As China releases ever more capable AI models—ones that compete with Silicon Valley’s top offerings—many American AI and national-security researchers have been arguing, loudly and forcefully, that the world should fear Chinese AI supremacy. The outcomes they envision are catastrophic. I spoke with a number of such experts recently, and they warned of bots that could devise an impenetrable missile-defense system that makes obsolete America’s nuclear arsenal, or manufacture an endless drone army that overwhelms American defenses. They could develop bioweapons that “target specific ethnic groups, e.g. anybody but Han Chinese,” as one influential AI white paper put it in 2024. Rama Elluru, a senior director at the Special Competitive Studies Project, a nonpartisan think tank founded by the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, suggested to me that Chinese AI models could be used to create “engineered humans,” akin to Marvel’s Captain America.

Perhaps anything is possible. At a moment when AI models are self-directing massive security breaches and designing novel pathogens, when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is warning about an “AI-enabled totalitarian nightmare” led by China, the worst-case scenarios can seem closer and closer.

[Read: It may be time to panic about AI]

At the same time, it’s worth taking a breath to consider how much these dire imagined futures are getting ahead of where things actually stand. A struggle really is, of course, playing out among the U.S., China, and any number of other nations over whether democracy or authoritarianism will be the dominant global influence. Both the United States and China have a history of launching propaganda campaigns against each other; the Chinese government is reportedly starting a concerted effort to be the source of more AI training data, in part so that it can embed its views, such as over the status of Taiwan, into chatbots worldwide. But fears about China using AI for swift global domination assume that the technology will advance to a kind of superintelligence: AI models smart enough to develop smarter bots themselves, which would lead whichever country controls them to enter “escape velocity where your adversaries aren’t able to catch up,” David Lin, a senior director at the SCSP who previously covered China and technology at the CIA, told me. It is not clear that such an omniscient digital being can or will be built.

The White House has further muddled matters by taking a series of contradictory stances toward Chinese technology. It has, for example, revised its policy on exports to more easily allow the sale of advanced AI chips to China, while also going back and forth on whether the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies can use the most advanced AI models of Anthropic. How seriously can anyone take the idea that the two nations are locked in a “hot Cold War II,” to quote Palantir chief technology officer Shyam Sankar, when the government is arguably enabling China’s own AI ambitions?

The technological race between the U.S. and China is so often discussed as a winner-takes-all competition. But such a narrow framing obscures what’s most at stake for Americans.

China is an obvious rival to the United States, as most former Biden-administration and current Trump-administration officials would agree. But that also makes “China” a convenient boogeyman for AI lobbyists and those with a clear financial interest in the industry, such as the former White House AI adviser David Sacks, who has said that “the AI race is even more important than the Space Race.”

[From the June 2026 issue: The venture-capital populist]

The two countries are not at war, but the most hawkish AI executives and national-security officials nonetheless fear that AI could confer what in military terms is called a “decisive strategic advantage.” Here is where the Cold War analogies come in. Such an advantage would entail the ability to land some sort of crushing blow that your opponent cannot recover from, “as if one country had nuclear weapons and no other country did, or maybe an even more extreme version of that,” Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center, told me.

Plenty of reasons exist to be cautious of this framing. For starters, to accept this argument, one has to assume that very soon, bots will exist that are smarter than the pooled expertise of entire nations. That’s total speculation, so the war-gaming can amount to “choose your own adventure,” R. David Edelman, an AI-policy researcher at MIT who previously served on President Obama’s National Security Council, told me.

Some pragmatic issues also exist. Software alone can’t win wars: The Pentagon is reportedly using AI models to speed up its target selection in Iran, but no matter how smart those bots are, America nonetheless is not exactly winning the war. Iran, for its part, seems to be hacking America’s water utilities—but those water systems are small and separate from one another, and have built-in physical redundancies. For similar reasons, a hack of a grid or bank would have serious but, in some ways, limited repercussions. These are all grave threats, to be sure, but they are not civilization-ending.

And translating any future ideas from AI into the physical world could take years. Even if AI cracked the code to create super soldiers, the military would have to figure out how to incubate and grow them, or else edit genes in adults without killing them. An AI system might say, Here’s how to defend against nukes, but that would leave the issue of building thousands or millions of missile interceptors on the table. In part for these reasons, no single AI-conferred advantage is likely to be large enough to permit any country to conquer the world. “It strains credibility that six months of advantage in AI could be the difference between the U.S. winning and losing a war with any adversary,” Edelman said.

In any case, the technology’s military capabilities might matter less than its effects on the economy. AI models are released as products. The top models from Chinese AI companies, including Moonshot AI, Z.ai, DeepSeek, and Alibaba, are by all accounts almost as good as and far cheaper to use than offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google. Simply put, that makes Chinese AI more economical for many companies looking to adopt the technology. Indeed, relative to the U.S., China’s government and businesses are “moving very fast,” Chan said.

If this is an economic race rather than a war, then it’s one that the United States could very well lose. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard any executives or researchers describe their work as part of a national contest against the United States,” Grace Shao, an analyst who covers AI and China and the author of the newsletter AI Proem, told me. Instead, “the more important race in China may be the race to diffuse AI into the real economy.”

China’s biggest advantage in the AI race comes from the physical world. This has little to do with AI itself: Decades of being a manufacturing powerhouse and implementing targeted industrial policy have made the country a leader in producing renewable-energy equipment, electric vehicles, robots, and other complex technologies. The country manufactures some 90 percent of all of the crucial components in solar panels. Last year, nearly 90 percent of humanoid robots sold were Chinese. Meanwhile, the U.S. is failing to meet AI’s electricity demands and has struggled to resupply missiles during the war in Iran.

[Tom Nichols: Iran, not Trump, is in control of this war]

“China has this strategy of exporting its technology globally,” Elluru said. Through its Belt and Road Initiative, China has helped build highways, ports, power plants, fiber-optic cables, and data centers throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America; AI services are the logical next offering. The concern, for the U.S., is that “this technology sphere of influence congeals into political alignment” with Beijing, Daniel Remler, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security who previously led AI policy at the State Department, told me.

For instance, dependence on Chinese technology makes it more likely for a government to support Chinese efforts on the global stage and vote with China at the United Nations. Several nations benefiting from these investments have sided with China in its mission to claim Taiwan. China has been accused of using ports, e-commerce platforms, and telecommunications networks in other countries to hoover up data. Already the nation is using AI to enhance its domestic-surveillance apparatus and further crack down on dissent; the spread of Chinese data centers and AI agents abroad could only expand that authoritarian web. National-security analysts are concerned that, in the case of military conflict, China could threaten to shut off partner nations’ digital communications or power grids—including in countries with a large American-military presence. The greatest threat of Chinese “artificial general intelligence” is not some sudden death blow so much as a hastening of the ongoing decline of American hegemony—and the freedoms, at home and around the globe, that at its best the U.S. seeks to enshrine.

Yet the Trump administration and AI industry’s approach to competing with China has been a mess. The White House spokesperson Liz Huston told me that “the United States leads the world in AI innovation, and President Trump will keep it that way.” The administration’s current policies on AI chips, Chinese-made robot parts, advanced cybersecurity models, and open-weight AI are one big contradictory jumble. At a summit this spring, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stressed “rightful alarm regarding China’s historic military buildup” just weeks after President Trump visited Beijing and said the nations would have a “fantastic future together.” OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and the like can’t seem to agree on what they are lobbying for, either. All of which would seem like a great way to lose a technological race with China, any way you measure it.

There’s a certain déjà vu quality to the AI race. Amid fears over Sputnik and nuclear proliferation, a report prepared at the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1958 declared that “should we ever allow the U.S.S.R. and Communist China to attain strategic superiority, we can be certain that subsequent events will be brutal.” According to a government report on the early years of the Advanced Research Projects Agency, “fervent belief in unending scientific progress” offered a way forward. Those words could have been written today by Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, or Secretary of State Marco Rubio. And indeed, this belief propelled America into many decades of technological advancement—in nuclear weapons, space exploration, computer systems, and more. Even back then, that agency, known today as DARPA, was quietly championing an emerging research area called artificial intelligence. J. C. R. Licklider, who championed the use of computer systems at ARPA in the early 1960s following the inspiration of Vannevar Bush, imagined that one day, machines that “will outdo the human brain” could make essentially all decisions of “military significance.” And ARPA developed the precursor to today’s internet.

Today’s AI race also traces back to the 2010s, when Silicon Valley began invoking China as a way to shape regulation. The idea of a technological arms race has “been wielded deliberately as a way to head off any attempts at regulating the tech sector” and, more recently, to champion “favorable industrial policy” for data-center construction, Sarah Myers West, a co–executive director of the AI Now Institute and former senior adviser on AI at the Federal Trade Commission, told me.

In 2018, while testifying before Congress, Mark Zuckerberg said that “if we make it too hard for American companies to innovate in areas like facial recognition, then we will lose to Chinese companies.” A few years later, a dozen former national-security officials wrote a letter to Congress arguing that “antitrust proposals that target specific American technology firms” risked “undermining America’s key advantage vis-à-vis China.” Today Silicon Valley is instead using the specter of China to angle for more and better AI, in more places, and faster.

American officials and tech executives are not wrong to want to compete. But the dominance of an oversimplified U.S.-China AI race, without clarity about who is racing and to where, doesn’t just mangle policy making; it obscures that the ultimate beneficiary of the AI boom ought to be citizens, not military contractors or Silicon Valley’s biggest corporations and investors. Rather than asking what kind of AI we’re building, Myers West said, one could ask, What kind of society are we building? The AI-accelerated spread of authoritarianism, within and outside of China’s borders, should be reason enough to worry. And if American AI executives and White House officials really cared about free-market competition, they might explore enforcing antitrust laws to separate the providers of AI models, data centers, and chips. If they were truly concerned about AI surveillance, they might look into finally passing some sort of federal digital-privacy legislation. And if they cared about spreading democratic AI abroad, they might take a close look at the state of democracy at home.

