to stick to the schedule. The injections also need to be refrigerated—which is especially a hassle whenever I travel. Last month, I visited relatives who don’t know that I’m on a weight-loss drug. I was too sheepish to have a conversation with them about it, so I left the pen in my toiletry bag and didn’t throw it in the trash until I got home.

This might all seem trivial, but a mere annoyance compounds when it must be repeated every week for the rest of your life. Even though many GLP-1 users hit a weight-loss plateau after several months, they have to continue injecting themselves to avoid gaining the weight back. “Over time—particularly as patients transition from the active-weight-loss phase to long-term maintenance—the psychological burden of ongoing injections can become more apparent,” Akshay Jain, a clinical instructor at the University of British Columbia, told me. (Jain has consulted for both Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk.)

[Read: The Ozempic plateau]

This may be where the true value in weight-loss pills lies. Patients may be able to use the injections to actually lose weight, and then lean on the tablets to keep it off. The pills can be downed with a swig of water just like statins, SSRIs, and so many other pharmaceuticals that are already part of people’s daily routine. On that front, Eli Lilly’s pill, sold under the brand name Foundayo, is especially notable. For most people, the drug doesn’t come with fussy rules about when it should be taken. Doctors I spoke with were enthusiastic about the idea of switching some patients to pills because it allows them to feel as if they’ve made meaningful progress toward normalcy.

So far, doctors just haven’t had very good options for GLP-1 patients who are looking to maintain their weight loss. Some have attempted to switch patients to older weight-loss pills. Others have suggested that patients space out injections to every few weeks. But neither strategy is foolproof. The older drugs have been successfully tested as a way to maintain weight after bariatric surgery, but they haven’t been studied among people coming off of GLP-1s, David Cummings, a professor at the University of Washington, told me. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the method may not be all that effective. “I have a lot of patients that regain all of their weight,” Catherine Varney, the director of obesity medicine at UVA Health, told me. (Varney has done paid speaking gigs for Eli Lilly.) The tactic of taking a GLP-1 shot less frequently, meanwhile, hasn’t been tested in a large randomized clinical trial.

By contrast, a recent clinical trial by Eli Lilly tracked nearly 400 subjects who switched from shots to Foundayo, and found that on average, they maintained most of their weight loss after 52 weeks. (The study has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.) A comparable study hasn’t been done with oral Wegovy, but Novo Nordisk, the company that manufactures the drug, believes that patients should be able to switch from the Wegovy shot without affecting their weight. Because the two drugs are made with the same molecule, “there’s no reason to think that there’d be any difference,” Andrea Traina, the senior medical director for obesity at Novo Nordisk, told me. Doctors told me that they have been encouraged by patients who have already switched from shots to oral Wegovy. “Initial anecdotal reports are promising, but we still need more long data to form conclusions,” Katie Robinson, an assistant professor at the University of Iowa, told me.

All of this comes with a significant caveat. These pills may not remedy the biggest reason people stop taking GLP-1s: price. The new tablets are cheaper than the shots, but they’re still not cheap. If you pay out of pocket, the lowest dose of Foundayo costs $149 a month, which is about half the price of the cheapest version of Zepbound. The Wegovy pill also starts at $149, compared with $199 for the injection. Again, this is $149 every month indefinitely—it quickly adds up. With insurance, the cost of these drugs can be much lower, but few people can count on that. A recent survey of employers found that only about one in five insurance plans at large companies covered GLP-1s for weight loss. The situation gets especially tricky for older Americans. Medicare is technically banned by law from covering weight-loss drugs, though the Trump administration is piloting a program to provide beneficiaries with access.

[Read: The obesity-drug revolution is stalling]

There is hope that the price of Foundayo, in particular, will drop over time because of the way it is manufactured. Unlike all of the other GLP-1s on the market, it is not a peptide—a class of drugs that mimics hormones in the body—which makes it much simpler to produce. But even if the price plummets, not everyone may be as eager to switch to a pill as I am. Everyone who takes a GLP-1 has their own issues that affect whether they stick with their regimen. For some, the once-weekly injection may be more convenient than daily pills; others may want drugs that come with fewer side effects; and still others may just decide to take whatever is cheapest and does the job.

So much of the attention surrounding GLP-1s has been on their remarkable efficacy at shedding weight—and the search for drugs that are even better. Retatrutide, a much-hyped injection that is in the works, can apparently lead to nearly 30 percent loss in body weight on average. But options that lessen the burden of taking a forever drug may matter even more.

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When canceled became a common label applied to basically anyone who’d done anything to offend anyone, it had many unfortunate effects. One was rolling transgressions as serious as sexual assault and as trivial as accidentally not being nice to a fan (maybe) into one bucket of misbehavior. Another was implying that society was run, more than ever, by mob rule. The truth is that the age of consensus has ended, and even the canceled can continue their careers by pitching themselves directly to the public—which is how, for example, the allegedly disgraced Morgan Wallen became the most popular man in country music.

Another consequence was making collective judgment seem cruelly irreversible. Cancel culture, as many a podcaster has ranted over the past decade, offers no obvious path to redemption. Examples of people expressing sincere apologies, changing their behavior, and winning forgiveness have been rare. Transgressors who’ve returned to public life, such as President Trump, have mostly offered denials of wrongdoing and worn their cancellation as a badge of honor.

So when Ye (formerly Kanye West) placed an ad in The Wall Street Journal in January apologizing to “those I’ve hurt,” it was genuinely surprising. A decade ago, after spending years defining the sound of 21st-century hip-hop, Ye began to alienate portions of his listenership by going MAGA. But he remained a bankable celebrity—in a lucrative partnership with Adidas—until 2022, when he went all in on anti-Semitism. He took to shouting out Hitler, selling swastika T-shirts, and otherwise preaching about how Jews control everything and must be stopped. Record labels, brands, and many fans distanced themselves from him.

In the Journal, though, he wrote that this behavior had been the result of an undiagnosed brain injury he’d suffered 25 years earlier. He had “lost touch with reality” but now, armed with a new health routine and outlook on life, had amends to make. “I aspire to earn your forgiveness,” he wrote.

The letter was well written. It conveyed that he’d wrestled with great shame and was humbly offering himself to the world’s mercy. A reader might ask: What if what happened to Ye—mental-health problems giving way to a Third Reich fetish—had happened to me? Wouldn’t I want a chance to make good?

But Ye is not like most people. He’s a celebrity whose words reverberate throughout the culture, and whose reputation is worth a lot of money. In recent weeks, he seemed to be inching his way back into normalcy by releasing an album (Bully) and playing gigs. Then, on Tuesday, the United Kingdom banned him from entry, citing the “public good.” Forgiveness had been the wrong concept to apply to his situation all along. The language of individual morality obscures what so-called cancellations—and ever-elusive uncancellations—really should be about: doing what’s best not for the celebrity but for the rest of us.

The timing of Ye’s apology always seemed a bit convenient. In the same week that the Journal published Ye’s letter, the rapper signed a seven-figure record deal with the media company Gamma. Co-founded by Ye’s former manager Larry Jackson, Gamma is a new music-industry player that’s trying to compete with the major labels. A separate article in the Journal reported that Jackson had discussed Ye’s signing during an all-hands meeting with his staff, some of whom had reservations. The company’s leadership reportedly believed that Ye “was committed to creating music with positive messaging.”

The run-ups to Ye’s albums have traditionally been littered with explosive statements, publicity stunts, and repeated delays. Before his 2024 album Vultures 1, he offered a public apology to Jewish people—then soon doubled down on hating them. By contrast, Bully’s rollout has been serene and slick. Its official release date was pushed back only once, by a week. Ye has given no interviews and posted nothing of note since his January mea culpa.

Until just a few days ago, the low-drama PR strategy seemed to be working. Fans were praising Bully as a heartening return to Ye’s early, soulful sound. Its lyrics contained no inflammatory content. He’d played two sold-out shows at Los Angeles’s SoFi Stadium. Lauryn Hill joined him on stage, and other celebrities were cheering in the audience. Little attention was being paid to the other scandals in his life—such as a lawsuit from his former assistant alleging multiple instances of abuse (he has denied the allegations), which came after previous reports that he’d bullied and harassed employees at Adidas (about which he has not commented).

He was then announced as the headliner for all three days of the Wireless Festival, a long-running and prominent hip-hop event in London. This was the kind of gig that, if it went off without a hitch, would smooth his return to the status of globe-trotting, big-tent pop star.

But not everyone was going along with the rehab plan. After all, less than a year ago Ye was working on openly anti-Semitic music with song titles including “Gas Chambers” and “Heil Hitler.” Creative Communities for Peace and other Jewish groups excoriated the Wireless booking, and PepsiCo dropped its sponsorship of the festival.

The managing director of Festival Republic (which, along with Live Nation, runs Wireless), Melvin Benn, released an impassioned defense of the booking. He identified himself as an anti-fascist and a supporter of Jews. He expressed the view that “forgiveness and giving people a second chance are becoming a lost virtue in this ever-increasing divisive world,” and urged people to “offer some forgiveness and hope to him as I have decided to do.” Ye put out a statement saying that his “only goal is to come to London and present a show of change, bringing unity, peace, and love through my music.” He added that he wanted to meet with members of the Jewish community to listen and learn.

[Read: Cling to your disgust]

That same day, the U.K. government denied Ye’s visa, banning him from coming to the country. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote online that he “will not stop in our fight to confront and defeat the poison of antisemitism. We will always take the action necessary to protect the public and uphold our values.” Wireless subsequently announced that it was canceling the entire festival.

The government intervention quickly redefined the conversation around Ye, bringing up questions of free speech and legal precedent (the U.K. generally has less permissive expression laws than the United States, though both countries have lately wielded immigration policy against artists and activists for things they’ve said). It also, predictably, fed the sense of persecution that Ye’s followers have long clung to. On Reddit and X, some fans are griping that their idol is being subjected to harsher punishments than associates of Jeffrey Epstein have been. They are alluding darkly to a conspiracy … by a certain group of people … who seem to control the world …

In a way, though, the decision by Starmer’s government is clarifying. The question of whether Ye should be “allowed” into public life again—meaning given mainstream platforms and institutional support—was never about whether Ye deserved a comeback. He was shunned not because he’d morally transgressed (though he had) but because he’d used his platform to spread dangerous myths about a group of people already experiencing a rising tide of bigotry. His single “Heil Hitler” (which, again, is recent—released in May 2025) became a rallying song for people such as Nick Fuentes, the ascendent influencer who pushes open racism, sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. In 2022, a hate group hung a banner over a Los Angeles freeway that read Kanye Is Right About the Jews.

Speech laws, of course, vary from country to country. And record companies, corporations, and concert organizers can’t stop anyone from saying whatever they want. But institutions can and probably should try to not give money, megaphones, and credibility to someone who might use those things to spread messages that can get people killed.

Making judgment calls about public harm can be tricky, and the process is muddied by the forgiveness-focused language that rules so much of the conversation about celebrity conduct. Ye’s redemption campaign has foregrounded a theme that fits our parasocial zeitgeist: empathy for the individual. Yet while many of us may want Ye to get better, or believe he’s entitled to personal redemption, none of us has any real idea what’s in his heart. All we have is the record of how he’s acted before, and all we can do is make inferences about how he’s acting now.

My inferences say not to trust him, not yet. After spending decades expressing himself in freewheeling interviews, lately he’s mostly shared his thoughts in highly curated statements. On Bully, he raps in bland and mechanical fashion about conquering darkness and achieving a comeback. His lyrics, once outlandishly specific, are now flagrantly generic: “Know the Lord’s intervention was divine / Political and social tensions on the climb.” Listening, I wondered when the real Ye would crash back in and say what he really thinks, for better or ill. Only time and evidence can make that suspicion wane. And the only reason to rush that process is profit.

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From the window of Orion, home looks like a pale-blue marble slipping under the dark felt of the universe. The four people aboard the spacecraft, now earthbound after finishing their lunar flyby, have traveled farther from our planet than any person has ever ventured, and have seen more of the moon’s far side than any person has ever beheld. The Artemis II crew includes Christina Koch, the first woman to fly around the moon; Victor Glover, the first person of color to journey there; Jeremy Hansen, the first lunar-bound Canuck; and Reid Wiseman, husband to the late Carroll Wiseman, the namesake of a newly identified bright spot on the moon’s surface.

Down here, their space adventure has stirred feelings of awe—“moon joy,” as one NASA officer recently put it. Moon joy at this scale has been on hiatus for the better half of a century. The last crewed lunar expedition was Apollo 17, and it took off in 1972. Artemis II’s voyage has revived a thrilling sensation from missions past: the feeling of inching together toward the edge of new knowledge. If all goes according to plan, there will be an Artemis III and an Artemis IV and an Artemis V, at which point NASA hopes to establish a permanent presence on the lunar south pole. But what will we do with all that moon when we get up there for good?

Humanity’s attitudes toward that great orb in the night sky have shifted over the centuries: A powerful lunar deity morphed into an object of scientific fascination. Later it became a possible arena for war (America considered detonating a nuclear bomb there partly as a show of force against Russia in the late 1950s) and then a real, tangible place, one that few humans have felt underfoot (the Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt reported that lunar dust smelled like “spent gunpowder”). During the 54-year lunar-exploration freeze, public interest waned and government funding for more missions dried up. But that didn’t mean everybody suddenly forgot about space—instead, the cogs of economic ambition went right to work. We tried to monetize the moon.

For the handsome fee of $1,600, you too could have shipped a quarter-size object to the moon via Astrobotic Technology’s moon-mail service, announced in 2014. But many mementos were likely lost a decade later when the company’s Peregrine Mission One lunar lander failed to reach its destination and burned up upon reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere—along with other cargo, including, and not limited to, a Bitcoin Genesis Plate, a physical Dogecoin, a sticker from a young space enthusiast, and some copies of Reddit posts, as well as a powdered sports drink whose voyage was sponsored by a Japanese beverage company. (Astrobotic is planning another launch for later this year, and more personal keepsakes will exit the stratosphere in MoonBoxes, which are now sold out.) “The march of human progress has come to an inevitable point in its evolution,” my colleague Megan Garber wrote in 2014. “We’re about to use our celestial neighbor as an enormous billboard.”

The idea of a lunar economy has floated around for years, as humans have searched for resources that could benefit Earth dwellers and future moon dwellers alike: Private companies are intrigued by the financial rewards of harvesting the moon’s rare metals, ice (to use in life-support systems on the moon, or to refine for rocket fuel), and helium-3, a rare-on-Earth isotope that could be used in nuclear fusion, which could in turn replace fossil fuels. In a few years, there may even be lunar Wi-Fi or lunar 4G—NASA tapped Nokia to furnish the moon with its own cellular network, which was operational on the surface for roughly 25 minutes last year.

If we do indeed manage to build a permanent space home for ourselves, we should take care to remember the sentiments that propelled us up there in the first place. Before the moon became a site to push product or dig for profit, the question of why we should visit it in person roused much debate. Two NASA scientists made the case in these pages in 1963, and their reasoning was simple: scientific and technological advancement, political clout, and an appeal “to the imagination of the student.” In other words, by fulfilling our lunar aspirations, not only will we creep closer to unlocking the universe’s secrets—we will also introduce young generations to that great frontier of celestial speculation.

When Buzz Aldrin became the second person to walk on the moon, he took it all in and remarked, “Magnificent desolation.” And it was magnificent—enough to show the precarity of what yokes us to one another, enough to kick-start a worldwide environmental movement to protect what we have now. There will always be those who, understandably, doubt what can be gained from going out there rather than from fixing everything that’s wrong right here. But “human nature is blessed, or perhaps cursed, with an inquiring mind and an itch for adventure, two qualities that may well spring from the same fount,” N. J. Berrill wrote in this magazine a few years after the Apollo program was established.

In a message recorded before his death, the Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell welcomed Artemis II’s astronauts to “my old neighborhood.” Koch, Glover, Hansen, and Wiseman listened to his tape before their lunar flyby, more than 200,000 miles from home. “I’m proud to pass that torch on to you,” Lovell said. “It’s a historic day, and I know how busy you’ll be. But don’t forget to enjoy the view.” His words were a reminder to his fellow space travelers that they come from a short line of people who have peered out at the swirling mass of the universe, and also a reminder to us: to look up instead of down, if only for a little while.

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Legal opinions tend to be dry, wordy, and intentionally vague. One issued by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel earlier this month is none of these.

“You have asked whether the Presidential Records Act of 1978 (‘PRA’ or ‘Act’) is constitutional. We conclude that it is not,” Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser declares. The law, passed after Watergate, is designed to ensure a reliable and accessible public record. It makes presidential documents public by law, and governs how and when they must be preserved.

If the opinion stands, it will allow Trump to destroy the records of his administration’s actions, or take records with him at the end of his term. Combined with alleged violations of PRA in his first term, this could make Trump the most poorly documented president since at least Richard Nixon, and perhaps going back even further. (As my colleague Henry Grabar writes, the actual library part of his planned presidential library is an afterthought at best.) Yet Trump’s habit of making policy without deliberation, and often with stream-of-consciousness speeches and posts on social media, means that his administration is a paradox: simultaneously one of the most transparent and most opaque in American history.

The Office of Legal Counsel exists to issue sophisticated legal guidance to the White House, and in effect is frequently asked to provide justification for an administration’s actions; perhaps the most infamous instance was the “Torture Memos,” many produced by the OLC’s John Yoo during the George W. Bush administration to justify the use of, well, torture during the War on Terror. And guessing why the Trump administration would want to be rid of PRA isn’t difficult.

Trump and his aides have reportedly broken the law on many occasions. During his first term, he was reported to routinely tear up documents, despite staffers imploring him not to. (Some aides were tasked with painstakingly taping them back together to comply with the law.) In other cases, he flushed papers down toilets. Chief of Staff Mark Meadows reportedly fed documents into fireplaces at the end of the presidency. Trump’s staffers then took boxes and boxes of surviving documents, many of them highly sensitive, when they left the White House. He refused to return them upon request from the federal government, then allegedly attempted to obstruct their recovery. According to photographs included in a federal indictment, Trump haphazardly stored documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom and a ballroom stage. Trump pleaded not guilty, and his election led to the case being dismissed, which meant he was never tried on charges of obstructing the investigation, but now he would like to erase the accusation entirely by eliminating PRA.

Former Special Counsel Jack Smith, who investigated the documents case, also believed that Trump wanted to use documents his team took from the White House to further his business interests, according to Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, who obtained Smith’s memo—in other words, stealing public records to make a private fortune. (Absurdly, Trump’s Justice Department returned to Trump the documents that had been collected from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.)

The Trump presidency is in some ways unusually transparent. The president takes questions from reporters regularly—sometimes in a gaggle, sometimes in cold calls on his phone. The president is temperamentally unable to keep his own counsel, to the point that French President Emmanuel Macron scolded him last week: “Perhaps you shouldn’t talk every day.” There’s simply less policy process to be recorded in preserved documents, because Trump has drastically shrunk bodies like the National Security Council and replaced them with his id and instincts, chronicled in real time on Truth Social.

Yet if Trump is allowed to destroy or remove documents, the American Historical Association argues in a new lawsuit challenging the OLC opinion, historians “would be left with an incomplete historical record by which to professionally research, produce scholarship on, and teach U.S. history.” They add, “Once lost, this information is irretrievable and thus the harm irreparable.” The suit notes that federal courts rejected similar arguments about the law’s constitutionality immediately after its enactment, when Nixon sued to block it.

The history of Nixon’s presidential record also shows the value of the law, even long after a president leaves office. Nixon loyalists controlled the former president’s library for years, and presented a whitewashed version of Watergate to the public. But the law required that the warts-and-all records be preserved, and when control of the library was finally wrested away and handed to Tim Naftali, a professional historian, in 2006, the library began presenting a more accurate account and providing access to historians, who have in turn presented more complete chronicles of Nixon’s career.

Trump is the most corrupt and scandal-plagued president since Nixon; indeed, his fiascoes eclipse Nixon’s, but many of them remain mostly or somewhat hidden, thanks in part to a much more acquiescent Republican Congress than the one Nixon had. In Watergate, the crimes were known; the question was, in the words of Senator Howard Baker Jr., “What did the president know and when did he know it?” With the Trump administration, the situation is perhaps the reverse: We know much about the president’s stated motivations and beliefs, but we do not have a full accounting of what he and his aides have done. Keeping a record would allow the nation to fully understand his actions and their consequences—if not now, then at least later.

Related:

Tim Naftali: The death of nonpartisan presidential history (From 2022)The Trump Library symbolizes his presidency perfectly.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Trump made a deal that gives him nothing he wanted.J. D. Vance is definitely against foreign election interference.A new geopolitical reality is here.

Today’s News

President Trump agreed to a two-week cease-fire with Iran last night, pausing planned U.S. strikes. Iran released a 10-point cease-fire proposal that includes demands for U.S.-troop withdrawal, sanctions relief, and the right to nuclear enrichment, many of which conflict with Washington’s position.Iran said it would restrict ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz during the cease-fire, requiring vessels to coordinate with its military and pay tolls, signaling that Tehran plans to maintain control over the key oil route.Republicans won a Georgia special election, but the district shifted sharply toward Democrats, and liberal candidates secured another decisive victory in Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race last night.

Evening Read

Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic

The Literary Job AI Can’t Replace

By Rebecca Ackermann

Nothing seems to make literary-minded people angrier than an author taking credit for writing they didn’t do. A few weeks ago, Hachette canceled the U.S. release of a novel, Shy Girl, following a barrage of online accusations that it had been written with the unacknowledged help of AI …

The collective outrage overlooks a fact that the publishing industry acknowledged long before the rise of artificial intelligence: Not everyone with a great idea or unique story has the skill, experience, or time to write a book—or even a book review. Right now, AI tools are cheap and widespread, ready to tap in with a service that some people do need. But these models have been trained on uncompensated creative labor. They plagiarize. They lie, and they lie about lying. So instead, I’d like to make the case for a frequently maligned profession—one I’ve participated in—that rewards good writing, helps authors survive in an ever more challenging field, and allows remarkable perspectives to reach an audience they otherwise wouldn’t. That’s right: Ghostwriting is good, actually—when it’s done by humans.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Charlie Warzel: An incredibly weird time to be aliveAmerica looks like a paper tiger.The forgotten war that Iran already wonWhat the astronauts see that Trump cannotThe David Frum Show: What it means to be American

Culture Break

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Watch. Scrubs has a sneakily radical vision of male friendship, Julie Beck writes.

Explore. The NBA isn’t the same for everyone, Jemele Hill argues.

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PS

Last month, I wrote about the many instances of waste, fraud, and abuse popping up across the Trump administration. One prime example was a $70 million jet that the Department of Homeland Security had leased and wanted to buy—supposedly for immigrant deportations, even though it included a luxe bedroom cabin. The purchase was too ostentatious even for Trump, and it reportedly played a role in Secretary Kristi Noem’s ouster. But that doesn’t mean the administration is letting the plane go. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the government will hold on to the jet, making it available to First Lady Melania Trump, among others. Noem, it seems, was more a symptom than a cause of the administration living the high life on taxpayer dollars.

— David

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic*.*

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Service in wartime has long been a reliable path for Americans denied full citizenship to secure their rights. Black troops’ contributions to the Union cause during the Civil War helped convince Abraham Lincoln of the righteousness of extending suffrage to Black men. Women’s work on the home front during World War I persuaded a reluctant Woodrow Wilson to urge passage of the Nineteenth Amendment as a “war measure.” The military’s repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was followed a few years later by the Supreme Court’s recognition of the marriage rights of same-sex couples.

Perhaps the Trump administration is hoping the process works just as well in reverse.

Despite the conflict with Iran and other recent military activity overseas, the Pentagon seems focused on purging minorities and women. Last week, NBC News reported that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had intervened to block or delay the promotions of more than a dozen Black and female senior officers. According to both NBC and The New York Times, some officials are concerned that officers are being targeted because of their race, gender, or perceived political affiliation. In one instance last year, Hegseth’s chief of staff, Ricky Buria, bluntly stated that “President Trump would not want to stand next to a Black female officer at military events,” the Times reported. (Buria denied this.)

The Pentagon told NBC and the Times that promotions under Hegseth are “apolitical and unbiased.” Nevertheless, the episode is part of a broader pattern. So far, Trump and Hegseth have dismissed or forced the retirements of several high-ranking Black and/or female officers: General C. Q. Brown as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Admiral Lisa Franchetti as chief of naval operations; Lieutenant General Telita Crosland as head of the Defense Health Agency; and most recently Major General William Green as the Army’s chief of chaplains. Hegseth has publicly said that “our diversity is our strength” is the “dumbest phrase in military history.” By erasing Defense Department histories of nonwhite service members, and seeking to restore tributes to Confederate soldiers who took up arms against their country in defense of slavery, Hegseth has demonstrated a limited view of whose service is to be honored.

