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.
Anthony Fauci returned to Capitol Hill this week, where he faced attacks from Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing. On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss his response, and more.
“The hearing was such a perfect encapsulation of Washington at this moment, with a lot of raised voices and a lot of yelling and virtually no new information,” Stephen Hayes, the editor of The Dispatch, said last night. “With a more serious government we would have gotten closer to answers through that hearing.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times; Susan Glasser, a staff writer at The New Yorker; Hayes; Nancy A. Youssef, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In one of my favorite videos of the singer-songwriter Glen Hansard, who died this week at the age of 56, he is standing in a small backyard in Cologne. It’s 2015, and he’s playing “Say It to Me Now,” which he performs in the opening scene of the breakout 2007 indie film Once; it’s a raw, wrenching plea of a song that explodes in its second half. In his guitar is a gaping hole: Hansard’s trusty cedar-topped Takamine—nicknamed “the Horse,” for its endurance—had been with him through many years of busking in Hansard’s hometown of Dublin, where he’d strummed it with sufficient force to cut through the din of the street.
Like its owner, the guitar had little varnish—hence the gash, which exposed its interior. Just as the performance begins to take off—mid–raspy belt, mid–resolute strum—the Horse’s G string snaps, and knocks some of its neighbors out of tune. Hansard coolly flings the limp string to the side, adjusts the tuning pegs with a grin, and sings on.
The sum of the video’s parts—the unassuming backyard, the battered Horse, the mishap taken in stride—tells you everything you need to know about Hansard. Many people might know him only as “the guy from Once,” which won him and Markéta Irglová, his co-star and musical collaborator, the Oscar for Best Original Song. But in this stripped-down performance, we witness the mastery and lack of artifice that defined his music and his life.
The simple scene also harkens to his origins as a street musician. Hansard said time and again that this vulnerable and often trying vocation, which he left school at 13 to pursue, turned him into the artist he was. Busking made him egoless, unflappable—the people’s troubadour.
The tributes to Hansard from every corner of the music industry show the profound mark he left over his four-decade career. Songwriters cited his influence on them; collaborators recounted his generosity; his fellow Irishman Bono hailed him as the “voice of the streets.” Other artists recalled how he’d made time for everyone: He’d befriended legends, paid tribute to peers who had passed, mentored those coming up behind him. He gathered his fellow musicians, and they gathered around him.
It’s no coincidence that Hansard shot to fame in the United States with Once: He starred as an Irish busker who falls for a Czech pianist, played by Irglová. The film begins with an unbroken shot of Hansard on a dark, nearly deserted street, guitar case propped open at his feet, singing “Say It to Me Now.” It’s a vocal tour de force, by turns tender and volcanic, that immediately establishes him as a rugged bard roiling with emotion. When he was invited, with Irglová, to perform their poignant, Oscar-winning ballad, “Falling Slowly,” at the following year’s Academy Awards, he put on a nice suit—but still played his beat-up old Horse.
Hansard’s brush with Hollywood was relatively brief. He had many other pursuits: He was the front man of the Frames, one of Ireland’s most successful rock bands, and one-half of the heart-on-its-sleeve folk duo the Swell Season, with Irglová; he also put out a number of solo records. He was recording new music up until the end of his life, and had been busking for decades. His final, two-volume album, a career-spanning retrospective, was called Don’t Settle. He never did. He had just finished work on another record, which he’d hoped to release next spring. Knowing the amount of music he still had in him—that he was nowhere near done—makes his sudden death all the more devastating.
Even as his profile grew, he remained a street musician at heart. He toured with Eddie Vedder, performed with Bruce Springsteen, and earned four Grammy nods, but he appeared to have no interest in hoarding the spotlight; after all, in the parks and streets he had long frequented, there was no spotlight. Music, he believed, was a communal experience, something to be shared and reveled in. “The thing with busking,” he once said, “is, it has to be inclusive—it has to be an open act.”
His life’s work, it seems, was to bridge the distance between performer and spectator. He often played surprise or impromptu sets in bars, clubs, or the street. At concerts, he could make a large venue feel as intimate as a pub; the amps, lights, and stage were all accoutrements. He invited friends to join him onstage, often doing a number with the opening act or local artists. The audience became his drinking buddies as he regaled them with stories and entrusted them with what felt like secrets. He often encouraged them to join him, and one another, in song; many of his shows included an a cappella sing-along of the Irish folk ballad “The Auld Triangle.”
Everyone who knew Hansard—and most of his fans didfeel that they knew him—has their own story that captures his big-tent ethos. I have many. This is one of them: In August 2023, Hansard and Irglová took the stage at Manhattan’s Radio City Music Hall, a stop on a reunion tour celebrating the 15th anniversary of Once. Toward the end of the night, Glen appeared onstage solo and said that the night before, he had met a young musician named Gabriel busking on the streets of Boston, and had invited him to tonight’s show. “Come up and sing with me!” he shouted into the orchestra.
Gabriel emerged from the darkness; Hansard threw a reassuring arm around him and handed him a guitar. They stepped away from the microphones, their instruments unplugged; the two men were buskers again. They played “Say It to Me Now.” Strumming in unison, they traded beaming smiles, assuring glances. It was clear that Hansard believed that they both had an equal right to be on that hallowed stage—professional, amateur, old, young, educated, uneducated, it made no difference. It was the music that bound them to each other, and Hansard to those who loved him.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
We often associate wonder with the faraway and the exceptional. But some of the planet’s most extraordinary spectacles unfold every day, largely unnoticed.
For a recent Atlantic story, the senior editor Vann R. Newkirk II traveled to Mexico to witness one such phenomenon: the annual arrival of millions of monarch butterflies after a migration spanning thousands of miles. The journey still puzzles scientists, but perhaps the most remarkable part is that it continues at all. After decades of decline, monarch populations are showing signs of recovery, thanks in part to years of patient conservation work across North America. It’s a reminder of how much the natural world still has left to teach us about not only what it can do, but what it can survive as well.
Today’s newsletter explores the many ways that nature continues to surprise and inspire us to look a little closer.
On Our Living Planet
The Return of the Monarch
By Vann R. Newkirk II
After years of decline, butterfly populations are rising—for now.
Do animals have fun?: Scientists want an evolutionary explanation for animal play. But maybe the answer is simply that it brings them joy, Sallie Tisdale wrote in 2024.
My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “I was hesitant to go to Antarctica because I thought it would be uncomfortably cold. Heaven forbid! It turns out, I was so entranced by the landscape, the wildlife, the sounds that I was willing to stand on the open deck for hours,” Jessica D. from Phoenix, Arizona, shared.
We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
Truth is under threat today from two opposing impulses. The first is subjectivism, or relativism: the denial of the existence of objective truth or the possibility of ever attaining it. This proposition may seem abstract, but it has direct consequences for our civic life. Contrary to what one hears at cocktail parties or in freshman philosophy classes, relativism is the predicate not of tolerance but of repression.
The other impulse poses no less a threat to liberty: the refusal to reckon with our fallibility. All of us, at every conscious moment of our lives, hold in our head some false beliefs. Even when we do our best to be attentive, informed, judicious, and honest, we can still be wrong about profoundly important questions—questions of human nature, the human good, human dignity, and human destiny. We can, for example, be confident that we are on the side of justice, yet profoundly mistaken about what justice demands of us.
Fallibility is a feature of the human condition. Although we can’t eradicate it, we can make progress toward replacing many of our false beliefs with true ones. But to do that, we need to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility, open ourselves to challenges to our convictions, and rebuild our capacity for civil discourse. Genuine civil discourse recognizes not only that objective truth exists but that it’s often best pursued by engaging with people who are convinced we’ve got it wrong.
Civil discourse is not mere politesse. It does not consist of listening patiently while someone articulates a view contrary to one’s own. Rather, each party considers the opposing argument in its most favorable light, sincerely entertaining the possibility that their own view is incorrect and should be abandoned. Their goal—a shared goal—is not winning a victory for their tribe; it is getting to the truth.
Achieving civil discourse is hard for us frail human creatures, particularly in our era of ideological partisanship, polarization, identity politics, and conspiracism on both the left and the right. It requires resisting the nearly universal human tendencies to embrace ideological tribalism and fall in love with our opinions. We often regard some of our beliefs—especially moral, political, and religious ones—as so integral to our identity that we experience even good-faith challenges as attacks on our very selves. In other words, we tend to wrap our emotions tightly around our convictions.
In a certain respect, this is helpful, even necessary. We have to be emotionally invested in our convictions if we want to accomplish anything, especially things that require strenuous effort, courage, and sacrifice. It’s important for even mundane matters too. A parent can have a bare belief in the usefulness of getting the kids up, washed, dressed, fed, and sent off to school in the morning. But the belief by itself—as any parent will attest—is not enough. Without some emotional investment, the kids aren’t getting to school on time.
We shouldaspire to be people of conviction—people who are prepared to act, take risks, and bear burdens for what we believe is good and true. And yet, we need to put some distance between ourselves and our convictions. If we wrap our emotions too tightlyaround our convictions, we lose the ability to contemplate the possibility that a critic of our view might be right. We then find ourselves descending into dogmatism, if not fanaticism.
Dogmatists and fanatics purport to uphold the truth, but in reality they jeopardize it. They undermine freedom of speech and other basic civil liberties—the prerequisites of truth seeking—because they see no reason to entertain challenges to their beliefs. They know the truth more or less completely, or so they suppose, and therefore have nothing to learn from those with whom they disagree. They regard their critics as enemies of the truth and thus forces to be defeated, even destroyed.
Relativism may seem like the antidote to this kind of thinking, but it leads to the same result. Relativists claim that there is no truth to be attained, and therefore none to be sought; that there is merely “your truth” and “my truth,” but no such thing as the truth, at least about questions outside the domain of empirical inquiry. In this worldview, people have no good basis for respecting one another’s freedom of speech, thought, inquiry, conscience, or religion. Why should we try to reason with one another about our competing desires or perspectives when there is no truth to reason about or toward? When there is nothing to reason about, there is no rational warrant for civil liberty. There is only power. “Truth” becomes the rule of the strong.
People of goodwill—intellectually and morally serious people of many shades of belief—share a desire to know the truth and live by it, even if that means giving up comforting or cherished convictions that fail to withstand critical scrutiny. To honor this fact is to reject relativism and absolutism. It is to regard reasonable people of goodwill with whom we disagree as friends who can help rescue us from false beliefs and better understand the truth.
This near collapse of civic friendship is a catastrophic threat to public life. Restoring it depends on our capacity to practice civil discourse, which in turn requires us to acknowledge our fallibility—deeply, existentially, and not merely formally. Without such an acknowledgment, it is impossible for people to cultivate the virtue of intellectual humility on which our civil liberty depends.
David Hockney, Contrejour in the French Style, 1974. Etching, soft-ground etching, aquatint.
David Hockney, who died at 88 in June, became famous as a young artist for imbuing 20th-century life with the formality and stasis of early Renaissance painting. His sharp-edged figures stand by the pool or sit by a coffee table in spaces as orderly as those in a Fra Angelico annunciation. The real world does not look so tidy, symmetrical, and enchanting. Except, very occasionally, when it does.
Contrejour in the French Style depicts a window at the Louvre that Hockney encountered shortly after moving to Paris in 1973. With its shade partly drawn, shutting out unwanted sunlight while giving a glimpse of garden, it was, he thought, “a picture in itself.”
Working from a drawing and some photographs, he rebuilt the found scene—tugging here, flattening there. His pathways and parterres are a streamlined echo of the nearby Tuileries, just as his balustrade is a compass-and-protractor enactment of the elegant original. The way the two receding diagonals intersect the wall, window, and walkway to converge at the tree line is an almost perfect diagram of single-point perspective. Hockney used visibly different etching techniques in different territories of the image—soft mats of color for the window blind, meticulous linear hatching for the floor, and splotchy, translucent color for the surrounding wall.
The formal garden, the parquet, the deep window setback, and the dappled wall (a nod to the pointillism of Georges Seurat) all wave the flag of “French Style,” with its distinct history of rules developed in the pursuit of beauty. Soon after Contrejour, Hockney’s own style shifted toward fragmented space, expressive brushwork, and episodic motion. This print, however, still exerts its wistful invitation to bask in quiet emotional weather, and notice the pictorial machinery he was about to dismantle.
This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “Contrejour in the French Style.”
On July 8, Spain’s supreme court issued a seemingly reasonable decision, unaware that by the end of the month, it would contribute to the deaths of at least 57 people, many by drowning. The court ruled that people who had migrated illegally could be sent back summarily only if they’d circumvented a physical barrier at the border. If no barrier exists—if they’d walked across open ground, say, or swum—then the government must go through a much more complicated process to deport them.
And if you’re trying to swim to Europe from Africa, there may be no better destination than Ceuta, a speck of Spanish territory in North Africa, surrounded by Morocco on its western edge and the Mediterranean elsewhere. Every year, some migrants try to swim to Ceuta, especially in the summer, when the waters are relatively calm. Ceuta has a facility that can process about 500 people at a time. But Thursday, 100 times that number—an estimated 50,000 people—made an amphibious attempt to swarm Ceuta and emigrate illegally from Morocco.
This was evidently a coordinated attempt, assisted by social media. One Facebook group, the now-defunct “Hraga Ceuta,” reportedly featured exact maps of the three-hour maritime journey from the Moroccan town of Fnideq, which bypassed the land border with Ceuta and ensured that anyone who arrived alive would break no barriers and would land on sand or rocks rather than at a fence or turnstile. People showed up with fins, wet suits, and floaties. They discussed going in together on kayaks and coordinating their departures. Their conditions on arrival were not all dire. An El País reporter in Ceuta met an unaccompanied 16-year-old girl, still wet from the sea, her mascara runny, wearing earrings and a gold necklace, “as if just back from clubbing.”
Europe will probably spend weeks trying to figure out exactly what led to Thursday’s catastrophe. (Danish and Italian leaders havecalled for suspending Spain from Schengen, the free-movement zone that allows someone to travel from Córdoba to Copenhagen without passing through border control.) But one contributing factor is that the supreme court effectively directed migrants to choose life-threatening routes. People saw their shot, and took it. Spain has alleged that human traffickers were among these opportunists. Morocco has been blamed for encouraging the migrants, to cause trouble for Spain. However, the Moroccan king happened to be giving his Throne Day speech nearby in M’diq, and it would have been an odd choice to spring a disaster of this magnitude so close by.
Another possible factor is socioeconomic: the long-term trends in Morocco that make life there miserable and send young people into the sea in search of opportunity. The youth-unemployment rate in Morocco is roughly one-third, and years of drought have led to a farming bust.
This second factor needs scrutiny, however. The past 25 years have been, droughts aside, good for Morocco’s economy. Indeed, its shift away from agriculture and mining and toward modern industry has powered consistent growth, led by such sectors as automotive manufacturing and phosphate processing. Youth unemployment is high, but it’s not much better in Spain, where it is currently about 25 percent, down from a high of 55 percent in 2013. So the migration is from a poor country without jobs to a rich one without jobs. I, too, would prefer a rich one, but the faster-growing economy of Morocco and the not-exactly-healthy labor sector of Spain complicate the picture.
In none of the accounts I have read from journalists in Ceuta do the migrants claim to be refugees—that is, people who fear persecution if they return to their home country. Some Moroccans have protested government policies, and according to reports, at least some of the migrants are sub-Saharan; some of them may have a legitimate asylum claim. But most of the Moroccans seem to be economic migrants, moving away from a country with economic problems but no economic catastrophe. In that sense, they are rational people seeking a better life, as anyone would. Because Spain has officially given swimmers a pass, it is also rational for them to have chosen that route, if they thought they could make it.
Far-right Spanish leaders are calling the incident an “invasion,” and even Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has described it as an “attack.” What I think perturbs Spaniards, and not just those on the right, is the combination of so many migrants’ awareness of the rules—knowing exactly how they work, and acting upon that knowledge for personal advantage—and their brazen unwillingness to submit to those rules when they prove disadvantageous. The name of the Facebook group that coordinated migrants used the Arabic-dialect word hraga. It means “burners,” and refers to the common practice of destroying one’s identity documents upon arrival in the intended country, to thwart even lawful efforts to detain, track, and deport their bearer. This combination of being a stickler for the rules and trying to evade them will leave a bitter taste for many Europeans.