In a time when an iPhone can be preordered, customized, and on its way to your doorstep all through a touch-screen tap, it’s almost quaint to remember that people used to camp out for smartphone releases. That was once the regular routine of Andrew Erickson, a longtime tech YouTuber, who recalled to me with a mixture of nostalgia and awe the time he braved the rain at 4:30 a.m. to join a line for the newest iPhone. The line snaked through the mall, nearly reaching the parking lot.

[Read: The $10,000 MacBook Pro is here]

Next month, when Apple is expected to launch the iPhone 18 Pro, Erickson has no plans to even buy the phone, let alone fight crowds for it. Instead, along with a growing number of Americans, Erickson is buying used. He’s fed up with incremental improvements in gadgets, he told me, and is more interested in getting an old version of the iPhone 17 Pro when it hits the secondhand market at a discount. Already, almost half of his current devices were acquired secondhand, and as electronics prices soar amid an AI-fueled chip shortage, he expects that portion to grow. “The argument’s just getting weaker and weaker to buy brand-new,” he said.

Based on the numbers, old tech products are indeed being looked at in a new light. Globally, the size of the industry could reach $153.4 billion this year, up from $104.1 billion four years ago. The used-smartphone market alone is expected to grow by more than 12 percent in 2026, according to the International Data Corporation, which forecasts that the market for new smartphones will experience a record drop this year. Growth in secondhand electronics and refurbished gadgets that have been restored to full working condition now outpaces that of new products on eBay, the e-commerce giant reports.

Among a number of shoppers I spoke with, there was a sense that new models are indistinguishable from the old ones, and the hype of securing the latest and greatest has given way to an upgrade cycle driven by practicality. More than ever before, people are eager to buy used.

“We’ve never been here,” Lauren Benton, the U.S. general manager of the refurbished-electronics marketplace Back Market, told me. She said demand ticked up immediately after Apple unveiled price hikes this summer. Back Market’s order values for refurbished MacBooks in the U.S. increased by 37 percent throughout the week following the price increase, while order values for iPads rose 25 percent. Demand for the company’s non-Apple laptops, too, has soared by 74 percent compared with last year. Outside of students and parents, a large portion of the marketplace’s buyers are “people that understand that the newer tech isn’t giving us all that much more,” Benton said.

Regular upgrade cycles were a hallmark of tech gadgets in the 2010s, a trend led by Apple, which has introduced at least one new iPhone model every year since its initial launch. Americans bought into the frenzy: In 2014, the first year Consumer Intelligence Research Partners tracked such figures, about 44 percent of iPhone holders said they replaced their device every one to two years. In those days, lines at Apple stores stretched so long that they were used by analysts to gauge annual demand.

In 2026, the lines that former Apple fanatics once waited in have all but disappeared. Online preorders are partly to blame, but so is dissipating excitement for releases that promise incremental upgrades. People now hold on to their smartphone for three years or longer, fatigued from “buying, effectively, the same device over and over and over again,” Wamsi Mohan, a Bank of America analyst who covers Apple, told me. Those buying new are doing so largely because their phone was broken or stolen, rather than to get their hands on new features. A recent report found that 76 percent of buyers refuse to upgrade until new capabilities feel “worth the cost.”

And those costs are climbing, driven by data centers eating up the world’s inventory of RAM. Samsung’s Galaxy Tab S11, Sony’s PlayStation 5, and Microsoft’s XBox Series S console were all marked up $100 this year. Apple conceded to “unavoidable” hikes in June, increasing the cost of its MacBooks and iPads by roughly 15 to 25 percent. Even the most ardent tech loyalists have changed their buying habits: A recent poll of thousands of readers of 9to5Mac, a website popular among Apple fans, revealed that 38 percent of them intended to upgrade less frequently because of higher prices.

In tandem, people are warming up to refurbished devices. Google queries for secondhand laptop have jumped by upwards of 5,000 percent over the past year. In an April CNET survey, nearly half of U.S. adults said they’d considered buying refurbished tech within the past year and cited cost-effectiveness and expensive new models as driving factors. Angie Cardona-Nelson, who recycles used electronics on eBay, told me that when she started her business in 2008, selling refurbished devices was tough going—she’d sit on products for months, attempting to drum up business with sales or discounts. “There was no confidence to buy a used item,” she said. Since January 2025, her laptop sales have more than doubled, and new listings are being bought up in a week or two.

The way people are buying secondhand devices has also shifted: Instead of opting for products that are roughly three generations behind, buyers are purchasing last year’s models—an indication that the refurbished industry is now attracting those who were “truly considering new,” according to Back Market’s Benton.

Erik Helgesen, the president of PayMore, a retail chain focused on used electronics, told me that the company had already seen a major uptick in sales preceding Apple’s price hike. But after, it was “just a hockey stick,” he said. Now PayMore can hardly keep some products in stock. Helgesen expects the company to open more stores in the coming year to meet demand.

This new readiness to opt out of the endless treadmill of releases seems to be a sign that people are starting to look for something more practical from their devices: deals. Whether this more utilitarian—and arguably healthier—approach to gadget consumption means that we’ll actually free ourselves from expensive tech, though, remains to be seen. A three-year-old MacBook may be a steal today, but as Nabila Popal, a senior director at the International Data Corporation, reminded me, prices reflect demand: If people keep buying up the used gadgets, those prices are bound to shoot up, too.

Today The Atlantic is announcing four new members of the editorial staff: Gabby Deutch and Ian Bogost as staff writers, and Nick Summers and Talya Zax as senior editors.

Ian is a familiar name to Atlantic readers, having been a contributing writer for the past 15 years; Gabby was an Atlantic editorial fellow in 2018 and 2019, and for the past five years has been a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider; Nick is a senior features editor who has worked at New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor; Talya will be a senior editor on the Books desk, and has most recently been the opinion editor at The Forward.

Below is the staff announcement from editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance:

We’re writing to share excellent news: After nearly 15 years as a contributing writer, Ian Bogost is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer; an alumna of the Atlantic fellowship, Gabby Deutch, is returning to us as a staff writer; and Nick Summers and Talya Zax are coming on board as senior editors.

First, Ian. As all of you know by now, Ian is an original—and he has contributed so much to our magazine over the years, with uncommon creativity and range. Ian has produced serious reporting on the cultural and social power of Big Tech, and helped our readers understand the knock-on effects of DOGE under Trump, the chaotic rise of AI in higher education, and the decline of American populist-industrial ambition. He has also analyzed the ontology of slushies, the merits of cow therapy, the delight of toasters, the glory of the 747, the design of carry-on bins, and the strangeness of the McRib sandwich. And he has played with all kinds of formats. (Remember that time he built an old-timey slang generator?) In addition to his reported features and essays, Ian writes the new Ordinary Extraordinary newsletter, which is growing rapidly. When he isn’t writing for us, Ian also serves as the Barbara and David Thomas Distinguished Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. And he is the author of 11 books—most recently The Small Stuff: How to Lead a More Gratifying Life, which was published last month—and is a founding partner of a game and design studio.

Next, Gabby. A member of the 2018–19 fellowship class (along with the previously announced, happily returning Maddy Carlisle), Gabby went on to NewsGuard, where she covered the 2020 election and the proliferation of conspiracies and falsehoods during the coronavirus pandemic as Washington correspondent. Gabby has spent the past five years as a senior correspondent at Jewish Insider, focusing this election cycle on how disputes over anti-Semitism and Israel are affecting both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Her reporting has appeared in The Washington Post, Politico Magazine, Tablet, and Wired. We can’t wait to welcome her back.

In more good news, Nick Summers will be joining us as a features editor. Nick is a talented and experienced editor who comes to us from, among other publications, New York magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New York Times, where he is currently the acting Sunday Business editor. He is a skilled director of business and finance coverage—including investigations and deeply reported profiles of industry leaders—and he’s also assigned and edited stories on topics as varied as the scourge of LED lighting (clearly Nick will have much to discuss with Gilad) and a highly unusual copyright fight.

And finally, Talya Zax is joining us as a senior editor on the Books desk. A sharp, stylish, and omnivorous writer and editor, Talya comes to us from The Forward, where she spent more than a decade at the intersection of news and the arts—including as the publication’s deputy culture editor and, most recently, as its opinion editor. Talya has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, of course, The Atlantic, where she has contributed reviews and reported stories about fiction and theater. We are very happy she’s agreed to join us and can’t wait for her to start.

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | press@theatlantic.com

The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”

In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state’s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.

If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, told me. “This is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,” Swain said. “It just hasn’t been in California”—which usually accounts for much of the nation’s fire activity and its media attention.

Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They’ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon’s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town’s water supply; the week before, he’d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire’s heat.

Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs—about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada—are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus—literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn’t get sent to Vietnam, “and some that did,” Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs’ main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.

Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it’s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association’s chairman, they’d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they’d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they’d catch naps during those stretches—in their trucks?—Doman clarified: “We were not sleeping.” The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year—normally the total they’d have seen by about October—and “we still have 90 more days of fire season,” Doman said.

Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they’re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that “they’re busy with their own fires,” Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. “Yesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,” Skinner said. “So everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.”

Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners “for two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.” Now the fires are burning those same places—land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.

Here it is, August on Martha’s Vineyard, and Alan Dershowitz has barely been heard from.

Well, that’s not exactly true. He has been heard from on many topics—because Dershowitz is who he is, and pretty much anyone can join Substack, and TV bookers can be hard to resist. Still, he has said little publicly about the maddening injustice he’s faced in recent years: his annual summer shunning at the hands of the island’s liberal social gentry. Has this perennial comedy of ill manners—the Vineyard cancellation of Alan Dershowitz—finally run its course?

