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If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.
But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)
Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.
Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.
Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”
The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment.
The pandemic also led to changes in how universities operate. Universities now routinely offer remote courses, and professors are under pressure to record and post videos of their lectures. Before the pandemic, 15 percent of undergraduates were completely remote. As of 2024, according to federal data, that number was 24 percent. “Along the way, you’ve lost social interactions that you may have had with people,” OSU’s Patel said. “You walk down the hall and you pass by somebody, you hold the door open for someone, you go to the dining hall to eat, you walk over to class and you see people along the way—these kinds of social interactions, that just fell off.” The rising senior at MIT said that because lectures are posted online and grades are dependent mostly on exams, fewer than a quarter of his classmates are likely to attend a lecture on any given day. “I have a class where, on paper, I should have five of my friends in that class,” he told me. “But then I show up, and I just go the whole week without seeing my friends, really, which is tough.”
Of course, college, where many students are away from their family and friends for the first time, has always made some people feel lonely. And some of the apparent rise in loneliness could reflect a change in how students label their feelings, as opposed to a change in actual circumstances. “I don’t think there’s any question that loneliness has increased among young people,” Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me. But he also thinks that the shift is partly a result of students viewing normal desires for more friends as unusual or even pathological. Previous generations might have felt similarly disconnected but chosen not to identify themselves as lonely. “This is the most psychologically literate and articulate generation in history,” he said. “People are much more proficient at and much more inclined to label their emotional states.”
This tendency creates a challenge for college leaders who hope to address high rates of loneliness. At USC, for example, Moore developed a course to teach students how to make friends, which MIT now uses. Drawing attention to the problem risks inflating the number of students who report feeling lonely. It’s normal, even important, for students to struggle as they adjust to a new environment, UCLA’s Eisenberg told me. That helps them grow.
Some administrators have explored more creative solutions. Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, told me that he had new footpaths built across lawns on campus to increase the odds of students physically encountering one another. He has invested in landscaping to beautify the grounds and encourage students to hang out outside. And he has insisted that new buildings be designed with more common areas to all but force students to interact. “The more I can get students to run into each other, the better,” he said.
Whether through similar interventions or because the pandemic has further receded from view, there are some signs that student loneliness is beginning to decline. The Healthy Minds Study, which Eisenberg helps administer, has documented a slight drop over the past few years, to pre-COVID levels. The National College Health Assessment has tracked a similar trend, the American College Health Association’s chief research officer, Mary Hoban, told me. But even if numbers are returning to their pre-pandemic baseline, that’s about half of all students reporting being lonely. “It’s still wildly high,” she said. “We’ve got a problem and need to address it.” All that partying college students used to do? It might have served a purpose after all.
When Julia Curlee was a kid growing up in Hawaii, she dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. In 2007, when she took her oath standing on the marble CIA seal, she achieved that goal. But she had another childhood dream too: She’d always had “an unshakable belief that I should have been born a woman.”
In 2013, Julia Curlee became the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep serving the agency. She felt more effective at her job living as the person she always believed she was—and years ago wrote about her experience under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. Her performance proved her effectiveness: She became the daily intelligence briefer for Vice President Pence during the first Trump administration and a director on the National Security Council in both the Biden administration and the second Trump term.
Less than 70 days after the president returned to office in 2025, Julia was fired from the White House without explanation. She returned to the CIA and, over time, began to feel a lack of support at the agency in an administration that was openly hostile to transgender people. Julia left her dream job with the federal government earlier this year. This week, she is telling her full story for the first time—in an Atlantic essay she wrote and in a conversation with Radio Atlantic.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Julia Curlee: After everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.
Adam Harris: As a high-level CIA officer, Julia Curlee had the ear of one of the most powerful politicians in America: the vice president of the United States. He relied on her to let him know what was going on in the world each day. She held prominent intelligence positions during the last three administrations: Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2. She is also a transgender woman.
For a long time, Julia had two dreams: to be a CIA officer and to be her authentic self. She realized the first in 2007, when she took the oath on the agency seal; the second in 2013, when she transitioned.
She made a promise when she did: never to hide who she was. Yet in 2017, she wrote two stories for The Atlantic under a pseudonym. She wrote about her experience; she wrote about what it meant for the intelligence community to accept people like her. The agency used it to help recruit on college campuses. Julia was using the discretion that came naturally for a CIA officer.
Now, after being pushed out of the White House and leaving an agency where she no longer felt supported, Julia is telling the rest of the story as herself.
I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and today: a conversation with Julia Curlee.
Let’s get to questions.
Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Curlee: Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Harris: Absolutely. So Julia, you served the United States for more than 20 years in intelligence positions. What was it that drew you to public service?
Curlee: Well, I grew up a barefoot kid in Hawaii, and I always wanted to see what was over the horizon and see the world and all that. And then, at some young, impressionable age, I was ambushed by The Hunt for Red October and the analyst as hero, getting to save the day. And, I don’t know, it sort of came out of nowhere and it sort of bubbled up in my life. And my parents definitely instilled in me a desire to serve our country, and intelligence just caught something in me and I wanted to be a part of it.
Harris: When you joined, was it everything you imagined?
Curlee: Oh, many more late nights and long PowerPoint-presentation sessions.
Harris: So not quite like the movie?
Curlee: Not so much, yeah. I didn’t call in many drone strikes on my way to the PowerPoint presentation that you would sometimes see in the movies. Did not repel off a helicopter into a submarine too many times.
But it was an amazing and wonderful career. I got to travel to 35 countries. I briefed several presidents. It was just all I wanted to do, and I desperately wish I was doing that now. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do and it was the only plan I ever had.
Harris: And today you’re writing in the pages of The Atlantic, telling your story for the first time under your own name. Why now?
Curlee: Well the institutions that I served through my adult life are under assault. The ability of officers to speak truth to power, to inform policy making so that they make the best decisions on behalf of the United States—that is being eviscerated. And the officers who deliver that, who spend their lives learning about foreign countries, learning how to systematically understand multiple sources of intelligence, convey uncertainty—all of that is being destroyed by an administration that wants to both cherry-pick the intelligence to only receive what they want to hear, and to punish the officers who have the courage to speak that truth to them, to do their jobs and to live up to the values that we inculcate in all of our officers. And so the only way to do that was to leave and to begin to tell my story.
I also felt like I needed to tell the other part of my story, which has nothing to do with my substantive experience in the world, and that’s being a trans person. And I know that the sustained assault on people like me is a part of a broader campaign to try to define who gets to be in public spaces, who gets to have positions of honor.
Harris: I want to talk about that service and about your transition while you were in the service. You transitioned in 2013, and did you have concerns when you were transitioning? What was that first day going into the office like?
Curlee: Well, it was the most terrifying day of my life. And that was in the wake of several war-zone assignments and being rocketed, and I didn’t know whether it would be the last day.
You know, as I already said, I’d always dreamed since I was a kid of being an intelligence officer. The other dream that I’d always had that was unexplainable was just an unshakable belief that I should have been more born a woman.
I didn’t know where it came from. It just was always lurking in the background. And over time in my life, it became this just unshakable darkness that clouded out everything else. And finally, I came to the conclusion I had to transition. The only problem, of course, is that there were no trans people. The last time someone at CIA had tried to transition had been decades before, and it had been terrible. The person had been driven out of the organization, in a hostile workplace, and management had not been supportive. And so I contacted the LGBT group to say, Hey, I’m here. I’m here to meet other people and get some help. And they said, Congratulations, but you’re the only one.
And that is what led me in 2017 to write in pseudonym in The Atlantic under the name Jenny Hall. And it was an opportunity to get the word out that people like me are a part of our national security, that we’re patriots, that we want to serve, that we don’t want any special rights. We just want what everyone else has.
And so I was very happy to get to do that. And in the years following that, CIA actually used those articles on college campuses to recruit people. And I was very proud of that, but I was also very, very happy to disappear back into my day job, in the work.
And so, you know, in short, my transition in those years was a big “nothing significant to report,” in the lexicon of my profession, and that was the best possible outcome.
Harris: So when you talk about the work, this is 2017; the first Trump administration has just begun. What were your concerns? Did you have concerns ahead of that first Trump administration about their policies, or the platform, regarding transgender people?
Curlee: You know, going into that term, it really hadn’t been in the political realm very much. I mean, it honestly wasn’t a big issue. It only really became, in my consciousness anyway, a big political issue when the president, the first time, banned trans people in the military, which was a shock, because for a lot of us it was a rock-solid belief that progress is linear, that things you gained might slow down, but, you know, the long arc, and that things would get better. And this was a case of it regressing in a significant way.
And I knew several trans intelligence officers who were in uniform who were doing the same job that I was doing at CIA, and they were being told that by being honest, by which the previous administration had told them they could be, that they would be thrown out and that their careers would be destroyed just for being themselves. And so I also wrote about that to try to make the case in a good-faith way to our leaders that this was the wrong decision and that it would hurt our national security.
Harris: So you gave the president’s daily brief during that first Trump administration. Can you tell us what it means to do that job and what all it entails?
Curlee: Yeah, so as a baby analyst, you imagine yourself being that briefer in the room with the commander in chief or briefing on Air Force One. It was the thing that most of us aspired to at the end of a long career. And initially I was assigned to the deputy national security adviser in the White House. And boy, it was like cramming for a final exam every morning from midnight to 5 a.m. or so. And then at some point there, you’re whisked downtown and you come to the White House when it’s pitch black and you check in with the Situation Room, and you’ve got these pieces that you’ve been studying. And so I would get to the White House and I would find my—I’d be the first person that would see my policy customer when they came in the door in the West Wing, the deputy national security adviser, at first, and I would be in there for 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes, and it would be 20 questions, and it would be firing things at me and asking me to follow up with taskings. And it was just exhilarating for a person that was a news junkie who wants to be plugged into the information universe, just wanting to be available to help these policy makers make good decisions. And I did that for two years in total for the Trump administration for the first term.
Harris: And so, while you’re in the Trump administration, you begin giving the president’s daily briefing, and you begin giving that briefing to Vice President Mike Pence. What was the experience of first meeting him like?
Curlee: Yeah, so I’d been in the PDB for a few months, and it was wonderful. And as much as I loved roaming the West Wing of the White House before dawn and no one caring apparently that a trans woman was serving the highest levels of the Trump administration, my boss walked into my office one day and said, you know, Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president? And I looked up at her and I said, This vice president?
And she said, Yeah, I think you’d be the right pick for this. And I took her word for it. And so, the first time I was standing in the driveway at the Naval Observatory when there he was, unmistakably, with his silver-white hair, and he turns to his outgoing briefer and said, You’re gonna abandon me with her? And it was his dad-joke humor, and there I was, and it was just me and Mike Pence.
And I discovered that he was an excellent intelligence customer. He took the book, he took the briefing almost every day, religiously. He took rapid notes and would be firing questions at me. And he really impressed me with how seriously he was taking the job of being this consumer of intelligence, this massive, multibillion-dollar apparatus we’ve built out to help our leaders make better decisions. And he was using it as I would have hoped he would. And in a broader administration where that was not always the case, I really felt like I could really do good, and support him as he participated in these policy conversations. And it was a real pleasure. It was truly the thing that I had been training and and wanting to do since I’d been a kid. It was like the experience that I dreamed of.
Harris: Yeah, so he was really relying on you for your expertise?
Curlee: Yeah, I mean, I would be one of the first people he would see in the morning. It has been described to me that a PDB briefer is—part of your job is, like, helping to filter the world so that a policy maker whose most precious commodity is time can know what are the really big issues to focus on. And I would play that part in his day, in focusing him on the key events happening in one part of the world versus another, teeing up information so that I would know what policy-making meetings he was going into or heading on a foreign trip, and I would be trying to anticipate his needs, and then when he asked a question, ensure that it was rapidly answered as quickly as possible. And so getting to travel with him around the world, getting to be a part of the team that follows the vice president, was truly an amazing privilege.
And for all of the fears and my own trepidations—I wasn’t ignorant of his public persona. It truly was a great experience, and I got to see our government operating as it should.
Harris: There’s probably some dissonance there, right, between that public persona and the private persona? How do you square the difference between the public policy and and the person who you engaged with on a regular basis?
Curlee: I don’t know, and I don’t want to suggest that I know his personal views. What I know is what I experienced. I experienced being treated with great respect, being treated as a serious professional, being trusted. When my tour was over, he asked me to extend. So that was a conversation to have with my wife.
But I had been raised in a CIA that had trained into us that we serve regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, that we are nonpartisan civil servants who will support them with the best information possible. And he was the vice president and needed the best information possible. And so what I would do is I would put that to the side.
It was the fulfillment of what I had always wanted to do, and there were moments like when my tour was finally coming to an end and he invited my family to the White House, and he took my mother’s hand—and this is my mother who had had a really hard time with my transition years before—and Mike Pence took my mother’s hand and says, You must be very proud of your daughter.
And I’m sitting there watching this and I’m thinking, We’ve arrived. There’s no more battles left to be won. I mean, it’s not, that wasn’t true, but it just felt like the two dreams that I’d had since I was a kid, which I had always felt were just completely incompatible.
Harris: You write about the moment that the vice president certified the election and how there was a certain sort of kinship between the two of you around that service, right? That you mentioned the, sort of, bargain, right? The exact quote was, “That was the bargain: service before politics, country before self.”
Can you tell me about that moment? What that moment signified for you?
Curlee: So, this was a few days after January 6 and I had been done briefing him for several months at that point. And he brought us all together, and we were in his West Wing office just down the hall from the Oval, and we went around talking about what serving in this role had meant to us. And I told him that moment, when he had prioritized the country, when he had certified the victory of his opponent in the election, that I was never more proud to have served as his briefer.
And he, you know, he took my hand; we shook hands, and he said that meant a lot to him.
And that is what the bargain meant to me, was the fact that despite our almost certain profound differences of views on many subjects, we could put that aside and treat each other with dignity and do what was right, regardless of our politics and the political cost. And it was a very special moment for me and everybody who was there.
Harris: So, after four years of the Biden administration, the Trump administration comes back for a second time, and people begin to decide whether they should stay or go. So what advice were you getting about what you should do?
Curlee: It was fairly uniform that we should all leave. So during the campaign I had been serving at the White House; I served for about 20 months in the Biden administration as a director for intelligence programs in the NSC. And all throughout that period, it was wall-to-wall TV. I remember standing in the sit room, looking up at one of the many screens and watching these scary images of people like me and hundreds of millions of dollars being poured to create this caricature that somehow trans people were a threat to America and tar the Democratic candidate with association with these scary people. And I’m watching this and in horror that I’m witnessing on the TV the same kind of dehumanization that I’d written PDBs about in my career.
And so, but, despite all of that, despite the warnings from our leadership that they were very afraid for us, that we would be targeted, that it would destroy our careers, that the online mob would be summoned against us—despite all of that, I was the trans woman that briefed Mike Pence. I believed fiercely in the idea of nonpartisan civil service to whoever is the president. And I was not going to walk away from this task that I had been given to help with the peaceful transfer of power of an administration.
And so, the only person in the whole White House, I have to say, who asked us to stay was the president. And I believed it, that was the right decision. And I still believe it still. But almost everyone that decided to do that has paid a price in some form or another.
And so when the politicals departed, about a week out from the turn of administration, I was asked to serve as the acting senior director for intelligence programs. And so I was there when the new team arrived on Inauguration Day. I was there in the West Wing as people were still finding their offices, as people were moving in the furniture and moving in the new furniture, when the vice president arrived and saw his office for the first time. I was there to help the new administration get off the ground. And I did. And for day after day, we did that until the third day, when the administration, while I was briefing the deputy national security adviser, summoned 160 NSE detailees from departments and agencies to a group call and told them they had 15 minutes to get off the compound.
I walked out of my briefing with a handful of taskings that I knew I needed to get to the intelligence community as quickly as possible. And my assistant intercepts me on West Exec, the road between the White House and the EEOB, where my office was, and says, Everyone’s fired except for you. And I was in shock at the recklessness and the callousness of it. And so over the next several days, it was a mess.
And so for the next 69 days, I and the few people from my team that I could bring back served until one day on a Saturday, I’m down in Roanoke, Virginia, with my family, and I get a phone call that says that my tour is over. The chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason why. You’re gone. You’ll be sent back to CIA. But if you don’t mind, we’d still like you to come in on Monday.
Harris: So you were removed from your position and asked to come back in.
Curlee: Yeah, in the same phone call, you know, fired on Saturday but needed on Monday. But I was warned in that call to be discreet. And I still didn’t understand what was happening until I got off the phone and my iPhone was was bombarded with friend after friend after friend forwarding me a tweet that said, that announced to the world, that there was a trans Biden holdover who hates President Trump in the intelligence directorate, and please give me this person’s name so that I can out them to the world.
And I was terrified of what that would mean for me and my family. But Monday came and I came to work anyway. And I served for another three days to help finish off an important budget item that I had been working on, to turn over a portfolio that I had managed at that point for almost two years, and it was that third night, my last day there, that a list of enemies within the administration was given to the president. And it was yet another purge of people with decades of experience, including my boss at the time.
And, you know, as I was leaving the White House for that last time, with my little box of mementos from two years of serving at the White House, you know, this dream come true, it really hit me what “Be discreet” meant in that point, after everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.
And that has stuck with me ever since, and why I have to tell my story, because they’ve taken from me my calling. I can no longer serve. I couldn’t use the bathroom. When I was at the White House, I had to cross the street to coffee shops across Pennsylvania Avenue in order to just get through the day. And the same restrictions followed me back to CIA. And the constant fear of being fired for being who I am just—I couldn’t continue.
But the one thing I can’t allow for me is for the fact that what has happened has already happened. It can’t be undone. And so telling my story is a part of putting that on the record, that someone like me can serve in the White House, can brief a president, can serve honorably, and loves their country.
And so I had to tell this story.
Harris: You mentioned the list of enemies landing on Trump’s desk, and the tweet hunting for the transgender intelligence person in the White House. That tweet and the list came from Laura Loomer, who is a far-right provocateur.