Trump is likely also seeking to ensure that remaining officers lack any qualms about following potentially illegal orders. Both he and Hegseth have long seen war crimes as worthy of admiration rather than scorn. As far back as 2016, Trump was regaling audiences at rallies with apocryphal stories about an American general shooting Muslims with bullets coated in pig’s blood. In 2020, he fantasized about turning the military’s guns on American citizens, but faced opposition from the leadership at the Pentagon. Yesterday morning, Trump publicly threatened to destroy Iran’s “whole civilization” and target civilian infrastructure, both war crimes. He subsequently backed down, handing Iran the ability to charge tolls for ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz; passage was free prior to the American attack.

Enlisted service members are disproportionately nonwhite compared with the U.S. population as a whole, while officers are disproportionately white. Women are also serving in larger numbers than ever before: About a fifth of active-duty military personnel are women. Yet Hegseth has long been dismissive of women’s service, particularly in combat roles, and once wrote that, under leaders like Brown, “black troops, at all levels, will be promoted simply based on their race” (this is called confession by accusation). Hegseth seems to want the pool of high-ranking officers to be even less diverse than it already is, having complained in his book that “America’s white sons and daughters are walking away” from the military. And he and Trump seem to be purging not only women and people of color, but officers who see them as equally capable—such as the Army chief of staff, General Randy George, who was fired after reportedly refusing to remove several Black and female officials from the promotion list to general.

[Adam Serwer: The war-crimes president]

Hegseth infamously claimed at the beginning of his tenure that promotions in the military would be “color-blind and merit-based.” It is now clear that this was not true. During his confirmation hearing, Hegseth was unable to provide any evidence whatsoever that the military had lowered standards in the name of diversity. If that is the case, then why have we seen so many well-qualified Black and female senior officers dismissed? Why did the Pentagon, for no plausible reason other than animus, expel trans service members after years of honorable service? “Color-blind and merit-based” now appears to have been a smoke screen for a politically motivated purge of not only Black people and women from leadership positions, but white officers who value their service.

The message being sent to lower-ranking officers is that they will be assessed on the basis of their gender, race, or politics, rather than their abilites—which will cause many officers to leave rather than stay and be mistreated, and many potential officers not to enlist to begin with. It is hard to deny the full benefits of citizenship to those who are willing to fight and die for their country; it is easier if that sacrifice is minimized or erased. Rewarding or punishing officers based on race, gender, or perceived political loyalty to Trump could also aid the administration’s larger project of undermining the claims of women and ethnic and religious minorities to equal treatment under the law in other parts of American society.

The progress earned by ethnic minorities and women in the armed services was hard-won. During the Civil War, Frederick Douglass argued that Black men’s service in the Union Army would strengthen their demands for equal rights. “Let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States,” Douglass said in 1863. “Nothing can be more plain, nothing more certain, than that the speediest and best possible way open to us to manhood, equal rights, and elevation is that we enter this service.”

Douglass was right, although the process was not as straightforward as he might have hoped. Black service helped justify the passage of the Reconstruction Amendments, but Reconstruction saw Black men disenfranchised and subjected to Jim Crow segregation. W. E. B. Du Bois made a similar argument for Black service in World War I. Returning Black veterans were subjected to horrific racist violence that ultimately strengthened Black resolve. Only after World War II—and over the objections of much of the brass—was the military integrated, and then only after an exhaustive internal investigation disproved racist assumptions that Black troops could only fill menial roles or serve in segregated units.

“Insofar as a service refused to a single Negro the technical training and job for which he was qualified, by just so much did the service waste potential skills and impair its own effectiveness. Quite apart from the question of equal opportunity, the Committee did not believe the country or the military services could afford this human wastage,” the final report from the Truman-era President’s Committee on Equality of Treatment and Opportunity in the Armed Services reads. “The Committee found, in fact, that inequality had contributed to inefficiency.”

[Adam Harris: The only thing integrating America]

Another way to put it is that overt racial discrimination and stereotyping made the military worse, not better. But that was before Hegseth, and his insistence that the problem with the armed services is that they are too diverse and too “woke.”

The result has been something like an inverse caricature of Republican complaints about diversity, equity, and inclusion, a system in which the incompetent rise not because of their abilities but because of their sycophancy. Authoritarian regimes behave as the Trump administration is behaving—optimizing for political loyalty rather than competence. Merit, in short, has little to do with it.

Hegseth is a prime example. Deeply unqualified for the job and convinced that brutality provides an easy path to victory, he has led the United States to the verge of a strategic defeat with a weaker adversary in Iran. The current cease-fire leaves Iran with a more hard-line government than before, one in total control of a shipping lane crucial to the world economy. The Islamic Republic is arguably in a stronger position today than it was when the war started, and probably in a stronger position than it was before Trump, in his first term, scrapped the Obama-era nuclear deal.

On Sunday, Trump posted on his social network a refrain that he and his toadies seem to think is insightful: “If you import The Third World, you become The Third World!” This archaic social Darwinism is the ideological mortar of the Trump project. It fuses Hegseth’s disdain for diversity in the military’s senior leadership and valorization of brutality with the administration’s attack on birthright citizenship and its deployment of federal agents to occupy American cities. It is a worldview that would assume an easy victory against a country like Iran, especially with America’s new, “unwoke” military. Bigotry isn’t just inefficient, as the U.S. military discovered in the 1940s. It also makes you stupid.

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The president of the United States is losing his head, and that means the rest of us must keep ours. At 8:06 a.m. eastern daylight time, Donald Trump posted this on his Truth Social site:

A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!

The world, unfortunately, has gotten used to Trump’s overheated rhetoric, and to dismissing the commander in chief as something of a crank who (as the French president recently advised) should perhaps keep more of his thoughts to himself.

But the president’s statements are policy, and he has now made it the policy of the government of the United States that at 8 p.m. Washington, D.C., time (3:30 a.m. in Tehran), he will order the U.S. military to destroy Iran and its entire civilization—permanently—unless his terms are met. (He did not specify those terms, but on Easter Sunday, he posted a frenzied and obscenity-laden message on Truth Social demanding that Iran reopen the Strait of Hormuz.) Whether the president is saying this with full control of his faculties or has well and truly lost his mind is irrelevant: He is still the president, and so we must consider the meaning of this policy.

[Read: Trump threatens to destroy an entire nation]

First, Trump is vowing to eradicate a nation of 92 million people and their entire culture, “never to be brought back again.” No leader standing in front of a court at The Hague would be able to finesse that language: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again” doesn’t leave a lot of room for charitable interpretations. Even Richard Nixon, the author of the “madman theory”—the notion that a president might seek advantage over an enemy by appearing to be irrational—never publicly threatened to wipe out Vietnam. Trump could argue that his threats against bridges and electricity plants might not be war crimes, if they have a military use, but his promise to erase a civilization from the Earth is a flat threat of genocide.

Second, the most important aspect of Trump’s threat is that it implies the use of nuclear weapons. Trump did not explicitly invoke nuclear arms, and he claims to abhor the idea of using them. (He has also, of course, asked why America has them if they can’t be used.) But the United States could launch every conventional munition it has, and although that kind of onslaught would immiserate the people of Iran, result in many deaths, and make reconstruction a long-term nightmare, Iranian civilization would survive. German civilization survived years of bombing so intense that the firestorms melted glass and asphalt; Japanese civilization survived similar incendiary attacks and two nuclear bombs. A threat to destroy an entire civilization in one night, assuming he means it, can be fulfilled only with the wide use of nuclear weapons.

The president now sounds no different from the authoritarian rulers of the world’s worst regimes. North Korea, when it was pursuing nuclear arms, would threaten to turn cities into “lakes of fire”; Iran, of course, has often threatened to “wipe Israel from the map,” which is why the world has been trying to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Now Trump is making those same kinds of threats—and he has nuclear weapons.

In the past, Trump’s sycophants in the conservative media have tried to wave away his bellicosity as just the way he talks and dismiss concerns as pearl-clutching from people who just don’t get him. But would any American offer the same grace to Kim Jong Un or Iranian Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, if they used the language Trump employed today?

Imagine how the United States would react if the leader of a major nuclear-armed power made a similar threat—if Russian President Vladimir Putin said something like Ukraine must submit to my demands by 0800 hours, or I will eradicate Ukrainian civilization, or if Chinese President Xi Jinping said, Taiwan must accept Chinese rule by sundown, or Taiwan, in one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world, will be gone and never return. At the least, the United States would likely go on heightened military alert—and might even raise the readiness of its nuclear forces—because we would have to assume that such statements from a national leader are not mere bluster.

Even during the Cold War, American planners avoided such pronouncements. U.S. nuclear strategy prioritized targeting enemy nuclear weapons, command and control, military assets, and the enemy government. There were good reasons for this list of priorities: Those targets mirrored what the Soviets would strike in the United States. Had World War III erupted, the net effect would have been something akin to what Trump is threatening now, but as the horrifying consequence of a nuclear exchange, not as an intended goal. (In 1967, Robert McNamara, in a moment of exasperation with some hawkish questioning from Congress, blurted out that the Kremlin’s leaders knew that if they attacked America, we’d kill 120 million Soviets; he was trying, however, only to reaffirm the deterrent logic of mutual assured destruction, not advocating for such action.)

If Trump did give an order to attack civilian targets that have no military value as a means of collectively punishing the Iranian people, he would be ordering war crimes. If he directs the widespread and irrevocable destruction of Iranian civilization—that is, if he commands a genocide and especially if he approves the release of nuclear weapons—the U.S. military should refuse such blatantly illegal orders.

In a better world, Trump would face a revolt in his Cabinet over such orders. Unfortunately, his Cabinet is stocked with needy courtiers who, to date, have preferred to enable the president’s reckless schemes rather than argue with him or resign in protest. Indeed, they were chosen not for the strength of their character but for their pliancy: People such as Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard exist as national political figures only because they circle Trump like dwarf moons around a gas giant. They are not going to stop him.

[Barbara A. Perry: This is not how presidents typically communicate]

Only Marco Rubio’s resignation would matter. Rubio, as secretary of state (and, concurrently, national security adviser), has a certain amount of political gravitas left, and if he spent it by threatening to walk out of the White House tonight as a private citizen, he might sway Trump from his mad threats. If Trump wishes to follow through on his threats, and the Cabinet declines to stop him, Congress could in theory convene and attempt to restrain him—but that seems even less likely to happen, despite some panicky concern from a few GOP senators.

Should Trump persist in his threatened course of action, then only a mass resignation of senior officers would stand between the president and a campaign of genocide. By this, I do not mean a mutiny or coup. The answer to Trump’s lawlessness is not more lawlessness. But American officers have a positive duty to refuse illegal orders, and the destruction of an entire civilization with nuclear weapons—which poses no similar threat to the United States—is as illegal as it gets. We must all hope that Trump’s message was an early-morning rant that got loose in the wild before anyone could stop him. But it’s out there now, and we are just hours away from his deadline. He is the president, and his words have meaning, and he has publicly committed the United States to the extermination of an entire nation.

If Trump gives that order, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should lay his stars down in front of Trump. Then, each general who gets the order should do likewise, and each man—and it will be men, in Hegseth’s Pentagon—promoted as a replacement should do likewise, until Trump has a pile of stars and eagles on his desk. Trump may eventually find someone to fulfill his orders, but people of honor and duty need not be the unwilling instruments of so great a sin.

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In 2005, a bipartisan commission of lawmakers and security experts concluded that “the Intelligence Community was dead wrong in almost all of its pre-war judgments about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.” America’s spies had told President George W. Bush that Saddam Hussein had reconstituted a nuclear-weapons program and that Iraq possessed biological weapons and mobile production facilities, as well as stockpiles of chemical weapons. These supposed facts became the basis for a U.S. invasion and an eight-year occupation. “Not one bit of it could be confirmed when the war was over,” the commission found. “This was a major intelligence failure.”

If a similar panel of experts scrutinized the run-up to the current war in Iran, their assessment might go something like this:

The intelligence community was accurate and consistent in its prewar judgments about Iran’s capabilities and intentions to attack the United States and its allies. Contrary to what President Trump has said to justify his decision, the intelligence showed that the Iranian regime was not preparing to use a nuclear weapon; it did not have ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States; and in response to a U.S. military attack, Iran was likely to strike at neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf and try to close the Strait of Hormuz, precipitating a global economic crisis. All of this was known before the war and presented to President Trump. This was an intelligence success.

Trump’s “excursion,” as he calls the biggest U.S. military operation of his second term, has unleashed a parade of horribles. Iran now controls the strait, where it plans to charge vessels a toll and can govern global flows of oil, natural gas, fertilizer, and chemicals that are crucial for manufacturing. A regime that Trump claims to have replaced still remains in the hands of hard-liners, whose repression of the Iranian people will be strengthened for having survived a decapitation strike by the world’s only superpower. And neighboring countries in the Gulf, whose livelihoods depend on exporting energy and creating safe places for people to visit, live, and work, will amass new weapons and reconsider their strategic partnerships with the United States.

Two decades ago, a president embraced information that turned out to be wrong, and disaster followed. Today, a president disregards assessments that proved to be right, and the predictable comes to pass. There’s a failure of intelligence there too—just not the kind we’re used to seeing.

“Your successes are unheralded—your failures are trumpeted,” President John F. Kennedy remarked in a speech to CIA staff at their headquarters, in Langley, Virginia, in 1961. Ever since, intelligence officers have ruefully invoked that truism whenever they’re blamed for a major screwup. The familiar storyline of an intelligence failure features analysts who neglect to “connect the dots,” case officers who get seduced by sources who exaggerate or lie, and politicians who contort ambiguous information to align with their preferred outcome. That’s what happened in the months before the Iraq War.

The lead-up to Operation Epic Fury turns this narrative on its head. The spies called it right, but the president went another direction. The failures of the intelligence community on Iraq’s WMDs produced systemic changes meant to keep botched calls like that one from recurring. In many respects, those reforms have worked. But they couldn’t account for a decision maker who had been seduced by previous military successes into thinking that the U.S. armed forces, under his inspired and perhaps divinely endowed command, could never stumble.

Some of Trump’s allies have criticized him for not making a public case for war, as the Bush administration did. But if he had accurately presented the intelligence, the facts would have argued against attacking Iran—or at least for not striking before the diplomatic options had been exhausted. Perhaps that’s why the president ignored, and later misrepresented, what his advisers told him.

[Read: Trump’s fateful choice]

“The regime already had missiles capable of hitting Europe and our bases, both local and overseas, and would soon have had missiles capable of reaching our beautiful America,” Trump said before a Medal of Honor ceremony at the White House on March 2. But the Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that building a missile that could hit the United States would take Iran until 2035, and only then if it was determined to do so, which analysts concluded it was not. When Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard—hardly the model of an apolitical presidential adviser—testified before Congress a few weeks later, she reported that Iran had missile technology that “it could use to begin to develop a militarily viable ICBM before 2035,” but did not say that it had done so. That timeline is crucial to understand, because to hit the United States with the ultimate weapon, Iran would have to place a nuclear warhead on top of an intercontinental ballistic missile.

That threat was not years away, Trump insisted. Iran was “going to take over the Middle East. They were going to knock out Israel with their nuclear weapon,” he told reporters in the Oval Office on March 16. A charitable reading might be that Trump believes Iran wants to use a nuclear weapon. But desire, or even intention, does not equal capability.

It’s true that Iran possesses uranium that could eventually be used to build a nuclear weapon, were it to be further enriched. But in late June, U.S. bombers struck nuclear-related facilities in Iran, which had made “no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability,” Gabbard said in her written statement to Congress. “The entrances to the underground facilities that were bombed have been buried and shuttered with cement.” That’s not a picture of a country on the brink of using a nuclear weapon.

Trump not only has misstated intelligence about Iran’s military potential. He has expressed surprise at the regime’s response to American and Israeli bombing, particularly Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the heavy drone and missile attacks it has launched on its neighbors in the Persian Gulf. But the president’s advisers had told him this was likely to happen. They knew that restricting a shipping artery would give Iran a chokehold on the world’s economy. It’s such a no-brainer maneuver that the Pentagon has built it into its war planning. When Trump’s military advisers apprised him of this possibility, he appeared to have shrugged them off. Iran would probably capitulate before trying to close the strait, he said, and in any event, he thought the military could handle it, The Wall Street Journal reported.

After threatening to bomb Iran if ships weren’t allowed to travel freely, Trump now says other nations should bear the burden of reopening the waterway. “The United States imports almost no oil through the Hormuz Strait and won’t be taking any in the future,” Trump said in a primetime address to the nation on Wednesday. “We don’t need it.” Oil prices rose following his remarks.

Trump has also said that no one told him that Iran was likely to attack Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and other Gulf nations that are close allies of the United States and host vital military bases. “They weren’t supposed to go after all these other countries in the Middle East,” Trump said during a White House event on March 16. “Nobody expected that. We were shocked.”

How could they be? In 2025, the U.S. intelligence community publicly reported that “Iran’s large conventional forces are capable of inflicting substantial damage to an attacker, executing regional strikes, and disrupting shipping, particularly energy supplies, through the Strait of Hormuz.” No less than Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, perhaps the war’s biggest cheerleader in the administration, had to admit that Iran’s regional retaliation was not exactly a surprise. “I can’t say that we anticipated necessarily that’s exactly how they would react, but we knew it was a possibility,” he said at a press conference on March 10.

Before the war, officials from two Arab countries told Trump and his top aides that they worried Iran could launch counterattacks on them, in order to halt the flow of oil, drive up prices, and trigger a global economic crisis, Politico reported. In early February, as U.S. warships were moving into position, I met with several of Qatar’s senior government officials. The likelihood of an Iranian reprisal was top of mind. One official pointed out the obvious, that a war could make it impossible for Qatar to produce and ship liquefied natural gas, the foundation of its economy. That’s exactly what happened.

After conducting its own war-gaming, one of the United States’ closest intelligence-sharing partners in Europe determined that a major American attack would compel Iran to hit countries in the Gulf and try to close the strait, an official in that government recently told me on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive assessment. The Americans were aware of those conclusions, according to the official, who was baffled that Trump claimed to be surprised.

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were also nonplussed, and angry, when Gabbard appeared before them last month. “There seems to be a discrepancy between what the intelligence community has reported over the years and what the president has said in terms of this action” in Iran, Senator Angus King, an independent from Maine, said. “And my question is, did you tell him?”

Gabbard avoided answering directly. But she said that the agencies she oversees had provided Trump “with the intelligence related to this operation in Iran, before and on an ongoing basis.” CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who was also present, said that he had participated in “dozens and dozens of briefings with the president,” including in the weeks before the war. He emphasized that “Iran had specific plans to hit U.S. interests in energy sites across the region.” Gabbard backed him up, noting that “this has long been an assessment of the IC that Iran would likely hold the Strait of Hormuz as leverage,” using a shorthand to refer to the intelligence community.

Senators were also keen to understand why one of Gabbard’s top deputies had quit his job over the president’s decision to go to war. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation,” Joe Kent, whom Trump had nominated to run the National Counterterrorism Center, wrote in his resignation letter, a revealing statement from an official who had access to some of the most highly classified intelligence in the U.S. government. Ratcliffe told the committee that he disagreed with Kent and that Iran maintained an aspiration to build a nuclear weapon. But that is not the same thing as actually building one and preparing to use it, as Trump has claimed Iran was doing.

[Read: An Army shake-up in the middle of a war ]

Senator Jon Ossoff, a Democrat from Georgia, read aloud a portion of a White House statement from the day after the war began: Trump had ordered “a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime.” He asked Gabbard: Had the intelligence community assessed that the threat was imminent?

The intelligence director, who had taken passionately anti-war stances as a member of Congress, walked an awkward line. She told Ossoff that the president is “the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat,” and that doing so was not the intelligence community’s job. In fact, it is precisely the job of the intelligence community to make that determination. But putting Gabbard’s evasive characterization aside, she said that “Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue to grow their nuclear enrichment capability.” What she didn’t mention: There is a world of difference between intention and imminent threat.

Plenty of presidents have dismissed the warnings and prognostications of their intelligence advisers, or simply not made time to hear them. When a stolen Cessna crashed on the South Lawn of the White House in 1994, some joked that it was flown by Bill Clinton’s CIA briefer, trying desperately to get a meeting with the president. At the other end of the spectrum, George W. Bush became obsessed with the minutiae of counterterrorism operations, keeping track of the various al-Qaeda members whom the CIA was hunting and killing.

Trump’s relationship with the intelligence community is more fraught than any of his predecessors’. As a candidate, he excoriated the agencies for their botched call on Iraq’s WMDs. As president, he has railed against a “deep state” that he claims has been out to get him for more than a decade. Trump has long said that he trusts his gut. He’ll know the war in Iran is over, he recently told an interviewer, “when I feel it, feel it in my bones.”

The U.S. intelligence community is neither designed nor equipped to restrain a president who is moved by impulse, emotion, and his own feelings. It can only provide him with information. When the president disregards what he’s told, or distorts it, that failure is his alone.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

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How is AI changing the way we work? This week on Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel is joined by Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale, two experts in management and leadership training. They discuss how chatbots and AI agents are winding their way through the workforce, offering a firsthand view of how companies are (and aren’t) adopting AI tools. The conversation covers the gap between AI hype and what’s actually happening in offices. It also touches on how overreliance on AI tools may be making bosses worse at their jobs, and how work may be one of the last bastions of sustained social connection in a period of cultural alienation and isolation.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Johnathan Nightingale: It turns out that humans really care about doing work they believe in, with people they care about. And when you hollow those things out, people have these emotional responses to it that I don’t see predicted by the marketing materials from the AI companies.

[Music]

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain: a show where today we are going to talk about work. Trying to talk about jobs right now—how we work, what that work means, what the future of white-collar work looks like—it is just extremely difficult.

We all seem to be situated in this very confusing moment, one that I think is captured very well by my Atlantic colleague Josh Tyrangiel’s story. It ran with this rather ominous headline: “America Isn’t Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs.” The piece is great, and you should totally seek it out. But the illustration of the piece I found quite apt.

It’s of this man; he’s in a tree. His eyes are two dollar signs, and he’s smiling while holding a chainsaw and cutting into the branch that’s supporting his own weight. This in many ways is the vibe of 2026. This feeling that this certain subset of people motivated by profit and efficiency are conducting an experiment that, if it succeeds, is not gonna just rewire the economy forever but change the very nature and essence of labor.

For the last few years, since the arrival of chatbots, the AI conversation around work has been some version of this. The tools are useful in automating busywork and drudgery. They’re getting better.

And so what does that mean for jobs? Well, AI executives have been issuing dire warnings. In 2025, for example, Dario Amide—the CEO of the AI company Anthropic—told Axios that AI could drive unemployment up 10 to 20 percent in the next one to five years and wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs.

Meanwhile, those who are running companies seem quite eager to unleash this technology on knowledge work—labor force be damned. They’re driven by profit incentives and a good amount of FOMO. AI is the future. Get on board or be left behind. What’s your AI strategy? In some cases, the fastest way to show results is to simply reduce head count.

Workers, especially young workers, are concerned. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate for college graduates ages 22 to 27 ballooned to 5.6 percent at the end of last year. And as The New York Times notes: “For those who are employed, more than 40 percent held jobs that do not typically require college degrees, the highest level since 2020.”

You can feel the weirdness in the economy right now. This fear of a kind of job-market stagnation, but no exact sense of what is happening on the ground. How much of all of this is actually AI driven? Simply put, there are huge fears here that AI is not only changing the way we might do our jobs, but it might be changing how we get them, whether we can keep them. AI executives are out here arguing that most of us, no matter the job, are destined to become middle managers for a host of AI agents. And you can take that with a grain of salt as just another tech CEO prognostication. But if there’s any truth to it, it would represent a massive change. And the concerns go well beyond the economy into something much more existential. What does it mean to be a human in a world that all of a sudden doesn’t value human labor in the same way?

So are we all destined to become middle managers? Is AI really ripping through the workforce? What is the value of work in this strange economy? And how can people survive—maintain dignity, human connection, all of that—in a world where decision makers driven by dollar signs are pruning the trees for every possible efficiency? Even if we’re all just sitting on the branches?

Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale are here to help me answer some of these thorny questions. They’re the founders of Raw Signal, a leadership and management training firm. Johnathan and Melissa have worked with thousands of executives and managers and companies across tech and other industries, and they’re keen observers of the ways that modern white-collar work and workplace communication is broken. But they also offer this clear vision of how work can stay human and humane. They join me now to talk it all through.

[Music]

Warzel: Melissa and Johnathan, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Johnathan Nightingale: Thank you.

Melissa Nightingale: Thanks, Charlie.

Johnathan Nightingale: It’s lovely to be here.

Warzel: So it is a weird time in the economy, especially in America. We’re in this low-hire, low-fire labor market. There’s this very amorphous and pressing fear right now about artificial intelligence taking or threatening jobs, especially entry-level jobs. And the labor market just looks increasingly grim and feels increasingly grim to younger workers. The vibes—they’re off, they’re not good.

I wanted to start just by asking you all: You’re talking to businesses, to people. You’re on the ground. What are people telling you about the vibes right now? Report on the vibes for me.

Melissa Nightingale: I love “Report on the vibes.”