The strongest case for mass immigration has always been that some people have no home to go back to, and need help. But the events in Ceuta seem very far from this category. They will empower right-wing parties that see Ceuta and say: Not a millimeter closer.
Wisconsin has been the nation’s most closely divided state for a quarter century. Since 2000, only one presidential candidate—Barack Obama, twice—has carried the state by more than a single percentage point. But despite its status as a battleground, America’s Dairyland has never been a bastion of milquetoast moderation. Wisconsin has produced both a father of progressivism, Robert La Follette, and the red-baiting conservative Joseph McCarthy. More recently, its voters have backed the liberal stalwarts Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin as well as the right-wing Republicans Scott Walker and Ron Johnson.
Francesca Hong is keenly aware of this history. Indeed, she’s relying on it as she tries to persuade Democratic voters to trust her with the party’s nomination for governor later this month. “We’ve been a laboratory for democracy and a petri dish for conservatism,” Hong told me during an interview last weekend at a brewery in Appleton, a small city near Green Bay where she had drawn more than 200 people for a rally.
A state legislator and former restaurateur, the 37-year-old Hong wants to make Wisconsin the country’s biggest lab for democratic socialism. She’s running on an expansive platform that includes creating a public bank and public grocery stores; providing universal child care and free school lunches; paid leave and a $20 minimum wage; and many more favored policies of the progressive left. Hong has filmed campaign videos in restaurant kitchens and on soccer fields, and she’s often wearing a red bandana that evokes Rosie the Riveter and labor solidarity. Her rallies are punctuated by profanity—a fellow state legislator who introduced her on Sunday wore a T-shirt that said Fight the Fuckery—earthy musical acts, and hearty endorsements by like-minded local progressives.
With innovative ads and a grassroots network of more than 7,000 volunteers knocking on doors across the state, Hong’s campaign has shot out far ahead of more experienced and well-known Democratic rivals. (Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, Sara Rodriguez, dropped her bid for the top job amid a campaign-finance scandal; its previous lieutenant governor, Mandela Barnes, suspended his candidacy on Thursday and effectively conceded to Hong.) The most recent survey from Marquette Law School—the state’s most reputable pollster—found Hong with 38 percent of the vote in a five-way race, with more than twice the support of her nearest competitor.
Naturally, Democratic grandees are nervous. Republicans, eager to run against a far-left candidate in the fall, have pumped more than $2.5 million into ads aimed at boosting Hong’s profile across the state. David Axelrod, an architect of Obama’s two victories, likened the Democratic primary on August 11 to “a slow-rolling car headed for a cliff.” Whoever captures the Democratic nomination will face Representative Tom Tiffany, a Trump loyalist elected in 2020 from the northern part of the state.
The primary race has alternated between unusual sleepiness and extreme volatility. David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, suspended his campaign early in July for lack of support, but then jumped back in after Rodriguez dropped out a few weeks later. Wisconsin’s outgoing Democratic governor, Tony Evers (who, if not quite milquetoast, is far more moderate than Hong), stayed on the sidelines for months. Then, with Rodriguez out, he passed over both Hong and his former second in command, Barnes, to back Crowley, who was far behind in the polls. “There’s been a lot,” Kendra Koeppen Mulwana, the director of the statewide group Badger Youth Action, told me with a laugh. “It feels like there’s something new that’s happened everyday.” A few hours after we spoke, Barnes’s withdrawal jolted the race again.
With so much uncertainty, many Wisconsin Democrats have yet to make up their mind even after months of campaigning—a dynamic that, with Barnes out, could give Crowley an opportunity to make a late run at Hong. During a televised debate on Tuesday, none of Hong’s rivals went after her very aggressively. “It’s hard to understand,” Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “There was not really a sense of urgency from the other candidates that you would expect.”
In a phone interview the day before, Crowley also declined to criticize either Hong’s record or her electability, telling me he was focused on “reintroducing” himself to voters. Yet that has also proved difficult with so little time left in the primary. On the day we spoke, Crowley had been scheduled to greet voters at the same Appleton venue where Hong appeared a day earlier, but he canceled the event after a tornado tore through the city. Christine Sinicki, a state representative and former chair of the Milwaukee County Democrats who is backing Crowley, told me that for Crowley to win, Evers would need to campaign across the state with him—something that has yet to happen.
The stakes of this election year are high for Democrats across the country, but particularly so in Wisconsin. The party has a chance to end years of Republican dominance in the state legislature and, if they also hold the governorship, secure a trifecta for the first time since 2008. Such an outcome could have ripple effects in Washington, because Democrats would then have the power to redraw Wisconsin’s congressional map and reverse a GOP gerrymander that has given Republicans all but two of the state’s eight House seats. That is one reason Sinicki is worried about nominating Hong for governor. “This is not the time to take a risk,” she told me. “2026 should be a Democratic year.”
When you ask Hong and her supporters how a socialist from Madison can appeal to independent and conservative voters across a state that Trump carried in 2024, they have a ready reply: AI data centers. Hong has proposed a one-year moratorium on their construction, going further than any of her rivals to crack down on development that, according to polls and interviews, is unpopular with voters of all political ideologies.
“I’m willing to stand up to bullies on both sides because I’m fighting for you” is how Hong summarized the pitch she’d make to Wisconsinites who voted for Trump. She told me, “I think that folks want someone to take a firm stance on another massive entity that’s trying to take control of people’s lives right now when people already are so uneasy about rising costs and feeling that it’s not enough.”
Data centers came up repeatedly as I spoke with Hong supporters at the Appleton event. Treston Kaepernick, an 18-year-old who’ll be enrolling at UW in the fall, told me he’s seen Hong signs pop up in his conservative hometown of New London and that he’s encountered Republicans who cite her opposition to data centers as a reason for their support. A Hong canvasser, Matthew Hennes, told me he brings up Hong’s proposed moratorium early in many of his conversations with voters. “That usually gets them very interested,” Hennes said. “From my personal experience knocking on doors and talking to the community, nobody wants data centers constructed in their backyard.”
The question for Hong, should she win the primary, is whether her crossover appeal on the issue of data centers can overcome what will surely be millions of dollars worth of ads from Republicans highlighting other positions of hers that might not go over as well with middle-of-the-road voters, such as her past calls to defund the police and abolish prisons. During last week’s debate, she said she did not support “the full platform” of the national Democratic Socialists of America and that although she is a DSA member, she is not running with its endorsement.
Hong is not quite as outspoken in interviews as she is on the stump. When I asked her how she differentiated herself as a democratic socialist from a progressive Democrat, she replied with a fairly anodyne answer that might have fit most Democratic officeholders. “Democratic socialist means that I want there to be more power for working-class people and the workers,” Hong said. “That the mega corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share. That we're unapologetic in taking on corporate interests and the status quo.” As for defunding the police? “I can’t defund or abolish the police as governor, and I won’t,” Hong told me.
Hong addresses what she calls “the E-word”—electability—head-on at her rallies. She cites her sprawling volunteer network and the people who tell her that their “Republican uncle” is supporting her, and the fact that she has more donors and more individual donations than Tiffany. “We’re already beating him!” she exclaimed at one point. “I truly think that in this moment, the more that folks doubt our power, the more power we can actually reclaim,” Hong said later in her speech. “When I hear from folks that there’s only a certain group that’s supporting our campaign, or that it’s fringe or left, one word comes to mind: bullshit.” The crowd roared.
But Democratic voters in Wisconsin are clearly thinking about the E-word too. As I followed Hennes on his canvassing route through Appleton, several people told him they liked Hong’s policies or were leaning toward her. But they also expressed some pause. “I like what she has to say,” Bob Molitor, a 75-year-old retiree, said, “but we’ve got to get a winner.”
Wisconsin’s history suggests the concerns about Hong’s statewide appeal could be overstated. Michael Wagner, a University of Wisconsin political scientist, pointed me to research showing that voters do not punish more extreme candidates. Her chances might be better still in a midterm election when turnout is expected to be lower than a presidential year, he said. “An ideological extremist can absolutely win a statewide election in Wisconsin,” Wagner said.
Democrats such as Sinicki, the former Milwaukee party chair, remain nervous about Hong because so much is at stake for the party. But for others, the favorable political environment for Democrats is reason enough to take the chance. “There’s not a better year to go all out than this one,” Kaepernick told me. With just slightly more than a week to go before the primary, most Wisconsin Democrats seem to agree.
As government prosecutors examined the Reflecting Pool to build their case against a three-time Olympic canoeist accused of violently ripping the lining with his bare hands, everything fell apart. They found that damage was consistent all around the pool, even in the middle, “where a vandal would not likely attempt to peel the lining.” This evening, the office of U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro asked to drop the case against David Hearn, whom she had excoriated after his indictment 29 days ago.
In a striking 19-page legal document filed late this afternoon, her office undermined everything that President Trump has been saying about the damage to the Reflecting Pool for the past six weeks, including the claim that vandals had used a box cutter to slash the floor of the pool. “The damage was the result of a botched installation and not vandalism,” Pirro’s office wrote in a motion to dismiss the case.
Taken as a whole, the court filing acknowledged what has been obvious to anyone who has spent time at the Reflecting Pool in recent weeks and watched the president’s $16.4 million project deteriorate in full view. Almost immediately after its reopening in June, the shallow pool filled with the green algae that the expensive renovation was supposed to have prevented. As park workers rushed to combat the algae, the pool’s sealant began to peel away in chunks. It was surprising to see outlined in legal language how Pirro’s office claims it felt duped. Rather than continue with evidence it acknowledged is not there, it is dropping the case.
“The Trump administration’s case against Davey Hearn should have never been brought,” his legal team—Norm Eisen, Mary Dohrmann, and Steve Levin—said in a statement. “Its dismissal today does not erase the abuse of government power in arresting and charging a patriotic American who did nothing wrong. The government’s approach was ready, fire, aim. The administration owes Mr. Hearn an apology.” The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Pirro’s office declined to comment beyond what was in the legal filing.
The filing largely blamed Department of the Interior officials for supplying information that was used to present evidence to a grand jury and obtain an indictment. Only afterward did prosecutors realize that they had been misled, and that Interior officials “provided less than fulsome information.” A large amount of data and documents that Pirro’s office later received “strongly suggest that a rushed and botched installation” is to blame, her office stated.
“These documents indicated a rushed and flawed installation process, with repeated failures of the lining during the installation process, and extensive peeling of the lining throughout the Reflecting Pool,” the filing stated. Eddie Wood—an owner of Atlantic Industrial Coatings, which was paid $14.7 million to line the pool—did not immediately respond to messages. Weather delays hampered installation, the filing stated, and rain meant more delays. Internal notes said that the project was “significantly behind schedule,” which caused further urgency to complete the project before the president’s promised deadline of July 4. A quality-control inspector noted blistering in the finished portions of the liner, requiring further repairs.
A final inspection was done on June 9, the filing stated, and crews cleaned the site. But only two days later, on June 11, an engineer at the National Park Service was alerted to peeling in the lining. The fact that officials were scrambling and identifying problems eight days before Hearn was arrested was likely going to cause legal problems in the case.
An open question remains as to how and whether the project, one of the most high-profile priorities for the president, will be completed. The pool has been drained, and the latest legal filing indicated uncertainty over why exactly the lining failed in the first place—and whether problems will emerge again when water is pumped back in.
I attended Hearn’s court hearings, and they often attracted a crowd of supporters. Some dressed as canoeists; others held signs. At one of his recent hearings, four people wore inflatable-frog costumes. The charges seemed ridiculous to his supporters. But when I recently spoke with Hearn, he told me that the case was hurting his ability to sleep at night. He had once carried the Olympic torch for his country, and he was now worried about being the center of a political firestorm. “It’s unsettling,” Hearn told me, “to feel like I’m being targeted by my government.”
Earlier today, I used Google Earth to conjure images of terrible things: office buildings on fire, mass destruction in San Francisco, a smoldering crater in place of the Eiffel Tower. I was able to because Google had just decided to integrate its AI image generator, Nano Banana, into the service, which has historically been used by people seeking satellite or aerial imagery of real-world locations.
Just open the site, “pick a spot on the map, and start bringing your ideas to life,” Google wrote in a press release announcing the update some 24 hours ago. So I did.
I was easily able to generate those violent images simply by searching for a location on Google Earth, clicking the “Create image” icon, and typing in a few words. The feature also readily doctored stills of less spectacular, and likely less immediately falsifiable, events: a homeless encampment on the White House lawn, protesters outside the Mar-a-Lago resort, immigrants streaming over the U.S.-Mexico border.
Google initially responded by directing people to check any suspicious images themselves. As fake images generated with this new Google Earth feature began circulating around the web, the company stated that it takes “misinformation seriously” and that “every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated.” At first, Google did not remove or restrict access to the tool. But today, shortly after I reached out with a request for comment, the company reversed course and announced that it is “rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.”
Google Earth An AI-generated image of a fabricated explosion at the Mar-a-Lago resort, created with Google Earth
Google Earth This AI-generated image from Google Earth falsely depicts a plane striking One World Trade Center.
Before it allowed people to create fake imagery, Google Earth was a unique resource for researchers, journalists, and intelligence officials, particularly those studying armed conflict and natural disasters. Satellite and aerial imagery can be used to monitor crop failure or deforestation, the creation of mass graves, and the results of bombing campaigns. Especially in conflict zones and other areas that are hard for people to reach, satellite imagery is a go-to method for establishing some sort of ground truth. After Google Earth rolled out the AI feature, though, one investigative reporter wrote on LinkedIn that the tool could be used to easily and rapidly create images of drone strikes that look “very close to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, Russia, the Middle East, and other war-torn conflict zones.” And instead of requiring malicious actors to find a screenshot and then get around some AI model’s safeguards, Google rolled everything needed for a misinformation farm into one smooth user interface. It took me all of four seconds to generate a rendering of a Trump Hotel on the Gaza Strip.
The problem should have been obvious to Google, whose other products already forbid such edits. I was able to create an aerial image on Google Earth of a plane flying into the new World Trade Center building, but when I tried to do this directly through Nano Banana, the tool refused to edit an image of the building to depict a terrorist attack. Indeed, 9/11 and other high-profile events are well-known, even classic, subjects for AI-image trolling.
This is not Google’s first time launching an AI feature, and in particular an AI image-editing feature, without serious safeguards. Last year, the company released an AI shopping tool that allows you to visualize what clothes might look like on your body by uploading personal photos. As my colleague Lila Shroff and I reported at the time, “With little friction, anyone can use the feature to create what are essentially erotic images of celebrities and strangers. Alarmingly, we also discovered that it can do this for minors.” In 2024, Google Gemini was ridiculed for generating images of a racially diverse group of Nazis but not of any white Wehrmacht soldiers. And Google’s most prominent AI feature, the chatbot-powered answers in its flagship search engine, were an utter disaster upon their rollout—the AI overviews told people to eat rocks and gave other potentially dangerous health advice. Only after tremendous public pressure did the company make a substantial change, and two years later, the AI responses in Google Search continue to be inconsistent and unreliable.
Google is, of course, not alone in releasing AI features that have had embarrassing, dangerous, and avoidable consequences. See, for instance, Elon Musk’s Grok generating more than 1 million sexualized images, including of children, over just a few days, or any number of embarrassing errors made by ChatGPT releases throughout the years. Again and again, the AI industry undercuts its rhetoric about safety by launching products with little or no due diligence. If, as every major AI executive has pronounced, this technology really could upend human civilization, their companies should perhaps start taking that responsibility seriously.
Speaking to reporters today about the war with Iran, President Trump delivered an inspiring pep talk praising the courage and resilience of a brave nation retaining its fighting spirit in the face of adversity. Alas, the subject of his praise was the Iranians.
“Their entire navy is laying at the bottom of the sea,” he said. “They had 200 airplanes—they’re all gone. Every one. They don’t have one airplane. They had anti-aircraft weaponry, very good, but it didn’t work, and it’s all gone. Their radar is all gone. Their leaders are all gone. Everything is all gone! But they’ll fight onward.”
It was probably the most Churchillian rhetoric Trump has managed to muster throughout the entire conflict. Iran shall fight on the beaches, they shall fight on the landing grounds, they shall fight in the fields and in the streets, they shall fight in the hills; they shall never surrender.