If she never posted that tweet, if that list had never gone out, do you think that you might still be in the White House?
Curlee: I think I probably would have reached my limit at some point in terms of my family, and it would have been time for someone else to come. But I fully intended to keep serving, and at the time it was funny. In that same conversation that I was in with the deputy national security adviser, briefing him on some very sensitive, important programs, he asked me when my tour was over, and I said, Well, sir, it’s been—it’ll be two years and just in a couple months, and, you know, I gotta get home and I’ve got a family. And he said, Hmm, June. I don’t think that’s gonna work for us. And so, I was already starting to think how I was gonna have this conversation again. But I wanted to keep serving, and keep serving at CIA. That was my only plan, and I’m just sad that it became impossible.
Harris: I want to home in on your expertise. You’ve said that what Americans should be concerned about is this wider assault on expertise in this administration, and especially in the intelligence community. So are we already seeing the consequences of that assault on expertise and elimination of expertise?
Curlee: I’m regretting to say we are, and it’s all around us in the evidence of disastrous policies. But to back up a second, you know, the same assault on trans officers, on other minorities, was accompanied by a parallel attack on the ability of our officers to speak truth to power.
So, one of the things that happened early in the new administration was I was asked to send a tasking to the intelligence community on the status of this group Tren de Aragua, which was a Venezuelan street gang. And the tasking was whether the Maduro government had ordered this group to invade the United States, which is the predicate for invoking the Alien Enemies Act almost verbatim, and I tasked it out to the National Intelligence Council, where the chairman of the NIC, which is the most senior analytic body in the intelligence community, dutifully wrote an excellent assessment that reflected the consensus position of the intelligence community. And he and his deputy, when they delivered the product, which did not accord with what the administration wanted to hear, were told that they should rethink their assessment. And when they refused, they were ordered out of the building. And publicly firing one of the most esteemed officers in the intelligence community and their deputy for living up to the values that we inculcate in every young officer was a devastating blow to the whole organization.
And it has had ripple effects all through. And it is just further attacks on officers for assessments that they wrote a decade ago, because they don’t conform with what the president wants to hear, has taught this generation now of officers that your clearance can be revoked with a phone call if you say the wrong thing. And so a muzzle has been put on an organization that is vital to our national interest.
And when you wed that with the destruction of the National Security Council as a policy-coordinating body, which I got to witness firsthand through the purges that unfolded through the first few months of the administration, you’ve lost the very venue in which those concerns and experts and expertise can be delivered to help the president make good decisions. And so it’s not surprising when disastrous outcomes ensue.
So, just for the example, when the country was marching to war in Iran, America launched a full suite of airstrikes showing that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the world. And at the same time, the State Department somehow hadn’t planned for the evacuation of half a million Americans and diplomats and officers and their dependents in a war we started.
In any competent administration, regardless of the wisdom of the effort, there would have been a plan. And there would have been a plan to deal with the fact that the Iranians were going to close the Strait of Hormuz. There would have been briefings that would have made clear to the president that decapitating the leadership and killing the supreme leader would not immediately lead to the Iranians surrendering. All of these things are what the intelligence community and the National Security Council should exist to do, to head off these things, to ensure that things that are foreseeable and have been foreseen in multiple public war games for decades about the Iranians would have been delivered and provided context for the administration to make a sound decision or at least plan. And none of it happened.
And as a result, we’re in this debacle where there’s no clear road out, where all the choices are terrible. And we’re looking at ending the conflict in a worse position than when we begun. And there’s, I think there’s a word for that, and it’s called losing a war. And this is a direct result of a climate of fear that the administration has instilled on a workforce that it somehow sees as the enemy within rather than the civil servants who have given their professional lives to helping the country. And we’re all paying for it.
Harris: You wrote that your grandfather told you “Work hard; don’t complain; and the country will take care of you.” Do you still think the country is taking care of you?
Curlee: No, no. It’s hard to feel the sense of betrayal, a bit. And it’s not just me; it’s all of the people who devoted themselves to this ideal of nonpartisan public service, who have been callously thrown away. I’ve got many friends who are transgender in the military, who have faced ruinous financial and life circumstances and had something so important to their identities taken away from them for no reason at all, other than just animus for who some people are.
And that’s why I titled the piece “The Wrong Kind of American,” because it really is that. It is a decision to treat some Americans as not worthy of a full life, of positions of honor, and to treat them as if they’re some sort of threat to society. And it feels as if we’ve just turned our back on the most fundamental ideal that we try to teach everyone, which is that we can rise as far as our talents take us in this country. And that’s a terrible thing.
You know, nine years ago I closed my piece in The Atlantic saying trans kids should know that CIA is always recruiting, because I wanted them to know that there was this amazing life that they could have, that there were some people like them who got to do that, and now I could not in good conscience advise any LGBT American to apply to work at CIA. And that is awful. That is un-American, and I regret saying it, but it’s just true. And I hope that in the coming years that will change and we’ll do what’s right, and we’ll look back at this period in our history with shame and we’ll learn from it.
Harris: Julia, thank you so much for sharing your story and for joining me on the show today.
Curlee: Thank you. It was a privilege.
Harris: That’s all for today’s show.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
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Committed anxious types like me rarely find a poem opening as enticing as this one from the late Mary Oliver:
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Why yes, I have worried about that: Will the natural order of things suddenly turn against itself? And what can I, a small, unremarkable being, do to fix it? The poem’s troubles go on to cover aging, illness, regret. And then, with a sigh, it resolves itself. “Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And I gave it up. And took my old body / and went out into the morning, / and sang.”
Much of Oliver’s now-famed poetry, including “I Worried,” sidles up right next to the reader, assumes a strong kinship, and then doles out a dollop of wisdom that might be interpreted as advice. Oliver rarely commands, but she frequently—especially in her most-shared work—offers statements or questions that read as counsel for the weary. Among many other examples, she slips “instructions for living a life” inside her poem “Sometimes”: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” “You do not have to be good,” begins the oft-quoted “Wild Geese.” And there is her more graceful take on YOLO, from “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Prompts such as these turned Oliver from a celebrated scribbler in the 1990s to a lyrical sage in the aughts to today’s still-reigning poet laureate of Pinterest. Her juiciest bits of guidance bounce around on social media like Mel Robbins quotes and are sold on mugs and T-shirts. There’s the burgundy corduroy cap that reads Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. and the bumper sticker (from the official Mary Oliver Shop) emblazoned with Joy is not made to be a crumb.
An upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, knows that popularity has made the artist’s reputation fraught, as popularity often does. It gently considers the question of whether someone so beloved by poetry neophytes can also earn the adulation of the critic class. As the writer Ruth Franklin points out in the film, Oliver never received a full-length review from The New York Times during her decades-long publishing career, even though that career included a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award. The attention eventually paid to her work seemed to come with an asterisk, as if to designate it as beloved and therefore depthless. In a 2025 essay titled “Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?,” the poet Maggie Millner argued that Oliver’s critics have “a discomfort with her work’s digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people—and a fear about what the popularity of such work might say about them.”
Then again, what critics of Oliver’s work and celebrity might really fear is that the platitudes have become detached from the poems, that all those feel-good lines aren’t appreciated as poetry. The medium has always been delightfully co-opted this way. Even those who rarely touch poetry can probably name a few sayings that initially came from the medium, such as “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” (from Keats) and even “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” (a modification of Coleridge). But when a line of poetry zooms off from the rest of its body, it can’t lift up the whole of the genre with it—and poetry, with its quiet place in the literary firmament, would probably like all the boosterism it can get.
The people who have turned Oliver into their patron saint of undecorated wisdom don’t seem to care whether the literary establishment is on board. Some of the reasons for their reverent following? The advice Oliver offers was hard-earned—throughout a difficult childhood and a long struggle to have her poetry widely read—and didn’t come off as self-help opportunism. Her work, much of which is concerned with the natural world she observed on daily walks in Cape Cod, was personal but never self-obsessed. It left a small but meaningful space for the reader to step into.
Saved by the Beauty of the World provides the broad strokes of Oliver’s life. Raised in Ohio in the 1930s and ’40s, she grew up in a “very dark and broken house” where she suffered at the hands of her father; the woods and fields offered escape. She briefly attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, then worked at the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s upstate New York home, tried out Greenwich Village, and landed in her 20s in Provincetown, on Cape Cod’s tip, where she stayed almost until the last years of her long life (most of them spent with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook). Oliver’s career didn’t explode until her Pulitzer win, in 1984, when she was 49. Before that, she worked at an military-surplus store and did typing for figures such as Norman Mailer; after, she was sought by rafts of admirers, including readers and the students she taught at various institutions, but maintained a private, almost elusive, existence, granting few interviews.
The work Oliver created over five decades isn’t as easily summarized as some of her detractors might say, though it does dwell on a few central themes. There is her earthy imagery—the song of the wren, the “gladness” of the beeches and the oaks and the pines, the glory of an August day. She is a high priestess of the ordinary—not someone who revels in trips to the dentist or afternoons spent giving kids lice treatments, but in finding grace in the fact that life is made of simple moments. The umbrella hanging over all of her writing is her penchant for observing and absorbing—as she puts it so perfectly, “attention is the beginning of devotion”—and her encouragement of her readers to do the same. The poetry is an attempt to ask, over and over, What am I supposed to do? It’s also, sometimes, an answer to that question.
Advice isn’t hard to come by these days: Fit-looking 40-something Instagrammers tell you how to slim down your middle-aged body; columns on manners and ethics or other interpersonal quandaries fill every big-name magazine and newspaper. And yet there is an (often unspoken) assertion that poetry ought not to give advice, that it should exult in the ambiguous. Poetry, perhaps more than any other writing genre, is unfairly assigned a value that is in direct opposition to its usefulness.
In an essay about O, the Oprah Magazine’s poetry issue, the critic David Orr snidely remarked of Oliver’s poetry, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it”; he also declared, “There’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs).” But poetry, like any other writing, is allowed to work toward a goal—so long as it doesn’t lose its structural integrity. Perhaps the problem isn’t that poetry fails to help one overcome challenges, but that its reputation doesn’t give it enough credit for that very thing. (If it did, Ada Limón and Kate Baer might have Z4 Roadsters of their own.)
Even after allowing that poetry can of course offer advice, the question of whether Oliver’s advice is any good is worth debating. I quibble with her notion that one could easily give up worrying: SSRI-usage rates are too high for that to feel possible. And I wonder what she means, exactly, by “good” when she says, “You do not have to be good,” in “Wild Geese”—her next line likens it to walking “on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,” but surely the matter of goodness involves a more complicated definition than just self-flagellation. Other lines seem so undoubtedly true that it’s no wonder they’ve ended up on apparel. She ends her poem “When Death Comes” with, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Do any of us? If poetry is, at least partly, the art of minute observation, Oliver’s work might come off as trite when it expounds so universally.
The claim her friends and admirers make in Saved by the Beauty of the World is that none of this was straightforward for Oliver, either. She wasn’t some sage from on high but a flesh-and-blood woman who struggled through heartache and counted her dollars and was occasionally, as her friend John Waters puts it, a “shit-stirrer.” Oliver professed herself an admirer of Walt Whitman, but the documentary suggests that she may have been more like his contemporary (and poetic opposite) Emily Dickinson—a woman who set herself apart from the world in order to make better sense of it on paper.
Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.” And for that, I’m grateful to have Mary Oliver’s words floating around my Pinterest page. I’d rather live the questioning life of an Oliver acolyte than the certain life of her critics.
NW Orchard, LLC courtesy of the Library of Congress
Western military planners do not seem eager to talk about their nightmare scenario, much less prepare for it. But they tend to agree on how it would begin: a coordinated, near-simultaneous attack on opposite sides of the planet, in which Russia targets a NATO member in Eastern Europe while China makes its move against Taiwan. The U.S. military would need to react on two fronts at once—three if it remains at war in the Middle East.
Until recently, this possibility sat at the more outlandish end of the threat spectrum, somewhere between a loose nuke and an alien invasion. Synchronized attacks would require a conspiracy too big for Beijing and Moscow to hide. Satellites would see their forces getting into position, giving the United States and its allies time to rally their defenses.
About a year ago, General Alexus Grynkewich, the top NATO commander in Europe, issued a rare public warning about the risk of a two-front war against Russia and China, and he called on European allies to help the U.S. prepare. But when I asked a range of military experts and strategists what the West would do in such a situation, the responses rang surprisingly hollow. Most of them expressed bewilderment and a bit of shame about how little has been done in recent years to study this risk in detail.
“Let’s just say this is the scenario we’re currently not ready for,” Florence Gaub, the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College, one of the alliance’s main academies for officers, in Rome, told me. NATO strategists remain “keenly aware” of this gap in their planning, Gaub, who specializes in the forecasting and analysis of future threats, said. But they have not taken steps to fill that gap.
Even as Russia and China have intensified their military cooperation, the West has held only a few low-profile exercises to analyze what would happen if the two launched a joint attack. Public discussion of this possibility has been remarkably muted among Western experts and military brass, who seem to lack the theoretical frameworks to process such a calamity and game out a response.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and a frequent participant in high-profile war games and strategic-planning exercises, told me that he and his colleagues last studied the idea of a two-front war against Russia and China roughly 15 years ago. “It didn’t go well,” he said.
Back then, the exercises showed that the U.S. did not have the weapons stockpiles or the industrial capacity to sustain a lengthy period of fighting on multiple fronts, and it could not rely on its allies to pick up the slack. Since then, Montgomery said, “Every one of those metrics has gone down. None of them has gotten better.” Under pressure from the Trump administration, U.S. allies have increased their defense spending. “But their forces have not yet shown improvement.”
The other sides have. Although Russia has been failing to achieve its objectives in the war in Ukraine, it has succeeded in shifting its enormous industrial base onto a war footing, and formerly civilian factories now aid in the production of missiles and tanks. The Russian experience in Ukraine has also made its forces adept at drone warfare. China, which produces most of the world’s drones, has not fought a war in decades and suffers from corruption in its upper ranks. But it has overtaken the U.S. in the number of warships and long-range missiles in its arsenal. Russia and China have also built stronger ties between their militaries under what their leaders describe as a “no-limits” partnership.
From their vantage point, the window of opportunity to strike the West might never have looked more tantalizing. The U.S. remains bogged down in Iran, having pulled a lot of its ships and aircraft out of Asia and Europe to backfill its forces in the Middle East. An estimated two-thirds of the American arsenal of advanced air-defense missiles has been depleted since February, and Donald Trump’s persistent insults and threats against NATO have turned the rift between the U.S. and its allies into a yawning chasm.
For most of his tenure as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin has aspired to dismantle NATO, and its current moment of weakness offers him a rare chance to achieve that goal. He has already started testing its defenses. NATO members in Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Poland, and the Baltic states, have seen repeated violations of their air space by Russian drones, missiles, and fighter jets. Earlier this month, German authorities found a suspected Russian drone loaded with explosives at an airport in Leipzig, apparently preparing to blow up a Ukrainian cargo plane over NATO territory.
The most recent U.S.-intelligence assessments have reportedly concluded that Russia could try to test NATO’s resolve in the next few years, using a cyberattack or a small-scale incursion against a member of the alliance. Such a gambit would be more likely to succeed in weakening NATO if Russia timed it to coincide with a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Admiral Rob Bauer, a former chair of the alliance’s Military Committee, told me. As of last January, when he retired from NATO leadership, Bauer was not aware of any concerted effort inside the alliance to prepare a strategy for this “worst-case scenario,” as he called it. “What are we going to do? Who’s getting which troops?” Bauer asked. “I think it would be wise to think that through.”
Many military threats have seemed far-fetched until they happened. Before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, Joseph Stalin received repeated warnings from his own generals and spies. But he refused to believe them until the bombing started, hindering the ability of his forces to prepare. The U.S. likewise failed to prepare for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the lead-up to the First World War, Europe split into two rival alliances, and no one predicted the scale of the destruction that their conflict would unleash.
“The indications were clear that they would clash, and we just weren’t ready for it,” David Santoro, the president and CEO of the Pacific Forum, a research institute in Hawaii that focuses on Indo-Pacific security issues, told me. In 2023, Santoro and his team organized a round of theoretical war games, known as tabletop exercises, in which two American allies called for help at the same time: Taiwan came under attack from China while North Korea seized its chance to invade South Korea. “We were struggling to keep up and divide labor,” Santoro recalled. “And we weren’t even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would happen if you threw Russia in there.”
A great variety of tabletop exercises happen all the time. Most involve two teams of military experts sitting around a conference table and responding to one another’s moves, like a multiplayer chess game. The organizers try to keep the rules simple and clearly defined. Such tight parameters do not reflect the chaos of warfare, but they prevent the games from getting too hectic when players from different fields of research talk past one another. This bias toward orderly games helps explain why so little research has been done on what experts call “multi-crisis environments.” Almost by definition, such scenarios would quickly get confusing.
“It’s complicated, to be sure, but I don’t think it is too complicated to study,” Eric Heginbotham, an authority on war-gaming at MIT’s Security Studies Program, told me. “I just don’t believe that anyone has done it.” He cautioned that some secretive department within the Pentagon or elsewhere may have quietly analyzed this grim contingency and drawn up response plans.
The general topic of a two-front war now gets discussed among military experts “more than it used to be,” he said. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., published a lengthy report in June on the best ways for the U.S. to “counter an axis led by China and Russia.” But Heginbotham, who has worked closely with CSIS, said that none of the most prominent research institutes in the U.S. and Europe has organized war games on the subject. “You’d need two relatively big and elaborate games running simultaneously, with some sort of command authority setting priorities in the middle,” he said in an email. “Sounds very interesting.”
In the public statements of senior NATO leaders, the risk of a multifront war has come up over the past year or so, though not very often. In December, a few months after Grynkewich issued his warning to U.S. allies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte mentioned the threat at the end of an interview that he gave to a German newspaper. “China is looking at Taiwan,” Rutte said. “And I am convinced that if China takes military action there, it will pressure its junior partner, Russia, under Putin’s leadership, to keep us busy here in Europe.”
