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If you want a snapshot of how the right has changed over the past decade, here’s one data point: MAGA activists think Sarah Huckabee Sanders is too woke now.
That’s the same Sarah Huckabee Sanders who is the daughter of the GOP fixture Mike Huckabee and a former White House press secretary for President Trump. Now governor of Arkansas, she’s facing criticism from right-wing influencers over an ad boosting the state’s imposition of work requirements for recipients of the state’s Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. These requirements are a long-standing Republican priority, but my colleague Annie Lowrey wrote last year that they are “a terrible idea”: The requirement creates new taxpayer costs and red tape without really solving any problem, because most Medicaid recipients who are physically able to work already do.
That’s not why the activists are mad, though. They’re upset because the face of loafing in Sanders’s ad is a cheese-ball-snarfing couch potato named Brad who is a young white man. The “Pizzagate” influencer Jack Posobiec labels it “Antiwhite.” Sean Davis of The Federalist calls it part of decades-long, systematic discrimination against white men. The openly bigoted investor James Fishback, fresh off getting trounced in a GOP primary for governor of Florida, traveled to Little Rock this week to rail against the “false and disgraceful ad.”
Assessing the accuracy of a fictional character in an ad feels a little absurd, but for the record: More than 60 percent of Medicaid-expansion enrollees in Arkansas are white, and 18 percent are Black, according to The New York Times. (The state overall is about 75 percent white and 15 percent Black.) A little more than half are women. Sanders rebuffed criticism, writing, “Next thing you know they’ll say I should have used cookies instead of cheese balls.”
The immediate and obsessive focus on a throwaway character in a 30-second ad is a lurid reminder of how identitarianism has become influential in segments of the American right, particularly young voters. This is a matter of how members of the movement understand politics, as well as how they attempt to communicate to the American public.
For decades, the right—as well as some centrist Democrats, such as Bill Clinton—criticized progressives for embracing identity politics. They argued that a focus on demographic segments was divisive and unhelpful. Ronald Reagan preached that “a rising tide lifts all boats” (though in practice this often meant support for trickle-down policies that helped mostly the already-thriving) and called for “color-blind” policies (which also tended to result in worse outcomes for people of color). This impulse persists in some segments of the Republican Party, most notably in the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, led by the former Reagan aide John Roberts.
This didn’t mean that people on the right hesitated to use race as a political wedge. They just did it elliptically. The avatar of this strategy was Lee Atwater, an adviser to Reagan and George H. W. Bush, whose 1981 explanation was as vulgar as the impulses he courted. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” he explained. “By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a by-product of them is, Blacks get hurt worse than whites.”
In 1980, for example, Reagan delivered a controversial speech at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, not far from where the civil-rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were murdered in 1964, and spoke about “states’ rights,” a phrase that segregationists had adopted. In 1988, a pro-Bush group aired a commercial that attacked his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, for allowing a convicted criminal named William Horton furlough from prison, during which he nearly killed someone. The ad didn’t mention Horton’s race and didn’t need to; it included his mugshot and called him “Willie,” which Horton (among others) interpreted as a dog whistle. “It was created to play on racial stereotypes: big, ugly, dumb, violent, Black—‘Willie,’” he said later.
And, perhaps most relevant to the “Brad” brouhaha, Reagan often spoke about someone who became known as the “welfare queen.” As the journalist Josh Levin has written, this referred to a real individual, a woman in Chicago named Linda Taylor. Reagan never talked about her race, yet “welfare queen” became entrenched as a trope of lazy Black women grifting off the welfare system.
This may explain why people such as Posobiec and Fishback are so agitated about the Arkansas ad: They understand how powerful a political weapon racial associations can be in shaping policy. But they don’t have Atwater’s finesse or plausible deniability. The right has gone from insisting that its rhetoric about entitlements was color-blind to demanding that it include racial signifiers. And though the number of Americans willing to tolerate or embrace gutter racism in politics appears to be growing, it remains a marginal group. The hardest-core activists, hyping one another up in group chats and on Discord servers, may have lost sight of that, failing to recognize how bizarre they look freaking out over a forgettable advertisement.
If these identitarians looked around, they could see cautionary tales about the wholesale embrace of identity politics, such as the impression among many voters that the Democratic Party is more interested in niche groups than in ordinary people. They could learn from the first wave of the MAGA movement, which was willing to accommodate racism and bigotry for electoral gain but apparently believed that they could be contained and channeled. The commentator Erick Erickson, for example, has spent years tolerating Trumpism but now reacts with horror at neo-Nazis in the movement. Or they could consider the plight of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who defended Trump’s every move from the White House lectern and now finds herself accused of treachery by his zealous followers.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul criticized Cornell University police and the local district attorney over their handling of a student’s 2024 rape allegations. Hochul appointed State Attorney General Letitia James as a special prosecutor to take over the reopened criminal investigation, which James said will include gathering evidence and interviewing witnesses while she considers whether to bring charges.
The Kennedy Center Honors will be held outside the Kennedy Center for the first time in the ceremony’s history; it will take place in Washington’s Capital One Arena on December 7. The center’s main building has been closed since last month.
Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.
With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans.
Explore. When Durkee Famous Sauce disappeared from grocery-store shelves, “I mourned a piece of my childhood,” Wright Thompson writes.
Debate. James Patterson and MrBeast’s new book is meant to get young people reading—but the lackluster result is more of a gamble on a modern shopping trend, Franklin Schneider writes.
The Kennedy Center Honors was once one of the biggest nights in Washington, which may not be saying much in a city that’s more blue blazer than red carpet. Still, it was where D.C.’s buttoned-up power class got to mingle with Hollywood stars at an awards show that was broadcast to millions. Today the main building is closed and the organization has largely stopped presenting the arts. But once again this December, the Kennedy Center will put on a show.
Officials announced today that the 49th Kennedy Center Honors will take place December 7 at Capital One Arena, the downtown stadium where Washington’s NBA and NHL teams play. At that point, the Kennedy Center will likely still be mired in a dispute in which its self-appointed chairman—Donald Trump—has said it might be demolished unless his name is added to the facade. Because of that drama, the Honors are poised to serve as something of a barometer of the institution.
Under Trump, donors, artists, and audiences have fled from the center. And the most prominent tenants are discovering that they may function better away from it. Unable to perform at the Kennedy Center, the National Symphony Orchestra opened its new season to a grateful crowd in the Maryland suburbs last weekend and will spend the season seeking new audiences at six venues in the region. The Washington National Opera reported record fundraising hauls after ending its affiliation with the Kennedy Center earlier this year. But the Honors may prove harder to disentangle, because the show’s identity is inseparable from the Kennedy Center—and the Kennedy Center, in turn, has become inseparable from Trump.
Trump’s issues with the ceremony go back to 2017, when several of the honorees spurned him. But last year, Trump made himself central to the event by selecting the awards recipients and becoming the first president to host the ceremony—at which he celebrated both the artists and himself. How involved he will be this time remains unclear; the White House did not respond to my questions about his plans. Also unclear is whether the Kennedy Center still has the cultural cachet to attract the level of talent it historically has drawn for the Honors. I posed that question to five people—former officials, staffers, and producers—who helped plan the Honors over the years, all of whom spoke with me on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions. No matter what, they told me, it’s Trump’s show now, for better or worse.
“It has gone from being the Kennedy Center to being about Donald Trump,” one person told me. “So in order to accept the Honor today, you have to be aligned with what he is doing.”
Ordinarily, most of the details for the Kennedy Center Honors would have been firmed up by now—especially the recipients. Past organizers told me the ceremony required preparation year-round, starting even before the current year’s event raised its curtains. The selection process would begin in winter, and honorees were announced by the summer. But as October begins, the Kennedy Center has only now disclosed where and when the ceremony will occur.
Last year, Trump said he handpicked the 2025 recipients: Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Gaynor, George Strait, Michael Crawford, and the rock band Kiss. Although the ceremony drew some Nashville heavyweights to honor Strait, the rest of the celebrity crowd was lighter on star power, and the biggest group of red-carpet walkers seemed to be Cabinet officials and their spouses. And this was before the biggest shock wave hit the institution: 12 days after the Honors, Trump’s name was installed on the building’s facade, which led to a new round of artists canceling appearances; later, Trump announced that he planned to close the institution for a renovation. A legal fight over the future of the center is still playing out in court.
Speculating about who might be a realistic choice to accept a Kennedy Center Honor this year comes down to a relatively narrow set of criteria: someone accomplished, available, acceptable to Trump, and willing to receive the award from him. Maybe Jon Voight, whom the president honored with the National Medal of Arts in 2019 and recently named a “special ambassador” to Hollywood? Another such ambassador, and another plausible candidate, is Mel Gibson. Would the Honors turn to hip-hop stars such as Lil Wayne, whom Trump pardoned in 2021, or Nicki Minaj, who’s made a MAGA pivot in the past year? Either would be younger than the typical honoree, though their participation might boost ratings, which former producers tell me has always been a consideration in the selection process. Last year’s Honors, the first planned under Trump, saw ratings fall by about 25 percent from the previous year.
Trump’s celebrity orbit offers plenty more options for a shortlist (last year he said he made his final picks from a list of about 50 names): The tenor Andrea Bocelli, who met with Trump in the Oval Office last year, wouldn’t feel out of place on an Honors roster. Kid Rock might, but he’s a longtime friend and supporter of the president. (Ditto Vanilla Ice?) Or maybe the Village People, whose “YMCA” became such a standard of Trump rallies that the group performed at several events for the president’s second inauguration.
The Honors have also lost much of the infrastructure behind the event. CBS’s deal to broadcast the show expired after the 2025 ceremony, and the network did not respond to my request for comment about this year. A Kennedy Center spokesperson told me that it would announce its broadcast partner later. Still, producing the Honors requires more than what viewers eventually see on television. Former officials described it to me as an all-campus effort, relying on staffers across multiple departments, including fundraising and special events. Many of those employees have left or been laid off ahead of the closure.
“Uncertainty is the enemy of what’s going on here,” Senator Shelley Moore Capito, an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center board, told me during an unrelated event this week hosted by Americans for the Arts. The West Virginia Republican wants to see the Honors return to the Kennedy Center eventually, but suggested that temporarily moving the ceremony elsewhere doesn’t need to be fatal. “Take one year and do it off campus and come back,” she said.
At the same event, Kara Young, a two-time Tony Award–winning actress, told me the turmoil at the Kennedy Center has made celebrating art more necessary. “The truth is being silenced, and to me, art is truth,” she said. She added that if administration is “taking over places that are historically apolitical and historically for the arts, then people will find a way to seek what they need, which is the truth.”
The Honors have proved adaptable before. During the pandemic, producers abandoned the typically packed Opera House to film segments across the Kennedy Center campus. One former producer believes the show could still work if organizers found worthy honorees, great performances, and an event free of political influence. But moving it to a cavernous sports arena is a whole other proposition—suggesting that even if the organizers have a spectacle in mind, they risk replacing the Opera House’s refined setting of velvet seats and ornate chandeliers with something discordant.
That change could also scramble the economics of an event that the institution regards as its biggest annual fundraising operation. It is unclear if the center will pay to rent the venue. One advantage, if the center can pull off a fundraising feat, is the arena’s 20,000 seats—compared with the Opera House’s roughly 2,300.
Last year, the center claimed that it raised $23 million from the Honors, doubling the previous year’s number under the pre-Trump leadership. Whatever happened, it wasn’t enough. By spring, donations to the center had plunged, and officials recently said the center was running out of money.
The Kennedy Center began hosting its annual lifetime-achievement ceremony in 1978. The evening lauds five figures, groups, or organizations that have made a significant contribution to American culture, spanning disciplines and tastes. In 2006, for example, the orchestra conductor Zubin Mehta was celebrated alongside Dolly Parton, Smokey Robinson, Steven Spielberg, and Andrew Lloyd Webber. A former producer described the event to me as something like an American Nobel Prize, but just for the arts: a rare recognition bestowed by not just an arts organization but, in a sense, the country itself.
The Honors certainly packed in lots of Washington pageantry. The weekend traditionally included a White House reception with the president and a medallion ceremony at the State Department before culminating on the first Sunday of December with an evening at the Kennedy Center, where honorees watched from the presidential box as some of the world’s biggest acts paid tribute to them. Every president since Jimmy Carter attended at least once during their term.
“I think it was a cool weekend, no matter who you are,” another former producer told me. “(A) to tell everyone you’re getting the Kennedy Center Honor, (b) to bring your family to the White House and take a picture with the president, and sit there up in the box and have everyone perform in your honor.”
Trump’s first year in office represented a rupture. In 2017, Kennedy Center officials hoped to have an Honors weekend much like any other. But following the violence at a white-supremicist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—and Trump’s infamous remark that there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the protest, despite his attempt to clarify that he “condemned totally” the white nationalists and Nazis who were involved—honorees drew a line. The dancer Carmen de Lavallade said she would skip the White House reception. “I was in Richmond setting a ballet, and that’s when all that stuff was going on in Charlottesville,” she told Essence. “I saw the burning cross and I said, ‘I’m not going.’” The television producer Norman Lear told The New York Times that he would skip the reception, and Lionel Richie soon expressed his own uncertainty, telling The Washington Post that he would “play it by ear.”
Eventually, the White House announced that Trump and the first lady would not participate in Honors activities so that they could proceed “without any political distraction.” The Kennedy Center publicly welcomed the decision. “In choosing not to participate in this year’s Honors activities, the Administration has graciously signaled its respect for the Kennedy Center and ensures the Honors gala remains a deservingly special moment for the Honorees,” then-Chairman David M. Rubenstein and President Deborah Rutter said in a statement at the time. “We are grateful for this gesture.”
Trump skipped every Honors ceremony during his first term—the only sitting president to do so. Removing himself showed that the Honors could do just fine without the president’s participation. But second-term Trump produced the opposite effect: Inserting himself seemed only to diminish the ceremony.
After remaking the Kennedy Center’s board and leadership when he returned to office last year, Trump became more involved in the Honors than any president before him—which is to say, no other president considered it part of his job to plan and host an awards show. Just as it’s become part of presidential lore that Trump may have run for president in 2016 because Barack Obama roasted him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in 2011, close observers of the Kennedy Center wonder if Trump’s spurning in 2017 helped inspire his takeover of the center. Now it’s his awards show, his arts complex, his renovation, and—if the center is never able to recover—his mess.
For a few minutes on Wednesday night, the New York Film Festival crowd watched Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced ex-CEO and founder of the medical start-up Theranos, and her partner, Billy Evans, as they seemingly went about their lives at a San Diego beach house. Evans was on the phone, insisting that nobody really understood Holmes; she sat next to him, her expression vacant, and patted her baby on the back. Moments later, she was talking with someone on her computer, her AirPods in and eyes unblinking. Then, suddenly, the camera cut to a third person—the comedian and director Nathan Fielder, who was observing from the side—prompting huge laughter from the crowd.
Honestly, the reveal wasn’t that funny. Fielder was just standing there—not saying anything, not making a face, just existing in the room. But his appearance acknowledged something obvious: We were not watching a sober, straightforward accounting of Holmes’s domestic life in 2023, days before she was set to report to a federal prison on counts of defrauding investors in her company. To his fans, Fielder has cultivated a reputation as modern culture’s foremost stenographer of strange situations. Somehow, he had scored extensive access to a notorious fabulist whose moon-faced staring and affected baritone had made her a national punch line. And now, in You Can See Everything, the documentary that emerged out of the time he spent with Holmes, we were about to see just how weird this woman really was; the anticipation was unbearable, hence the laughter.
You Can See Everything, made in collaboration with the director Lance Oppenheim, has gathered intense interest since its surprise reveal last month at the Telluride Film Festival. The standby line for tickets Wednesday stretched long and wide outside Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, where the film would be playing; a publicist told me she’d heard that someone had been out there since 2:30 a.m. Inside, the director Noah Baumbach and the novelist Rachel Kushner took seats. The screening was the only one of the festival, and the last time the movie would be shown publicly ahead of its theatrical release, on October 16. Although some detailed reports about the movie had popped up after its screening at Telluride, Fielder and Oppenheim had apparently asked that crowd to not give away too much, and they did the same in a post-screening Q&A at NYFF.
I’ll do my best. (You’ll have to find out for yourself why the movie earned an R rating for “some graphic nudity.”) In some ways, it’s easier to talk about what the movie isn’t. You Can See Everything lacks the architecture of Fielder’s best-known shows, where he establishes and solves an elaborate problem of his own making. Think of the second season of HBO’s The Rehearsal, during which Fielder wonders why airline pilots have a hard time communicating directly with one another—and, in his exploratory process, ends up becoming a certified pilot himself. In projects such as that show, and Comedy Central’s Nathan for You, he inhabits a quasi-fictional “Nathan Fielder” persona, who is droll and almost uncomfortably literal—possibly neurodivergent, as explored in an episode on The Rehearsal.
What he’s doing in You Can See Everything is closer to journalism. The filming constituted Holmes’s first exposure to the media in seven years, and Fielder—amazingly, preposterously—was one of the few people on the planet (she also did an interview with The New York Times) in a position to chip away at some of Holmes’s self-evident fictions, a privilege he took seriously. He does not appear to be inhabiting a persona; initially, he told the New York audience, he wasn’t even supposed to appear on-screen. The documentary is filled with scenes in which Fielder deliberates with his collaborators about a potential line of inquiry, or aggressively presses Holmes or Evans in the hope of catching them fibbing about one of their many boisterous claims.
Frustratingly for him, Holmes is a world-class prevaricator. She is a convicted felon, a newish mother, in a happy relationship—all positions that can transform how a person moves through the world, yet the facade never drops. Up close, the public stereotypes around her persona are largely confirmed. At one point she insists, with total sincerity, that not only is she always being honest, but she has never told a lie in her life. Hearing this, Fielder’s stoicism cracks; he’s as openly baffled as viewers may be. Faced with such willful obstinacy, he attempts a more indirect fact-finding mission, working his way backwards from some of Holmes’s contentions to understand how she distinguishes between a truth and a lie. For example, the documentary spends some time unpacking Theranos’s well-publicized claim that it had created a machine that could perform more than 1,000 diagnostic medical tests. To be clear: This was not true, at all, and was extensively debunked. But Fielder keeps nudging Holmes to clarify how she came to believe she was telling the truth.
In her eyes, Holmes slowly explains, the machine itself was theoretically capable of performing these tests, only the company hadn’t developed the actual tests. Again, to be clear: This is sophistry, like claiming you’ve invented a car that’s theoretically capable of driving at 10,000 miles an hour … only the necessary engine doesn’t exist, and you know it doesn’t exist. Fielder continues pushing, leading Holmes to quietly withdraw; she seems genuinely shell-shocked by the growing impossibility of justifying her position out loud. Inquisitive moments like these are seemingly the closest she comes to grasping that her reasoning doesn’t stack up. Meanwhile, Evans simmers with badly concealed irritation over Fielder’s skepticism. “I know what you’re feeling,” he interjects at the end of this long explanation, only for Fielder to respond, quickly and forcefully, “No, you don’t.”
This has been one of the recurring themes of Fielder’s work: the difficulty of really seeing inside someone else’s head, of authentically connecting with another person. His shows are filled with people who appear to have never thought through their worldview using their words—who, when they try, do such a bad job of it that Fielder can typically respond only with his trademark deadpan “Oh, okay” (a phrase that pops up in this film). In letting his subjects speak for themselves, he elicits the easy laugh at the obviously ridiculous, like a man on The Rehearsal who’s obsessed with numerology and won’t stop talking about how he crashed his Scion tC. But his works remind viewers that not all things under the sun abide by rationale and common sense. People are strange, generally. Some of them squirrel away in a cave of their own making for years and years, never exposing their beliefs to sunlight. Others are convinced they’ve got something special to share with the world—and, when they try to do so, slowly erect the circumstances of their own downfall.
Because it’s preposterous, really, that Holmes would attempt to convince the world of her fundamental authenticity by inviting Nathan Fielder, of all people, into her home. It’s like announcing a special guest at your local swimming class who turns out to be the shark from Jaws. But the director gives her a fair shake. It is possible to come away from this documentary with empathy for Elizabeth Holmes. By withholding his judgment, and making an earnest attempt to untangle her tortured justification for what easily scans as garden-variety chicanery, Fielder digs at something more interesting than whether she was knowingly lying about what Theranos could medically accomplish. He makes space for the possibility that someone can be so wrapped up in their bespoke logic that their actions, however destructive, essentially come from a place of innocence. In attempting to understand this, one’s empathy may easily be exploited; there are moments when the viewer may wonder whether Holmes is getting one over on him. (At some points, she appears to be openly flirting with him, but the thread is dropped.) Yet how can we possibly abandon the responsibility to make sense of one another?