The story has become a familiar seasonal menace; as pernicious as ticks, and as hard to kill. Its particulars are known. Dershowitz, the inexhaustible Harvard Law professor who represented a gallery of notorious clients over several decades, was once a kibitzing dynamo here. But that was before the blacklists and the badgering.

In his telling (and retelling), Dershowitz became socially radioactive during Donald Trump’s first term, when he began speaking out on the president’s behalf, and then joined his first impeachment defense team. Although he did not personally support Trump—he’d been a lifelong Democrat who’d voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and would support Joe Biden in 2020—his stock explanation was that everyone is entitled to legal representation. It was the same basic principle he had applied when representing the likes of Mike Tyson, O. J. Simpson, Claus von Bülow, and, more recently, Jeffrey Epstein. It was no different, in fact, than the occasion of Dershowitz’s first-ever visit to Martha’s Vineyard, in 1969, when he was enlisted to help in the defense of Ted Kennedy after his late-night accident at Chappaquiddick.

Yet defending Trump was apparently too noxious for Dershowitz’s reputation. “I never thought I would see McCarthyism come to Martha’s Vineyard,” he lamented in a column in The Hill in 2018. According to Dershowitz, locals have urged his exclusion from various Vineyard businesses and institutions. Every summer, it seems, has brought a new episode in ostracism, cold shoulders in the hot sun.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: The right is changing the rules of the culture war]

There was the Great Pierogi Incident last year at the West Tisbury farmers’ market, in which a vendor refused to sell half a dozen dumplings to Dershowitz, citing his representation of “several sexual predators and abusers, including Jeffrey Epstein.” Dershowitz claimed that he was being discriminated against over his vocal support for Israel and initiated a follow-up spectacle a week later in which the vendor, Krem Miskevich, refused to accept a signed copy of one of Dershowitz’s books (The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies) as a peace offering.

In 2022, Dershowitz said he’d received a fan email from a reader who alleged that he’d been beaten up at the beach (he did not specify where) just for carrying a copy of a book written by Dershowitz. “Without warning, I was slugged and punched in the face,” the man wrote to Dershowitz, who reprinted the unverified email on Substack in a post titled “Email From a Man Who Got Beaten Up for Reading My Book.”

And then there was the infamous clash at the Chilmark General Store with Dershowitz’s now very-much-ex-friend Larry David. In the annals of Dershowitz’s social spiral on the Vineyard, this conflagration has taken on almost-mythic dimensions, like his own personal Stalingrad. Dershowitz was sitting on the porch of the store with another friend, “who happened to be a very kind of radical woke lefty from New York, but very tolerant,” he told me. David was not very tolerant, at least of Dershowitz. He walked onto the porch, refused to shake Dershowitz’s hand, called him “disgusting,” and stormed off. Dershowitz said at the time that David was so irate, Dershowitz worried that the comedian might suffer a stroke.

That unpleasantness on the porch, memorialized on Page Six, took place five summers ago. But Dershowitz talks about it as if it were yesterday.

On a recent Saturday, I ventured north from Washington for a little hardship duty in Chilmark, the preciously pastoral town on the western side of the island where Dershowitz has owned a home since 1991. I approached him first by email, telling Dershowitz that I was curious about his current social standing on the Vineyard and how things were going for him this summer. The subject matter could be freshly topical, I figured, because his two most prominent clients—Trump and Epstein—are more toxic than ever. To my surprise, Dershowitz agreed to speak with me.

Actually, I was not surprised.

“We can meet on the porch for a slice,” he proposed.

Dershowitz, who turns 88 next month, has been presiding from the rocking chairs of the Chilmark General Store for decades, juggling pizza and discourse. When I arrived, I found him wearing a bright-red T-shirt with the words Proud American over an Israeli flag and an American one, each in the shape of a heart. He told me that he’d asked his wife, Carolyn Cohen, to join us but she had no interest. “She said, ‘I’m so sick and tired of this subject,’” he told me. Dershowitz conceded that he, too, is weary of it. “But, you know, it’s important that people get the whole context,” he said.

The whole context, in 2026, is basically this: Dershowitz says he has started a new life on the Vineyard. But just because his persecution tale has become an island eye-roll does not mean that it has subsided. Especially, according to Dershowitz, in his own, bucolic neighborhood. “Here in Chilmark, it’s 90 percent negative,” Dershowitz reported to me. That reception contrasts with what he gets in Miami Beach, where he spends his winters and where, he said, he is treated “wonderfully.” He is “treated very well” even in the more heavily trafficked Vineyard towns on the other side of the island. “In Edgartown and even Oak Bluffs, the African American community, I’m treated very well,” he said. “It’s all Chilmark. And it’s all Jewish, anti-Zionist.”

I noted that he can at least still hold court at the Chilmark General Store. But he argued with my choice of the term holding court.

“I used to—not anymore,” he said.

“You don’t hold court anymore?” I asked, as he arguably held court. “What is this?”

“You’re interviewing me,” he said. In the past, it would have been a high-end conclave. “Normally, we would have this whole area,” he said, motioning to a group of rocking chairs on one side of the porch. “I would have Larry David here,” he said. “Ted Danson was here sometimes,” he added. “The guy who did Ghostbusters—he died a few years ago—he was here.” (This was Harold Ramis, who died in 2014.)

“The whole crew of Chilmark friends, I would say, 20 or so, no longer talk to me,” Dershowitz said.

He pointed next door to the Chilmark Tavern, one of his favorite restaurants on the Vineyard, where he claims that some of his vacation nemeses are trying to get him banned. “A bunch of people went to the Chilmark Tavern and said If you continue to serve Dershowitz, we’re not coming here,” he insisted.

I was skeptical of this. “Ask her; you can check with her,” he said. “Jenny.” When I contacted Jenna Petersiel, the proprietor of the Chilmark Tavern, she told me that she’d assumed that The Atlantic wanted to speak with her about the challenges of running a restaurant, or ticks. “A discussion of Alan Dershowitz had not crossed my mind,” she said, declining to comment otherwise. Dershowitz also told me of an event he had attended on the Chilmark Tavern deck not long ago. A woman got out of her car, he claimed, “saw I was up there, turned around, and went back to her car.”

He appears to have a limitless supply of such stories, in part because it seems as if Dershowitz initiates a fair number of confrontations himself. The week before our conversation, he had returned to the hallowed cultural battleground of the Pierogi Wars, the West Tisbury farmers’ market. He was wearing his U.S.-Israel shirt (or “my Zionist T-shirt,” of which he has two—one red, one blue) and saw a guy wearing a Free Palestine shirt. “I walked up to him. I said, ‘Can we take a picture together?’” The man refused. “He said, ‘No, no, no Israel,’ and he walked away.”

Dershowitz believes that many of his old Vineyard friends revile him for calling out the “anti-Zionist” and “radical” bent of the progressive left. He showed me his phone and cued up what he calls “my daily love note.” This one was an unsolicited email he’d just received, with “GENOCIDAL ZIONIST ISRAEL!” in the subject line; he kindly forwarded the note to me. “They always combine Zionism with pedophilia,” Dershowitz observed of his correspondents.

A few times during our conversation, I questioned Dershowitz about whether people really reject him because of his Zionist views or whether it might involve something more comprehensive: him being Alan Dershowitz. His position on the Middle East seems farther down the list of reasons that people might not like him than his affiliations with Trump and Epstein and his overall reputation, accrued over decades.

But Dershowitz claims, for instance, that he’s no longer asked to speak at the Martha’s Vineyard Book Festival because “they censor anybody they disagree with.” (A spokesperson for the book festival told me in an email that Dershowitz’s claim is “completely false” and that “the festival line up over the past two decades hardly reflects a narrow or excluding agenda.”)

“I personify what the woke hates,” Dershowitz said. Before I could ask him what, exactly, “the woke” is, he explained that he is now seen as a “traitor” to the Democratic Party. The enmity is mutual. In September, he has a new book coming out called Why I Quit the Dems: And So Should You! The subtitle is Confessions of a Reluctant Republican.

I asked Dershowitz directly whether he had voted for Trump in 2024.

“You’re allowed to ask it,” he said. “And my wife does not allow me to answer it.”

“Okay, so you’re going to hide behind your wife,” I said.

“I’m going to hide behind my wife,” he confirmed.

For the record, Dershowitz added that he always votes, and said that he had not voted for Kamala Harris. Also, his new book includes a blurb from President Trump (who obviously read every word).

Despite all of this, Dershowitz has arrived at a nuanced take on his snubbing. “I think it’s selective cancellation,” he told me. “We decided, basically, to change our life on the Vineyard.”

He said that he keeps busy by writing and doing regular paid appearances on Newsmax, occasional hits on Fox News, Piers Morgan’s show on YouTube, and other outlets. (He used to be on CNN all the time, but no more—“CNN has canceled me.”) He said that he does not lack social options. He has become very active in a Vineyard Chabad that he helped start. He told me at one point about all of the new friends he’s made. “Most of them are more supportive of Israel than the other group was,” he said. “And I often ask myself, How did I allow myself to become part of that other group?”

When I asked Dershowitz who his new friends are, we wound up talking about someone who is definitely in the “other group”: Larry David.

They used to speak all the time, Dershowitz told me. They would have dinner, share jokes. “I allowed him to use my gym to work out,” Dershowitz said. “I helped him on a number of occasions.”

“Larry David doesn’t talk to me anymore,” Dershowitz said at another point. “He screams and yells at me when he sees me.” He told me that he used to be a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm but can no longer bring himself to watch it. When discussing David, Dershowitz often spoke in the present tense, describing their breach as if it were an active feud and a still-fresh wound.

Predictably, David had minimal enthusiasm for discussing any of this when I reached out to him.

“I don’t know why he’s still thinking and talking about me,” he told me by email.  

As for the five-year-old confrontation at the Chilmark store, David added this: “I have lots of confrontations on my show but rarely in life,” he said. “And then only if I think I can take them in a fight. Hence the Dershowitz dust-up.”