One of the most detailed analyses of this possibility, at least in the public domain, comes from an obscure research institute in Prague called the European Values Center for Security Policy. Its 35-year-old director, Jakub Janda, told me that he began studying the idea of a “dual-theater” war in Europe and Asia after the institute opened an outpost in Taipei, in January 2022. At the time, the risk of a coordinated attack from Russia and China seemed remote or, as Janda put it, “not a major consideration.”
That began to change the following month, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Putin had visited Beijing less than three weeks before he ordered the invasion. He has since made at least four more visits to China, and another one is planned for November. Throughout this period, China has become the main supplier of technology to the Russian weapons industry while propping up the Russian economy through the purchase of oil and gas. Although they have no mutual-defense pact, Russia and China hold regular military drills to help keep their forces in sync.
The first war game to simulate a joint attack from both of them took place at Janda’s institute in the spring of 2024. Finding experts with enough background knowledge to participate proved difficult for him. Most research institutions and think tanks have separate teams that specialize in their own regions, he said. “They work in their silos, with different expertise.”
Over time, the participants grasped the way that wars in Asia and Europe could overlap and reinforce one another. The institute has already held roughly 20 rounds of war games on this topic, gathering experts in a variety of countries, including Japan and South Korea. The results have been particularly alarming, Janda said, for the Europeans. In almost every two-front scenario that he has studied, the U.S. prioritizes the Chinese threat and transfers military resources from Europe to Asia, leaving its NATO allies to defend themselves against Russia.
In one hypothetical case, China begins the war slowly by banning the export of raw materials to Europe’s defense sector. It maintains the embargo for five months, long enough for European factories to run out of supplies and stop producing weapons. Then Russia, with full access to Chinese resources, invades a NATO ally in Eastern Europe.
All of the scenarios in Janda’s series laid bare the need for Western unity. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example, the U.S. might demand that Europe impose severe sanctions on China’s economy, effectively cutting off trade. “But European governments don’t want to do that,” Janda said, describing how that premise played out among the experts. “The problem with European capitals is that Taiwan is far away. They want to focus on the threat from Russia, and that’s what scares me.”
If Russia and China act in unison while the U.S. bickers with its allies, the chances of a Western victory in a two-front war begin to look bleak. The side that comes out on top, in other words, tends to be the one that moves with common purpose and remains united over time.
These are the facts that no one disputes: On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children to death, then she attempted suicide by cutting her wrists and neck and jumping out of a second-story window in her Massachusetts home, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. The point of contention, as her trial has progressed, is whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for her actions.
Clancy has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. A jury will soon decide whether she was sufficiently mentally ill at the time of the murders to spare her a mandatory sentence of life without parole in a state prison. The problem for Clancy and her defense team is that although she appears to have been extremely sick in the months leading up to the tragedy, the jury may still find her legally sane. This is because the legal standard for insanity diverges from the clinical understanding of mental illness.
Insanity defenses, which are premised on the idea that people are not fully blameworthy for criminal acts that could be seen as outside their control, have existed since ancient Greece and Rome and have been a feature of jurisprudence for hundreds of years. The legal definition of guilt typically requires both action and intention, which means committing a crime while in a reckless, negligent, purposeful, or knowing state of mind. An insanity plea is premised on the assumption that people who are insane at the time of their crimes do not have the capacity for criminal intent, so they cannot be considered entirely guilty.
Christopher Slobogin, a professor of law and psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School, told me that courts have applied different tests for establishing insanity over time, though none has overlapped fully with clinical descriptions of mental illness. In the Victorian era, courts seeking to determine whether a defendant could be excused from criminal liability by reason of insanity began relying on something called the M’Naghten rule, named for Daniel M’Naghten, a Scottish artisan whose paranoid delusions about a grand conspiracy moved him to shoot and kill a senior British civil servant in 1843. M’Naghten’s case inspired a rule that designated defendants legally insane if they did not understand the nature of their criminal acts or that their actions were wrong. This rule remains in use in roughly half of the United States.
According to Michael Perlin, an attorney and a professor emeritus at New York Law School, the insanity defense became controversial in the United States after the acquittal of John Hinckley Jr., whose defense attorneys had argued that his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 was a consequence of his schizophrenia and delusional obsession with the actress Jodie Foster, whom he wanted to impress. Outrage swiftly followed the 1982 verdict, stoked by politicians who called trial-jury members before a Senate subcommittee to interrogate them about their decision. Idaho’s legislature promptly eliminated the insanity defense that year, followed by Utah in 1983 and Kansas in 1995. Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act in 1984, which narrowed the application of insanity defenses in federal cases.
In states that kept the insanity defense, views on how to apply it have continued to evolve. The closures of mental-health institutions across the country in the 1960s and ’70s increased the number of mentally ill people in the criminal-justice system, which created some urgency for establishing an adequate standard for legal insanity.
By defining insanity in terms of what a defendant knew at the time of the crime, the M’Naghten rule excluded defendants who had understood their conduct was wrong but nonetheless had been unable to resist or control their impulses. Some states addressed that limitation by expanding insanity defenses to include defendants who had acted under an irresistible impulse caused by mental illness or who had been otherwise unable to abide by the law. In Massachusetts, defendants may be found not criminally responsible if a mental illness left them unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct or unable to conform their conduct to the requirements of law.
In the months prior to what Clancy’s defense team has described as a psychotic break, she had repeatedly sought psychiatric help. She was briefly hospitalized and had prescriptions for 13 medications to treat her intense anxiety, depression, racing thoughts, insomnia, and confusion. Her lawyers have argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a psychiatric condition that occurs after 0.1 to 0.2 percent of deliveries in women who don’t have a history of mental illness. At the time of their death, her children were eight months to 5 years old.
According to Veerle Bergink, the director of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Mental Health Center, postpartum psychosis is an acute episode of psychosis, mania, or psychotic depression in the months following childbirth. Symptoms include severe mood disturbances, delusions, hallucinations, confusion, and catatonia, and patients generally lose touch with reality. Bergink told me that a woman may come to believe that all the wars in the world are her fault, or that her child is possessed by an evil spirit. Because mothers diagnosed with postpartum psychosis are at heightened risk of suicide and infanticide, the condition is considered a psychiatric emergency.
Clancy’s desperate diary entries dated from the days and weeks before the murders recount such symptoms. She described feeling “incredibly sad and guilty” about not breastfeeding and suffering from “crazy brain fog.” She wrote that she was living “moment to moment waiting for the next nap time,” terrified that her infant son was becoming overtired, “because I feel I can’t help him.” She admitted to contemplating suicide. “I feel like I’m drowning every day,” she wrote. She told medical staffers that she was suffering from “intrusive thoughts,” and she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Year’s Eve and spent several days there before being discharged.
Clancy, her ex-husband, and their attorneys have filed a medical-malpractice lawsuit against the psychiatrists who treated her during the months she spent spiraling. But regardless of whether a timely and accurate diagnosis could have saved Clancy and her children, she was plainly suffering from severe mental illness at the time of her crimes. Still, the jury may deny her insanity plea because the clinical understanding of postpartum psychosis—like those of a host of disorders—does not fit squarely within the legal definition of insanity.
Massachusetts prosecutors have argued that Clancy acted rationally and with clear intent, noting that she seemed organized, reasonable, and communicative in the days leading up to the murders, according to witnesses. Clancy’s diary entries and help-seeking indicate that she knew that her desire to harm herself and others was wrong, yet on the day that she apparently intended to kill her children, Clancy asked her then-husband to run an errand that would keep him out of the house. But the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, like those of bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder, are known to involve sudden and dramatic fluctuations, meaning that Clancy’s moods and cognition could have changed rapidly in the run-up to the murders—in defiance of most legal tests of insanity.
Regardless of the evidence, judges and juries regularly treat such defenses with skepticism. Although lawyers present this defense in only 1 percent of felony cases, Perlin told me that many people assume insanity defenses are overused—and suspect that defendants who plead insanity are faking their illnesses. Some are certainly trying to sell a story, but studies have found evidence that defendants falsified mental illness in fewer than 10 percent of cases.
For this reason and others, claims of mental illness at trial can be a “double-edged sword,” Slobogin, the professor at Vanderbilt, told me. He explained that juries regularly treat evidence of insanity as a sign that a defendant is inherently dangerous, best managed by being locked away—or put to death. In 1995, Scott Panetti was put on trial for the 1992 murders of his in-laws in Texas and was allowed to represent himself despite his history of schizophrenia. Panetti conducted his trial defense in a cowboy outfit and attempted to call more than 200 witnesses, including the pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Panetti’s jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Panetti remained on death row until he died from natural causes in 2025, about two years after a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Panetti “lacks a rational understanding of the connection between his offense and his sentence of death and that his execution would therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet his case and others have made defense attorneys wary of touting a client’s mental illness, even when it is overwhelmingly obvious and crucial to making sense of their crimes.
Another problem with an insanity plea is that many jurors are under the mistaken impression that the penalties for such verdicts are too soft. If Clancy is found guilty of murdering her children, she faces a mandatory sentence of life without parole. If she is found not criminally responsible, she will be admitted to a state psychiatric facility for observation, after which state officials can petition for her continued commitment, subject to periodic review. But this does not mean that Clancy will eventually be freed: Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her children while suffering from postpartum psychosis, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remains in a state psychiatric facility to this day. (She received this verdict after a retrial was prompted by the discovery that the prosecution’s psychiatric expert had provided false testimony in her original trial.) Perlin told me that, in general, people who successfully plead insanity spend more time in state custody than if they had been found guilty.
Whether Clancy is committed to a psychiatric hospital or locked up in prison, her story is harrowing not only because of the abject horror of her actions, but also because of the eerie familiarity of her struggle with new motherhood. I can remember my earliest days with my second child—the restless hours, the boundless needs, the sudden doubling of diapers, the endless laundry rotation in our small apartment, the struggle to care for both a toddler and a newborn. But I also remember the sunshine, my daughter’s delight in her brand-new baby sister, the newborn’s tiny arms in a triumphant stretch fresh out of the swaddle, those first precious smiles.
Clancy’s illness caused her to drown in the overwhelming chaos of mothering, beyond the reach of such buoying joys. Although she survived her suicide attempt, her life was in many ways already over. Regardless of what the jury decides, she is already in hell, and has been for some time.
Editor’s Note: Watch the interview with Julia Curlee on Radio Atlantic.
At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired.
President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s first pick to run intelligence for the National Security Council being shredded by an online mob on suspicion of disloyalty. There wasn’t yet anyone in place to fire me.
After taking the oath, Trump spoke at the Capitol. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
“Did he … ?” an NSA colleague asked. She glanced at me and looked away.
“Yeah,” I muttered. The good news: I was one of those two genders. The bad news: The administration would have views as to which one.
I gripped my badge. I could take it off, leave the White House complex, walk out the north gate, and never look back. I imagined the story they would tell: See? Even she knew she didn’t belong.
I didn’t move. I’d wanted this badge since I was a kid. I’d chosen to be here.
“I know you all heard what the president said,” I told my team after Trump’s speech. “There’s a rumor of an executive order on bathrooms. If anyone asks, I’m using the coffee shops across the street.”
My whole team spoke up: Julia, we’ve got your back.
“Me being trans is not a secret,” I reminded them. “Promise me: Nobody covers for me.”
Back in my office, I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound—the way you do when the walls have ears, and everyone thinks you’re fearless.
Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried two dreams. The first came true in 2007, when I raised my hand, standing on the agency’s marble seal, and became a CIA officer. The second dream, I didn’t dare speak aloud; it came from an unexplainable conviction that I should have been born a woman. The longing, like homesickness, grew into an unbearable darkness.
On a sweltering June morning in 2013, I sat in the CIA parking lot, hands clamped on the wheel, preparing myself to live out my second dream. Terrified of my first day at work as Julia, I’d chosen a blue button-down and pants, hoping no one would notice I’d changed genders. At the turnstile, the guard smiled. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, and the badge reader flashed green. To use the lexicon of my trade, the after-action review would have read: “Nothing significant to report.”
In the years ahead—traveling to 35 countries, briefing former President George W. Bush, becoming a mom—being trans would sometimes seem like the most ordinary part of my life. But as much as I wanted to disappear into normal womanhood and the work, I knew there were others who needed to see that a life like mine was possible. So, in 2017, I wrote in these pages under the pseudonym Jenny Hall about how being openly trans at the CIA made me a better officer. CIA recruiters used the essay on college campuses, and new officers—not realizing they were talking with the author—told me that it had inspired them to apply.
Soon after the essay ran, a call went out for volunteers to join the President’s Daily Brief staff and serve the new Trump administration. Working the PDB meant staying up all night to distill the most sensitive intelligence we possessed into a book that the president and our senior leaders read at dawn. It was one of the CIA’s most coveted assignments—a proving ground for our best analysts.
Growing up in Hawaii, I dreamed of seeing the world. My grandfather gave me a simple promise: “Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you. We came to America for small things. No pogroms. No leaky roof. Paradise was a bonus.”
Service before politics. Country before self.
I clung to this promise as I became a man, a husband, a father, a CIA officer, a wife, a mother.
For two years I served the Trump White House, arriving at work around midnight, six days a week, roaming the West Wing before dawn. My wife learned to live with the silence at the dinner table.
Sometimes I filled in on the road—summers in Bedminster, winters in Palm Beach. On my first trip, I boarded at Joint Base Andrews and a card waited at my seat: Ms. Curlee, Welcome Aboard Air Force One.
Grateful for the welcome, I was less grateful to whoever had sat me in the middle of the White House press pool. So I stuffed my face with the best waffles of my life and kept small talk to a minimum. As we flew to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s aide beckoned me to the front of the plane. No one cared that a trans woman was briefing President Trump.
Then one morning, my boss walked in, a wide smile on her face. She had a new job for me.
“Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president?”
“This vice president?”
Days later, I stood in his driveway at the Naval Observatory. I must be insane, I thought. Mike Pence had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine—to people like me. But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too.
“Mr. Vice President,” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you. My name is Julia”—like I’d practiced a thousand times.
“You’re abandoning me with her?” Pence teased his outgoing briefer, with a line I’d heard he used with other people. He turned to me. “Okay, Julia, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sir, did you know that a third of Purdue’s computer-science grad students are Chinese nationals?”
He nodded once. “Get in the car.”
I grabbed my case and climbed into the Beast, the nickname for the executive limo. I hunted in vain for a seat belt as Secret Service radios squawked, “On the move.” I dug in my heels as the floor pitched. Pennsylvania Avenue, the PDB, and me—alone with Mike Pence.
When I got home, my wife and I decided to keep my new boss’s identity a secret. In my community, his name was shorthand for everything we feared. I could imagine the optics, and God help us if someone called a reporter.
For the next year, I briefed him nearly every morning. As soon as the coffee was hot, Pence was ready to work. He ripped through the briefing book, firing questions at me, scribbling in the margins.
Down the hall, the president was using his phone to light up Twitter. The vice president preferred to use our multibillion-dollar intel apparatus to save lives. Some mornings he would push back on an assessment, but I would hold the line, explaining how the conclusions had been reached. That was the job. When my tour was almost up, he asked me to extend it.
One morning, as we approached the White House gates, the vice president turned to me. “Julia, do you know why they call it ‘the People’s House’?”
“No, sir.”
“Right up until the Civil War, anyone could come to the door and wait to see the president.”
As the steel gates opened, he leaned in. “You know, it’s a privilege to work here.”
“Yes, sir.” I held his gaze. “It is.”
When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.
No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.”
In that moment, it felt like the battle had been won.
Courtesy of Julia Curlee
Vice President Pence with the author at the White House in 2019
For years, friends told me people need to know that a gay trans woman had worked for Mike Pence and that the world hadn’t exploded. No—I was adamant—we serve in silence. But I kept the photos of that time.
After January 6, 2021, the vice president invited his former PDB briefers for a farewell picture in the West Wing. The place was quieter than I’d ever heard it. As we said our goodbyes, my voice shook.
“Sir,” I said, “what you did last week—I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”
We shook hands. The mob at the Capitol had chanted for his hanging. He’d done his duty to the country, certifying the vote. I’d done mine to him. That was the bargain. Service before politics. Country before self.
Two and a half years later, after a stint back at the CIA, I returned to the White House as a director for intelligence programs on President Biden’s National Security Council.
Days after Trump’s 2024 election victory, the intelligence staff gathered in our boss’s office. He was not a man who frightened easily. But he knew what was coming. “I need to strongly advise you to leave before Inauguration Day,” he said. “There’s a world in which you’ll be targeted individually.” He didn’t say my name. He didn’t need to. “They know how to use the tools this time. Install loyalists at CIA, FBI, and Justice—turn clearances and investigations into weapons.”
I told him I wasn’t resigning. Then the CIA’s deputy director sat me down. “Julia, look at me. You don’t have to do this. You have a target on your back that others don’t.”
“With respect, sir—this is what we do.”
He searched my face, looking for a crack. When he didn’t find one, he nodded. “Good luck.”
Days before the inauguration, Biden gathered the staff in the East Wing. “Now, folks, here’s the deal. Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you. It’s important for the country.”
Of all the senior government officials who spoke with us before the new administration took office, Biden was the only one who asked us to stay.
On Inauguration Day, I stood in the West Wing to brief the new national security adviser, minutes after he’d taken office. Down the hall, the president signed an executive order banning me from restrooms in all federal buildings. I would start to plan policy meetings around bathroom stops across Pennsylvania Avenue.
The next day, my team fanned out to brief the new leadership on our nation’s highest secrets. Then these leaders stripped my insurance coverage for the estrogen that keeps me healthy, voided my discrimination protections, and declared me “male” to foreign governments on my passport. I would keep briefing them anyway.
On the third day came the purge—160 career NSC staff members sent home. Then new White House officials asked me to read them into classified programs; they called me around the clock, desperate for access to intelligence. Programs crucial to U.S. interests sat unmanaged; the officers who had been in charge of them had been escorted out. When NSC leaders realized what they’d done, it fell to me to call the people they’d humiliated and beg them to come back. They did.