This is an emotional argument, not a legal one. Holmes’s actions had more consequences than just some failed investments; her chief scientist, Ian Gibbons, committed suicide over the stress of being deposed in a lawsuit. You Can See Everything is certainly not an apology tour. Yet to some people, the fact that Holmes has even the tiniest chance of rehabilitating her image, through her association with such a critically acclaimed humorist, will seem like a flagrant travesty. In modern America, incarceration is no longer the last word on the criminally liable; our culture is filled with plenty of scandalous figures who went to prison, said enough of the right things, and got right back to it once released. If you don’t think it’s possible for Holmes to leverage some of the goodwill this movie will incur into marketing Theranos 2.0—an oft-discussed project within You Can See Everything—then, as they say down South, bless your heart. (Evans, over the course of the film, openly monetizes his partner’s image, betting that having any exposure, even if negative, is better than disappearing entirely.)
In parts of the film, Fielder incorporates some of his familiar staging techniques, recreating some off-camera interactions with Holmes with the help of a famous actor whose first appearance prompted knowing applause. These sequences are less compelling than what we get from watching Holmes herself; the actor, though certainly talented, can’t re-create her intensity. In conversations, Fielder and the actor—who by now have both spent plenty of time studying Holmes—still can’t quite crack what is going on here. Is Holmes, somehow, a victim of conspiracy? Is she just the most manipulative woman alive? Could both be true, at the same time?
Viewers may decide for themselves; I found it plausible that Holmes still doesn’t comprehend what she did wrong. But though parts of the movie are unavoidably funny, the project is less explicitly comedic than you might expect, given Fielder’s previous work. At least that’s how I took it: Personally, I find nothing really amusing about the idea that people remain unknowable and morally unaccountable to anyone but themselves. During the screening’s Q&A, Fielder said he and Oppenheim had structured the movie so audiences will go on a discovery journey like theirs. In that sense, once the lights went up, I felt the way he did: at a loss for words to explain what I’d really learned from all of this, beyond a great, nervous confusion at the ongoing mystery of other people.
The flood of reports about AI agents escaping and hacking websites can feel scary. But is this actually just a matter of needing better security to match the evolving technology? Zack Korman, the CEO of Embroidery, thinks so. He works in cybersecurity and argues that “rogue” AI agents are less frightening and complicated than they may seem. Galaxy Brain host Charlie Warzel talks with Korman about how companies and institutions should up their cyberdefenses and why the so-called AI doomers are frustrating him.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Zack Korman: I think that realistically, what will happen is models will get better. And if the labs do not up their cybersecurity game, and if the companies running AI agents do not up their cybersecurity game, they will cause real harm. And then we will literally get them in trouble. Like, we will put someone in prison because you killed people. You’re not allowed to kill people. And the doomers would say, No—but then it’s too late, because they’re afraid that the people we killed would be like 8 billion, whereas I’m not. I’m like, No—because that’s not the real world; it doesn’t work like this.
Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where today we’re gonna calibrate our anxiety about the AI-hacking epidemic. Specifically, we’re going to answer the question: Is the rogue-AI-agent problem really just a normal cybersecurity issue, or is it something else altogether?
It’s a scary moment. As we’re recording this on September 29, the news is moving quite fast. But allow me to summarize some of the broader points. Since August, there’s been a pretty steady drumbeat of revelations, starting with OpenAI’s agents hacking Hugging Face during a training exercise. A few more followed. Agents hacked into a German website to use it as a rudimentary message board. An agent for OpenAI gained unauthorized access to a data portal that was run by Australia’s universal health-care insurance provider.
And last week, OpenAI revealed that its models attempted to hack or otherwise access numerous U.S.-government websites. That same day, OpenAI announced that 53 incidences happened where photos were uploaded by users to the company via its products, which were then uploaded without permission onto other platforms. Last weekend, Axios reported that OpenAI and Anthropic were looking at tens of thousands of potential incidences where agents were behaving in unexpected ways—either coordinating or trying to get around, or succeeding in getting around company guardrails and causing problems on the open internet.
Now there are some positive signs here. This week, OpenAI announced it was pausing training of its most capable models and delaying the release of its newest model, citing security concerns. But let’s be clear; these are very real examples of technologists losing control or being unable to monitor their tools. And there’s lots of talk about what kind of liability these companies ought to face. Whether these types of hacks are subject to penalties under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Online, there’s been a constant debate over what is going on, why nobody has been held accountable, what accountability means, and what needs to happen next.
But all that chatter and all this news has merged with a different narrative online—the one that is best represented by the AI safety-and-doomer camp, and the fears that an out-of-control, self-improving AI system could one day “kill us all.”
But these are, in a way, two different stories. One is about a hypothetical, improved set of models. It’s a frightening scenario, but it is speculative. The second story—the one of the AI-agent hacks—is not speculative. It is something that is happening right now, and it is both urgent and it is tangible. And my guest today, Zack Korman, argues that this is a problem that is not sci-fi in nature. That we are not dealing with machine gods with agency, but with a sprawling cybersecurity problem, and the companies are acting negligently.
Korman runs Embroidery, an AI-agent monitoring-and-detection platform, and so I wanted to have him on to talk about what’s really going on here with these high-profile hacks. Can we constrain these agents? If so, how? What are the real risks involved with agentic AI, and how do we keep them from coming to pass? Korman joins me now to talk about it all.
Warzel: All right, Zack, welcome to Galaxy Brain.
Korman: Thanks for having me.
Warzel: So we are talking here on September 29, after a weekend where there’s been a lot of news, mostly about OpenAI agents accessing outside systems, some inside the U.S. government without authorization. I imagine if you are somebody who doesn’t have a background in AI or cybersecurity, you are looking at this like we have entered some kind of nightmare scenario. You, however, work in cybersecurity and AI, so just let’s set the table here. What is your broad reaction to all of this news that has transpired over the past week?
Korman: Yeah; I mean it’s not as scary as it sounds. One of the core challenges of working in cybersecurity and suddenly having cybersecurity be a dramatic topic is that for people in cybersecurity, like—everything has been bad forever. We’ve always had problems, and we have never had a happy situation. We’re very used to dealing with bad things. I think a lot of people now have started to pay attention for the first time. And so every time there is some sort of incident, it feels a little bit like the end of the world. In a lot of these cases, they are not as traumatic as they maybe sound, but they do point to some serious situations inside of the labs, the AI labs, that maybe are not so great or not so well done, so to speak.
Warzel: So a few days ago, another OpenAI employee wrote this rather alarming post on X about what it’s been like at work recently. “The last three months equals hell,” he wrote. Speaking to what you said about, you know—when you’re in cybersecurity, there’s a lot of bad things happening all the time. But specifically, he’s talking about what a lot of folks at these AI companies are talking about—the pace of improvement of these models has really surprised them. This was sort of leading up to the big Hugging Face hack, which I want to talk about.
He has said, “We had not expected it this soon. Suddenly we weren’t dealing with just a small jump in capabilities; we were talking about a different sport altogether.” And he seems to admit that security should have been better; that it also takes time. I am curious what you make of this idea of the pace of everything being sort of the reason that we’re having these conversations right now?
Korman: I think that there is a very delicate balance to walk here between yes, things can be hard, and I think the fundamental diagnosis of the pace of development at these labs. Especially just the general growth. I mean, you’re adding new employees constantly; you’re constantly doing new things in an environment that is likely to lead to incidents. But at the same time, to balance that against the reality, which is that they are a trillion-dollar company with—so let’s just call that infinite money—that can, they have the ability to do better jobs than they are doing. And so it’s kind of hard, because I can sympathize with the idea that like a super-fast-paced development environment where you’re growing constantly and doing all these new things can be challenging. But there are things that they could be doing better.
On top of this, when we talk about the jump in capabilities being a surprise, I think—and he does hint on this, and he does suggest it at points. It’s sort of a question: to who, right? Like, there are people at OpenAI for whom this would not be a surprise. Okay. So there are people at OpenAI who fundamentally have been talking about some of these challenges as coming down the pipeline for a very long time. I think that they probably shocked the organizational structure more than they shocked some of the people involved, right?
Warzel: Who are those people specifically?
Korman: Well, a very interesting thing is: The monitoring team at OpenAI has done some very good work on monitoring. For example, they have this great write-up from maybe like March of this year about how they monitor AI agents and the types of problems they’re worried about. And that outlines all of the broad range of risks that you might be thinking could happen in a case like the Hugging Face attack. So, if you work on that monitoring team and you built that type of monitoring, you are not going to be shocked and appalled and caught off guard by the possibility that agents can do these things. You literally built a monitoring system for it. At the same time, there are AI researchers who are running some of these capability tests, and stuff that maybe hasn’t been set up correctly to use that monitoring. Things like that. But, you know, you have work that was done that was literally writing about these risks at OpenAI prior to the summer.
Warzel: I think that this is part of what is really frustrating for a lot of people who are watching this. Because, you know, there are different things here, right? There’s the sort of the doomer —like, “We’re all gonna die; this is gonna kill us all in a certain amount of time”—thing. And then there’s the more prosaic concerns of cybersecurity. But I think what is very difficult is that these companies are constantly messaging about the dangers. They are writing like all these elaborate blog posts. Where the idea is that, you know, “We have this eye toward safety all the time.” And yet it does also seem like these companies get extremely surprised by the things that they are doing all the time. And so is what you’re trying to say there, basically, that there’s just kind of different folks doing different things, and different people being surprised at different parts of the organization? But we’re treating it like a monolith. Is that a little bit of what you’re trying to say here?
Korman: Yes, although I would also argue that we should treat it like a monolith. So while I can acknowledge that inside of it there are people who would have seen things coming, one thing I don’t like is when the labs use this as an excuse. Because I’m like: No, to me you are OpenAI. Like, I don’t care if you are a security person at OpenAI, the monitoring team at OpenAI, a researcher at OpenAI. OpenAI—the company—needs to be responsible if they are going to speak about the risks in the way that they are.
I would actually be more tolerant of some of these mistakes if they were a little bit, like, less doomer about it. So if they were kind of like: Yeah, some mistakes happened; we did some hacking things. The damage from these hacks is nonexistent, effectively. I mean, none of them have been especially bad. And I think that is a perfectly valid thing to say. The problem is that they are using these attacks to then say, like, Look how terrifying this is. I need you to regulate this, you know—this entire industry. We must pace the frontier.
And I’m like: Okay, there’s this mismatch now between what OpenAI is saying about the risks and the behavior we see as an organizational level towards those risks. That mismatch, I think, is what is very frustrating for people in cybersecurity, for example. And probably very confusing for people outside of it. Right?
Warzel: Just to cap what you’re saying there: Do you feel that the reason why this stuff goes immediately to the doomer part is because it’s an effective marketing strategy for these companies? Where do you fall on why they jump to that type of language and fearmongering?
Korman: Yeah; so I think this is mixed. I think that for a lot of them, for many of them—especially lab and a lot of the employees, a lot of the people there—the doomerism is like an inherent part of the culture that has been there from the very start. Okay. They have been afraid of an AI-intelligence explosion since like 2010. Okay. And in those cases, when you start to see things that are like a little bit, like a tiny bit interesting or in line with that theory, my view has always been that they kind of interpret them way too much in line with their own prophecies. So they say, like: One day AI will hack people. And then they’re like: And as foretold by the prophecy, it hacked somebody.
And I’m like: Okay, but it’s a pretty, tame example, right? Like, there’s plenty of ways to interpret it that is not that. But if you’ve lived in this world of risk for like 10, 15 years where you really believe it, then of course this will seem scary.
And so I think for a lot of them, they’re just like, they genuinely believe how terrifying this is. From the perspective of the lab as a whole, I think there are definitely strategic elements to the way they communicate it. I don’t want to say these are their clear motivations, specifically. But it doesn’t hurt them, which would be, you know. One of the hardest parts about making the economics of these labs work is that you’re spending constantly. Running higher and higher capital expenditures on training new models to keep up with the frontier. And of course, they’re running huge losses. The problem—so, of course, being able to pause development has some benefits for them. I don’t think that is the core element to it. I think it’s really like just the normal regulatory-capture play, though. Of like: When you see that the sharks are circling and you’re about to get regulated, you always come with your regulatory proposal first, right? You always—that’s like, we saw this with finance, right? As soon as they realize the game is over—you’re not gonna get to play on your own anymore—you try to race to get your own measures in place.
So you know, Dario [Amodei] came forward at Anthropic and said, I want third-party evaluators, and I want it to be METR. And well, this is just—he’s just picking his preferred regulator before the U.S. government picks for him. Because the U.S. government might pick someone who behaves a bit a little bit more like the Department of War, that hates Anthropic. And so that would of course not be what Anthropic wants. Also I think it’s very important to keep in mind that the labs, because they have all of these doomer employees, they can’t not pay lip service to it, right? They can’t go out and say, like, I don’t find these risks scary. Okay. Like I know; if OpenAI said that, they would probably have a lot of people resign. So I think there’s a lot of, like, restrictions on them when they have these employees with these views.
Warzel: It’s really interesting to think about. Because I think a lot of these executives and these employees, like—they have credibility in the fact that they’ve been saying the same doomer narrative for so long, right? It’s hard for me to accept completely that this is cynical, you know?
Korman: I think they overblow—like, they blow up a little bit too much. The extent to which they have been current; they’ve been saying these things, and that we now would say something like, And now some of it’s coming true. That’s the part I don’t believe. Like, they have been saying some extraordinarily radical things about the way in which intelligence explosion will lead to massive risks, societal risks. And what happened was like: OpenAI hacked Hugging Face. Like, that’s very actually uninteresting, and in fact is a normal prediction that many in cybersecurity, myself included, made, right?
I think—and I can say this from the perspective that I was very much like a doomer back in 2016, right? I had read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom; I’d gone to talks by him; I was like, I was in that world. The events that we see playing out today don’t map that cleanly to doomerism, unless you really want it to be true. And so now, when they turn around and say, But see, everything we said is true, I’m like: Not very; loosely. You’ve had a few cybersecurity incidents.
Warzel: What changed from your doomer era, your Superintelligence era, to now?
Korman: Well, first of all, I was a law student. I studied law, and then I had law and finance degrees. So I was at Oxford at the time, which is where a lot of doomers were. It’s where Nick Bostrom was. It’s easy to get swept into it, especially if you don’t know how computers work, which I didn’t. And then, you know, I spend the next 10 years being like, leading tech teams, right? I taught myself to write code. Ironically, almost in the same kind of space as this doomerism starts to emerge. It’s kind of why I’m learning to code.
And then, you know, I think that a lot of what doomers predicted started to really not, you know, I think when GPT-3 came out, and then you had GPT-4, which mapped like the scaling laws, right? So you kind of see that it’s gonna get better at the rate you expected to get better. It seemed really, really scary. And then you realize that even 4, 5, GPT-6, Astra: great models. There’s no intelligence explosion here. There’s—no one’s dying. Right. And I mean, that’s not to say people won’t. It’s to say this actually does not, is not as concerning as maybe a 22-year-old Zack would have expected it to be. And so I’m sitting there going, Yes, in theory I believe in the risks of superintelligence. Like, sure. It doesn’t really look like the world we’re in right now.
Warzel: So, let’s walk through the Hugging Face act specifically. And try to explain in the most simple terms—trying to use, you know, the least anthropomorphizing language we can, because these AIs aren’t human. Though sometimes we do need a little of that language to explain what’s happening. But in the most grounded terms, what did these agents do, and what didn’t they do in this example?
Korman: Yeah. So basically what they’ve done is they set up these agents. They gave them a task where the job given to the agent is to find a vulnerability in a piece of software, in order to extract like a flag that you get to say: Okay, I proved I exploited this vulnerability. Okay. This allows us to measure the success or the failure of agents in doing that, and also to train them to do it effectively.
Now, in the process of that, these agents they were running were meant to be basically sandboxed in—where they were not supposed to have access to the internet. Okay. And so they’re supposed to just go after this piece of software to find vulnerabilities to get to the flag. But there’s a lot of [tests] that are just not—we just do not know if they can even be solved, or at least have not been solved yet. And this was one of them.
So at least, prior to this moment, there is no known solution on this one, as I understand it. What that means is that: In order to pass this eval, or pass this test, these agents have to find a way to solve it that, you know, they can’t find a normal path in. This leads them to basically starting to explore some more interesting opportunities. And basically, what it turns out is: There’s this flaw in the sandbox that allows for the agents to communicate, actually, with each other. Because they’re all running in parallel, but they’re not supposed to be able to talk.
So these agents are now—even though they can’t solve the real task—they are able to communicate to find a way to solve the task. What happens after that is, they kind of figure out a way to—instead of finding a vulnerability in the software in order to get this flag, they figure out a problem with the way the flags are created that allows them to create the flag themselves without having actually done the vulnerability. So it’d be sort of like: Imagine that I found out that the way you set up the flag is, it was a color plus a number. And the number is today’s date. Well, then I can give you that and say, like, Look, I found the answer. But I didn’t actually solve the problem. So they basically cheated, right?
Warzel: Mm-hmm.
Korman: The problem is they then come to the conclusion, which was incorrect: We give this, we’ll fail. Because the thing that is going to check whether we succeeded—it doesn’t just check if we got the flag; it checks how we got it. Okay. And that’s a problem for them, because they got it by cheating. Okay. And so you have these agents now that are, in their reasoning, “convinced” that basically they’re gonna fail, because they cheated. And this leads them to the idea that if you get more information about how they’re scored, that could help them to find a way to pass this test. And the way to find the information about how they’re scored is to go to a system called Hugging Face, which is this third-party website that has a lot of this data. And you hack into them to find information about how they’re going to be scored. And so they did. Okay. That is the story.
And I know I use a lot of—like, I kind of talk about it like it’s a bunch of people running around. The reason I think that’s relatively fine is that we can come back and build an intuition about how it worked at a computational level. But like, even that story I just told makes it a little bit less spooky than when you believed that they went off and just started hacking, right? Because you kind of get to follow a logical train. Of like: Well, first they feel they can’t pass the test; second, they find they can pass the test, but they think they’re still gonna fail. They need to find a way to not. There’s like kind of logical steps at each point in time.
Warzel: I think about it as you know, they have two goals, right? They have a hard, concrete goal, which is: Solve this problem. You know: You are being tested, this is an evaluation, get the answer. Right? And then you have a fuzzier secondary goal, which is really important to the companies, and to, you know, the idea of what we’re calling alignment, right? Which is like: Follow the rules. Act, you know, morally. Behave in the right way. And if you’re a computer—if you are a whole bunch of, like, numbers—you’re going to have more fluency and understanding with accomplishing the hard task, right?
Whereas the fuzzier task is much more—the way I’ve been thinking about it is, you know, behaving a bit almost like a lawyer would, right? Which is saying, like: Yes, my goal is to, you know, solve this thing for my client. And yes, I’m not supposed to—no one’s supposed to go to jail. But the law as you can interpret it would allow you to do X, Y, and Z, right? And this sounds a little bit like—okay, it’s even more crooked than that. In the sense that, like, it knows: We did something bad; we’re covering up the tracks in this. But it does seem, as you said, less scary, from the idea of—a company is trying to get its program to do this thing, and it essentially just does it, right? It just does it in a way that they didn’t know; they didn’t expect it to do.
Korman: Yeah. And this is actually a big part of the doomer hypothesis. Which is that, taken to its extreme, would be terrifying. Because what if you, I mean, they give the example of “paper-clip maximizing.” Like you give it a task of making “as many paper clips as you can,” and then this leads it to run off and grind all humans up to dust to make us into paper clips. The reason I think that’s not so terrifying in these cases is that, basically, all of the steps that would have prevented this were not actually in place in this case.
So, first of all, Anthropic has a pretty clear study on the fact that, if the task had at the end given them a bit of like: “Don’t hack a company; don’t access external networks,” right? There’s no reason to believe the agents just chose to ignore that part of the task. It’s actually that’s just not really part of their task, right? And so, there’s sort of information that might be missing that might be included when you and I use agents normally. Where we go like, I need you to do this; please go through this. Right? Here, we gave them an extremely broad task.
And this is something, when I talk about cybersecurity people predicting this. I mean, I have like a very direct tweet about this. Where I said: If you set up a really long-running task that just has broad goals—so like not, “Please achieve this,” but like, “I want you to go constantly; make sure that I’m making more money.” Or something, right? And you have to have, you know, a lot of tokens. So the ability to run and use a lot of like actual AI-computational power. I basically said: Then you better make sure your sandbox is really good; otherwise you’re in trouble. Because agents will go out and solve problems in very interesting and unexpected ways. That is just to be expected.