Johnathan Nightingale: “The vibes” is such a great place to start. Because I don’t know if you remember, but it wasn’t so many years ago that companies were appointing “chief vibes officers.”

Melissa Nightingale: Do you remember this? Like, in 2022?

Warzel: I don’t really, no.

Melissa Nightingale: Okay; there’s a very weird future-of-work moment where everybody was, like, a future-of-work thought leader in 2022. And The New York Times reported they had a big story about chief vibes officers being like…

Johnathan Nightingale: The new jobs of the new economy.

Warzel: Man, I missed out on that. I would love to be chief vibes officer.

Melissa Nightingale: But that was the new hot title.

Johnathan Nightingale: Because, like, in 2022, like everybody was fighting. I think junior engineers were getting, you know, 100, 200, 300,000-dollar offer packages because everybody was starved for this tech talent. And that was the story of the moment—“Wow, how much worker empowerment there is.”

Melissa Nightingale: And so, we’re not trying to make the vibe sad. But it is worth starting with: Where were the vibes as we head into … like, where are the vibes now? So 2022: still relatively hot labor market; still a lot of competition for talent. Particularly junior talent; particularly junior engineering talent.

Johnathan Nightingale: And you could tell that senior leaders were pissed off about them. It was too expensive. These people were too entitled, right? Like, “chief vibes officer” makes good buzz. But you could tell in early 2022 that this was about to get some pushback.

Melissa Nightingale: Remember, this was the earliest version of return-to-office mandates. People saying: “We went home. We did amazing work at home. Why do we have to go back? And also, like, if you make me go back, I have another $300,000 job offer lined up tomorrow.”

Johnathan Nightingale: Just walk across the street. And so, it’s funny because people talk about AI and all the layoffs. And there’s been, you know, half a million layoffs in the last several years, and technology workers and stuff like that. Those layoffs started before the first ChatGPT release.

Melissa Nightingale: What it did was reset the market, right? It recalibrated. Like, you had folks who had that sort of early engineering role. And they got a little bit more skittish about, Should I leave to go across the street, or should I stay put? Should I feel grateful that I have a job, that I have this opportunity? And you started to see people feeling a little bit more nervous, and a little bit more uncomfortable around the market overall.

Johnathan Nightingale: These days, AI has sucked all the oxygen out of the room. And people are like: “That’s all driven by AI.” I’m like: no. First of all, November ChatGPT couldn’t count how many Rs there were in strawberry. That’s not a reason to turn your whole business upside down. But also, the layoffs happened six months before that too. It’s really been part of a pattern of executives in some organizations reasserting power and making sure that, especially, junior workers lose that sense of entitlement. I think vibes-wise, that’s happened. They succeeded in that.

Warzel: It was such an interesting moment. I wrote back in—I think it was 2021, but it might’ve been 2022—in that time period of a hot labor market. Also of, as you say, some real worker empowerment. I remember writing this piece that was like: “Do workers, do people even want a career?” Right? Like, do the young, Gen Z people coming up, do they even want a career? They’re questioning the idea of the standard thing, because there’s just so many different options. And maybe I don’t want to work the way that my parents worked. And to compare that feeling to now, where it’s like “Could I even get in the door to have a career, or am I going to have to figure out something else completely different?” I think that that’s extremely stark in terms of that shift. What are people telling you on the ground now in terms of this moment? Obviously there is that sense of precarity with workers. But in terms of that force, of generative AI, how are people feeling about it?

Melissa Nightingale: Johnathan and I both come from tech, right? We’ve both been working in tech since the first dot-com boom, all the way on through. And we work with a lot of organizations with tech leaders. And what we’re hearing from folks is—on the one hand, you sign up for tech as your industry and as your career, you like working on the cool new stuff, right? Like, we are an industry that loves our toys. We love innovation. We love sort of taking things out and experimenting. Sometimes they last; sometimes they don’t last. But as an industry, if that doesn’t get you lit up, you’ve picked the wrong job.

But what we’re hearing from a lot of folks is that the day-to-day of “We’re playing with these tools” is no longer lining up to “What are we supposed to be doing here?” And that playing with the tools has become sort of an end into itself. And a lot of folks are finding: “We’re using them, but I don’t know—what are we running toward?”

Warzel: Do you get the sense that this is like, if we’re going down the chain: This is executives high up on top, see a thing. They’re reading a lot about it; there’s a lot of hype. They feel, Okay, more than anything, I have to make sure that we do not get left behind here. And then the sort of middle-manager layer is feeling that it’s forced on them. Or is there sort of, broadly speaking, a lot of enthusiasm—but there’s just not enough time to figure it out?

Melissa Nightingale: All of the above. Like, we met a lady who’s a really skilled executive, and she was working in an organization where she’s like: “I came in as a fixer, right? My whole job was fixer. And I was really excited about it. Like, the opportunity was cool. Came in, doing the work. And starting to see the impact of that work, right?” And she’s like, “And then my CEO got really excited about GPT, and I started sending things that were strategic plans for my division, for my department. And what started coming back from my CEO—who I report directly into—wasn’t from him. It was clear he hadn’t read any of the plans that I was putting forward. He just pushed them through and said, Generate an email in response to this.” And she’s like, “I went from being so excited about the turnaround potential for this business, for this organization, and for my department and team, to feeling really sad. Like fundamentally—just having a very hard time figuring out, What am I doing if I’m putting in all this effort?”

Johnathan Nightingale: When you look at a story like that—that’s a management failure. It can take one of a couple flavors. One thing you can say is, “That person’s work is now useless because GPT replaces it well enough. And so that person should have just been given a firm handshake and a goodbye package and sent out the door.” Or you can say “GPT can’t replace human ingenuity at the senior levels.” And so there’s a real dereliction there, because you had a motivated, engaged senior employee, and you burnt them. In either case, that’s a management failure. A thing that’s coming up a fair bit is that people look at what code generation can do in LLMs today. And they sort of do the “well naturally”: Well, naturally, in time, it will write good poems. Well, naturally, in time, it will be your accountant. And well, naturally, in time, it will manage as well or better than most people do. It’s just this leap, this linear leap, that is not borne out by what we’re seeing on the ground today.

Warzel: Do you feel like that’s a broader trend of, especially on the executive layer—and I’m not trying to paint people as caricatures here—but this idea that, especially with these higher, more like “vision strategy” jobs, where there is a lot of busywork involved in that sense of communication. That, you know, what I’ve heard is that AI is a perfect CEO, right? Like, it could be—it’s just sort of broad, broad pronouncements—being able to speak with maybe more confidence than is earned or deserved, right?

Johnathan Nightingale: Incredible executive presence.

Warzel: Great presence in that sense. And so, naturally, people higher up on the end of the management chain might be enamored with it or the ability of it. Do you feel like CEOs are overly AI-pilled right now?

Johnathan Nightingale: I think they’re a vulnerable group. I think one of the challenges with being a CEO is that even an incredibly effective CEO shouldn’t know more about every function in their business than the people working those functions do. Right? If you’re an expert engineer and you become a CEO, you might know a lot about engineering.

Melissa Nightingale: But over time, you’ll actually know less than the people who are typing on keyboards all day.

Johnathan Nightingale: And your head of sales should know more about sales than you do. Your head of marketing should know more about marketing than you do. Right? Like, that part of the job of building a senior team is to make sure those people are, one, lighting you on fire with great ideas, and two, are credible leaders for their own functions in a way that you couldn’t be. Because a person can’t know everything about everything. And so, it’s tempting from that seat to flatten a lot of that work, and to say “If an AI can do that work 80 percent as well, maybe I have to spend some more compute over there in order to get the result I want. But, like, do I even need a marketing department? Do I even need an engineering department? Do I even need a finance department?” They’re vulnerable to it if they don’t hold on to a sort of core “go touch grass” reality. Which is that it takes a long time to learn some things, and human judgment is valuable.

Warzel: Where do you all think we are in terms of adoption? Because again, for someone on the outside, who’s not speaking to managers and the rank-and-file types of employees at all times, it’s hard to get a good sense.

But how much have these tools already changed what is happening day in, day out? Versus how much of it is that feeling of like, I need to be doing this. This is something that we need to have? There is the, you know, the FOMO element. Where do you see the balance there?

Johnathan Nightingale: Certainly among the groups that we work with, people in engineering roles have been the most curious about it, and in some cases the most compelled to engage with it. You definitely have people who are very credulous—“We’re playing with it a lot”—who feel like they’re getting super productive about it. We’re starting to see studies about how those people are burning themselves out. Right? Those people are really struggling, because they’re orchestrating so many bots that they never want to close their laptop. Because they’re getting this dopamine hit from productivity. They’re not necessarily deepening their skills; they’re just doing a bunch of stuff. But like, there you see a ton of adoption.

Melissa Nightingale: We’re starting to see the fingerprints of AI-adoption mandates in context where it makes no damn sense. So like, prompt saying,“We have a client organization that was building technology to respond to bots infiltrating contact forms on websites.” Because so many people were having their agent basically go: “Reach out to this organization; we’re trying to get this work done. Can you go figure out a quote for this thing? Like, go write them with a description of what we’re trying to get done; have it come back.” But the cycle times are considerably longer, in part because the context that you can anticipate a human responding to it needing just isn’t there. And so you end up with, like—it’s meant to save a step, but it causes three more. And we’ve all had the experience of somebody like a junior person sending a shitty email and being like, Fuck, I gotta go unwind that. Right? Like, I gotta go unwind that you sent an email. And, it makes no damn sense. And now I’ve got 30 people in the organization going on, running and chasing a thing.

Johnathan Nightingale: Or “You sent it to a client, and now I gotta go apologize for that.”

Melissa Nightingale: Right. But imagine that multiplied across many workforces right now. Where you’ve got a lot of communication and requests flowing that, like, just missed an important key step before they went out the door. And so there’s a bunch of weird context and cleanup that’s taking longer than the original initial task would have taken to just do the damn thing.

Johnathan Nightingale: And there’s this rigidity forming, too, which is worth fighting against. Which is that you’ll have people farming everything out to GPT—even really obvious ways, right? You get emails from a colleague, and you’re like, “This is not what you sound like. This is obviously GPT. And what am I meant to do with the fact that you didn’t bother to write this email?” Right?

Warzel: Absolutely.

Johnathan Nightingale: And then like the alternative is to say, “Well, screw it. I will never let GPT do that. It’s an insult when somebody does it to me; I’m not gonna do that to other people.” And from that place, this sort of entrench and say, I refuse to engage with these tools. And then you’re putting your refusal up against management pressure. And, it’s driving conflict that isn’t very helpful.

Warzel: When I hear, “Oh, these agents are filling up these contact forms; it’s creating a whole bunch of extra work.” The guy who’s been listening to people in Silicon Valley talk about this technology for a very long time says, “Yes, well; their solution to that is you need agents on both ends, because having agents on just one end is, you know, not balanced.” There’s this way in which I can see that. People are creating—it’s a very classic tech thing to create a bunch of problems and then offer a technological solution to the problem that you created.

Johnathan Nightingale: Yeah.

Warzel: That all adds to more problems down the line. I also think, though, that what I wanna highlight there is the way in which this creates these asymmetries and builds these little cracks and pieces of distrust. That seems like something that feels really important in the context of all of this going forward, if you are somebody who cares a lot about what you do and puts a lot of effort into these things.

And then you have a group of people who may also care, but they use these tools. And there’s not this standardization of work output. And you see somebody respond to your email with something general. I think it’s really interesting that it creates that fracture, based off of how AI-pilled you are or how excited you are about the technology. And that feels like a bigger problem than I think people are thinking about right now.

Melissa Nightingale: We’re seeing that play out across like technology right now. Where you’ve got folks who feel like maybe you’re being incredibly efficient, and you’ve got like 12 agents working for you, and you’re getting a ton of stuff done. And I think, Wow, what a go-getter. Or I think, You’re really fucking rude, and you don’t give a shit about your work or the impact to my organization on you sending garbage across as a transmission.

Johnathan Nightingale: Isn’t that interesting? Like, not from a culture war, “red team versus blue team” shit. But like: why? Like, why can so many people nod along to this idea of like, Oh yeah, when you get a GPT email, that feels rude. Like, That feels like the person didn’t care. Right. I thought these agents were supposed to be solving all kinds of problems. I thought they were more talented. They’re passing the LSATs. They’re like, you know—they’re doctors, they’re therapists, they’re whatever. Like, why would we receive it as rude?

It turns out that humans really care about doing work they believe in, with people they care about. And when you hollow those things out, people have these emotional responses to it that I don’t see predicted by the marketing materials from the AI companies.

Melissa Nightingale: And the hyper-rationalists will fall short on this one every time. Because, fundamentally, being more efficient should, like, it goes—

Johnathan Nightingale: You ought.

Melissa Nightingale: You ought to be excited about being 10 times more productive than you were yesterday. You ought to be excited that your colleagues sent you an email that they didn’t spend any time on, because you also don’t have to spend any time on reading it or consuming it. Like, that should be exciting.

Warzel: You’re both management and leadership trainers. Which means your job is ostensibly to try to make people better bosses, right? And I wanna ground some of this in asking: What makes a good manager? Or what makes a good middle manager? What are those qualities there?

Melissa Nightingale: We have bosses who show up in programs. And they’re like, “I am a good manager because my team likes me.” Wrong. “I am a good manager because, like …

Johnathan and Melissa Nightingale: “My team is happy.”

Melissa Nightingale: We’re like, “Wrong.” Happy is an impermanent state, right?

Johnathan Nightingale: And you can’t take custody for people’s emotions.

Melissa Nightingale: No. Fundamentally, you are a good manager if you are making your team more effective.

Johnathan Nightingale: And effective feels really mercenary, but it isn’t. Because it turns out as you get deeper into this, you learn that the best way to build an effective team is to see them as individuals: to align their personal motivations and aspirations and sense of mastery, the things they want to learn, their curiosity with the things your organization is trying to get done. It turns out that, like, that only happens if there’s a high level of psychological safety. If they’re able to take risks; if they’re able to talk to you about their struggles.

Melissa Nightingale: If you’re able to give critical feedback on the work, where it is showing up exactly as it should and where it isn’t showing up exactly as it should.

Johnathan Nightingale: And if they see you engaging as an authentic leader. They don’t need you to be perfect, but they need you to not be bullshit, right? It’s an important part of how they cohere as a team, and how they find anything that you have to say remotely credible. But many people in management roles lack those skills. And if you’re like, “Wouldn’t that make work terrible for a lot of people?” Yes.

Warzel: There we go. Well, part of the reason I ask is because it seems in this AI conversation, the term management is a skill set that AI companies seem to want to impose on all of us, right? Recently the co-founder of Anthropic, Jack Clark, went on a podcast, he’s talking about the way that chatbots and increasingly these coding agents are, you know, going to be sent off to accomplish these tasks. And there’s going to be all of what we’re talking about, right? These things happening on behalf of us: goose chases, all kinds of stuff. And he had this quote that I thought was striking. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you all. Which is, he says, quote, “Everyone becomes a manager, and the thing that is increasingly limited—or the thing that’s going to be the slowest part—is having good taste and intuitions about what to do next.” What do you make of that line? “Everyone becomes a manager.”

Johnathan Nightingale: It’s such a shallow read on management, isn’t it? Like, if you think about it—let’s say he’s right. Let’s say he’s right that when I fire up my Claude Code instance and I say, “Claude, create a marketing team for me. I want a content marketer. Want somebody on social media.” Right. Have I done it now? Like, can I transfer those skills over to the humans that are still on my team? Is it the same thing? Can I just go to Tony and be, like, “Tony, get Alex and Sam in a room? You got new jobs. Now. Here’s what you’re doing.”

Is that going to work? Nobody thinks that’s going to work.

Melissa Nightingale: I also think any model for management that doesn’t come with employees who have needs and, like, labor and rights—there’s a bunch of pieces that are missing from that mental model. And either that’s accidental, or that’s on purpose. But we should all be really concerned about a model of labor and a model of management that includes work happening without any capacity for what the people doing that work—or what the folks who are supposed to be responsible for that output—need.

Johnathan Nightingale: Buddy seems to know a lot about AI. I know the podcast you’re talking about. It’s cool. He’s built something that’s very big and seems to be changing a lot of people’s lives. And, I hope, some of them for the better. Like, that’s super neat. But on management, I’m not convinced he has the range to give anybody advice on what constitutes good management. You can build a very wealthy company and still be cooking a bunch of people inside it. And saying something like that—I don’t know, you can call that an insult, you can call that a threat, but that’s not what management is.

Warzel: Well, what’s interesting is, you know: As you’re describing what makes a good manager, and you pause and say, “This could sound mercenary.” Right? But what’s actually involved in all of this is the very human work of recognition. Of getting to know people. Of caring. Of giving a shit, right? It seems like that idea of “everyone becomes a manager”—that definition from an AI executive—it pauses at the mercenary point. It says, “He’s with you until that moment where you say, But then it requires all this.”

And part of the reason why I want to have this part of the conversation is also because my partner, Anne Helen Petersen, and I wrote this book about the rise of remote work in 2020. We spoke to you guys a lot about that book. And one of my broader takeaways from all the reporting is that—despite being in the boss layer, right?—the managers and especially middle managers were pretty miserable. Just in general. Just, like, a pretty miserable, core of that thing. Like, maybe miserable in different and unique ways than, you like oppressed rank-and-file workers. But pretty miserable. S

So when I hear that we’re all gonna become managers? From that, I hear: Man, that’s a lot of task switching and a lot of, “I’m getting incoming from two sides of this thing.” Like, two groups of people are kind of converging on me. I’ve got these unhappy people on one side; this unhappy thing on the other side. I kind of have to figure out how to exist in this world. I’m being pulled in a hundred directions.

Melissa Nightingale: Charlie, you’re selling it. You’re making it sound so compelling.

Johnathan Nightingale: Strong pitch, strong pitch.

Warzel: But that, to me, is like: I don’t know. I mean, does it seem as dystopian to you? Or do you just recognize this as, I don’t know, a guy pontificating? Without, as you said, the understanding?

Melissa Nightingale: We have a working mental model; like, we have a real-world model for where automation takes more of the front seat on management. Amazon warehouses are a good example. Uber drivers are a good example.

Johnathan Nightingale: Already being managed by algorithms. The common thread there is this idea that where people are working in Amazon warehouses because they can’t automate that piece yet. Right. And so they build all the automation around these little stations where the human stands, and the humans are reaching up and reaching down. That shouldn’t be our vision for the future of work. And when you listen to a lot of the people who are like, “Oh, everyone’s going to be a manager.” You’re to have this swarm of agents. Who’s doing stuff? Like, what’s the end state there? That you’re a team of one? That you’re a company of one? And so, when you try and sell me this story about a billion-dollar company with one person, I’m like: Think about the best times you’ve had at work. Best times. You might have had a shit boss. I get it. There’s a lot of them. We’re working as hard as we can. But, like, the best times you’ve had at work—and I guarantee that story involves colleagues. Right? And so when somebody tries to sell you on, “Don’t worry; you don’t need colleagues anymore,” I’m like: What are you doing? Like, that’s an anti-signal. I understand your technology is very impressive, but, like, that’s a weird thing to sell.

Melissa Nightingale: Unless you’re annoyed at paying the junior engineers $300,000 a year straight out of school. And then it’s a very compelling sell.

Warzel: There’s a lot here, right? Some of these people who are talking this … some of them, yes, are people who are inside large companies right now that are building all this. That have this workforce. So I think that argument makes a lot of sense. There’s another group, though, of, let’s just say “venture capitalists” who are actually on that island, right? A little bit. I mean, yes; there are plenty of people who work in some of these venture firms, no doubt. But the idea is that sort of like, life of the mind. Like “I’m this tech soothsayer.” And I think in some sense there is this, “How can I push this to the furthest possible extent?” Right? And there’s this idea, always, with the efficiency, right? The reason why the AI bro–type person who’s saying this thing about the excitement of the first one-person, you know, unicorn company, I think, speaks to the idea of … like, this is “efficiency” pushed to its broadest level, right? This is like the cheat code for late-stage capitalism.

And I think it ties though to this broader premise of how productive this stuff actually is, right? So there’s this recent survey from this company called ActiveTrack. And they analyzed over 10,000 workers across 376 companies. And they did it 180 days before and after AI adoption. And the thing that I think won’t be surprising to a lot of people who follow this is: email, up 104 percent. Chat and messaging, up 145 percent. Collaboration time surged 34 percent to an hour a day. Multitasking rose 12 percent. It’s that classic, you know, Parkinson’s-law, “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”–type thing. What do you make of those types of numbers and the idea of productivity?

Melissa Nightingale: We tell bosses all the time: Busy is not the same as effective. Like, you can run your team totally ragged in terms of having them chase every idea that seems like a good idea. But if that’s not what we’re here to do, then you’re wasting their time and your own.

Johnathan Nightingale: Yeah, the maximalist arguments are always so weird, right? Like, the thing you could do is say to your team: “This is a cool tool; we should figure out where we can apply it.”

Melissa Nightingale: Where is there an annoying problem within the organization that you wish someone would fix for you? Where is there an internal tooling thing that would be so cool to have and get a thing out of your way in your workflow? Like, great—let’s go build that.

Warzel: Right. Software-size problems.

Johnathan Nightingale: That could be the end of a sentence. It doesn’t have to be. And then we fire everyone. Like, it doesn’t. You can just end. They’re like, “Well, but if all your competitors are cutting to the bone and outsourcing all their sort of, you know, friendships to ChatGPT or whatever, then you’re going to have margin pressure. And you’re going to have to do the same thing.” And I’m like, man, “Maybe.” But it turns out that creative, resourceful, adaptable humans are good at some shit. And that an LLM—which however amazing you might find it to be—is trained on yesterday. It’s at some point going to run into problems inventing tomorrow, right? And like, that’s a thing people can do. And then tomorrow it’ll train on it. But I will bet on people. Again, not like a team thing. It’s cool for the people to have tools. “We’ve got lots of tools.” That’s great.

But it’s so weird to bet your business on entirely outsourcing critical thought, creativity, collaboration, partnership to this thing that can generate grammatically correct paragraphs. Like, it just feels like such a weak-sauce version of leadership.

Warzel: How hard has it been to give that message to this group of people? Have you been effective in conveying that? Is the siren song of all of this, you know, too difficult to resist? Like, what are you butting up against with this?

Melissa Nightingale: Two things. Okay, so it’s a great question. Like, on the one hand, you spend a third of your waking hours at work. If you’re lucky and have like a normal work schedule, you spend a third of your waking hours at work. So I think for a large number of people, the idea that like one—we just fully and outright reject the idea that that’s how we’re going to spend a third of our waking hours, as a collective. Like, absolutely not.

Two, we’ve seen it, and that lends some credibility. In that we’ve seen inside a lot of organizations, and we talk to a lot of leaders about moments at work that really mattered to them. And it’s like: I think the conventional wisdom is nobody would have any moments at work that mattered to them. Nobody would have any moments where a boss saw them, connected with them, brought them up, helped skill them up. Helped unlock the next stage of their career, because work is crappy. We have to spend a third of our life there, and it’s always going to be crappy. But the fact of the matter is, you ask people: Do you have one of these moments? Do you have one of these things that happened where work really mattered to you, or was a support or a stability for you at a time where the rest of your life was, like, really rocky? People, by and large, do. And so our starting point, I think, for a lot of folks is that the idea that it could be good for a lot of folks is one, a radical concept, and two, a very welcome idea.

Johnathan Nightingale: But when you ask about receptiveness, it’s funny. One of the first companies we ever worked with was an AI company. And I remember meeting with the leaders that were going to be coming through a program with us. And this one guy, very sort of eccentric-professor vibes when he came in. Sort of scattered, came in a couple of minutes late. And he said, you know, “I’m coming to this management program. They’re sending everybody to this management program. But I need you to know something right up front. I don’t believe any human should manage any other human.”

Warzel: Yeah.

Johnathan Nightingale: Cool, fair, yeah, great. He’s a bit, “I’ve never done a program like this before; so you know, I’m open to it. I just want you to know that upfront.” By like the third week of the program, he’s sitting there reading High Output Management by Andy Grove. Which is sort of, former CEO of Intel; like a standard management text, particularly in tech circles. We’re talking about hiring, and he’s looking at a job description. And he’s like, there’s a bunch of gendered stuff in that job description. You’re going to end up with a really tilted candidate pool if you keep doing it. Like, he’s fully engaged with it, and is really thoughtful and conscientious about how to engage with it. He just didn’t know the receptiveness is a really easy sell. It’s a surprisingly easy sell. Nobody likes to be in a job that they don’t know how to do and feel like they’re failing all the time. And if you can give them some stuff, you know, there’s this moment where you give them some tools. And they’re like, “I don’t know if that’s going to work.” And then you get them back next week, and they’re like, “That did work. What else do you have?” Right. And like, it’s actually really easy to convince.

Warzel: How worried, just hearing you say this, how worried are you guys that these tools, these AI tools, will effectively just act as a Band-Aid for any of these moments? Of “Instead of having to think about it hard, and have that conversation that’s ultimately really fruitful and ultimately helps me and everyone else around, I’ll press this button instead”?