One week in, the administration I served reinstated its ban on trans people in the military. Decorated officers such as my friend Colonel Bree Fram were thrown out for the crime of being honest. In the White House, people called me “indispensable.” I still was not welcome in their bathrooms.
A month later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired 100 intelligence officers, many of them trans, for taking part in an LGBTQ group chat that conservative media had cast as sexually explicit. The next day, I ran an intel briefing—for her—because that is what we do. The following week, the president stood before Congress and called trans children a lie.
Then, one Saturday, I was sitting in a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, when my phone buzzed. “Julia, sorry to bother,” my boss said. “I have bad news. Your White House tour’s over. Chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason.”
I was elbows-deep in brisket, the sauce congealing. I’d beaten the “Fire Julia” office pool by about 68 days. I was being sent back to my home agency. My boss cleared his throat.
“Um, Julia—we still need you Monday. But please. Be discreet.”
Fired on Saturday. Needed on Monday. But stay invisible?
Then my phone exploded—a dozen friends forwarding the same tweet. “SCOOP: A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office,” the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had written. “If you are aware of this person and have their name, please send it to me and I will post their identity.”
Monday arrived, and cherry blossoms framed a perfect spring day in Washington. I reported to the White House. I had no badge, and my accounts had been revoked. I spent three marathon days helping the administration that had fired me finish the budget, and handing off the portfolio I’d overseen for two years. As I packed up, a string of senior Trump appointees stopped in to say goodbye. One took my hand. “Thank you for staying as long as you did,” he whispered. “Not many would have.”
That night, a list of hidden “enemies” in the administration provided by Loomer landed on the president’s desk. But an internet activist like Loomer doesn’t come up with names on her own, or just walk into the Oval to give them to the president. Someone in the building had helped her. Most of those fired, including my boss, were rock-ribbed Republicans, experts in their fields, who had been courteous and professional.
As I walked out the north gate with my small box of belongings, I finally understood the warning: “Be discreet.” The White House had needed me. Trump officials had known I was trans from day one. This hadn’t been an issue until it was public—and then nothing else I’d done mattered. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used.
I was the wrong kind of American.
One morning after returning to the CIA, I passed a tour group in our museum, clustered below a photo of me high on the wall, near one of the 33rd president. “Here next to President Truman,” the guide said, “is a PDB briefer on Air Force One. Our highest secrets, collected at vast expense and great risk.”
“How do you become a briefer?” someone asked.
The guide smiled. “Very competitive. Years of experience. Our best.”
The tour moved on to the Osama bin Laden raid. I stayed. My eyes drifted over the photo, from my face in black and white to the vice president’s PDB in my lap. I’d spent decades fighting for my place—from a beach boy who dreamed of seeing the world to an officer who served her country. Now my photo hung as an artifact of a time when the CIA proudly said the quality of the work was more important than the gender of the person doing it.
My eyes fell to the door below—the door to the restroom I was barred from entering.
Courtesy of Julia Curlee
The author in Baghdad in April 2005
Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues. But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone. My finger hovered over the “Send” button. Two sentences:
“Happy Pride. You are not alone.”
I froze. Someone would report this email to drive me out of the agency, just like at the White House. Don’t end up the last openly trans CIA officer, I told myself. I deleted the email, breathing through the urge to do something heroic and stupid. In the screen’s dark reflection, I saw my face—exhausted, angry.
That was the moment I knew I had to resign. I’d weighed my family’s health insurance against two sentences of solidarity and chosen to surrender my integrity. The agency that had taught me to tell hard truths was now teaching me to be invisible. It was time to go.
I loved the agency. I loved its mission. I love it still. I served under four presidents and through three wars. I lived by my grandfather’s words: Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you.
I kept my end.
In 2017, I closedmy Atlantic essay with the words “And trans kids should know, CIA is always recruiting.” That promise has been broken. I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written.
The agency has been gutted as part of a deliberate plan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget once boasted, to put the people who defend our country “in trauma.” Analysts have been fired in public or questioned by the FBI; decade-old assessments have been denounced by the CIA director in the press. The president calls analysis “virtual treason” when it contradicts his preferred reality, and uses the CIA to undermine public confidence in American elections.
Fear has done its work. Irreplaceable officers with crucial language and technical skills, and decades of experience, have walked out the door. Those who remain within an agency built to deliver hard truths are being muzzled.
Twenty years ago, I sat in a bunker in Iraq, praying I would survive the night, in a war begun after our intelligence community had failed to do enough to challenge what the White House wanted to hear. Our agency spent the next two decades repairing the trust that failure broke. I know institutions can be rebuilt. Officers can come back, but only if someone is willing to tell the truth. In the entrance of our Original Headquarters Building, across from the stars for every officer slain in the line of duty, you can still read the words carved in marble:
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
I know that the CIA friends I left behind are holding the line under impossible circumstances. The country needs them more than ever. And I understand my colleagues who left but can’t speak up. Their livelihoods depend on clearances and contracts that can be revoked with a phone call. But we all swore an oath to the Constitution.
Naima Green for The Atlantic
The author in Washington, D.C., in August
I’m afraid too. This administration has already taken most of what I had to lose. I know that the White House and its online mob will come for me. My ancestors fled pogroms; they knew a fear I never expected to feel in the United States. I was offered an untenable bargain: Don’t make trouble. Take the insults—deviant, diversity hire, man in a dress—from those who have never faced enemy fire, who asked for my assistance in private and then signed the orders to erase people like me because “transgender ideology” was a threat to Western civilization.
Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.
But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.
I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.
Julia.
This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Wrong Kind of American.”
Children still learn long division even though calculators exist, and many people continue to study languages even as AI translation becomes faster and more accurate. Is there a deeper purpose for learning that technology will never touch?
In this episode of How to Touch Grass, the co-hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck hear from Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University who studies technology and learning. She explains that although the changing tides of tech may shape what and how we learn, as humans we still have the autonomy to build the minds we want.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Michelle Miller: Learning is how we build ourselves as individuals, and it’s how humanity shapes its course.
Julie Beck: Michelle Miller has thought a lot about the purpose of learning. She’s a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University focused on attention and memory and how technology shapes education. As she said, learning is a very human endeavor. But what we learn and the kindsof learning we value are shaped by the changing tides of technology.
Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.
Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.
Brennan: Julie, that sentiment—that what we learn changes with the tides of technology—feels really relevant to a change I’ve noticed in the last decade. I think of coding and how big of a push that was when I was in college to Learn to code or you’ll be left behind. But just a few years later, now my coder friends are really worried about job security, and the thing we’re being pressed to learn is learning how to correctly prompt AI so that it can code.
Beck: Mmm. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. And the thing that I keep thinking about now that so many people are starting to outsource so many things to AI—coding and other things—one of the biggest questions I keep coming back to is: What is the point of learning something when you no longer have to? When a machine could just do it for you?
Brennan: Well, this is one of those questions that keeps coming back around, right? Why do I need to learn math if a calculator can do it?
Beck: And yet, generations of children still continue to learn math!
Brennan: True.
Beck: So we’ve come to some consensus that there is value to learning long division even if you don’t end up using it much as an adult. But the question feels especially relevant rightnow, because the kind of things that technology is currently threatening to replace are more wide-ranging and complex than just arithmetic.
[Music]
Miller: I look back and I say, At every big turning point in history, how many times was it: and then we learned how to? This is what forward motion really is.
Beck: We really wanted to talk to Michelle about this because she has a really expansive view of what technology is and how it shapes us. Not just whether tech is good or bad for learning, but what kinds of tech help or hurt, under what circumstances.
Brennan: And it all depends on how we use that technology.
Beck: Exactly.
Michelle, I’m curious: Have you learned anything new recently?
Miller: Oh my gosh. Well, one of the things that I’m working on right now is barebow archery.
Beck: Oh, okay!
Miller: So really low-tech, you know, think really traditional wooden bow and so on. And I have a coach, and I share my archery range with a lot of individuals who are doing more of the actual hunting type of archery with the big compound bows. So that’s not me. I’m the lady who’s over shooting at 15 yards just with my little quiver of arrows trying to just get a little bit better every single time.
Beck: I love it. You’re like Legolas.
Miller: (Laughs.)
Beck: I was gonna ask if, you know, technology was involved in anything that you had learned recently, but I mean, I guess a bow is technology of a very ancient sort.
Miller: It absolutely is. And it is funny, though, that even something that is so almost primal in that very physical, what we think of as low-tech, although it would’ve been high-tech at some point in human history—
Beck: In the Bronze Age or whenever that was, yeah.
Miller: —it’s still complemented these days by technology. And I think of something else that—I went through a relearning journey about starting 20 years ago, which is knitting.
Beck: Mmm.
Miller: But it is fascinating that there, too, you think of something that’s so tactile, so physical, and it’s really enjoyed a resurgence in the modern age because of technology. Because we have the ability to, you know, I no longer have to depend on maybe my great aunt or the lady down the street to show me, Oh my gosh, how to get out of this problem? I have my choice of instructional videos. There’s communities. There’s whole sites that are just devoted to this. So—
Beck: That’s definitely true when it comes to my hobbies. But I want to step way back for a sec, for the big philosophical view. Are you ready?
Miller: Okay.
Beck: What, to you, is the ultimate purpose of learning?
Miller: Ah, the ultimate purpose of learning. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we as people and our minds and our brains evolve and change over the course of our lifetimes, and some of those are kind of out of our control. They’re sort of “nature takes its course.” But the changes that are wrought through learning are the ones that, in a sense, we have the most agency and control over, that we can self-direct. Whether it’s saying, I wanna learn a new crochet stitch, and this would be a way to make something that’s unique or to spend time with people I care about, or to test myself and my own creativity and limits. The way that we can do that is learning. And we’ve talked about the technology angle of it, but it’s still also something really social. I think that teaching another human being how to do something—that is one of the highest and best expressions of humanity that there is. It’s one of the best and most positive ways that we interact with and contribute to one another. So I do think it comes back to that core, our self-agency and our connection to this great web of humanity. I mean, it comes about through learning.
Beck: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, it seems like we’re kind of coming away with: The point of learning is that you are able to kind of direct your own experience in this life in a way that you might otherwise, in a lot of ways, just be kinda tossed about on the tides of, like, history and aging. Is that fair to say?
Miller: I think that’s fair to say. And, I mean, to maybe even elevate it a little bit more, especially as a kind of an introverted person myself, I think of my own mind is that’s where I live. That’s ultimately, well, literally at the end of the day, that’s where we’re at. And our mind is our experience, and learning builds the mind that we live in.
Beck: Yes. I mean, ultimately, we are all just, like, in the black box of our own skulls, unfortunately, when it comes to how we engage with the world. We can’t really get out of there. When do you think technology helps with that purpose, and when does it get in the way?
Miller: So I like how you put that question of not good or bad, but more when. And I would add to that how. So instructional designers will always say, You have to start with the end in mind. So, you know, a professor will walk in and say, Well, I heard about this technology or this application, this quiz game or whatever at a conference. Should I do it? And they will always take a breath and say, What are you trying to accomplish? Or sometimes, What problem are you trying to solve? Where do you know that students are going to struggle? That’s where, sometimes, the boost of a technology tool can be helpful. And one case in point that really illustrates this, I think pretty clearly, is this: So there’s this principle or phenomenon called “retrieval practice.” We often contrast it with, for many students, good-faith effort. They think the way to study, say, a list of vocabulary terms, they think, Okay, I’m gonna reread that part of my textbook over and over. I’m gonna highlight, and I’m gonna read it again, and I’m gonna read it again. I’m gonna kind of have a general little gut check and say, ‘Uh, did that feel familiar? Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.’ But what will deliver the ability to retain that stuff you’re reviewing is to close the book and answer questions, even if you don’t know the material very well. It just produces these huge, long-lasting effects that are very, very versatile.
Beck: Socrates was right. (Laughs.)
Miller: Yeah. So how does that figure in with technology? Well, first it was CD-ROM databases that had lots of quiz questions that students could answer, and you could track how the whole class was doing, and students could get immediate feedback. They didn’t have to wait for me to grade. It was great. And then we moved on to things like these little in-class clickers, where the whole class could do retrieval practice and answer a question. And now with AI, AI can generate lots of really high-quality questions, even open-ended questions. We’re no longer locked into multiple choice. So that’s a great example of how—it’s not just like, well, grab a phone, open an app, learning happens. But here’s a principle that helps accelerate this one particular aspect of learning. An expert has gone through and selected and said, Well, here’s what you need to know. And so we marry those two together, and then we get something that actually does deliver something that’s positive for students.
Beck: And when is it not helpful?
Miller: Where it detracts. If there’s something that you want to experience and remember in the moment, that's a different form of memory. That’s what we call episodic memory. So if I’m finally visiting, say, in my area, the Grand Canyon, and I want to see this and remember this moment, that’s where technology is not necessarily going to help. Even things like—it’s very ironic: We take pictures to remember an experience, but there’s research showing that we remember less from an experience when we’re walking around taking pictures of it. And it’s really just an attention effect. Just these little phones—even if you have it on “Do not disturb,” setting up the shot takes away, takes you out of that moment.
Beck: Right.
Miller: So when that is the concern, technology is not your friend.
Beck: Hmm. That’s so interesting. As you were saying that, I was thinking about, you know, people— whenever you go to a concert these days, right, everybody just has their phone up and they’re recording the video of their favorite song or they’re taking a picture. And I hadn’t thought about it as learning, but I guess in a way it’s sort of like, your memory of your life is like learning the story of your life. So maybe you are not retaining that concert so much.
Miller: Perfect example. Yeah, we don’t have different, you know, pieces of the brain or parts of the memory that are like, Okay, here’s learning;here’s serious learning, and here’s all the other stuff.
Beck: Learning is just everything.
Miller: Learning is an experience.
[Music]
Beck: I guess to drill into it a little more, what is specifically the value of learning a thing that you can just easily outsource to technology and you don’t ever need to do it? Like, I would like to remember my trip to the Grand Canyon, like sure, but I don’t ever need to calculate a tip ever again in my whole life. I’ll just do it on my phone.
Miller: Yeah. And I mean, if that’s really the case, then I say: Have at it; pull out the phone.
Beck: Mm. But is there still, I don’t know, whether it’s philosophical, spiritual, cognitive value of learning a thing that you don’t have to learn? For instance, learning a foreign language when you can just translate it with AI, or learning how to code when, from all reports, it seems like AI is kinda taking over that industry. Is there still value to learning those things regardless of that progress?
Miller: Yeah, and as I’m kinda standing—I think of myself kind of standing at the bottom of a mountain of: I wanna become expert in. And let’s take, for example, I wanna be an expert in fashion design. You know, where does that step start? It starts with really getting into the nuts and the bolts of the construction of what you’re doing. So maybe, if that’s my goal, I wanna learn how to knit a sweater from hand or sew a pair of pants. And even as an expert fashion designer, how many times am I gonna just sit down and sew a garment for a client or just knit something by hand?
Beck: Probably send it to the factory, right?
Miller: Yeah, you send it to the factory! But to really understand How does fabric behave?Why do I wanna make cable stitches in a particular way?And how is cashmere different than cotton when I work with it? I wonder if there really is no substitute for sitting with it. So it’s not—I don’t wanna make it sound like, Oh, you gotta take your medicine and pay your dues. I don’t think it has to be like that. I think it’s more in the spirit of exploration and the spirit of actually physically seeing: How do the building blocks that I’m gonna work with from here on out, how do those behave? So that’s an argument for learning from the ground up, even when we can look it up.
[Music]
Beck: Okay, this is gonna sound very stupid, but why is or how is AI different than a calculator?
Miller: Okay. AI and calculator. Oh my gosh, talk about a conversational football that we’ve been throwing back and forth in my field right now. I mean, at its core, it does offer a few ways to do things that were time-consuming and maybe even sometimes do them more accurately. Well, that’s where a calculator perhaps is even better than AI in that way. Calculators don’t hallucinate. They are one-trick ponies, but boy, they do that trick really, really well. So that’s one perhaps smaller difference. But AI is not like a calculator in that it can mimic authentic human communication. In, say, contemporary higher education, you hear horror stories of students who are like—you ask them an icebreaker question like “What’s your favorite movie?” and they have AI pick a favorite movie and fill that out. And you’re just going, Oh, why? And here I am on the other end, pouring my heart and soul, and not AI, into this course. And who’s even on the other end? So I think it raises more questions about what’s kind of the contract between professor and teacher and student?
Beck: Yeah. Well, thinking about the calculator comparison, I mean, that’s something that I just hear a lot from people who are, you know, very excited about AI or not too concerned. Just sort of saying, Calculators made us more efficient. They let us just do things better. And we don’t generally consider using a calculator to be morally bad or a sign that we are degrading our ability to think because we did our tip calculation on a calculator. But does AI fall into that similar category to you, where it’s like, Ah, this is just progress. We can outsource stuff we don’t need to do, or is something about it inherently different?
Miller: Well, I do think that it challenges in a new way, in a perhaps a more painful way, our ego, frankly, and our value as educators, and that’s something that I also encourage people to think about. How much of this resistance, if you have it, is because you’re saying, Well the knowledge that I have for you, what I had prepared, what I want to profess, has a different value now than it once did. And I don’t know, but I would wager that there were people back in the day, individuals, who could add, subtract, and divide. That was a high-end skill. And somebody came along with an abacus, and now any old person can do it. Or being able to use a slide rule like my grandfather could do as an engineer. So I kinda keep falling back on those as well. But I think the upside is also potentially so much more vast than a simpler, more targeted one-trick pony like a calculator.
Beck: Hmm. The way that I’ve been thinking about it is like, are you outsourcing a task? Which could be good or bad or neutral, depending on the situation. Or are you outsourcing your own thought process? Which to me is like a betrayal of your own humanity. Is that a reasonable way to think about it or would you frame it differently?