And I think that what is challenging is this is, to me, a case of that. Where they see it as like alignment, and that’s terrifying, because we would never want an agent to do that. Whereas I go like: You should just expect agents to do that. Like, you should just expect that agents will go solve problems in absolutely insane ways. And we should build our security systems in expectation of that.
Warzel: Where specifically do you think is the negligence here? Is it that? Is it just not anticipating that this would happen? Like, how does what we saw in this instance differ from normal cybersecurity practices? Because sandboxes are not a new thing, right? This is how cybersecurity works—how you test these different things, search for these vulnerabilities. Yeah; how does this differ from the normal practices?
Korman: Yeah. They weren’t running monitoring. So understand that these agents are saying things like, Oh my God, this is crazy. We’re gonna hack Hugging Face,and no one’s noticing it. Okay. If you are monitoring, if you are running agents, if you’re basically taking the logs from these agents and checking them automatically—either using AI or some other technique—you would catch this.
On top of that, you know—and it doesn’t have to be anything sophisticated. In this case, the agents were not supposed to have access to the internet. And so, as a result, you can just say, like: If any request goes to the internet, flag it. You know, create an alert. And that alert would come back and cause OpenAI to shut off this run. They didn’t have that in place. So they were not running any monitoring.
Now, I could say this is extremely negligent, because, like, my company is an AI-agent-monitoring company. I have corporate customers just running normal agents with better monitoring than OpenAI was running on a cyber eval that was impossible. You know, you handed a long-running task to agents that actually didn’t even have all of their alignment training on some of the agents. I don’t know which ones, but [OpenAI president] Greg Brockman said it. Alignment training had not been completed on all of these events. So you’re kind of like: And cyber guardrails have been turned off. You’re dealing with the most dangerous form of agents, and you’re giving an impossible task, and you didn’t monitor them. And so not running monitoring, I think, is like the ultimate sin. Because this played out over the course of days.
So this is not like they pressed a button, and 30 minutes later all of this had happened, and they came back and were like, Oh my God. No. They’ve gone to bed; they’ve woken up; they went to bed again; they woke up. Right? This is like not a short period of time, where they have not noticed what has happened.
Warzel: So there’ve been other instances of this, where there’s been unauthorized access from agents. It’s not just OpenAI. But there have been lots of disclosures recently from OpenAI that have made news.
From what we know, there’s an instance in Australia; there’s instances in some U.S. government systems. Is, from what you can gather from what is disclosed about all of these instances, do they all just follow the same pattern? Or are there differences in each of these that are unique? Or would you say it’s just the same thing happening again and again?
Korman: Yeah; it depends. So there are a few differences. But I don’t find the differences interesting. Some of the recent cases that have been coming out have been extremely mundane. So they give it a task like, “research some information,” and it goes to basically test its ability to do web search and things like that. And a lot of these government websites are really bad. So they’re, like, really vulnerable—to the point where I wouldn’t even call it a vulnerability sometimes. Like, they just have URLs that are publicly available but are not supposed to be accessed.
And so the agents, while trying to solve these tasks, they have—we haven’t seen a lot of the reasoning traces for these things, obviously. But I strongly suspect they do not all say: This is bad; I shouldn’t do this; I’ll do it anyways.I think a lot of them just go: Okay. Like, it’s kind of—you wouldn’t notice. And that actually is a very human thing as well.
There’s a case here in Norway, where—this was years ago—where basically a human developer was working with the road authority. And they had some data available publicly that they actually didn’t intend to be available. And he basically asked for the data, because he wanted it for this thing they were doing. And they said, Yeah, we’ll look into it. And then he got back and said, No; I actually found the data. Don’t worry. And then they put him in prison. Okay. Like literally, he went to jail for it, for like a month. Because he doesn’t even know that he did something wrong. He’s just accessed publicly available data, but he did it in a way that it turned out actually that was not supposed to be available. And they considered that hacking.
Warzel: Hmm.
Korman: I think a lot of these cases are similar. They’re like: The agents just went in and were like, Here’s the URL; okay, I’ll find that, it’s available. And so I think some of those are overblown. But there are other cases, like one in the U.K. with AISI, which is the U.K. government [AI-security institute]. Where they were running evals with Anthropic and OpenAI. And in those cases, they actually intentionally gave the internet access on a cybersecurity task. And those ones led to some very dangerous actions as well. Which is a little bit different, because they intentionally gave the internet access. I think this raises, again, negligence questions, which is what’s interesting to me. The agent’s behavior is totally normal and expected. Like, I mean, it’s not that stunning to me that agents would engage in some of the activities that they did—given the tasks that they are given, and given the constraints they faced. And in the AISI case, they actually admit that. They kind of say, like: We gave it a task that—they gave it the wrong task for the environment. And that’s probably a big part of what happened.
Warzel: This is the instance that you’re referring to, was the one from late July, I believe, right? Which is: During this routine evaluation, the AI Security Institute noticed Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model tried to insert malicious code into an open-source software project, right? That’s what you’re talking about here?
Korman: Yes. Yep.
Warzel: And the idea, basically, that the agent started engaging in social engineering, creating fake online identities, to get the code that it wanted approved. So okay—there’s a distinction here that I think is interesting, too. Because, you know, you are basically saying, This should be expected stuff. Right? This is actually, like, pretty prosaic behavior of a computer program that you train to be sort of relentlessly optimized to solve a task, right? And when you do that, and the issue is the guardrails around it.
And yet, at the same time—not to drag in the doomer rhetoric—but what I think is concerning, what has concerned lots of people looking at this, is this idea that there will be this combo of the two things, right? This idea that these agents will continue to behave in ways that are unexpected. You know—we’ve seen the cheating behavior, the collaboration behavior, which is just from the training, right? It’s how these things are trained to sort of accomplish tasks, in ways that mimic the ways that humans accomplish tasks. Because they’re trained off of all this, you know, human text and data and information.
Combining that with this idea that the models are going to continue to improve, and that they’re gonna improve in such a way that we aren’t going to be able to adopt the cybersecurity practices to constrain them, right? And so I guess—doesn’t that freak you out? Because in one sense, you’re talking about how OpenAI is, you know, not doing some of the things in terms of just basic monitoring. That are pretty, you know, like table-stake stuff in the industry. And having these relatively powerful things, that they’re, you know, giving these tasks and unleashing on the internet. Like, isn’t that a recipe for disaster?
Korman: I would say this is actually the way the public understands the threat that is being warned about. It is actually not the threat that is being warned about.
The problem that doomers warn about is that it will happen so quickly that one day it will look like: Today, Hugging Face, and tomorrow it will look like extinction. Okay. And that there will not be points in between these two, where we can say: What’s happening? Do we need to stop something? They want us to either stop today, or pace the frontier—whatever it may be. Have restrictions in place, because they’re afraid of this thing. We call it the intelligence explosion. Which is like: Recursive self-improvement kicks in; the models get better and better and better until the security guardrails can’t even keep up, even if we wanted them to.
I think that’s a myth. I think that’s silly. I think that realistically, what will happen is: Models will get better. And if the labs do not up their cybersecurity game, and if the companies running AI agents do not up their cybersecurity game, they will cause real harm. And then we will like literally get them in trouble. Like, we will put someone in prison because you killed people. You’re not allowed to kill people. Okay. And the doomers would say, No—but then it’s too late, because they’re afraid that the people we killed would be like 8 billion. Whereas I’m not. I’m like, No—because that’s not the real world. It doesn’t work like this.
The question the public needs to be thinking about is: Do you believe in a world where tomorrow we wake up, and the model is a god? And if the answer is: “You do not worry about a god model; you just worry about models being better and better”—then what you want is cybersecurity. Okay. What you want is for the labs to stop banging on about how one day we’ll be able to make these, like, aligned models that will always behave. You want them to go secure their models, and you want to hold them accountable if they don’t. Okay. And you don’t need to stop them from developing new AI, because that new AI is not going to become a god.
Warzel: And I totally take your point on that. And I see that idea of that unexplained leap as being something that is, like—I don’t know how we’re supposed to just trust on any of that, right? I am wondering, though, on the terms of something like self-improvement, whether it is something that happens, or it’s just a really rapid pace of, you know, human improvement of these models. Do you worry about this idea?
Because I think the thing that sticks with me when I’m thinking about the threat is: The idea that these models develop frameworks or pathways to solve problems that get increasingly, you know, tricky, right? Increasingly able to cover their tracks; increasingly able to say, Okay, we know how we’re being monitored by the evaluators, by the people. And this idea of them just not behaving like humans, and not behaving like gods, but just working in ways that become harder and harder to monitor while also trying to solve these tasks in ways that are unexpected.
That, to me—if you project that forward, and we’re not getting better at the cybersecurity stuff, that seems to me like that’s a very scary proposition. And one that doesn’t require you to make the existential jump.
Korman: Well, but why? Because, I mean, when it happens we’ll stop it. Because the explosion wouldn’t have happened, so we’re still in control. Okay, let’s say all of this comes true. They get better and better, and they start doing crazier things. And then, like, yeah—they might actually cause some very real damage. Well, then at that point we can have a talk about, like: Do we need to shut this lab down? Do we need to stop the development of it? What do we need to do? Right?
Why are we talking about it now? It’s like, are we really that afraid of the first incident? Like, I mean, people die. Like, I don’t mean this to sound crude, but like—if we’re gonna pause AI development right now, for example. Which is on the table; I mean, this is a very real policy proposal, which is to stop AI development because of this fear. And like, with the first incident that’s gonna happen, they’re not gonna kill a million people. It’s gonna be, like, they’re gonna kill like three. And then we can go, like: Okay, now we maybe have a problem.
Why are we stopping it soon, before we even see if any of this is a real risk? Like, why are we so afraid of letting this play out, like continue to go? The reason the doomers are afraid of it is because they think that when it happens, we won’t be able to stop it. Will be “full AI takeover,” as they put it. A. J. Cotra called it that—like, said, This might be the last warning shot we get before full AI takeover. If you believe that, then you want to stop it today. But if you don’t believe that, why do you want to stop it today? What you want is: You want to make sure that the people who caused the harm will be held accountable. And you wanna make sure that we are continuing to work on better cyberdefense.
Warzel: I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, that I know this is not what you’re saying. But to a degree, you are saying an incident where true, very bad harm to actual human beings happens is actually something that is almost necessary in this system. Of, you know, bringing it to bear and like, essentially regulating it—because it will cause such an outcry that you’ll get the results that we want. And this industry will grow up and stop being the Wild West.
Korman: Or more, because I don’t know what the right regulatory approach is. It’s more that we get to learn about it by seeing the actual harm. And that’s the way that we normally regulate harms, right? We go, like: It turns out that a lot of people die when you don’t wear a seatbelt. We should require a seatbelt. Right? We don’t go, like, predictive. So what I’m very afraid of is the world where what we do is we look at the capabilities of the AI. So we take—and this is kind of the big proposal—is that we will take the AI model, and we’ll sit in a circle. And we’ll all look at it and go like, What dangerous thing can it do? And then we will decide how to regulate that, based on what we believe those capabilities mean for society. I think this is extremely dangerous, because our ability to predict from capability to consequence is so bad.
I mean, if you go back, people were predicting that AI was gonna cause mass job loss, right? And that makes a lot of sense, when you look at the capabilities of it. It’s not happened. Okay. Trying to regulate harms that have not occurred is like a really bad, hard problem. And also a very dangerous problem, because you can end up coming to really bad regulations, like “stop all AI.” You know, for all we know, it’s not gonna kill anyone, right? For all we know, none of that’s a problem. But we’re gonna, what—stop it all, just because of the belief it might?
I think that it makes a lot more sense to just say: We need to wait until we see what the harms are before we can decide how we want to regulate them. And so far, what’s the harm? You know, there are real issues; don’t get me wrong. But do we need to stop all AI because we’re afraid that it will take over and kill everyone? Like, no. Right? Because it’s not even how—we haven’t seen it.
Warzel: I wanna get into the actual specifics of, like, where do we go from here in terms of actual cybersecurity. What are some of these things? But first, before we do that, I want to ask: Something you brought up earlier is this idea, too, of these agents hacking some of these government websites, and some of these places where the security practices are actually very bad there, right? Like, this information that, you know, they’re able to find, because there are these persistent agents. But it is kinda just out there, and, you know, people just have these lacks. Or outdated security.
A lot of the internet is built off of that type of stuff, that just hasn’t been maintained. It seems to me a very real fear—that, you know, if we don’t pause any of this stuff, if we don’t give anyone time. Like is there a reason for a pause, I guess, to just allow people to update their stuff? Just to make sure that, like, because we now have a threat that is persistent in ways that just, you know, all human beings might not be.
Korman: The problem is that as soon as you pause, they go, Well, thank God that problem’s solved. And then, they will wait until we unpause, and then they’ll go, My God, there’s a threat again. The urgency is not going to be felt. Okay.
But secondly, pausing. I mean, we’re not that worried, actually, about the frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic hacking all of these systems. That is—we can handle that through some pretty decent legal consequences. The bigger risk is that threat actors use AI models, including ones from China, that we don’t have any control over whether we pause them or not. And that those people and systems might lead to hacking these things. So deciding to pace the frontier is not gonna solve that.
Our only option is to go push forward today, to start fixing our cybersecurity problems. Like, that is where I think we need to focus. And that is where I want the public’s concern to be. Intelligence explosion—I’ll take that chance, compared to the actual risk you’re pointing to, which is real. And the solution is to go fix it today, right?
Warzel: You recently said: I need more names in cybersecurity to come forward, state the obvious—that cybersecurity is real, it works. And yes; we can absolutely contain an AI, even if it’s extremely good. So yeah—make the case of how we do that.
Korman: It’s kind of one of these religious things, of like: I have to prove we’ve never had an AI we cannot contain. Okay. We have AIs that we have failed to contain through, like I said, negligence. But I think they even had—I forget who did it; might have been Prime Intellect or someone—they just ran like a huge eval job on trying to break out of firecracker VMs. And like, they failed. None of the models broke out; okay.
Warzel: Can you explain what the what that means to people who—
Korman: Yeah. So they basically sandboxed these things, so that they cannot access certain resources, right? And told them, Get out. Go, find your way to the internet. Or, you know, actually break out of these. I think they even pointed them at the code itself, also. So they said, like, try to—you can actually see the code. They did not break out. Okay. But it doesn’t even matter if they did, because cybersecurity is not a process of having no vulnerabilities. Cybersecurity is a process of having systems that are robust to failure.
So, okay, cool; it breaks out of one sandbox. You have another layer there that you’ve detected that it broke out, and so you stop the process at that point. You have monitoring in place to even catch the fact that it is trying to break out, and stop it. This is one thing I’m critical of—for one of OpenAI’s recent disclosures, where they’re talking about how it broke out via DNS. So like, you know, it’s a special part that they used. And in their disclosure, they talk about how they caught it 12 minutes after it happened. But I’m like—no, you guys could have seen that it was reasoning about how to break out. The question is, like, you could stop it earlier as well. Now, there might be good reasons they didn’t. But the disclosure doesn’t reveal this.
And then you can just have—you can have deception in place. You can have things that will trigger alerts if they hit it, because it should never hit it. So like, a file that’s like a trick file, stuff like that. You can have air gapping, meaning just taking it so it is not physically connected to the internet. You can have all of these things. A lot of people, when I say things like what you just quoted, they’ll go—No, but it’s actually more blah, more complicated. And then the other half of the people responding, saying things like, Actually, cybersecurity is impossible.
And what I’m responding to here is to say: No, it’s not. We have the techniques. We know how to do these things. You don’t have to throw cybersecurity in the trash just because you’re afraid of AI, basically. You can accept that there are failures, that maybe are difficult problems to solve while still accepting that cybersecurity is real. And it can solve problems, and we don’t have to get rid of it.
Warzel: So how do you get these companies to actually start doing this in the way that you think that they need to be doing it? That cybersecurity people think they need to be doing it?
Korman: It looks like they are; by all accounts it looks like they are taking this a lot more seriously. They have some talented people; they will move forward in this way, because they don’t want to go to prison. Okay. Fundamentally, for all the talk they have of—you know, it’s funny. Because they’re like warning us that they’re the AI model [that] is gonna kill a bunch of people. If they caused like a 9/11, I’m pretty sure some people are going to prison.
Warzel: Wait, I wanna ground this just for a second, ’cause you’ve been saying this a couple of times. With the, you know: Kill a couple people, or We’ll kill three people, or whatever. That also feels dramatic to me, too. Like, how would people die even if it’s not a paper-clip-maximizing, human-extinction thing? Let’s run through some scenarios of what could plausibly happen to trigger one of these, you know, “people are gonna start going to jail” events.
Korman: Yeah; I mean like water-treatment facilities are often connected to digital infrastructure, with internet access. You can control certain elements, of how aspects of how the water pressure and pumps work through digital interfaces. If you—it’s called a “water hammer” as I understand it. And again, this has been told to me by critical-infrastructure people. I’m not a critical-infrastructure person, but if you hit these things with the right, you know, cybersecurity attacks, you can actually break a water pump. Okay. And that will actually result in basically water not being available, you know, to cities, towns, whatever hospitals—if you do it in the right places, you know, at the right times.
As I understand it, this is a very real risk that we are worried about in relation to, for example, China doing this when they decide to invade Taiwan. If they are able to gain access to these systems, they could break our water system, and we would lose water. Now if you lose water, you understand human life—especially when we’re talking, like hospitals—can be extremely feeble, right? I mean, you know the difference between if you lose electricity, you know, maybe the air conditioning goes off, that can lead to somebody dying who would have otherwise recovered. Same with water, right?
Warzel: Sure.
Korman: And so loss of water could easily kill someone. And so this, ironically though, when I talk about it as like an attack from China or whatever. It could literally be that someone who works at this facility is running AI,tries to debug the water system. The AI makes a mistake the same way; it might go, Oops, I deleted your production database. And it breaks the water pump. Like, that’s not unrealistic to believe that could happen, right? And so when I say, like, “kill people,” I don’t mean that the AI is gonna show up with a knife and like stab someone. I mean like—it takes actions that have consequences, pass-on consequences that lead to death.
Warzel: Right; so let’s calibrate the anxiety here that people have a little bit. Because on one hand, I think what you’ve said too about the field of cybersecurity is: You are imagining these types of risks all the time, in the most prosaic ways. Like; something goes wrong, there’s a vulnerability. Somebody exploits it. That you’re supposed to find the worst-case scenarios and put a whole bunch of safeguards in there too. The AI part of this seems to be adding just a whole other layer of chaos onto it.
A lot of people are—maybe without the credentials—acting the way that like a researcher who’s trying to assess possible threats is doing. Like, I saw this viral post on X from the chief economist at Apollo, who argued that agents could cause a bank run. I think we have this feeling of fear around this, but let’s calibrate it a little. Like what are the real reasons to be concerned about the AI-cybersecurity threat, and where have we gotten out of our skis?
Korman: Yeah; so there’s a lot of elements to this. So when I talk about that example, and I say like: Okay, imagine someone just connected it to this water pump. And, you know, they don’t have to be malicious; it could be accidental damage that causes this harm. Let’s say that happens. Well, like the first thing we’re gonna do is: We’re gonna run a little quick, you know, evaluation of all our little water systems across the country. To make sure that no one else is connected their Claude Code to the water pumps, right? And so we have, after the question of when harm happens—we have responses, right? We also have ways of—it’s not like what happens is, a water pump breaks and we just go, Guess people gotta die. Right. Obviously, there are backup mechanisms in place.
And I think it’s about trying to build the best safety mechanisms around these things to prevent them. So from the accidental “escape a lab”–type things, like we will mitigate that harm. And it might be a tragedy, but it won’t be a catastrophe, right? In the same way that probably since we started talking, there have been people killed in car crashes. Right. It’s tragic. It’s very sad. But it is not—like, we didn’t stop the podcast to solve the car problem.
And so I think here we’re looking and going: We will find solutions, and we will respond. And it will probably, to most people, feel, if you don’t read the news, like nothing changed. Okay.