While Dershowitz and I spoke on the porch, a woman sitting in a rocking chair next to him kept leaning in, almost certainly eavesdropping. She confirmed this about half an hour into our conversation.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” the woman said to Dershowitz. “I was just sitting here. And I just wanted to say, you sound super fascinating. And I hope nobody’s ever mean to you. Ever.”

Dershowitz kvelled.

“Did you plant her there or something?” I joked (sort of).

“I only paid her 10 dollars,” he joked (I think).

During our conversation, Dershowitz told me about a less cordial episode that had taken place last month in front of the Chilmark store, just a few feet from where we were sitting. The incident was not covered in the media, but Dershowitz had filmed a portion of it on his phone and shared the video with me. A guy in a Yankees cap had spotted Dershowitz at the store and promptly launched a barrage of Bronx cheers his way from the parking lot.

The man showed exemplary message discipline.

“Do you defend pedophiles? Do you defend pedophiles?” he repeated. “Yes, he does.”

Dershowitz demanded that his tormentor identify himself.

“My name is Jeffrey Epstein Jr., great friend to Alan Dershowitz,” the man replied.

Dershowitz kept demanding that the man state his name.

“What are you going to do?” the man asked.

“I’m going to sue you if you give your name,” Dershowitz said. (Surprisingly, the man continued to withhold his name.)

“Why? What are you going to sue me for?” he asked.

“For defamation.”

The heckler also mocked Dershowitz for, among other things, claiming to a TV reporter that, although he’d once received a massage from an adult woman at Epstein’s house, he’d kept his underwear on during the experience.

“He was on the plane, and he kept his underwear on,” the man taunted, while retreating across the street. There was some more hollering back and forth.

“You’re still a schmuck,” Dershowitz shouted.

In the pantheon of rogues and sleazeballs that Dershowitz has represented, Epstein stands out. Dershowitz helped orchestrate the late sex offender’s controversial plea deal in 2008; Epstein was allowed to plead guilty to state prostitution crimes in Florida, but he avoided federal trafficking charges and wound up serving just 13 months in jail. (At the time of his death, in 2019, he was awaiting trial on federal charges of child sex trafficking, by which point Dershowitz had fallen out with him and was no longer representing him.) Earlier in their relationship, they were frequent companions. Dershowitz was a visitor to Epstein’s homes in Palm Beach and New York, and went once with his wife and daughter to Epstein’s infamous island. (“No young women there,” Dershowitz wrote to me by email. “No one there except staff and ghislaine Maxwell.”)

I asked Dershowitz whether he’d ever been a passenger on Epstein’s plane.

“Oh, 20 times,” he said. As Epstein’s attorney, he explained, when he had to travel to Florida, his client would fly him down. However, the heckler’s claim that Dershowitz had received a massage on the plane was incorrect. That had taken place at Epstein’s home in Palm Beach. “This was a shoulder-and-neck massage, from an older woman,” Dershowitz told me. He said that this was “the only massage I’ve ever had in Epstein’s situation.”

“I’ve never in my life had an erotic massage. Not even from my wife,” he added, excruciatingly.

Dershowitz has said repeatedly that he never witnessed or participated in any unlawful sexual impropriety related to Epstein. In 2014, the Epstein survivor Virginia Giuffre alleged in court documents that the financier had trafficked her to multiple men while she was a minor. This included Dershowitz, who vehemently denied the charges. Giuffre sued Dershowitz for defamation, and Dershowitz countersued, claiming that she had made up the accusations. Giuffre withdrew her suit against Dershowitz in 2022, acknowledging that she might have made a mistake in identifying him. She died by suicide last year.

[Gilad Edelman: What everyone assumes about Jeffrey Epstein]

“I wish I never met him,” Dershowitz told me, speaking of Epstein. “But I don’t regret my representation of him.” This struck me as a classic bit of Dershowitz hairsplitting, and I was not quite sure what to make of it. Regardless, Dershowitz conveyed far more remorse over representing Epstein than I heard him express about any of his other clients. And he told me that he is resigned to Epstein being a lasting stain on his reputation and legacy.

“I’ve been already told I will have a bad obituary in The New York Times,” he volunteered.

“Who told you that?” I asked. “Do they work at The New York Times?”

“No,” Dershowitz said. He claimed to have heard it “from a guy who does obituaries for another newspaper.” (Apparently, all obit writers swap notes.) He added that an obituary writer for the Times did call him.

“With his deep obituary voice,” he noted, affecting a stentorian baritone. “I have to tell you that your obituary will include the allegations against you from Jeffrey Epstein,” the Times reporter said, according to the deep-voiced Dershowitz. He said that he’d urged the obit guy to “put it in perspective.” (Danielle Rhoades Ha, a New York Times spokesperson, declined to comment on any specific obituaries but told me by email, “We don’t write ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ obituaries, but strive for fair, comprehensive and accurate accounts of a person’s full life.”)

Dershowitz wanted to make clear to me how unfair he believes the Epstein-related allegations against him are. He and his wife have been married for 40 years, he said: “I have never cheated. I have never hugged—I don’t hug people. I don’t like hugging.” He also told me that he is “not a big massage person.”

“And by the way, nobody on the Vineyard believed this, even the people who hated me,” Dershowitz added. “Because they all see me with my wife.”

He went further. “In fact, the lawyer for Virginia Giuffre, he came over to me one day”—it was during a deposition—“and said, ‘Alan, I’ve seen you with your wife. I can’t believe you would ever have done anything.’”

I said I was dubious that the opposing lawyer would say something like this.

“I’ll give you his name—his name is Chuck Cooper.”

Reached by phone for comment, Charles Cooper, Giuffre’s lawyer, told me the exchange that Dershowitz had described had never taken place.

“This event that he’s reporting and this comment that he’s attributing to me are both categorically untrue,” Cooper said. He added that he remembers seeing Dershowitz with his wife on only one occasion, and that it was enough for him to make only a “fleeting observation.” Either way, “I did not say and I would never have said what he’s attributed to me,” Cooper said. “Give me a break.”

In the course of my discussion with Dershowitz, I learned of another fundamental change to his life, one that filled me with something I did not expect to feel: pathos.

Last year, Dershowitz’s son Elon died at 64, after suffering a stroke. He had been diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor when he was 10 and had been told that he’d be lucky to make it to his bar mitzvah. “We took extraordinary steps,” Dershowitz said, “all over the world.”

Elon had been his father’s sidekick. A film producer, he was the prime mover behind Reversal of Fortune, the 1990 legal thriller based on Dershowitz’s book about his successful defense of the British socialite Claus von Bülow in his trial for the attempted murder of his wife. The film solidified the status of Dershowitz (played by Ron Silver) as one of the “super lawyers” of his generation. “We went to the Oscars together,” Dershowitz said of him and Elon. Jeremy Irons won Best Actor for his portrayal of von Bülow. They went to an after-party. “I sat next to Gregory Peck, and it was a great moment,” Dershowitz said.

When Dershowitz spoke about Elon, I detected a note of anguish in his voice. On the Vineyard, they’d been pretty much inseparable. Dershowitz’s son used to join him at the Chilmark store, when he still held court. “He would come to the porch with me every day,” Dershowitz said. If anyone came up and started giving him trouble, Elon would get after them. “He was my guy.”

[Read: Nantucket doesn’t belong to the preppies]

Everybody on the Vineyard liked Elon, Dershowitz said: “Even when they turned against me, they generally didn’t turn against Elon.”

“Although Larry David did.”

“Even when my son died—and Larry knew him very well—he never sent me a card,” Dershowitz said. “Never called me, never did anything to acknowledge it.”

After I returned from the Vineyard, I spoke with Dershowitz by phone. Since my visit, he’d suffered a fractured rib. When I asked how it had happened, he lamented that the cause was nothing dramatic. “I mean, I’d love to have a great story,” he said. “Passionate lovemaking, you know?” (Although definitely not an erotic massage.)

Alas. “I sneezed too hard,” he said. “My doctor told me at my age, a sneeze or a hard cough can fracture a rib.”

Despite being in pain, Dershowitz said that he was planning to go that night to a Chabad event at the home of the billionaire hedge-fund manager Paul Singer, a big Republican donor and supporter of Israel. In a few days, Dershowitz was scheduled to be honored at the Chabad to mark the 75th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. We briefly revisited the Pierogi Incident; he sent me a link to a Facebook post from someone marking “the anniversary of Pierogigate” and vowing to “have a potato pierogi later today in honor of Dershowitz.”

When I mentioned Larry David’s name again, Dershowitz sounded freshly pained—as if I’d elbowed him in his bad rib. They had been really good friends, he reiterated. I asked whether he’d had any interaction with David since the Chilmark-store episode in 2021. Not really, Dershowitz said, except for one chance meeting at a restaurant, in which David had again blown him off. Later, Dershowitz wanted to know whether I’d spoken with David for this story.

After our initial email exchange, I finally did speak with David by phone late last week. He was on vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, and I expected him to be cantankerous and annoyed—which he was at first. When I brought up the matter of Elon’s death, however, David’s tone shifted. “He’s 100 percent right,” David told me, referring to Dershowitz. “I should have reached out, and I certainly regret not doing so. As I said on Curb once, ‘I think of nice things. I just don’t act on them.’”

David, who turned 79 last month, said that he has been “softening” and might be open to some kind of rapprochement with Dershowitz, if only to extinguish their one-way feud once and for all. “I’m starting to feel a little sorry for him, actually,” David told me. “Certainly because of his son.”

It was a touching moment, and seemed sincere. But something also felt off, as if the network had enlisted focus groups and then ordered up a feel-good ending.

Then David sent me an email the next morning.

“I’m loath to say anything mean because he’s been so ostracized,” he wrote of Dershowitz. A reversion to sarcasm! “But he only has himself to blame. He made a deal with the devil. Literally. And I’d bet the devil hasn’t said a word to him since the impeachment.”