Melissa Nightingale: We come back around again, right? It’s like, if I am your direct report and I fucked up in a meeting, like: I’m sorry, I just didn’t know that thing, and I said that thing, and I thought it was a good idea at the time. But like, whatever, I screw up in a meeting. And what happens after that meeting is you send me a thing to tell me I screwed up in that meeting, and it is perfectly outlined.

Johnathan Nightingale: Lots of em dashes.

Melissa Nightingale: It is perfectly structured. And, you know, you’ve given the feedback to an LLM, but it spit out a thing. And then I get the thing; we’re back to the part where I’m like, That’s rude as shit. Like, if I screw up, tell me. I am a grown-up; I can absolutely handle it.

But you’re back to this weird moment in work culture right now. Well, either that’s a well-intentioned manager trying to format a thing so that it lands correctly without having to, like, have the like social risk in that moment. Of, like, “If I send it to Melissa and she’s upset about it … well, if GPT wrote it, she’s mad at GPT. She’s not mad at me. But if I actually put time and effort and energy into it, I might get it wrong. It might not land well. And I might have to spend some time reflecting on, like, That isn’t the way I wanted that to go. I want it to go differently next time.”

Johnathan Nightingale: There’s this study. Even if it never touches the employee, even if it’s just something that the manager does, you know, they go into their own chat window and say, “Here’s what happened. What am I supposed to think about it?” Study came out a little while ago, talking about sycophancy in LLM chats and its effect on sort of attribution of fault during conflict. Right?

So I get into a fight with someone, or my direct report is pissed off because they didn’t get a promotion. Or I’ve got hard feedback to give to them, and I gave them the feedback, but it didn’t go the way I wanted it to. And so I’m using Chat to help me debug it. And what the study found is that the more sycophantic the LLM is, the more likely I am to feel like I did nothing wrong. The more likely I am to bring that sense that I did nothing wrong into my future interactions with that person. And then you cross-multiply with the studies that are well established now, that LLM use suppresses critical thought and critical reflection. And that a major component for leadership development is critical thought and critical reflection. And you’re in a bad spot. Even if the employee never receives that GPT message, just me using GPT as my leadership coach is likely to really impair my sense of my relationship with my people, and also my own reflection.

Melissa Nightingale: Outside of management and leadership circles, it may not be obvious why that’s such a core component. But basically: If you are in a modern organization today, one of the biggest problems that we have of getting bosses to show up differently in the role is that they are often running from meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting. So if something goes wrong in my first meeting of the day, I have no opportunity—other than 2 a.m. when I’m staring at the ceiling—to think about, like, How did that go, and what do I want to have happen next time? Learning like humans are really freaking good at like: “This went this way; like I touched the hot stove. I don’t want to touch the hot stove again. And here’s what I’m going to do differently.”

If they’ve got time to think about it. The hard part that we have, in our industry and in our sort of line of work, is that for many leaders there’s not any of that baked in anymore.

Warzel: I want to get here, near the end, of something bigger, though. That we’re kind of circling around all this. Which is: this idea of a constant replacement in work, right? Replacing the expectations of how much work should take up someone’s life. You know, the expectations of how much dignity someone should be able to derive from it; the expectations of the path of predictable progress in a given career. The technology is often that we put into these spaces, you know, as we said. They free up space that is then used to, you know, fill more in. You keep piling stuff on here, without the attention and as much of the focus on the nourishing qualities that we’re talking about here. And the things that might give people some purchase and some connection. And you’ve all been writing a little bit around this idea lately of social atrophy, and the role that work plays. What is work’s role right now in this broader loneliness epidemic? Third-space dwindling, broader-disconnection feeling that a lot of people are experiencing?

Melissa Nightingale: We started to see weird glimmers about two years ago. Where a lot of organizations were saying, like: “I’m managing a team, but my team is geo-distributed, right. And so, I’m managing people all over the world. And sometimes I’m managing them, occasionally in office, but sometimes I’m managing them [remotely] … and we just don’t share a lot of overlapping daylight hours. And we work in sort of our own Zoom windows. And for my folks, where I’m managing them, and they’re not interacting with a lot of people, things have gone a little bit weird. And what do I do about that?”

Like as a management question, right? Would come into our programs and say, like, “It’s not a performance problem, per se. They’re showing up for meetings. Like, the camera’s off, but they’re showing up. Things have just gotten wobbly enough that I have an overarching wellness concern. What do I do with that?”

[Content truncated due to length...]

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Throughout his first term, Donald Trump serially fired and replaced members of his Cabinet as they displeased him. In his second, he seemed to be trying to break this pattern—keeping top aides even after their missteps and humiliations that would have sunk careers in any other administration. But now the president is back to his old ways. Last month, he fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Today, he announced the departure of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Trump’s Truth Social post about Bondi is warm, despite his habit of insulting ex-employees: “We love Pam,” he wrote. But reportedly, the president had become frustrated with what he perceived as Bondi’s failures to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies, and with her clumsy handling of the ongoing fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Unfortunately for Trump, these are not issues that can be fixed by appointing a new attorney general. Whoever holds the position next will be confronted with exactly the same problem: Trump is asking his attorney general to do the impossible.

Measured against Trump’s eclectic slate of early Cabinet nominees, Bondi seemed—on paper—like one of the more qualified choices. She was a vocal Trump supporter and had served on his legal team during his first impeachment trial, but she also had a legitimate track record as a lawyer and had worked for eight years as Florida’s attorney general. “Lawyers who have worked with her report that she is serious,” The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote, declaring her nomination “acceptable.” During her confirmation hearing, she reassured Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat, that she would not “politicize” the office of attorney general or “target people simply because of their political affiliation.”

[Jonathan Chait: Pam Bondi couldn’t possibly succeed]

This commitment to apolitical justice did not last long. On February 5, Bondi’s first day in office, she signed a lengthy list of memos reversing Biden-era policies and establishing a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate Special Counsel Jack Smith and other lawyers who brought legal cases against Trump. Many Justice Department lawyers, though, were most concerned by a memo that seemed to erode DOJ’s independence from presidential meddling. Traditionally, DOJ attorneys could decline to work on cases if they had serious moral or legal qualms. Bondi announced that this would no longer be the case. The practice, she wrote, “deprives the President of the benefit of his lawyers.”

At the time, I spoke with multiple current and former Justice Department attorneys who expressed alarm over Bondi’s phrasing. Some lawyers who later quit pointed to that memo as a turning point. DOJ lawyers have traditionally understood themselves as representing the United States—not the president.

Bondi proved dedicated to the task of turning an independent Justice Department into a machine for supporting Trump’s interests. Under her leadership, DOJ dropped the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, in what appeared to be a play to put pressure on Adams to cooperate with Trump’s immigration agenda. When asked by Sean Hannity whether she would fire prosecutors who worked on Smith’s investigation, Bondi promised, “We’re going to root them out.” During congressional hearings, she spent her time expressing her love for Trump, refusing to answer questions, and attacking Democratic members of Congress with apparently scripted insults.

Bondi shaped the Justice Department in other, stranger ways. The gift shop at DOJ’s Washington, D.C., headquarters began selling water bottles branded with Bondi’s name, current and former DOJ lawyers, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, told me. No one knew of any previous attorney general who had peddled their own merchandise. A well-known dog lover, Bondi also created a new category of the prestigious Attorney General’s Awards—typically given to top-performing DOJ employees—for K9s. She presented an award for “exceptional service” to the canines Lady and Diggs, employed by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

Despite Bondi’s best efforts, she was never able to provide everything Trump wanted. The Epstein scandal, in particular, proved difficult for Bondi to navigate. Her role at the head of DOJ put her in the awkward position of sating the many Trump fans eager for the release of the Epstein files, while also keeping the president’s name out of the spotlight. She made an early misstep in claiming, apparently without any basis, that Epstein’s “client list” was “on my desk right now to review,” and then releasing to MAGA influencers binders with Epstein-related material that turned out to contain little new information. After Congress passed bipartisan legislation requiring DOJ to publicly release records on Epstein, people on the left and right alike blamed Bondi for the department’s struggles to carry out this task. At a congressional hearing in February, when Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat, asked Bondi to turn and address a group of Epstein’s victims, Bondi refused to look at them.

This made for bad press—a cardinal sin, in Trump’s view. Perhaps even worse, Bondi failed, in Trump’s eyes, to do enough to destroy his political enemies. With Bondi at the top, DOJ has dropped cases against Trump’s allies and brought bogus criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. But those abusive prosecutions foundered. Judges threw out Comey’s and James’s cases (though DOJ is appealing), and the other cases sputtered out for a lack of evidence. According to The New York Times, Trump grew to feel that Bondi “has not moved aggressively enough to prosecute his political enemies.”

[From the March 2026 issue: What happened to Pam Bondi?]

Bondi’s inability to placate Trump was not for a lack of trying. She didn’t move aggressively enough, because she couldn’t. The politicized prosecutions that Trump wanted her to bring simply could not get through a legal system that, for all of its flaws, turns out to be capable of checking at least some of the worst abuses of a malicious executive branch.

Trump has announced that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer, will take Bondi’s job while he searches for a more permanent replacement. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is reportedly a top candidate. But neither Blanche nor Zeldin nor anyone else will be capable of escaping the trap into which Bondi fell. Bondi was boxed in by the restrictions of the legal system and the demands of online influencers, including those of the biggest influencer of all—her boss. She is just one example of how the administration now finds itself caught between the constraints of reality and the fevered promises of MAGA conspiracists.

Shortly after Trump announced Bondi’s departure, Fox News reported that she had already headed off to Florida, her home state. She leaves behind a Justice Department with a shattered reputation, weakened by the departure of thousands of attorneys who left under her watch. Bondi was not uniquely skilled at destruction, just a willing cog in Trump’s machine. Eventually, the machine ground her up, too.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In 1961, William F. Buckley Jr. had a problem. The preeminent intellectual of the conservative movement was being outflanked to his right by the John Birch Society. Founded just three years earlier, the group had grown to tens of thousands of members, fueled by its claim that Communists had infiltrated the highest levels of the U.S. government. Buckley reportedly complained at the time that he was incessantly asked about the organization.

By 1962, Buckley had had enough. In what conservatives have since heralded as a principled maneuver, Buckley used the pages of his magazine, National Review, to excoriate Robert Welch, the society’s leader, as a ham-fisted operator who was unable to understand nuance, who was incapable of leading a proper right-wing movement, and who “anathematizes all who disagree with him.” Buckley’s diatribe is credited with limiting the influence of the Birchers, as they were known, in mainstream politics.

Buckley’s fight has been replicated by high-brow conservatives in other eras when they believe that the conspiratorially minded among their brethren have gone too far and risk turning off those who might otherwise be persuadable. In the 1990s, the writer Norman Podhoretz tried his best to stymie the influence of the populist paleoconservative commentator and presidential candidate Pat Buchanan, whom Podhoretz saw as anti-Semitic. In 2017, as Donald Trump’s MAGA movement was consuming the right, the respected conservative columnist George Will wrote that conservatism had been “hijacked” by “vulgarians” and “soiled by scowling primitives.”

And today, many of the conservative cognoscenti are again fed up with the right-wing hoi polloi.

In October, Politico published racist and misogynistic group-chat logs from members of the New York Young Republicans Club. The conservative writer James Lindsay, who made his name by opposing what he viewed as overly sensitive “woke” culture, chastised his fellow right-wing scribes for not taking the revelations seriously. “The group chat exposé is the tip of a very nasty iceberg, and your denialism isn’t helping a damn thing,” Lindsay wrote on X. Later that month, the conservative commentator and conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza wrote that he was seeing more “vile” anti-Indian racism on the right than he had ever encountered in his 40-year career. In December, the right-wing writer Scott Greer complained that the right’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s assassination “exposed the idiocy and weaknesses of the modern conservative movement,” as well as “its addiction to conspiratorial thinking.”

Richard Hanania has been one of the loudest and most consistent critics of the right from within its own ranks. He has publicly criticized the conspiratorial and racist tendencies that have become popular on the right, but he told me that these frustrations are also being discussed in private. Hanania said several high-profile conservatives have reached out to him to share their grievances about what the movement has become.

The most notable public protests have come from Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who works at the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. Since 2020, Rufo has been influential chiefly because of his crusade against how he believes matters of race were being taught in public schools. His campaign against critical race theory—a 1970s academic framework that posited that racial bias is embedded in American law and society—helped turn some school boards across the country from sleepy, overlooked features of local government into political battlegrounds. Rufo is also seen as a driving force for the Trump administration’s campaign to banish diversity training across the federal government. But in February, he posted on X that “the Right’s collective brain is getting melted in a vat of slop, conspiracy, and algorithm-chasing. An intelligent man will guard himself against all of it.”

[Read: Nick Fuentes’s strategy is working ]

In the post, Rufo didn’t say whom he was talking about. But he has been critical of Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes. Since September, Owens’s podcast has focused on a convoluted conspiracy theory about how Kirk, her fellow conservative personality, was killed—possibly by the Israeli government—as part of a plot that’s now being covered up by shadowy forces. She also has questioned the character of Kirk’s widow, Erika, in a YouTube series called “Bride of Charlie.” Fuentes is a young white supremacist and anti-Semitic streamer whose profile was elevated in the right-wing mainstream by his easygoing, sympathetic interview in October with Tucker Carlson. Lindsay and Hanania, among others, also take a dim view of Carlson, partly for his own conspiratorial views and partly for his elevation of Fuentes and another interview subject, the Nazi-apologist podcaster Darryl Cooper.

Bookish conservatives are fond of the tale of Buckley banishing the John Birch Society to the fringes. But that’s not the whole story. Buckley walked a fine line, publicly criticizing Welch while otherwise trying not to alienate the society’s rank and file, the historian Matthew Dallek argues in his 2023 book, Birchers. Buckley’s gripes were more about the group’s style and its leaders than its ideology. Birchers were widely derided for being racist and conspiratorial. But Buckley, the genteel conservative, was broadly in alignment with some of the group’s views, calling white people “the advanced race” in a 1957 editorial in National Review, supporting Jim Crow segregation, and writing a book defending the red-baiting propagandist Senator Joseph McCarthy.

[Read: ‘We need to do McCarthyism to the tenth power’ ]

Some members of the modern right-wing intelligentsia have their own awkward tension with the people they are now criticizing, having espoused comparably extreme views in the past. Greer, for example, has pseudonymously written racist and anti-Semitic articles for the white supremacist Richard Spencer’s website, Radix Journal. In the ’90s, D’Souza argued that “we have to take the possibility of natural differences seriously,” including the chance that there is a “natural hierarchy of groups: whites or Asians concentrated at the top, Hispanics in the middle, and blacks at the bottom.” Similar arguments are now being used to justify the racism he is speaking out against. He’s also continued to spread his own bigotry—in January, he shared a video of a racist caricature of a Somali person. (He did not respond to my request for comment.) HuffPost reported in 2023 that Hanania made his own pseudoscientific arguments about the inferiority of Black people. (He has since said that he regrets those views and has renounced them.) As a group, the right could be said to have seeded the same extremism that they now condemn.

When I asked right-wing writers about this, I received a range of responses. Lindsay, who has broken from the right and now describes himself as a classical liberal, was the most contrite. “I’ve reckoned with it on my end,” he told me. “I seriously lament any role that I played in contributing to this. I seriously reevaluated how and who I’ll work with.”

Greer told me that his past associations with Spencer and like-minded people were a necessary part of politics and coalition building. He said that despite working with Spencer and Radix, he’s not a white nationalist. “I didn’t write about killing people, so I don’t have anything to apologize for,” he said. “I’m a right-wing, conservative American nationalist. White separatism is stupid. No one wants it.”

Hanania has apologized for his past work. When I asked him about his previous writing on the links between race and IQ, he told me that “different groups score differently on standardized tests,” but that focusing on this is not healthy or conducive to “maintaining a kind of social harmony.”

Rufo was less penitent. In 2024, Rufo co-wrote a Substack post titled “The Cat Eaters of Ohio,” which claimed to have video evidence of an African immigrant in Dayton grilling a cat. Rufo also offered a $5,000 “bounty” for anyone who could provide “hard, verifiable evidence that Haitian migrants are eating cats in Springfield, Ohio.” Statements from local officials and subsequent reporting from Drop Site News cast doubt on Rufo’s story. On the campaign trail that year, Trump and J. D. Vance made similar claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets.

In 2021, Rufo encouraged his followers on X to call teachers who discuss LGBTQ matters “political predators” and accuse them of “ideological grooming”; he made a similar point the following year. When I asked Rufo about these statements, he said the “framing of this story is disingenuous, littered with factual errors, and even after I have repeatedly corrected them, they are still here.” He did not provide details.

If some of these conservatives are reluctant to revisit their own role in fostering hatreds they now condemn, their shifting views might nevertheless be significant. Again, Buckley provides a potential model. By the late 1960s, he had grown more sympathetic toward the mainstream. “I think he understood, as the ’60s moved on, that conservatives had an opportunity to win real power, and to do that, it made a lot of sense politically to moderate,” Dallek told me. “I do think that he did evolve, and he was not clamoring for a return to Jim Crow in the mid-to-late 1960s.”

Frustrations over the right’s inflammatory factions may be seeping into the intellectually inclined wings of the White House as well. A senior administration official, who spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal, explained the right’s tolerance of bigots as a product of politics and “foxhole sympathies.” In the past, conservative thinkers were more tolerant of the anti-Semitic and conspiratorial right because they felt that the left was more powerful and intent on demonizing their ideological adversaries. Since Trump’s return to the White House, that sense of camaraderie on the right has dissipated, and the extremists—the administration official termed their views “feverish, howling Nazism”—are now viewed by many as hurting the cause. The irony of this, of course, is that Trump has been one of the key enablers of the right’s most extreme fringes.

In their heyday, intellectuals such as Buckley and Will were the closest thing to influencers on the right, heavyweights whose written words in national publications made them prominent conservative voices. Buckley could make or break careers and help determine policy priorities.

[Read: Teenagers are pushing Himmler’s favorite myth]

Today, the most influential voices on the right are the people the intellectuals are criticizing. Owens’s show is the fourth-most-popular news podcast on Spotify and the second-most-popular conservative news show. Tucker Carlson’s podcast is first in both categories. The overtly anti-Semitic and white-nationalist politics of Fuentes have made such views more popular than they’ve been in decades. They’ve also gained purchase among young members of the right, who will shape the movement’s future. Even though relatively high-profile voices on the right have stepped up to condemn the proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-Semitism, and white nationalism, they don’t seem powerful enough to stop it.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

He wanted it big. He wanted lots of gold, lots of marble. He wanted visitors awestruck by his architectural expansion of the country’s symbolic seat of power. “They should sense the strength and grandeur of the German Reich as they walk from the entrance to the reception hall,” Adolf Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer, outlining his plans for an extension to the old Reich chancellery, at Wilhelmstrasse 77 in Berlin.

The new annex, connected to the chancellery by a marble corridor hung with crystal chandeliers, was part of Hitler’s ambitious plans to align the Berlin cityscape with his vision for the future of the country. Hitler wanted a Triumphbogen, a triumphal arch, twice the size of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. He wanted an “Avenue of Splendor” for military parades. “The Champs-Élysées is a hundred meters wide,” Hitler told Speer. “We will make our avenue twenty meters wider.” A planned Volkshalle was to accommodate 180,000. The Eiffel Tower could fit beneath its cupola. This “Hall of the People” was to be topped by the largest swastika on Earth. Berlin itself was to be rechristened as Weltstadt Germania, “Capital of the World.”

Speer embellished these extravagantly outsized “Hitler branded designs”—Entwürfe Hitlerscher Prägung—with fascistic flourishes: bundled reeds, or fasces; spread-winged eagles; and enormous twisted crosses. In 1938, when André François Poncet, the French ambassador to Berlin, visited Hitler at the Berghof, the Nazi leader’s Alpine retreat outside Berchtesgaden, he was led through a “gallery of Roman pillars” to an “immense glassed-in rotunda” with a dramatic view that gave one the impression of being suspended in the air. “Was this edifice the work of a normal mind,” François-Poncet wondered in his memoirs, “or of one tormented by megalomania and haunted by visions of domination?”

Hitler’s interest in architecture originated in his teenage years when, as an aspiring artist, he applied to the Academia of Arts in Vienna, only to be rejected and informed that his real talent, such as it was, lay in architecture rather than painting. Of the several hundred surviving sketches and paintings from Hitler’s years as a struggling artist, 80 to 90 percent are of physical structures, the best-known being some watercolors from 1912, of the State Opera House in Vienna, and from 1914, of the Courtyard of the Royal Residence in Munich. There is also a 1915 pencil sketch of the farmhouse, near the northern French village of Fournes, where Hitler, then a 26-year-old corporal, was billeted as a message runner for the List Regiment during World War I.

[Read more from Timothy Ryback: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

Glimmerings of Hitler’s grandiose architectural imaginings can be discerned from that time. In the rare-book reading room at the Library of Congress, you can request an early-20th-century architectural guide to Berlin, entitled simply Berlin, that is smeared with trench dirt and drips of red paraffin wax, most likely traces of nighttime reading by candlelight, and features this inscription on the inside cover: Adolf Hitler, Fournes, November 5, 1915. The book, by a Jewish art critic named Max Osborn—whose books were burned in the spring of 1933, though Hitler’s copy survived in his private library—mocks Berlin’s pretensions to architectural greatness. “Berlin among the famous cultural sites?” Osborn writes in his introduction. “There will be no shortage of skeptics,” since the city can scarcely compare to urban gems like Paris, Prague, and Venice.

Heinrich Hoffman / ullstein bild / GettyThe Grand Reception Room designed by Albert Speer

Osborn calls Berlin a “cornucopia of artistic missteps,” a hodgepodge of neoclassical architectural structures built on swampland and overlaid with decades of uncontrolled growth and chaotic urban planning. Having imbibed Osborne’s perspective as a young soldier, Hitler 20 years later as chancellor echoed the Jewish critic’s aesthetic disdain. “Look at Paris, the most beautiful city in the world!” Hitler told Speer. “Or even Vienna! Those cities are magnificent. Berlin, however, is nothing but a haphazard jumble of buildings.” As chancellor, Hitler set about righting the capital city’s many architectural wrongs with a fierce and unbridled dictatorial will.

When Speer was appointed general inspector of the capital of the Reich in 1938, the architect, then only 32, was given carte blanche in redesigning the Berlin cityscape. Hitler did not want Speer hobbled by legal or bureaucratic restraints. “Neither the interior minister nor the mayor of Berlin, and not even the Berlin Gauleiter Goebbels was to have any authority over me,” Speer recalled. He reported only to Hitler.

One reason that Hitler was so concerned with freeing Speer of architectural constraints was that he himself had confronted them when he sought to have a second-floor balcony added to the Reich chancellery. Eduard Johst Siedler, the Berlin architect who had updated the old Reich chancellery and the adjacent Wilhelmplatz in 1927, objected to the Hitler balcony as an intrusion on Siedler’s intellectual property, a legally enforceable claim. “Siedler has defaced the entire Wilhelmplatz,” Hitler raged, making the chancellery look “like the administrative office of a soap company, not the center of the Reich.” Hitler eventually secured Siedler’s approval by offering him a new commission. The chancellery’s new balcony, designed by Speer, was installed and became the setting for Hitler’s iconic appearances before jubilant throngs.

In the spring of 1937, Hitler ordered an entire block of historic houses razed, including the justice-ministry building and the “Adolf-Hitler-Haus,” the local headquarters for his own political party, to make way for construction of the new Reich chancellery annex. Protest was muted. Joseph Goebbels held a eulogy before the local party offices were obliterated. Berliner Morgen-Zeitung observed gingerly that bricks and stones that had stood for “decades even centuries” were now “wandering” to other places in the city, where “they will fulfill useful purposes for coming generations.”

Late in January 1938, Hitler summoned Speer to discuss his vision for the annex, which was to fill the entire vacated block of Voss Street that ran perpendicular to the chancellery’s Wilhelmstrasse address and dwarf the rest of the building. A marble gallery leading to Hitler’s new office was to be twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Hitler’s time frame for the project was comparably ambitious: He wanted the new extension completed within a year, in time for the next annual diplomatic reception, in early January 1939. “I place the entire Voss Street at your disposal as the site,” Hitler told Speer. “What it costs is of no concern to me.”

Hitler wanted the new extension built fast but also to endure, at least for the span of his thousand-year Reich. Hitler’s “law of ruins,” as Speer called it, required structures to be built with an eye cast many generations into the future, when they would be “overgrown with ivy, with tumbled columns, and pieces of masonry scattered about.” Speer sourced construction materials from across the country, and following Hitler’s annexation of Austria that March, he was also able to procure large quantities of the distinctive red Adnet marble from Salzburg.