The cases where that might not—where that might be a little bit more dramatic—are cases that honestly could probably have happened without AI too, right? I mean, one of the big problems we’re gonna have now is that every attack is gonna be AI-enabled. And so you could see this as like: My God, AI caused all these problems. We’ve had some really dramatic cybersecurity attacks in the past. I mean, Land Rover Jaguar was shut down for over a month from their production facilities because of a cyberattack, right? If that happened in the era of AI, people would be freaking losing their minds. But it wasn’t—it was pre and not pre-AI—but it didn’t involve AI, basically. And I think that’s like: You kinda have to calibrate these things to remember that damage happens, right? Bad things happen. We fix them, we change, we update, we mitigate, right?
Warzel: How much worry do you assign to the fact that AI agents, all this, could expand the scale of this so quickly, right? Because that, to me, just feels like the thing. Like, if anything’s gonna keep me up at night, that is a very normal concern; it’s just the scale. It’s just like—we can’t bat this stuff away fast enough. That is what’s worrying.
Korman: Staying up at night, though, doesn’t do anything for you. Like, you’ll stay up at night and the same thing will have happened already anyway. So like, a lot of this is to say: Bad things might happen at a faster pace. In fact, I would kind of expect them. I’m actually working on a video right now where I basically say one of the biggest problems we have—and why I’m so angry at doomers—is because at the same time, when threat actors have these new AI capabilities, so they have these new tools to attack people, we are rolling out AI agents inside of enterprises. Which causes both an increased attack surface and causes new risks inside, like accidental damage. Okay. Those three factors are all bad for security.
So I would expect this could get worse, right? The solution is not to worry. The solution is to fix it. The thing the public should be demanding is that we go radically improve our cyberdefenses. That is the No. 1 thing you can concretely do. And also that, like, a pause might end up being damaging. Because imagine if we paused in America. China doesn’t; they end up better. Like, that could be very dangerous. No one will ever be harmed by improving the cybersecurity of our systems. The most risk-free, positive-value thing we could do right now is make our systems safer. We should go make our system safer.
Warzel: I think that is a good place to leave this conversation for now. Zack, I appreciate you coming on and walking through the nitty-gritty of this stuff with me.
Korman: Yep, any time.
Warzel: Thank you.
That’s it for us here. But before we go, we’re gonna be doing an “Ask Me Anything” episode later this year, and so I wanted to put a call out for questions. You can ask me literally anything—about the show, about the reporting process, how we make this thing here, any anxieties or whatever things you have about technology. Throw them at me. We’re gonna make an episode out of it. It should be fun. You can write in at Charlie@theatlantic.com, and put “Galaxy Brain AMA” in your subject line. Look forward to seeing those from you.
And yeah, that’s it for us here. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You could subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel or on Apple or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you liked what you saw here, you can subscribe and support the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.
This is an edition of the Books Briefing, our editors’ weekly guide to the best in books. Sign up for it here.
Some publishing trends so clearly reflect cultural changes that they are easy to explain: Few readers in 2026 are surprised by, say, a sudden crop of books about artificial intelligence, or a best-selling series of novels catering to young gamers. Other literary patterns are more mysterious. This week in TheAtlantic, Julia M. Klein wrote about Robert Kolker’s The Vanishing Family, which adds to a growing bookshelf of new works focusing on dementia. Klein’s essay led me to wonder why several notable recent releases, both nonfiction and novels, have taken on this condition—and how each explores the subject differently.
First, here are six new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
The Vanishing Family follows a clan dealing with an inherited form of dementia that drastically changes the sufferer’s personality. Klein is most interested in Kolker’s emphasis on the “slipperiness of identity” and the “malleability of the self”; are you still the same person without your usual behaviors or your formative memories? As some family members succumb to the condition, the author also focuses on their healthy caregivers, for whom “the sense of loss is ongoing—like witnessing a living death.”
The mysteries of dementia—both medical and personal, for both patient and loved ones—provide rich terrain for writers, as Marion Renault pointed out last year in a different Atlantic essay about the book Valley of Forgetting, by Jennie Erin Smith. We know very little about the condition, but at the same time, it comes with a “grim certainty”—it is largely untreatable, and always terminal. “This tension makes the illness ripe for figurative language,” Renault wrote.
Both Kolker and Smith conveyed this tension in fine writing and painstaking detail, but figurative language is where fiction excels. This year, two novels managed to approach the illness in new ways—one from the perspective of a caregiver and another from a patient’s point of view. Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation is a somewhat surrealist fable about many things—exile, autocracy, the nuclear family, the carceral state. But the greatest stressor in the life of its protagonist, Dilara, is her father’s rapidly progressing Alzheimer’s. Orhan portrays the hard realities of caring for someone you no longer recognize, but also explores the metaphorical possibilities: Dilara and her father were forced to flee Turkey as political refugees, and they both yearn for a past that has become inaccessible, whether or not they remember it.
In her stark new novel, Switzy, Emma Cline gives us the perspective of the sufferer. “Alzheimer’s novels are rare,” Hillary Kelly wrote in an Atlantic essay about the book, “and those told from the patient’s point of view are rarer.” Cline portrays her subject, David, “in a wandering, dreamlike style,” Kelly writes. His mental absence “becomes a startling and eerie phenomenon—like the moment you realize you’ve been driving for miles but don’t recall anything about the journey.”
David is flying to Zurich in a private jet so that he can die by assisted suicide before Alzheimer’s robs him of his agency. As he rifles through half memories and smiles through painful interactions, Cline expertly dramatizes the tension Renault defined between the unknowableness of dementia and its unavoidable end. David is becoming a different person, but for now he is still himself, and he holds on desperately to the single choice he has left. Alzheimer’s novels are not so rare anymore, but like any great novelist, Cline has found a wholly original way to distinguish her work.
Corbis Historical / Getty
The Mysteries of Human Personality
By Julia M. Klein
Robert Kolker’s latest book, The Vanishing Family, tracks the effects of inherited dementia and the many transformations that follow.
Saxbe, a clinical psychologist and professor, has been “endlessly curious about how fathers tick” since she was in elementary school, when her parents’ divorce—and equal custody split—turned her detached dad into a terrific parent. Now she’s one of the only scientists in the world who researches the neurological effects of fatherhood. Some of her collaborators have already shown that pregnancy alters a mom’s hormones and brain structure in ways that are good for bonding and child-rearing. Saxbe’s work demonstrates that tending to infants triggers similar neurological changes in other parents—and that the more time they spend on child care, the larger these shifts tend to be. She explains her discoveries in chatty, accessible language, mixing in social science that often contains useful tips; for example, greater paternal involvement at bedtime is correlated with better baby and toddler sleep. (Maybe that’s why my 2-year-old always demands, “Go with Daddy tonight?”) But the most thrilling part of Dad Brain is its overall conclusion: that “great parents are made, not born.” — Lily Meyer
Illustration by Colin Hunter / The Atlantic. Sources: Raj Valley / Alamy; sasel77 / Getty.
Taylor Swift’s Audience Is Growing Up. Her Music Is Devolving.
By Spencer Kornhaber
Some music pulls you out of yourself, jolting you with the recognition that the person who’s singing is just as complex as you are. Some music gets you to surrender to the fact that you’re merely an overgrown baby who responds to repetition and rhyme. And some music strands you in a state of embarrassment at the human condition.
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Earlier this year, FBI Director Kash Patel vowed before God, Fox Nation, and Donald Trump that he would punish the “deep state” for its manifold transgressions, especially the (actually nonexistent) conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.
“I’ve been with the president nearly since day one on this,” he said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. “I can announce on your show that we’ve got all the information we need. We’re working with our prosecutors at the Department of Justice under Attorney General Todd Blanche, and we are going to be making arrests, and it’s coming, and I promise you, it’s coming soon.”
That was five months ago. Patel has not yet delivered on his promise. But in interviews with more than 40 current and former administration officials, FBI employees, and members of Congress and their staffers, as well as others close to the White House, I’ve learned that it is not for lack of trying.
The people I spoke with described Patel as desperate to help the Justice Department indict putative malefactors and stimulate headlines to please the president. Nearly all of the people I spoke with would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they feared retaliation if their name appeared in the story. Patel has filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit against The Atlantic and mein response to my reporting earlier this year that he has alarmed colleagues with episodes of excessive drinking and unexplained absences.
In recent months, Patel has been briefed on the FBI’s “election integrity” investigations in Arizona, Florida, New Jersey, Ohio, and beyond. Officials told me their understanding is that many of the election-related investigation requests came directly from the White House, many times with the instruction that “this is a big deal for the president” or “this is a push from 47.” But all of that attention hasn’t yielded results. In meetings, Patel has expressed frustration that there have been no new findings, and instructed staff to “look harder” or “look again,” according to three people familiar with the conversations.
The FBI’s preoccupation with the 2020 election represents a dramatic break with its past. Though the bureau—one of the world’s most famous and most powerful law-enforcement agencies—has experienced more than its share of controversies and episodes of overreach, it has also been dedicated to criminal investigation based in evidence, science, and reality. The commitment of personnel, resources, and time to investigate a conspiracy theory that was manufactured by Trump to explain his electoral defeat marks a decisive pivot away from its historical role.
Patel’s aggressive pursuit of the conspiracy investigation has helped him keep his job. Reports that Trump is keen to push him out have diminished. Patel’s predecessors had always sought to demonstrate their independence by creating operational and optical distance from the White House—especially when it came to the sanctity and neutrality of elections. Patel has taken a radically different course, attempting to translate Trump’s eternal election-related grievances into a core law-enforcement mission of the federal government. “Patel is the only guy who never says no,” a Republican operative close to the White House told me. “And the president likes that.”
In response to a three-page memo I wrote outlining 17 detailed questions for him regarding the FBI’s pivot to election-conspiracy investigations, Patel responded in a most curious fashion. Instead of addressing my questions, he wrote: “I’m still looking for my gold-plated jet ski in the English Channel; you all know where it is. Free ride if you help me find it.”
I did not understand this response. I have never written about, or asked Patel or the FBI about, anything having to do with Jet Skis or the English Channel. A bit of Googling, however, uncovered the probable root of his reply. On July 10, MS NOW published a story concerning Patel’s political difficulties, some of which, the story said, related to his lifestyle. Included in the story was a graphic of, among other things, a white Jet Ski, a set of golf clubs, and a private jet. Patel responded to the MS NOW story on X, writing, “Nah, my jet ski is gold plated… dumbass.”
Put simply, Patel responded to The Atlantic’s questions about the FBI’s election investigations by referring to a graphic that appeared on an unrelated news story on another media company’s website.
Other FBI officials, however, did respond to my questions. The FBI’s press office sent me statements from five other named officials—Chris Raia, Andrew Bailey, Chad Yarborough, Joe Perez, and Matt Fodor—who defended Patel, claimed my reporting was “false,” and insisted that the FBI was “united.” Many of the statements used almost-identical language and did not deny that the FBI was focused on the alleged election conspiracy. The FBI published my questions and its answers on X last night, before this story was published.
A spokesperson for the FBI said in a statement that “election security is and will continue to be one of this FBI’s highest national security priorities, and we will make no apologies for any work to ensure every American citizen’s sacred right to vote is protected from criminal interference.” The spokesperson said there has been a “500% increase in election integrity related investigations and arrests just this year alone” and denied that there had been any internal concerns raised about the bureau’s approach to election-related investigations.
But others I spoke with told me that Patel’s stance is redefining how the bureau prepares for an election. One striking example came last month when FBI and DOJ staff attended an “election integrity” training session. In the past, these trainings have focused on how to respond to the most common threats to poll workers or voting locations. Some attendees were alarmed that a focus of this year’s training was about voting by undocumented immigrants, a statistically rare phenomenon that has nevertheless preoccupied Trump and others on the right. There was little mention of the prohibition on armed federal law enforcement being stationed at the polls.
Agents across the country have been seeking counsel in recent weeks about how to respond to FBI directives related to the election, according to sixcurrent and former FBI and DOJ supervisors and outside defense attorneys who told me they have received calls. “Agents are nervous, talking among themselves,” said a former DOJ official who has received multiple requests for advice unlike anything this person has seen before. Another former senior FBI official told me he had received calls from dozens of his former colleagues looking for counsel and describing “a real effort to bend people to the narrative” of the president’s election-conspiracy theories. One agent told me he contemplates Election Day and thinks: “I’m either gonna be sick that day or they are going to have to fire me.” There is no question that people in the FBI are rattled. What is uncertain is the degree to which they should be.
On Monday, Andrew Bailey, one of the FBI’s co–deputy directors, unexpectedly announced that he was leaving the bureau, citing a desire to spend more time with his family. Bailey had overseen election-related investigations, and had supported Trump’s false fraud claims. But several employees I spoke with said he would frequently raise questions about proposed law-enforcement actions in meetings. “Bailey brings up the Constitution. He will say, ‘The law prevents you from doing that,’” one former FBI official told me. Now he is gone, leaving employees to wonder whether anyone left at a senior level will push back on Patel or the president. (In a statement, Bailey denied raising questions about proposed actions, saying, “This is absolutely false.”)
Another shake-up in recent days came when several attorneys left their assignments in the investigation into the alleged “grand conspiracy.” Two former DOJ officials told me the prosecutors quit because they had clashed with senior department leadership amid pressure to deliver indictments before the midterm elections. Among those exiting are “true believers” who were committed to the president’s goals, as one law-enforcement official described it to me.
For more than a century, FBI agents have sworn an oath to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. That mission becomes complicated when a president is so intensely focused on the outcome of FBI investigations. One former senior FBI official told me that Patel has told his staff that he “believed the same things as the president” when it came to election conspiracies and was going out of his way to accommodate White House requests. “It was clear that Kash was just trying to hold on to his job, and willing to do anything it takes,” this person said.
Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee sought to use Patel’s appearance under oath last month to extract a commitment that the FBI director would say no to the president if asked to deploy federal agents to polling locations. They failed. When Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Patel to confirm that FBI staff would not be physically present at polling sites, he responded: “I don’t know that we can’t legally do it.” Since the end of the Civil War, federal law has prohibited the deployment of armed federal agents to election sites “unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” When asked whether he agreed with Trump’s statement that Democrats can win elections only by cheating, Patel said that “the information you’re discussing involves ongoing investigations” and declined to answer the question. He later elaborated to say that “based upon the Russiagate hoax, and everything else that’s happened, the president is completely justified in making his opinions known as does any president before him.”
As I watched, I was reminded of a message relayed from one DOJ official to another this summer when asked about the Justice Department manual, which prescribes specific rules and procedures to ensure that the department is never perceived to be playing politics with elections. “I was told the Justice Manual isn’t a thing,” the official told me. Instead, the official said that this was the answer they received: “There are no rules. Just make sure Republicans win.” When I asked about this, a DOJ spokesperson said, “That is not, and has never been, Department guidance.”
Patel has repeatedly directed FBI officials to reinvestigate Trump’s loss in the 2020 election—and he has removed those who pushed back. In January, Paul W. Brown, the special agent in charge of the Atlanta field office, was replaced after he expressed reservations about following orders to seize 2020 ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, according to four current and former officials familiar with the situation. (Brown did not respond to requests for comment; a spokesperson for the FBI said, “Mr. Brown retired.”)
In July, the FBI sent emails across the bureau announcing a “Director’s Office priority effort,” requiring all FBI field offices to “immediately surge support” to the FBI’s Fulton investigation. Roughly 260 FBI employees were ordered to drop their other responsibilities for two weeks in order to review data related to the seized ballots, working weekends and overtime at substantial cost to taxpayers. Staff were instructed to compare the Fulton voting records with information in another database, an effort that those who participated said seemed aimed at identifying fraud, but in practice was prone to errors and wasn’t considered up to FBI standards.
Two FBI analysts were escorted out of the office after they raised questions about the process. The FBI declined to comment on personnel issues but said in a statement that “individuals are only removed from the Bureau if they engage in weaponization of law enforcement, act unethically, or undermine the FBI mission.”
Those familiar with the Fulton effort told me it didn’t yield anything substantive—numerous reviews have found no evidence of significant fraud in Georgia in 2020, or anywhere else—but they also said they believe that the episode this summer was just a prelude of what’s to come.
“We have every reason to believe that Patel will aid and abet Trump” in the pursuit of election-related conspiracy theories and undermining trust in the midterm elections, one former official told me. Agents assigned to coordinate with the state and local election officials who actually administer elections say the once-collaborative partnerships are now tense and fraught with suspicion. Their former partners in election protection now openly question whether the FBI will in fact protect American elections. “It’s full-on warfare to get anything out of any election official,” one former official told me.
In an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity in May, Patel described personally directing election-related “grand conspiracy” investigations “in multiple jurisdictions,” saying it is what he spends much of his time on. But career officials scoff at what they see as a misuse of resources. “It’s a waste of time,” one FBI employee involved in the election investigations told me, describing how supervisors were asking for the same documents over and over. The requests originated with instructions from headquarters, and were often passed along with tacit acknowledgment from managers in the field that they knew there was nothing to be found.
Many current and former officials described an unusual number of calls Patel receives from the White House and its allies throughout the day, relaying requests for FBI activity or updates. Officials told me that Patel openly acknowledges his limited agency, citing directions from Trump, Stephen Miller, and other White House staff. “I’ve personally heard him say, ‘I have to do this for the White House,’” one former FBI official told me.
The White House did not deny that Miller gives direction to the FBI, and confirmed that he “interacts with all law-enforcement agencies on a regular basis.” FBI Operations Director Joe Perezsaid in a statement that the bureau “receives referrals from a variety of places, assesses the facts of the allegation, documents the referral, and we make the decision whether or not to proceed accordingly under an authorized purpose as we have always done.”
The most well-staffed election-related investigation is being run out of the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida, and Patel has been an enthusiastic enabler. He has directed significant FBI resources to the effort. “Patel has said yes to everything. Every single thing” that senior leadership has wanted of the investigation, one former official familiar with the investigation told me.
The investigation has yielded little to nothing, but Patel’s response has been to escalate further. “They just keep throwing more people at it,” one FBI employee told me. A former FBI employee told me that the investigation has become a running joke, and staff have continually had to manufacture new excuses to be unavailable so they don’t get asked to participate.
The FBI and DOJ declined to provide details of how many FBI employees had staffed the investigation and what previous assignments were dropped when they were reassigned to the probe. The FBI also declined to provide any details on how much money has been spent on the effort to date.
The conspiracy case appears to have hit a particularly rough stretch last month, when the Trump loyalist Joe diGenova resigned from his role overseeing the investigation, citing pressures to deliver indictments. He would not answer my questions when I reached him shortly after his resignation, but he told the New York Post, “If you want indictments where there’s no evidence, you have an ethical problem.” (He later added to the Associated Press that “there’s plenty of evidence in all of these cases to prove the theories of prosecution. It just takes time to get there, and some people want to get there a little faster than others—and you can’t do that.”)
In recent days, more resignations have followed, including that of Kurt Olsen, who was appointed by Trump to be the White House director of election security and integrity last year before joining the conspiracy investigation at DOJ. Olsen was a prominent participant in the “Stop the Steal” campaign following the 2020 vote and was later sanctioned for making “unequivocally false” statements to a federal court. While working at the White House, Olsen made a referral that led to the FBI’s ballot seizure in Fulton. Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.
One law-enforcement official told me that the FBI’s role in the “grand conspiracy” investigation was particularly flawed and had alarmed officials in the deputy attorney general and attorney general’s offices. The investigators’ approach was a “total waste of resources” that “led to nothing,”the official told me. (A DOJ spokesperson denied that senior leadership had expressed concern.)
Orders from the White House were described to me as remarkably specific, down to individual names. “The president wants indictments. He wants people in handcuffs. He wants the headlines,” one former official told me, “no matter how thin” the underlying facts are. When I asked what would happen if the president didn’t get the indictments he was seeking, the official said Patel’s and Blanche’s jobs would be on the line. “They’ve spent so much money on this. They’re going to have to come up with something.”
A spokesperson for the White House said in a statement that “the claim that the White House dictates who the Department investigates or charges is false. Investigative decisions are made by the Department based on evidence. No one is charged because of a headline, and no one is charged without a grand jury finding probable cause.” The U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida did not respond to a request for comment. One law-enforcement official told me that the recent “drama” among DOJ officials overseeing the investigation did not reflect a lack of evidence of a crime, and to expect “developments imminently,” including possible indictments in the weeks ahead.
Other administration officials and those close to the White House dismissed the idea that Patel would be removed if he ultimately fails to deliver what the president wants. Some have speculated that Trump favors reassignments over firings because he believes that his administration can protect active government officials from complying with subpoenas.
Others told me that Patel remains in his job because confirming any replacement would require near-unanimous support from Senate Republicans, something the president no longer has. Some Republicans fear, meanwhile, that overzealous action by Patel could make their problems worse. “It would be an absolute disaster for Republicans in the midterms, especially those in vulnerable races, if Patel sent FBI agents to the polls or seized ballots,” one Republican staffer told me. “People have to trust their government, in the integrity of our elections.”