Every July, I take my boys back to my hometown in Indiana so we can watch the Independence Day parade. They run around in American-flag shirts and devour far too many rocket pops as vintage cars, tractors, and an Abraham Lincoln in shorts make their way down Main Street.

I’ve always loved that parade, but it’s not the same one I recall watching as a girl. In recent years—in between the marching bands and Girl Scouts—comes a camouflage military Humvee, a papier-mâché bald eagle flying at a jumbo-size Bible, and a tribute to “Indiana’s fallen heroes,” during which photos of so many, too many, young Hoosiers who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq are carried out on banners. It’s a somber scene. The shadow of September 11, the wars that followed, and the culture that shaped us all hangs over the parade.

I’m not usually one to read much into the symbolism of anniversaries, but this year marks both 250 years since the founding of the United States and 25 years since 9/11. I can’t think of one without the other, because September 11 not only transformed how the United States interacted with Muslims abroad and at home; it also changed our collective view of American values around citizenship, identity, and civil liberties.

In my earliest memories, we didn’t have a hometown mosque—there wasn’t enough money or enough Muslims to build one. But by the early 1990s, the community had raised the funds. We were excited to celebrate our newly constructed mosque amid the cornfields, but not everyone felt the same way. During the official ground-breaking, one of the neighbors blasted music aggressively. Then one day, a mountain of dirt appeared along that neighbor’s property line—a berm to, presumably, hide the mosque from sight. We children were warned to stay away. If someone accidentally kicked a soccer ball into the neighbor’s lawn, we were not to chase it. It’s disorienting, as a kid, to feel unwelcome in your own hometown.

[Steven B. Smith: How to love the U.S.A.]

I was a teenager on September 11, and mourned with all Americans the terrible loss of 2,977 lives on that awful day. Three months later, bullet holes were discovered in a window at the mosque, though no one saw the culprit and no one was hurt. Muslim communities in other parts of the country faced more threats in the days, weeks, and years that followed. It became routine for women in hijabs to be harassed and for mosques to be vandalized. In Ohio, a man plowed his Ford Mustang into the front door of a mosque. In Texas, a man threw a Molotov cocktail toward a mosque; children fled as it shattered. In Seattle, a man attempted to set fire to cars in a mosque parking lot and then fired a gun at worshippers. I’m not sure how much I knew of these episodes at the time, but I was well aware that some Americans were deeply distrustful of Muslims, and I worried about the rumblings of government surveillance.

But in my hometown, such threats were not the norm. The Indiana I grew up in was friendly, known for its “Hoosier hospitality.” Sure, it wasn’t always particularly attuned to difference. When I was in middle school, our class learned about Islam by watching Not Without My Daughter—the 1991 East-versus-West saga about an American woman, played by Sally Field, who was trapped in Iran by her husband.  

One of the benefits of growing up in a fairly tight-knit city with a small-town feel, though, was that a lot of folks had known me—and my siblings and parents—for most of my life. Despite the bad guys who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center, to most locals we were just “the Khalids.” I was fortunate to have a relatively normal high-school experience. For homecoming I tie-dyed my hijab red and white—our school colors—and classmates complimented the look. It sounds so much like a cheesy Hallmark movie that I’ve asked friends and family to confirm, so I can make sure I’m not misremembering it all.

But as 9/11 retreats further into the past, strangely, anti-Muslim rhetoric has grown—no longer veiled or marginalized but actively celebrated by those in power. Prominent lawmakers have made it clear that they don’t see people like me as Americans. “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee wrote on social media in March, the same month that Representative Randy Fine of Florida wrote, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.”  

“Every single Muslim holding public office in America is a trojan horse, and a threat to both national security and our republic,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina recently posted.

But the messages that are the most difficult for me to reconcile are the voices of my own people: Hoosiers.

In May, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, Micah Beckwith, went on a conservative Christian talk show and declared: “I hate Islam. It’s a demonic death cult.” (He added that he actually loves Muslims because we make “great Christians” once we find Jesus.)

His comments came just days after three people were killed in a shooting at a mosque in San Diego. Beckwith didn’t mention that shooting, or any of the concerns that Muslims have for their safety—the need, for example, to hire guards or install security gates, as my old hometown mosque did. He wore a polo shirt with the insignia of the state of Indiana when he said that Americans need “permission to hate again,” and singled out Islam for that hatred.

After a group of religious leaders including Jews condemned Beckwith’s comments, he called them “deeply misguided” on X and wrote, “One need not look far into history to see what happens when the sheep are persuaded they can safely coexist with the wolf.”

To me, it was all a depressing sign of how much my homeland has changed in the past 25 years.

I first started noticing the shift in the run-up to the 2016 election, as a reporter for NPR. I covered American politics, interviewing voters during one of the most tumultuous periods in recent politics, and an era in which being Muslim became seen as antithetical to being American.

In 2015, I was at a resort in Orlando for the Florida Republican Party’s major political summit. By the time Donald Trump took the stage, the crowd was hearing murmurs of a tragedy unfolding in Paris—coordinated shootings and bombings by ISIS militants in what would become one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in French history.

A Muslim woman in a hijab spotted me in the audience, and excitedly introduced herself, thinking I was a fellow Republican in this unwelcoming crowd. “Sorry, I’m a reporter,” I said. But good luck, I thought.

Roughly a week later, Trump was proclaiming—falsely—that when the Twin Towers fell, “thousands and thousands” of Muslims were cheering in New Jersey.

Soon after, he called for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

In Florida, I met a man named Jared at an event for Trump-campaign volunteers. As I was about to leave, he stopped me. He wanted to share something that had been on his mind: why Trump’s “Muslim ban” would be beneficial for a Muslim such as me. “True believers” of Islam, he warned, have a mission: to come to the U.S. and do “heinous things.” And if they did, that would be a liability for me—I could even end up in an internment camp. A “Muslim ban,” he said, was just “risk mitigation.” I didn’t bother telling him that I had always thought of myself as a true believer: someone who prays, fasts, and believes deeply and personally in God.

Shortly after that conversation, Trump casually told Anderson Cooper on CNN, “I think Islam hates us.” It was a flippant comment made by a man known for hyperbole and bombast, but one that is seared into my memory. Who exactly was “us”?

Trump didn’t create suspicion of Muslims; he merely tapped into fears and distrust that had been bubbling up since 9/11. But his comments started permeating into our broader culture.

In late 2018, I went to the Mahoning Valley in eastern Ohio. I’ve visited that region many times, in part because it’s a place that tells a story of changing American politics—one of the counties that voted for Barack Obama before turning redder—and in part because it reminds me of home. These are the former steel hubs, old manufacturing towns and cities where many people tell me how much better life used to be.

One of my first stops was the local Republican Party headquarters, in an ordinary strip mall. Connie, one of the club’s volunteers, had told me to swing by because they were having their Christmas party that evening.

Before the festivities kicked off, we were chatting, and she told me how absurd it seemed to her that classic songs like “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” had become offensive to some people.

“You don’t want to hear it, go away. Get out of our country,” she said.

I initially thought she was complaining in a general sense about liberals, but then the conversation turned personal.

“You’re probably a Muslim?” she asked. (Probably the hijab was a giveaway.)

“I don’t care for them, I’m sorry,” she continued. “First of all, take that scarf off.”

“Me?” I asked, suddenly confused.

“When I see girls with those headscarves on, it just irritates me,” she said.

I tried to explain that I wear the scarf because I want to, that not all my sisters do, and that, frankly, my dad’s never been a big fan.

“You’re so pretty,” she said—a backhanded compliment, I assumed, to convey that she just thought I’d look better without a scarf. “I mean you have a pretty face.”

Connie was a former hairdresser, the kind of woman who, well into her 70s, still manicured her nails and had a blond pixie cut. I had interviewed her twice before, so perhaps that familiarity allowed her to feel that she could be candid. And I wanted to hear that candor—I was curious. So I asked her why she didn’t “care for” Muslims.

“Because they want to take over America,” she said.

Personally, I’d never met a Muslim who came to America to “take it over,” so I was baffled.

“ Why can’t they just come here and live like us?” she went on. “If you want to be an American, be an American. Or be a Muslim.” She said it as if the two were incompatible.

“Do what we do,” she continued. “We were here first, okay? You’re second.”

That comment has haunted me for years: We were here first, and you’re second.

The story of Islam in America is not a foreign story; it began long before September 11—before, even, our nation’s founding. Thousands of Muslims were present in the colonies, captured in West Africa and brought to the shores of North America in chains. Historians estimate that 10 to 15 percent—possibly even 30 percent—of enslaved people transported to North America were Muslim.

One of those people, Yarrow Mamout, was brought to Annapolis, Maryland, in the summer of 1752, where he was put up for sale. He spent decades enslaved on plantations in Maryland, before gaining his freedom and building a home on a plot of land he bought on what is now Georgetown. I live near where his house once stood, and to my shame knew little about Yarrow’s story, though he was so well known in his time that he was painted by the famous Revolutionary War–era portrait artist Charles Willson Peale. That portrait is now preserved at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Peale was fascinated by Yarrow and wrote about him in his diary: “Yarrow has been noted for sobriety & a chearfull conduct, he professes to be a mahometan, and is often seen & heard in the Streets singing Praises to God—and conversing with him he said man is no good unless his religion comes from the heart.”

When Yarrow died in 1823, an obituary was published on him in more than 38 papers. His house is now gone, but at the site you’ll find a plaque—a reminder not just of Yarrow but of the tens of thousands of Muslims already here at the nation’s founding.

When the Founders first enunciated their commitment to religious freedom, they were thinking about Muslims. The protections of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson wrote, extended to “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.” He invoked Islam to demonstrate the theoretical reach of religious freedom in America—even as tens of thousands of enslaved African Muslims were denied that freedom themselves.