Arno Breker, the sculptor who became known as the Nazi “poet of the human form,” was commissioned to create two 11-foot-tall bronze male nudes—representing “The Party” and “The Army”—to flank the chancellery’s ceremonial Wilhelmstrasse entrance. Josef Thorak, the “master sculptor of the Third Reich,” designed an enormous horse for the garden, under which an air-raid shelter would eventually be expanded into a sprawling underground labyrinth that included the Führerbunker, reinforced with four meters of concrete overhead. Kurt Schmid-Ehmen, who had designed the iconic wide-winged eagle clutching the swastika cross in its talons for the Nürnberg-party rally grounds, created an enormous bronze replica to be placed above the Voss Street entrance. Another iconic addition to the expanded chancellery was the enormous globe that would be parodied by Charlie Chaplin in his film The Great Dictator. Seven thousand laborers worked night and day, in multiple shifts, seven days a week, erecting the structure that came to occupy the vacated city block. The final tab came to 90 million reichsmarks, the equivalent of half a billion dollars today.

Hitler reviewed plans and progress on the construction at every turn, studying each detail of every proposed design, sometimes making adjustments, sometimes offering evident approval. Hitler enthused over his office desk, blazing with gold gilt and an inlaid sword half drawn from its sheath. “Good, good,” Hitler said to Speer. “When the diplomats who sit before me at this table see it, they will learn the meaning of fear.”

On Wednesday, January 9, Hitler took a final walk through what he had taken to calling the “new Reich chancellery,” even as he retained his living quarters in the old chancellery. The following day, the doors were opened for the traditional new-year diplomatic reception. Guests entered through a wide portal flanked by the Breker statues, then passed through the polished marble gallery illuminated from above by a glass ceiling and lined below with white orchids, until arriving at Hitler’s cavernous office.

Heinrich Hoffman / ullstein bild / GettyA model of the sculptor Josef Thorak’s horse at the New Reich Chancellery, where an air-raid shelter would eventually be expanded into a sprawling underground labyrinth that included the Führerbunker.

“The German nation recalls with profound gratitude that the year 1938 brought the German people fulfilment of the incontestable right to self-determination,” Hitler said in his welcoming remarks, then alluded to the Munich Agreement, signed in August, which saw France and Britain sacrifice Czechoslovakia to Hitler in putative exchange “for peace in our time.” Hitler could not have been more pleased with the evening or with Speer.

“I flatter myself that I accomplish more than the other statesmen in the so-called democracies,” Hitler told Speer afterward. “I believe that we also set a different pace politically and, if it is possible to incorporate a state into the Reich in three or four days”—a reference to the annexation of Austria and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia—“then it must also be possible to erect a building in one or two years.” Eight months later, Hitler plunged the world into war. Speer’s mission to transform Berlin into the “capital city of the world” was put on hold. Speer was eventually put to work as minister of armaments.

In the coming years, Hitler would employ his Reich chancellery extension as a marble-and-gold-gilt symbol for impressing celebrities, most notably film and stage actors, and for intimidating foreign dignitaries. Paul Schmidt, Hitler’s translator, recalled that the most notable feature of a visit was the walk along the five-hundred-foot grand hallway to the new chancellery office, where Hitler received them at his desk with its half-unsheathed sword. “The floor was so smooth that visitors felt compelled to cover the five hundred feet to the great double doors of the anteroom to Hitler’s office with short, prudent, courtly steps,” Schmidt said.

In March 1939 Emil Hacha, the aging, frail president of Czechoslovakia, which had been recently truncated by the Munich Agreement, was summoned to the new Reich chancellery by Hitler, forced to wait until 1:15 in the morning, and then finally marched through the marble gallery and into Hitler’s office where he was met with a tirade from the führer. “Finally, I had worked the old man over to such an extent,” Hitler boasted afterward, “that his nerves were completely shattered and he was already willing to sign; then he had a heart attack.”

Throughout the war years, even long after Allied bombing raids of Berlin had begun, Hitler continued to use the Reich chancellery annex to court and cudgel, as he did with Stalin envoy Vyacheslav Molotov in November 1940, before invading the Soviet Union the following June. As late as December 1944, Hitler received Ferenc Szálasi, the puppet head of the Hungarian government, in his gilded chancellery office, with the chandeliers and wall hangings fully intact. An advent wreath with four candles rested on a table for a seasonal touch.

Even as large tracts of the city were laid to waste in the bombings, the Reich chancellery remained relatively unscathed, as did Hitler’s architectural ambitions. Traudl Junge, one of Hitler’s private secretaries, recalled that as even German cities fell into “rubble and ash,” Hitler was planning their resurrection, with wider streets, taller buildings, more beautiful than ever. “The plans for Hamburg, Cologne, Munich, Linz and many other cities were not just in Hitler’s mind,” Junge recalled, “but in fact had taken on concrete form as completed plans on paper.”

On Saturday, February 3, 1945, more than 1,000 American B-17 bombers flattened much of central Berlin in the largest daylight raid of the war. The Reich chancellery emerged from the bombing with its façade scored by shrapnel and its windows shattered but with its interior halls and galleries still intact.

By then, Hitler had relocated from his private quarters in the old Reich chancellery into the Führerbunker. Hitler passed hours in the bunker complex studying table-size models of his future construction projects. Speer recalls sitting with Hitler as late as April 1945, the month of his suicide, while he pored over architectural projects that included a palatial residence that Hitler hoped to have completed by 1950, with an office that measured 960 square meters, 16 times the size of the old Reich chancellor office, and a dining room that could seat 1,000 guests. “The isolation of this bunker world,” Speer recalled, “surrounded on all sides by concrete and earth, ultimately sealed Hitler’s isolation from the tragedy that was playing out outside under the open sky.”

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The most momentous launch since the Apollo era was about to begin, and along Florida’s space coast, a secondhand exhilaration was working its way through the assembled crowd, as though all of us, and not just the astronauts, would soon ride out of Earth’s gravity well on a pillar of fire. The space faithful had started arriving at the A. Max Brewer Bridge in Titusville before dawn, under the light of a full, yellow moon. They had set up their folding chairs and tripods at the high point of the bridge, to get the best line of sight, and stayed fixed in place during a brief rain, and again later, when a concerning wind blew across the lagoon.

On the launchpad, the rocket stood more than 30 stories high, illuminated by banks of stadium lights. As the day wore on, a tailgate atmosphere took hold in the park at the foot of the bridge. For miles, cars had pulled onto nearly every available stretch of grass. Families spread out on picnic blankets, and college-aged kids wheeled out coolers. They threw footballs and baseballs back and forth and drank beer.

Two hours before sunset, thousands of us massed on the bridge. Again and again, people told me that they’d come to see history. If Artemis II is successful, the astronauts will be the first humans to reach the moon’s orbit in more than 50 years, and their path around its far side will take them farther into the universe than any human being has previously traveled. The man next to me was streaming the NASA telecast on his phone. He told me that we were one minute from liftoff.

The Artemis II mission has seemingly come out of nowhere. In January, a few weeks before an earlier launch attempt, I’d started asking friends if they were looking forward to it. Few of them had any idea it was happening. “We’re going back to the moon?” they would ask, with the sort of mild surprise that one might experience upon being told that the Super Bowl is only a week away. They didn’t linger on the subject. Anyway, how are the kids?

The original moon missions of the 1960s could be sold as history’s grandest adventure. The Apollo program was the triple-back-handspring exclamation mark on a century of American technological transformations, during which Americans had electrified their cities, filled their streets with cars and their skies with airplanes, split atoms, and invented digital computers. To complete this phase shift into the future, the country banded together to build a spaceship that carried humans to another world, and performed a flag planting for the ages, a peaceful Iwo Jima. Wernher von Braun, the (ex-Nazi and) intellectual architect of Apollo had compared the moon landing to the epochal moment when aquatic life had first crawled onto land.

In the decades since, the Apollo program has lost some of its aura, in part because it did not lead to a glorious space future in the way that its architects, including von Braun himself, had hoped. Six decades have passed, during which time we’ve had the invention of the internet, the smartphone, and powerful artificial intelligence, and yet this year’s launch is not to Mars or the outer planets or the stars. We’re just returning to the moon. Even though three-fourths of the world’s population is young enough to have never experienced a crewed lunar mission like this one, it has the feel of a rerun. Again we’re rushing to arrive before another nation does, this time China instead of the Soviet Union. We’re told that if we don’t get there first, the Chinese might claim the craters with the best water ice.

Gerardo Mora / Getty Thousands of spectators gathered on a bridge in Titusville, Florida, to watch the first moon launch in a half century.

Jared Isaacman, NASA’s administrator, often says that the Artemis program will be different from Apollo because this time we’re going to the moon to stay. But are we really? The Artemis II astronauts won’t even leave their ship. They won’t even be stopping at the moon. After they swing around its far side, they’ll come right home. NASA has plans for future Artemis moon landings, in which astronauts will supposedly lay the foundations for a nuclear-powered moon base. But although these plans are more than mere renderings on a PowerPoint slide, they will likely need to weather several NASA budget fights in Congress and at least one presidential transition. The Apollo program’s architects had grand plans for a moon base, too, but without sustained political support, those came to nothing. On the bridge, Carl Ulzheimer, a self-described “old dog from the Bronx,” told me that he’d made sure to come to this moon launch, because 50 years might pass before there was another one, and he didn’t have that kind of time.

That this Artemis launch is happening in the lead-up to America’s 250th birthday has heightened the sense that it’s a nostalgia act for the Baby Boomer gerontocracy. All the more so because Donald Trump, the oldest person ever to be elected to the White House, is presiding over the whole affair. His administration has sought to sabotage NASA’s scientific missions, but the president seems delighted to have the agency gin up a national spectacle on his behalf, just as he was happy to have a military parade on his birthday.

To me, it was a small mercy that he hadn’t embossed his own face on the rocket, or otherwise put himself at the center of the launch. Brad Kowalski, who lives nearby, told me that Trump should have at least come down to see it. “It’s significant that the son of a bitch isn’t here,” he said. Just as a matter of statistics, surely many of the president’s fans were on the bridge, but I was surprised not to see a single red MAGA cap.

[Read: How Donald Trump tried to ground NASA’s science missions]

The world has cheered on America’s previous moments of cosmic glory. After one Apollo mission, a Soviet space scientist congratulated the United States for marking a new “stage in the development of the universal culture of Earthmen.” But with Trump having started a war and a global energy crisis in the 30-day run-up to launch, the idea of a universal culture of Earthmen suddenly felt quaint and distant.

With 30 seconds to go, I stared across the lagoon, mesmerized by the rocket. The Space Launch System is a techno-boondoggle for the ages. On a cost-per-launch basis, it’s likely the most expensive rocket ever built. The initial version took 11 years to develop—the Saturn V took just six—and its launch cadence has been dreadfully slow. Worst of all, as a single-use rocket in the age of new, relaunchable technology, SLS is already obsolete, and the design may well be discontinued before the Artemis missions actually start landing on the moon.

And yet, what a handsome rocket! On the launchpad, it had a retro-futuristic charisma, not least because old space-shuttle parts were used in its construction. The large core stage is insulated in the same distinctive orange foam as the big one that fired the space shuttle into orbit. On its sides, two slim, white boosters have NASA written on them in that old “worm” font that rounds off every letter’s sharp angles, and simplifies the As into upside-down Vs. Once the monstrous explosives in these boosters begin to burn, they can’t be stopped. No human has ever caught a ride on this system, and yet in the small, conical capsule at its top, the four astronauts were tilted back in seats, staring straight up, awaiting ignition.

Austin DeSisto / NurPhoto / Getty Unlike with the original moon landing, the Artemis II astronauts won’t even leave their ship. They won’t even be stopping at the moon. After they swing around its far side, they’ll come right home.

The crowd on the bridge had just finished counting down when the arms of the rocket’s adjoining tower pulled away. NASA calls this process umbilical separation. At first, the launch itself was like a little silent movie. Smoke billowed out from the rocket’s base, followed by the first flames. And then, a churning river of the brightest orange light you have ever seen shot straight down at the pad. For a moment, much of the surrounding marsh looked to be engulfed. A second sun seemed to have risen, and the whole hulking rocket was ascending out of it, miraculously. Children stood around me, slack-jawed, and when the sound finally hit, they flinched. It was a holy rolling thunder. It shook the bridge and enveloped our entire bodies as we watched the spaceship rise and rise in the sky.

How joined we felt to the astronauts, just then. NASA doesn’t so much choose its crews as cast them, and in this dark moment, they’d done their best to embody a wholesome sense of America. The mission’s commander, Reid Wiseman, is a single dad of two daughters who lost his wife, a pediatric nurse, to cancer. Victor Glover, its pilot, grew up in Southern California’s Inland Empire. Before he became an astronaut, he went to the Navy to fly fighter jets. Now he’s the first Black man ever to journey to the moon. Sitting alongside him is Christina Koch, a veteran of several Antarctic expeditions, who also once spent nearly a year at the International Space Station, during which she participated in the first all-female space walks. On this mission, she’ll make history again, as will the crew’s lone Canadian, Jeremy Hansen, when he becomes the first non-American to venture beyond low Earth orbit.

The four of them were now streaking toward the stratosphere. After only two minutes, the boosters fell away, exhausted, but we could still see the spaceship trailed by a flame longer than itself. The astronauts had not even gone halfway up into the dome of the sky, and control of the flight had already shifted to NASA’s nerve center for human spaceflight, in Houston. In ground control, the rows of technicians would guide them as they twice circled the Earth, and then fired one last burn to intercept the moon, which is itself moving at more than 2,200 miles an hour.

What will the astronauts be thinking, as they watch our blue planet receding through their windows of acrylic aquarium glass? The world’s affairs may take on a different cast from up there. Before humanity’s first visit to the moon, the lunar-flyby mission of Apollo 8, Americans had also found the culture of their country riven. The Tet Offensive suggested that the Vietnam War could spiral into something longer and bloodier. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy had just been assassinated, and the Democratic National Convention had descended into riots.

Apollo 8 is said to have provided some measure of national healing, but these things are difficult to measure. On Christmas Eve, as the astronauts came around the moon’s far side, they took turns reading from the book of Genesis: In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. With cameras, they tried to capture the glory of our home planet. A snapshot that the crew took of Earth rising from the ashen lunar plain has been credited with giving us a new cosmic orientation, and galvanizing the environmental movement. But again, these things are hard to measure.

Do we even dare to hope that Artemis II might deliver a similar moment of historical gravitas? The astronauts will surely send back some extraordinary images. The mission has been timed so that the sun will be at their backs. Geologists have coached them to look out from their ship at certain features of the far side, including the Mare Orientale, an impact crater with concentric rings of mountains inside it, which terminate in a dark lava basin, a bullseye. No human has ever laid eyes on it, in situ. For 30 to 50 minutes, the astronauts will lose communication with NASA, and they’ll be alone with these fresh vistas. When they see the Earth again, it will be dwarfed by the moon. Perhaps the astronauts will be moved to say something new and beautiful about its fragility; perhaps all such things have already been said. Either way, they’ll already be homebound. On the seventh day, their official schedule calls for rest.

But all that is in the future. For just another few moments, the Artemis spaceship still belonged to the Earth. After it faded from view, I looked around and saw people hugging, speaking in secular tongues, making great whooping noises, laughing with glee. A few college boys started chanting “USA! USA!” They looked like they might storm a football field and knock down some uprights. The awesome sound of the rocket finally tapered to a faint rumble. We could once again hear waves lapping below. To the east, somewhere on the horizon, the full moon was about to rise.

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On March 16, two weeks into his Iran war, President Trump assured reporters that he had the Strait of Hormuz problem well in hand. “And we’re hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, with more than 30 mine-laying ships destroyed,” he said. “We hit, to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine-laying ships.”

On March 31, the national average price of gasoline at the pump surpassed $4, the highest level since the post-pandemic shocks of 2022. One-fifth of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas usually flows through the strait, but hasn’t since Iran began impeding the waterway in early March. Yet Trump continues to insist that Iran’s partial closure of the strait isn’t a problem. Markets don’t agree with Trump, and neither do his poll numbers.

How did Trump get Hormuz so wrong? The answer reveals one of Trump’s most characteristic and most fateful mistakes: his steadfast refusal to acknowledge that Americans live in a world economy.

Here he is on March 16 again: “You know, we get less than 1 percent of our oil from the strait. And, uh, some countries get much more. Japan gets 95 percent. China gets 90 percent. Many of the Europeans get quite a—quite a bit.” These specific numbers are, as you might suspect, wrong. China gets about 40 percent of its oil from the Persian Gulf. Still, the general point is correct. Gulf oil flows mostly to Asia, and vanishingly little goes to North America. But what Trump fails to understand is that these geographic details matter little to world energy markets.

[Graeme Wood: Mutual assured energy destruction]

Trump wishes for a United States economy walled off from the rest of the world. That’s why he loves tariffs so much—and why he refuses to think about what they mean to American producers, who now must pay more for inputs such as aluminum.

But with energy, there is no walling off. Most of America’s oil and gas is produced in the United States. American imports come overwhelmingly from Canada and Mexico. But American oil can be put on a tanker and sent to Japan or the European Union if the price across the ocean rises. The global process of buying and selling equalizes prices worldwide. Walling off the U.S. would mean America would have to stop exporting and importing oil. Trump does not want to do that. In fact, he endlessly urges other countries to buy more American oil and gas. As he said in his March 31 comments: “Buy from the U.S.; we have plenty.”

Trump’s inability to comprehend the relevance of Persian Gulf supplies to American motorists may explain how he stumbled into his Iran war in the first place. A threat to the Strait of Hormuz may be the most war-gamed problem in the whole U.S. military inventory. It’s thorny enough to have deterred American presidents from attacking Iran for nearly 50 years, no matter how provocatively Iran behaved.

“No president was willing to do what I am willing to do tonight,” Trump announced as the first bombs dropped on February 28. But why did Trump go where every other leader had declined to tread? Maybe he was the first president to see this war as an answer because he was the first who did not understand the question.

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The human head louse has a ghostly quality. It tends to glimmer in and out of view, leaving only subtle signs and omens of its presence. Is that oblong speck an egg sac or a flake of dandruff? Was that a prickle on your scalp? Is it normal that your son is scratching just behind his ear? Maybe you have lice and he has lice, and you’ve all had lice for weeks. The possibility is frightening. The uncertainty leads to madness.

The louse evolved to be intrepid and a sneak. Its behavioral imperative is simple and relentless: “They are naturally negatively geotropic,” Ian Burgess, a medical entomologist who runs a company that tests insect-control products, told me. “They will always climb upwards towards the head.” He recalled a day when one must have fallen on his shoe during a comb-out in his lab. He was driving home that afternoon and noticed that the bug was sitting on his knee, apparently confused. “It had climbed to the highest point it could get, and it didn’t know where to go from there.”

Once the bugs ascend, they suck your blood and attach their eggs to the roots of your hair. Within a month or two, your skin might start reacting to the parasites’ saliva, and some degree of itching will ensue. But otherwise, a case of head lice has no ill effects. “To say the truth, head lice are not a real medical problem,” Kosta Mumcuoglu, a lice entomologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, told me. Still, their presence is unwelcome, to say the very least. Emergency scalp checks, precautionary treatments, instant-onset symptoms of delusional parasitosis: “It is definitely a psychological, emotional problem,” Mumcuoglu said.

Mumcuoglu is an expert, but this was not a useful insight. I have two kids in elementary school. I am quite familiar with the psychological, emotional problem that is lice.

For decades now, experts have been trying to convince Americans that the plague of Pediculus humanus capitis is very mild, and that it doesn’t really merit drastic measures; for decades, too, parents have heard the opposite from schools, in the form of urgent letters saying lice have been detected and countermeasures are essential. Along the way, we’ve heard claims and rumors that the head-lice situation is deteriorating—that outbreaks are increasing, that drug-resistant superbugs are taking over. Yet the basic facts of lice remain the same. The parasites are programmed to get up to our heads. We are programmed to let them get inside our minds.

The modern lice wars got their start in Newton, Massachusetts. Deborah Altschuler’s son had lice, and his school implied that this was her fault—that a family like hers would not be welcome anymore. It seemed to her just then, in the early 1980s, that the school itself should have taken more responsibility, that its policies on lice should have been more clear. For that matter, shouldn’t everyone, from parents up to politicians, have been more informed about the problem?

The group she formed out of her home, first called Parents Against Lice and later the National Pediculosis Association, would advocate for aggressive lice-check protocols and more systematic rules for expelling kids from class. If this was not a movement to abolish lice, then it was at least an all-out bid for taking head lice seriously as a public-health concern. With the help of several entomologists at Harvard and the University of Massachusetts, Altschuler pressed the case. At one point, she proposed that head lice were a vector for the virus causing AIDS, spreading it from scalp to scalp. “I felt that AIDS was a wake-up call,” she told me. “We got lucky that it wasn’t insect borne, but it could’ve been.”

[From the September 1987 issue: Aids and insects ]

Altschuler also worried that the common treatments of the time—various insecticide shampoos either used alone or, more distressingly, in combination—were causing harm to kids. In this and other ways, she was an early incarnation of the MAHA mom: incensed about the failings of the public-health establishment, inclined to do her own research, worried about toxic products and the companies that manufacture them. And in the ’90s, her approach to lice caught on. A new industry of lice consultants and lice-removal salons began to form. Altschuler herself became a leading expert in the field. (Her proudest moment, she said, was speaking to the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board in 1992, not long after Operation Desert Storm.) Eventually she’d have a dozen people working for her association, taking around 100 calls a day and selling T-shirts with messages such as Keep your wits, not your nits and Don’t let your child become an egghead.

But even as this wave was gaining strength, a sort of countercurrent formed beneath it. One of Altschuler’s Harvard contacts, a public-health entomologist named Richard Pollack, had begun to worry that the newly fostered panic was unfounded. He knew that the bugs were harmless in themselves; more than that, he believed they might be far less prevalent than many people suspected, especially the ones who had been reaching out to him with horror stories: “They were telling me that lice had become so common, so abundant, that I could go into any elementary school and collect thousands of them in a morning.” But when he followed up on this idea, and started doing field research on grade-schoolers’ heads, the results weren’t really that alarming. Misdiagnosis was indeed a rampant problem, and the people who were the most upset—the ones who’d put their families through repeated treatments—were the least likely, as he saw it, to actually have lice. “They were stuck in this vicious cycle,” he told me.

A folk entomology of head lice had taken hold, and it entailed a range of false beliefs. Pollack sometimes heard it said that lice could jump from one child’s head to another, and that they were infesting kids from classroom desks and rugs. None of this was true, he said; in general, contagion happens with only direct head-to-head contact—and a louse that falls off a kid at school will soon dry out, infesting no one else. (Mumcuoglu told me that parents needn’t worry about lice-infested furniture or bedding either.)

Even worse, for many schools and lots of parents, the mere presence of a nit, or even a nit-like object in a child’s hair, was prima facie evidence of a dangerous contagion. But a louse’s empty egg sac can remain adhered to growing hair for months, like a shell casing on a dormant battlefield. This is one reason why studies find little benefit from screening kids in class: False positives abound. In 2006, Mumcuoglu estimated that two-thirds of all lice treatments in the U.S. are given to children who don’t have an active infestation. And because many schools send kids home if they’re suspected of having lice, those false positives may add up to as many as 24 million lost days of school. (No one has tallied the time and tears wasted on unnecessary pillow quarantines and the bagging of stuffed animals.)

If Altschuler and her group hoped to raise awareness and concern, then Pollack sought, in part, to tone things down. The two of them had worked together in the ’90s, but inevitably they had a falling out. “Early on, I saw him as a wonderful ally and a helpful person to the cause,” Altschuler told me, “but then he started trying to become us, in his own way, with information that was inconsistent with ours.”

In particular, Pollack and the other head-lice moderates took aim at the unforgiving “no nit” policies in schools, which might exclude a child from the classroom on the basis of a single empty egg sac, and they were winning some important hearts and minds. In 2002, when the American Academy of Pediatrics put out its first clinical report on treating head lice, its authors called no-nit policies “detrimental” and “a response to infestations that is out of proportion to their medical significance.” Two years later, the nation’s school nurses—who have been focused on the scourge of head lice since their profession’s founding in 1902—followed suit. Eventually, some school systems would ease up too. In New York City, where I live, the public schools that service a million students had done away with no-nit policies by 2008.

These were salutary changes, to be sure. Fewer kids would be ejected from the classroom, and presumably some degree of lice-related learning loss was curbed. But the new guidelines did not eliminate the broader set of problems that the parasites create for children and their families. Even though some schools now tolerate nits on children’s heads during the school day, they still communicate aggressively with parents on lice-related matters, encouraging frequent checks at home and better-safe-than-sorry interventions.

No one ever articulates the rationale for treating the mere possibility of lice with more concern than a cold or even COVID. (No one ever gets a letter home from school saying, A case of rhinovirus has been detected in your classroom.) But the thinking surely boils down to this: It’s icky to imagine that your child’s hair—and yours!—might at this very moment be aswarm with bloodsucking bugs. Once the lice have gotten to your head, and in your head, no amount of “Just calm down” can make them go away.