This is not just a mystifying rhetorical move, but also a peculiar analysis of the military situation. If Iran’s military is gone, how exactly is it continuing to fight? An extant military of some kind is generally seen as a precondition for waging war.
Trump’s comments might be chalked up to spin or confusion. But his contradictory appraisal of Iran’s capabilities turns out to be very similar to the doctrinaire assessment of leading Iran-war hawks.
Marc Thiessen, the former Bush-administration speechwriter and frequent Trump adviser, recently wrote a Washington Postcolumn that, having been published the evening before the president’s remarks, seemed to anticipate Trump’s case for why the war has been a success and must continue.
“After the Iranian regime’s ballistic missile attack on U.S. troops in Jordan, the time has come for President Donald Trump to take a good, hard look at the advice he is getting on Iran—what has worked, what has failed and who is responsible for those successes and failures,” he begins. This is an audacious way to frame the question, given that Thiessen’s own advice helped bring Trump to the current impasse. But his argument is that the hawks’ strategy in Iran has actually worked, and needs only to be followed a bit longer to produce victory. Thiessen praises the military’s “stunning success on the battlefield—entombing Iran’s nuclear material, destroying more than 85 percent of its defense industrial base, sinking its navy, grounding its air force, decimating its ballistic missile capability, annihilating its conventional military forces and imposing a crippling blockade on its ports.”
Alas, Trump tried to turn this victory into a negotiated deal. Big mistake: “Result? Iran fired five ballistic missiles at a U.S. military base in Jordan,” Thiessen writes. The same Iranian military that Trump had already destroyed took advantage of his cessation of hostilities to attack us.
This seems to suggest that destroying Iran’s military does not mean that it will stay destroyed. Indeed, a recent Wall Street Journal report found that Iran has quickly rebuilt much of its infrastructure and military capability. The same principle would imply that “entombing Iran’s nuclear material” is useful only if Iran cannot dig it back out again, which it likely can. The natural conclusion is that bombing Iranian military installations has limited, reversible effects, and requires endless application.
No, no, no, Thiessen counters. “No one is advocating indefinite war,” he proceeds to argue. “What many are advocating is completing the military plan that was paused in April when the ceasefire took effect—executing the final few weeks of the campaign the U.S.-Israeli combined force was carrying out.” Just a few more weeks of bombing will finish the job permanently.
Those of us who closely study Thiessen’s columns for clues as to what Trump is likely to say next will notice something familiar here. After the April cease-fire, Thiessen wrote, “U.S. military commanders had about two weeks’ worth of targets left,” and allowing just two more weeks of strikes would leave Iran “fully crippled militarily.” He repeated this claim at the end of that month. “If he decides to resume major combat operations and finish the job, Trump is just 14 days away from a decisive victory in Iran,” he wrote.
The cease-fire has since crumbled, and Trump has had more than three weeks to attack remaining targets. Yet now the final destruction of Iran’s military is “a few weeks” away.
One barrier to once again finally re-destroying the Iranian military is that the United States’ capacity to sustain combat operations is finite. A week ago, journalists reported that Trump held back from carrying out bigger strikes owing to a shortage of munitions, especially interceptors to defend against the inevitable Iranian counterattack. United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz went on NBC’s Meet the Press this past Sunday to insist that this was untrue. The military “has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” he insisted. Also, he added, “the people that are leaking this nonsense deserve to be in jail.”
Threatening prison time for people who leak information that he claims isn’t even real about the American military seems like overkill. But when you are as passionate about operational security as Waltz, no measure is excessive. And he seems to have transposed upon our military the Schrödinger’s-cat state of military preparedness that we have projected onto our adversary, depleted yet dangerous. The two combatants, in their paradoxical states, appear to be well matched.
Later in Trump’s remarks, a reporter asked him if Americans should expect Iranian attacks to continue. Called upon to inspire his countrymen to endure ongoing sacrifice, he replied: “They’ll get weaker. They’ll get a little stronger, maybe, now. But they’ll get weaker, and then they peter out. Uh, yeah, sure. I think so.” Churchill could not have put it better.
In the summer of 1985, representatives from five Western European countries met aboard a riverboat in Schengen, a wine-making village in Luxembourg, to celebrate the removal of checkpoints at their borders. According to the treaty they approved, which became known as the Schengen Agreement, the signatory countries sought “solidarity between their peoples by removing obstacles to free movement,” forming a borderless zone that gave tangible expression to principles of liberal internationalism that were ascendant as the West glimpsed victory in the Cold War.
Schengen has succeeded spectacularly, at least by certain metrics. It has grown to include 29 countries, from Portugal to Poland, and more than 450 million people. Four decades on, it remains one of Europe’s most popular policies among people who benefit from it—those who work, study, shop, date, and live across borders, able to cross multiple European states in a matter of hours, without ever stopping their car. But as a mechanism to build European solidarity, Schengen has been a failure.
The latest evidence of that came this week, when as many as 60,000 migrants from Morocco rushed into the Spanish exclave of Ceuta, which sits on the North African coast of the Mediterranean. Ceuta has a population of only 83,000 and isn’t even on the European continent. But because it is part of Spain, entering Ceuta, in theory, affords access to 29 countries. The migrants swam or climbed over fences to reach the tiny territory. Several dozen have died.
Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, decried the situation as an “attack” and a violation of his country’s territorial integrity, vowing that the migrants would be turned back; according to Spain’s interior ministry, more than half of them already have been. Sánchez blamed trafficking gangs, and others pointed a finger at Moroccan authorities for possibly instigating or enabling the huge number of crossings into the Schengen Area, dwarfing equivalent single-day figures from the European migration crisis in 2015. Morocco’s ambassador to Spain disputed such allegations.
The political blowback for Sánchez, a leftist whose pro-immigrant position has differentiated him in an era of resurgent nationalism, was predictable. Criticism came from his domestic opposition in Madrid, as well as from the White House, where President Trump saw an opportunity to paint Europe as lax on immigration and identify an edge for his party as the midterms approach. “That’s going to be us in three years if the wrong side gets in,” Trump told Fox News.
The most notable reactions, however, came from other European capitals, which once committed themselves to freedom of movement as a basis for cross-border solidarity, an integral part of shared European Union membership that also includes a common trade policy and, in most cases, a shared currency. Giorgia Meloni, the right-wing prime minister of Italy, called for the suspension of Spain’s Schengen membership (for which there is no formal process), and her foreign minister blamed the Spanish government for the chaos, labeling its plans to grant legal status to more than half a million migrants “profoundly wrong.” In response, Madrid summoned the Italian ambassador, accusing foreign leaders of “partisan demagoguery.”
Other countries backed Meloni. Finland’s interior minister argued that Spain had “completely failed to protect the Schengen Area’s external border from infiltration,” adding in a post on social media, “This cannot continue.” France increased checks at its border with Spain, and the chancellor of Austria, which is about 1,000 miles from the Iberian Peninsula, said his country was weighing whether to close its borders.
There is no evidence that any of the new arrivals in Ceuta have crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to the Spanish mainland. Transiting the strait typically requires a ferry or plane, and involves border and identity checks that validate whether passengers have the relevant visas. Meanwhile, there aren’t legal mechanisms to suspend a country’s Schengen membership, especially unilaterally. What other countries can do is reintroduce controls at their borders. The authority to do so was written into an implementing convention approved by the signatory states in 1990, and they’ve made liberal use of it. Italy had already reimposed checks at its land border with France because of the anticipated presence of “radical activists” at a festival in Piedmont, in northwestern Italy, and earlier today, Meloni’s government halted passport-free travel at air and sea borders with Spain. Austria had already reintroduced controls at borders with four of its neighbors, citing irregular migration through the Balkans, the burden of migrants on its asylum system, and the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
But these piecemeal steps to police borders aren’t grandiose enough when there’s political hay to be made of immigration. Meloni can’t be outdone by her deputy prime minister and coalition partner, Matteo Salvini, who has taken to social media in recent days to urge, vaguely yet repeatedly, “Suspend Schengen.” Marine Le Pen, the far-right firebrand in France and a candidate for president in next year’s elections, vowed today to restrict the agreement if she came to power. Le Pen’s party, now called National Rally, has expertly channeled anger about Schengen. Amid the 2015 refugee crisis, when more than 1 million people crossed into Europe, mostly in flight from the Syrian civil war, party representatives performed death rites on the riverbank near where the agreement was signed 30 years earlier. They laid a funereal wreath on a star-etched monument to the system of free movement created there.
The corps of mid-level diplomats who created Schengen gave little consideration to its political consequences. “We did our job as junior ministers,” the French representative, Catherine Lalumière, told me as part of research for my book on the history of the agreement. They thought that borderless travel would fulfill promises made by the Treaty of Rome, the founding document of European integration, and advance both the development of a common market and the cultivation of solidarity among member states.
Except there were signs of a potent backlash already at that time. In 1983, the National Front, as Le Pen’s far-right party was then known, came to power for the first time in French municipal elections, in a small town called Dreux. A year after Schengen’s creation, the party entered the national Parliament for the first time, in elections held in 1986. As anti-immigrant populism gained influence in France, the government in Paris helped lead the drafting of Schengen’s implementing convention, trying to pair internal freedom of movement with security at Europe’s external borders. Language about “solidarity” present in the original agreement was nowhere to be found in the 1990 document. Instead, more than half of the convention’s 142 articles dealt with security and the exchange of data necessary to crack down on unwanted immigration of the kind now seen in Spain’s offshore exclave.
The crisis in Ceuta is likely to be contained, and quickly. But if Europe’s reaction to a surge of immigration is to isolate individual states, rather than to use the tools it created to protect freedom and manage human displacement in a globalized world, Schengen really is at risk.
The American right sacrificed its supporters to its COVID-era delusions and lies. Right-wing politicians and media influencers disparaged masking. They derided safety advice against indoor gatherings. They spread crazy lies about COVID vaccines once those became generally available. Many conservative Americans who made the mistake of trusting their political and media leaders paid with their life.
Pew Research Center compared the 20 percent of the U.S. population who lived in the country’s most pro-Trump counties with the 20 percent who lived in the most pro-Biden counties. The most pro-Trump counties suffered nearly 70,000 more COVID deaths than the most pro-Biden counties did.
In the face of right-wing resistance, the United States fully vaccinated only about 66 percent of the population by the end of April 2022. Had the U.S. achieved full vaccination within the first 16 months that the shots were available—as was materially feasible—the death rate from COVID could have been cut in half, according to some estimates, and more than 300,000 lives could have been saved.
If you are hunting for a COVID villain or villains, then, there are many beckoning targets. Investigate the crooks who promoted quack remedies such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine for profit or plain crackpot mania. Investigate the sources and pathways of anti-vaccine disinformation. Investigate the pattern and funding of Russian support for anti-vaccine disinformation by following the map already provided by the U.S. State Department’s work on the subject. Investigate the response by U.S. public-health agencies, including the CDC, to better prepare for the next pandemic.
But the present Congress is investigating none of that. Instead, a Senate committee has fixed on Anthony Fauci, the physician and pandemic-era chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. The Senate obtained his diary—reportedly from Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claims to have found it on a government server—and then, outrageously and gratuitously, published 1,100 pages of it for the world to see.
Regarding the many accusations and insinuations hurled at Fauci, the first thing to be said is this: Even if any of them were true, none would have made the slightest difference to the immediate and urgent problem—what to do to save lives from a deadly new virus.
Senator Rand Paul and others want Americans to believe that Fauci was aware of the possibility that the coronavirus was intentionally created in a Chinese lab, even as he insisted in public comments that the virus had a natural origin. He may not have been forthcoming; the scientific verdict remains uncertain. But whatever its origin, the virus really killed people. The U.S. scientific community’s first and supreme job was to protect people. It did. Scientists discovered and developed the COVID vaccines that brought the pandemic to an end. It’s the anti-vaxxers, not the scientific community, who should stand indicted in the light of 2026.
Did scientists, including Fauci, sometimes speak with excessive certainty about the extent of their knowledge in the early weeks of the pandemic? Perhaps. That seems a lesser offense, however, than the president putting American lives at risk by consciously telling lies for personal advantage.
When the pandemic struck, President Trump’s immediate concern was that it might depress the stock market. Trump had started a trade war with China in February 2018. That trade war tumbled U.S. capital markets; at the end of that year, The Wall Street Journalreported that U.S. stock indexes had suffered their steepest annual drop since the global economic crisis of 2008. Trump’s priority in 2019 was to negotiate a face-saving exit from his failing trade war. That December, Trump unveiled a “Phase One” deal —but markets remained nervous and skeptical. When reports spread about a lethal outbreak in China, Trump appointed himself chief international cheerleader for the Chinese government. CNN counted 37 separate compliments by Trump to Chinese leaders in the opening months of 2020. That February 7, for example, Trump tweeted: “Great discipline is taking place in China, as President Xi strongly leads what will be a very successful operation.” Nothing must interrupt Trump’s hopes for a trade deal that would boost the stock market and thus—he assumed—get him reelected in 2020.
As it became apparent that the virus had escaped China and reached the United States, Trump minimized the danger—although in private conversations with the reporter Bob Woodward, the president revealed that he expected a mass-casualty catastrophe for the United States as early as February 2020. He admitted to Woodward that his deception was intentional: “To be honest with you, I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic.” In early March that year, Trump resisted allowing passengers to disembark from a virus-stricken cruise ship because once the people were on U.S. soil, their cases would augment the number of recorded infections. He said he would rather not let them off, because “I like the numbers being where they are. I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.”
Trump allies made it explicit that to recognize the danger of COVID was to commit a thought-crime against Trump. Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program on February 24, 2020: “Folks, this coronavirus thing, I want to try to put this in perspective for you. It looks like the coronavirus is being weaponized as yet another element to bring down Donald Trump. Now, I want to tell you the truth about the coronavirus.” He continued, “Yeah, I’m dead right on this. The coronavirus is the common cold, folks.” Trump declared at a White House event at the end of the month that the virus would soon disappear on its own. (Trump reasserted his prediction of spontaneous disappearance repeatedly through the spring and early summer of 2020.) In early March, Trump dismissed COVID as far less deadly than the common flu.
As infections and deaths surged in March and April, two imperatives gripped the MAGA world. The first was to fix blame for the mounting disaster on an external hate object. Far-right websites introduced claims that COVID had originated as a Chinese “bioweapon” in January. By late February, the bioweapon language spread among Republican members of Congress. On March 16, Trump tried to rebrand the coronavirus as “the Chinese virus.”
But “blame China” took MAGA only so far. If China was to blame, whether because of malice or accident, then Trump looked all the greater a fool for having courted China so hard through 2019 and into 2020. And “blame China” did not offer any exit from the shock that was killing Americans, had shut down the U.S. economy, and was threatening to defeat Trump in November.
Thus, the second imperative: Find a fast-and-easy miracle cure. The first candidate was an antimalarial drug, hydroxychloroquine, touted on Fox News nearly 300 times in March and April—and cautiously endorsed by Trump at a press conference on March 19. When hydroxychloroquine flopped, it was replaced as the great right-wing hope by a deworming drug, ivermectin. After the podcaster Joe Rogan contracted COVID in the fall of 2021, he told his fans that ivermectin, vitamins, and other home remedies had cured him.
Trump lost the presidency and—after the failure of his attempted coup d’état—left office in January 2021. By then, vaccines had been developed. Now two new imperatives gripped right-wing America.
The first was to sabotage COVID recovery to do to Joe Biden’s new presidency what someone (but who?) had done to Trump’s. The second was to profit financially and politically from the reservoir of COVID paranoia that had accumulated on the American right.
If the vaccine rollout could be stalled or thwarted altogether, the Biden presidency would be blighted. At the same time, influencers and Republican politicians bidding for followers could use vaccine hesitancy to their personal and career advantage.
The arc of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s COVID response is illustrative. DeSantis began as a highly responsible actor on vaccines. Through the first half of 2021, he promoted vaccination in his state. He argued—correctly, in hindsight—that the state could combine a vaccination program with the abolition of lockdown mandates and an early return to in-person classroom teaching. Florida children went back to school in August 2020—and soon were outperforming their peers in Democrat-governed states that deferred to teacher-union wishes to postpone classroom reopenings.