For the past three years, I’ve been working on a PBS documentary series tied to America’s 250th anniversary called American Muslims: A History Revealed that tells these and other stories. I wanted my sons to have a fuller vision of American, and Muslim, history. The 9/11 era shaped so much of my adult life. It changed not just how we deal with one another—domestic surveillance laws, TSA checks, a political shift in American partisan politics—but also how we interact with the rest of the world. I had hoped that the era of the U.S. fighting in the Middle East wouldn’t be a patriotic inheritance for my boys.

But if anything, we seem to be stuck in an even worse version of 9/12—one governed less by fear than by outright hate.

This unease with Islam isn’t an issue only on the right. For all of the Biden administration’s talk about diversity, few Muslims had any role in foreign-policy decisions. Many Muslim Democrats remain angry about Joe Biden’s approach to the war in Gaza, and feel that his attitude toward Palestinians abroad was so dehumanizing that it has exacerbated hostility and harassment at home. But on the right, Islamophobia has been much more direct.

[Read: What the Islamophobic attacks on Mamdani reveal]

This summer, Beckwith, the lieutenant governor of Indiana, told the podcast Conservative Review that Islam is “a more dangerous ideology than even Nazism.” I had been wondering whether he might ever apologize for saying “I hate Islam.” Eventually I emailed his office to ask. An aide replied that “Lieutenant Governor Beckwith does not regret his comments and has not had a change of heart.”

Since 9/11, the Muslims of my hometown have grown in number. The mosque has expanded. I’m told that relations with the neighbor have improved, though the mound of dirt remains—now covered in grass and trees, but still a warning to stay on our side of the property line. I tried calling and texting the neighbor, but she declined to talk—replying “do I want to speak to you NO” and “you need to research your information a lot better.”

Growing up, I had thought of our mosque’s neighbor as a bit of an odd character—an uncharacteristically unfriendly midwesterner, her attitude not particularly indicative of how Muslims were seen in the city or the state.

But in the past decade, politicians have amplified and normalized that animosity toward Muslims, even when it has no basis in reality. This summer, Beckwith advocated for banning the Muslim call to prayer on loudspeakers—though there are no reports of any mosques in Indiana publicly broadcasting it.

Most dramas about murderous women save the revelations of deviance for the end, after parceling out uncertainty and complication. Furious does things exactly backwards. Here is a monster, the Hulu series announces with its very first scene, during which an unblinking blonde in a Halloween cat mask kills a man by forcibly injecting him with fentanyl, which she keeps in a bedazzled silver tin. “I don’t really like listening to you,” she whispers, as he gasps for breath. “I don’t like the sounds you’re making. But I love your smile.” After he dies, she reaches for a bowl of candy corn, which she eats slowly and with care, piece by piece.

The scene felt confrontational to me at first watch, as though it were daring me to switch it off in discomfort. But why? Crime shows begin with violated women all the time—the naked, bloodied female corpse is such a staple in the genre’s visual language that viewers hardly notice it. Why is a scene of a young woman luxuriating in her sadistic treatment of a man so unsettling? As Furious goes on, it offers up more murders, but also more context for why this woman, Catherine (played by Lola Petticrew), is doing what she’s doing—and although she remains monstrous, the show shades in her full, horrifying humanity.

Furious—created by the writer Liz Meriwether and executive-produced by the actor Emmy Rossum, who also stars in it—is preoccupied with elemental ideas about violence and transformation, which juxtapose nicely with the more conventional framework of a police procedural. Rossum plays Alice, a former detective turned FBI grunt who’s dragged into investigating Catherine’s latest victim by her former partner Danny (Scoot McNairy). Like Catherine, Alice has been warped by trauma; her previous boyfriend, also a police officer (Jake Lacy), beat her, and all of her colleagues except Danny froze her out when she finally reported him. She uses apps to find sexual partners who will agree to beat her, role-playing her own abuse. In one episode, she outright refuses to shower, a tendency that seems off-putting until her sister reveals to Danny that her ex used to drag her from the shower to hit her, sometimes leaving her passed out under the running water.

[Read: Everything we know about rape is wrong]

Early on, the show evokes Medusa—whose rape at the hands of Poseidon saw her turned into a hideous Gorgon with snakes for hair—in reference to Catherine, whose own history is at least as cruel; there are also multiple references to the Furies, winged goddesses of retribution. Nora Washington (Quincy Tyler Bernstine), who runs the FBI sex-crimes division that Alice is trying to get assigned to, describes the room that agents use to review child-sexual-abuse material as “the darkest pit of Hades down deep in the bottom of the Earth.” Washington’s perpetual rage, and her attempts to quash it with emotional detachment and tequila, suffuses every scene she’s in.

Watching the show, I remembered the moment, almost a decade ago, when women’s anger became the subject of countless books and news stories—when many people expressed hope that it might have a revolutionary power. Instead, during a period when women have lost fundamental rights and have been confronted with the apparent futility of their protests, cultural narratives about women’s rage no longer have the luxury of optimism. Instead, anger has metastasized into vengeance, inflamed and out for blood.

While watching Furious, I happened to read Honey, by Imani Thompson: a wry and erudite take on the dark-academia genre about a Ph.D. candidate at Cambridge named Yrsa (derived from an Old Norse word for “furious”) who—almost accidentally—becomes a serial killer. Yrsa’s journey toward murder begins casually one day, when she tips a bee into the lemonade of an older male colleague who has betrayed Yrsa’s friend and stolen credit for the research project they were working on together. When the bee stings the man, who’s allergic to them, Yrsa watches while he chokes to death, observing “the theatrics of the wheezing man. The red-hot raspberry of his face.” When he falls to the ground, she gets onto her knees and strokes his hair. Afterward, she eats ice cream. Murder in the book becomes associated with sweetness and satiation. In dull moments after the man’s death, Yrsa replays the scene in her mind, and it fills her up.

Thompson wanted to write about a female serial killer, she said in one interview, because “we always see the woman as a victim,” in ways that are often glamorized. But Yrsa is also working on a Ph.D. about “Afropessimism and Black women’s discourses on their liberation,” and the book is studded with references to academics and writers who consider the heritage of violence. Yrsa often uses critical theory to try to justify what she’s doing: She cites thinkers such as Audre Lorde, Stuart Hall, and Saidiya Hartman, and fixates particularly on Hartman’s essay Venus in Two Acts, about all of the nameless murdered Black girls obliterated by history. How, Hartman wonders, can she “revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?” In Yrsa’s mind, this question becomes twisted into the idea that punishing abusive men might redress some of the imbalance.

Yrsa does so in part by tracking down men outed on a site where sex workers name their most vicious clients. She injects one with a fatal dose of heroin and enjoys doing it, much like Catherine, savoring the memory of “that moment when she realized he was vulnerable only to her. That moment when she could do anything.” Late in Furious, Catherine tells Alice about how her brutal actions feel to her: “It’s power, watching someone die.” She adds, “When I’m killing someone, it’s like I’m eating him, like I’m swallowing him, like everything he’s ever done is disappearing inside me.” She is, it turns out, pursuing and murdering the men who hurt her when she was an underage teenager being trafficked for sex, starting with the pimp who beat, raped, and starved her. Her pleasure in killing, unlike Yrsa’s, is derived not from the act itself but from neutralizing what these men did to her.

[Read: When women are accused of complicity]

The show is a fascinating pivot for Meriwether, who previously created the beloved offbeat Fox comedy New Girl and who most recently co-created the FX series Dying for Sex, about a woman who receives a fatal cancer diagnosis and decides to pursue sexual pleasure in her final months. There are moments in Furious that come off as morbidly comic—an FBI agent played by Rob Yang shouts “Boom!” at inopportune moments, and a witness with muscular dystrophy (Steve Way) needles police officers with his wheelchair—but more often, the series is pitch-dark. The show was shot with anamorphic lenses to foster a moody, surveillant feeling, evoking David Fincher more than Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The point seems to be to use the visual language of neo-noir while shifting the focus to characters who don’t usually draw the camera’s attention.

Furious has been referred to as a “crime drama for a post-Epstein world,” and one of the characters—a billionaire with similar proclivities who seems to operate with impunity—seems modeled after the serial sex offender. “The ones who are really to blame don’t get caught, never, never,” Nora tells Alice. “You think you’re ever gonna catch anyone who matters?” But Meriwether, in an interview with Vulture, noted that she was “much more interested in the experience of the women than I am with the experience of the perpetrator,” and the show is especially curious regarding women who become compelled to victimize others. What does living with that kind of trauma and injustice do to a person’s psyche? “My memory sucks,” Catherine says in one scene, trying to piece together fragments of her past life into a coherent shape. “It’s ’cause I got strangled so much.”

The actors in Furious are uniformly brilliant: Bernstine’s achingly blasé Nora; McNairy’s frowsy, compassionate Danny; Rossum’s magnetic and volatile Alice. Petticrew turns Catherine’s postured immaturity into something vividly repulsive—she’s constantly restaging the girlhood she never got to have, but in an unavoidably corrupted way. By the show’s end, we can better understand her, even if we’re lucky enough not to have her tolerance for cruelty. What happens to anger when it can’t be absorbed? We can only consider whether there’s truth in Nora’s assertion that only evil can really fight evil, and that in order to defend humanity, you occasionally have to sacrifice your own.

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In the Henrik Ibsen play The Wild Duck, Dr. Relling dispenses a drug that soothes the most profound self-loathing: livsløgn, a “life-lie,” a form of grandiose self-delusion that lets the pathetic figures who take it believe that they are geniuses and noble romantics. The life-lie, it turns out, is a hell of a drug—perhaps the most potent Scandinavian pharmaceutical invention before Ozempic—and keeps the play’s fragile characters from succumbing to “self-contempt and despair.” Against Relling’s advice, another character, Gregers, decides to free these losers from their life-lies and expose them. The play ends with a suicide.