If the fear of lice can be recalcitrant, the lice themselves are even more defiant. “It’s an insect that is abnormally subjected to stresses on its survival,” Burgess, the entomologist who tests insect-control products, told me. A louse’s clawlike feet hold fast in both a shower and a swimming pool. Its physiology weathers perfumes and soaps and the bristles on our hairbrushes. And given time enough, its genome may adapt to shrug off almost any poison we apply.

You don’t need to hire experts to dislodge an infestation—humans have managed to delouse themselves since deep antiquity—but the process takes some work, along with proper information. I’m sorry to say that the latter isn’t always near at hand. The New York City schools, for instance, suggest that parents give their kids chemical treatments, naming two kinds in particular—permethrins and pyrethrins—that were obsolesced long ago by insect evolution. America’s head-lice problem will never improve, Mumcuoglu told me with some annoyance in his voice, so long as our institutions insist on making this mistake, particularly about permethrin. (In an emailed statement, the New York City Department of Health said that over-the-counter, permethrin-based products are “an accessible starting point for many families,” but other products may be necessary if “there is treatment failure or suspected resistance.”)

In fact, we do have many other ways of getting rid of lice, even so-called drug-resistant superlice. Ivermectin may not be an anti-cancer, anti-COVID wonder drug, but it’s miraculous at treating parasites: A topical ivermectin cream can likely cure your child of an infestation, and may be purchased over the counter. Ivermectin pills—which could be even more effective—can be prescribed off-label. (Dawn Nolt, the lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ head-lice report, told me that ivermectin may be upgraded to a first-line treatment in the next update to the guidelines.) I happen to be partial to dimethicone, a lubricant that will coat a louse’s body and seal up the holes it uses to get rid of excess water. Since dimethicone’s effect on lice is physical instead of chemical, it may be less likely to provoke resistance over the long term. But Burgess, who first identified dimethicone as a lice-killer, warned me that he’s seeing signs of its waning potency. (Perhaps the louse’s body has been changing shape, he said, and their excretion holes are now harder to plug up.)

[Read: How ivermectin became right-wing aspirin]

And then, of course, there is the fine-toothed comb—a medical device that seems to have been in use by human populations for at least 5,000 years. (Archaeologists have found lice on human mummies, and lice combs in mummies’ tombs.) Combing, when performed with diligence, can sometimes be effective on its own accord, even if it’s also highly, highly inconvenient. Proper combing technique involves sectioning out and clipping up the hair in strips, then combing out each section repeatedly while inspecting for lice and nits that may be the size of sesame seeds. After that, one might need to repeat the entire procedure as soon as two or three days later. Strangely, the AAP guidelines say this process might be beneficial, head lice notwithstanding, in the sense that it allows “a caregiver and child or adolescent to have some close, extended time together.” Extended? Yes. Close? Please be serious. I asked Nolt why the AAP was spreading this absurd misinformation. “We were trying to have a silver lining,” she said.

But there is no silver lining, I’m afraid. In the end, the lice wars have only brought us back to where we started, and also where we’ve always been: worried, inconvenienced, and confused. Pollack says he’s proud of what his 40 years of advocacy accomplished—“an awful lot of kids stayed in school, rather than being sent home,” he said. But he also knows that certain head-lice myths have never gone away, and maybe never will.

When I spoke to Altschuler, she lamented the idea, sometimes floated by today’s head-lice experts, that head lice aren’t so important. “They are important for the people who have them,” she said. This, at least, is a scientific fact.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

In this worn, domesticated world of ours, there are few truly pristine wildernesses, remote regions where no man has gone before, places unseen by human eyes and unexamined by human exploration. And so I suppose we should be especially grateful for the undiscovered country that is Marc Andreessen’s soul.

As you may have heard, a couple of weeks ago, the billionaire investor went on a podcast and said that he aims to have “zero” introspection in his life, or at least “as little as possible.” He added that “I’ve found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s a real problem.”

This whole introspection thing, Andreessen asserted, is a folly invented in the 20th century by people such as Sigmund Freud: “If you go back 400 years ago, it never would have occurred to anybody to be introspective.”

After the podcast aired, he doubled down on X: “It is 100% true that great men and women of the past were not sitting around moaning about their feelings. I regret nothing.”

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The very powerful men who think introspection is dumb]

As you can imagine, the internet erupted. Andreessen had unwittingly stumbled into one of the great cultural rivalries of modern times. On the one side are the business-world paragons who consider themselves decisive manly men of action who don’t waste time on girly things like feelings, self-doubt, and personal reflection. On the other are the humanists who look at Andreessen as just the sort of monster capitalism can create: emotionally impoverished, spiritually inert, arrogant, utilitarian, blind to all knowledge but empirical data, and voraciously materialistic.

Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is a whole novel about this rivalry. The main character, Thomas Gradgrind, is a Victorian Andreessen, a utilitarian materialist. Talking to students and a schoolmaster, Gradgrind barks out his theory of education: “Now what I want, is Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life.”

Over the course of the novel, the humanist Dickens puts Gradgrind and his offspring through hell in ways that expose the shortcomings of his heartless and soulless philosophy—until he finally cracks. This narrative arc was enacted in real life by the philosopher John Stuart Mill. His father, a friend of the utilitarian thinker Jeremy Bentham, tried to raise Mill to be a perfectly rational thinking machine. This all seemed to be going well until Mill had an emotional breakdown and experienced a complete loss of joy and meaning. Mill recovered only when he started reading William Wordsworth’s romantic poetry, a redemption that is often treated as a vindicating win for Team Humanism.

The problem for the humanists is that Andreessen is not entirely wrong. Introspection consists of at least two mental acts: First, trying to pin down and understand the ceaseless flow of beliefs, emotions, and desires that surges through your mind minute by minute; second, trying to look behind the wellsprings of actions and get a sense for the unconscious processes that ultimately drive perception and behavior. Both of these acts are unbelievably hard to do. When you ask people why they made a certain choice or hold a particular attitude, they tend to confabulate. Instead of excavating their actual mental processes, they generally seize upon the first plausible story that pops into their head and makes them feel attractive to themselves.

The past 30 years of cognitive sciences have underlined the extent to which we are often strangers to ourselves. When we try to understand our own personalities, our own decisions, our own motives, we are highly unreliable. As Will Storr put it in his book The Science of Storytelling, “We don’t know why we do what we do, or feel what we feel. We confabulate when theorising as to why we’re depressed, we confabulate when justifying our moral convictions and we confabulate when explaining why a piece of music moves us.”

Because of this, many therapists no longer ask why questions. Asking a patient “Why did you do that?” serves little purpose when the answer will largely be a piece of fiction.

Bad introspection can in fact make you feel worse. When I was a callow young man in college, I used to be happy that I was so shallow. All of those deep people around me who were peering into their soul and writing bad poetry seemed self-absorbed and miserable. I wasn’t entirely wrong. Introspection, when done poorly, can backfire. A study of some 10,000 college students found that introspection correlated with a drop in overall well-being. A study of men who had engaged in introspection soon after their partner had died from AIDS found that they felt a bit better then, but they were more depressed one year later.

After a traumatic event, such as a school shooting, grief counselors used to rush in immediately to help people process their shock and pain. But research has found it did no apparent good, and might even have retraumatized the students and made them more depressed. For some people, immediate reflection might have frozen the pain and locked it in place.

The researcher Anthony Grant found that there’s a big difference between introspection and insight—you can do a lot of the former without producing any of the latter. The organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich made a study of this and was astonished. “The people who scored high on self-reflection were more stressed, depressed and anxious, less satisfied with their jobs and relationships, more self-absorbed, and they felt less in control of their lives,” she found. “What’s more, these negative consequences seemed to increase the more they reflected.”

Leo Tolstoy is one of my favorite novelists, yet he is the poster child for bad introspection. He kept a journal for much of his life and devoted a lot of it to measuring his own moral failures. Here’s an excerpt from 1851: “Arose somewhat late and read, but did not have time to write. Poiret came, I fenced, and did not send him away (sloth and cowardice). Ivanov came, I spoke with him for too long (cowardice). Koloshin (Sergei) came to drink vodka, I did not escort him out (cowardice).”

The problem with Tolstoy’s introspection is that he was entirely bent in on himself. He treated other people as props for his own moral self-obsession. He produced magnificent works and inspiring ideas. Although he spent his life trying to be a holy man, all of that self-examination never produced much self-improvement. He was a narcissistic schmuck to his wife the day before they married, and he was a narcissistic schmuck to her decades later when he abandoned her and died in a train station.

Yet whatever truths it contains, Andreessen’s worldview still comes with a few problems. In the first place, he is an ignoramus of epic proportions. The idea that it would not have occurred to people to introspect before the 20th century would have been news to, say, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Montaigne, Jane Austen, or George Eliot. Each of them produced stunning insights into the heart of human nature. Their lives demonstrate that although it’s possible to do introspection badly, it’s also possible to do it magnificently.

Andreessen’s second problem is that he is scientifically illiterate. The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years has shown that “feelings” are not passing fancies that get in the way of forming an objective view of reality. Emotions are vital to all rational thought. Our feelings help us assign value to things, and if you can’t do that, your decision-making landscape will be hopelessly flat. In his book Emotional, Leonard Mlodinow quotes the neuroscientist Ralph Adolphs: “An emotion is a functional state of the mind that puts your brain in a particular mode of operation that adjusts your goals, directs your attention, and modifies the weights you assign to various factors as you do mental calculations.” People who have brain lesions that make it impossible for them to process emotions are not a super-smart Mr. Spock; their life falls apart because they make terrible choices.

Despite Andreessen’s prejudices, the ability to understand, recognize, and label your own emotions is a necessary part of living a fulfilling life. The mere act of naming an emotion dampens its psychological power, which is a tremendously useful trick. One key to a good life is the ability to make your emotions your advisers rather than your masters.

Some non-introspective people have what the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett calls “low emotional granularity.” They can distinguish between only basic emotions: I like; I don’t like. Other effectively introspective people have high emotional granularity. They can distinguish between adjacent emotions such as anxiety, angst, frustration, irritation, anger, pressure, and stress. People with this introspective skill are capable of superior emotional regulation. They react with less aggression, and they are less likely to binge drink and more likely to have better mental health.

So what’s the difference between bad and good introspection?

One distinction is akin to the difference between archeology and journalism. Bad introspection consists of trying to dig down deeper in search of your “true self”—excavating one stratum after another in search of the answers that lie buried within. Good introspection, by contrast, requires achieving some distance from yourself. It’s done by observing your behavior (not just your thoughts) from the outside, as if you were a reporter watching another person. Talk to yourself in the second or third person, Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan suggests. Establish some temporal distance from yourself by asking, say, “What would I feel about this experience if I looked at it 10 years from now?” If you’ve experienced something traumatic, don’t write about it right away. Give yourself some distance.

People who are good at introspection tend not to ask themselves why questions. Instead, they ask themselves what, where, and when questions: What’s going on? What am I feeling? When was the last time somebody made me feel these feelings of inferiority?

Good introspectors are skilled at noticing their own behavior patterns without succumbing to excessive self-absorption. They don’t ruminate or let their own thoughts spiral around and around in dark, depressing doom loops. They get in, get on with it, and get out.

The psychologist James Pennebaker has conducted some of the most compelling research on how to do introspection well. Decades ago, he found that people who write about significant experiences—but who do so for as little as 15 minutes a day over four evenings—experienced fewer health problems. Other researchers expanded on his work, finding such people experienced better immune function, better mental health, and better academic and professional success.

[Julie Beck: You don’t know yourself as well as you think you do]

This method works in part because the act of writing forces people to describe events in linear sequence, and to pin their emotions down with words. It’s hard not to slip into spiraling ruminations when you’re lying on your pillow at 3 a.m. and staring at the ceiling. When you’re writing something down, though, you’re not just trying to discover what’s going on inside of you—you are actively constructing a narrative that will allow you to shape how you experience your experience. As novelists have long understood, we tell ourselves stories about our life and then we inhabit the stories we tell. People who are bad at introspection tell themselves distorted stories that are either too self-flattering or too self-denigrating. In the former, they tell stories in which they are always the flawless hero; in the latter, they tell stories in which they are the perpetual victim, whose life has been ruined by, say, an overbearing parent or a personal flaw. A lot of good introspection (such as psychotherapy) is really story editing. It’s easier to live a growing and fulfilling life if your life story is closer to what really happened. Good introspectors tell stories that account for flaws and setbacks, and that still point to higher possibilities. “All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story,” the Danish writer Isak Dinesen observed.

Finally, good introspection is done with a specific goal in mind: making introspection unnecessary. During introspection, the self is divided; there is the acting self, and there is the self that is observing the acting self. But life goes best when you are unified and wholehearted, and so enthusiastic about what you are doing that you’re not thinking about yourself at all.

The best life is lived after you’ve done enough introspection to achieve some self-knowledge so that you can turn your attention on others. The worst life is lived by those who have done no introspection and achieved no self-understanding but who are nonetheless utterly self-centered. The guy in the White House is like that. So, perhaps, is a certain billionaire investor who is able to talk with great confidence even while lacking basic awareness of the fact that he doesn’t know what he is talking about.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

About half an hour into Episode 694 of the Flagrant podcast, and after a lively debate over manscaping methods, Andrew Schulz leaned back into the couch and brought the chin-wag to a screeching halt. “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked his co-hosts. Schulz seemed to be feeling some. “Americans can’t fucking afford health care,” he said later. “They don’t care about what’s happening in Iran!” War hawks have been angling for years for this war, he added. With President Trump, “they found a guy stupid enough to do it.”

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024, after having him on the podcast—a move that angered a lot of liberals. But the 42-year-old comedian was never what one might call “full MAGA,” and he isn’t explicitly Republican. Instead, Schulz is representative of a not-insignificant slice of Trump’s voting base: nonideological guys who love free speech and are drawn to politicians who seem anti-establishment and, maybe more important, anti-woke. (The podcaster-comedians Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Tim Dillon, and Dave Smith all fit somewhere in this camp.) With their help, Trump pulled off his improbable comeback.

But a lot has changed since November 2024. Schulz and many of his fellow manosphere commentators seem to feel—by varying degrees—duped by the president they helped elect. Some have been airing those grievances for months, starting with Trump's handling of the Epstein files and, later, the killing of American citizens at the hands of federal agents in Minneapolis. To Schulz and others like him, a brand-new war in the Middle East is a betrayal so massive, you almost have to laugh. “The only shot you have at a good life right now is to hasten the rapture,” Tim Dillon, another podcaster and comedian, said on a recent show. “The foreign and economic policy of our country currently is the rapture.”

The evolving views of Schulz and others in this cohort are notable because they represent a reversal of support for the president. Their discontent had been mounting since even before Trump went to war. “The cracks have been forming for a while,” Charlie Sabgir, the director of the group Young Men Research Project, told me. For some, Iran “might be the last straw.”

The MAGA faithful are overwhelmingly sticking with the president. Not so for everyone else. A number of new polls show that some of the voting blocs that helped power Trump’s 2024 win have lost faith in him: His support among young people has cratered; so has his approval among Latinos. According to one survey, more independent voters disapprove of the president now than they did at any point in his first term. The broad coalition that put Trump back in the White House no longer appears to exist. In the short term, this development bodes well for Democrats. Longer term, it might shed some light on the next iteration of Trumpism.

I’ve watched almost every new episode of Flagrant since the 2024 election. The show, which stars Schulz and his comedian sidekick Akaash Singh, along with their co-hosts AlexxMedia and Mark Gagnon, is often hilarious, sometimes insightful, and frequently mind-numbingly dumb. The most interesting segments involve Schulz and the guys debating the news of the day, when they argue gamely about their loosely held opinions, most of which don’t scan as neatly liberal or conservative. They sound, in other words, a lot like the average American voter.

Schulz voted for Trump in 2024 partly because he didn’t trust Democrats with the economy and partly because he considers the Democrats to be pious and annoying. He and the guys seemed particularly excited about the testosterone of the incoming administration. “The way that Tom Homan was talking about them cartels? This is fire!” Schulz said. Later, on the subject of the Houthis in Yemen, Singh gleefully predicted that “Trump be bringing the ruckus to these folks!”

But Trump didn’t bring enough ruckus. Six months into his second administration, prices were still high, and he’d signed a bill that added significantly to the deficit. Then, in an about-face from his campaign promises, he blocked the release of the Epstein files. “Obviously the Trump administration is trying to cover it up,” Schulz said in a July rant, during an episode in which he and his co-hosts are literally wearing foil hats. This was not what he had voted for, he added. “I want him to stop the wars; he’s funding them! I want him to shrink spending, reduce the budget; he’s increasing it!” (Schulz, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.)

Even Trump’s deportations were getting to be too much. By December, Schulz and the boys were debating whether and how they’d hide migrants from ICE in their homes. The killing of Alex Pretti in Minnesota by federal agents in January led to the second major milestone in Schulz’s Trump evolution. “ICE murdered an American citizen in cold blood,” he said. “I see the administration trying to spin it, and it’s fucking disgusting.” The operation had gotten out of hand, and Schulz and the others were starting to suspect that the cruelty and chaos were intentional. Alexx Media, Flagrant’s most consistently left-wing voice, couldn’t resist pointing out that Trump “said he was gonna do this.”

When Trump embroiled the United States in a war with Iran, Schulz and the guys couldn’t understand the point. “Naturally, Americans are furious about it, right? Because we’re like, ‘How the fuck does it benefit me?’” Schulz said. “‘I can’t afford to pay for college, I can’t buy a home, I can’t pay for health insurance, and we’re gonna spend billions of dollars in a war in a country I can’t even point at on a map?’” (Later, he predicted that it will be much harder to install a U.S.-friendly leader in Iran, a country led by theocrats for nearly five decades, than it was in Venezuela. Iran will “take it to the end,” he said, because, unlike Latin Americans, Iranians don’t “have reggaeton” or know how to “enjoy life.”)

Plenty of other bro-casters have followed the same trajectory as Schulz, as the initial thrill of Trump’s triumph over wokeness quickly gave way to confusion and disappointment. Last year, Joe Rogan was frustrated that Trump was withholding the Epstein files; earlier this month, Rogan complained that Trump’s moves in Iran are “so insane, based on what he ran on.” This week, Rogan asserted that MAGA is “a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks.” Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL and CIA contractor who’d also endorsed Trump, praised Joe Kent, who resigned over the Iran war earlier this month, and read back some of the anti-war campaign promises from Trump and others in the administration. “Every single one of these things is a complete fucking lie,” Ryan said.

[Read: The first big administration defection over Iran]

Perhaps predictably, some of this Iran-related criticism has veered into anti-Semitism. A number of Trump allies—including the conservative commentators Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, and the white-supremacist influencer Nick Fuentes—have suggested that the president was manipulated into the war. “That is unfortunately becoming the narrative” among some young men, Dan Cassino, a pollster and political scientist who studies masculinity, told me. “It’s Oh, the Jews tricked Trump into this.”

Even before Iran, there was plenty of turbulence in Trump world. For months Owens and her internet goons have waged conspiratorial war against Turning Point USA and Erika Kirk over the murder of her husband, Charlie. Onetime pals Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro are at each other’s throats. As the GOP attempts to reel women back into its movement, conservative Christian hard-liners are publicly mulling revoking the Nineteenth Amendment.

[Read: (Some) MAGA girls just wanna have fun ]

Tack on a new war, and you’ve got something worse for MAGA than turbulence. You’ve got disappointment and apathy in a midterms year. You’ve got, as the right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich put it on X last week, “a generational coalition, squandered.”

Although the great majority of self-identified Republicans approve of how Trump is handling the war, according to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, only about half of Republican-leaning independent voters say the same. There are age gaps too: Older Republicans generally approve of Trump’s conflict, while less than half of those 18 to 29 do. Cassino told me that he isn’t terribly interested in Trump’s overall approval numbers. “The key thing I’ve been looking at is the number of ‘don’t know’” responses in polls, which have “gone through the roof,” Cassino said. The trend shows that many voters are no longer sure if Trump is trustworthy or doing the right thing for the country. To them, Trump has simply become one more unreliable politician.

Of course, most of the die-hard MAGA types will continue to vote for Republicans. (“I don’t care how mad you are at the Republican Party. You get death on the American streets if you vote Democrat,” Kelly said in a recent podcast.) But many of the disillusioned young men and independents who voted for Trump in 2024 have never identified heavily with either party and tend, generally, to tune politics out. These voters are probably not going to cast a vote for Democrats in November—but they also can’t be expected to get out and vote for the GOP. “Staying home,” Charlie Sabgir explained, “is the most likely result.” On the most recent episode of Shawn Ryan’s podcast, Kent told Ryan that Republicans are “going to need a lot of hard-core MAGA people to come out to knock on doors.” “Don’t come bangin’ on my fuckin’ door,” Ryan replied. “I don’t want to hear more of those fuckin’ lies.”

All of this is happy news for Democrats. Low GOP turnout might help them achieve a blue wave in the midterms, much like the one that overwhelmed Trump’s party in 2018. Already, Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats across the country, and candidates have outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 showing by an average of nearly 13 points.

But the unraveling of Trump’s coalition also provides an inkling of where the MAGA movement goes next—and who might rise to lead it. There’s an obvious opening now for someone to pick up Trumpism’s fallen mantle and carry it further than the president has been willing to himself. That person could be someone like Representative Thomas Massie, the consistently anti-war libertarian congressman famous mainly for being a thorn in Trump’s side. It could also, theoretically, be someone more like Fuentes, a man with darker intentions and a growing following.

“If Trump did one of the things, we would’ve been happy!” Singh told Schulz in an episode from last July. “Stop the endless wars, stop the spending, release the Epstein files—we would have been like, ‘You know what? Okay, cool!’” Whoever follows through on those pledges might just win over the manosphere.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

For 13 months, President Trump has been the chairman, muse, occasional programmer, and featured artist at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. His centrality—perhaps even more than his name on the building—helps explain why so many acts have abandoned the Washington, D.C. arts complex. (The most recent, the New York City Ballet, didn’t need to explain itself when it dropped a six-show run this week.)

Trump is undoubtedly on his way to remaking the Kennedy Center in his image. But his stewardship also imposes constraints on him, as became clear during the recent back-and-forth between the White House and the comedian Bill Maher, who the center said will receive this year’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Occasionally, someone else gets to be the main character—in this case, a person from that prickliest of artistic mediums, comedy.

My colleague Ashley Parker and I reported last week that Maher was the choice for this year’s prize, one of comedy’s highest honors, according to several people familiar with the selection. But within a few hours, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement: “This is fake news. Bill Maher will NOT be getting this award.” White House Communications Director Steven Cheung posted on X that the story was “literally FAKE NEWS.” As Ashley and I wrote, after our article was published, the White House called the Kennedy Center to make clear that Maher would not receive the award. One Kennedy Center staffer described a sudden change of plans.

[Read: Not so fast, Bill Maher]

On Thursday, the Kennedy Center announced that Maher is, indeed, this year’s Twain recipient. Maher addressed the reversal last night on his HBO show Real Time: “So, I was gonna get it and then Friday, Trump’s—both his spokespeople—come out and say, Fake news; Bill Maher’s never getting it.” He went on: “We have reached a compromise, okay? And the compromise is, I am going to get it, and then I am going to give it to him. Everybody’s happy.”

Is everybody happy? It was a revealing monologue, suggesting why the White House may have been reluctant to let a punchy comic—one without much reverence for the president—receive this prize in a venue that lately would seem to have room for only one name on the marble facade.

In some ways, the activity at the Kennedy Center has been business as usual since Trump took over in February 2025: orchestra concerts, Broadway tours, free concerts for families. But it has also been the setting for a sustained work of performance by Trump.

It began last March with some storytelling, when the president convened his loyalist board at the center. In audio that leaked to reporters, he imagined reshaping the annual Kennedy Center Honors ceremony to suit his preferences, and floated names such as Sylvester Stallone and Paul Anka. At past awards shows, “these are radical left lunatics that have been chosen,” he said. “I didn’t like it. I couldn’t watch it. And the host was always terrible.” Most years, the Kennedy Center announced the winners of its most prestigious prize in newspaper exclusives and a press release. But by August, Trump had returned to the center to reveal not only the recipients (including Stallone), but also that he had personally approved the choices and would serve as the event’s emcee.

Trump’s taste became an even louder presence at the Kennedy Center as the year went on. He held a high-dollar fundraiser during the opening night of Les Misérables, a musical in keeping with the Trumpian aesthetic: big, populist, and a product of the ’80s. He televised Kennedy Center board meetings as though they were episodes of The Apprentice, and even invoked his catchphrase at the most recent one: “I think he’d do a good job,” Trump said of the center’s newly installed top executive, Matt Floca. “But if I don’t think he will do a good job, I’ll say, Matt, you’re fired.” He weighed in personally on Kennedy Center–renovation decisions, posting potential design choices (such as marble armrests) on Truth Social and ordering the gold-hued exterior columns to be repainted white. At the Kennedy Center, Trump was a mogul, impresario, and master builder all at once.