Sometime over the course of 2021, however, DeSantis seemed to have decided that he could exploit COVID conspiracy thinking to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. In September 2021, DeSantis appointed the vaccine opponent Joseph Ladapo as Florida’s surgeon general. Although DeSantis prudently accepted the first-round COVID vaccination in spring 2021, he turned evasive when asked months later whether he had taken the recommended booster. “I’m not going to let that be a weapon for people to be able to use. I think it’s a private matter.” DeSantis never quite repudiated his past support for vaccination. But he aligned himself with the ever wilder ideas of vaccination adversaries. In December 2022, DeSantis called for a state grand jury to investigate harms allegedly caused by COVID vaccines.
The gathering anti-vaccination movement battened on anti-Semitism, racism, and general looniness. Viral TikTok campaigns in the fall of 2021 promoted the label “pure blood,” implicitly associating unvaccinated status with white-nationalist identity. Republican officeholders generally refrained from endorsing these more extreme fantasies. But Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, among others, still traffics in the false claim that thousands of people have died because of injuries from COVID vaccines.
This is the route that has brought Fauci to the Senate hearing.
Democrats and liberals have their own post-COVID soul-searching to do. Blue states kept schools closed too long. They showed hypocrisy when they pivoted from demanding lockdowns in the spring of 2020 to welcoming mass George Floyd protests in the summer. Their analysis of lockdowns may have underweighted harms, especially to small businesses and otherwise healthy schoolchildren. Continued masking after the advent of vaccines could have enabled anti-social and even criminal behavior. The Biden administration in 2021 and 2022 exploited the genuine need for post-pandemic recovery to pass lavish spending bills that probably accelerated inflation. Americans should, as best as they can, delve deep into the exact degree of Chinese-government culpability for the coronavirus—not because it makes (or would have made) any actionable difference to the COVID response, but because it may serve as guidance for future dealings with China. The fullest obtainable history of COVID will reveal much that Americans need to know about the truthfulness, competence, and danger of the Chinese regime.
Fauci may have misjudged, mishandled, or misstated many particulars. He was a scientist and bureaucrat unaccustomed to—and dazzled by—celebrity. History will judge his actions with more dispassion than the present day can or will. One thing that people should keep in mind, however, is that Fauci was thrust into his pandemic-leadership role because of Trump’s shameful and deadly dereliction of duty. Trump’s record of dishonesty, callousness, and selfishness during the pandemic is a documented reality. The imputations against Fauci are mostly fantasies.
No mistakes by blue America or by the scientific community begin to compare with the brutal indifference to the well-being of Americans—and the betrayal of their own cruelly deceived supporters—that disgraced MAGA and the broader right wing in the pandemic years. Their consciences should be heavy. They seek now to transfer their own burden of guilt onto Fauci. The reckoning is a lie. The transfer is a fraud.
Less than a decade ago, when I was working on technology stories, my colleagues and I ran into an issue that I’m pretty sure had not occurred to the people who founded this magazine in 1857: how to style the word influencer, which was an occupation and cultural force, but one just emerging. We weren’t sure that all of our readers would know what one was, and we also didn’t know how exactly we would define the word ourselves. I spent the fall of 2018 sending a lot of emails about whether we needed to encase the word in scare quotes.
Quaint! Many—but not all that many—years later, influencer is very much a real job, no explanation required. As of 2023, 27 million Americans were paid to make online content in one form or another, at least according to one marketing consultant company. Enthusiasm from influencers can turn a random business into a sensation, while their ire can do the opposite. Donald Trump’s White House is full of influencers, but Joe Biden’s courted them too, in apparent recognition of their power. This week, Arizona State University announced that it would begin offering a bachelor’s degree in content creation—influencing by another name—through its journalism school.
In some ways, the influencer industry is more legitimate than it’s ever been. But it has always been precarious, and more than a decade into its existence, it is neither novel enough to be exciting nor established enough to have a real professional code. In an oversaturated market, rage bait is the last sure way to get attention, despite the way it alienates people over the long term. AI is swiftly becoming the dominant way many people get personal-seeming advice about how to live their life, which makes the usefulness of aspirational online content even less apparent than it ever was. And so, although influencers—especially lifestyle influencers—have never been universally respected, they lately seem to be openly reviled.
Naturally, much of the influencer backlash lives online. A few months ago, someone asked on Reddit, “What’s an industry that provides zero value to society but makes billions of dollars?” Among the 5,300-plus responses: Ticketmaster, sports-betting companies, multilevel marketing schemes, private prisons, and—several times over—influencers. A hilarious number of people have found internet fame by making content about how much they hate other people who are internet-famous for making content. (“Everyone Is Finally Turning on TONE DEAF Influencers” is the title of one recent video, made by an Australian YouTuber with nearly 300,000 subscribers and a clothing line.)
But the juiciest fights play out in the physical world, which is where influencers very literally bump up against the people who can’t stand them. A few years ago, a coffee shop in Brooklyn banned photography after too many influencers clogged the café with tripods and handheld lights; earlier this month, Indonesia indicated that it would crack down on people creating content for pay while on tourist visas.
Last week, the scene of the debate was a gift shop in Nantucket, an island that has recently been overrun by vacationing influencers, just like Bali, Iceland, and Santorini before it. The store’s operators, evidently fed up with the stream of people filming inside, had a sign made that read No Influencers, hung it up in the store, and posted a picture of it on Instagram. There, it drew the attention of thousands of people, including Paige Paul, who has about 2 million followers across platforms, is married to a famous tennis player, and has been spending time on the island since she was a child. Paul, previously known as Paige Lorenze, declared the sign a misogynistic slight against an industry that is overwhelmingly female. The store’s owner, John Sylvia, said it was meant as a joke for locals, but the sentiment clearly came from an earnest annoyance: “A lot of people are tired of feeling like extras in someone else’s video,” he toldNew York magazine.
The fight felt freighted. Influencers today are a bit like plastic surgeons, or plumbers: On a societal level, many people sure seem to like what they do—they just don’t necessarily want to be right next to them while they’re doing it.
But influencers are unique in how they seem to be everywhere, particularly in places where people are trying to do things other than be on their phone to watch influencers. Of course we love the game and hate the player: It’s much easier to be annoyed by individuals than by concepts, especially when those individuals are, often, pretty annoying.
You’d need to be pretty clueless to not feel a little weird about the online attention economy and all it entails—the vanity; the grift; the slop; the desperation; the calculated intimacy; the endless consumption; the creeping sense that everything and everyone is actually just there to make you feel kind of bad about yourself and then sell you something. Social media can, of course, unite like-minded people, but it can also reward the kind of tribalist reactionaryism that can conflate disliking some women with disliking all women, or make an anti-consumerist folk hero out of a store that sells $2,750 baskets. The industry that Paul and her cohort belong to is unquestionably grim—but the industry isn’t walking around town with a selfie stick. There’s a reason that the sign doesn’t say no influencing, but rather no influencers.
As for the sign: Sylvia’s post was liked more than 10,000 times before it was removed (by Instagram, according to the store); a second one has now been liked even more. “They couldn’t have predicted it would get the traction that it ultimately did,” People magazine wrote of the store in one of many articles about the sign that have popped up online over the past few days.
Sure. I will grant that the future is inherently unpredictable. But it is undeniable that posting the sign online is its own kind of influencing, insofar as it involved leveraging the internet’s focus and wrath for one’s own benefit. (“Came for the friendship baskets, stayed for the shade,” the original post’s caption trolled.) The sign is handsome, and crucially, it is inside the store—if you want to see it up close, you need to go in, past the baskets. Visitors have already started posting the sign on social media, and the store’s Instagram account has added about 8,000 followers, according to an interview that Sylvia’s partner, Jessica Jenkins, did with The New York Times. “It’s come with a lot of drama,” she told the paper. “But it also brings in business.” Any influencer would understand that.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
In biological science, anthropomorphism is best avoided; nonhuman organisms should be studied on their own terms, without human qualities projected onto them. But that rule goes out the window in fiction—especially the kind in which animals are the main characters. As a child, the writer Rachel Vorona Cote was captivated by novels told from the perspective of chatty puppies and noble horses; the “imaginative leap” of making them think prompted her to realize what fiction could do. In an essay this week for The Atlantic, Cote wrote about Paul Yoon’s new novel, Etna, concerning a dog conscripted into a war, as well as other tales that endow animals with an innocence that their bipedal characters lack. But I’d like to recommend a couple of hilarious stories by Franz Kafka (trust me!) that do something very different.
First, here are four new stories from the Atlantic’s Books section:
Many contemporary animal stories, Cote writes, focus on creatures in peril. Etna follows a dog who, after the fighting ends, must make an Odyssey-like journey home. Yoon’s novel shares a theme with Henry Hoke’s 2023 novel, Open Throat, which is told by a mountain lion living in the Hollywood Hills, and with the recent films EO and Flow. All these works feature dignified animal narrators struggling to survive in the mess that people have made of their world. “Etna may lack the privilege of human sovereignty and the benefits of advanced intelligence,” Cote writes, “but he is free of the hubristic delusions that underwrite so much human-produced wreckage.”
The beasts in two of Kafka’s last works, on the other hand, are full of hubristic delusions. (His most famous animal is probably a giant bug, the protagonist of his novella The Metamorphosis—but that one starts out as a man.) These short stories, which Kafka wrote late in life and never quite finished, feature narrating critters. “Investigations of a Dog” stars a curious and philosophical canine, and “The Burrow” follows a hypervigilant mole (or maybe a badger—he doesn’t describe his appearance much, but we know he’s got issues). The dog story is sometimes read as a satire of academia; the hound proposes elaborate theories to explain where food comes from. Little does he know—because he either can't see it or chooses not to—that humans exist, and that he and his social, freedom-loving peers are merely pets.
The mole/badger, by contrast, is a fragile neurotic. He has spent years constructing a complicated underground burrow with an impregnable “Castle Keep” at its core. “There I sleep the sweet sleep of tranquility, of satisfied desire, of achieved ambition,” he thinks. “For I possess a house.” We soon learn that this satisfaction is fleeting and illusory. The more the narrator has, the more he has to lose, and he descends into paranoia, imagining that unknown predators will soon destroy him or—worse—his castle. You don’t have to be a post-structuralist like Jacques Lacan (who referenced “The Burrow” in his theoretical writings) to see the mole as an allegory for human accumulation and striving, which has a way of magnifying, rather than easing, existential anxiety. Kafka’s varmints, in other words, are no better than us; they are creatures of both instinct and self-justification, overcompensating for what they don’t know.
And what’s so hilarious about that? Humor is subjective, but animals can generate comedy in the most serious of tales: I find the idea of a house-proud mole or a canine academic pretty funny, and I can’t be alone. The philosopher Aaron Schuster, who wrote a whole book about Kafka’s dog story, called these works “screwball tragedy.” I think that’s a fair gloss and a good way of describing some of my favorite fiction. These particular stories may introduce us to bizarre mammals, but like any good screwball tragedy, they leave us laughing and crying over ourselves.
Illustration by Alisa Gao / The Atlantic
Why Animal Narrators Are All the Rage
By Rachel Vorona Cote
A new novel helps explain why so many storytellers enlist animal narrators to explore humanity.
Byrne’s book could be called a memoir or a manual, but whether you’re primarily interested in the New Wave pioneer’s career or actually attempting to start yours, the depth of knowledge he shares on the music industry makes this a worthy read. Byrne’s chapters range widely: One covers how the structure of performance spaces can inform the type of music played within; another provides a thorough examination of the development of recording technology (and its effect on music). Perhaps the most revelatory section is the one concerning money: The singer documents in granular detail how much he spent and earned for one record, pulling back the curtain on a process that’s ordinarily very hush-hush. You’ll finish with a greater respect for all that musicians do, whether they’re superstars or just starting out in the back of a bar. — Juliet Izon
A Brief Exchange That Shows the Enormous Difference Between Trump and Obama
By Sally Jenkins
Suavity is a sorely missed ingredient in the American presidency. The effortless charm of a Roosevelt or a Reagan, a Bush or a Clinton, projected a particular brand of power. Suave means a kind of athletic ease and self-command in difficult, spotlighted circumstances, the assurance that solutions are at hand if only we all hold our composure and act right-headedly. Here was the ultra-suave Barack Obama’s message to the basketball player Caitlin Clark in a small but noteworthy exchange over the WNBA All-Star weekend: It never hurts to be winsome. In fact, it can help you win.
Silicon Valley has long been a place of tech innovation and optimism. When Claire Stapleton moved there to work in communications at Google in 2007, she was bright eyed and optimistic about the company’s mission. In those days, she describes the executives as acting like “benevolent kings.” But over the course of the next decade, Google grew and changed. It arguably succeeded in its initial mission of organizing the world’s information, and it has grown an enormously profitable ads business. But it’s also had to face tough questions about data privacy and government contracts, and courts have declared parts of its business a monopoly. In this episode of Galaxy Brain, Charlie Warzel talks to Stapleton about her journey at Google—from the early days of ball pits and gourmet food to the growing disillusionment that eventually led to her leading an employee walkout in 2018, and leaving the following year.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Claire Stapleton: I do think that inevitably having so much money and power, it creates a form of brain rot. Like, I just don’t think that you exist on the planet in a normal way at all. And I can’t really account for how quickly the mask slipped with the tech CEOs who were seemingly so offended by Trump at the beginning, and now are on the MAGA train as hardcore as anyone else. But it’s genuinely surprising, because they were much more interested in positioning themselves as sort of like benevolent kings of the universe before. And now, it’s just—the vibe has completely shifted.
[Music]
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re going to talk about what happened to Google. At the risk of sounding ancient, I still remember an internet before Google. Like a lot of people, I’d been burned by plugging keywords into other old search engines and getting these weird, just barely relevant results. It’s as if the computer didn’t understand what I wanted.
Before Google, there were all kinds of tactics that you had to use. It was almost this language that you had to speak to get what you wanted. And Google changed all of that. It felt, as the best technology does, like magic. And I probably don’t need to outline what happened next. How Google dominated search, how it became an advertising giant, how it printed money, and became arguably the foundational online company of the 21st century.
Their mission statement was to organize the world’s information. And honestly, it’s hard to disagree that they at least in part accomplished that goal—Search, Maps, Gmail, Books, Photos. They branched into phones, into workplace software. They bought YouTube when it was still a fledgling video site. They became a behemoth, and they got so big and so rich that they started trying what they called “moonshot projects,” like self-driving cars, drone delivery services, and trying to cure death.
In some ways, the story of Google is the story of the commercial internet. Or maybe more specifically, it is the story of what we often refer to as Big Tech. Google famously started in a garage with just two people: Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company built something ingenious with search, and it quickly developed this quirky, upbeat, benevolent California-company ideology, all built around a very specific credo. Don’t be evil. And then it grew. And grew.
It had to adapt to the realities of having money and influence and real power. It had to make unpopular decisions, like partnering with the military or changing permissions on how it collected data on users. Its search dominance grew from this success story to a monopoly. It faced criticism. It became a target of the late-2010s tech clash. It got hauled in front of Congress, sued by the FTC.
Claire Stapleton was there for this hinge point in Google’s history. She joined the company in 2007, and she worked on a team that helped shape Google’s image internally with its own employees. Over the next 12 years, she worked across the organization, in executive comms and at YouTube. She watched all this change happen, and eventually she grew frustrated by it.
In 2018, she was one of the leaders and organizers of Google’s Walk Out for Real Change. This was a landmark moment in this burgeoning tech-labor movement. Her involvement, she alleges, ultimately led to her having to leave the company in 2019. And so now Stapleton has written a memoir. It’s titled, very fittingly, Don’t Be Evil, and it’s about her time inside Google. I wanted to talk to her about Google’s transformation.
What happens after a tech company succeeds in its initial mission? And so, Claire Stapleton joins me now to talk about it all.
Claire, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Claire Stapleton: Thank you so much for having me. This is a thrill.
Warzel: So you joined Google in 2007, if I’m right—a time that for Google but also for the internet feels almost unrecognizable for today. So my first question here is: What was Google like when you joined?
Stapleton: Yeah, I think it’s like such a time capsule in so many ways. And 2007 was like, there was this feverish rush to capture college talent in a way that they sort of never did again. They were doing large-scale college recruiting to just bring in people fresh into the workforce. It was hardly a start-up, but it still had this sort of fresh energy of, you know—American innovation, and yet not yet corporate. It was not yet at all really considered to be sort of like some scary behemoth, or Should we be wondering about all the power and money that’s sort of flowing into this company? It was on the cover of Fortune magazine—“best place to work”—a couple of years running at that point. It just felt like: Wow, they not just, like, reinvented the corporation, but it was sort of this Willy Wonka, brand-new kind of model of a corporation.