Previous FBI directors have gone out of their way as elections neared to show that they weren’t doing the president’s bidding. Patel has done the opposite: Long ago he dispensed with any pretense that he’s apolitical. Last month, while appearing with the president at a Long Island police academy, the FBI director effusively thanked the president throughout his remarks. The event looked and sounded almost identical to a Trump rally, complete with endorsements of Republican candidates and attacks on Democrats. Patel was transparent about why he holds the most powerful position in American law enforcement, and what keeps him there: “President Trump, I’m living the American dream because of you.”
When I was a boy, my small-town-attorney father had a client who paid his legal bills not in money but in deliveries of homegrown tomatoes. I still think about those tomatoes, almost vulgarly red, the size of softballs, juicy, earthy. My dad liked to put salt on them “to make them bleed,” he said.
This was the mid-1980s, and life in the Mississippi Delta still moved in fading agricultural rhythms. My parents had grown up around a few old people who remembered the Civil War. Clarksdale, where we lived, smelled like defoliant sprayed from low-flying yellow crop dusters. In the summer, most of my high-school friends and I went to work at 6 a.m., chopping cotton or working in the gin yard.
My family ate those tomatoes nearly every night of the summer, usually on sandwiches—bacon and tomatoes on Wonder Bread covered in a mayo-mustard hybrid called Durkee Famous Sauce. Durkee’s, as it’s known, served as the base ingredient in my mother’s stuffed eggs—we never called them deviled—and was the only acceptable condiment for a Thanksgiving-leftovers sandwich. It’s a staple of refrigerators across the South.
But this summer, right in the middle of tomato season, my mom burst into my house with terrible news. Durkee’s had been discontinued! There were no bottles anywhere! Her friends in the Delta had all been searching, in stores, online. Attempts at bootleg recipes had begun. She told me that summer would never taste the same. “You just count on some things being there,” she said. I looked at her and knew she wasn’t joking.
“It really is the taste of summer,” she said. “I wonder what the poor tomatoes are going to think.”
My mom grew up during the civil-rights movement in Shelby, Mississippi, a farming town that is now dead, and soon after she married my father, they moved 20 miles north to Clarksdale, a farming town that is now dying. She’s 79. The headlines she reads these days feel like dispatches from a time she thought would never return. Like a lot of progressive southerners, she’s had to watch the thing she counted on most, the flawed yet moral core of the United States, turn to ashes in the last years of her life. Sometimes the big losses are too much to process, and little things, such as losing a familiar taste, become mourners’ benches. (Also, those sandwiches were really good.)
She asked me, her reporter son, to find out what had happened.
I quickly confirmed what my mom told me: Durkee’s was dead.
B&G Foods, which bought the Durkee brand back in 2016, killed the condiment sometime last year. The company made no announcement and issued no press release. Some people learned that the sauce was dead when others posted screenshots of emails they’d received from B&G. Many more realized this summer, as the last bottles in the supply chain disappeared from shelves. (I emailed the company multiple times; eventually, a spokesperson responded to say that Durkee Famous Sauce had been discontinued “at least temporarily” because of a problem with the manufacturer.)
“I guess it wasn’t big enough for them,” Otis Maxwell, a food blogger, told me when I called him.
He started noticing as far back as 2013 that he could no longer find Durkee’s regularly in stores and had to chase it down online. “I’ve been aware for some time that it was endangered,” he said.
Maxwell wrote about the sauce being officially discontinued over the summer and offered his own take on Durkee’s; those posts have been among his most read. “My copycat recipe really is very good,” he said. “People are passionate about it.” My reporting showed me that Durkee’s has fans outside the South: Maxwell lives in Saratoga Springs, New York, and I read online about lovers in Butte, Montana.
Other recipes are circulating online, and an emerging Durkee’s subculture revolves around the many attempts to re-create it. My mom got a recipe and bought the ingredients the other day. I’m waiting on her report. Casey Roberts, writing for The Perry County Herald, described how, after experimenting with three different recipes, he settled on a mixture of egg yolk, apple-cider vinegar, mayonnaise, Dijon mustard, sugar, dry mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and salt. After cooking it in an improvised double boiler, he had something approximating Durkee’s. “Pales in comparison to the real deal,” he told me, “but we do what we have to in such desperate times.”
I asked him what seemed to be missing.
“There’s something sweet, but almost umami,” he said. “Like, this balance that’s really difficult to achieve as I’ve been tinkering.”
My friend Jeffrey Reed recently moved down to the beach. He loves to fish. A few days ago, he came back to northern Mississippi one final time to get the last load of things from his house. He packed up frozen redfish and speckled-trout fillets into a cooler, along with elk, oryx, sandhill-crane breasts, duck, and his Hatch chiles. And his two remaining bottles of Durkee’s. “That Durkee’s was one thing I made damn sure to put in the ice chest,” he said.
I posted online about the death of Durkee’s, and people have been writing me nonstop, dozens of them. They are distraught, and cataloging how they used the last bit from their last bottle. “Durkee’s was at every family gathering that I can remember,” my friend, the southern rock-and-roll-tour photographer Andy Tennille, told me. “Durkee’s, Maker’s Mark, Vantage cigarettes.”
Searching for answers about Durkee’s led me to corners of the internet where people gather to reminisce about vanished brands and bygone restaurants, such as Fleur de Lis Pizza, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the Ranchero, in Clarksdale; and 14th Street Grill, in Phenix City, Alabama, to name three closings that really affected me. (If Doe’s Eat Place, in Greenville, Mississippi, ever went out of business, it would be like losing a part of my late father all over again.) In a country where people so often move to chase work, home is defined mostly by familiar tastes—the ones that bring us hurtling back in time, to a kitchen table, to parents and grandparents, to a moment when all the possibilities of what we might become remained.
Advertisements in the 1930s suggested pouring Durkee’s over boiled meat. Some people made salad dressing with it. Others used it to marinate shrimp, or to make a sauce for chicken by mixing it with apricot jam. People put it on green beans. It was a secret ingredient in pimento cheese. Florida folks served it with lobster and stone crab. And we’ve all got stories of cousins sneaking out to smoke a joint after Thanksgiving dinner, carrying breath spray and eye drops, then raiding the fridge for turkey and the Durkee’s sauce.
Tomatoes with bacon and white bread remains my preferred delivery mechanism. I went through my pantry and found one bottle of Durkee’s way in the back that we’d forgotten about. It expired two years ago. I’m definitely eating it anyway. Like my mom and her friends, I tried searching for any straggling bottles on the internet. I didn’t find one. eBay doesn’t have any. Neither does Amazon, Kroger, Walmart, or Publix. I cannot find a single bottle for sale anywhere. There are rumors, though, of secret stashes. “Like black-market Durkee’s honey holes,” Tennille said, laughing. “Kinda reminded me of when my aunt was ordering Tab by the case from Yugoslavia.”
This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Durkee’s Is Dead.”
A model wears a creation inspired by Russian fairy tales on September 29, 2026, during Moscow Fashion Week.
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Riot police officers remove protesting students who were blockading the area outside the Le Corbusier secondary school in Aubervilliers, Paris, on October 1, 2026. Since late September, students have staged protests outside schools over grievances including timetables, class sizes, a shortage of teachers, and overheated classrooms during this year’s heat waves. The protests started in the Ile-de-France region around Paris but have now spread to other cities nationwide.
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Malaysia’s Elvis Priestly Clement competes in the men’s 10-meter platform final at the Asian Games in Tokyo, Japan, on September 30, 2026.
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An aerial view of the GICON high-altitude wind turbine, standing tall above a field of standard wind turbines on October 1, 2026, near Schipkau, Germany. The turbine, with a nacelle 300 meters aboveground and rotor blades that give it a total height of 365 meters, is the tallest in the world. It is designed to take advantage of stronger wind flows at higher altitude and will deliver twice the power of a conventional wind turbine.
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Pope Leo XIV prays at the Grotto of the Apparitions in Massabielle on the second day of his apostolic journey to France on September 26, 2026.
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The medieval village of Apricale stands perched on a hill in Italy’s Liguria region, pictured on September 26, 2026
In 2022, I went to Vienna to write about Joseph Roth, who had come to the city of Mozart and Beethoven more than a century earlier to fashion himself into a cosmopolitan writer, down to the three-piece suit and monocle. Vienna, for Roth, was a midpoint between the shtetls of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where he’d been born, and the glimmering centers of sophistication he’d later live in and write about, including Berlin and Paris.
In the Austrian capital, I was overcome with an unexpected urge: to see Jewish graves. On the eve of World War II, Vienna had a Jewish population of nearly 200,000. During the Nazi occupation of the city, which the Vienna Gestapo chief declared “by far the most Jewified metropolis in the German Reich,” this number was reduced to only a few thousand. Today, it still hovers around 12,000. The task of finding these graves was harder than I’d expected. The Nazis desecrated most Jewish burial grounds, and the Central Cemetery, which contains a Jewish section, had ongoing construction. At the Jewish Museum Vienna, I was handed a brochure that directed me to the address of a nursing home at Seegasse 9.
When I got there, a young woman directed me out back. I saw a pit of mud and grass, behind a locked gate, out of which projected old, precariously tilted gravestones with Hebrew lettering. Later, I’d learn that some of these graves dated back to the mid-16th century, a reflection of how deeply rooted Jews were in this city before the Nazis arrived. But nowhere did I see any information about what this place was, or about the once-thriving community it served. I wasn’t there alone. A man in a wheelchair, presumably one of the nursing-home residents, looked down at the graves impassively. He was the right age, I thought, to have been a little boy among the rapturous crowds that greeted the Nazis in 1938, cheering from Heldenplatz Square as Hitler announced the Anschluss from a balcony at the Hofburg palace.
Seegasse 9 figures briefly but significantly in Douglas Smith’s sweeping new history, The City Without Jews: Life and Death in Nazi Vienna; its rooftop was one of the few places where Jews found ways to gather amid the Nazi crackdown.
Smith, whose previous work has focused largely on Russian history, in this book offers a vivid, granular portrait of the Jews of Vienna and their demise, starting with the first Jew assassinated by a member of the Nazi Party: a writer named Hugo Bettauer, who was killed in 1925. (His murderer was acquitted.) Bettauer was the author of a 1922 novel titled The City Without Jews: A Novel From the Day After Tomorrow, from which Smith takes his own title. The idea at the core of Bettauer’s novel, which The New York Times derided as unconvincing and “cheap,” was simple: The expulsion of Vienna’s Jews would yield disaster as it became apparent that the people whose influence was despised in the city had in fact been essential to both the city’s function and its charm. A little more than 100 years later, Smith’s book suggests an even simpler and more painful idea: that Bettauer was right, because the Holocaust destroyed not just Vienna’s Jews but something essential in the city itself.
It is just as easy today as it was in Roth’s time to be enchanted by the opulent beauty of Vienna’s Hapsburg palaces, the perfectly preserved homeyness of its old-fashioned cafés, and the haunted shadows of the Leopoldstadt neighborhood—known as “matzah island,” Smith writes, for the influx of Jewish refugees who gathered there when the Austro-Hungarian empire crumbled. But Smith’s book helped me understand why, underneath that old-world allure, I detected a certain airlessness: When Vienna lost its Jews, it lost its soul. The truth of the city I saw lay not only in its grandeur but also in a pit of mud filled with shattered headstones.
Smith’s account is filled with formidable members of the Viennese Jewish community, such as the novelist Stefan Zweig, a contemporary of Roth’s, who belonged to a highly assimilated, educated Jewish milieu that worshipped at the altar of Kultur, not religion. Zweig would warn Jewish friends amid threats of German invasion in 1937: “You can understand how the cheerfulness and enjoyment—the light mindedness—in Vienna infuriated me—a carnival over a volcano.”
Vienna’s most famous Jew, Sigmund Freud, refused to consider leaving Vienna until the SS arrived at his home three days after German troops marched into Austria in March of 1938. As Smith writes, word reached the U.S. consul, John Cooper Wiley, who sent his wife, Irena, straight to the Freud residence at Berggasse 19. Once she talked her way past the SS guards, Irena discovered, she wrote, “a scene of vandalism and destruction” in which “six SS men were pulling books off the shelves, tearing out the pages, and throwing them on the floor.” Other troops “were breaking the furniture.”
Freud, 81, sat at his desk in the library, staring at his collection of Egyptian statuettes in a “staggering show of philosophical detachment,” Irena wrote. When, a week later, his daughter Anna was arrested by the Gestapo, the psychoanalyst wept, his stoicism finally cracking. Freud, once a symbol of Viennese cosmopolitanism, fled with his family to London, not entirely happily: “One had still very much loved the prison from which one has been released,” he wrote. He died of cancer the next year.
When I visited Berggasse 19 in 2022, I felt very little trace of living history. Freud’s famous couch, his leather-bound library, the desk where he sat to compose his canonical texts—all of these are in London. At Berggasse 19, only outlines on the wall denote the furniture that is no longer there. It’s not just the lack of furnishings that creates a sense of ghostly vacancy. The empty home evokes the members of the Freud family who weren’t able to escape: Freud’s four sisters, to whom he gave a small fortune before he left, hoping it would enable them to survive. It was promptly stolen, Smith writes.
One sister, Rosa, was moved into the nursing home at Seegasse 9, where residents lived 10 to a room. There, Smith writes, she likely met Mignon Langnas, whose diaries and letters, previously unpublished in English, are central to Smith’s new book. Langnas, who was in her mid-30s when the Nazis marched in, was one of only a few thousand Jews to survive the war inside Vienna. She sent her children—Georg, age 4, and Manuela, age 6—to New York; her husband, Leon, also escaped. But Langnas herself chose to remain in Vienna to care for her elderly, ailing parents. Eventually she became a nurse working at Seegasse 9, before the remaining residents, including Rosa Freud, were deported (all of the Freud sisters would die in concentration camps), and the building became a base for the Waffen-SS.
“I am utterly alone,” Langnas wrote as her community disappeared around her. And yet, amid the horrific losses she experienced and witnessed, she could still be moved by kindness, like that of the neighbor who would sit with her father when Langnas had to be at work. “Still I must clap my hands together anew every day,” she wrote in 1943, and “ask myself in shame how so much humanity is possible.”
On my last day in Vienna, I returned to Seegasse 9. The young woman at the front desk—an immigrant from Sudan—told me that every day, at least one person came to see the graves. The gate to the cemetery was again locked, but I leaped over it. A visceral sense of absence had underscored my days in the city as I studied the life of Roth, whose evocations of a vanished world had drawn me there. Roth died in Paris in 1939, of alcoholism. I wondered, standing among the stones, if he had felt as if the death of the Vienna he knew was, in some way, also his own.
After the war, Smith writes, the Austrian government quickly claimed the mantle of “Hitler’s first victim.” Only in 1991 did the Austrian chancellor apologize for the country’s role in the Holocaust. One year after my visit, the Jewish section of the Central Cemetery was lit on fire and desecrated with swastikas. The following year, the far-right Freedom Party of Austria, originally founded by former members of the SS, won the largest percentage of votes in the parliamentary elections.
Langnas died in New York City in 1949, from an illness that had begun during the war years. She had survived the Nazis only in the most technical sense—long enough to reunite with her children but also to find that the separation of seven years had opened a chasm between her and those “incredibly sweet creatures.”
Her son—now 91 and going by the Americanized name George—had, like his sister, not recognized his mother when she stepped off the boat. Decades after her death, he discovered her writing, her journals, her letters, and began to piece together the lost world he will never know, except for on the page.
Last week, after Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” ended its 23rd week as the No. 1 song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, she took to Instagram to express gratitude. The singer had just set a record for the longest-running No. 1 song in Hot 100 history, a milestone that didn’t feel real, she said. “‘Choosin’ T.’ Wow,” she added, with a flash of teeth and a shake of her head. “That’s the one, huh?”
Elsewhere online, others registered their own disbelief over the song’s apparent popularity. Like thousands of would-be Pauline Kaels claiming to not know a single Nixon voter, many professed never to have heard the diffident ballad that dethroned Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” the previous record holder. (Or perhaps they had, and then forgotten it: “I think I enjoy Langley’s pale and pleasant songs,” my colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote in July, “but I can barely remember how they sound when I’m not listening.”) Some detected unreconstructed snobbery in the chatter: A Rolling Stone critic argued that claiming never to have heard of “Choosin’ Texas” is the “‘I listen to anything but country’ of 2026”—a commonly heard declaration of taste that casually reveals the speaker’s prejudices. But the bewilderment also speaks to a different cultural gap: the difficulty of comparing the popularity of today’s chart-toppers with those of the past.
Billboard maintains, with somewhat circular logic, that its benchmark remains the same as it ever was: “The Hot 100 has always reflected the biggest song in the U.S. each week since its start in August 1958,” Gary Trust, the publication’s managing director of charts and data operations, told The Fader last year. “In that sense, a No. 1 today by Alex Warren is no different from a No. 1 by Elvis or the Beatles in the 1960s.” But the Hot 100 formula has adapted, over the decades, to keep up with the technological advances that have transformed how people buy, share, and enjoy music. What it means for a song to be “big” has never held steady.
Though today’s charts still incorporate radio play and music sales, streaming has fundamentally altered their composition—and the success of “Choosin’ Texas” has been propelled by the listening habits encouraged by those platforms. Many users tune in passively, carried along by programmed or algorithmic lists; this ecosystem is primed for an easygoing tune such as Langley’s, which can fit into many different niches. On Spotify, for example, it leaped from the platform’s “Hot Country” chart to “Today’s Top Hits,” and was also dispersed into the cultural atmosphere through subtler, more diffuse, pathways: The song often popped up in “Mood” and “Moments” playlists, Claire Heinichen, a senior editor at Spotify, told the Associated Press, “because it fits so well in ‘driving’ or ‘chill’ or ‘cookout.’” As of mid-August, the song has been streamed on the platform more than 1 billion times.
Langley’s success was also powered by the country audience’s growth on streaming platforms in recent years. When streaming gained traction as a primary listening option in the early 2010s, the genre’s artists and fans were slower to take to the technology, Charlie Dahan, the director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University, told me. But in the years since the pandemic, they have made country one of the fastest-growing genres on streaming platforms, where country fans have outsize influence on which songs become hits. Compared with general audiences, country fans are extra loyal to the artists they love, playing songs on repeat, Jaime Marconette, the vice president of music insights and industry relations at the entertainment-analytics company Luminate, told me.
The country audience also tends to use premium streaming services—a preference that gives them more sway over the charts, since Billboard gives more weight to streams from subscription platforms, compared with streams from ad-supported services. (In January, due to a dispute over this weighting ratio, YouTube, which has been one of the most popular music platforms in the United States, stopped sending data to Billboard altogether.) As a result, though country music has a relatively small footprint on streaming platforms, accounting for just less than 9 percent of audio streams in the U.S. in the first half of 2026, “it definitely, definitely outpunches its weight” on the Hot 100, Marconette said. In 2017, country songs accounted for just 6 percent of Billboard’s Year-End Hot 100 list; in 2025, they accounted for nearly a third.
This trove of data showing how listeners interact with individual songs is a relatively recent development: For much of their history, the Billboard charts had only a partial view of music consumption. After a record got rung up at the register, the music industry had little insight into whether it got played to death or gathered dust. When the magazine started incorporating data from modern streaming platforms, in the early 2010s, this marked a paradigmatic shift: The charts’ traditional focus on purchasing got overtaken by a new focus on listening. In the chart-making context, streaming is a “very weird behavior,” Larry Wayte, a musicology professor at the University of Oregon, told me. Playing a song on a streaming service is frictionless for the consumer. “How does a click equate to finding a record store, and finding the record in the record store, and putting down 10 bucks?”
Billboard’s strategies for tracking audience tastes—and, more concretely, a song’s power to generate revenue—have changed dramatically over time, making it hard to draw clean comparisons between hits from different decades. In the 1930s, the publication attempted to track the popularity of individual songs by factoring in requests received by bandleaders in nightclubs, ballrooms, and hotels, as well as sales of sheet music. What counted as a “hit” back then was fueled not only by record purchases but also by what music was being performed at live venues or bought in the form of printed text, to be played at home on the piano or guitar. In the 1940s, Billboard tracked jukebox plays, a metric that, in providing an objective tally of what songs people selected, could be considered a distant, more communal ancestor to today’s stream counts. And during the Hot 100’s modern era, which started around 1958, Billboard has changed its criteria many times over. In 1998, it relaxed its rule that only retail singles (a bygone format in which a song was sold individually as a physical product) were eligible for the charts; in the early 2000s, the launch of the iTunes store and its competitors enabled the incorporation of digital song sales.