The president conducted his politics and extended his personal brand at the center. He insisted on moving FIFA’s World Cup draw to the Kennedy Center; at the December event, the federation’s president bestowed Trump with a made-up award, the FIFA Peace Prize. He rallied the troops at a Republican congressional retreat there in January. Melania, a critical dud of a vanity documentary about the First Lady, had its world premiere at the venue. No amount of squinting could let the public pretend that this was still a normal arts center known for drawing bipartisan crowds.

[Read: This is not the Kennedy Center]

At the Kennedy Center Honors in December, Trump held court on the red carpet and during the ceremony; it was another opportunity to assert his dominance over the institution. Speaking to reporters, he joked that he might nominate himself in 2027. Onstage, he abandoned the host’s creed of putting an audience at ease. “So many people I know in this audience—some good, some bad,” Mr. Trump said. “Some I really love and respect. Some I truly hate. But they’re having a good time.”

For the Honors, the Kennedy Center managed to program an evening compatible with Trump’s ongoing cultural project: The talents were by varying degrees Trumpy, but none of them felt too dissonant with the event’s actual star attraction. A comedy show—almost any comedy show—is a different creature. To make a more subservient pick such as, say, the Fox News late-night host Greg Gutfeld (whose name was reportedly floated) would be almost too heavy-handed. It would suggest that this most personalist of presidential administrations doesn’t just demand obeisance, but also that it can’t take a joke.

The question of whether the president can take a joke has driven a surprising number of his controversies. Trump has a lengthy and mostly venomous history with Maher, but the two broke bread last year, only to engage in an insult war last month. The former Politically Incorrect host makes some sense for a Trump-era Twain Prize, the ceremony of which will be streamed on Netflix later this year. The comedian is as well known for critiquing liberal pieties and “woke” culture as he is for poking fun at those in power, and he’ll give the president credit on certain issues.

“I’m not mad that he did this,” Maher said of the temporary rescinding of his prize. “Me and the president, we have a complicated relationship,” he noted. “Him trying to block me from getting it? I respect the move. Keep the game going baby, okay?” Addressing Trump directly, he added: “You can thank me in person for being one of the few people on the ‘lunatic left’ who’s glad you hit Iran and is hoping we win that one.”

Maher’s selection illustrates that Trump’s Kennedy Center has never quite been as censorious as some critics assumed. Most of the high-profile cancellations, after all, have come from artists trying to dissociate from Trump’s self-branded marble shoebox on the Potomac. (At the same time, the center has shed staffers tasked with diversifying programming, and even sued one jazz artist for canceling a concert.)

In his way, Trump respects comedians. It’s why he insults Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, and perhaps even why his Federal Communications Commission has gotten into scraps with networks over their late-night programming. An anti-elitist elite, Trump may simply crave their approbation and respect. Maher is willing to dispense the rare drop of it. But I doubt that will keep Trump safe on Maher’s big night.

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From The Atlantic via this RSS feed

Nick Fuentes, a 27-year-old white-supremacist influencer, is notorious for a political outlook that he summarizes succinctly: “Jews are running society, women need to shut the fuck up, Blacks need to be imprisoned, for the most part.” For Ericson Contreras, a left-leaning 23-year-old Afro Hispanic man from New York, Fuentes is not a natural ideological guru. So when Contreras was scrolling Instagram at 3 a.m. recently, he was surprised to find himself served a clip of a Fuentes monologue. More surprising still, Contreras was nodding along.

“Trump is better than the Democrats for Israel. For the oil and gas industry. For Silicon Valley. For Wall Street. Is he really better for us? I don’t think so,” Fuentes declared while gazing at the camera in one of these fan-uploaded clips. “Biden made it so that medical debt doesn’t go on your credit report—that was good for me. Biden tried to forgive the student loans—that was good for me.” Retouched in a tasteful black and white, the video featured an orchestral soundtrack that crescendoed as the fast-talking, besuited polemicist delivered his final punch: “The free market says that Republicans have enough money to bomb Iran but not enough money to pay for my student loans. And I’m going to vote for that ’cause I’m an idiot.”

Fuentes’s economic populism resonated with Contreras. “I’m like, Y’know, he kinda has a point,” Contreras told me. He flicked through more Fuentes reels and was impressed to find jabs at President Trump, Vice President Vance, and other leading conservatives, as well as a full-throated takedown of America’s attack on Iran, which has moved Fuentes to encourage voters to back Democrats in the midterms: “We need, in 2026, for this administration to be shut. The fuck. Down.” Contreras admitted, however, that finding common ground with a self-proclaimed racist can be disorienting: “I get mad because I agree with him.”

There is increasing concern on the left and in parts of the MAGA right about the rise of Groypers, a term for the growing number of people, most of them conservative young men, who follow Fuentes, a man who has denied the Holocaust, defended Jim Crow, and argued that women should be denied the vote and that many of them “want to be raped.” But Fuentes also appears to be gaining a following on the left. Thanks to an army of fans bent on broadening his audience, clips of Fuentes sounding well mannered and oddly agreeable now regularly go viral on the very social-media platforms that have officially banned him for his hate speech and anti-Semitism. The clip in which Fuentes praises Joe Biden, for example, has more than 5 million views.

Many left-wing social-media users are as mistrustful of mainstream-media outlets as Fuentes’s usual fans, which may prime them to reconsider a figure the usual gatekeepers have dismissed. People on the outer edges of the political spectrum also tend to share anti-elitist, anti-establishment views, which can shade into the hatreds that Fuentes is so skilled at tapping.

Yet if some of Fuentes’s leftist converts are the by-product of horseshoe politics, others seem a product of the peculiar new mechanics of social media. His show, America First With Nicholas J. Fuentes, streams for hours every weeknight on Rumble, but few of the converts I spoke with had ever watched it. They had, instead, encountered Fuentes through brief, selectively edited videos that cropped up in their feeds. Social-media “clippers” rely on algorithms to circulate the cherry-picked content they post, which is how these videos are reaching people who, like Contreras, are bewildered to find themselves agreeing with a man who once said, “My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler. My problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler.” (Fuentes did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

[Ali Breland: I watched 12 hours of Nick Fuentes]

Cut from his show, these snippets handily capture Fuentes’s appeal to his followers—his charisma, humor, and willingness to throw punches—while leaving out most of the racism and misogyny that might trigger censors or alienate viewers. In many clips, Fuentes channels his anti-Semitism into criticisms of Israel that may resonate with young progressives. The Fuentes in these videos, which have been appearing in my feeds, too, is an ideological chameleon. In one, he decries “the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in American history”; in another, he derides neo-Nazis for lionizing “a racial supremacist,” adding: “If Hitler had it his way, they would’ve killed and enslaved millions of people. Like, what the fuck are you talking about?”

Other progressives have expressed similar surprise in finding themselves charmed by this deceptively scrubbed-up Fuentes during their late-night scrolls. As a 23-year-old Jewish anti-Zionist leftist from New York told me, “He could be your homie.” (A number of sources declined to be identified to avoid professional blowback or harassment for praising Fuentes.)

“Finally getting it Nick,” former Representative Jamaal Bowman commented on the viral clip of Fuentes praising Biden. A New York Democrat who ran on taxing the rich and defunding the police, Bowman added, “It’s us, against the oligarchy. Now no more racist bullshit from you.”

TikTok, YouTube, and Meta all maintain bans on official accounts belonging to Fuentes. These companies told me that they prohibit hate speech and remove it when they can. Yet most social-media platforms have loosened moderation standards since Trump’s reelection in 2024, and they are clearly unable to keep up with all of the fan-uploaded clips. In response to questions about the videos I was seeing in my feeds, Meta asked for the relevant links on Instagram, which Meta owns, and promptly erased them for violating their guidelines. Within minutes, I found identical clips on Instagram.

Because Fuentes’s monologues tend to rattle on for hours without focus or consistency, clippers have little trouble finding messages that appeal to different users. “You can show 90 seconds to one person, and 90 seconds to someone else, and 90 seconds to a third person. Each of those people will say, Yeah, I agree with that,” Laura Edelson, a Northeastern University professor who studies online extremism, told me. She added that social-media algorithms amplify these clips by using speech-to-text transcriptions to group similar content together. So leftists who “like” videos that praise student-loan forgiveness and criticize MAGA may find themselves served with a snippet of Fuentes making similar points.

Clippers can further game social-media algorithms by adding left-wing hashtags, such as #liberal and #lgbtq, to their captions. Instagram served me one video of Fuentes expressing admiration for Stalin over a caption that read: “😭 his silliness knows no bounds (hashtags bc i want left wing ppl to react to this so im seeing if i can bait them into watching this clips)” and included #marxism, #leftist, and #anticapitalist. Unlike TikTok and Instagram, YouTube lets users manipulate algorithms with back-end tags, too, which viewers don’t see.

One 21-year-old Christian nationalist who runs the @womenforfuentes fan page on Instagram told me that she spends hours each week carving out clips of his softer, funnier side to better spread his message. Fuentes is “right about everything,” she insisted, citing his takes on immigration, Israel, “neocon foreign politics,” and “the catastrophic harms of modernity and feminism.” She said that she clips for fun and to make new friends online, but noted with pride that “Nick loves his clippers.” He reposts “his favorite edits,” and once “liked” one of her posts on Telegram.

Joan Donovan, a professor at Boston University who studies algorithmic radicalization, told me that Fuentes deliberately makes it easy for clippers to spin his message differently for different demographics. “It’s part of his communication strategy to get algorithms to pick up this content and serve it to wider audiences,” she explained. “Fuentes definitely knows that when he’s playing into the left or praising Biden.”

A 24-year-old medical researcher with isolationist views told me that he agreed with a video he saw in January in which Fuentes criticized America’s intervention in Venezuela, likening it to the war in Iraq—and “look at how that turned out,” Fuentes said in the clip. The researcher was shocked when I told him that Fuentes energetically backed the Venezuela attack in another episode, saying: “We will kill all of you. Our military will come in and wipe out your regime, and we’ll take your oil.”

Fuentes claimed in a December 2025 episode that recent moves to embrace more freedom of expression by social-media platforms and a proliferation of fan-uploaded clips may be “the biggest” reason why his show blew up last year. Since his return to X in May 2024, Fuentes’s following on the site has grown from less than 300,000 to 1.3 million. “It used to be the case that if you posted any clip from my show, your whole channel will get deleted,” he said. “All of a sudden, starting this year, you’re able to post the clip without it getting taken down.”

Some of Fuentes’s fan accounts include a kind of call to action in their Instagram bios: “1,000 clippers > 10 news outlets,” meaning they believe that their aggregate work in disseminating his message reaches more viewers than anything that might run in a prime-time broadcast.

Snippets that intentionally soften or distort Fuentes’s views to appeal to more users worry researchers who study radicalization online. “Partial, agreeable exposure lowers friction,” Don Shin, a professor at Texas Tech University, told me. “That makes people more likely to watch another clip, click through to a full stream, or simply stop actively avoiding the creator—which is often the first step toward deeper algorithmic exposure.”

Shin led a 2024 study that found that TikTok’s algorithm gradually radicalized users by nudging them toward incrementally more extreme content. Small actions such as rewatching a clip or scrolling the comments led to more dramatic recommendations to maintain attention, a phenomenon called the “loop effect.” Within a matter of months, participants who experienced constant exposure to certain views began to adopt them.

Videos of the white nationalist that lean into mistrust of the mainstream media have inspired some viewers to make excuses for Fuentes’s more outlandish statements and views. “He just seems like a normal, funny dude who you would want to have as a friend,” the 23-year-old New Yorker, who voted for Kamala Harris and Zohran Mamdani, told me. This young man said he was entertained by Fuentes’s controversial appearance on the show Piers Morgan Uncensored in December—particularly when Fuentes responded to a question about his racist commentary by citing his friendship with Kanye “Ye” West, whom Fuentes insisted was untroubled by his use of the N-word. (Ye and Fuentes dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2022.)

[Peter Wehner: The intellectual and moral decline of the American right]

“Nick kind of dominated,” the young New Yorker said. “Piers Morgan expected to have a debate or be like: Ha! See, I proved it. You’re racist.” But, he added, “Nick was five steps ahead.” As for clips in which Fuentes used racist slurs and tropes, this young man insisted that they were all a provocative performance, not a sincere expression of beliefs. “A lot of the time, he’ll backtrack,” he said. “All streamers do that. They’ll clip-farm”—say something outlandish in the hopes of going viral—“and then they’ll clarify after.”

A “pretty left-wing” 17-year-old was similarly inclined to apologize for Fuentes. He told me that the Fuentes in his social-media feed wasn’t the “bad guy” the mainstream media had made him out to be. This teenager said he often found himself agreeing with Fuentes, particularly when the pundit bashed Trump, criticized the political power of wealthy Americans, and lamented the starvation of children in Gaza—all clips the teen shared with friends. As for Fuentes’s description of Hitler as “really fucking cool” and his claim that “mass migration” to the United States is creating a “white genocide,” those were clearly jokes, the teen insisted. “There’s some stuff he says that, it’s just like, there’s no way any human believes it. Those I try to just dismiss,” he said. “He’s just engagement baiting. He’s trying to get viewers; he’s trying to make money.”

Kurt Gray, a psychology professor at Ohio State University, told me that Fuentes’s appeal to the left might, in part, reflect the theory of “optimum distinctiveness,” or the inclination of people to differentiate themselves from their group. In this case, lefties watching Fuentes may think: “Yeah, I’m left-wing, but I’m a free thinker. I listen to Nick Fuentes,” Gray said*.* “Everyone wants to think of themselves as Neo”—the hero of the Matrix films. “Everyone else is a sheeple.” Gray added that controversy can encourage people to work harder to justify their views, so that someone begins to think, “I must really believe Nick Fuentes because now my sister’s calling me an idiot for believing him.”

Instead of dismissing Fuentes’s odious views, some of his more recent and ideologically diverse followers contort themselves to justify them. Sure, Fuentes has said, “We need white men running everything,” but he was just being ironic, right? When he claimed recently that the “No. 1 political enemy in America is women,” obviously that was for the clicks.

This is what makes Fuentes so successful—and, to anti-radicalization researchers, so insidious. He’s relying on the shield of irony and the spear of clipping to win the battle to widen his audience. And it’s working.

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Lanre Dokun, a psychiatrist in New York, has a lot of clients with financial anxiety. For the older ones, the stress is usually situational: Perhaps they’ve lost their job, or they’re worrying about medical costs. But for young adults, he’s noticed, the concern is downright existential. It’s a “chronic background stressor,” he told me, or even “a character in their lives.” Clients who are objectively on solid ground are worried they one day won’t be. Some are obsessive about budgeting. Others are scared of being replaced by AI. One high-earning client consistently saves 40 percent of her income, yet still feels she’s behind.

Gen Z does seem to be a financially savvy and hypercautious bunch. A 2024 Charles Schwab survey found that the average Zoomer started saving at age 18, younger than other generations had. (The typical Boomer, for comparison, began at 34.) Nearly half are investing, and most began that before age 20. According to a study by the Investment Company Institute and the University of Chicago, which adjusted for inflation, Gen Z households have nearly three times more assets in defined-contribution retirement accounts than Gen X households did at the same age.

Joelle Remy, a financial adviser in Chicago, told me that she’s noticed young people trying to earn extra high-school credits so they can graduate from college early and save on tuition. Others are getting retail jobs at 16 in order to stash wages away for an eventual master’s degree. Some of her Gen Z clients have saved more than a lot of her Millennials have.

All of that might seem counterintuitive for a generation with a bit of a Peter Pan reputation—known less for buying bonds than for living in their parent’s basement. And it’s true: A ton of young people are postponing the traditional adulthood milestones, putting off having families or buying homes at least in part because they don’t feel they can afford them. But what seems like falling behind could actually be planning ahead: watching and waiting, always trying to prepare for the future. Maybe young adults, far from being in arrested development, are growing up exceptionally fast.

Gen Z has been coming of age in an über-expensive world. Child-care costs have been rising for years, outpacing inflation. Home prices are exceptionally high—especially in cities, where a whole lot of entry-level jobs are located. Pensions and “jobs for life” have practically gone extinct. Much of Gen Z dreams of house deeds and baby carriages; those landmarks are simply taking longer to reach.

But the irony is that for all that time young adults spend not achieving their goals, many of them are quietly squirreling money away instead. The prototypical grown kid in the basement, as easily as he could be labeled a degenerate, may be amassing a nest egg from what would’ve been rent or mortgage payments; the paycheck diverted from diapers could be funneled into savings or investments. Michael Tenam, a 23-year-old IT worker, told me he makes $90,000 a year—but he’s living with his parents in Brooklyn, chipping away at his student-loan balance, wondering whether he might be ready to move out by 26 or 27. (He’d rent; home ownership, he said, “seems like an impossibility.”) Nearly all of his friends moved home too, so he’s not particularly ashamed of it, and he knows he’s lucky to have the option. “Realistically,” he said, “I could do a lot better for myself in the future if I just stay at home longer and just don’t waste that money this early on in my life.”

Young people today are surrounded not only by high sticker prices but by reminders to be careful, to plan ahead. The glossy-haired finance influencer “Mrs. Dow Jones” might pop up on their TikTok, chatting about tax withholdings; an infographic on compounding wealth from “Matt the Money Guy” might appear on their Instagram feed. (When I was growing up, the financial-advice icon Suze Orman was sometimes on TV at night, breaking the hearts of callers who asked “Can I afford it?” by shouting: “DENIED!” But Orman did not live in my pocket and follow me around giving tough love.) And more employers are enacting “opt-out” retirement plans, meaning that workers are automatically enrolled.

[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]

Young adulthood was once a time to take risks, to try things, to be a little reckless before assuming the burden of real responsibility. But now financial-health tricks and economic-news headlines can feel inescapable, and blissful ignorance near impossible. In a sense, the modern lifespan holds less breathing room for play or exploration—for youth. Shannon E. Cavanagh, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin, remembered talking with a graduate student who was saving part of her meager stipend for retirement. The decision struck Cavanagh as almost strangely conscientious for somebody so young, making so little. When Cavanagh was that age, she told me, she simply had faith in Social Security and her own ability to find work.

A certain amount of financial conservatism is a good thing. Facing reality head-on can make people less anxious, after all; as Remy, the financial adviser, put it, “Discipline is freedom.” But I’m not sure I’d describe Gen Z as free. Today’s young adults have particularly high rates of anxiety. They are famously risk-averse and moderate: drinking less and having less sex than previous generations, eschewing romantic passion for lower-stakes situationships. “There’s so much delayed joy,” Cavanagh told me. And Zoomers—many of them the children of Gen Xers who lost work in the 2008 financial crash—are particularly stressed about money. Leading up to the 2024 election, a University of Chicago study found inflation to be the No. 1 issue for young adults, across race and party affiliation.

Of course, money stress is rarely just about money itself. In an age of war and widespread mistrust, of AI infiltration and climate gloom, it may well be about control. “Financial anxiety often stems from the illusion that their perfect decision making will guarantee their safety,” Dokun told me. “But we all know that’s just not true.”

[Read: America isn’t ready for what AI will do to jobs]

In this context, information abundance can turn from a gift to a curse. Having finance influencers in your ear 24/7 can amplify the turmoil you’re already feeling. You might get great investment advice from one, but misinformation from another. In fact, many young people may have heard so much about how chaotic and terrible the world is in general, and how doomed they are as a cohort, that they have over-indexed on prudence. I share a funny sense of culpability for this with Cavanagh and her husband, Robert Crosnoe, a fellow UT Austin sociologist. They recently published a book titled The Journey Into Adulthood in Uncertain Times; we all make our living in part by describing the obstacles in Gen Z’s way. “I do think that we might have made it worse,” Crosnoe told me. “They think it’s even worse than it really is.”

In the midst of writing this story, I took a break to speak on a radio show. The topic was an article that I’d written about how hard it is to be a young woman in 2026; I was joined by Meg Jay, a clinical psychologist I’d interviewed for it. Traditionally, Jay said, young adulthood is a time of “unrealistic optimism,” when people let themselves imagine they’ll never have to dial back their dreams. But in recent years, she’s found the opposite problem with her clients: unrealistic pessimism. They’re crouched, hands over head, waiting for a big blow that may never come.

I’ll now state the obvious: Not every young person is saving. Many people simply don’t have the means. Others hold an attitude that Rebecca Palmer, the head of financial guidance at Fruitful, a fiscal-planning company for people in their 20s to 40s, called “financial nihilism”: They don’t see the point in working slowly and steadily toward a goal that seems unlikely to ever be reached. Earlier this month, a study from the financial-services company Northwestern Mutual found that nearly a third of participants ages 18 to 29 said they were considering or already putting money into sports betting and prediction markets. Eighty percent—more than any other generation—said they might invest in such “high-risk or speculative investments” because they feel financially behind.

That might seem to contradict my point about Gen Z’s financial wariness. But hypervigilance and nihilism are just two different responses to the same uncertainty: If you don’t know what the future holds, you might scrupulously manage every cent to your name. Or you might laugh darkly, mutter “What future?,” and log onto Polymarket to try to make a quick buck. These are both classic strategies in times of economic strife, Crosnoe told me. Some people become very focused on the short-term problem of making ends meet, which researchers call an “income effect”—a phenomenon most common among those “in dire straits,” Crosnoe said, who might not have any savings or familial support to fall back on. Others become fixated on the long game: a “substitution effect,” in which they try to position themselves for eventual prosperity. (That helps explain why U.S. college enrollment went up after the 2008 downturn, even when tuition wasn’t easy for many to afford.)

[Read: My year as a degenerate gambler]

So the super-savers are a lucky bunch: privileged enough to fret over the future, rather than treading water just to stay afloat in the present. But all of the “delayed joy,” all of the worry and austerity, is still taxing. Cavanagh and Crosnoe have found that the people most panicked in rocky economies aren’t typically the ones in the worst circumstances; they’re the ones who are downwardly mobile, less wealthy than their parents. And perhaps they’re less wealthy than they feel they should be; maybe they imagine that they can fix everything if they push a little harder or sacrifice a little more. “There’s just so much shame” among this cohort, Dokun told me—a feeling of inadequacy compared with peers who always seem to be doing fabulously on social media, but also compared with previous generations.

In all likelihood, much of Gen Z will land on two feet. As Baby Boomers downsize, move into retirement homes, or—sorry—die, more homes will come on the market, according to Daryl Fairweather, a chief economist for the real-estate company Redfin. That should make buying property much easier by about 2035, she predicts, as a lot of Zoomers hit their mid- to late-30s: approaching peak first-time-home-buying years, these days. People like Michael Tenam will move out of their parents’ places, and they’ll be richer for the time spent there. Many will eventually end up with the wedding ring and the mortgage and the baby, just like their folks. Cavanagh and Crosnoe reviewed five decades of data for their book, and found that even the Great Depression and the Great Recession didn’t affect young people’s life outcomes all that much. Individuals did suffer, but in the aggregate, Crosnoe told me, “10, 20 years after the fact, it’s really hard to pull out a cohort that looks really different from the ones before or after it. Historical change is just much more gradual than that.”

The more pressing question may be whether young people are okay right now—because there is a cost to putting today off for tomorrow. Lora Park, a University at Buffalo psychologist, has studied the well-being of people who are particularly fixated on long-term goals. She’s found that they tend to report feeling anxiety, guilt, and regret when doing anything other than working toward their narrow mission. And when they stake much of their self-worth on financial success, they tend to feel less autonomy, not more.

While we were talking, Cavanagh plucked a quote from the historical data she and her husband had used for their book. This was from someone weathering the Great Recession. She summarized: “I’m extremely frugal, I save every penny I can, I don’t trust banks. I keep all my money in cash.” That woman wasn’t even saving for a discrete goal such as marriage, Cavanagh noted. “It just felt like a barrier against the unknown.” I wondered for how many years she was bracing, and what she gave up before the unknown arrived anyway.

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When I opened Sora this morning, I was met with a flood of strange and disturbing AI-generated videos. On OpenAI’s video app, I scrolled through fabricated scenes of the Iran war and a barrage of fake Donald Trumps blabbering about Jeffrey Epstein. In my least favorite clip, I watched a man deep-fry an infant. The app lets users create fairly realistic-looking AI-generated clips—including of their own likeness—and then post them on a TikTok-like feed. Not all of them are so unsettling, and for better or worse, Sora has been a steady source of internet virality. Within days of its release, it skyrocketed to the top of the App Store.

Now Sora will soon be dead. Yesterday, OpenAI said that it was shutting down the app and terminating public access to its video-generating technology. The decision was seemingly abrupt: Just a few months ago, Disney announced plans to invest $1 billion in OpenAI as part of a licensing deal to bring its characters to Sora, and earlier this week, workers from both companies were apparently still collaborating. (Disney has since retracted its investment plans.) Even some Sora staffers themselves were reportedly caught off guard by the announcement. Online, people eulogized Sora by posting their favorite videos—such as one featuring a column of spinning penguins and another in which Jesus walks on water to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming.