Miller: Mm-hmm. I mean, if I would reframe it at all, kind of the way you’re coming at this, it’s also to me a matter of who’s in control of it? I think that we’re starting to, those of us who’ve tried AI, we’ve started to have that feeling of like: When is it driving the conversation and just doing the thing? And when am I giving instructions? I’ve even played around with— I wish that we could say, instead of, “Oh, ask AI,” “Tell AI.” Wouldn’t that be a different world? Because that’s where AI shines, is when it does exactly what you, the human user, tells it to do. So I would love for us to kind of charge into this, um, with that sense of, I am the boss of you. I am giving instructions. I am telling you. Don’t do—I mean, we learn pretty quickly. That’s one of the most useful phrases that you can share in something like a ChatGPT is, “Do not write or draft or change until I tell you to.” So perhaps we can start to approach that and share with our students more planful and intentional ways of getting to that point, where there’s a boundary, and the human is putting in the creativity, and the human makes the final call.
[Music]
Beck: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: Does outsourcing our learning pose a threat to democracy?
[Break]
Beck: I’m really curious how you think about all this when it comes to civics and, not to put too fine a point on it, the continued existence of democracy. (Uneasy laughter.) Just because, you know, if people start to abandon learning or, maybe less extreme, abandon control over their own learning like you were saying, what might we lose or what might happen on the level of society and democracy?
Miller: Oh my gosh. That is a really big challenge, and it means that when we go around and say, Well, our fellow citizens should just, you know, develop critical thinking, I, as an educator, go, “Okay, yes, they should, and oh my gosh, that’s hard.”
Beck: And like critical thinking for what?
Miller: Yes, critical thinking for what? And it’s simply hard. I sometimes say that critical thinking is like learning to walk on your hands, you know, or any kind of formal reasoning. We can do it if we’re motivated to do it. Nobody does it as a default. Nobody comes in and says, Oh, here’s something in my feed that says, you know, lemon juice will cure every disease I know, and I should just drink lemon juice. I think we’ve all seen those blog posts that go by.
Beck: Yeah, the terrible ads at the bottom of articles. “One mom discovered the secret to anti-aging.”
Miller: Yeah, discovered the secret to anti-aging. You need to think critically about that. But you need something on the order of six weeks, a whole semester, or more to really produce measurable gains. So we do not need to fear that the presence of AI is gonna wipe out critical thinking. In fact, though, we do need new critical-thinking skills. There’s even research on visual critical thinking, which all of a sudden we need to know, like, how do you look at a photograph and get some immediate red flags of: Is this AI-generated or not?
Beck: Oh yeah, that stresses me out.
Miller: It stresses us all out. So we need it, and this is the time for us to speak up and say, What are the ways that we can use our technology to develop critical-thinking skills, and how can we challenge ourselves to resist those biases that are at the center of a lot of critical thinking? So things like: Don’t just cherry-pick what you agree with or feels good on a gut level. Don’t just go with anecdotes. Be sure you understand correlation versus causation. All of those things are incredibly important, and technology can be a positive here, but only if we’re very, very deliberate about it.
Beck: Mmm. Often when we talk about technology, right, we mean a pretty small slice of technology, like modern digital computing-based technologies. And as we were saying, like, knitting is technology; archery is technology. Many things are technology. They’re just not new. So I wonder, would expanding our minds about what technology actually is make a difference in how we think about using technology to learn, how we learn alongside technology? Do you think that would change anything?
Miller: Well, I think yes, in the sense—especially in the sense if we talk about our relationship to it. And we sometimes do speak about it like something that came from outer space and was just sort of imposed on us. And we have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. And so it is part of us. And sometimes I, you know, instead of thinking of it as this external thing that showed up, think of it as a mirror. And I would also steer us away from, if I could, thinking of it as this environmental pollutant. And that’s hard because that is a very sort of clickbaity—we wanna see, like, Oh my gosh, exposure to technology does X, Y, and Z to kids, or is affecting my brain in some way.
Beck: Like it’s a carcinogen.
Miller: Yes, it’s almost like it’s like smoke or, you know, electrical waves from some place. But it’s not a pollutant. It’s not a carcinogen. I don’t think that that’s an appropriate metaphor. And when we talk about it that way, it does steer us into that binary, right? Like, should children be around cigarette smoke? No, they should not. Probably nobody should be around secondhand smoke. But with technology, it’s like, well, all right, but what was the type of use? What was the level of use? We see this all the time in research on technology. It’s not the hours on a smartphone, for example, that makes the big difference in cognitive or even mental-health factors. It’s: What were you doing when you were on it? So getting back to: What are you doing with it? Why are we doing it that way? Why did we even build a technology that could do this at such a high level, and why did people want it so badly? In my ideal world, that’s how we would talk about technology.
Beck: I wanna go back to something you said about standing at the base of the mountain. You wanna become an expert in something. Even if you’re standing at just a little hill, right? And you don’t even wanna be an expert in something, but maybe you just wanna be okay at it. For instance, I’m trying to learn Korean right now. My in-laws are Korean. It’s hard. My brain is aging. I don’t retain vocabulary as well as I used to. I could just hold the phone up and have it translate for me, but I feel like that wouldn’t be the same. So I guess I’m curious, not just when you’re on a journey to becoming an expert in something, but when you’re just trying to learn anything to be a little bit better at it, or to be pretty good, is there still value in learning that thing that you could outsource or that you don’t have to learn?
Miller: Languages, as always, they’re kind of their own special category, right? And the thing with spoken language: They’re real time. The substantial amount of time and energy. I mean, there’s always opportunity cost, especially in learning a language. I can think of nothing else where it’s like, if you’re gonna—it’s not gonna be a hill. It’s going to be a mountain, and you’re going to need to climb and climb and climb, and there’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to let go that you can’t learn and you can’t do if you choose that one. But that’s up to you, and you’ve got this clear picture of: Here’s where I’m gonna be on the other side.I am going to be able to speak in my own voice with no delay, with no weird barrier in between us, to these people who I love and care about. And that feeling too, you’re probably experiencing that, and I think this is common to lots of things that are difficult to learn. Barebow archery, I mean, when you hit that bullseye, wow, you feel it. And when you have the words coming out of your own mouth and your own brain? That feels really, really good. I mean, that’s your brain’s reward systems kicking in. Our reward systems don’t just kick in over, you know, sugar and doom scrolling. They kick in when we get it right, and that’s your opportunity to get it right.
Beck: Yeah. That’s so true. And going back to the, like, building the brain you wanna live in, like you said, I mean, people will always say, and I find this to be true, that if you think in a different language, like you do think differently. You are almost a slightly different person in a different language, when you embody a different language, than in your native language. And so if you outsource that, then you maybe lose that opportunity to find out who you are in Korean, to find out who you are in French, or whatever it may be.
Miller: Yes, and a plug for language learning as well. I mean, we haven’t quite gotten into this other highly practical aspect of learning, but time and again, we’ve seen that really substantial learning projects, like learning a language in particular, may offer a buffer against, you know, some of the typical changes that come with age and possibly against some age-related diseases and disorders. Now, that said, I always caution people: Don’t think of the brain as a muscle and you’re just gonna build it up. But when it comes to something like actually jumping in and learning Korean. I mean, you’re physically building whole new structures in your brain, and that can actually help. So we could see some real improvements if we did make even greater—if we did invest even more as a society in serious lifelong learning.
[Music]
Brennan: Julie, from what I am hearing from your decision to learn Korean is that a core part of the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this episode—why we learn things we don’t have to—is that to you, that intention matters right? It’s a way of showing your devotion.
Beck: Yeah, I mean, a machine might be able to say what I want to say in grammatically perfect Korean. Or maybe not; I do think machines sometimes miss out on cultural nuances. But regardless, I have to imagine it means more to people hearing me try and make mistakes and make that effort to connect.
Brennan: Right, like trying is the meaningful part.
Beck: Yeah.You know, there’s this quote from the writer Oliver Burkeman that I really like. And he wrote, “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
Brennan: Yeah, likethat feels like the point of learning to me. Learning is a way to engage more deeply, whether that’s engaging with a relationship, engaging with the world around you, or engaging with your own mind. Like Miller said, building the brain you want to live in. Whatever you’re learning, learning is a way to invest care.
Beck: Yes, totally. And that really brings me back to the question of: What is the connection between learning and democracy? Or between learning and being a good citizen? And I think it’s that. Like, do you care enough to engage, or don’t you?
[Music]
Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.
Beck: Next week:
Jenny Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like think about it, like when do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? The person picks up their phone, what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit lives between people.
Beck: I talk with author Jenny Odell for advice about how to break some of those habits and maybe heal your attention span in the process. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.
Last winter, Donald Trump plunged recklessly into war with Iran. The United States is now losing that conflict. Iran remains defiant, much of the world economy is more threatened now than it was six months ago, U.S. military resources are overextended, and munition stores are dangerously depleted. Trump and the United States have suffered one embarrassment after another; last month, he had to sneak away from the region on a backup plane because of a possible assassination threat from Tehran.
And so the president of the United States has taken the logical next step: He is punishing South Korea, a loyal American friend, and tempting U.S. enemies to doubt America’s will to defend its allies.
Early Sunday evening, Trump instructed the Defense Department to “substantially reduce” its participation in an annual joint military exercise with the South Koreans. He did this, he said in a post on Truth Social, in part because such activities are expensive, but worse, they are insulting to his friends in North Korea, a country that has been “unthreatening and respectful” while he’s been in office. (Trump seems unconcerned about the dozens of nuclear weapons Pyongyang is pointing at U.S. and South Korean forces—many of them developed on his watch. Just a reminder: There are roughly 28,500 American troops currently stationed in South Korea, some just a few miles from the DMZ.)
More to the point, he complained that the South Koreans have not helped him defeat Iran:
While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”
When Trump makes the effort to say something is “unrelated” to his actions (and then adds a coy question mark) it usually means it is completely related—and probably his central motivation.
Scaling back the exercise is, of course, an insane decision, which does nothing but hurt an ally, and tempt an adversary to think—correctly—that American leadership is feckless. You could be forgiven for wondering why South Korea and the rest of the free world must pay for Donald Trump’s failures. Such confusion is understandable, except that in Trump’s world, every loss, every defeat, is a personal insult. When things go wrong, someone must be held responsible—and that someone is never Donald Trump.
America and the rest of the world are now witnessing a public exhibition of narcissistic rage. Trump embarked on a war for personal glory, and what he got instead was ongoing humiliation. He clearly finds it all unbearable.
Trump both fears and respects the autocrats who rule Russia, China, and North Korea, and so he dares not cross them. Instead, he is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.
The Iran war was not the president’s failure, you see. Others failed the president. Those disloyal South Koreans, who every few years drag him into a needless confrontation with that respectful and peace-loving young man in Pyongyang, refused to help him topple the Iranian regime. And because Trump is unable to subdue Iran, unable to replenish stocks of U.S. weapons he should never have expended in this war, unable to take care of the service personnel he has put in harm’s way, someone is going to pay. The most convenient target he could find, at least for the moment, was South Korea.
At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy. They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power. Those days, at least among legislators of the president’s party, are long past. They will take whatever Trump dishes out. Our allies might for the time being similarly ignore Trump’s tantrums, but they have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.
The Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreans are certain to draw the appropriate lessons from this deranged policy. They have been shown, yet again, that when Trump fails, he hurts those he feels safe hurting. Already, North Korea is dispatching missiles and thousands of soldiers to aid Russia in its war on Ukraine. If a conflict should break out in the Pacific or on the Korean peninsula, or if the war in Europe spreads farther west, the world’s dictators might well count on Trump to focus American wrath not on the enemies of the free world, but on the nations that have always pledged to stand side by side with the United States in a mutual defense of freedom.
During her January 2025 confirmation hearing to be secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem was asked how she would strengthen the nation’s cyberdefenses. Noem told senators that she would make the department’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency “smaller” and “more nimble.” President Trump had created CISA as a stand-alone agency within the Department of Homeland Security during his first term to give cybersecurity more institutional heft, and it had grown quickly with support from lawmakers of both parties. But after CISA declared the 2020 presidential election to be “the most secure in American history” and the agency’s director, Christopher Krebs, refused to back Trump’s claims that the vote had been stolen, Krebs became a target for the president’s fury and a seething grudge.
During the DOGE fever of the first few months of Trump’s return, CISA’s budget was reduced and its staff cut by one-third. The agency hasn’t had a permanent, Senate-confirmed director since Trump retook office. In April, the White House proposed deeper cuts to CISA’s budget, but Republican lawmakers have raised concerns that critical U.S. infrastructure is already too vulnerable.
In June, Noem’s replacement, Markwayne Mullin, reversed course. He told lawmakers during a DHS budget hearing that he wants to add 600 positions at CISA. The agency has scheduled new hiring expos, and Acting Director Nicholas Andersen says that he’s “ruthlessly prioritizing” critical cyberdefense roles. But the United States is now nearly six months into a war with Iran, an aggressive and capable cyber foe—and preparations for the midterm elections are under way, with far less intelligence from CISA about foreign and domestic threats.
Hackers with suspected ties to Iran targeted U.S. water and wastewater systems late last month in more than a dozen states. In Braham, Minnesota, the attacks temporarily shut down the water system. The town was one of more than 30 systems that were targeted, state officials said, describing the attacks as the most extensive they’ve seen. The Trump administration has not confirmed Iran’s purported role in the water-system hacks or said how many states or utility systems have been affected—or whether there have been other breaches. Three port facilities in North Carolina reported disruptions to operations from cyberattacks two weeks ago, although authorities haven’t linked the incidents to a specific actor. But CISA, the FBI, and the EPA warned last month that Iran-affiliated hackers are attempting to exploit vulnerabilities in U.S. systems. Cybersecurity experts told us that hacking attempts could spread as the midterms approach and hostilities with Tehran enter what Trump has characterized as a more low-key phase aimed at squeezing the Iranian economy. Iran may respond by going after U.S. infrastructure. DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
Despite the elevated threat from Iran, the Trump administration continues to focus its attention on questioning the integrity of U.S. elections. The president and Andersen have each met recently with election deniers who have spent years attacking the officials who carry out the democratic process and calling for votes to be counted by hand. The administration has halted federal intelligence briefings for state officials responsible for overseeing the vote, and it has ended funding for an information-sharing network. Federal employees who worked to combat foreign disinformation within CISA were put on leave, and DHS hired Heather Honey, a conservative activist who’d tried to help overturn Trump’s 2020 defeat, to oversee election integrity. The administration is investigating the 2020 elections in Georgia and Arizona, and demanding access to data about voters—and Mullin has threatened to throw election officials in prison if they don’t comply.
The administration’s stances are deepening distrust and straining relations with state and local election officials, especially those who are Democrats. Although the ability of foreign attackers to change election results remains low, given the decentralization of the system, former CISA officials told us, the broader goal of hackers would be to undermine confidence in democratic institutions and the integrity of U.S. elections. But that’s what the president and his allies are already doing as they continue to make false or unproven claims about rampant voter fraud. State officials worry that if a foreign hack actually happens, the administration will use the incident as a justification to press for more federal control.
CISA was meant to provide nonpartisan, technical expertise and function like the Transportation Security Administration or the Secret Service. It has no regulatory authority, so it relies on the trust of state and local officials who want its support and advice. But the hope that it would float above politics was damaged after the 2020 presidential election. Republican lawmakers erupted at the Biden administration’s attempts to enlist CISA against foreign misinformation campaigns, accusing the administration of “weaponizing” the agency to pressure social-media companies and censor conservative speech.
Today, it’s mostly Democratic officials who are wary of the agency. Half a dozen Democratic secretaries of state, along with some of their staff members, told us that they no longer look to CISA as a reliable partner to help safeguard their election-related systems. They have tried to replace the role of the agency by sharing information with one another and enlisting the help of private contractors, state and local law enforcement, state homeland-security departments and National Guard, emergency-management agencies, and nonprofit organizations (including one filled with ex-CISA officials).
But no other entity can replace the extensive intelligence gathering and threat analysis that the federal government performs by drawing on its web of agencies and cyber units, experts told us. It took years for CISA to earn the trust of state and local election officials, some of whom had been suspicious of the agency during its early days but came to appreciate its help in responding to cyber threats, limiting damage, and even assessing buildings for vulnerabilities in an era shaped by political violence.
Krebs, now an independent consultant, was singled out by the White House in an April 2025 presidential memorandum titled “Addressing Risks From Chris Krebs and Government Censorship” that claimed that he’d “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
The attacks on water systems may be a warm-up. Krebs told us that cyberattackers target utilities that are in some way connected to the internet. Many smaller water systems with fewer employees lack expertise but may have a greater need to perform remote operations that require connectivity. During previous attacks on water utilities, hackers sought out systems with poor password security, which allowed them to disrupt operations until the interference was detected. Krebs said that these weaknesses are a result of a wider, lackluster approach to cyber risks, but he added that it’s unfair for Trump officials to tell local governments that it’s solely their responsibility to fend off the attacks.
The U.S. bombing campaign in Iran has hit bridges, desalination plants, and power stations, and Trump has threatened to wipe out the rest of the country’s physical infrastructure. Although Iran can’t retaliate from the air, it can try to hit back online.
“If you’re gonna go start a shooting war with someone that we know has capabilities, you have a responsibility to work with state and local partners and give them a hand,” Krebs said. “You can’t have a geopolitical conflict on a global level that’s going to manifest at the local level and not do anything in between.”
Jen Easterly, who ran CISA during the Biden administration, told us that water systems and other U.S. utilities were created to maximize efficiency and reliability, not security. “They have a lot of inherent weaknesses, but I don’t think these small towns and municipalities should have to defend themselves from the Iranian government,” she said. AI models are making it easier for hackers to find vulnerabilities and exploit these systems, she said: “The threats are moving faster and the risks are more dangerous than ever.”
Most of the voting equipment used in U.S. elections is not connected to the internet and produces paper ballots as a backup against manipulated tallies. It is the other, online elements of the electoral process that remain most vulnerable, including voter-registration systems and state and local election websites that report results. If hackers can inflict outages or make abrupt changes by hacking those sites, they can damage public confidence.
Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who serves as secretary of state in Arizona, told us that he remains skeptical of CISA and the administration it reports to. “They cut off all support for us; they’ve threatened to investigate us, they’ve continued to promote falsehoods against election officials across the country,” he said. “And that’s not the posture that an ally would take. That’s what an adversary would do.”