Certainly I’m sure people were not totally bought into it, but as a young person entering the workforce—and of course for the record, 2008, the recession would happen the next year. So it was sort of like this very limited window to come into this sort of tech boom feeling like the world was ours, I guess.
Warzel: No; I remember it. At the time there was this idea of like, my gosh, you go to work, and it’s like beanbags and parties and like ping-pong tables. And that was the Silicon Valley vibe, the ethos overall. But there was this feeling—like, the Willy Wonka thing really tracks for me. Because I was like, What goes on there? Like, the internet happens in that building or in that series of buildings. Describe the atmosphere, the campus, the people, the free food, the optimism, all of that.
Stapleton: It was like this continuation of college. Which was really bizarre, because you were also sort of transitioning into the hierarchy of a fairly normal corporate environment, frankly. I mean, there were plenty of executives and some corp speak and all sorts of rules that governed being a young person there. But they really did encourage socializing and staying on the campus. It felt very lush.
When I was moving out from the East Coast from college to the Bay Area, and they encouraged the people to live in these sort of like new developments, in group apartments. I was giving campus tours almost immediately after getting there. So yeah; I was very deep in the bones of sort of like: Here’s all the thoughtfully sourced natural materials, as well as here are all the sensory touches. I mean now I think there’s—probably people would roll their eyes a bit more to it. But also I think it was sort of like a celebration of neurodivergence in that way, like: Here’s the ball pit, here’s like the yoga balls, here’s the ways that the engineers can sort of get their ya-yas out in between their coding sessions or whatever.
So I think there were certain things that were very considered. It’s like how you can have some amazing person designing a children’s playground. It was like they had all these great minds thinking about: How do you foster innovation and collaboration and, you know, of course soak the most productivity out of people? Get them to give, you know, 110 percent. But it was quite thoughtful.
And then, separately, there was so much rhetoric pumping through which was also quite thoughtful. Because I think at the time they said a lot that, you know—you really have to have people sort of hooked into the mission so they feel a stake in it. So they sort of come up with their most creative ideas. So it’s like: We want to capture and harness the amazingness of humans. All of the kind of talking points which I know, because I was giving the campus tour, talking about how amazing the campus was.
Warzel: Did those perks feel to you at the time as earnest perks? Like: This is so great that we can get laundry done, that we can basically live our entire lives inside this little ecosystem here that is work? Or did it feel a little bit like: We’re being trapped in a system, so all we do is work?
Stapleton: Part of my job—I was working in PR at the beginning, and they were giving me kind of lower-priority journalists to take through. And in those days it was a lot of foreign journalists, because the American press had covered the campus a lot. So, you get a lot of journalists from Europe, and they were much more skeptical. So I was aware of this whole thing where they were like: This is totally just an idea, a plot, to keep the workers here 24/7. This is very Big Brother, you know. And so I think, internally or externally, I’d be combating that. Like, wow, the cynical person; of course this is completely virtuous.
There was always a really thoughtful talking point to counter that. Because, you know, who does want to go home when you’re exhausted at the end of the day and do your laundry? It’s nice to not have to drive off campus to get lunch. It’s like, right there and whatever. So I mean, I think that I was able to sort of see that there were some aspects that were kind of about keeping people there, and keeping them super engaged.
But only much, much later was I able to actually analyze the emotional effects and also the kind of difficult golden-handcuffs effects—where then people feel uncomfortable speaking out in any sort of difficult situation with management, because you’re so grateful and you sort of feel spoiled. And all these other things where you could see how it degrades a healthy kind of back-and-forth in office culture.
But you know, I felt really lucky to have this job, and I think there, at the time, it was like everyone’s so impressed by it. It’s just like the way it is in life; you know, when people are telling you, “What a lucky girl you are to have this job.” The reality of it, you know, as I trace in the book—it was always a bit more complicated.
Warzel: So you write about—you were involved in the internal marketing for Google, right? Selling the story of Google to itself. And you write about in many ways that you became the voice of Google. So how did that happen? And then for those of us who might be blissfully unaware, what is the voice of Google?
Stapleton: With Google’s sort of obsession with its own culture, there was a lot of lore, internal lore. So, you know, there were—the executives would kind of become characters in the TV show, because there was so much internal communications. Larry and Sergey hosting the weekly meeting kinda felt like a revival; you know, like all the executives would kind of get up there.
And you know, there was a meme message board that was launched, sort of just a few years after I got there. There was so much internal chatter. So I think the company culture created its own little characters. So when I first got there, one of the first things I was ever assigned to do was work on TGIF [a weekly meeting]. The internal communications team wrote the script for Larry and Sergey.
Warzel: Who are the founders of Google, for people who don’t know.
Stapleton: The founders of Google, yeah. I think they’re like, Ben and Jerry. It’s like they’re kind of these folksy American characters, though now they’re, you know, seen [as] much more nefarious. But they were huge celebrities internally—but they were really accessible. And so they would broadcast the TGIF video, you know, to the far-flung locations in Mountain View, and you know, call these kind of growing satellite offices around the world. So one of the first tasks I had, a few months in, was sending around the logistical information for this meeting. Like, how to tune in to this meeting. And so, you know, it was like a very straight email at first. And I just sort of, as it went with this huge growing company, I had a lot of leeway. You know, a lot of leash. So sort of started, you know, kinda slowly getting a little, putting a little more personality in it.
Which I think, you know, for better or for worse, kinda hit the vibe of Google at that time. Which was kind of geeky, kind of like riffing on the rhetorical talking points of the time and the products and the new things. It’s just like how, you know, someone that sends like the emails for your kids’ school has amazing name recognition. That’s like, I don’t want to oversell—but it was kinda like that. It’s like, you can’t not know who Claire Stapleton is, because I’m sending this email like every single week for five years. I mean, it was kind of amazing that it went on for so long. And I think back, you know, very fondly of it.
Warzel: So part of this book, as I see it, is really about what happens when a company evolves into a corporation, right? When company culture becomes more bureaucratic and a little bit less human. And you describe some of the features of Google’s corporate culture. These sort of endless performance reviews. But also something that really stuck out for me is the corporate idea of radical accountability. What was radical accountability inside Google, and what effect did it have on the culture of the place?
Stapleton: They put all the new-comms hires, and I think like broader swaths of the new hires that came out of college into a training program. Which was run by a guy named Fred Kofman, whom Sheryl Sandberg has sort of credited with profoundly altering her life. He’s sort of like a Valley executive-coach guy. But it was theoretically about how to live your values in a career, how to be courageous in the world. It sort of sounded very tonally in tune with everything else about Google. You know: Here you are; be an owner. You know, like this is a place to really contribute to the world, to help change the world. But actually, really what the training was about was something called radical accountability—which was that, as a young person in the corporation, you should really never blame your circumstances. You know, a classic example would be: You come into a meeting, and you’re a few minutes late. You shouldn’t say, Traffic made me late. You say, I should have left earlier because of traffic. You know, it’s sort of like presenting yourself that way in a corporation makes you a very attractive young hire. That’s basically what they were saying to us.
One of the other lines was that you should strive to be a player at all times, never a victim. You know—victims are bad, like, you’re a taker. Nothing is ever the system’s fault, the hierarchy’s fault. And so I found this amazing Gchat that I’d sent to my brother when I went to this training, being like: Today I found out that if my team is dysfunctional, it’s my fault. And I was joking about it. I was able to kind of have the, you know, distance from it to be like: This is a little slightly whack that they’re like telling people who are like 22years old that, you know, don’t expect to change anything around you, because your life is what you make of it. And like, If you want to be a rock star, then, you know, you better not be kind of criticizing anything about the corporation.
And even though I was sort of criticizing at the time, I found that it was very pernicious. You know, it’s pernicious ideology for me personally, because as I, you know, wended my way through different roles in the company and found myself in situations that were pretty messed up. I think I was sort of like: Be a player, not a victim; be a player, not a victim. You know, move on, one foot in front of the other, your life is what you make of it. But there’s real limits to that when you run up against the company doing things that you really disagree with. Or things start to sort of like pile up, as they did in me.
Warzel: You talk about Larry Page as the ultimate techno-optimist, right? The ultimate, like: We can solve anything through innovation and hard work. The wanting to cure death, the Project Calico, with the infamous TIME cover there. And then these phrases he had, this: “Have a healthy disregard for the impossible,” or “Computers should do the hard work so humans can get back to doing what humans do best: learning, living, loving.” It’s very live, laugh, love coded there. Because not a lot of people get a front-row seat for this type of person.
I am curious; from your perspective, how much of that techno-optimism felt really genuine from your vantage point? How much did you feel that these people really believed that?
Stapleton: I think I did. I was sort of still going with the tide. And Larry came in pretty hot with this. He used to say that if we only had two million Googlers, think of all the good we can do. Because again, we’re continuing here from: Here we are, this sort of rarefied species of, you know, world-changers with all these resources. And we need to solve the world’s biggest problems. He was really, like, putting the whole Google-mission thing on steroids at this time. I think two things were true. Like, at the same time that I was sort of saying, This sounds kind of hokey; it sounds kind of unreal—it also seemed inevitable that yes, Google will, you know, solve these things. And that sounds great. I look forward to Google, you know, curing death. Or whatever it was like. Even though, yeah, looking back it was sort of like—wow, some of the actual progress Google was making was quite banal.
And Larry Page's role as the CEO would be that, you know, everyone has not only amazing world changing problems to work on, but that they feel that they are seen and sort of nourished as human beings within the company. And I think that even though in interpersonally to see s him sort of on the stage at TJIF, he was not the warmest and fuzziest person, but he seemed to have like a very strong kind of moralistic streak about how companies should operate and how they should really, you know, take care of their employees. So it would have been really hard for me, even with a little bit of cringing at the rhetoric, to think like, this guy's totally full of it. It was—it actually sounded like to some extent quite refreshing because I think he was even putting a little bit more bones behind the kind of freewheeling fun campus stuff of yesteryear.
Warzel: This might sound naive on my part, but you talk a lot about everyone being really bought into this idea of helping build the future. What future did you personally think you were building, that Google was building? Like, what did that look like in your mind’s eye? Was it really vague, and just kind of like: It’s gonna be better because of all this? Or did you have your own ideology about it?
Stapleton: Where things started to kind of slowly break down for me, over time, is what is actually my contribution. Not only can I not exactly see the world that Larry Page is proposing with the sort of army of Googlers, you know, kind of flipping everything on its head. But here I am, writing like internal comms, you know, or doing ghostwriting for, you know, an executive who’s like kind of an a-hole. Who’s like, you know, selling ads, because I was working on the ads business for a while. Which is really, that’s actually what the company was doing. Like it was, you know, building an online-advertising juggernaut. It was a little sad when I was like, you know, kind of going through the book or process the last year or two. And thinking: No shade, but, like, what did Google actually ever do in any of the categories of things that Larry was talking about?
Warzel: Well, not to not to not to defend Larry and Sergey here. But as a devil’s advocate, I think what’s fascinating about a company like Google and some of these tech companies is that the initial thing actually is wildly impressive, right? Organizing the world’s information; like you can make a strong case at Google, that was the mission statement. Google did that, right? Like, they built something incredibly powerful; changed the way that everyone accessed information. These things were very powerful. I think it’s easy to—and not that you’re doing this—but it’s very easy for everyone to say, yeah, like what did they do, right? And then you look at like, you know—like, Gmail was a revelation when it came out.
Stapleton: Yeah. Google Maps, yeah.
Warzel: Google Maps has changed the way people get around. These products are huge. Like the photos, the cloud storage, the things that they have done. Even the ad business. And the juggernaut, you know, propelled a lot of people into having sustainable business models on the internet, early on. So I totally actually understand that feeling.
But there is something that’s fascinating about the vagueness of it. You said in an interview previously that during the Google tenure you had that feeling that there was like a meaninglessness to the work, sometimes, that you were tasked with doing. I’m curious; what specifically felt meaningless?
Stapleton: Yeah, okay, so I never once felt that in my early, kind of internal-comms journey. But then I spent another five years at Google in the marketing department of YouTube. And this is where all that’s coming from. Because the Google marketing team, specifically was, you know, hiring like gangbusters. Not just internal full-time Googlers, but also we had a whole cottage industry of agencies. And what we were doing was brand marketing for YouTube. Some of it would cycle through as we’re trying to improve our relationship with women or creators of color. So there’d be specific initiatives.
But really, we were like a social-media operation that was massive. I mean, it was just like, you know, millions of dollars for every campaign. I mean, we had multimillion-dollar budgets with all these agencies. And what we were doing was producing like a couple tweets a day, right? So imagine like, you know, 30 or 35 people at YouTube working on the Twitter account. So that kind of stuff. And so my husband’s an architect, which has its frustrations in different ways, but like: You’re building a house brick by brick. And here I am, it’s just like, kind of it was a bullshit job. I like going to the gym every day. And it was just like, everybody’s there. Just like, you know, gravy train. I would have these existential moments where I’m like: Okay, what is YouTube doing? YouTube is, you know, connecting the world through video. And we had all these vague goals about being part of the cultural conversation.
But all this is to say—was tremendous resources, human resources, money. You know, sweat; the urgency of it, all the time, for what was like forgettable tweets. I mean, no offense to the people who still work on this stuff. It’s, you know—I’m sure people find meaning in their jobs in all these different ways. But I personally found that really hard. I think particularly because I’d, you know, been weaned on this sort of “your work should feel like it matters.” By that point, I was just like—I look around, and I’m seeing bloat. And seeing like, you know, as my former manager’s big character of the book said: You don’t get a gold star for coming in under budget. Which is what she said to me, trying to justify us doing some, like, ridiculous creator event in L.A.; which—it didn’t matter. I mean it’s all these things like making, you know, YouTube-branded cupcakes. People will be shocked where the money goes.
Warzel: The cupcake budget. I would love to see the cupcake. Please leak me the cupcake budget, if you haven’t already. No; this is what I wanted to get into, because you describe Google as becoming bloated and inefficient. And in many ways, this is fascinating because it’s a criticism that’s shared across ideologies, right? Back in 2024, Mike Solana, this Peter Thiel–orbit guy who has a website as well and blogs, has argued that Google got bloated and stagnant as a result of being “overly woke,” right? But then, there are other arguments that have nothing to do with, you know, the liberal-minded nature of this. Just that there was bloat and stagnation. What happened, in your mind, to Google in this time period? This 2010-to-2018 period, where that stagnation was really occurring?
Stapleton: I think it was a couple things, and a lot of it was organizational psychology. I think it’s probably this weird, wonky strain of the be a player, not a victim thing—where you end up with incredible kind of corporate game players, who are able to kind of play the court politics. I think what happens between 2010 on, as the political landscape is changing, the social-media landscape is changing, I think the executives are feeling like they’re losing their grip.
So with my zone of social media, or from social-media marketing, it was sort of like, all the kids. You know, Gen Z is all on TikTok or Instagram, and YouTube’s gonna lose this audience unless we could make any number of arguments there, right? There’d be different teams working on smartwatches at the same time. Like, that’s kind of vaguely demoralizing. It’s also inefficient.
But again, the smartwatches thing. Like—Well, this is in the air, and like Apple’s coming along. And we need to be in this, because otherwise we’re gonna lose. Google Plus was also motivated by, you know: We’re gonna lose being people’s portal to the web, because Facebook. There’s gonna be a Facebook browser, and then, you know, we’re screwed. Or whatever.
So I think that Google’s domain ended up bleeding—you know, it’s like all the internet’s domains kind of bled together, where social media becomes dominant. You know, search is still huge, but then AI comes along. And it’s really hard to keep it all sort of organized with a vision, because it’s just so unwieldy. And then in that unwieldiness, I think you end up reading a lot of different toxic work cultures, or opportunistic kind of leaders come in, and all these other things. But yeah—I constantly hear from people that it just has not been a happy place to work for a long time. Despite the tremendous resources and still impressive workplaces, and everything else. Or offices, that is.