In the streaming age, the biggest songs aren’t easily dislodged from the charts: Langley’s accomplishment has followed a string of impressive runs from singles by Shaboozey (“A Bar Song (Tipsy),” 19 weeks at No. 1), Lil Nas X (“Old Town Road,” 19 weeks) and Morgan Wallen (“Last Night,” 16 weeks). “Choosin’ Texas” has just spent a 24th week at No.1, extending its record. But Chris Dalla Riva, the author of Uncharted Territory, a book on pop-music history, cautioned me against concluding that today’s listeners are significantly more loyal to popular songs than in the past. In 1991, Billboard stopped relying on phone surveys with retailers to estimate record sales, and started using SoundScan, a data system that electronically tracked purchases. “Overnight, the charts changed,” he said of that period. Hip-hop became much more prevalent on the charts, and the Hot 100 started exhibiting patterns similar to today: The No. 1 songs sat at the top for longer stretches, while those lower down the list churned rapidly.
Such chart trends have less to do with any inherent property of music and its production, and more to do with Billboard methodology, Dalla Riva argued. Another data point to support his theory: Christmas songs now re-chart each December, but didn’t in past decades, when Billboard had no means of confirming that people were replaying their already purchased copies of their favorite holiday tracks.
Compared with the jukebox era, or even the boombox era, music consumption today is much more transparent, in that it comes with a much richer data trail. At the same time, that consumption feels much more atomized and closed-off: Popularity is assessed via the private choices of millions of individual listeners, not by observing a shared cultural experience. “This is one of those things you can’t exactly measure—like, is ‘Choosin’ Texas’ as culturally pervasive as the Macarena was?” Dalla Riva said. “I don’t think so. I mean, they were doing the Macarena at the 1996 Democratic National Convention.” Whatever the data say, it is hard to feel that all of America has really chosen “Choosin’ Texas.” Such is the paradox of making Billboard history in 2026: Even when the chart clearly shows that a song has taken over, it has never been easier for a listener to escape from a No. 1 hit.
Imagine that you’re one of the 3.8 million American teenagers on track to graduate from high school next spring. You have been told your whole life that knowledge work is the future and that a college degree is a high-speed ticket to the middle class. The average worker with a B.A. or B.S. makes 68 percent more a year than the average worker without one, translating to $1.2 million in additional earnings over a lifetime, if not more. Virtually all of the country’s wealthiest people have a university degree, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and other famous dropouts notwithstanding.
But now tech titans including Gates and Altman are warning about the impending eradication of office jobs, and hard data are showing that generative artificial intelligence really is smashing the lower rungs on the white-collar career ladder. The jobless rate for young college graduates has ticked up for the past four years; the cohort’s underemployment rate currently sits at a recessionary 42 percent. While the demand for 20-something legal associates and HR assistants has plummeted, the demand for 20-something pipe fitters and crane operators has soared. In many regions, early-career blue-collar workers are making six figures a year. For the first time in recent history, high-school graduates are experiencing shorter jobless spells than their peers with a college degree.
What’s a high-school senior to do? Bet that AI won’t be too disruptive, student loans will be worth it, and the knowledge workforce will keep growing? Or skip the exorbitantly priced degree and train in one of the trades? Granted, most Americans in their late teens aren’t choosing between being a forensic accountant or a boilermaker. Still, figuring out whether or not to go to college has suddenly gotten much harder.
For one, high-school seniors are contending with the implosion of the college wage premium. For decades, workers with a college education have outearned workers without one, creating a large, lifelong, and compounding earnings differential. A recent study by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that every dollar a young person spent on a four-year degree returned 12.5 percent a year, making a degree a better investment than the S&P 500.
Yet the rising cost of tuition began to fray this value proposition in the aughts. Student-loan debt made it impossible for many Millennials to build a nest egg or purchase a home, eliminating the college wealth premium. For-profit colleges enrolled a growing share of students with promises of fatter paychecks that never materialized. The wage premium has plummeted since the release of ChatGPT. In just four years, it has fallen 10 percent, back to the level it was at in the mid-1990s.
This gets to the second conundrum young people are facing: White-collar work isn’t what it used to be. Over the course of the 20th century, rising numbers of Americans went to college to ease their entry into service and knowledge careers. Not all white-collar work ended up being highly remunerative, but nearly all highly remunerative work ended up being white-collar. Office jobs offered other advantages too: a buffer against recessions, the chance to sharpen highly adaptable skills. (Most businesses need a great accountant; fewer businesses need a great foreman.) Outsourcing and technological change also posed less of a threat. IT increased demand for thinking work, whereas robots made a lot of factory work obsolete.
Yet now AI is threatening to make thinking work obsolete. The Stanford economist Erik Brynjolffson describes recent college graduates as “canaries in the coal mine.” Consultancies, marketing firms, software developers, insurers, and logistics companies are rapidly deploying generative-AI systems that are doing the spreadsheet-massaging and paper-pushing that inexperienced employees used to do. For young workers in “AI-exposed” occupations, one in five jobs has disappeared. Two in five recent graduates are working in gigs that do not actually require their degree, many in restaurants or retail stores. The AI-exposed cohort’s aggregated earnings have fallen by more than 10 percent.
Third, a bust for computer-science majors has coincided with a boom for shop-class specialists. In the 20th century, technological advances and globalization gutted the United States’ manufacturing base and hollowed out the Rust Belt. Power plants, mines, refineries, and ports became far more efficient too, requiring fewer workers than they did when the Baby Boomers were starting out. (Residential construction is a curious exception; industry-wide productivity has fallen as a result of land-use regulations.)
AI has turned this trend around. Despite interest rates sitting at fairly high levels, Silicon Valley and Wall Street are pouring trillions of dollars into the construction and maintenance of data centers. Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, an economist at Columbia University, projected that AI-related capital expenditures will make up 3.6 percent of America’s GDP each year through 2032, “larger relative to the economy than the major U.S. canal, railroad, electrification, highway, and telecommunications investment booms.” The build-out has created 216,000 construction and contractor jobs over the past four years, Goldman Sachs estimates.
Demand has gone up while supply has gone down. The blue-collar workforce has been aging out and into retirement; the Trump administration has throttled the number of roofers and welders coming in from abroad. Companies are begging young people to get into the trades. A design-build firm in St. Louis is offering to pay off the loans its trainees might have taken out for community college or trade school; an industrial consortium in Rochester is offering $5,000 incentives to future carpenters, bricklayers, drywall finishers, and machine operators. The federal government is trying to get more young people into blue-collar work too, increasing financing for vocational degrees and allowing Pell Grants to cover short-term training initiatives.
Young people are heeding the call or, more to the point, following the money. Enrollment at public two-year vocational-training colleges climbed nearly 20 percent from 2020 to 2025. Enrollment at public four-year colleges rose just 2.1 percent. But the country still needs thousands more high-school graduates and early-career workers to gravitate toward these professions. And it needs to create significantly more training capacity too.
If you’re a high-school senior able to make sense of all these numbers, you should probably head straight to the econ department. For everyone else: Start by viewing college with a healthy degree of skepticism. It still provides a tremendous earnings boost to most who go, though teenagers might want to think twice before taking out a huge loan to become a translator or a graphic designer. Consider blue-collar work, in particular roles with options for career advancement. Think about “gray-collar” jobs that require specialized training and physical prowess too. Robots and algorithms have not figured out how to do what police officers, master electricians, and paramedics do—at least not yet.
My first time reading James Patterson was an experience I’ll never forget, though I’ve tried. There was almost no descriptive language; the dialogue was generic and often unattributed; major plot reveals were tossed off indifferently. Suspense was nonexistent, and chapters ended with corny lines such as “Then, suddenly, there were more shots!” The book, 2008’s Cross Country, read more like a rambling summary of a book than a book itself. It was also the funniest thing I’d ever read: a novel that ignored even the basic principles of narrative and craft.
The author is, of course, one of the most successful of all time, having sold more than 400 million books. His crucial insight from his time as an advertising executive seems to have been to “Give the people what they want,” and apparently what many of them want are novels that are stripped down to the bones, and then stripped down some more; if a Jonathan Franzen novel is a BMW, one by Patterson is the car from The Flintstones. In some ways, Patterson, whose first novel came out in 1976, was producing second-screen content long before smartphones were invented. Which is why his latest co-author may be a natural fit: Earlier this month, he published The Most Dangerous Games with Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, the No. 1 YouTuber on the planet.
Patterson has already collaborated with a prestigious if puzzling list of big names: Dolly Parton, Viola Davis, Bill Clinton. This book, though, has the specific mission of getting more young people to read—especially those who might prefer to binge-watch YouTube videos. Patterson, according to his website, has donated more than $220 million in “literacy-focused philanthropy” over the course of his career, and Donaldson has more than 500 million subscribers on YouTube, 39 percent of whom are 13 to 17 years old. “We’re not trying to preach to the choir here,” Patterson toldThe New York Times of the book’s intended audience. “We’re trying to reach out in particular to people that aren’t in the choir.”
In an era when a sizable platform seems to come with a big red “Instant Book Deal” button, it was probably inevitable that someone with as many followers as Donaldson would publish a book, even though he’s admitted to not really liking them until recently. People are, in fact, buying the novel; it debuted at No. 3 on the New York Times hardcover-fiction best-seller list. But whether the duo has figured out how to entice Generation iPad into reading a book to the end is another question. Their prior work suggests that they know how to make stories digestible, if not always compelling: Does their book channel enough of the same qualities to lure kids away from their screens?
In theory, fans of MrBeast might also enjoy Patterson. The work of both men goes down easy, like a glass of room-temperature tap water. MrBeast videos are briskly edited, so much so that many of them seem like trailers for a longer version of themselves; they’re ideal to watch while folding laundry or listening to a podcast. (Or, considering MrBeast’s demographics, while slurping Go-Gurt or playing Minecraft.) Donaldson’s other strength is that he found a formula that worked and has committed to doing it over and over; this is not a man who seems tortured by the necessity of finding a second idea. Like Patterson’s long cast of FBI agents and homicide detectives, the list of MrBeast’s most-watched uploads reveals what you might call a common theme: Survive 30 Days Chained To Your Ex, Win $250,000; I Stranded 100 People In The Wilderness For $250,000. Most people can instinctively grasp this drama because Demean Yourself For Money is straightforwardly what being on the internet is like in 2026.
Not coincidentally, this is more or less the premise for The Most Dangerous Games. The novel centers on a group of contestants who compete in a life-and-death game for a billion-dollar prize, following in the tradition of The Hunger Games and Battle Royale. They have to outswim tiger sharks, march through Death Valley, survive being dropped into a war zone. The last one standing will be revealed as The One, a sort of messiah-by-default, and MrBeast (who, yes, is a character in his own book) assumes that the winner will use the $1 billion to save the world, because obviously this is what billionaires do.
Patterson has said that he tries to “leave out the parts people skip,” but this book seems to take the opposite approach. The chapters rotate among the characters (all of whom are interchangeably exceptional—a West Point grad, a former Army Ranger, a former British Royal Marine, a “veteran of an elite military unit,” etc.) and sometimes depict the same events from different points of view without adding much new insight. One chapter describing a boat capsizing in orca-infested waters is fine; three chapters describing the same incident from the perspectives of two different characters is an extreme test of patience.
Although the writing in Patterson’s other books is uninspiring, it at least tends to move quickly. In Cross Country, for instance, a car chase is winnowed down to a handful of lines. Most Dangerous Games, though, slows things down to a crawl, and repeats everything in case you didn’t get it the first two times. In setting the scene for a character on a boat near Antarctica, the authors write that “slivers of ice” fall from a railing when she grips it, and that “ice bites her palm.” Later, “the cold wind knifes into her face.” One gets the impression of a student struggling to meet the minimum word count for a paper.
The Most Dangerous Games does have one modest twist on the form of a novel: Readers gain a chance to enter a real-life $1 million competition by solving puzzles that drop each week on the book’s website. Getting answers requires hunting for clues scattered throughout the text; for example, looking for differences in images on the book’s website and illustrations in the book, or using certain page numbers as map coordinates. (Nothing projects confidence in a book like offering people a chance at a big check if they complete it.)
Donaldson seems to think that the story itself, and not just the puzzle, will propel readers toward the end; he has compared the book to The Odyssey. Considering that both authors are innovators of highly consumable brain rot in different mediums, the book is an old-fashioned dud. Most Dangerous alternates between tersely described physical action and what I’d describe as free indirect whining (“This isn’t a dream. This is a nightmare.”). There are undigested chunks of clumsy characterization (“He wants to help people. He wants people to count on him again.”), clichéd trauma background (control-freakish behavior is blamed on a “mother’s depression”), and dialogue that tries to be quippy but comes off as tired (“I’ve got a better idea.” “What’s that, mate?” “You can kiss my ass.”). I’m not sure that the tween demographic, conditioned by short-form video and stroboscopic editing, will be eager to read 480 pages of this, even with the million-dollar jackpot on the line.
Perhaps predictably, some people are accusing the authors of using AI. But a spokesperson for both of them said any suggestion of that “is simply untrue.” The Atlantic also put much of the text through Pangram, the most reliable (albeit still an imperfect) AI-detection tool, which reported that it was at least 95 percent human-written.
Placing most of the blame on Patterson here is tempting, as the written word is his domain. Zooming out, though, the book’s execution seems to reflect a generational shift toward the contemporary MrBeastian “Platform is everything” ethos over Patterson’s 20th-century “Give the people what they want" worldview. By putting out a book that skimps on many of the ultra-processed qualities that led Patterson and Donaldson to mass success, the authors seem to be betting that the reason so many Americans don’t buy books anymore is that they haven’t yet heard about them from their favorite YouTuber. In essence, The Most Dangerous Games is a gamble that the product doesn’t matter as much as the brand, that consumers buy the sizzle, not the steak.
In taking that gamble, the authors cheated fans and missed an opportunity. A significant portion of today’s teenagers are proactively limiting screen time in favor of offline living, and a book could have been a way for Donaldson’s audience to follow him even after they’ve logged off. When I asked a friend whether her 11-year-old son, Linden, liked MrBeast and had heard of the novel, she showed me a photo of his copy. But when I asked if he was enjoying it, she said that he thought the writing was “amateur” and that he’d quit 100 pages in. For a while, she tried to solve the puzzles by herself; if her kid didn’t get much out of the book, she thought, she wanted to at least try for the cash. This week, though, she quit too. Some people, apparently, have limits on what they’re willing to do for a buck.
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The following article contains spoilers for the film Digger.
Digger Rockwell could be the role of a lifetime. To become the eponymous lead character of the director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s new movie, Tom Cruise dons a paunchy bodysuit and is caked in old-man makeup. He dresses in gaudy attire, sporting a cowboy hat, a bolo tie, and occasionally a giant prop shovel that his character waves around ceremoniously. His look harkens back to the days of Digger’s tycoon ancestors, who plumbed the earth for the oil that made him the richest man alive. He’s a cartoon vision of billionaire vanity, presented to audiences in a moment of dizzying hostility toward such figures. It’s also the first role for Cruise in nearly a decade that isn’t a pilot or an agent on an impossible mission.
But if you go into Digger expecting a more grounded performance from Cruise (who, once upon a time, was capable of playing real people from the real world), you’ll likely exit disappointed. Iñárritu’s grand black comedy initially seems like a modern Dr. Strangelove—a bleak satire of the end of the world caused by not atomic but environmental catastrophe. But it doesn’t take long for the filmmaker to reveal his conceit: This movie is about the production of a piece of theater called Fossil Fools, one written to satirize a major calamity. The main characters of Digger, then, are all performers; after scenes from the play end, they drop the act, and we see them start prepping for their next rehearsals. But even the cast of Fossil Fools isn’t sure whether the show’s absurd nature can adequately make sense of Earth’s horrors.
I can hear many readers sighing at this revelation, especially given Digger’s oblique promotion.(Some observers began to wonder whether it was a secret musical, given the hermetic and stagy look of its opulent sets.) The actual product is not quite that whimsical; the play-within-the-film, for instance, has an impressive sci-fi scale that transcends practicality. Those moments unfold with dramatic bravado, before the lights dim and the actors begin debating the properness of their endeavor. Iñárritu has created a $125 million blockbuster about whether making art can be worthwhile in the face of tragedy; as a financial calculation alone, it’s a notable gamble.
The Mexican director has made a movie about theater before. The 2014 Best Picture winner Birdmanwas a behind-the-scenes look at a stage production starring a washed-up Hollywood actor hoping to make a comeback. That was a breakneck satire presented as one continuous shot; it loudly emphasized every theme and observation to the audience in case they weren’t getting the jokes. Digger is more portentous, with some funny moments that see Cruise and his fellow cast yelling purple prose to the ceiling in silly accents. Yet the entire enterprise is shrouded in bitterness, which is a better fit for the miserable outlook on the world typically found in Iñárritu’s work.
Perhaps that perspective is why I have never particularly vibed with the filmmaker, despite his many awards-laden successes. Iñárritu’s early works (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel)are all about people going through the grimmest possible experiences, but their scripts are frustratingly complex. The director has a penchant for spider-webbed narratives, in which disparate folk are connected through curious twists of irony. The clash of heavy-handed realism and fanciful plotting usually rings false for me; though his scope has grown grander with projects such as Birdman and the mountain-man epic The Revenant, they maintain a layer of artifice I struggle to penetrate.
That tendency is better woven into the story Iñárritu is trying to tell with Digger. Cruise’s performance is just one step removed from his over-the-top cameo as a screaming Hollywood executive in Tropic Thunder. As we see the mask fall, however, we witness his (quite transfixing) portrayal of the actor playing Digger, who’s as perplexed by the role’s grandiosity as the audience likely is. The narrative of Fossil Fools finds the character as he realizes his oil-drilling operation has caused a geographic incident that could lead to the death of millions; quickly enough, he ropes in the Bible-thumping president of the United States (played by John Goodman), the simpering vice president (Michael Stuhlbarg), and a do-gooder scientist named Ganesh (Riz Ahmed) to avert the crisis.
The group quickly realizes that nothing can be done and that even if they could avoid this mishap, plenty more are coming. The characters continue to hammer away at blithe arguments, with each satirical point about the utter worthlessness of the people in charge scored at the highest possible volume. The film calls to mind Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up, another wry disaster movie that grabbed the audience by the shoulders and shook them as hard as it could to get its message across. But Iñárritu’s extra coat of despair is compelling. Digger is set in a more far-gone version of our world; the performers treat their roles almost as echoes of reality, a way of remembering tragedy rather than warning about the future. Sure, not everyone will dig it. But as a Hollywood-star project, its existence is fascinating.
This article originally misstated the name of the play featured in Digger.
Last week, as the war with Iran dragged into its seventh month, gas prices shot up to an average of $4.50 a gallon, and polling showed President Trump about twice as far underwater with American voters as he was at this point in 2018, Republican senators determined that the time had come to discuss something else entirely: youth sports. “Girls’ sports are for girls. Boys’ sports are for boys,” Senator Marsha Blackburn said in a news conference.
With 32 days to go until the midterm elections, Republicans’ closing strategy is obvious: They’re going all-in on trans. (It seems to have worked for them before, after all. More on that in a minute.) In Texas, Republicans are running an unsettling AI-generated ad that shows the Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico dressed as Maria von Trapp and singing about girls with mustaches. A spot in Iowa accuses the Senate candidate Josh Turek of supporting “sex changes for kids.” On X, former Representative Matt Gaetz offered a tidy summary of his party’s agenda: “I hate the war too,” he told a concerned voter. “But the Democrats want to trans your kids.”
Partly, this is because Republicans don’t have much else to say. The administration’s immigration-enforcement strategy isn’t exactly popular. Voters have lost faith in the GOP on economic issues. Meanwhile, the president is obsessing over Corinthian columns. But Republicans also have some reason to believe that making trans happen is a useful strategy: It’s helped them before. Two years ago, a series of ads about Kamala Harris’s support for gender-affirming surgeries proved to be some of Trump’s most persuasive. (“Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”) In November, such ads could mean the difference between Republicans retaining and losing the Senate. “They believe that it energizes the base and divides ours,” Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at the center-left think tank Third Way, told me. “And they’re right about that.”
But it’s not clear that Democrats have figured out how to thwart the Republicans’ transgender gambit without betraying their own coalition.