On Friday, the former Cambridge professor Jason Arday died at the age of 41. British police said his death was “unexpected” but not “suspicious.” This classification, unexpected but not suspicious, includes the possibility that he died accidentally. But reports of Arday’s delicate emotional state at the time have led most to assume that he killed himself after weeks of accumulating revelations that he had lied compulsively for personal and professional gain. One of his last public statements was an interview with The Times of London in which he affirmed that he was “not a liar,” a line itself so blatantly false that any Ibsen fan would have recognized symptoms of a livsløgn overdose. He gave no George Santos–like, impish shrug at having been finally caught. (What took you so long?) He did not prepare to switch careers to pursue reality-TV stardom or write a Catch Me if You Can–style memoir about the dupes he met along the way. Instead, his response suggested—it is painful to notice this now, when nothing can be done—that he felt he had to stick with his story. That way led to a catastrophic end: narcissistic collapse, in which the lies stop working on others and finally on the liar himself. Arday appears to have convinced himself, wrongly, that the last remaining option was suicide, which was, of course, his final self-delusion. His lies won him undeserved praise and status, and they gave (unforgivably) false hope to people whose loved ones have severe developmental delays. But the only lie that ever killed anyone was the last one.

Some are now suggesting that Arday was the victim, and the people who drew attention to his lies, the villains. Ibram X. Kendi suggests that Arday might even be vindicated after a full accounting of the allegations against him. (Keep in mind that in addition to his straightforward acts of fabrication and plagiarism, always of less powerful academics, he claimed to have taken part in a British documentary series that preceded his birth.) And the hapless Good Law Project, which persuaded dozens of Cambridge bigwigs to rally behind Arday and dismiss his critics as racists, has issued an open letter calling for an investigation of “the press.” The media’s alleged crime: writing about this extraordinary case of a habitual liar’s appointment to a distinguished academic post, rather than letting the liar keep embarrassing himself and his institution. “Reasonable public interest” in the case had dissipated, the letter says, yet the press kept digging. Arday’s death was, it says, the “direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment.”

A Buddhist proverb says that when a wise man points at the moon, the fool stares at his finger. The media were unrelenting, but con-man stories are always popular, and the bigger the victim, the better. The press’s obsession was in proportion with the outlandishness of the lies told by Arday and on his behalf, and with public interest in the failures they revealed. Those failures were intellectual, institutional, and even legal. Arday called the cops on an academic who had asked him hostile questions, and he instructed a law firm to send a threatening letter to a reporter who did the same. The focus on those who pointed out Arday’s shortcomings, rather than on Arday himself and those who abetted his rise, is a clear sign that lessons from this miserable episode remain unlearned. The people responsible for it may repeat their errors and, in some cases, commit appalling new ones. (Kendi compares Arday’s treatment to a “lynching.” This analogy is tenable only if you think lynching means harshly criticizing people for actual transgressions, rather than summarily murdering them for no reason at all.)

[Read: The truths that failed Jason Arday]

Some lies are so preposterous that intelligent people who believe them bear some responsibility for being taken in. And they are outright guilty for repeating the lies and urging others to believe them. This is obviously so in Arday’s case. The lies depended on willful credulity, as well as amplification by other professors, including Cambridge’s Hilary Cremin, who went on the BBC and told Arday that “you are the best in the world, in terms of the research that you do.” Reviewers gushed over his books and pronounced them moving, “brave,” and “insightful.” Defenders did begin to distance themselves when the lies became even more lurid and inexplicable, as with the claims that a masked man invisible to security cameras had menaced Arday with a knife and that someone had sent him the head of a pig, which he disposed of rather than preserved as evidence. The trajectory of his deception seems to have been from tragedy (a man carried away with lies and too compulsive to stop telling them) to farce (once the lies became ridiculous enough that only a complicit person could believe them) and finally back to tragedy on Friday. Arday’s colleagues, his editors, and the people who knew he was a fraud but said nothing have absorbed some ridicule for their role in hiring and publishing him. But to date, I have seen no evidence that they have considered their complicity, let alone repaired the damage to their institutions by explaining their error or, better yet, just resigning.

They elevated Arday, a fragile and disturbed person, into a position where his fragility would be tested and he would be shattered. Even if the Cambridge Faculty of Education’s standards were so low that his inadequacies would remain unremarked there, he was a fellow of a Cambridge college with real scholars who would eventually be indignant upon realizing that their new colleague’s scholarship consisted of copy-paste jobs, semiliterate nonsense, and fan notes on his favorite 1990s Brit-pop. Did Arday’s allies think no one would notice? That those who noticed would be forever intimidated into polite silence? That drinking sherry in the common room of Jesus College would be a pleasant experience for Arday himself as he waited to be found out? Those who placed Arday in that situation were cruel and heartless. They may as well have taken a skin-and-bones Make-A-Wish kid, told him that he could fly, and shot him out of a cannon. The journalists were not the ones who stuffed Arday into the cannon and lit the fuse. They were gravity.

In The Wild Duck, Ibsen’s main villain is Gregers, the crusading moralist who makes it his mission to “rescue” the characters from their sustaining life-lies and help them and those who respect them see their deficiencies. The Gregers in this case is Nathan Cofnas, a philosopher with an abiding interest in race and a particular curiosity about the supposed mental deficiencies of Black people. Cofnas’s views on race science (he believes that very few Black people are cognitively equipped to be employed at a “meritocratic” university) led him to be run out of Cambridge in 2024, just as Arday was being appointed to one of the university’s most prestigious chairs. Cambridge’s failure to vet this appointment left an opening for Cofnas, smarting from his own dismissal, to take on the unsavory task of assembling a dossier on Arday’s work. The results were so galling that morbid curiosity drove others to scrutinize everything else about Arday, including his implausible claims that he secretly raised large sums for charity and was among the world’s greatest long-distance runners.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Dr. Relling calls Gregers’s urge to disabuse and expose “an acute attack of integrity” and warns that patients going cold turkey off livsløgn will not end well for them or others. (Other Ibsen plays are relevant here too: In some, the collapse of illusions afflicts whole towns, not just a few of their members.) The difference between Gregers and Cofnas seems to be that the latter, perhaps as a result of his being scorned by Cambridge, has no affection for the people whose life-lies he methodically destroyed. Cofnas recently told the podcaster Winston Marshall that “talking about” race “makes people feel bad, and there are a lot of things that are true that make people feel bad that we don’t need to talk about.” But the subversion of academic standards, at what Cofnas perceives as his own expense, demanded action. The result will be good for academia, Cofnas insists, a far better outcome than preserving the good feelings that went along with silence.

In Ibsen, when Gregers forces integrity on a self-deluded character, that character’s daughter decides to kill herself. Gregers sounds most like Cofnas in the final scene. He is confident that her death, however horrible, will “set free all that is noble” in those who partook in the life-lie as they see life for what it is. Life sustained by delusion “is not worth living,” Gregers says. But he knows the cost of being an odious truth teller. “I am glad that my destiny is what it is,” he tells Relling: “to be the thirteenth at table,” the guest who everyone wishes would stop showing up, because he brings misfortune to any dinner he attends.

Arday was hired to teach social science. A terminal irony is that his main contribution to that body of knowledge will be as a case study, about a community that elevated a flawed man to a position exalted beyond his ability, without knowing or caring that they were actually offering him as a human sacrifice.

We Americans remember our presidents in all sorts of ways, with monuments and statues, on coins and street signs. Another thing we do is wait—we wait until a president is safely out of office, or dead, before we bestow such honors.

Donald Trump has bent many democratic traditions, but this one, he’s discarded altogether. Trump has been putting his name on buildings since before most Americans were born. He built his political career atop his personal brand, and much of his second term has been defined by an obsession with leaving his mark. The result is something entirely new in the nation’s history. The more you look, the more you see Trump’s face, name, or signature all around you—on a government building, infrastructure project, banknote, taxpayer-funded website, or official document.

COMPLETED

Trump’s face has appeared swiftly, often with little warning—and nowhere more so than in the nation’s capital. To find a comparable leader so fixated on the proliferation of his image, the historians I spoke with reached across oceans and time: The face of Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for nearly three decades, was printed on children’s schoolbook covers; Mussolini covered Rome’s Palazzo Braschi with a display featuring his head. Obviously Mao Zedong comes to mind. This creation of a cult of personality is partly how strongmen have sought to erase memories of their predecessors and “insert themselves into the social fabric,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian of authoritarianism at NYU, told me. There may not be a perfect comparison, but past regimes offer clues, the scholars said, about how a leader’s ubiquity can help inure citizens to broader shifts in their relationship to their government.

IN THE WORKS

The Kennedy Center debacle offered the president a reminder: “Letters can easily be taken off of the surface of buildings,” Lawrence Vale, an MIT urban-planning professor who studies capital-city design and national identity, told me. Come 2029, if a Democrat wins back the White House, it’s difficult to imagine the Trump-faced banners and paintings remaining up for long. Other things—multimillion-dollar monuments, travel documents, money in circulation—would be far more challenging to undo.

ON TRUMP’S WISH LIST

Trump—and those in his orbit looking to flatter him—will almost certainly propose more places for his name and face to appear. The president could grow dissatisfied with having his name on just one airport, especially one that serves fewer than 10 million people a year. Or the new football stadium coming to Washington might grab his attention. And, of course, there is his obsession with being on Mount Rushmore. Many ideas that seemed improbable when they were first introduced have since been carried out.

The tenures of previous world leaders obsessed with imparting their images onto history have yielded troves of artifacts—and left successors with the question of what to do with them all.

As Hungary’s Communist era came to an end, the government confronted one such quandary. Budapest’s new government didn’t want to melt statues down or discard them, so in 1993, it deposited dozens of them in a park 20 minutes outside the city center. In one sense, the park became an oversize storage unit for junk the Hungarian public no longer needed; in another, it was a tourist attraction in its own right—a memorial to the way that a past regime had sought to memorialize itself.