One day after the United States struck Iran’s nuclear capabilities last summer, a suspected pro-Iranian intruder gained access to the Arizona secretary of state’s server and websites. The cyberattacker defaced websites displaying election results dating to 2016 and replaced candidate photos with images of a late Iranian ayatollah. State staff scrambled to limit the damage and alerted state-government officials. But given CISA’s new direction and staff, Fontes did not directly tell the agency as he would have previously. Instead, his office asked state homeland-security officials to connect with CISA—but without identifying the office that was affected. “I don’t trust them,” Fontes told us at the time, adding that he had lost confidence that the agency was collaborating in good faith.
Some state election officials told us that they fear that any information they share with CISA about cyber intrusions, weaknesses, or threats could be used against them as evidence of malfeasance or wrongdoing. They watched that scenario unfold when Trump blamed Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, for cyberattacks on his state’s water utilities, not Iran, the suspected culprit. “The strange thing is, after this water incident and others, I don’t have to worry about state and nonstate malicious actors,” Walz told us. “I have to worry about this administration.”
One election official in a battleground state told us that he had received a threat briefing in April from major technology companies that said that, based on their intelligence, they have a “high degree of confidence that Iran is going to attempt to disrupt the general election this year.” The state official said that he wasn’t surprised by the information but that he was baffled when a CISA official reached out a few weeks ago, after Trump’s prime-time address questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election, for the first time in many months to let him know that CISA “would like to come back and help.” He remains skeptical.
Andersen, CISA’s acting director, faced sharp questioning from Democratic secretaries of state when he appeared on a video call with them on Monday, twirling a pen and sipping an energy drink, according to people on the call. They asked him why they should trust the agency, whether CISA would resume offering them intelligence briefings, and whether it would restart penetration testing of their systems (another service that they said had gone dormant) before the November election. Andersen sidestepped some of the questions, gave noncommittal responses to others, and said that government shutdowns had affected various services. He also told the group that some of the services for election officials might resume in 2027, those on the call said.
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, told us that he got the impression that CISA is “mostly writing off the 2026 election cycle” when it comes to direct services for states. “They kind of seemed resigned to looking forward to the next election cycle and not this one,” Simon said. Several secretaries of state said that although they hope the federal government will restore the services before the November election, it is late in the cycle for CISA to help in any meaningful way.
Why shouldn’t Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White play women’s basketball? The answer is simple: They’re not female. By all evidence, the two former NBA players have XY chromosomes—White has fathered children—and have been through male puberty. They have significant athletic advantages over female athletes and should not be eligible for the WNBA. To reach this conclusion, I don’t need to peer into the pair’s souls to see whether they’re pink or blue, nor do I need to decide whether they are sincerely applying for the WNBA draft or just trolling.
Although, let’s be clear, they are trolling. On August 6, Freedom sent a letter to the WNBA’s commissioner that might as well have read: Hello—I would like some attention. The 34-year-old, whose NBA profile lists him at 6 foot 10 and 250 pounds, played pro basketball for 11 seasons. Now he wants to register for the women’s draft. He argued on X that he is “simply asking that the current rules be applied equally to everyone—the rules that represent the very values many WNBA players and coaches have publicly advocated for.” In an interview on Friday, he imagined catching a pass from the Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark, dunking the ball, and then bumping chests with her—“which I’m allowed to do,” he said, “because I’m now a woman.”
The backdrop to this stunt is the controversy over the Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, who told ESPN last month, “I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men,” and has been mocked as “MAGA Barbie” because of her views. The players’ union put out a statement condemning the “hate, abuse, and demonization of any person or group of people, including transgender people.”
As it stands, the WNBA’s collective-bargaining agreement restricts entry to “players who are women” but does not define women. The league has so far waved away Freedom and White. “There are no immediate eligibility matters affecting the WNBA,” it declared in a statement Wednesday, “and we strongly denounce the bad-faith efforts to use these topics to demean or marginalize others.”
No one—not even White and Freedom—seriously believes that the WNBA will let the two trollish men play as women. But the league apparently hopes to reject them without ever grudgingly coughing out an agreement with Cunningham’s view that biological males don’t belong in women’s sports. Five years ago, the WNBA’s official Twitter account celebrated Andraya Yearwood and Terry Miller, biologically male athletes whose female competitors in Connecticut sued to keep them out of girls’ races in high-school athletics. The ACLU defended the trans girls’ right to compete. Above a picture of Yearwood and Miller, the WNBA expressed its own support: “We support you and all of the other trans athletes just trying to compete in the sports they love.” (Six years on, there has been no ruling in the case.)
The WNBA has become an appealing target for culture-war politicking, in part because the successes of Clark and a handful of other exceptional players have significantly raised the league’s profile in the past few years. As its prominence grows, its ability to sidestep controversy shrinks.
Not long after Freedom’s declaration, White also announced plans to enter the draft. After a short, lackluster career in the NBA, he is now a conservative activist who has run for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, and he is currently under a no-contact order with his ex-wife because of alleged threats against her and their teenage son. (He has disputed the accusations.) White has declared that he is indeed a woman, if only for basketball purposes. “I’ve always trusted the science and I thought I was a man my entire life, but after further review, a strong look at my personal preferences, it would appear that I am indeed sometimes identifying as a transgender woman,” he said on Fox News. He has since bought a long wig and accused a television network that canceled an interview with him of “not giving Black women a voice.”
When the WNBA uses the words bad faith, the only reasonable interpretation is that league officials do not believe that White and Freedom are women, despite their self-declarations. Funny story: I’m still on the advocacy group GLAAD’s enemies list for saying the same thing in 2017, in a column headlined “A Man Can’t Just Say He Has Turned Into a Woman.” At the time, Britain’s government was debating whether to loosen requirements for a person to legally change their gender. Many feminists feared that without any gatekeeping, nothing would stop male creeps and predators from using a new identity to victimize women (as the rapist Karen White did in a women’s prison). Although my article acknowledges the existence of transgender identities, it also argues that legal protections for trans people should rest on a medical diagnosis, or at least a formal bureaucratic procedure, rather than a simple verbal declaration.
Now, it seems, the WNBA agrees with me—White has not magically turned into a woman because he says so. You are allowed to dispute people’s self-identification. But only if they are a Republican.
In the United States, many progressive organizations, including the ACLU, maintain that the female category belongs to anyone who (sincerely) identifies into it. The underlying argument is that trans people should not have to seek medical treatment or alter their physical presentation to have their inner identities respected.
Freedom and White have elicited much less deference. Pod Save America’s Jon Lovett recently declared, “If they would like to play in the WNBA, they better fucking transition. Let’s get them on some fucking hormones.” The left-wing satirist Walter Masterson demanded that the two men “commit to the bit” and “chemically transition, or STFU.” But this is not a demand that is applied, say, to male sex offenders who ask to be housed in women’s prisons in California. Several years ago, the ACLU and other groups successfully lobbied for a law directing prison authorities to house trans women in a women’s facility if they request it, regardless of whether they have physically transitioned at all.
Bombarded with pro-trans commentators insisting that he medically transition, White has gleefully thrown progressive talking points back at them. “Don’t tell me how to be a Black woman! Taking hormones are optional,” he wrote in one X post. In another, he added, “Genitalia doesn’t determine gender.” Royce’s clapbacks are near-verbatimrehashings of popular activist slogans.
Over the past decade, many sports have wrestled with the question of how trans and nonbinary athletes can be accommodated fairly and safely. In some cases, such inclusion has presented no problems—biological females have competed in sports for bothsex categories because they have no unfair advantage in either. (The WNBA accommodated the player Layshia Clarendon, who came out as trans and nonbinary, until their retirement in 2024.) Admitting biological males to women’s sports presents a more difficult question. Almost everyone agrees that men are on average stronger and faster than women, but how much of that advantage can be mitigated by testosterone suppression? Various sporting bodies have tried different approaches in the past decade, although many—including the International Olympic Committee and the Women’s Tennis Association—have now concluded that the women’s category cannot admit males, no matter how comprehensive their physical transition has been.
Having belatedly realized that the majority of Americans do not agree with their enthusiasm for male inclusion in women’s sports, the response of the left has often been to say: Why are we even talking about this nonstory? The columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic criticized Cunningham for “choosing to weigh in on the divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated ‘issue,’ and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.” But surely, athletes are allowed to have an opinion about competitive eligibility for their own league? For a long time, the right told stars such as Colin Kaepernick, who wanted to make political points about racism and injustice, that they should “stick to sports.” Some on the left now think that female athletes should not even have that grace.
What Freedom and White’s trolling has exposed is a widespread refusal to defend gender-self-identification policies on their own merits. One can argue that there is no such thing as male athletic advantage, or that inclusion for trans people is more important than fairness and safety for women. Both of these arguments are wrong, in my view, but at least they are internally coherent. What we get instead is a squeamish refusal to own the consequences of the approach that liberals endorse: White and Freedom are cynical operators, and that’s all anyone needs to know.
My counterpoint would be that cynical operators will always be with us. Any regulations that can’t deal with that fact are, by definition, bad regulations. Self-identification is unworkable in practice for the same reason that prison abolition isn’t viable: Bad actors will ruthlessly further their own interests at other people’s expense. For more examples, see how rich students are asking for disability accommodations to secure an advantage in college exams. How some air travelers are using wheelchair services to skip lines—at the expense of genuinely disabled people. How the service-animal exemption for airplanes was stretched so far that someone eventually tried to take a peacock into the cabin. Wherever there is an unpoliced boundary, some individuals will cross it.
Why would gender be exempt from this phenomenon? In 2024, soon after Germany passed a gender-self-ID law, a neo-Nazi named Sven Liebich declared that he was now Marla-Svenja Liebich and would therefore require accommodation in a women’s prison. (Marla-Svenja kept Sven’s handlebar mustache, however.) After a public backlash, Liebich was sent to a men’s jail, although it is unclear what legal basis the German state had for declaring this one particular case of self-identification fraudulent.
The WNBA appears to be following the same playbook—gearing up to make an arbitrary decision because of bad publicity, rather than engaging with the fact that its policies have created an exploitable loophole. Keeping out Freedom and White is not a hard problem to solve: Just say that you respect people’s identities, but sports are segregated by sex.
Progressives are losing the fight over gender identity in women’s sports. It’s time to concede and move on. They should save their energy to fight some of the truly egregious discrimination imposed against trans people by red states and Donald Trump’s executive orders. No one’s interest is served by refusing to articulate why Freedom and White don’t belong in the WNBA.
“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.
So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.
The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.
The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.
For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.
To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.
Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The goal was less to exclude criminals from the banking system than to use “the banks to track the money and find the criminals,” Aaron Klein, an expert in banking regulation at the Brookings Institution, explained to me.
By destroying the database, the Trump administration has removed that help from financial institutions and foreclosed an essential avenue for tracking crooks.
Despite the Treasury’s claims that this purported deregulation of financial information “is a victory for common sense and American small businesses,” in the words of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the change provides scarcely any benefit at all to honest businesses. They still have to report the relevant names, addresses, dates of birth, and government-ID numbers every time they transact with a financial institution. That burden remains the law. They have been relieved only of the slight additional chore of filing the same information with the federal government—a chore that lowered their costs of doing business. Those costs are now destined to rise.
The purported “deregulation” is, however, a great benefit to tax evaders, drug traffickers, money launderers, and other criminals hoping to elude scrutiny of their finances. If they can locate a weak or careless or greedy financial institution, they can open accounts with imperfect information—and they now stand a much higher chance of getting away with their deception. The Financial Accountability and Corporate Transparency Coalition estimates that the Treasury’s action reduces the number of enterprises required to report their true ownership from 32.6 million to 11,667.
The Trump administration is the most pro-crime administration in United States history—as long as the crime in question is committed by the president, his family, his donors, or his friends. Klein at Brookings noted that Trump is using anti-money-laundering laws to require notice of remittances to Mexico of as little as $200 (the legal threshold is $10,000) even as his associates, including Paul Manafort, are allowed to keep anonymous bank accounts in Delaware.
Across the federal government, enforcement against rich-people crimes has been crippled or abandoned. Inside the Department of Justice, resources have been redistributed away from white-collar-crime enforcement, and Trump has stopped enforcing laws against bribing foreign officials altogether. Pre-Trump, some three dozen lawyers worked on domestic public integrity at DOJ. That figure has been cut to two. The team that policed lawbreaking in the crypto industry has been disbanded.
The Treasury’s announcement last week is merely the latest Trump gift to crooks, cheats, and traffickers. As his popularity collapses among almost every other demographic, Trump seems to recognize that the criminal-American community is his last and most loyal constituency.
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Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on August 18, 2026
Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.
He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.
Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.
The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.
What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.
Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”
Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.
Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.
I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.
Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.
I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.
The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.
To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.
Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)
It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.
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.
“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.” That yearning is reflected in American consumer culture: “By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes.”
This early push to transition into fall can make us lose sight of what’s so special about the season we’re in now. For Bruenig, it’s accompanying her children on adventures and watching them play freely. For others, it might be spending more time with loved ones, travelling, or enjoying the simple pleasure of ice cream (although it is my personal belief that ice cream has no seasonal limits). Today’s newsletter explores how to make the most of the end of summer—without putting too much pressure on yourself to do it perfectly.
If Only This Could Last Forever
By Elizabeth Bruenig
Summer is the worst season of all, and also the most beautiful.
Go for a walk: In 2021, Arthur C. Brooks recounted what he learned about transcendence from a very boring 100-mile trek.
The new parent trap: At summer camp, the kids may be far from home, but technology is keeping many moms and dads tethered to them—and anxious, Russell Shaw writes.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Last night I couldn’t sleep and sat on the front porch in the dark, surprised to hear rain,” Bliss G. wrote last month. “This morning, no sign of the rain but this one, glorious drop, which even in the breeze, wouldn’t disappear.”
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
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.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has said that the U.S. could maintain a blockade of Iran “indefinitely.” On Washington Week With The Atlantic, panelists joined to discuss the political consequences of the continued conflict, and more.
The president has made “a total miscalculation” with Iran, Elisabeth Bumiller, a writer at large at The New York Times, argued last night. What has unfolded since the conflict began reflects “the reason that previous presidents did not do what Donald Trump did, because of the inevitable consequences” of “igniting a regional war in the Middle East and closing the Strait of Hormuz.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Bumiller; Adam Harris, the host of Radio Atlantic; Dan Lamothe, a national-security reporter at The Washington Post; Liz Landers, a White House correspondent at PBS News Hour.
The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.
These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”
The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”
A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.
Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.
In the United States, official guidance on toilet training has been through a huge evolution over the past century. In a 1938 guide to infant care, the U.S. Children’s Bureau advised that bowel training should begin at six months or earlier and be completed by the child’s first birthday; bladder training should start at 10 months, and daytime dryness should be achieved by age 2.
Things shifted in the mid-20th century, particularly after the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton published a paper titled “A Child-Oriented Approach to Toilet Training,” in which he argued that a child needed to reach certain physiological and psychological milestones before their training could begin. Brazelton’s emphasis wasn’t really on starting at a particular age but on allowing the child to direct the process. “Don’t rush your toddler into toilet training or let anyone else tell you it’s time,” he said years later, in a 1998 Pampers commercial. “It’s got to be his choice.”
The child-led approach has had formal backing from established experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, since the 1960s. To this day, many American parents are coached to wait for signs of their child’s readiness before kick-starting the potty-training process. (Readiness is a fuzzy term, but it essentially means that a child will, in addition to hitting specific physical and cognitive milestones, ideally give indications that they’re motivated to use the toilet, such as expressing discomfort in soiled diapers and a desire to wear “big-kid” underwear.) A University of Michigan poll last year, of a national sample of parents, found that 75 percent reported initiating training when their child “seemed ready.” Other motivations for beginning—preparation for day care or preschool, the high cost of diapers—weren’t as influential.
All of this waiting for readiness has coincided with the emergence of delayed potty training. According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.
In parents’ defense, the readiness framework can be hard to follow. Tinne Van Aggelpoel, a Belgian pelvic-floor physiotherapist who has conducted research aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of delayed toilet training, told me that no consensus exists regarding what ought to count as a sign of readiness or when parents can expect signs to manifest. Some, such as the ability to stably sit on a potty, tend to emerge very young. Others, such as the capacity to walk or dress oneself, develop far later. And some seem unlikely to develop until potty training has begun: A child probably won’t start asking to use a potty chair or demonstrate the ability to sit on it for long stretches unless a potty chair is already in the picture. “If you don’t give your child a bicycle,” Van Aggelpoel said, “then they don’t learn to ride the bicycle, right?”
The deeper issue, though, is that readiness does not develop in a vacuum. It is influenced by all sorts of social and environmental factors, including diapers, Van Aggelpoel said. Bodily cues—expressions that a child needs relief—are one common sign that a kid is ready to toilet train. But research by Van Aggelpoel and her colleagues suggests that disposable diapers reduce these signals. Without a diaper on, kids squirm and touch themselves when they need to use the toilet. Kids wearing a disposable diaper mostly carry on playing. And of course, to a great extent, readiness boils down to a child’s dissatisfaction with the diapered status quo—the discomfort of which today’s diapers have been explicitly designed to mitigate.
From Van Aggelpoel’s perspective, there’s no such thing as training too early. Continence, like crawling or walking, is a motor skill that develops over time. Its development relies on sensory feedback acquired through a messy trial-and-error process of exercise and repetition. “You do something, and something goes wrong,” Van Aggelpoel said, “and then you know, This was wrong; I need to do it in another way.” Just as children learning to roll, crawl, and walk need plenty of opportunities to lie on the floor, pull up on chairs, and tumble around, children learning to control their bowels need plenty of opportunities to experience all of the bodily sensations that go along with failing to hold it. Disposable diapers directly inhibit this feedback loop.
In the United Kingdom, experts have lately been departing from the readiness-centric paradigm. This past spring, when I was living in England, a health-care provider examining my then-10-month-old told me that there was no need to put off potty training, and then texted me a link to a site offering parents guidance on how to get started. “Should we wait for ‘signs of readiness’?” the FAQs read. “No!” the answer said. “The idea of readiness is not based on good research evidence.”