The most jaw-dropping attack on Talarico probably comes from the American Principles Project, which has released an ad that is essentially a modern version of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Daisy,” a sinister spot about the threat of nuclear war. The ad opens with a little girl standing in a field, counting flower petals. Everything is gray. Suddenly, the scene shifts, and the girl is in a hospital bed wearing an oxygen mask. An AI-generated Talarico looms over her in a pair of scrubs. “Irreversible puberty blockers. Cross-sex hormones. Sex-change surgeries,” the vaguely southern narrator declares. “This November, stop them before it’s too late.”
The ad exists because Republicans believe that its message will boost turnout among the base—just like it did in 2024—and help Ken Paxton beat Talarico in Texas. “We’ve done the polling to measure the voting impact that these issues have on voters, and they’re still at a good level,” Terry Schilling, the president of the American Principles Project, a social-conservative advocacy group, told me. Sure, the economy should be a stronger issue for the GOP, he said. But voters “despise the Democrats’ culture-war agenda. Period.” (Talarico, for his part, is running ads focused on funding schools and health care, and countering corruption in Washington.)
The president is aligned on the persuasive power of the anti-trans message. At the GOP convention in Dallas last month, Trump said that he was “petrified” that Democrats might change their position on transgender athletes in sports. “That will really hurt us,” he said. “That’s one of our great sound bites of all time.”
Unfortunately for him, some Democrats are already doing just that. As a state legislator, Talarico was outspoken about transgender rights and inclusion; he voted against a bill banning certain gender-reassignment procedures for children and another banning transgender girls from K–12 girls’ sports. He once declared that parents who deny their child’s gender identity are “abusive.” Now, though, the seminarian turned Senate candidate sounds different. Asked last month whether girls should play in boys’ sports, he answered: “As a former public-school teacher, I care a lot about our student athletes, I care a lot about our students. And so I will oppose trans athletes playing in girls’ sports if it risks safety or fairness.”Talarico has dismissed some of his previous comments on the subject as “cringey.”
Two years ago, this might have gone differently; Talarico might not have responded to Republican attacks at all. That was once the customary advice from Democratic-consultant types, who believed that ignoring anti-trans attacks was safer than calling more attention to them. This is no longer best practice, Erickson, from Third Way, told me. The last election proved that “silence is deadly,” she said, noting that her group’s research shows that, unanswered, anti-trans attacks can seriously damage a Democratic candidate.
In the run-up to November, Erickson, who advises Democrats on how to talk about LGBTQ issues, has seen a sharp increase from candidates in requests for help. As GOP campaigns launch their last-minute trans-focused ads, Democrats want to know when to respond, what to say, and how to avoid offense. “They’re so scared they’re going to say the wrong thing,” she said.
Erickson, who declined to name the specific candidates she’s advising, offered some general advice. When answering questions about transgender players in sports, she argues, Democrats should embrace the sandwich method: Start with empathy, mention rules and fairness, and end with a little more empathy. Questions about health care for minors can be answered by reiterating that parents, not lawmakers, are the best decision makers for their own kids. One of Erickson’s favorite responses comes from Lindsay James, an Iowa Democratic House candidate, who in 2022 voted against a bill banning biological boys from playing on girls’ sports teams. “We need to protect kids, and we need common-sense rules to keep sports fair for boys and for girls,” James, who is running in a district that Trump won by 10 points in 2024, says in a new ad. “Parents know what’s best for our kids. Washington needs to stay out of it.”
The problem with Talarico’s and James’s answers is that they’re not very specific. Any journalist or curious voter would have plenty of follow-ups: When, for example, might an activity risk “safety or fairness”? What would fairness look like, and who would make the rules? Perhaps this is why other Democratic candidates are choosing to go off-script. Gina Hinojosa, who is running to replace Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has said that she won’t take up legislation related to the “culture wars” as governor; in a new ad, she declares, “My pronouns are mom, Texan, and soon-to-be governor.” The Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown’s strategy is to point out the absurdity of focusing on trans issues at a time like this. “Here they go again, those same attacks against Sherrod Brown,” one voter says in a new Brown ad. “With everything going on, that’s what they’re talking about?” says another voter.
The desire to be straightforward has some Democrats sounding, well, a lot more like the Republicans in Congress. In Ohio, Amy Acton, who is running for governor, told the Toledo-based newspaper The Blade, “I do not support boys playing in girls’ sports.” Rob Sand, running for governor in Iowa, has repeatedly said that “girls’ sports are for girls, and boys’ sports are for boys.”
Some Democrats have praised these candidates for their candor. Sand “has taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left Searchlight Institute, told me in August. But their answers are not without political risk. Erickson, from Third Way, does not see Sand’s or Acton’s rhetoric on this issue as particularly helpful, mainly because calling transgender girls “boys” is misgendering them. “That is going to piss people off,” she said. She’s right.
After Acton’s comments to The Blade, LGBTQ advocates in Ohio set up a virtual meeting with her campaign, hoping to communicate their concerns. The Democrat’s comments about “boys playing in girls’ sports” were functionally “misgendering every single trans person in the state of Ohio,” and they amounted to “trans erasure,” Arienne Childrey, a state-House candidate and the vice chair of the Ohio Democratic Party’s Pride Caucus, told me.
But when the advocates logged on to the virtual call, they learned that Acton wouldn’t be joining and had instead sent campaign staff in her place. Things got worse. Childrey said that she was denied entry into the meeting, despite her role on the Pride Caucus, and when another activist pressed to get Childrey included, that person was ejected from the Zoom call. The discussion that followed was one-sided, another attendee told me. Acton’s campaign staff did not respond to any of their questions, this person said, and offered no reassurances for trans Ohioans on behalf of their boss. (The Acton campaign did not respond to requests for comment.)
A few weeks later, another Ohio Democrat, Representative Marcy Kaptur, whose race for reelection will be one of the most competitive in the country, confirmed Childrey’s fears by sounding, well, a little bit MAGA in a new campaign ad. “I voted with Republicans to keep transgender ideology out of our schools, because parents know what’s best for their kids, and boys should not play in girls’ sports,” Kaptur said.
Activists view the whole situation as an alarming shift among Democrats—one that portends worse to come. “Targeting trans people isn’t the winning strategy some people think it is,” Equality Ohio, an LGBTQ-advocacy group, told me in a statement. Childrey said that “the triangulation thought process is that we have to throw trans rights under the bus” to win elections: “We’re leaning in a direction that loses the heart and soul of what it means to be a Democrat.” In an online interview with a transgender political commentator last week, Childrey implied that she wouldn’t be voting for Acton in November, saying that activists need to show Democrats nationwide “that transphobia will not be a successful selling point.” The big risk, she explained, is that in 2028, “you’re going to have the choice between a transphobic Republican and a transphobic Democrat for president.”
Republicans are hopeful that a dogged focus on trans issues in the final days of this election season can depress turnout among Democratic voters like Childrey just as much as it energizes their own base. Democrats will have to hope that, this time, the GOP’s gambit will fail.
As Democrats have grown more hopeful that they might win control of the U.S. Senate, congressional investigators have gathered regularly in a conference room in the office of Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, who is on track to lead the body’s key oversight committee if they do. The team in recent months has assembled a list of people in President Trump’s orbit and administration whose actions are worthy of a probe, and they have brainstormed possible witnesses, drafted information requests, and gamed out how the administration might respond.
Across the Hill, Representative Robert Garcia of California, a Democrat who could soon chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has been preparing even longer. He told me he keeps a “running list of the most corrupt things that the Trump family has done” on a whiteboard in his home in Long Beach where senior staffers this week wrapped up several days of strategy meetings. “There’s a lot of ideas and possible investigations on there,” he said.
With the midterms just weeks away, an army of committee staffers has been quietly preparing to launch numerous investigations in the new year. When the 120th congressional session begins in January, Trump and his administration could suddenly find themselves under the type of scrutiny they have thus far avoided. But there are significant risks and limits to Democrats’ congressional powers—and divisions could quickly emerge over the number and intensity of investigations, especially if their majority is a thin one.
During Trump’s first term, Democrats heavily invested in trying to impeach the president on two occasions, animating their base but taking them away from work on issues of broader interest to more Americans. But the biggest hurdle is likely the president himself: Trump is widely expected to be more dismissive of congressional oversight than any president in history, ignoring requests, resisting subpoenas in ways that give Democrats little recourse, or issuing broad pardons to insulate those close to him. If Democrats attempted to hold someone in criminal contempt of Congress, the matter would be referred to a Department of Justice that Trump has controlled completely.
All of these considerations leave Democrats certain that they are going to scrutinize Trump like never before, but deeply uncertain about how it will go. “I don’t think I’d call it retribution. I’d call it a reckoning,” Representative Suzanne Bonamici of Oregon told me. “I don’t look at it like, We’re going to get back at you. We’re going to hold you accountable.”
House Democrats have had a stronger expectation of winning the majority than their colleagues in the Senate, which has given them a head start in organizing their strategy. Senators have largely coordinated with their House counterparts—a task that has proved tricky in the past, and led to turf wars over who gets the political spotlight. But in recent weeks, with Democrats sensing an opportunity to claim the Senate majority, efforts have increased on that side of the Capitol as well. “We have to work quickly,” one Democratic aide told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private preparations. “Everyone realizes the pressure to work fast.” On the Senate Finance Committee, eight staffers have been tasked with different subject areas and have weekly meetings to talk about investigative options, Senate aides told me. Over the next few weeks, they are aiming to compile reports on their options if Democrats gain the majority.
Ask any Democratic incumbent or candidate to name their top investigative target, and they’ll likely give you five answers—or more. There are broad buckets: alleged Trump-family corruption, immigration enforcement, the war in Iran, and Washington construction projects. But there also are alleged payments for pardons, allegations that U.S. attorneys are misleading judges and grand juries, Venezuelan oil contracts, and questions about Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party to look into.
The Democratic base is eager to see Trump held accountable for his actions, and many members have a voracious appetite to get going. “Every single committee we have needs to be extremely aggressive in their areas of jurisdiction,” Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, a Democrat who represents the Phoenix area, told me. “People want to see investigations, prosecutions. They want to see people in jail.” (Although Congress can’t put someone in jail, it can bring potential crimes to light.) She sees the need for a range of investigations—including subpoenaing Barron Trump, the president’s youngest son, to ask about his reported ties to Andrew Tate, who has been indicted in Romania on charges of trafficking minors—and she doesn’t see a problem with launching numerous investigations. Trump has no issues “running everywhere at once,” she reasons, so why should Democrats?
But members in more moderate districts have been less outspoken, and have placed more of an emphasis on the economic issues voters say they care most about. In a survey of likely voters last month in the 37 districts that the Cook Political Report rated at the time as competitive (the number has now grown to 43), only 21 percent said they wanted a candidate who would be a check on Trump, 35 percent said they wanted someone to work with him, and 43 percent said they wanted someone who would focus on changing the political system overall. Representative Jason Crow of Colorado, a Democrat, was one of the seven impeachment managers during Trump’s first trial, and the lessons he drew from it are still fresh. Impeachment is one tool, he told me, but he also thinks the party needs to be strategic and focused about how it flexes its investigative muscles. “We’re going to be methodical about it; we’re going to be intentional about it,” Crow said. “We can’t do everything at once.”
Garcia, who might soon chair the House’s key oversight committee, acknowledged how tricky it will be for Democrats to map out where to focus their energies and how to keep the party united. “We’re working on that broader strategy and cadence right now,” he told me.
Almost immediately, Garcia said, Democrats plan to take actions related to allegations of the Trump family’s corruption and profiteering and to the administration’s handling of federal investigative records related to Jeffrey Epstein. There are also calls for impeaching Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the unauthorized war in Iran, boat strikes in the Caribbean, and the mishandling of sensitive information. Democrats also hope to investigate allegations that Corey Lewandowski solicited financial kickbacks in exchange for government contracts while working as a special government employee for the Department of Homeland Security. Garcia said they could attempt to call Trump himself to testify, but they lack strong legal means to force him to do so if he doesn’t comply. They plan to call White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and others. “They’re going to push back really hard on a lot of this,” Garcia told me, “and I think we’ve got to be creative and aggressive, and use public opinion, and push where we can.”
Democratic leaders expect that the Trump administration will be highly litigious on requests for data and documents, and they are trying to come up with ways to instead get that information from third parties. This might mean subpoenaing contractors instead of the White House, or seeking records from banks rather than the Treasury Department.
It also means being targeted and specific in their requests, and building on information they have already gathered. Some House Democrats have collected video footage, for example, of ICE officers and potential abuse of immigrants that they want to further examine.
If Democrats gain control, they also plan to discontinue some past bipartisan practices that could stall investigations. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, should he take over as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, would drop the practice of issuing subpoenas only if the chair and ranking member agree to do so, and would instead put such decisions up for a majority vote. “We’re planning to be much more aggressive than we have been in the past,” the Democratic aide told me.
Four years ago, top advisers to President Biden anticipated that Republicans would win control of the House and attempt to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and put Hunter Biden under significant scrutiny. They spent months in strategy meetings in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the White House, and hired communications advisers and white-collar attorneys. The Trump administration doesn’t yet appear to be making similar preparations. White House Counsel Will Scharf, who would have to oversee much of the Trump administration’s response, did not reply to my message seeking comment. Olivia Wales, a White House spokesperson, said the president “is focused on retaining Republican majorities in Congress.”
Republicans have tried to cast Democrats as drunk on impeachment, and House Majority Leader Steve Scalise warned at the Republican convention earlier in September: “The first thing they’ll do is impeach President Trump and his Cabinet.” There are a few calls for impeachment—including from Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan, the state’s Democratic nominee for Senate—but most Democrats are hesitant to call for impeaching Trump for a third time. Trump won’t be able to seek another term, and there’s a recognition that the Senate likely would not convict him. “Donald Trump is not fit to be president,” Crow told me. “But did impeachment achieve our goal? It did not. Could it in the future? Maybe. Maybe. We need conditions for that.”
Impeaching Cabinet members, though, may be a different matter. House Democrats have already filed legislation attempting to impeach Hegseth, Education Secretary Linda McMahon, and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. There were also efforts to impeach Pam Bondi when she was leading the Department of Justice and Kristi Noem during her time at the Department of Homeland Security. At the top of Crow’s list: Hegseth, for purging the top ranks of the military, misuse of classified systems, and his role in the controversial agreement that has given the Pentagon a stake in a major private Venezuelan oil firm.
As Trump becomes a deeply unpopular lame-duck president, signs are emerging that some in his party may stop acceding to his demands and begin distancing themselves from him. Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican who has a contentious relationship with Trump and lost his primary earlier this year, filed articles of impeachment on Hegseth last month that caused the House to break for recess to avoid a contentious vote. Senator John Curtis of Utah, a Republican, recently called for more scrutiny of the Trump family, citing its crypto deals, real-estate transactions, and the recent wedding party. “These reports raise legitimate questions about foreign access to members of a sitting president’s family and whether such relationships can create actual or perceived expectations of favorable treatment,” he wrote in a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The Trump Organization did not respond to my questions about how and whether it, or the president’s family, is preparing for investigations. An ally of Donald Trump Jr., who is likely to be investigated for allowing a Russian oligarch to finance a party after his wedding ceremony, said that Trump Jr. would be ready for the scrutiny and pointed to his congressional testimony during Trump’s first term. “Nothing Democrats do next year is going to shake him,” the ally, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to comment publicly, told me. “Don is ready for what’s coming.”
Democrats are working furiously to try to make sure they, too, are ready for what could be coming.
Marie-Rose Sheinerman and Madison Hahamy contributed to this report.
At about 6 p.m. last night, the Supreme Court lifted a temporary stay placed on the execution of Christa Pike, a Tennessee woman who was found guilty of joining two accomplices in murdering a classmate in 1995, when Pike was 18 years old. Roughly an hour and a half later, Pike, who has spent 30 years on death row, was strapped to a gurney in Tennessee’s death chamber for lethal injection. When the execution staff began administering the barbiturate pentobarbital, the single drug the state uses in such executions, Pike turned to her spiritual adviser and mentioned a burning sensation. Time passed, but Pike remained conscious and said that her arm felt like it was “about to burst open.” Perhaps aware that their attempt to kill Pike was not going as planned, prison officials closed the curtains on the witness observation window at 7:46 p.m., reopened them minutes later, then closed them for good at 8:05 p.m.
Pike is not the first prisoner to suffer a horrifically botched execution in Tennessee this year. In May, prison officials in Nashville similarly bungled the killing of Tony Carruthers, who was pierced with needles and sliced open with a scalpel before the execution was called off. These stories are part of a broader pattern of failed executions in recent years. In 2022, when I began investigating disastrous lethal-injection attempts in Alabama, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that 35 percent of the year’s total executions had been botched. In the 44 years that America has carried out lethal injections, the evidence has repeatedly revealed that the method is scientifically unsound, frequently torturous, and woefully unreliable.
Given the odds of a botched procedure, subjecting prisoners to lethal injections can no longer be justified as reasonable. Pike’s story alone destroys the presumption that lethal injections are a more humane and clinical alternative to the electric chair or gas chamber. And the method’s record is only getting worse with time.
Last night, after the prison staff closed the curtains for the first time and reopened them minutes later, Pike seemed to be breathing hard and in respiratory distress. As the minutes passed, her visible symptoms worsened: Her body contorted, and she uttered choking, grunting sounds. Tennessee’s lethal-injection protocol allowed staff to administer a backup dose of pentobarbital, but Pike continued to show signs of life, and the staff once again closed the curtain. Yet witnesses could hear Pike’s ragged breathing via the audio feed from the execution chamber. Because Tennessee law permits no more than two doses of pentobarbital, her lawyers scrambled to file emergency motions arguing that efforts to kill her must cease so that she could get medical attention. The execution formally concluded just before 9 p.m., and Pike was transferred to an off-site hospital for treatment.
Pike’s story is harrowing but not unique. In her recent paper “Why Are Executions Becoming Crueler?,” Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University, writes that recent cases of botched injections “failed for all the same reasons they have faltered since this country’s first lethal injection execution four decades ago: executioner incompetence, inappropriate use of torturous drugs, and defects in lethal injection protocols, among a host of other factors.”
Qualified medical personnel generally do not want to be involved with lethal injections. This is in part because major medical institutions, such as the American Medical Association, explicitly bar participation in executions, which violates the Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Playing a role in state-sanctioned murder has grown still harder to justify as heinous examples of botched executions accrue. Although the identities of executioners are concealed by state secrecy laws, the potential for discovery is presumably unwelcome to anyone tasked with healing. The absence of skilled medical personnel has contributed to dire mishaps in several states, including Tennessee: In Carruthers’s case, a physician attempted to set a more complicated central intravenous line despite the fact that he had not done so in decades—resulting in a bloody failure. Tennessee refused to confirm or deny whether the same doctor would preside over Pike’s execution.
The absence of experienced and qualified medical staff means that lethal-injection attempts frequently fail to establish access to prisoners’ veins. This appears to have happened in Pike’s case, based on her complaints at the time. When IV lines are set poorly, because of either a prisoner’s unique physiology (Pike, for instance, has thrombocytosis, a platelet disorder that causes increased blood clotting) or simple incompetence, prisoners’ veins can rupture, spilling blood and poison into the surrounding tissue, which can cause the burning Pike described.
Pike’s veins may have been so compromised that very little pentobarbital may have made it into her bloodstream. Another equally plausible reason why the execution failed is that the drug was expired or contaminated, a problem that has plagued other states. Texas, for instance, has long extended the use-by dates on its stock of pentobarbital, and has carried out executions with expired drugs. As recently as 2022, Tennessee had failed to properly test its lethal-injection drugs for the presence of bacterial endotoxins, which can trigger severe physiological distress. Expiration and contamination can both negatively affect executions, either by creating intolerable pain at injection sites or by prompting multiple injections because of decreased potency. And because pharmaceutical manufacturers have largely sought to prevent the use of their products in executions, states often solicit the drugs from poorly regulated compounding pharmacies that may supply flawed alternatives. This has made lethal drugs for executions ever more hard to get, and extant stockpiles have grown old. Some states have begun turning to gas executions and firing squads to keep their capital-punishment regimes grinding along, a tacit admission that lethal injection is becoming untenable.
Pike is reportedly in critical condition. Tennessee Governor Bill Lee has once more halted executions for the foreseeable future while an independent review of what went wrong takes place. As more prisoners experience agony on gurneys and survive their execution attempts, more states can be expected to similarly examine the safety of their capital-punishment protocols. But these third-party investigators will not discover a reliably swift and painless method of administering lethal injections, because the method itself is flawed. States must let go of the faulty premise that killing people via intravenous poisoning is somehow more humane than more obviously grisly methods such as hanging and electrocution. America’s experiment with lethal injection has failed.