Warzel: It feels like a victim of its own success, right? When you grow in that way, when you have unlimited money; “you’re not gonna get any points for coming in under budget.” And people spend, and people build out those things. But at the same time, you have to be in this defensive crouch, right? That’s what it feels like from the outside; there were these initial world-beating products, and after a while you just start guarding them. But at the same time, you are growing. But if you’re guarding and you’re growing at the same time, it just turns into this really odd—and it sounds like, just like totally unwieldy—bureaucracy that nobody really knows what anyone else is doing. Which gives them the ability to do things that maybe other people wouldn’t want them to do. Or it’s not organized in any way.
Stapleton: Yeah; there’s a lot of anxiety, and not enough constraints, probably. Like, just the unlimited money of it. People could always argue for more money. And what does that all lead to?
Warzel: And so this all kind of leads to the 2017, 2018 timeframe. And you’re best known for helping to organize Google’s famous 2018 walkout, which is in response to a number of issues inside the company. Including what you and others alleged was a culture that had problems with sexual harassment and discrimination. And in the case of one executive, Andy Rubin, a very lucrative exit package after allegations of sexual impropriety that he, we should note, still denies. But I want to understand more how you ended up playing such an important role here. Because that’s not there; there's this way that you describe yourself in the book as being a real, you know, cheerleader for this company, and feeling really in line with the type of messaging. And kind of like plugging into the system. And yet you ended up playing this crucially important role in this dissent. How do you feel like you got there?
Stapleton: For me, the lead-up was the radical experience of having a kid, and coming back from maternity leave with sort of like bleary—you know, fresh eyes. But my work at that time at YouTube was so focused on cheerleading the virtues. I was plagued with always having a cheerleader role. Like, no matter what my kind of technical title was, it was like: We’re putting Claire, and like, the new thing we’re gonna trumpet and be enthusiastic about. It’s like a paid enthusiast, right? Mercenary.
So I think that kind of job—which requires a lot of sort of inner conviction, because if you really think that that’s not true, or that’s a lie, or you’re selling something that’s false, then it’s really hard to do that job. So I just usually was able to kind of manufacture enough, you know, enthusiasm to do these jobs. Did this big get-out-the-vote campaign, which was sort of understood to be about helping, you know, get out the vote for the youth. But then also, YouTube’s creator class was becoming really complicated. And the dark underbelly of YouTube was sort of coming to the fore, where a lot of the biggest creators on the platform were kind of, you know, pushing the Overton window. Or becoming this sort of—it was becoming very popular to be a provocateur, like PewDiePie becoming, you know, anti-PC and all these other things.
Not to put a value judgment on the sort of like, you know, gamers of the platform. But more that, simultaneously being told to run an International Women’s Day campaign, when every time we post something about that online, people are like, Why do you never take any action to protect women on your own platform? It’s like, you sort of want the credit for, you know, the pinkwashing or the big Pride campaign. But when, you know, the creator community raises the things they’d actually want, in terms of—it’s like, you know, you can talk the talk, but can you walk the walk? It was like, I was constantly faced with that cognitive dissonance. Because of being the sort of forward-facing person for the company, but then also seeing all this very, very valid, you know, criticism. And I think also trying to grapple with this sort of narrative that YouTube was a net positive for society, at a time when it seemed like it was contributing to a lot of things that were very polarizing and negative within society.
So all this is to say: It was sort of brewing in me. And I just, you know, had not been in organizing before. There was already the kind of fabric of Googler, “the tech won’t build it” movement. Which I think is a really great phrase—which is basically like, you know, people who are technologists, who are thinking of the implications of their technology. Very interesting ethical conversations were going on, and in different pockets of the company. I was not involved in any of that when I got into the organizing with the walkout; simply was someone who was used to being on all these message boards and internal threads. Probably from my vestige of my years in the communications department, where I used to monitor these things. But I also just love to sort of chat online. It’s kind of my way around.
And so, you know, I was in this moms’ group. There was an anonymous moms’ group that was not political at all. But the day that this sort of big New York Times story broke—which was about Andy Rubin, but also about a couple of other executives who’d either had relationships with women at the company, which had ended badly for the woman. Or there was some stuff during the hiring process where there’d just been like a—it was a weird soup of things in this article. And what was fascinating, for me, was that it created this rupture in the moms’ group. Where people were all of a sudden starting to talk about the ways they’ve been disappointed by—I mean, not just Google. It was like their life in tech, of just how little progress it seemed the tech industry had made since the kind of bro culture, brotopia. You know, back in the kind of old days of the ’90s and early ’00s. That still there was a lot of opportunity discrimination, a kind of boys’-club environment. As well as people being outright sort of sexually harassed. And how hard it was, given this sort of radical-accountability culture, to raise it; to have any semblance of justice. And it was exciting to think that, you know, in a company that did, at least on paper, celebrate employee voice, and, you know, welcome dissent and all these other things. Which—whether or not that was authentic at all at that point—I thought, This is a time to push it. Because the world seemed to be having this kind of interesting conversation about the patriarchy.
Warzel: #MeToo.
Stapleton: Yeah, #MeToo. I mean #MeToo; it was really the biggest context here in a lot of different ways. But anyway, even when I started to write the book, I was like: How did I end up doing that? Because I’m like, you know, not the ultimate stay-in-line rule-follower you’ve ever met, but it was a little bit out of character. But I can really see how it was sort of just like things were bottled up. And I was a little bit like, I also I felt quite safe. Because I was like, you know, even if Google would want to punish the women who were doing this—someone like me, who’s been around forever, I have the protection of the fact that it would look so bad. You know, to futz around with anyone’s job. Even though that was incredibly naive. But yeah.
Warzel: The walkout is this very, very prominent event in the world of tech that spills out into broader culture as a part of this—you know, the #MeToo stone in the pond rippling out everywhere. It was initially praised by your bosses, right, as representing the classic principles of a Googler. Just standing up, doing the right thing, having that virtue. But then, there’s what you’ve alleged as this retaliation from Google, right? That your boss starts to reassign your role, change who you report to. And, you know, you note that at one time the company’s narrative seemed to be even that you were having your own mental struggles alongside all of this, as the fallout of this. So then, you start to negotiate your exit. And you left in 2019. But there are parallels that I found going through your story to the pandemic era, right? Where there’s this employee backlash over politics and labor issues in Silicon Valley around George Floyd protests, around COVID, all of that—followed by, almost immediately once people start to return to the office a little bit, an employer crackdown.
And so I’m curious how you viewed that tension, going through what you went through from afar. Like—and broadly, the question I guess, is like: How do you think Big Tech’s executives view their workforces?
Stapleton: I think that, you know, they really overcorrected. Because even though with Meredith [Whittaker] and me, and there are a couple of other women who—there was this funny business around our roles and the shifting of our responsibilities. Which we thought was clearly illegal. But then, you know, in the coming months, I mean—there were these five people that they fired. They outright fired five people around that Thanksgiving, that very year. So we left in June. And the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] sued on these people’s behalf, and they settled with Google.
So Google was like at that point: No more Mr. Nice Google. They were clearly like: We need to completely rearticulate the relationship between the workforce.
I think it has, ever since then, it’s been this constant rearticulation of the power. Where I think that there’s—so all the philosophy that was around, giving workers power because that was great for not only the company culture, but for the company bottom line. Because people bring their best selves, and all that. They’ve just completely thrown that out the window in the service of: We’d prefer to concentrate control with the executives at the top. And if that sucks to be you, well then fair enough. Because we think now, precarity and the threat of layoffs and, you know, all these other things—the chilling effects—are more important for serving our goal of maintaining leadership’s steady hand or whatever.
Warzel: It’s maybe obvious, but also just such an interesting about-face. Because the Larry Page idea of “this should be a family” was not unique to Google. This was broadly a tech-industry trend, right?
Stapleton: Yeah; Salesforce, Ohana.
Warzel: Right. We are here doing this thing together. You’re gonna give as much focus and attention as you would to your family, but you’re also gonna be rewarded with that broader feeling. And then the crackdown coming was very much, you know—I experienced it reporting on it in 2021, as like: You will not bring this part of yourself to work. In fact, you will just bring the part of yourself that works. And everything else, we’re gonna leave this to the side. It is such a fascinating about-face.
I want to talk a little bit about the idea of empathy, because there’s this period of the time in the book where you’re working at the Creative Lab at Google. And you detail this boys’-club atmosphere, where the executives are always talking about empathy, right? Empathy is king, and Google needs to adopt this radical empathy in the design of its products. Step into the user’s shoes, but also in the workplace.
And then cut—a couple years later, you recount the story of James Damore, this Google engineer who wrote this manifesto about the “Google echo chamber,” and how women were less represented in the tech industry because of biological differences. And this memo is rather famously hinging on a lot of specious claims about gender and issues with DEI programs—things that would later become, you know, like the conservative, reactionary obsessions. But one thing that Damore points out in that essay is this need to “de-emphasize empathy.” And this to me is this subtle but important shift in Silicon Valley that you got to experience firsthand. And I’m curious how you parse its evolution.
Stapleton: Yeah; I mean I think what was really interesting with the kind of Creative Lab thing was how it was a marketing tool. I guess it was sort of like—they were trying to hack the mainframe. That if you feel Google is so friendly and so nonthreatening, then you’ll let it sort of deeper into your life. I mean, that was how I took what he meant by empathy, which, if you’re listening to it, didn’t feel completely manipulative and nefarious. But it actually is quite disconcerting.
Warzel: The reason why I ask is because, you know, Elon Musk and some of these other titans of Silicon Valley have adopted the Damore-like framework around empathy, right? Musk calls it “suicidal empathy”; you have Marc Andreessen talking about the need for no introspection.
The reason why I’m curious to ask you this is: It does feel like a pretty big shift. Because even if it was lip service, even if it was in order to get people to, you know, buy into a very specific culture—the, let’s say, 2014 version of “Empathy is king” is so different as a mindset for how to run your organization than “No, no, no; empathy is dangerous. Empathy is keeping us from making the decisions we need to make to build the things that are gonna change society.” And I’m just curious: Did you feel that breakage happening?
Stapleton: Yeah. I agree that back then there was something to it that was true. It’s like, we have this responsibility; I feel like the way that they’re kind of right. The suicidal empathy—the sort of concept that’s sort of swinging around—is so sad, because I think it that is actually trying to disconnect people from their, you know, their natural connection to other people. And also, as was my situation with the walkout, the idea that caring about other people and, you know, wanting the world to be more inclusive and hospitable to people. I mean, I think people have a tremendous ability to affect the world around them, even as a manager of a small team, right? Or you know, raising your voice in certain ways.
It’s not to say that always [there] is a, you know, linear, path forward. But the idea that we should be cutting ourselves off from empathy because we might, you know, start to care about a person in a war-torn country. And this is, you know, sort of politically threatening to the right-wing project or something? It feels very sad that it’s now been sort of weaponized. It was being perhaps appropriated in ways that were sort of a little creepy or weird.
But I think ultimately there was something about Larry Page, you know, back in the day—not that he was talking about empathy, but the whole “learning, living, and loving” thing. I think it was sort of like that: Humanity is something that we should celebrate and protect, whether it’s the humanity of our workers or, you know, the humanity of people who use our products. And now I think everything just feels quite craven. And it’s sort of like “It’s our team.” You know, it’s like “the West must win” or all these other things. Where everything feels so politicized and so tribal that we’ve broken down any of the more kind of utopian aspects of, you know, Google’s philosophy or rhetoric. Whatever it was back in the day.
Warzel: But you worked in this culture. What do you think attributes that change? Is it just like sniffing the political winds and latching onto something, ’cause, you know, it’s advantageous? Or do you think it’s a kind of almost madness that’s induced by just having all the money and resources at your disposal? What do you think is responsible for that change? I know you can’t answer definitively, but you worked with those people.
Stapleton: No; it’s really interesting. It’s weird. Like someone leaked the TGIF when Trump was elected the first time, and Larry and Sergey are there. All the executives are up there; they’re shocked. Sergey gives this whole speech about, you know: Myself as an immigrant; I’m so offended by this, and I know it’s just so hard to realize how many people don’t share our values. And he was like, you know, protesting the immigrant ban. And to now imagine that, you know, by the time Trump was reelected, he’s second row of the inauguration, with all the rest of the tech CEOs—I do think that inevitably having so much money and power, I think it seems like it creates a form of brain rot. Like, I just don’t think that you exist on the planet in a normal way at all.
And I can’t really account for how quickly the mask slipped with the tech CEOs who were seemingly so offended by Trump at the beginning, and now are like on the MAGA train as hardcore as anyone else. And I think that, of course, all the layers of people underneath will get in line at the company, because my team and the marketing team, by definition, we were, you know, deploying whatever the corporate wind was. So before it was kind of, you know, the resistance: We wanna stand up for trans kids. And all these other things in the, you know, earlier Trump administration. And now they’ve dialed down all the political stuff. There’s no mention of diversity and all these other things. They’ve reworded things. No longer could be, you know, accused on the social-media channels of being “lib,” in any way.
So there are these sort of trends, and these things that sort of fall out of favor because the marketing team’s following the executives, or what they think is popular with the public. These companies are no longer trying to take a stand as a brand, you know, on social media.
But the people at the top—I think it’s completely confounding. And I don’t understand. Because could it really be so simple, with all of them leaving California for the wealth tax? Of course that amount of money would never affect their life—whatever that one-time payout could be. But they’re so kind of vehemently and existentially opposed to that. You have to think they’re just like, you know, radicalizing each other in group chats, just like any other segment of the population.
But it’s genuinely surprising, because they were much more interested in, you know, positioning themselves as sort of like benevolent kings of the universe before. And now, you know, it’s just—the vibe has completely shifted.
Warzel: You write that “Tech didn’t solve the world’s problems, but it’s intensified and monetized them.” And you continue, saying that: “Google said it would change the world. It did. I just didn’t expect the transformation to feel so relentlessly hollow.”
I mean this question not flippantly, just earnestly. What did you expect the transformation to feel like? Like, when you look back on it, does it feel like that early faith in the company was naive? Or does it feel like there was a different path that Google did not have to evolve and grow in the way that it did? How do you see that?
Stapleton: Yeah. I think the company was more guided by, you know, engineering feats and technological challenges. And then something shifted, as we’ve entered a later stage in sort of like empire or the industry or whatever. Where everything seems to be just driven by your typical kind of capitalistic pursuits and exploits and the, you know, shareholders. Whatever; all these things, right? And it seems more like trying to preserve the empire than doing literally any of the things that Larry Page was talking about in 2010, of solving the world’s problems.
I mean, Google was always, you know, doing their earnings call and doing talking points every year. About how we’re gonna continue to grow, and da da da, whatever. But it just seems like the whole thing is guided by wealth and power. Which is the exact opposite of what they said they wanted to go. So even though Google did have incredible—you’re right, with the search and the maps and all these other, Gmail, these sort of utilities. And the technologies that were so transformative to the world.
But anything else outside, any other problems that humanity faces—Google isn’t tackling those. It’s just sort of continuing to just, you know, siphon money out of the system. It’s like the input of everything in the world, and let’s keep it that way, is what the kind of mission of Google feels like to me today. Which is quite bleak. That’s not an inspiring vision. And it’s just such a change, you know, from even what—15 years ago? I mean, most of this was happening.
Warzel: There’s a moment near the beginning of your memoir where you’re describing an early job you had as a kid, as a waitress. And realizing at some point, or hearing someone say, that you got promoted in part because you looked the part. And in this moment, you write, How do you challenge a system? Things you know are messed up when the system is rewarding you. And I wanted to end by asking: How would you answer that question today?
Stapleton: I think that, for me, one of the most radicalizing moments was when we were planning the walkout. I sent around a Google form saying, What compels you to do this? Why are you doing this? And, you know, we got a couple hundred responses. And I read them all, sort of agog at what other people had experienced. And it was starting to knit together this latent layer of things that I had experienced at the company. Some of my kind of more existential qualms with the direction of the company. With the rhetoric, you know, with the day-to-day things I was experiencing. And starting to form, you know, a worldview that is less understanding of the system, right? Like, as a manager, I’d seen so many things happen with the contractors on my team, kind of getting cut or shuttled around in ways that felt quite inhumane to me. Or I didn’t have power over, or maybe I did in certain ways in different times, but, you know—I am someone who's sort of guided by empathy for other people.