In the United States, too, experts seem to be subtly backing away from recommending that parents delay. In 2008, guidance from the American Academy of Family Physicians stated in no uncertain terms that the skills required for toilet training do not emerge until after age 2; it cited research suggesting that children benefit little from starting training earlier than 27 months, because the earlier training begins, the longer it takes. But an updated version of the guidance, published in 2019, acknowledged that kids in a lot of countries are trained much earlier—89 percent of Vietnamese children begin training by six months, and 98 percent are trained by 2, for example—and that normally developing children seemed to experience “no harms from early training.”
As recently as 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ webpage outlining the right age to potty train stated that “child-development experts now believe that toilet training works best for most families if it can be delayed until the child is ready to control much of the process herself.” The current page is far less heavy-handed about children calling the shots, advising parents to “expect hesitancy.”
Dorota Talalay, a Polish writer who has pointed out how odd the delayed approach to potty training looks to many people outside the Anglosphere, acknowledged that training can indeed take longer the earlier that you start. But she told me that this doesn’t necessarily mean the training is harder. When she began plopping her child, at six months old, on the potty every 90 minutes or so, she received little resistance. “You just sit them on the potty,” she said, “and because they can’t walk, they just sit there, they do their thing, and then everybody moves on with their lives.”
By contrast, the current U.S. norm of waiting until kids are at least 2 means that potty training is aligned with a child’s “peak defiance,” Talalay said. She may be on to something. Per the Michigan poll, the most common potty-training difficulty that parents cite is the child “not being cooperative.” Oddly enough, then, if the goal is to avoid urging a child to begin training when they’d rather not, the key may be not to delay—but to start early.
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Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable. In the meantime, though, Johnson has shared just a single set of texts: a Fauci group chat that he considered so explosive in its implications that it had to be released forthwith. “This is a blockbuster revelation,” the senator said on Tuesday. The public had to know.
The texts in question were from a short exchange that Fauci had with two other public-health officials—former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky—in January 2021. Murthy had asked whether either of them knew of “any data or theoretical reason” why an expectant mother might choose to vaccinate early versus late in pregnancy. Walensky answered no, that this was all “data free.”
Fauci agreed, but a couple of hours later, he followed up. After asking around, he’d heard about a theoretical concern: A second dose of the vaccine could lead to fever and cytokine storm—an overactivation of the immune system, also linked to COVID itself—which in turn might lead to early-term miscarriage. In an interview that Fauci gave just one week later, he alluded to the need for balanced thinking on vaccination during pregnancy, given the lack of clinical-trial data. But he noted that thousands of expectant mothers had already gotten shots by then, and no issues had arisen. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said, but “I would rather take my chances with a vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant.”
Fauci’s critics now assert that this was tantamount to murder. Fauci knew that COVID shots were killing babies, they argue—he said so in a private text—and then he went out and pretended that the shots were safe. Representative Anna Paulina Luna called this “a crime against humanity and the most evil thing that could’ve ever been done.” Meghan McCain demanded that the 85-year-old be handcuffed, perp-walked, and put in a jail cell for the rest of his life. (“This is not hyperbole,” she noted, rather unconvincingly.) Senator Roger Marshall called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the matter—either that, he said, or “a full 9/11-style commission.”
Even a cursory reading of the context at the time suggests that Fauci’s group chat doesn’t quite reach the level of a “crime against humanity.” In fact, the new material is unremarkable, unrevealing, and—worst of all—maddeningly irrelevant to the many, far more interesting questions that still surround one of our most important public-health leader’s behavior and decision making during the pandemic.
Despite this week’s operatic calls for justice, there wasn’t really any gap between what Fauci typed into his phone and what he said in public at the time. Indeed, according to the messages released this week, Fauci sent another text to the same two colleagues just one day after he’d voiced his “theoretical” concern about the risks of vaccination. In that message, he gave essentially the same assessment that he’d offer to the public shortly after. He even used similar language: “No red flags” had yet emerged from real-world use, but even so, in the absence of clinical-trial data, “one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits.” (Senator Johnson’s office told me that the records show that “Dr. Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know,” and in doing so he robbed them of informed consent. Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky did not respond to requests for comment.)
That logic still applies. The safety and efficacy of the COVID shot during pregnancy were never tested in a full-scale, randomized clinical trial. But observational data—of which we now possess a very large quantity, after many millions of vaccinations—have not identified any reason to believe that any risk of miscarriage, if present, is significant. If the mRNA shots really were abortions in a needle, as some of Fauci’s critics have alleged—if they really caused a loss of pregnancy in 82 percent of cases, as Senator Ted Cruz and many others claim—then this catastrophic harm would surely have caused at least a blip in U.S. birthrates in 2021, when more than 200 million Americans were fully vaccinated. (As it happens, the number of Americans born that year went up.)
More tempered critics acknowledge that the COVID shots never did turn out to be dramatically unsafe for pregnant women—but then, no one could be confident about the risk at the start of 2021. The text message shows that Fauci clearly was aware of the uncertainty, they argue, yet he buried it in public statements; his crime, in other words, was one of clinical duplicity in the first degree. “He essentially told the public that it was safe for pregnant women to take it when he didn’t know that,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said this week.
But Fauci and the public-health establishment did signal their uncertainty. If anything, they were unusually direct about the known unknowns around this topic—at least compared with their messaging on COVID origins, the value of masking, and the importance of school closures, among other squirrelly, scientific questions. When it came to vaccination during pregnancy, no one hid the fact that the most conclusive safety data were lacking. Fauci made this point both in public and in private; he also said repeatedly, both in public and in private, that the systems used to track vaccines’ adverse events had not yet picked up on any reasons for concern—an assessment that more formal analyses would later confirm. In the meantime, the CDC had already found that getting COVID was itself a major threat to pregnant women’s health, associated with a tripled likelihood of going to the ICU and a 70 percent higher risk of death.
What was this, if not transparency? Vaccines had been made available; the CDC’s official advice was that expectant mothers should discuss the matter with their doctors and reach their own conclusions. In the face of all this cautious, careful guidance, many women did decide to skip the shots: By the end of July 2021, fewer than one-quarter of all the pregnant women in the country had been vaccinated, according to CDC data from the time. That lack of uptake may well have had a grave human cost all its own, given that maternal mortality rates doubled in that year.
In other words, this week’s attacks on Fauci haven’t just inflated the importance of his text message; they’ve reversed its meaning altogether, transfiguring a moment of humility into one of arrogance and self-contradiction. The resulting tangle of misinformation has done little more than bring disgrace to the actual work of determining whether, and how, Fauci and other public-health officials might really have misused their power.
The case against Fauci has always been diverse; its most aggressive prosecutors are a big-tent assemblage of anti-vaxxers, libertarians, and lab-leak truthers. Some believe that he lied about the safety of the COVID shots; others say that he was the capo of immoral lockdown measures, or that he played a role in paying for (and then concealing) the research that started the pandemic. So far, the entire spectacle of this investigation—the email dumps, the diary, and now the texts, as well as the Senate hearing where Fauci refused to answer any questions—has only cast a scattered, insufficient light across a range of matters large and small. To choose just one: Do Fauci’s emails really show, as Senator Josh Hawley and others have asserted, that Fauci cajoled his institute’s grantees for help in winning large cash prizes for himself? The documentary evidence doesn’t indicate that he violated any ethics laws, but it is at least suggestive of self-dealing—and it does at least invite further questions about his use of public office. (When pressed on this during his Senate testimony, Fauci responded as he did to every question, by pleading the Fifth.)
And what about the mystery of COVID’s origins? Released emails and private chats do seem to show that virologists in Fauci’s circle took seriously, over many months, the possibility of a lab’s involvement—yet this idea was rarely given credence in the public sphere. Did Fauci help coordinate some sort of message discipline? How much did he really know about the coronavirus work in China that his institute had funded, and what does he think about that sort of research now? The information we have is inconclusive on these points and many others too.
Fauci remains, in the eyes of many experts, a public-health hero whose work on treating and preventing AIDS and other infectious diseases has saved millions of lives. But there are real uncertainties in his pandemic record and questions as to how he and others led the government’s response to COVID—and these points are only getting lost amid the rampant lust for retribution and the wild overreading of his private records. Fauci’s critics say he papered over gaps in knowledge and in doing so misled the public. Now they’re doing just the same.
This summer, Ukraine began one of the most ambitious campaigns of its war with Russia. It launched drones deep into Russian territory, hitting some of the country’s biggest oil refineries and causing a nationwide fuel shortage. In some areas, Russians have waited for gas for as long as 69 hours, in lines stretching miles. Impatient drivers have beaten and stabbed one another. Even state-controlled media have acknowledged the problem.
Ukraine and its allies seemed to hope that frustrated Russians would rise up in protest. After more than four years, the war had finally “come home.” Now that more citizens were feeling its effects, one might assume, they would demand its end and apply pressure to President Vladimir Putin ahead of parliamentary elections in the fall. But so far, no mass uprising appears likely, now or anytime soon.
Russians are used to inconveniences. Under Soviet rule, they lived with shortages of just about everything. Lines were so ubiquitous that academics theorized about Russian identity being shaped by waiting. Books were published with chapter titles such as “The Queue as a Form of Soviet Life.” The newspaper Socialist Industry estimated that Soviet citizens spent 30 billion working hours a year waiting in line for essential goods.
In the late 1980s, at the peak of Soviet scarcity, my family lived on the outskirts of Gorky, a city east of Moscow. Sometimes my mother would send me shopping. I hated it. At a small, gray store called Vegetables, I would wait in line to pick through boxes of rotting produce, hoping to find an acceptable carrot or beetroot for borscht. Then I went to Bread, where I waited some more. Shelves were half empty. The only item that never seemed to run out was margarine; enterprising salespeople tried to make it more appealing by sculpting it into hedgehogs, which they put in display cases. Lines got even longer on the rare days when cheese or butter were delivered. Meat hardly ever came.
Still, nobody protested. We waved away the deprivation and delays. Everyone lives this way, we told ourselves. After all, Soviets knew the cost of complaining. In 1962, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest wage cuts and government-imposed price increases. In response, Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s government deployed thousands of troops, who killed roughly two dozen demonstrators in what became known as the Novocherkassk massacre.
Russians continue to fear their government. I recently called my former neighbor in St. Petersburg, an art teacher and activist whom I’ll call Svetlana. When I asked whether she had witnessed any street protests, she laughed. “Are you guys living on the moon out there?” she asked me. “Don’t you get how dangerous it is here?”
“It’s even worse than in the Soviet days,” Svetlana continued. “One guy bragged to me the other day that he’d reported his neighbor to the FSB”—the successor of the KGB—simply for listening to anti-war music. She also told me about an acquaintance who had spent two years in prison for leaving a poem and flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian poet. In most households, gripes about the regime don’t leave the kitchen.
At the start of the war, demonstrations were more common. In 2022, police arrested nearly 19,000 anti-war activists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights group. Since then, protests have all but disappeared. This year, one of the most notable critics of the regime was a veteran named Alexander Lunin. In June, Lunin put on his military uniform and recorded a speech denouncing Putin and the war. He posted it on social media, where it received more than 12 million views in 24 hours. The police jailed him, and Lunin publicly apologized for “giving in to emotions due to fatigue.”
Earlier this week, the only anti-war party was banned from parliamentary elections. Far-right politicians had sued the party, named Yabloko, alleging that it had received foreign funding, violated copyright law, and promoted “extremism.” The supreme court ruled in the far right’s favor, removing Yabloko from the ballot. Only a few hundred Russians protested outside the court.
Most Russians seem to have inherited the long-suffering mentality of the generations who grew up under Soviet rule. Rather than tiring of the war, “Russians realize that they are under attack, and that it’s time to stand together and tighten their belts,” Irina Borogan, a journalist who has studied Russian dissidents, told me. When the BBC asked a middle-aged man living in Crimea about the fuel shortages, he shrugged them off: “We are humans. We’ll adapt.”
Last month, I called Konstantin Sonin, an economist and a professor at the University of Chicago who left Russia in 2015. He told me that his friends in Moscow have made only the barest wartime accommodations—such as sending their kids to summer camp in Gelendzhik, a town on the Black Sea coast, instead of one in the heavily shelled Crimea, even though both areas are well within range of Ukrainian drones. He sounded astonished by his friends’ comfort with risk. “We’ve seen what Ukrainians have been capable of coping with,” Sonin told me. “Russians can endlessly adapt to this crisis too.”
I heard a similar message from Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist and political scientist who lives in the United States. Inozemtsev told me that his friends in Moscow have used their contacts to circumvent the fuel shortage and get gas delivered to their door. “It’s twice the normal price, but they can afford it; the middle class quickly adapts to difficulties,” he said, while acknowledging that Russians in rural areas will likely have a harder time.
By some accounts, Moscow hardly looks like the capital of a country fighting a war of attrition. Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, described his walk to work to me. The city center, he told me, is filled with decorations that the government has put up: an oversized samovar, an inflatable elephant, sprawling flower beds. Volkov said that he sees no sign of a public revolt. “I would say that the expectations of a revolution in Russia are not based on any real facts,” he said. “All our data proves the opposite.”
A few months before the war, Levada found that Putin’s approval rating was 63 percent. In June, it was 74 percent, although it has been dropping since the start of the year. A majority of Russians—52 percent—said that their country was moving in the right direction. “People blame mainly the West and Washington for all their troubles” instead of Putin, Volkov said. These findings undoubtedly reflect the reluctance of citizens in an authoritarian country to complain to pollsters about their government. Nonetheless, according to Volkov, Levada found that 16 percent of Russians said that they would participate in street protests, up from 11 percent in 2024. Last year, 16 percent of respondents said they felt fear or sadness. This summer, that figure was 29 percent.
Even though there have been no signs of mass protest, Putin is preparing. This year, the Kremlin increased the budget for the national guard and other law-enforcement agencies to a record high of more than $47 billion. Just like Russians who fear the reprise of Soviet-era government violence, Putin also has a precedent to worry about. In 1991, after years of keeping Russians off the streets, the Soviet regime was unable to stop a rally of hundreds of thousands in Moscow, which accelerated its end. Putin may not have much reason to fear such a protest in the near future, but he can’t be too careful.
Somewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.
This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.
Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”
Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence.
Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the lesser of two evils” and made a face when I asked whether he enjoyed being in it. “I can’t imagine saying I like being in any political party,” he told me. “I love being a dad.” Before addressing a crowd in Des Moines County last year, Sand’s staff asked for party insignia to be removed from the walls to make the space more inclusive.
The auditor obviously wants to steer clear of the national party’s noxious fumes. But whereas his progressive contemporaries distance themselves by railing against the establishment, Sand’s campaign approach has been different: Quietly, and with an easygoing optimism that Fred Rogers would envy, Sand questions the concept of partisanship itself. “Our political system is broken, and it’s broken mostly because it’s run by two private clubs” that make voters “feel trapped” into making a binary choice, he told a crowd last month in Newton. “The good news is that Iowa is a place where we have typically said we are going to make politics work for ordinary people.”
National Democrats like what they see—even if they find it tough to describe. Sand “is doing the opposite of what almost every other politician is doing,” the strategist and former Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith told me. He isn’t a loud progressive, but he also doesn’t sound like a corporate moderate, Adam Carlson, a pollster, agreed. “Sand is doing a third thing.”
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Rob Sand rides his bike from Independence to Manchester, Iowa, during RAGBRAI, a weeklong bike ride across Iowa.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
One of the notes riders left for patients of the University of Iowa Health Care Stead Family Children’s Hospital was written by Sand.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
A cyclist wears a jersey with a corn print.
In November, Sand will be up against a potentially strong GOP candidate. But his most daunting adversary will be the math: Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 200,000 in Iowa. Which means that Sand plans to spend the next 11 weeks telling Iowans that he can be trusted, in spite of the D behind his name. Will enough of them believe it?
Sand had been annoyed the last time I wrote about him. I’d included all of the relevant background details in my story: that he grew up in Decorah, a town near the Minnesota border, which explains his long vowels (Sand pronounces it “Dee-corah”); that he went to Brown University and worked a few modeling jobs in Europe before attending law school and working for seven years as a prosecutor. I’d explained that, like any good red-state Democrat, Sand loves to hunt and spends Sunday morning in church—and that his wife’s brothers called him “Baby Jesus” for his tendency toward self-righteousness.
But Sand was concerned about something else: that I had not fully captured his frustration with America’s two-party political system. “I was hoping you’d get more into election reform,” he texted me—a sentence that, I am confident, no one has ever said before or since. At the time, I did not imagine that many readers were pining to hear a state auditor’s thoughts on the decline of bipartisanship. But here we are, three summers later, and Sand is still talking about the same ideas: moving to an open-primary system and implementing “approval voting,” which would allow Iowans to support more than one candidate. More remarkable, voters are listening.
Sand is a Democrat because “Jesus is for the little guy, and the Democratic Party, at its best, is for the little guy.” But his more inclusive vision wouldn’t require party affiliation. The scramble to replace Graham Platner in Maine, for example, wouldn’t have happened under Sand’s system, he said. Or, “if a really old candidate, hypothetically, had a bad debate experience, and everyone was like, Um, maybe this person is too old to do this, it wouldn’t be a crisis.”The reforms would reward civility, Sand added, and prevent one-party domination of a state.
Republicans have had total control over Iowa for a decade. In that time, they’ve dramatically cut income taxes, redirected hundreds of millions of public dollars toward private schools, and restricted abortion after six weeks. Right now, the state is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and the second-highest cancer rate in the country.
But Sand does not harp on Republicans. Actually, a Sand political event doesn’t really feel like one: Each town hall begins with a round of applause for the Republicans, independents, and Democrats (for good measure) who showed up, then transitions into a group rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Sand speaks for a while about his policy priorities (corruption, public education, affordability) before opening the floor to questions, some friendly and others confrontational. The event I attended in Newton concluded with a resounding cheer for—you guessed it!—a return to divided government in Iowa.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Sand speaks with cyclists in Manchester.