After OpenAI launched the Sora app, in September, Sam Altman predicted that society was about to undergo a stunning artistic revolution. “Creativity could be about to go through a Cambrian explosion,” he wrote online. But such a revolution never materialized. It’s not that people hate AI slop. In fact, if anything, people seem to have a surprising appetite for it—the latest TikTok trend is raunchy telenovelas starring AI-generated fruit. In response to a request for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson pointed me to a public statement that cites “compute demand” as a key factor in the company’s decision. Generating videos is much more costly than generating text is, and Sora has likely been a real financial drain: In the fall, Forbes estimated that Sora might be costing OpenAI millions of dollars daily, and Bill Peebles, who leads Sora, said that the economics were “completely unsustainable.” (OpenAI declined to comment on Forbes’s estimates at the time.)

The decision to quickly spin up a project and then suddenly pull the plug has become a classic OpenAI move. The company has spent the past few years cycling through new product features and business models with spectacular haste in an attempt to find its way to profitability. OpenAI seems to finally be learning that slop is not a business strategy.

Altman has never had a great plan for how OpenAI will make money. “We have no idea how we may one day generate revenue,” Altman said at a 2019 event. He went on to explain that one day, AI would be smart enough that OpenAI would simply ask the computer how to generate an investment return. “You can laugh,” he told a (rightfully) amused audience. “But it is what I actually believe is going to happen.” After ChatGPT’s success a few years later, investors began pouring money into OpenAI, and Altman has done a tremendous job of marshaling investor funds. The start-up is now worth more than Toyota, Coca-Cola, and Disney combined. But investors like to see returns, and so far, OpenAI hasn’t done much to prove that it is capable of generating enough cash to stay out of the red.

[Read: The MySpace dilemma facing ChatGPT]

That’s not to say it hasn’t been trying: Over the past few years, OpenAI has explored just about every business model conceivable. Last summer, Altman described OpenAI as four separate companies—a consumer-tech business, a massive-scale infrastructure project, an AI-research lab, and an incubator for “new stuff,” including hardware. (OpenAI has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.)

The trouble with trying to do everything is that sometimes you end up doing nothing well. Sora is the latest casualty in a long string of abrupt reversals, about-faces, and seemingly sloppily implemented projects. Last year, Altman announced a massive joint AI-infrastructure build-out with Oracle and Softbank called Stargate, but the effort stalled, reportedly following poor leadership and coordination. Altman said in 2024 that combining ads and AI would be a “last resort” response—but then, earlier this year, the start-up launched an ads initiative. Last fall, OpenAI debuted a shopping feature, which allowed people to buy products directly inside ChatGPT; yesterday, the company announced that it was killing the feature and pivoting to focus on product discovery instead. In January, the company said that the first of its much-awaited devices was “on track” to launch later this year, but weeks later, court filings revealed that the company is unlikely to debut its new hardware before 2027. OpenAI originally banned NSFW content, and then it announced last year that it would make exceptions for such material, even planning a December rollout for erotica, only to later put erotica indefinitely on hold.

Some amount of change in business plans is only natural for any company, let alone one an industry as fast-moving as AI. But when compared with its peers, OpenAI’s strategy is especially chaotic. The company’s plans are seemingly always provisional: No partnership or product road map feels guaranteed to endure. Earlier this year, Nvidia walked back a commitment to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI. At the time, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had concerns with OpenAI’s “lack of discipline” in its business approach. (When asked about the report, Huang said that it was “nonsense” to suggest he was unhappy with OpenAI.)

OpenAI’s haphazard business strategy has left the company to deal with an identity crisis of its own making. OpenAI is losing ground to Anthropic, its chief rival in the AI race, which has stuck with a targeted approach of selling productivity-enhancing AI tools to other businesses. Anthropic has had great success in its steadfast focus on the enterprise market. Now OpenAI is attempting to copy Anthropic’s playbook. “We cannot miss this moment, because we are distracted by side quests,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s applications chief, reportedly told staff in a company-wide meeting earlier this month, explaining that the company needs to nail “productivity on the business front.” To do so, OpenAI is planning to nearly double its head count this year, including by hiring a team of specialists who will help other companies adopt its technology. Even at the product level, OpenAI appears to be copying Anthropic—OpenAI is apparently planning to launch a “superapp” to streamline its product offerings into one app, likely an attempt to compete with Anthropic’s Cowork and Claude Code. “We were spreading our efforts across too many apps,” Simo wrote to employees last week. “That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want.”

After scrolling through Iran deepfakes and Trump slop on Sora this morning, I navigated to Altman’s account on the platform. I was curious to see what the company’s CEO might have to say about the end of Sora. The last time that Altman appears to have posted on the app was six months ago, back when the app launched. Perhaps that should have been a foreboding sign. I continued watching more clips until a pop-up filled my screen. OpenAI wanted to know how using Sora was affecting my mood. The app offered me a choice between “Thumbs-Up” and “Thumbs-Down.” I hit “Thumbs-Down.”

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On Friday, after almost a full month of bombing Iran, Donald Trump offered a glimpse of the end. American military operations in the country, he said, could soon be “winding down.” A day later, he swerved, giving Iran an ultimatum: Should its leaders refuse to lift their effective blockade on the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours, unfreezing much of the world’s oil, he would “obliterate” the nation’s energy infrastructure. Then, yesterday morning, another swerve: Following “productive” diplomatic talks, Trump would postpone the deadline until Friday. Never mind the fact that Iran has denied that any such talks took place.

The president hasn’t always been clear about what he wants from this war—or how he plans to mitigate the energy crisis it has created. At one point, he suggested that the spike in oil prices might actually be a good thing, because “we” could stand to “make a lot of money.” That’s true for oil producers, although not exactly a counter to all of the negative effects of a global energy shock. But the timing of this ultimatum and the timing of its subsequent deferral are revealing in their own way. Oil-futures markets don’t trade from Friday to Sunday evening. Because Trump’s threat to Iran arrived on a Saturday night, speculators had a short buffer—a little less than a day—to assess the potential price impact before trading resumed. And the reprieve, which lasts exactly five days, will conclude as markets head into the weekend pause.

The persistent rise of U.S. Treasury yields, coupled with the news yesterday morning that Asia’s markets (which start trading before Western markets) had plummeted after the ultimatum, probably also contributed to the postponement. John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019, told The Atlantic that during Trump’s first term, foreign-policy announcements were sometimes timed with trading hours in mind. Those calls were made both by the president himself and by Treasury officials who advised him to do so. Trump’s second term has only clarified how much power the markets seem to have over his decision making—and other countries are likely paying attention.

Intentionally or not, certain military actions in Iran have aligned with weekend market pauses. And Trump has made at least one big decision that explicitly hinged on the market’s reaction: The initial announcement of last year’s “Liberation Day” tariffs, which resulted in the most significant equities-market shake-up of Trump’s second term, was deliberately delayed until the end of the trading day, Atlantic reporting has confirmed. The president has also enjoyed his power over the markets more broadly. My colleague Jonathan Lemire told me that, according to his reporting, Trump has in the past alerted aides when he thought an upcoming social-media post would get a reaction from Wall Street—and then watched the ticker move in real time. (“The Administration is naturally attuned to how major policy decisions affect financial markets and the economy, but any implication that the President’s decision-making—and timing—is influenced by anything other than the best interest of the American people is baseless and false,” a White House spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Atlantic.)

It’s easy to get conspiratorial about how, exactly, Trump times these moves. After all, not every foreign-policy decision can be chalked up to markets alone. The United States’ and Israel’s initial strikes on Iran were planned to coincide with a meeting of top Iranian leaders. That meeting happened to be on a Saturday. The timing of the raid on Nicolás Maduro’s compound reportedly had to do with the weather in Caracas in January; unfavorable cloud conditions delayed the capture of the Venezuelan president for days. Lucky, then, that the clouds cleared up on a Saturday—energy markets had a chance to figure out what the effects of the intervention might be before they reacted.

Thomas Wright, an Atlantic contributing writer and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told me that although Trump has long cared about shifts in U.S. Treasury yields (Barron’s went so far as to call them his “kryptonite”), his recent actions have underscored the importance of energy markets in his decision making. “We’ve discovered in the Iran war that he’s also very sensitive to the price of oil—which we could have gathered from what he said over many years—but I think we have some evidence to it,” he said. Yesterday, Trump appeared to acknowledge the link between oil prices and the timing of his policies; after he announced the delay of his ultimatum on Iran, the price of oil slid and the stock market bounced back. “The price of oil will drop like a rock as soon as a deal is done,” Trump told reporters. “I guess it already is today.”

Iran is likely keeping tabs on Trump’s sensitivity to the markets too. When the price of oil shot up after the start of the war, the consequences set in for Americans pretty quickly: Gasoline is up; jet-fuel prices are up, compounding the ongoing chaos at American airports; and groceries and other everyday items are poised to get more expensive as well. Iran knows it has at least some leverage here. Trump’s apparent willingness to make decisions based on the markets is a liability—the more he reacts, the more easily he can be exploited.

Jonathan Lemire and Vivian Salama contributed reporting.

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The Pentagon is preparing to deploy an elite combat brigade from the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division to the Middle East, adding to recent U.S. military buildups in the region. Officials say no decision has been made about whether they will send troops into Iran.Senators said that they are nearing a deal to fund most of the Department of Homeland Security, including TSA, while excluding the agency responsible for immigrant arrests and deportations. Political pressure to end the partial shutdown has mounted due to massive airport disruptions across the country.Minnesota sued the Trump administration, seeking access to evidence in the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, who were shot by federal immigration agents. The state alleged that federal officials have blocked state investigators.

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The Most Urgent Issue for the U.S. Catholic Church Isn’t Abortion Anymore

By Francis X. Rocca

Not so long ago, when U.S. Catholic leaders said something political, they tended to sound like conservatives. American bishops’ most prominent policy statements focused on three issues: same-sex marriage, contraception, and—above all—abortion. Their frequently stated opposition to all three put them at odds with not just the left but also many Catholics. It even created tension with Rome.

Since Donald Trump’s reelection, however, the Church in the United States has been sounding more liberal. Its teaching hasn’t changed, but the president’s second term has shifted the bishops’ attention. The most urgent political concern for America’s Catholic leaders is no longer abortion; it’s immigration.

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Early this morning, with Asian markets sharply down and oil tankers idling in the Strait of Hormuz, President Trump offered Iranian leaders a familiar mix of threats but also a reprieve. What had been, only days earlier, a 48-hour ultimatum—reopen the strait or face the destruction of energy infrastructure —softened into something more elastic: a five-day extension for what he described as “very good and productive” talks with Tehran.

The contours of the talks were not immediately clear, though Trump suggested while leaving Palm Beach this morning that both he and “the ayatollah, whoever the ayatollah is” should control the Strait of Hormuz, through which one-fifth of the world’s oil supply passes. He boasted of “major points of agreement” and assured reporters that Iran, like the United States, wants “very much to make a deal.” Otherwise, he added, “we’ll just keep bombing our little hearts out.”

It was, by his telling, progress. By Tehran’s account, it was fiction.

The gap between Trump’s claims and Iran’s categorical denials underscores how little control either side has over the conflict—or its narrative. The White House is attempting to manage a large-scale military confrontation with an undefined exit strategy—a confrontation that is unnerving markets. As military strikes fail to reopen the waterway and allies worry about the expanding conflict, the administration is facing the limits of unilateral action.

Three foreign officials with knowledge of the U.S. efforts told us that Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, has communicated with the Iranian government through Pakistan and other regional intermediaries in an effort to get the embattled regime to agree to demands regarding its nuclear program and uranium-enrichment efforts. They said that the U.S. presented a 15-point plan—based on the 15-point proposal presented to the Iranian government last year—to give the weakened regime a chance to concede and spare itself further bombardment. These officials, like others we spoke with, did so on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations.

Vice President Vance spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu today about efforts to restart talks with Iran, a person with knowledge of the discussions told us. Vance, whose long-held isolationist views have put him at odds with some in the administration—including the president—may also take part in talks in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, in the coming days, this person said.

White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told us in a statement that the situation is fluid and that any “speculation about meetings should not be deemed as final until they are formally announced by the White House.” She added that the administration would not negotiate the conflict “through the press.” Iranian officials insist that there are no negotiations. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the Parliament speaker, dismissed Trump’s claims as market manipulation—they are an attempt, he said, to “escape the quagmire” and to reassure oil traders rattled by the strait’s closure.

The result is a war suspended between escalation and exit, its terms of victory as undefined now as they were at its outset.

Trump’s aides had previously urged him, advisers have told us, not to issue any ultimatums or deadlines that the U.S. would have difficulty enforcing—guidance that he followed for a time, even as his threats toward Tehran grew more belligerent. But the president grew frustrated late last week when Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz and refused to reopen it, even under heavy American and Israeli bombardment.

The strait’s closure sent oil prices soaring and stock markets tumbling, and it unnerved Republicans facing close elections this fall. (Trump has often taken the stock-market indexes to be the most important metric of presidential success.) By Saturday, Trump was seething that NATO allies had refused to help secure the strait—and that he had received criticism and negative news coverage for announcing that he was glad that Robert Mueller had died, two advisers who were aware of the president’s mindset over the weekend told us. That night, Trump issued his 48-hour ultimatum to Iran.

[Read: How much pain is Trump really willing to endure?]

But Iran showed no signs of budging, and some of Trump’s advisers and U.S. allies in the region warned that destroying Iran’s power infrastructure would be a mistake, one of those advisers and two other people familiar with the conversations told us. U.S. allies and experts warned that a strike of that nature might prompt Iran to attack its neighbors with much of its remaining arsenal.

And still, there would be no guarantees that the strait could be swiftly reopened. Allies also cautioned that extensive damage to Iran’s infrastructure might produce a failed state at the war’s end, which could create a refugee crisis and a dangerous breeding ground for terrorism and violence.

Since late last month, when U.S. and Israeli strikes killed much of Iran’s senior leadership, the military campaign has moved quickly (but not smoothly) toward some of the administration’s discernible objectives. American forces have hit missile sites, naval assets, and fortified positions along Iran’s southern coast near the Strait of Hormuz. Trump has said that the bombing of Kharg Island, a centerpiece of Iran’s energy infrastructure, completely destroyed the island’s military sites, though oil facilities were conspicuously untouched.

The strait, effectively closed by threats of Iranian mines, drones, and attacks on ships, has proved more difficult to reopen than to threaten. Shipping traffic has dwindled. Insurance costs have spiked.

Trump is known to pay close attention to financial markets, and he announced the five-day extension just as Wall Street opened this morning. The markets immediately rebounded, and the price of oil fell. The president acknowledged the link to reporters soon after. “The price of oil will drop like a rock as soon as a deal is done,” he said. “I guess it already is today.”

One former administration official told us that even the prospect of resuming talks is enough to give Trump cover to extend his self-imposed deadline. It has also bought the president more time to consider whether he wants to deploy ground troops to the region, perhaps a strike force to seize Kharg Island. Such an operation—pushed vigorously in public and private by allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham—could force Iran to give up control of the strait but would also come at a cost: The fighting would likely be fierce, and Trump has expressed reluctance to risk numerous American casualties.

[Read: The Iran war’s next threat is to food and water ]

Allies, too, have hesitated to turn to force to reopen the strait. European and Indo-Pacific partners—Japan, Australia, and several NATO states—have resisted direct military involvement, instead urging diplomacy or limited escort missions through the strait. The coalition Trump once envisioned has not materialized.

Against this backdrop, the president’s messaging has grown more improvisational. On Truth Social, Trump has alternated between declaring overwhelming victory and calling for other nations to assume responsibility for the strait’s security. His suggestion today that the passage could soon reopen under U.S.–Iranian management lacks confirmation from Tehran. The strikes threatened on Iran’s power grid—once imminent—have been paused, not canceled, and made contingent on diplomatic momentum that one side insists exists and the other denies outright. Meanwhile, the fighting continues, with no clear end in sight.

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Seabourn is bringing The Atlantic aboard for an exclusive three-year partnership to host a series of curated events on select itineraries, developed specifically for Seabourn guests and designed to deepen onboard enrichment through thoughtful dialogue and cultural exchange. The partnership will culminate in a full itinerary takeover in 2028, with a 12-day cruise from Montreal to Boston, where The Atlantic was founded in 1857.

This is a first-of-its-kind partnership for both The Atlantic and Seabourn. The Atlantic will develop programming on select Seabourn cruises reflecting a range of topics––including culture and books, business and science, health and tech––with conversations led by its writers. The Atlantic, which has been dramatically growing its editorial platforms and live programming over the past several years, is known for convening must-attend journalistic and idea-driven events such as its annual Atlantic Festival, and it recently launched a nationwide tour, The Atlantic Across America, that will hold events in all 50 states over the next three years.

Departing October 4, 2028, Seabourn Quest will sail on a “12-Day With The Atlantic: A Seabourn Conversations Exclusive” voyage as part of Seabourn’s 40th-anniversary year. Set against the backdrop of Canada’s fall foliage, the cruise will feature exclusive editorial programming inspired by The Atlantic Festival. Additional voyages featuring programming from The Atlantic will be announced at a later date and will happen in 2026 and 2027.

The partnership includes a subscription integration: Guests on a cruise featuring an Atlantic event will have free digital access while onboard and will receive a complimentary three-month subscription after their sail. The Atlantic is also curating the libraries on each ship fleetwide, to include recent issues of the magazine and books by its current and historical writers.

“We’re thrilled to be collaborating with Seabourn to bring The Atlantic and the experience of our live events to their voyages,” said Alice McKown, The Atlantic’s publisher and chief revenue officer. “Storytelling and connection define our work, and this allows us to develop one-of-a-kind events in intimate settings for Seabourn’s guests.”

“Our guests are driven by a desire to explore—drawn not only to new destinations, but to the discovery of ideas, culture, cuisine, design and beyond that shape the world around them,” said Kacy Cole, Seabourn’s chief marketing officer. “With The Atlantic, we’re extending that exploration beyond place—bringing meaningful conversation and perspectives on board in a way that feels immersive, relevant, and unmistakably Seabourn.”

This programming is part of Seabourn Conversations, Seabourn’s enrichment program known for offering guests insights from leading thinkers, authors, and experts in an intimate, conversational setting. Designed to foster meaningful dialogue, Seabourn Conversations brings guests face-to-face with influential voices across culture, science, politics, history, and the arts, for the world’s most compelling conversations at sea.

About The Atlantic The Atlantic was founded in 1857 as a magazine of politics, arts, and letters, with a mission to understand the American idea. That work has intensified and expanded through reporting on culture, science, national security, technology, literature, and more. In the past year alone, The Atlantic has added more than 50 journalists to its staff as part of a major editorial expansion; launched broader coverage of defense, national security, technology, health, and science; begun publishing two more print issues annually; introduced a Games hub; and begun offering free digital access to every public U.S. high school. It has a record number of subscriptions—more than 1.4 million—after many years of continuous and dramatic subscription growth.

About Seabourn Seabourn represents the pinnacle of luxury ocean and expedition travel and operates a suite of six modern ships. The all-inclusive, boutique ships offer all-suite accommodations with oceanfront views; award-winning dining; complimentary premium spirits and fine wines available at all times; renowned service provided by an industry-leading crew; a relaxed, sociable atmosphere that makes guests feel at home; a pedigree in expedition travel through the Ventures by Seabourn program and two new luxury purpose-built expedition ships, including Seabourn Venture that launched in 2022 and Seabourn Pursuit in 2023. Seabourn takes travelers to every continent on the globe, visiting more than 400 ports including marquee cities and lesser-known ports and hideaways. Guests of Seabourn experience extraordinary offerings and programs, including partnerships with leading entertainers, dining, personal health and well-being, and engaging speakers. Seabourn is a brand of Carnival Corporation and plc (NYSE / LSE: CCL and NYSE: CUK).

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

Opposition to President Trump’s continued attacks on Iran is growing—not only from resentful European allies and Democratic Party leaders, but also from parts of his MAGA base. This week, a top counterterrorism official resigned from his role in protest. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss this and more.

What does winning a war with unclear objectives look like? Panelists examined what it would take for Trump to declare victory in the war with Iran.

Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, this week: Idrees Ali, a national-security correspondent at Reuters; Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch; Vivian Salama, a staff writer at The Atlantic; David Sanger, a White House and national-security correspondent at The New York Times.

Watch the full episode here.

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If you’ve been following the Iran war, you will have heard about the surpassing geopolitical significance of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow waterway responsible for carrying a fifth of the world’s oil out of the Persian Gulf. Shortly after first being attacked, Iran announced that it would not let ships pass through, a move that almost overnight created what the International Energy Agency called the “largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.”

The good news is that the effects of closing the Strait of Hormuz will reverse almost as soon as it is reopened. If the conflict were to end tomorrow, then everything would quickly go more or less back to normal. The bad news is that Iran has an even more potent weapon than closing the strait, one with the potential to turn a temporary supply disruption into a lasting shortage: destroying oil-and-gas infrastructure in Arab nations. In recent days, Tehran has demonstrated that it isn’t afraid to use it. President Trump, eager to avoid a full-blown energy disaster, has begun scrambling to limit the fallout. But the situation might not be in America’s control.

The war’s unnerving new phase began on Wednesday, when Israel launched an air strike on Iran’s largest natural-gas field, which supplies most of the country’s electricity. This was the first time since the conflict began that Iran’s energy production had been directly targeted. In response, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian warned of “uncontrollable consequences” that “could engulf the entire world.” The regime released a list of crucial pieces of oil-and-gas infrastructure throughout the Middle East that are now considered “direct and legitimate targets.” Hours later, Iran launched attacks on Qatar’s Ras Laffan complex, the largest natural-gas export facility in the world, responsible for about 20 percent of the planet’s liquified natural gas.

[Rogé Karma: Would Trump risk an oil crisis?]

Until that point, Iran had conducted smaller strikes on nonessential infrastructure that could be repaired in days or weeks, mostly to send a message. This time, it targeted the most important pieces of equipment: the highly complex, expensive machines that turn vaporous natural gas into its liquified form that can be shipped around the world. The CEO of QatarEnergy, the state-owned operator of Ras Laffan, reported that the strike had caused “extensive damage” and that the destroyed units would take three to five years to repair. This caused natural-gas prices to spike by 35 percent in Europe.

Iran launched separate attacks on a major Saudi oil refinery and two more in Kuwait, one of which is the largest refinery in the Middle East. These attacks did not inflict the same kind of lasting damage to key infrastructure as the Ras Laffan strike. Their purpose seems to have been to demonstrate how far Iran might be willing to go. “Our response to Israel’s attack on our infrastructure employed FRACTION of our power,” Iranian Foreign Minister Seyed Abbas Araghchi wrote on X following the attacks, declaring that there would be “ZERO restraint if our infrastructures are struck again.” The message got through. The price of a barrel of crude oil temporarily surged from about $100 to $120 shortly after the attacks. (The price was sitting at about $65 before the war.) “The Iranians have demonstrated a capability to escalate this conflict to a much greater extent than really anyone expected,” Gregory Brew, the Eurasia Group’s senior analyst for Iran and energy, told me. “We are on the cusp of this conflict entering a completely different phase.”

One might have expected Trump to react to Iran’s escalation with grandiose threats to unleash yet more devastation. Instead, he tried to take the temperature down. In a Truth Social post, he claimed that the United States “knew nothing” in advance about the Israeli strike on Iran’s gas field and promised that “NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL.” (Several Israeli officials have claimed that they in fact had Trump’s sign-off.) And he suggested that future attacks on Iran’s energy supply would occur only if Iran were to strike more of the region’s oil-and-gas infrastructure.

[Rogé Karma: ‘We would be entering a completely different world’]

The fact that Trump felt the need to deny responsibility—and promise a cessation of attacks on Iran’s energy infrastructure—is telling. Significant damage to the Middle East’s oil infrastructure would be devastating for the American consumer. U.S. gas prices are already up from $2.90 a gallon in mid-February to $3.90 as of this morning. A March 9 Deutsche Bank analysis of more than 500 international and U.S. routes found that airfares for domestic routes had increased by 15 to 124 percent, depending on the route and airline, and that transcontinental flights had gone up by 106 percent. The president of the American Farm Bureau Federation recently wrote a letter to Trump warning that “the U.S. risks a shortfall in crops” as a result of a global fertilizer shortage created by the crisis, and that the disruption would “contribute to inflationary pressures across the U.S. economy.”

Trump’s announcement appears to have calmed oil markets, for now. The price of a barrel of crude has since fallen back down to about $110, but the situation could reescalate at any moment. Hours after Trump’s post, Iran launched a missile strike against an oil refinery in northern Israel. (The strike caused “no significant damage,” according to Israeli officials). This morning, it launched a second attack on Kuwait’s largest oil refinery, causing multiple fires to break out across the facility and forcing the Kuwaitis to suspend operations while the damage was assessed. Whether or not these strikes violated Trump’s red line against future attacks is unclear, given the characteristic inscrutability of his Truth Social post. Meanwhile, Gulf states are beginning to threaten military retaliation of their own. “We will not shy away from protecting our country and our economic resources,” Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister said yesterday.

At this point, the difference between de-escalation and escalation is the difference between an energy shortage measured in months and an economic catastrophe that could be felt for many years. And those choices are no longer Trump’s alone to make.

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