And part of my sentimental education here, my arc, was to be able to say that even though things, generally speaking work, for me—this isn’t the kind of world that I want to live in. The kind of world I want to, you know, have kids in. And all these things.
I think that Google capitalized on this impulse, which many people have, to be part of something bigger than themselves. That was a lot of the philosophical thinking about the mission. Was if people—it doesn’t matter if you’re a customer-service operator, if you feel like the company is doing really good things that are gonna make the world a better place, you’re gonna be excited and invigorated to come in. And, you know, do your job in the widgets factory or whatever.
And when that started to break down for me, I still had the feeling that I wanted to contribute to something bigger than myself and to leave the world better than I found it. Or, you know, whatever. I no longer feel so attached to I must protect the status quo, because I have my place in it. And I’m rewarded for that. You know, if I truly still felt that way, I could have easily put my head down and just not rocked the boat. Or upset the apple cart, so to speak.
Warzel: Claire, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and talking about all this with us. Really appreciate it.
Stapleton: It was fun. Thank you so much.
This episode of Galaxy Brain was produced by Renee Klahr and Hadley Robinson, edited by Nat Frum and engineered by Miguel Carrascal. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Donald Trump blared yesterday on social media, “is a STAR, and everyone knows it!” But the rest of the presidential missive told a very different story. Blanche’s nomination to run the Justice Department has stalled over objections from outgoing Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to a settlement between Trump and the IRS that would create a $1.8 billion slush fund for rewarding Trump’s political supporters, including those convicted of crimes on January 6, 2021. Tillis and Cornyn have demanded that Blanche deliver written guarantees that the fund would not proceed, and they remain unsatisfied with what they’ve received. Although a deal may still be struck, Trump wrote in his post that he had “no objection to temporarily withdrawing” Blanche’s nomination “and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”
The senators met with Blanche last night and could still waver, and Trump could still change his mind, but the president this morning posted a strong defense of the slush fund and attacked Cornyn. “John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called ‘Fund,’ which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas,” he wrote. “Todd Blanche, a good man, should be immediately approved as U.S. Attorney General.”
This moment of peril for Blanche’s nomination reveals three things: First, dissident Republicans really can push Trump around if they want to; second, Trump (as usual) seemingly has no strategy or contingency plan to save the nomination; and third, Trump apparently cares more about preserving the slush fund than he does about Todd Blanche.
If Trump really valued Blanche, then reaching an agreement with Cornyn and Tillis would be easy: He’d just have to give up on the fund. Not only is the planned payout politically toxic, but courts may prohibit it anyway. The fund emerges from a settlement in a case filed by Trump against the federal government over a leak of his personal tax returns. In exchange for dropping the case, the government agreed to grant Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits and to create a $1.8 billion pot of money for supposed victims of a “weaponized” federal government, such as people prosecuted for their role in the January 6 insurrection.
The fund is an abomination for several reasons, as my colleague Jonathan Chait wrote when it was announced. The deal was struck between Trump as plaintiff and Trump as head of the executive branch—an arrangement a federal judge later said is improper. It gives the president an opportunity to direct taxpayer money to his allies and supporters—and specifically people who attempted to subvert the 2020 election and rioted at the U.S. Capitol.
One federal judge, Leonie Brinkema, is currently blocking the fund’s creation, and another, Kathleen Williams, concluded that the settlement was improper self-dealing and harshly criticized Blanche’s role in negotiating the deal as acting attorney general. Blanche himself told senators that the money wouldn’t be paid out, but as my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick reported in June, administration officials said privately that it wasn’t really dead. That helps explain why Brinkema requested a sworn statement from Blanche about the demise of the fund, and why Cornyn (who lost a GOP primary in May) and Tillis (who decided to retire) have said they want written assurances from Blanche.
By announcing that he would rather pull Blanche’s nomination, even temporarily, than allow Blanche or any other administration official to provide such assurances, Trump has implicitly confirmed that he has no intention of letting go of the fund. His statement also undercuts Blanche’s credibility with senators because it shows that Blanche was either not telling the truth or was making a promise he couldn’t keep when he said earlier that the fund wouldn’t proceed.
The idea of renominating Blanche later on may well be a feint anyway, since Trump hates to ever admit defeat, but it’s peculiar. Trump’s unstated premise is that he will have a more favorable Senate in 2027, which is questionable. Cornyn and Tillis are currently preventing Blanche’s nomination from advancing out of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and neither man will be on that panel come January. But most forecasts suggest that Democrats will gain ground in the Senate in the midterm elections, and possibly even win a narrow edge in the chamber. Either way, Blanche will still have a hard time getting the necessary votes for confirmation next year.
That is especially true because Trump’s power over Republican senators appears to be on the wane. For years, senators have trash-talked Trump privately, but meekly followed him in public. Tillis and especially Cornyn made their hesitations about Blanche public weeks ago, and the White House seems to have wagered that they would simply give in as GOP members have in the past. (The administration may have underestimated Cornyn’s taste for revenge against a president who endorsed his opponent in the primary.) At the same time, Trump has been unable to persuade all Republican senators to back the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to present proof of citizenship to vote, and they have shrugged off his demands to eliminate the filibuster in order to pass it. After all, they know that they could be in the minority within six months.
What made Blanche attractive to Trump as an attorney general was not his legal acumen but his eagerness as an enabler. Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, began in the administration as deputy attorney general. Attorney General Pam Bondi was willing to destroy many of the boundaries keeping politics out of the Justice Department, and she pursued many of Trump’s projects of political retribution, but she fell out of favor after some of them stalled and was soon asked to resign. When Blanche became acting attorney general in April, he set out to fulfill Trump’s desires with zeal.
That was enough to win Blanche a nomination to hold the job permanently, but it also made his path to confirmation more perilous. Now Trump has little reason to fight for his nomination. Since Blanche is already deputy attorney general, the president can leave Blanche as acting attorney general indefinitely, even without confirmation. That would surely be a disappointment to Blanche, who worked so hard to win Trump’s favor, but it’s an easy calculation for Trump: Why would he give up a $1.8 billion pot of money when he already has a lackey in place?
On geological timescales, the Earth is a dynamic place. Tectonic plates shift. Continents move. Mountains rise and fall. But during humanity’s tenure on Earth, the ground beneath our feet has largely stayed put.
That stable period may now be at an end. Climate change began in the atmosphere, where greenhouse gases accumulate, trapping heat from the sun. The planet’s waters reacted—precipitation patterns shifted, glaciers and ice caps began melting, the ocean generously sponged up heat and carbon dioxide.
When the Earth’s waters shift, so does solid ground. Now warming is destabilizing land across the planet, and geology is becoming a real-time science. In more and more places, the floor is giving way.
In Alaska, Norway, Greenland, Chile, and New Zealand, as well as across the European Alps, mountains are crumbling. As glaciers retreat, some at unprecedented rates, they leave behind unstable cliffs that were once supported by ice. In 2023, one collapsed into a fjord in Greenland and generated a 660-foot wave that sent ripples through the Earth detected on monitoring stations worldwide for nine days. In Alaska last year, a landslide-generated tsunami struck in a fjord frequented by cruise ships. In Switzerland the same year, part of a mountain glacier detached entirely, burying the village of Blatten in a cataclysmic landslide. In the past decade or so, scientists have collected enough dramatic examples of this phenomenon to suggest that they’re clearly not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern linking the loss of glaciers with landslide risk.
And those landslides could get larger. When the glaciers melted after the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, the landslides that followed were orders of magnitude larger than any we’ve seen in recorded history. But because some of today’s glaciers have persisted in the landscape longer than those of that glacial period did, they’ve had time to carve steep, unstable cliffs. This means that “we haven’t seen the upper bounds of landslides yet,” Kristian Svennevig, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told me. In Arctic regions in the near future, the magnitude of landslides could exceed any scientists know of in the geological record.
Along with glaciers, permafrost holds mountains together at high altitudes and latitudes worldwide. It, too, is in retreat, as scientists predicted in the 1980s and as has now become apparent across the Arctic reaches. In the Brooks Range, home of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, long-frozen mountains have started to spontaneously deform and collapse within the past few decades or so, as their permafrost glue gives way. “We’re pushing these mountains into a state of disequilibrium, where they need to adjust their slopes in order to match the climate of today,” the independent Alaskan geologist Bretwood Higman told me. They’re essentially too steep for this warmer temperature regime.
“As a geologist, I’ve found it shocking how widespread the sudden increase in landslide activity is,” Higman said. When you’re used to thinking on scales that span tens of thousands of years, to see these changes play out over human lifetimes—“it’s very dramatic.”
The thawing of permafrost in mountainous regions already threatens infrastructure. Denali National Park is close to finishing a $100 million bridge that will span a moving permafrost landslide. In the Brooks Range, engineers are pumping refrigerant underground to refreeze permafrost and stabilize pipelines. And mountains aren’t the only land giving way. Cement-solid Arctic ground is turning into bogs. Communities across Alaska have had to relocate as their homes, fuel tanks, sewage lagoons, and garbage dumps tip, spill, or sink. Elsewhere, as massive underground chunks of ancient ice melt, the surrounding earth collapses into the voids left behind, buckling roads and swallowing buildings. In Siberia, once-trapped methane explodes from under permafrost to cause 100-foot craters.
“When permafrost thaws, it changes everything,” Sue Natali, an Arctic-climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told me. Natali and her colleagues are seeing the thaw speed up too. “That is not a maybe thing, and it is not a local thing. It is a pan-Arctic thing,” she said.
Climate is also shifting the land at lower latitudes. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means more frequent and extreme rainfall events. In recent years, scientists have begun modeling how this kind of rain will increase landslide risk, and linking individual events to storms made more dramatic by climate change. “Harder, more intense, longer-duration rainfall has a greater possibility to generate landslides,” Jonathan Godt, who leads the United States Geological Survey’s landslide-hazards program, told me. These kinds of debris flows and mudslides now threaten more communities. In North Carolina, Hurricane Helene triggered more than 2,000 landslides in a week. In California, slopes wiped clean by logging and drought-fueled wildfires slough away after heavy rain—one mudslide in Montecito destroyed 100 homes and killed 23 people in 2018. Landslides already cause $20 billion in damage globally, and that cost will only climb with climate change.
Already, scientists have been able to catalog the effects of melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and extreme rain. Other dramatic consequences of shifting precipitation patterns—volcanic eruptions and earthquakes—are only just coming into focus.
More than a decade ago, in his book Waking the Giant, the University College London volcanologist Bill McGuire compiled decades of paleoclimate research to predict that climate change could lead to more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. An increase in volcanic and tectonic activity would be a natural response to the end of a glacial period. For thousands of years now, the Earth’s crust, which was weighted down by ice, has been slowly bouncing back. That process releases pressure from long-subdued faults and volcanoes, such as those in Iceland. Human-caused climate change is only accelerating these processes. And water, whether from extreme rainfall or glacial melt, can percolate in cracks underground to increase pressure on rock and reduce friction along faults, triggering both earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Last year, researchers in Switzerland and France found some of the clearest evidence so far that glacial melt could indeed be affecting seismic hazards in high-altitude regions. After a period of intense glacial melt in 2015, a series of small quakes struck the Grandes Jorasses on Mont Blanc Massif, on the border of France and Italy; the probability of a 3.0-magnitude earthquake rose by 10 times, Toni Kraft, a seismologist at the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich and one of the authors of a related paper, told me. These quakes are still small, but they could trigger rockfall events that are already on the rise across the Alps.
Falk Amelung, a geoscientist at the University of Miami, has also argued—somewhat controversially—that climate-driven extreme rainfall might have led to the dramatic 2018 eruption of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano. Scientists have not been able to find an obvious triggering mechanism for the eruption, and Amelung hypothesized that rainfall had infiltrated the volcano’s edifice and increased pore pressure in the rock, kilometers down, to the highest rates in almost 50 years. USGS volcanologists were unconvinced: A link between heavy precipitation and some types of volcanic activity is widely accepted, but some scientists still reject the theory that an eruption such as Kīlauea’s could be caused by water reaching the magma below. If Amelung and others in his camp are right, though, as many as 700 volcanoes could be at risk of dome explosions and flank collapse over the next 80 years, he calculated.
“The system must be heavily stressed in a way that it’s close to breaking anyway,” he told me. “And then this small stress change due to water brings it over the edge.”
During Earth’s long history, small perturbations have caused millennia-long swings between hothouse and icehouse conditions. The amount of carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the atmosphere, at a higher rate than ever before in Earth’s geological history, is a pretty significant perturbation, which then causes its own significant perturbations. “The crust is not isolated. It’s always connected. The climate, the fluid layers, the solid layer—you cannot separate them,” Benedikt Soja, a geoscientist at ETH Zurich, told me. The atmosphere, ocean, and land are interacting systems, and their fragile equilibrium is reacting together to the stress we’ve put on them.
This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.
Meeting your heroes can be demoralizing. Reading more than 1,000 pages of their personal diary can be worse. Or, alternatively, totally riveting, at least in that rubbernecking-at-a-car-crash kind of way—the car crash, in this case, being one of the most storied careers in the history of American science.
That’s been my takeaway after cringing my way through the pandemic-era musings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, which the former chief of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases inexplicably saved on a government server.
Predictably, Fauci’s diaries made their way into the hands of one of mainstream science’s most notorious mean girls: Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Also predictably, hundreds of pages of Fauci’s entries came to light—or were leaked to light—just in time to embarrass the embattled doctor before his appearance on Wednesday in front of Paul’s Senate committee that’s investigating the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. In response to taunts and baiting questions from Senate Republicans, Fauci repeatedly invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.
If only he’d shown the same discretion with his diary.
A generous reading of the compilation is that Fauci, long seen as a paragon of selfless, nonpartisan government service, was attempting to catalog the mounting disbelief he felt during a surreal period in the nation’s history—and certainly in his own history. “Brewery in Georgia named a beer after me,” he wrote in one entry from April 2020. “Bobbleheads of me being made in massive quantities in China.” He refers to “stories of granmothers who have crushes” on him (the misspelling is Fauci’s) and to petitions to vote him “Sexiest Man Alive.”
But whatever Fauci’s intentions might have been, the document has become an instant classic in the genre of bubble-world anthropology that confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about Washington being a cesspool of pampered, preening, and panting self-regard. More than a decade ago, I wrote a book that tried to explain to readers, essentially, what Beltway people are really like when the cameras aren’t rolling and the talking points are tossed aside. If I were working on that book now, Fauci’s diary would be a godsend.
His saucer-eyed romp behind the curtain renders a not-especially flattering impression of the people allegedly in charge of our country during a precarious time. Foremost, this includes the diarist himself, as Fauci becomes more and more high on his own supply of Washington adulation, at a time when COVID death rates were soaring across the country.
Here are extracts from a few of Fauci’s entries—typos and all—that I copied and pasted for posterity, in no particular order.
July 29, 2021
Went to a book signing party add the home of Adrienne Arsh. The book is “I alone can fix it “ bye Phil Rucker and Carol Leonnig. The Super a list from Washington DC was there. It was a little bit uncomfortable since I was wearing a mask with the new guidance from the CDC and almost everyone else was without a mask. When they saw me with a mask , several of them put a mask on.
October 17, 2021
Chris and I went to a wonderful brunch over Adrienne Arsh’s home. The brunch was in honor of Christine LaGarde. the typical Washington a list was there. It was a fun brunch since Adrienne is such a wonderful and generous person. I tend to shy away from these functions since everyone gathers around me wanting to take photos and telling me what a wonderful job I’m doing.
For the record, I too go to a lot of Washington brunches and book parties—yet I have never met Fauci. Am I not getting invited to the right “Super a list” parties? Whom do I talk to about this?
November 5, 2021
Another extraordinary Day !!! I attended the Funeral services of General Colin L Powell at the Washington National Cathedral at the invitation of the Powell family.
He added:
On the wayout General Mark Milley came up to me put his arms around my shoulder and said “the only person who was getting his balls kicked more than me in Washington is you “. I responded by saying “no shit”. he then responded by saying “Fuck ‘em”.
November 11, 2022
Exciting day. In preparation for the installing of my “living portrait’ by Hugo Crosthwaite into the National Portrait Gallery tomorrow, there was a gala celebration at the home of Jeff Bezos … His home is an enormous mansion that goes on and on.
November 16, 2022
Terrific event last evening. I was honored at the home of the French Ambassador to the United States … where I received the Pasteur Medal commemorating the bicentenary of Louis Pasteur's birth in 1822.