An observer might fairly describe all of this as just a tad cringe. But one person’s cringe is another’s stirring call for unity. “There’s a movement afoot for change, and he comes along at a good time,” Steve Mullen, a retired teacher, told me in Newton.
It helps that Sand does not behave like most Democrats. He is not, for example, easily drawn into culture-war debates or bandwagon slogans. Early in his campaign when a radio host asked him whether biological males should be allowed to play in women’s sports, Sand answered succinctly, “No.” In January, after federal officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Sand did not join in the calls to abolish ICE. “He’s taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left think tank Searchlight, told me.
The progressive left, as you might imagine, is not wild about Sand. Some were disgusted, for example, that the Democrat did not release a statement denouncing ICE after Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Others see Sand’s comments on trans athletes as a betrayal of the LGBTQ community. Still, most seem to find the state auditor tolerable. “He’s a happy warrior for nonpartisan technocratic efficiency and anti-corruption,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Sand might slap that on a billboard.
Iowa’s state auditor can seem a little naive. Even if he becomes governor, Sand would almost certainly be working with a Republican state legislature that won’t be eager to hand him any wins. But Sand says he isn’t worried. “There’s still a lot of people of good faith in that caucus,”Sand told me at a deli in Manchester after we’d finished our bike ride. State GOP lawmakers know that they’ll need to have something to show for their public service when they “reach the pearly gates.” Had Sand met a politician recently? I thought. When I voiced my doubts out loud, Sand looked stricken. “I am really hopeful,” he said.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Sand greets supporters at Nordic Fest in his hometown of Decorah, Iowa.
Meanwhile, Republicans are busy trying to convince Iowa voters that the auditor is more extreme than his kumbaya suggests. “It’s like The Truman Show,” Zach Lahn, Sand’s GOP opponent, says in one campaign video. “He’s not a moderate.” In another, Lahn pledges to take back Iowa’s public-school curriculum “from the Marxists who hijacked it.”
Lahn, a former Republican operative, seemed to come out of nowhere in June when he defeated incumbent Representative Randy Feenstra for the GOP nomination. More specifically, Lahn came from Kansas. Although he was born and raised in Iowa, he has lived in Wichita, where he founded a private school, for much of the past decade. TheDes Moines Register reported that Lahn splits his time between Iowa and his second home in Kansas, where some of his children live, although Lahn reassured Iowans that if he is elected governor, he will be in the state “as much as humanly possible.” (Lahn did not respond to my requests for comment.)
But Lahn’s outsider status might help him. He has no elected-office experience and is not yet a known quantity in Iowa, which means that he does not wear the albatross of incumbency. So far, he’s campaigned on protecting small farms from corporate agriculture, an unusual Republican position in the state. For this, as well as his pledge to ban mRNA vaccines and improve the state’s water quality, Lahn has also received the MAHA stamp of approval. Several conservative Iowans along the bike route told me that they wouldn’t have voted for Feenstra, but they were considering Lahn’s “new ideas.”
Lately, Republicans have accused Sand of doing too much stumping and not enough of his day job; they’ve also drawn attention to the significant campaign donations from his wife and her wealthy family. But Lahn’s main project ahead of November will be to remind Iowans that Sand, regardless of his rhetoric, is running as a Democrat. At Sand’s Newton town hall, a Lahn supporter named Carrie Atkinson asked the auditor to declare the number of weeks at which he would support a ban on abortion. Sand answered that he thought Roe v. Wade was a reasonable decision. “He didn’t answer my question!” Atkinson told me later. At another event, a local Republican activist named Gary Loeffler asked Sand to justify his support for abortion as a Christian.There are “many verses in the Bible that say life begins at breath,” Sand said, an answer that enraged some religious conservatives.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Horned helmets line a table.
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Dancers at Nordic Fest
KC McGinnis for The Atlantic
Sand rides in the Nordic Fest parade.
Republicans believe, or say they believe, that Sand, a wealthy guy with an Ivy League education, is far more liberal than he lets on. Loeffler offered a disturbing visual: Like an infested cob of sweet corn, Sand might look normal on the outside, but inside, he’s “full of worms.”
Luckily, I was able to test Loeffler’s hypothesis—by traveling to Sand’s hometown and peering into the proverbial husk. In Decorah, along the Upper Iowa River, I attended Nordic Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian heritage that included Viking battle reenactments, Nordic dancers, and a parade featuring Sand in the back of a convertible. It felt a little like visiting Bedford Falls with George Bailey. “This is Rob Sand; he’s a good friend of my eldest son!” the announcer said as the auditor drove by. Sand’s aunt, who ran the lefse stand, trotted into the street to give him a package of fresh Norwegian flatbread. Sand’s father asked me in Norwegian if I spoke the language of my ancestors. (I do not.)
After the parade, Sand offered a wry tour of his hometown. Walking down the main drag, he pointed out the old teen center. “Can you guess how many times we went?” Near a statue of a long-snouted woodland creature, he explained: “Trolls are out in the world and can be dangerous.” Quickly, we were overwhelmed by friends and well-wishers. Among them was Andy Rasmussen, Sand’s best friend from high school. Sand was always smart and ambitious, Rasmussen, who does autobody work in Decorah, told me later. He liked to skateboard and bowhunt. He didn’t drink, but he’d give friends rides to parties. “The running joke was that someday Rob’s gonna be president,” Rasmussen said. But what were Sand’s politics back then? I wanted to know. Is he a Trojan horse of socialist corn worms? Rasmussen basically shrugged. “He will generally talk to and listen to anybody that’s out there.”
Others who knew Sand during college and law school similarly described a man committed to listening. At Brown in the early 2000s, Sand frequently criticized the Bush administration in his column in the school paper. Still, he recruited Stephen Beale, a conservative columnist at the paper, to start a new class on conservative thought, featuring readings from Edmund Burke, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan. Sand is still “being his authentic self,” Beale, who now works as a freelance writer, told me. “He really does care about hearing the other side.”
I thought about Sand’s cheering section at the Nordic Fest parade. “Light ’em up, Rob!” one man had shouted. But Sand had waved him off. “No, no, no,” he’d said.
The next two months may not be so friendly. So far, Sand has outraised Lahn, but Republicans are pouring millions into the state, partly thanks to a high-profile Senate bid from Democrat Josh Turek and three surprisingly competitive House races. Expect ads from both parties to be vicious—and pervasive. On Thursday, screaming activists for Turning Point Action chased Sand around the Iowa State Fair.
Right now, Sand looks reasonably well positioned for victory. The Cook Political Report has changed its analysis of the race from “lean Republican” to “toss up,” and new polling shows Sand leading Lahn by five points.If he succeeds, Democrats might finally be able to say out loud what many have believed for years: that Iowa still defies partisan categorization.
Many Iowans are only now starting to pay attention. Before I lost Sand on the bike ride, a middle-aged man named Ethan Vaas had rolled up next to us. “Are you who I think you are?” he asked Sand, sounding more suspicious than excited. The two chatted for a moment, but Vaas soon pedaled away, looking unimpressed. An hour later, though, he was back, this time to talk with Sand about his job and his kids. Vaas wasn’t sure how he’d vote this year, he told me later. He typically “leans right.” But there was something different about Sand.
Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing. Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome. Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny. Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky. And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.
In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, Wolfe Herd’s thinking went, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type—content waiting patiently to be chosen.
This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.
Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that when Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, apparently, these women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.
This news didn’t surprise me, but it did feel like a tidy summation of how dating has evolved since 2014. When Wolfe Herd founded Bumble, the idea that an app could revolutionize romance and empower women didn’t seem quite so quaint. Online dating had already begun to transform courtship—and fast. If a lot of men were being overly forceful—sending an excess of innocent, excitable texts or of entitled, angry missives—that was partly an unfortunate by-product of their enthusiasm for the technology: They were logged on, present, and interested. Too interested.
Now America is in an era of dating listlessness. Deciding who should message whom first is difficult when no one seems eager to make a move. These days, a typical app experience might go something like: mindlessly open the platform while between tasks, maybe respond to a message or two, then forget to check back in until the next week. The apps have lost their novelty, and they don’t feel radically promising. They’re homework.
The gender dynamics have also changed. Bumble was built on the premise that men, by nature or nurture, are chasers—and that for too long women have simply been their reward. Yet in my reporting on singlehood, I don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. More often, they say that they do want to feel sought after—but instead are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.
If men seem less actively engaged in courtship, maybe it’s because a lot of them are isolated, scrolling social media or playing video games or gambling online rather than prioritizing romance. Maybe they lost social skills in the pandemic lockdown. Maybe they’re nervous about overstepping or watching screenshots of their blunders go viral. Or perhaps something more profound has shifted. The idea of men as pursuers was based on the assumption that they’re the ones with the power. But now many women, having gained a certain level of educational and professional might, aren’t so desperately reliant on men anymore. The rules regarding who leads and who follows are hazy, and in the absence of a clear mandate, a lot of people simply want the other person to do the work.
I’m not grieving the days of “women message first,” though. Bumble was always a Band-Aid for grislier wounds: an online-dating ecosystem that leaves users with little accountability for their behavior and little recourse when things go bad; a society marred by misogyny, in which many of the wrongs that women face are far worse than a noxious opening pitch. Bumble cut nearly a third of its staff roughly a year ago; since around then, the company’s share price has declined 57 percent. Now the app is launching new features, including one that will deliver a lightly chastising note to people who send perfunctory openers. But those are likely to be superficial fixes too. The age of app optimism is already over.
I’ll keep using dating apps anyway. A virtual conversation, no matter who initiates it, can swiftly go south. Or it can lead to some interesting and beautiful places. That’s the reason, after all, that Bumble’s old rule was never going to change everything: The first hello was always just the beginning.
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Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.
The following contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.
Fleabag (streaming on Prime Video)
Almost nobody is left happy by the final moments of Fleabag—not the heartbroken but resolute “Hot Priest”; not the protagonist Fleabag, watching a fox trail behind the man who has just left her for God; and certainly not the viewer, who has no choice but to let Fleabag look into the camera, shake her head, and leave us behind.
But the best ending is a cathartic one. Fleabag, played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a dry-humored, unabashed, fourth-wall-breaking character who encounters God and new meaning in the second season, which is also the last. She attends a Quaker meeting and is moved by the Holy Spirit to say one of my favorite lines of the series: “I sometimes worry I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” She and her sister, Claire, repair their relationship and each kneel, exasperated, before different men to ask for deliverance—Claire from her obnoxious husband, and Fleabag from her suffering. And in the last moments of the finale, after a backyard wedding and the implosion of Claire’s marriage, Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she loves him, and he tells her, “It’ll pass.” To anybody still reeling from the conclusion of this perfectly short-lived show, that’s also a message to us: This is the end, and one day it will feel like enough.
— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor
***
Twin Peaks (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+)
Twin Peaks had multiple conclusions over its strange life as a TV show, first ending on a shocking second season cliff-hanger in 1991, then failing to resolve that with a follow-up film a year later, leaving fans feeling frustrated by what could have been. But in 2017, the co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost delivered a magnificent and challenging third season with an even more mind-bending last episode. In the true finale of Twin Peaks, titled “Part 18” or “What Is Your Name?,” the heroic Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finally frees himself from the demonic possession that he’s been under for the entire season and travels back in time to the start of the show to try to undo Laura Palmer’s murder. Whatever he does, however, creates an entirely new world that seems even more confusing, and the screen cuts to black as some new version of Laura lets out a chilling scream. It’s another dramatic cliff-hanger, but this time a more intentional one, underlining the hubris in Cooper’s straight-arrow heroism: Try as he might to fix the world’s wrongs, its fundamental evil and suffering are impossible to scrub away.
— David Sims, staff writer
***
Nathan for You (streaming on HBO Max)
The overarching story of Nathan for You, the brilliant docu-comedy hosted by Nathan Fielder, is easy to miss. Fielder’s show ran for four seasons on an episodic premise: He uses his very minimal business acumen to help local entrepreneurs and store owners boost their foot traffic through absurd means that are clearly destined to fail. Fielder performs the role of a stoic, socially awkward, sometimes-cruel game master with aplomb, but amid all the tomfoolery is a very human through line: Fielder, the show implies, really just wants to connect.
That context explains why the series finale is a moving, feature-length meditation on love, remorse, and loneliness. “Finding Frances” focuses on a man named Bill Heath, who previously appeared on the show as the world’s least convincing Bill Gates impersonator. Fielder endeavors to reunite him with a long-lost old girlfriend, and the episode makes clear that he is afraid that he may eventually become Bill, who, in his 70s, is alone and full of regret, having funneled all of his energy into his career. The quest to locate the titular Frances is full of the usual contrivances, but it’s also sentimental and shockingly earnest. The very last scene—in which Fielder has to choose between his heart and his humor—ends the show with a reveal that rings poignant, even a little sad.
— Allegra Frank, senior editor
***
Cowboy Bebop (streaming on Crunchyroll)
This 1998 anime about bounty hunters adventuring through galaxies aboard a spaceship is nothing like its more famous Cartoon Network contemporaries Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Cowboy Bebop isn’t kid friendly (though I did first discover it at age 12): There is bloodshed, sex, and criminal activity, but most of all, there is the profoundly adult theme of running away from one’s past. Among the hunters is Spike, who split from a crime syndicate under circumstances I won’t spoil; Faye, a wanted amnesiac; Jet, the hulking captain, who lost a love; Ed, the quirky teenage hacker left by her father; and Ein, a corgi rescued from a lab.
For me, a perfect finale needs to feel both inevitable and surprising, and it needs to actually round out the story. Cowboy Bebop takes care to draw out every character’s past, and gives them arcs that befit their endings. This does mean that the found family you’ve grown attached to over the course of 26 episodes may not stay together in perpetuity. But I wouldn’t want to see the show finish any other way.
— Shan Wang, programming director
***
Insecure (streaming on HBO Max)
Issa Rae’s namesake character on Insecure routinely looks at herself in the mirror and talks to her alter ego. Her reflection is a little more outgoing and blunt than she is in real life, and in the series finale, that alter ego is once again laughing at her for a situation she put herself in: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here.” In real life, Issa replies that she just wants “to fast-forward to the part where everything is okay.”
But life is not lived in a series of highs. “One could collect the highest peaks of the whole world but put together they would not be a continent,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Just a collection of bristling peaks. No nuances of valleys and plains.” Insecure, as a show, follows the relationships and friendships of two Black women in Los Angeles, giving us a look into the minutiae of their daily lives and how big everything can seem. The finale, in contrast, is a series of vignettes showing each central character’s birthday at some point in the future—the moments when they think they have it all figured out, and the moments amid those highs when they remain insecure.
— Adam Harris, Radio Atlantic host
***
The O.C. (streaming on Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max)
The last season of this popular early-2000s teen drama is somewhat controversial among fans. There are plenty of cringeworthy plotlines (Chris Pratt plays an animal-rights activist named Ché; a main character’s absent father suddenly reappears), but the finale manages to save the show from the mess it’s made. The episode follows Seth Cohen and Ryan Atwood, who was taken in by Seth’s family at the series’ start, as they all prepare to move out of the titular O.C.
The storyline provides closure while leaving just enough open-ended. A flash-forward in the final minutes allows viewers to catch a glimpse of the futures they have yearned to see for these characters: Seth and Summer get married; Ryan goes to college and later offers to help a young boy the way the Cohens once helped him. Set to Patrick Park’s “Life Is a Song,” the montage provides one last moving musical moment on a show known for them. It also delivers what I think all finales should: emotional payoff and an ending that feels earned.
— Kate Guarino, senior editor
***
The Jinx (streaming on HBO Max)
There has never been a finale like the Season 1 finale of The Jinx. The 2015 HBO documentary series investigated the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst, the wife of the real-estate heir Robert Durst, as well as the murders of two of his acquaintances. It sounds like your typical true-crime doc. It isn’t.
If, in the 11 years since it came out, you have by some miracle not been spoiled on what happens, do not read the rest of this blurb. I’m serious. To those in the know or stubborn enough to stay for the spoilers, I will say this: I have never been as shocked by anything on television as when Durst seemingly confesses on mic: “Killed them all, of course.”
I know I am bending the rules a bit here—technically, the Season 1 finale of The Jinx isn’t a series finale, but at the time, it was supposed to be. And the evidence revealed in that season directly contributed to Durst’s arrest and eventual murder conviction, which the show covered when it aired a second season nearly a decade later.
The Jinx ruined all other true-crime documentaries for me. If you aren’t going to actually catch the killer, why would I even watch?
— Julie Beck, staff writer
***
St. Elsewhere (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)
During its run in the 1980s, the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere engaged in plenty of creative experiments. But the 1988 finale is a masterpiece, a loving homage to time-honored shows such as The Fugitive and M*A*S*H (an autopsy is performed on “patient 4077 … Blake, Henry”). Why so many inside jokes about old TV shows?
Because, as we find out in the show’s last few minutes, the entire series is merely the dream of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall. The two top doctors at St. Elsewhere are actually, in Tommy’s real life, his grandfather and his construction-worker father, who wonder what Tommy thinks about all day while sitting in front of the TV and staring into a snow globe with a model of the hospital in it.
This amazing moment lives on: It has spawned years of internet theories about the “Tommy Westphall Universe.” If St. Elsewhere is a dream, what about all of the crossovers from other shows? The doctors of St. Elsewhere visit the bar from Cheers, which is also set in Boston; is that showpart of Tommy’s fantasies?
It is a fine ending to a quirky series, and almost 40 years later, I still wonder whether so many shows I loved were just dreams in a snow globe.
Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking that resulted in death and admitted that he had shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in 2024. Federal prosecutors said that they will seek a life sentence; Mangione still faces a separate state murder charge and has a trial scheduled for next month.
President Trump said that the USS Abraham Lincoln’s deployment of more than 250 days was “not nearly long enough,” rejecting concerns raised by some sailors’ families and Democratic lawmakers about conditions aboard the carrier. The Lincoln, which has been supporting U.S. operations against Iran, is expected to be replaced in the Middle East by the USS George Washington.
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