Image sources: COMPLETED: Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Kevin Dietsch / Getty; Kevin Carter / Getty; Andrew Leyden / Getty; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Chip Somodevilla / Getty; Demetrius Freeman / The Washington Post / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Andrew Harnik / Getty; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Doug Mills / The New York Times / Redux; Celal Gunes / Anadolu / Getty; travel.state.gov / U.S. Department of State; National Park Service; trumpcard.gov; Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty; trumpaccounts.gov; trumpira.gov; trumprx.gov; nps.gov; @realDonaldTrump / Truth Social; Saul Loeb / AFP / Getty; Chandan Khanna / AFP / Getty; George Walker IV / AP; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; Amy Beth Bennett / South Florida Sun Sentinel / TNS / Getty; IN THE WORKS: Helen H. Richardson / MediaNews Group / The Denver Post / Getty; Thomas Peipert / AP; Commission of Fine Arts; Jim Bourg / Redux; Andrew Harnik / Getty; Salwan Georges / The Washington Post / Getty; McCreary Architects PLLC 2025; AP Graphic / Treasury Department; Kent Nishimura / AFP / Getty; Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP / Getty; U.S. Air Force. ON TRUMP’S WISH LIST: @realDonaldTrump / Truth Social; Courtesy of Washington Commanders; Courtesy of Dulles Airport. 

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A memorandum of understanding between Iran and the United States, reached in June and intended to provide breathing room to end the conflict between the two countries, expired today. The agreement will be little missed: A cease-fire had effectively ended within about three weeks of its signing, and the MOU had failed to produce fruitful negotiations or a real opening of the Strait of Hormuz.

The president’s actions in the days leading up to the deadline demonstrate that his approach to the world, always contingent and improvisational, has lost its last shred of coherence. The White House cannot agree on the goals of the Iran war, much less on how to achieve them. The president is clashing with long-standing allies, in conflict with his vice president on the aims of the war, and publicly at odds with uniformed commanders over conditions for American troops stationed abroad.

Trump on Friday called on Americans to accept higher gasoline prices as the cost of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. He posted this morning that the “number one Goal is, and always will be, that Iran cannot have, in any way, shape, or form, a Nuclear Weapon”—even though his administration assessed before the war that Iran was not actively building weapons, even though the White House hasn’t offered any explanation for how the war will prevent the regime from restarting its weapons program, and even though the war may make Iran’s desire for a nuclear arsenal only more urgent. Meanwhile, Vice President Vance says that lowering fuel prices is actually now “goal No. 1” of the war.

In practice, the real aim of any diplomatic or military action now is resuming ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which Iran seized early in the conflict—a risk foreseen by many analysts but not by Trump. For weeks now, Trump’s basic choice has been clear: Either launch a much larger military operation, including ground troops, or else surrender de facto control of the strait permanently.

The president refuses to accept this. He continues to complain that the Iranians are bad-faith negotiators, which is surely true but was well known before the war. During a speech on Friday, Trump said that “pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.” This is dishonest, delusional, or both. Such a declaration would contradict Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s insistence on the neutrality of the strait as well as Trump’s repeated statements that the U.S. should not act as a global policeman. But it’s also beside the point, because the United States has no means to control the strait.

The conditions for those U.S. troops already in the region are reportedly awful. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, which has been at sea for nearly nine months, sailors report shortages of basic supplies, malfunctioning systems, and faltering mental health. When Trump was asked Friday about service members’ families who have publicly voiced their worries, he insisted that they were not concerned: “No, they’re not,” he said, adding that the ship’s deployment had not gone on “nearly long enough” yet. In a sign that military brass takes these worries seriously, the admiral overseeing the war visited the carrier this weekend and acknowledged mental-health issues.

With the U.S. unwilling or unable to break the Hormuz deadlock, Oman has embarked on negotiations with Iran to create a toll system for ships. This morning, Trump threatened to expand the war with strikes against that country. “If Oman gets in the way, we’ll bomb the shit out of them,” he told Fox News. Trump’s frustration with Oman is understandable, yet a threat to attack a venerable regional ally is still shocking.

This kind of public conflict with allies has become typical. Over the weekend, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner—who has no official government post—met with Hamas officials in an attempt to revitalize an administration plan to disarm the group and rebuild Gaza. That plan is struggling for several reasons, including a flat rejection from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has long been close to Trump and reportedly talked him into the Iran war.

Meanwhile, Trump announced yesterday that he was curtailing joint military exercises with South Korea, “based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea.” This supposed friendship has produced a splashy 2018 summit and flattering correspondence that Trump purloined from the White House after he lost the 2020 election, but it has done nothing to advance American interests. Most important, it has done nothing to curtail North Korea’s nuclear program. At the same time that Trump is fighting a war in Iran that he claims will prevent nuclear proliferation, he’s bestowing a favor on North Korea, which has offered no concessions and many threats. But Trump also gave another reason for his snub, noting that South Korea—like every other major U.S. ally—has declined to get involved in the Iran quagmire.

Throughout Trump’s two terms, many analysts have sought to discern some sort of guiding doctrine to his foreign policy. The incoherence of his actions in the past week alone should provide further evidence that looking for a framework is futile. Earlier this year, my colleagues Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker reported that the White House’s foreign-affairs philosophy was “Fuck around and find out.” Administration officials meant this as a warning to the leaders of other countries. But as the current crisis festers, they, too, are finding out.

Related:

• The fuck-around-and-find-out presidency
• Trump will make South Korea pay for his Iran humiliation.

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• Julia Curlee: “The Trump White House needed me—until the fact that I am trans became public.”
• Jonathan Chait on what Trump officials mean by “never”
• Even college students have stopped hanging out.
• NATO’s nightmare

Today’s News

1. A 60-day window for the United States and Iran to negotiate an end to the war expired today without a final agreement. The June framework laid out terms for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, easing some financial restrictions on Iran, and addressing its nuclear program, but talks have stalled as both sides have traded attacks and accusations of violations.
2. Jared Kushner met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem to discuss President Trump’s plan for Gaza after Israel said it refuses to pull back its military from Gaza until Hamas fully disarms.
3. The Supreme Court declined for a second time to review Trump’s appeal of a $5 million civil judgment awarded to E. Jean Carroll. A federal jury in 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll; Trump paid the $5 million award last month.

Dispatches

• The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal explores what the last weeks of summer can offer.

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Evening Read

The Problem With Child-Led Potty Training

By Stephanie H. Murray

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 …

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Radio Atlantic: The Trump administration wanted her expertise, just not her.
• Why Lindsay Clancy’s insanity defense might fail
• Why learn something that a machine can do for you?
• How Trump left America vulnerable to cyberattacks
• David Frum on Trump’s last loyal constituency

Culture Break

Watch. The masked web-slinger has been setting box-office records for decades, even as the popularity of superhero movies wanes, David Sims writes. And this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel (out now in theaters) has broken nearly every record imaginable.

Explore. Poetry critics didn’t always think much of Mary Oliver, whose work could sometimes read like self-help—but they didn’t give her enough credit, Hillary Kelly argues.

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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”

This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.

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

In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.

To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.

Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.

The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through delaying tactics and questionable decisions by a sympathetic judge he’d appointed.

The power of the “never has, never will” defense lies in its brazenness. The administration is not attempting to defend the specifics of any particular acts. Instead, it broadly declares that all of its actions are outside the realm of plausible scrutiny.

During the first Trump term, the president pushed against or sought to flout long-standing norms. His first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation because he was a potential subject of it, a standard application of traditional ethics for which the president has never forgiven him. Another attorney general, William Barr, begged Trump not to publicly direct his work for fear that doing so would taint the process. Trump scaled back some of his business activity, taking comparatively small profits (for instance, foreign countries could book blocks of rooms in his hotels).

[Quinta Jurecic: DOJ enters a new, even more aggressive phase]

During his second term, he has abandoned all restraint. He won’t bother trying to argue that the Justice Department is not a personal weapon of vengeance or that his business interests do not overlap with his public conduct. Instead, his appointees declare that such behavior will continue and is perfectly legal.

Just as Trump took the term fake news, which originally described deliberately falsified stories on social media, and applied it to news outlets that attempt to report objectively, his administration now casts his own unethical conduct as being ethical. Any Trump demand upon the justice system is, by definition, proper. Any Trump business activity is, by definition, not a conflict of interest. Any action Trump takes is, by definition, legal. This latter doctrine is one Trump arrived at early in his presidency, when he wrote on social media, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

Blanche is saying, as clearly as he can, that this administration deems the very concept of Trump doing something unethical to be self-evidently absurd. When he says that Trump never has and never will make an immoral demand, he is actually telling us that he himself never has and never will resist such a demand.

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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.

[Faith Hill: 20-somethings are in trouble]

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.”

[Ellen Cushing: Americans need to party more]

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.

Editor’s Note: Read Julia Curlee’s full essay here.

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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.

If you like what you saw here, new episodes of Radio Atlantic drop every Monday and Thursday.

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Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

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.

[Mary Oliver: Lilies]

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.

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.”

[From the June 2024 issue: The new propaganda war]

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.

[Read: The autocrat’s dilemma]

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.

[Norm Ornstein and Steve Leifman: Locking people up is no way to treat mental illness]

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.

[Elizabeth Bruenig: The dishonesty of true crime]

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.

[Read: Coming out as transgender made me a more effective CIA officer]

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.

But the new administration was led by a president who had praised Vladimir Putin and compared the intelligence community to the Nazis. Almost nobody volunteered. I did.

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.

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.

[Read: Transgender soldiers want the dignity of serving their country]

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.

[Adam Serwer: The attack on trans rights won’t end there]

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.

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 closed my 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.

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.”

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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 kinds of 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 right now, 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, like that 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.

[Read: Arizona is now at the center of election investigations]

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.

[Read: The forever negotiation]

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.