May 5, 2020
OMG! This is really getting nutsy. Sally Quinn evidently wrote a book some time ago about a character that is me.
July 1, 2020
Had dinner over Jake Tapper and Jen Tapper’s home in DC. Terrific couple. Friendship building.
April 17, 2021
Dana Bash sent me a text: “I just watched the whole Jordan thing. Again, you’re a better man than I…. As our friend Wolf Blitzer said to me yesterday – no one would have blamed you if you said simply “Mr. Jordan, go f--- yourself””
Presumably, this referred to Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio. Also, presumably, Fauci refrained from telling him this.
June 5, 2020
I made favorable comments today on CNBC about vaccines and decreasing of # of cases and the stock market went up by 3%. I should (but will not) contact the POTUS and say that he told me on Tuesday that my remarks blunted the increase in the Stock Market and cost him “one trillion fucking dollars”. And so now my remarks actually made him “4 trillion fucking dollars”, and so he owes me $3 trillion.
August 20, 2020
Becoming really nice pen pal with Joan Baez.
This appears to be true. Fauci says she texted him later that year on his birthday (“HAPPY FUCKING BIRTHDAY AND MANY MORE”). The onetime “Queen of Folk” also called Donald Trump a “miserable fuck,” according to the diary, and told Fauci that he should be honored by the president’s attacks on him.
October 5, 2020
POTUS called me up from his hospital room at Walter Reed. 1:08 PM. He rambled on about the suite he was in and how expensive it was to build it. Says it is better than the White House. Asked me if I have ever been there. I told him about the time I went there to help in the treatment of President Nixon’s pneumonia.
November 4, 2021 (“Call from Barack Obama”)
Obama said That Donald Trump junior is “A fucking moron”. He apologized for using crude language but then went on to say that Donald Trump was a hopeless idiot who was a pathologic liar.
August 14, 2020
Joan Baez sent me a beautiful note this evening.
Hi Tony,
Just a thought..
People have told me over and over how important I was I’m their lives..I never really either believed them or paid them much attention. But maybe too much modesty, false or otherwise, is as silly as blowing ones own trumpet to loudly.
Fauci and Baez had not yet met in person at that point. But Baez invited him to attend a May 2021 ceremony in which she received the “Kennedy Center medallion for lifetime performance as a performing artist.”
“Finally, I got to meet her in person after the year-long building up of our friendship via texts and phone calls,” Fauci gushed to his diary. “She is an absolutely amazing, warm an endearing person, and our friendship was cemented last night as it became clear that we really were, as I said, ‘meant for each other ‘.”
I have questions!
August 30, 2020
Spoke with Joan Baez today – She wants to use the portrait of me [one Baez had painted] to advertise the need for science and adhering to public health messages. In essence, she wants to use the portrait in PSAs. She really is wonderful.
October 1, 2020
Hope Hicks is infected!!!
November 17, 2021
I went to a book party last night for Jonathan Karl’s new book about Trump. It took place at the Cafe Milano. The place was incredibly crowded and I was almost forced to take my mask off for 2/3 of the time I was there since they were serving drinks and people were talking and taking selfies. I was totally swamped all night by people wanting to say hello, shake my hands, and take pictures with me. I could not get away from it . Although some people may think that this is great to have people treat you like Elvis Presley , but it was really very unnerving.
Unnerving indeed. Reading Fauci’s dispatches left me with a strong sense of returning to a grainy dream state. How did we survive that time? Did this really happen? And did Barbra Streisand really call Fauci’s cellphone?
Yes, she did. “Had great call with Barbra Streisand,” Fauci wrote on February 23, 2021. She consulted him on a medical issue. “We then stared discussing life in general,” he continued (more friendship-building). “I told her that I work listening to her songs on ALEXA. She really did not know what ALEXA was. I accidentally butt called her later in the evening and she said that she was going to call me anyway.”
Celebrities: They’re just like us!
“I brought the phone over to ALEXA and asked to play ‘Songs by Barbra Streisand’,” Fauci added. “When the song came on loud and clear, she started laughing and absolutely loved it!”
Embarrassing as this all may be, a lot of high-level government officials insist on keeping diaries in which they chronicle their high-level government activities. This happens even, or especially, when these activities involve sensitive matters. And if these diaries become public (which seems to occur with some frequency), they can yield irresistible morsels for history’s sake. Or, at the very least, gossip’s sake.
This spring, a few weeks before the fishing season began in earnest, I went over to a buddy’s house with a six-pack and a bucket full of beaten-up lures. We sat at his kitchen table, swapping out rusty hooks as we talked about new spots we wanted to try, gear we’d bought over the winter, and the all-important question: When would the first striped bass arrive near us on their annual northward migration?
A few hours in, my friend mentioned something his wife had said before I came over: “You spend so much time with Tyler, but whenever I ask you about his personal life, you don’t know anything about it!” He’d replied, “There’s a lot of fishing to talk about!” We both laughed as he recounted the story. Then we went back to replacing hooks and gabbing about striped bass. There was, in fact, a lot of fishing to talk about.
These sorts of friendships between men—ones that lack personal disclosure and frequent displays of emotion—have gotten a bad rap in recent years. Some critics have made the case that they are a product of toxic masculinity and implicit homophobia. Others claim that such relationships can harm men’s health. Another popular argument alleges that because men do not take responsibility for their own emotional needs, they end up placing additional burdens on the women in their lives, a phenomenon that has been termed “mankeeping.” By contrast, men who break from these trends have been commended for “resisting masculinity,” being “courageous,” and curing themselves of the “disease” of emotional reserve.
The concern about male friendships is understandable. American men are less likely than women to enroll in and graduate from college. They are more likely to say that they have no close friends. They die from deaths of despair—suicide, overdoses, alcoholism—at higher rates than women. But an accurate diagnosis (men don’t have enough friendships) need not be packaged with a more contestable one (men have the wrong types of friendships).
To use myself as an example: I have male friends I speak with on the phone multiple times a week, male friends I meet regularly for drinks, male friends I play fantasy football with, and male friends I text about current events. I see my fishing partners almost every day during the season, amounting to hundreds of hours together every year. I feel socially fulfilled. I am among the fortunate 27 percent of men who have six or more close friends. Nearly all of my male friendships, however, might be considered unhealthy according to the standards of what is sometimes called the “new masculinity.”
It is possible that I am repressed, bottled up, too shriveled to realize that I would be better off if I spent more time talking about feelings. But it’s also possible that my emotionally reticent male friendships are fine, actually—and that the people telling men to open up if they want to avoid dysfunctional relationships are pathologizing perfectly normal forms of sociality. The issue, as I see it, is not so much that men need to embrace a different style of friendship, but that men need more opportunities to have the kinds of friendships that they generally gravitate toward in the first place.
An undercurrent in much of the criticism of male friendship is that men should relate to one another in the same ways that women tend to. Sometimes this judgment is merely implied, but sometimes it’s explicit. A recent New Yorker review, for example, lauded the television series DTF St. Louis for presenting a world in which “straight men could access, without shame, the kind of emotional and physical closeness that is generally the province of close female friendships.”
This impulse, says Geoffrey Greif, a professor emeritus at the University of Maryland’s School of Social Work who has studied male friendships, is misguided. “Men’s friendships don’t need to look like women’s friendships,” he told me. Indeed, researchers in psychiatry and other fields have long observed meaningful—but not necessarily troubling—differences in male and female friendships and emotional lives. Greif has observed that many men and women construct their friendships in distinct ways, for example. Whereas female friendships are frequently “face-to-face,” prioritizing intimate communication, male friendships are more likely to be “shoulder-to-shoulder,” centered on shared labor or hobbies.
Thomas Yarrow, an anthropology professor at Durham University, in England, offers a case study in these tendencies. After going through a divorce five years ago, Yarrow found that the advice he received—go to therapy, share your feelings with friends, talk it out—didn’t suit him. He ended up joining a group of male hobbyists who spent their weekends restoring heritage railways in the British countryside—an experience he wrote about in an ethnographic paper published this year in the journal American Anthropologist. The work was physical and solution-oriented but did not lend itself to revealing conversations with his fellow volunteers. “Let’s face it,” one man told the group. “We’re just not that into emotions.”
Yarrow found that the men nevertheless had ways of supporting one another—and him. He told me that at the railway, he didn’t talk about his divorce. Instead, “I did something that made me feel good about myself. And someone would grunt and make me a cup of tea.” He suspected that the other men could tell that “something wasn’t quite right,” but they didn’t say much to him about it. Yarrow appreciated this restraint: “At least in that period of my life,” he told me, “that seemed to be what I needed.”
Activity-centered friendships can easily slide into a form of escapism, of course. Not all problems can be solved. Some can only be talked about, endured, mourned, and accepted. Friends can give much-needed emotional support during life’s most difficult moments. Still, like Yarrow, I value my activity-oriented friendships because they allow me to immerse myself, however briefly, in a world where the central challenges I face are discrete and readily addressable. The problems I think about at work—the crisis of American education, political dysfunction, the intrusion of technology into once-sacred spheres of everyday life—do not admit quick fixes. At home, the ones I confront are likewise stimulating and meaningful, but also open-ended. Raising children is an 18-year proposition (at least), and what “success” looks like is nebulous.
My hobbies and the friendships they sustain offer more manageable problems: Where are the striped bass tonight, and what do they want to eat? They also provide a refuge from the therapeutic tendencies of American culture, with its focus on introspection and “working on yourself.” At their best, such friendships can encourage a kind of public-spiritedness, a way of investing in a shared outer world, instead of seeing one’s own private psychodramas as the center of social gravity.
The challenge is that these types of friendships can require “social scaffolding,” as Richard Reeves, the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, noted in a 2023 essay. If male friendship thrives on shared interests, then opportunities to engage in those activities need to exist. Various trends in American life over the past generation, however, have limited those opportunities. Churches, clubs, civic institutions, and public spaces are in decline. Jobs that take the form of staring, alone, at computers rather than engaging collectively in physical labor are on the rise. Hobbies are getting more and more expensive, and screens are colonizing the time once taken up by IRL activities.
I’m very aware that my friendships are strong in part because I live in a place with relatively good social infrastructure, and I make enough money to maintain the leisure activities my friendships are organized around. This is the real crisis of American male friendship—not that it’s too emotionally stunted, but that too many men are deprived of access to the conditions that make it flourish. That flourishing can take many forms. In my case, it’s sitting at a kitchen table, dropping spent hooks into an old plastic bucket, and discussing not feelings but fish.
Firefighters burn off vegetation while trying to stop a wildfire called the Bench Fire from spreading in Warm Springs, Oregon, on July 25, 2026.
Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty
A Tezutsu-shu, a traditional fireworks performer, is showered with sparks from tezutsu hanabi, hand-crafted bamboo tubes packed with gunpowder that erupt in a towering column of spark and flame, during the Tatebayashi Arm-Held Fireworks Festival in Tatebayashi, Gunma prefecture, Japan, on July 25, 2026.
Lee Jin-man / AP
A participant plays in a mud pool during the Boryeong mud festival near a beach in Boryeong, South Korea, on July 25, 2026.
Pavel Bednyakov / AP
People run through Red Square under pouring rain in Moscow, Russia, on July 28, 2026, backdropped by Saint Basil’s Cathedral.
Mateusz Kaczmarek / Reuters
Europe’s largest statue of the Virgin Mary, measuring 182 feet, pictured before its official opening to the public, in the village of Konotopie, near Torun, Poland, on July 29, 2026. The monument, funded by billionaire couple Grazyna and Roman Karkosik, is expected to become a major religious landmark and tourist attraction.
VCG / Getty
People ride a roller coaster past a giant Lego minifig at the Legoland Shanghai Hotel in Shanghai, China, on July 24, 2026.
Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty
“Valor” (left) and “Sacrifice,” the two statues that make up the “The Arts of War” equestrian statues along Arlington Memorial Bridge, are visible after the scaffolding surrounding them was partially removed, in Washington, D.C., on July 29, 2026. The U.S. Interior Department said it was regilding four gold-plated equestrian statues near the Lincoln Memorial and that the project is slated to cost more than $5 million.
Toby Melville / Reuters
Young deer stags are silhouetted against the darkening sky, beneath the moon as it approached its full Buck Moon phase on July 29, as it rises above Richmond Park in London, England, on July 27, 2026.
Mesut Karaduman / Anadolu / Getty
A ballerina performs as the full moon rises in the evening sky in Tekirdağ, Turkey, on July 29, 2026.
Sunday Alamba / AP
People dressed in costumes perform during the Mask Festival in Porto-Novo, Benin, on July 26, 2026.
Tyrone Siu / Reuters
Italy’s Guillaume Bianchi (right) faces Hong Kong’s Choi Chun Yin Ryan in the Senior Team Men’s Foil at the World Fencing Championships in Hong Kong, China, on July 28, 2026.
Phil Noble / Reuters
Nigeria’s Ruth Asuquo Nyong attempts a clean-and-jerk lift in the Women’s 48kg Final during the Commonwealth Games 2026 in Glasgow, Scotland, on July 26, 2026.
Angela Ponce / Reuters
Peru President Keiko Fujimori steps out of the congress after being sworn in as the country’s new president, in Lima, Peru, on July 28, 2026.
Temilade Adelaja / Reuters
A tall puppet walks the parade route during Manchester Day 2026, celebrating Manchester’s cultural links with Barcelona, with performers from Spain and the U.K., in Manchester, England, on July 26, 2026.
Borja Suarez / Reuters
Volunteers pose nude for the art photographer Spencer Tunick in Santa Ana Square, in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, on July 26, 2026.
Justin Tallis / AFP / Getty
Hundreds of people dressed in red take part in “The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever 2026” dance event at Folkestone Harbour Arm in Folkestone, England, on July 26, 2026. Originating in Berlin, the annual event held at many locations around the world gathers participants to re-create the music video for the musician Kate Bush’s 1978 song “Wuthering Heights.”
CFoto / Future Publishing / Getty
Geese swim in a lake at an ecological goose-breeding base in Menmen Township, Suqian City, Jiangsu province, China, on July 29, 2026.
Pierre Albouy / Reuters
Alphorn blowers perform an ensemble piece on the last day of the International Alphorn Festival on the Alpine pasture of Tracouet in Nendaz, in southern Switzerland, on July 26, 2026.
Anne-Christine Poujoulat / AFP / Getty
The peloton ascends Col du Noyer during the Stage 19 of the Tour de France cycling race, in the French Alps, on July 24, 2026.
Chaideer Mahyuddin / AFP / Getty
Paddy fields, viewed at sunrise in Samahani, Aceh province, Indonesia, on July 24, 2026
Pablo Blázquez Domínguez / Getty
A helicopter collects water from a swimming pool to combat wildfires on July 28, 2026, in Casillas, in Ávila province, Spain.
Kostiantyn Liberov / Libkos / Getty
Local residents and visitors relax on a beach on the outskirts of Odesa, Ukraine, as smoke from a fire rises in the background following a Russian missile strike on July 29, 2026.
Giuseppe Distefano / Etna Walk / AFP / Getty
A plume of ash rises from Mount Etna during an eruption on July 30, 2026.
Scott Olson / Getty
An aerial view shows fallen trees from the previous day’s tornado in Saint Mary Cemetery in Appleton, Wisconsin, on July 28, 2026. The tornado passed through several communities in the area, causing widespread power outages, and left behind a long path of destruction.
Pier Marco Tacca / Getty
The grape harvest kicked off early in the Pavia area at the Defilippi farm in Oliva Gessi, Italy, on July 28, 2026. The recent heat wave across Europe has led to a record early start for this year’s harvest.
Arif Ali / AFP / Getty
People walk across a washed-out railroad track in a flooded area after the Ravi River overflowed following heavy monsoon rains in Sheikhupura, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, on July 29, 2026.
Yuichi Yamazaki / AFP / Getty
A collapsed house rests partly on a small truck in Yatsushiro, Kumamoto prefecture, Japan, on July 29, 2026, after an earthquake struck southwestern Japan the previous day.
Michal Čížek / AFP / Getty
A polar bear cools down on a pile of ice cubes in its enclosure at the Prague Zoo on July 30, 2026, as temperatures were expected to reach at least 96.8 degrees Fahrenheit.
Login