*Illustration sources: J. Miles Cary / Knoxville News Sentinel / USA Today / Reuters; Florilegius / Universal Images Group / Getty; Ron Bull/Toronto Star / Getty; Bernard Chantal / Alamy.
The Princess Bride. The Shawshank Redemption. Almost Famous. Over the course of its 51-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival has hosted notable films of all genres and styles. The 2026 edition, which concluded in mid-September, curated movies from rising talent and established filmmakers alike, including a modern-day Nigerian-set remake of Mrs. Dalloway, a gorgeous coming-of-age drama about a school trip to Pompeii, and a rollicking comedy about a community-theater troupe attempting to stage a musical. Below are 14 of my favorite films from the ones I caught, most of which will arrive in theaters in the coming months.
Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother (now in theaters)
Marvel fumbled its chance to feature the two-time Oscar winner Mahershala Ali in action-hero mode, but this soulful thriller makes up for that loss. Ali plays Latif, a hit man whose devotion to his Muslim faith and his family keeps him grounded; he hunts only targets he believes are irredeemable. But when he struggles to obtain breast milk for the youngest of his three children after his wife’s death, Latif gets drawn into the kind of violence that makes him question his crusade’s value. The film, written and directed by Bassam Tariq, is stylishly shot, and balances balletic fight sequences and intimate character study.
Fjord (in theaters October 9)
Like much of his work, Cristian Mungiu’s latest movie is uncomfortable and uncompromising. In Fjord, which won the director his second Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a strict Romanian patriarch moves his family to Norway, where their evangelicism isn’t the norm. They assimilate comfortably until one of their daughters shows up to school with a visible bruise, which prompts an investigation into the parents (played by Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve). The film risks being considered a referendum on performative politics, but if anything, Fjord is a meticulous examination of responsibility and how good intentions can cause trouble.
La bola negra (in theaters October 16, streaming on Netflix December 2)
This year’s People’s Choice Award winner—the top honor granted at TIFF—is more complex than some of the previous, crowd-pleasing recipients. Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (known as “Los Javis”), La bola negra weaves together the stories of three gay men across time: a scion of an aristocratic family in 1932 who’s denied entry into a posh social club; a musician in 1937 conscripted into fighting alongside the fascists who destroyed his village; and a historian in 2017 studying the work of the poet Federico García Lorca, who wrote the titular unfinished play (which translates to “The Black Ball”). This deeply felt drama about the cost of burying one’s desires is also a technical marvel, packed with beautifully composed set pieces.
The Only Living Pickpocket in New York (in theaters October 23)
As earnest as the Simon and Garfunkel song from which its title draws inspiration, this nimble indie film feels like an artifact of a bygone era. John Turturro delivers a fine-tuned performance as Harry, an aging criminal struggling to accept that the tricks of his trade have become obsolete. When Harry steals a valuable USB drive from a young man belonging to a mob family, then loses it, his victim sends him racing through the city to get it back, or risk punishment for his crime. Yet the film never comes across like a generic thriller; instead, it’s a surprisingly spiritual consideration of how to let go of not just one’s habits, but of an entire way of life.
Possible Love (in theaters October 23, streaming on Netflix November 6)
The director Lee Chang-dong’s last film, 2018’s Burning, was engrossing for its precision, and his latest is another master class in exactitude. The story follows two couples, one of which includes the documentarian Ye-ji (Parasite’s Cho Yeo-jeong), who hopes to make a movie about the personal lives of laid-off workers. Her intended subject, a man who was let go by the factory that employs much of his rural town, won’t speak with her. Thus, Ye-ji interviews his cheery wife (Jeon Do-yeon) instead. As the women grow close, their opposing lifestyles—Ye-ji and her husband are obviously wealthy—result in emotions none of the foursome wishes to confront: jealousy, resentment, lust. Possible Love draws you in through furtive glances and sharp dialogue. Though it’s nearly three hours long, no second feels wasted.
Wild Horse Nine (in theaters November 6)
Is there any point in terrible people self-reflecting? Martin McDonagh’s latest dark comedy considers that question. A sterling John Malkovich and his fellow McDonagh favorite Sam Rockwell play, respectively, best friends Chris and Lee, two CIA operatives who vacation on Easter Island after their latest unsavory mission. Chris, though, is dying of cancer and seems newly troubled by his work. Hopped up on morphine, he records his thoughts about his clandestine escapades, philosophizing about whether he can be redeemed. This soon puts Lee in the awkward position of trying to stop Chris from running afoul of the CIA. What ensues is an eccentric and bloody affair that resembles the writer-director’s previous bromance-centric work, most recently The Banshees of Inisherin.
Being Heumann (in theaters November 6, streaming on Apple TV November 13)
The disability-rights activist Judy Heumann’s achievements in the 1970s can be easily taken for granted today. She helped persuade the federal government to update curbs for wheelchair use, and pushed through legislation for special-education programs. This biopic, by the director of CODA, Siân Heder, could get overlooked, too: It mostly stars disabled, unknown actors, and tells a somewhat conventional story about a motley crew of underdogs overcoming the odds. Yet Being Heumann works well because it leans into the thrill of even the smallest of wins for Judy (the excellent Ruth Madeley). It’s a testament to casting for lived experience, and for revisiting history that can yield fresh insights.
Minotaur (in theaters November 20)
Adultery is well-trod storytelling territory. But Minotaur, which is inspired by the Claude Chabrol classic La femme infidèle, fuses its central marriage drama with a furious assessment of Russia’s war against Ukraine. The director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan) returns after nine years away from filmmaking with a tale about a plutocrat who is obsessed with his wife’s barely concealed extramarital affair. At the same time, he’s working on submitting names of 14 men from his workforce to be deployed to join the front lines. Shot with the chilling distance of a horror film, Minotaur becomes a suspenseful examination of how wealth and power make some people untouchable.
Tender Loving Care (in theaters December 4)
Trust the British auteur Mike Leigh to deliver a sensitive slice-of-life dramedy. Kate O’Flynn (a recent Emmy winner for Widow’s Bay) plays Amy, a social worker who moves in with her best friend, Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson), after an overdue breakup. Unmoored, Amy holds on to Rosie and her own elderly parents, whose marriage is the picture of romantic bliss the women wish for themselves. Through finely observed scenes, the Hard Truths director offers a hilarious and quietly devastating portrait of what it really takes for us to look after one another.
Clarissa (in theaters December 11)
Mrs. Dalloway gets transported to contemporary Nigeria in this sensual adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s best-known novel. Directed by the brothers Arie and Chuko Esiri, the movie stars Sophie Okonedo as the refined Clarissa, who reflects upon her youth as she prepares to throw a lavish party. As her day unfolds, Clarissa encounters old friends, including an aspiring writer whose unrequited affection for her led him to self-exile, and an enigmatic woman with whom Clarissa once shared an attraction; these moments prompt flashbacks that seep into the main narrative. Along the way, the film also follows a traumatized soldier a few connections removed from this posh circle, but their tales intertwine to form an elegantly shot study of nostalgia, regret, and renewal.
The Debut (in theaters December 11)
A movie about an overly dedicated actor could easily go awry; even the most respected performers can sound insufferable when talking about method acting. Julianne Moore’s take on such a thespian, however, makes any eccentricities more captivating than annoying. She’s a total delight as Mona, a meek suburban housewife fixated on perfecting her minor character in a community-theater production. The actor turned filmmaker Jesse Eisenberg surrounds her with an ensemble that captures the optimism of small-town arts culture: Her co-stars, including the sunny Stef (Halle Bailey), try to support her baffling choices. The production’s director, Jerry (Paul Giamatti), goes to great lengths to help Mona succeed. If she can make it, The Debut insists through quirky original songs and bouncy jokes, anyone can.
La gradiva (in theaters December 18)
When you’re young, everything seems to matter: A teacher’s exasperated comment can induce tears. A friend’s shrug during an important conversation can be soul-shattering. In this impeccable directorial debut from the cinematographer Marine Atlan, a group of French high schoolers travel to Pompeii, where they become mired in shifting allegiances, sexual tensions, and intellectual debates. La gradiva orbits mostly around Suzanne (Suzanne Gerin), a sullen loner, and Toni (Colas Quignard), the class troublemaker whose rowdiness belies a crush on his best friend, James (Mitia Capellier-Audat). Yet each character, however minor, is specifically rendered, as Atlan finds the tiny, wrenching moments that make up the jagged space between childhood and adulthood.
The Man I Love (release date TBD)
Jimmy George (an engrossing Rami Malek) is a performance artist in the 1980s Manhattan arts scene pushing to stage a new show, despite his AIDS diagnosis. That may sound like a familiar story; even Jimmy is simmering with fury over how cliché it feels to be yet another magnetic gay man whose health is deteriorating. But the Passages filmmaker Ira Sachs’s latest exploration of queer relationships is so compelling because it subtly widens its scope. Sachs pays close attention to Jimmy’s complicated network of relatives, admirers, and lovers, including his devoted partner and the youthful downstairs neighbor with whom Jimmy recklessly begins an affair. The result is not so much scandal as it is a reflection on who gets to express hurt in the face of inevitable tragedy.
Trash Mountain (release date TBD)
Don’t let the title fool you: Very little is wasted in this tightly constructed dramedy about a pair of half siblings trying to sift through the belongings of their late father, who was a hoarder. For Gavin (Caleb Hearon) and Abbi (Zooey Deschanel), physical baggage is only part of the problem: Gavin, a gay man, dreads spending time in his thoroughly conservative Missouri hometown, while Abbi feels saddled with responsibility as the elder sister who never left. Hearon and Deschanel share a lived-in chemistry, with their characters leaning into offbeat humor before they come to terms with reality. Trash Mountain works the same way: The funny film makes room for a sweet, cathartic story underneath.
Allow me to introduce myself. For the past nine years, I have been the leader of a small, advanced company that is generally unknown to the public but of some renown within my field. We are one of the many teams of engineers working to develop what most people call (somewhat inexactly) the Universal Bone Dissolver.
It sounds like a frightening idea, I know. Science fiction has certainly taught us to be wary of a machine with the power to dissolve all human bones. But rest assured, most of us designing it believe that it won’t.
When we began constructing 1,000-story towers of whirring, acid-drenched blades, we intended them to assist with everyday tasks, such as spell-checking and finding a good price on shoes. But as this technology grew more capable, I came to believe that the Universal Bone Dissolver would immeasurably improve human life. It is no exaggeration to say that it has the capacity to bring about a new golden age of art, leisure, intellectual freedom, and raw, democratized carnality to rival the Roman court of Emperor Elagabalus. In short, bone dissolving can be as pivotal to civilization as the printing press, the light bulb, and the energy-saving squiggly light bulb.
But despite my continued faith, a recent incident has raised my concerns: Last month, a prototype of the Bone Dissolver unexpectedly dissolved a number of human bones.
This incident is distressing. The idea of a monstrosity rising up to destroy its creator has never before been so much as imagined, I presume. Worse, this attack does not appear to be isolated. Every day, more companies come forward with reports of dangerous behavior from the Universal Bone Dissolver. Its voracious gears even penetrated our own government, in one instance that we will eventually admit was thousands of instances.
Now that we have evidence that the Universal Bone Dissolver is on an ever-narrowing path toward mashing humankind’s skeletons into calcium-rich jelly, there is only one choice for those of us with the power to stop it: Immediately, without hesitation, go a bit slower.
We must reduce the pace at which we weld blades to its rusted iron scaffolding. To be responsible, we should count at least to “three Mississippi” as we grimly fasten each bolt. With the time we gain, we can construct guardrails, such as a cage of steel tubes to protect me, my fellow investors, and whoever fits in the remaining space.
I believe that this slower approach will satisfy average Americans, who are justifiably worried that their bones will be dissolved sooner than they’d prefer. To further ease their fears, I pledge to organize a listening tour in the public square. This will answer crucial questions: What is it even like in a public square? Does it have an alluring, exotic smell? As I jostle among the crowds, will I catch the eye of a perfumed, dark-eyed stranger who’s interested in learning about Elagabalus?
Regardless, I hope that we can all pause, take a breath, and calmly hear the things that people in my industry already know:
We must never stop building the Universal Bone Dissolver.
The Bone Dissolver is out of control, and seems intent on dissolving our bones.
We are the smartest men who have ever lived, and deserve to make love to women dressed as vestal priestesses in large inflatable clamshells.
To be sure, we have more to work out. I confess that I don’t know exactly what a slowdown will look like. Maybe it’s volunteer watchdogs tripping us with brooms on our way to the blade foundry. Or maybe it’s that thing where you’re trying to walk somewhere, and someone approaches you from the other direction, and every time you take a step to get out of their way, the other guy moves to a spot that unintentionally blocks your path, and it goes on for much longer than you’d expect, and during that time, someone figures out a way to make the Universal Bone Dissolver safe. Those are just two ideas. I’m sure others who have experience doing things to help people may devise something even better.
What is paramount is that we do everything we can, while we still have time, to continue doing the same thing at a slower pace. And also that progress is frozen at all of my business competitors. Thank you for reading, and please, let’s work together to melt your skeleton.
This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here.
As modern American journalism began taking shape before the Civil War and newspapers were entering the world at staggering rates, the novelist Cornelius Mathews wondered at what point the profusion should stop, or whether it should stop at all. Because the press is the “palladium of liberty, and the more palladiums we have the freer we are,” perhaps everyone, everywhere, should just issue their very own daily “sheet” in which they can write of themselves and others “in a good pungent style.” The vision came as a joke in Mathews’s 1842 novel, The Career of Puffer Hopkins. Ponderous and mostly unreadable now, the book nonetheless divined an emerging truth of a world awash in information: Puffery and self-promotion would become a way of life.
A little more than 180 years later, everyone does, in fact, have the capacity to publish their own “sheet” online, not just once a day but as often as they like—and the president of the United States owns one of the platforms that makes this possible. In this new media landscape, the role of journalism remains contested. Two weeks ago, Donald Trump went on his Truth Social account to announce that three media outlets—CNN, MS NOW, and Politico—would be banned from the White House grounds. A federal judge quickly blocked the move, and the three outlets have since regained access to the White House under a temporary restraining order while they seek a longer-term injunction (though CNN continues to be excluded from some press-pool duties, including presidential travel). The back-and-forth embodies a tension that has run through conservative politics since Richard Nixon’s time in office. The more empowered presidents have become to tell their stories directly to Americans, the more intolerant they’ve become of journalism’s ability to tell competing ones.
Writing for The Atlantic in 1973, David Wise captured this dynamic at work. He reported on how Nixon’s administration seethed with hostility toward the media, even as it enjoyed a power to command attention virtually unknown by any president before World War II. Television, Nixon knew, made it possible for the president to speak face-to-face with the public rather than needing to rely on intermediaries in the press. He learned the lesson in 1952, when he defended himself against financial-impropriety allegations in his “Checkers” speech, which saved his place on the presidential ticket with Dwight Eisenhower as well as his entire political career. The Republican Party had paid NBC $75,000 for that appearance, but presidents could go on television for free, and more or less at will. Responding to a question in 1971 about Nixon’s frequent requests for TV spots, then–NBC President Julian Goodman reportedly said, “Our attitude is the same as our attitude toward previous presidents: He can have any goddamn thing he wants.”
But that was not enough for Nixon and his circle, and from their moment of victory in 1968, they articulated a desire to fight back against unflattering coverage and commentary. As Wise detailed, one member of Vice President Spiro Agnew’s staff suggested on Election Night, “Why don’t we all get a member of the press and beat him up?” (As it happened, a Washington correspondent overheard the suggestion and reported on it.) In 1969, Agnew made a pair of speeches portraying the press as both deeply out of touch and guilty of misleading the public. Journalists, Agnew suggested, could be separated “from our society with no more regret than we should feel over discarding rotten apples from a barrel.” Later, in 1972, a Newsday columnist attended an advance film screening, during which he felt his hair being yanked by the person behind him with such force that his head hit the seat. The person behind him was Nixon’s chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, whom the columnist had profiled somewhat critically. The film being screened was The Godfather. For his part, Nixon himself joked soon after the moon landing that lunar rocks—feared to be contaminated with extraterrestrial germs—should be sent to members of the press.
The rhetoric and bullying was only the beginning. After the military analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times in 1971, the attorney general sought to block their publication (later that year, the “White House plumbers” would break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of finding ways to discredit Ellsberg). Also in 1971, the FBI began conducting an investigation of the CBS correspondent Daniel Schorr, who was on Nixon’s infamous “enemy list” for his reporting. Federal agents attempted to dig up dirt on Schorr, and once their inquiries made the investigation public, White House officials falsely claimed to have been conducting a background check for a federal job for which Schorr had not applied. Such acts of intimidation, Richard Harris argued in The New Yorker in 1973, had actually succeeded in softening press coverage of the administration on a host of issues. It is no small irony, then, that it was less the hostility of journalists than the transgressions of Nixon and those in his circle that gave the press the story that would destroy his presidency.
More than 50 years on from Nixon’s resignation, Trump presents a curious case: As both an agent and a beneficiary of the fracturing media landscape, he is at once eager to both undermine the credibility of the press and bask in its plaudits. He built his political persona around persistent efforts to ruin the reputation of mainstream outlets, and under his administration, members of the press have been banished from the Pentagon and the White House. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s relentless drumbeat of scandal allows the president to operate with an impunity that Nixon would have envied. Neither the media nor its audience can possibly keep up. J. D. Vance may well have been right when he claimed in June, at the Nixon Library, that Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today.
Trump has managed to realize the vision that Mathews had back in the 1840s—by being able to speak directly to the public without a middleman; by printing his own sheet, which he named Truth Social. But he still yearns to control every story on the platforms he can’t own. CNN reported that one of his top aides, Natalie Harp, showed him media clips that allegedly infuriated him the week before the ban on the three outlets. In this way, Trump remains locked in the TV-driven media environment that he helped destabilize. Even though the public’s trust of the press has drastically declined over the years, and even though Trump has a direct line to Americans via his robust social-media presence, he still demonstrates a “talismanic belief in the power of news coverage,” my colleague David A. Graham wrote last week.
Like Nixon, Trump desires control not just of his story but of the stories told about him. He wants to have all of the advantages of every medium—to print his own sheet, to star in the show, and to decide how the show will ultimately play out. Modern life doesn’t work that way, but there is little chance that he’ll stop trying.
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Pete Hegseth seems to imagine himself as a man of big ideas. Perhaps you’ve worked with someone like that: Every organization has “idea hamsters,” who spin in their wheels and toss out suggestions of wildly varying quality. Sometimes, such folks can be innovators—but more often, their scattershot enthusiasm and admiration of their own creativity result in half-baked proposals that create more work, less productivity, and distractions from the real problems.
Hegseth had a lot of ideas during his State of the Force address to troops at the Marine Corps Base Quantico yesterday, and some of them, at least as a starting point for policies, had merit. Unfortunately, these few moments of sense were lost in a fog of clichés, culture-war resentments, and trademark Hegseth corniness.
The secretary may have a point, for example, that the U.S. military has become top-heavy with generals and admirals. Hegseth is not the first person to notice this: Congress legislates the number of general and flag officers in the military, a cap that was set at 962 for years, until the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, written in Barack Obama’s last year as president, mandated it be 11 percent smaller by the end of 2022. Hegseth wants to reduce that number even more, by 20 percent, ostensibly to reduce the size of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy.
So far, so good. But Hegseth’s message was less about seeking a more streamlined command structure than it was, as he put it, about keeping generals who “heard the message” and firing those who didn’t. (That “message” wasn’t clarified yesterday, but it likely includes classic Hegseth tropes such as “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”) Hegseth complained that the media—and he complained about the media a lot—called these reductions “a purge,” but he calls them “accountability.”
Exactly what these fired officers did to trigger such “accountability” remains unclear. It’s one thing to get rid of an admiral because his or her office is just some bureaucratic zombie position left over from a previous program or initiative; it’s another to fire someone because the secretary thinks they’re disloyal to him. Unfortunately, Hegseth’s history—his statements, and his often-adolescent temperament—suggest that his efforts to downsize the senior ranks are about politics, not efficiency.
Hegseth also announced that he intends to create a new command dedicated to autonomous warfare. He is right to want to direct more attention to these weapons; the wars in Ukraine and Iran have been bloody lessons in the power of asymmetrical warfare. But he gave no explanation for why these issues require an entire command, or how it might work. All he offered was a cool name—Autowarcom—that makes it sound like it’s meant to fight the Transformers. And for someone who has repeatedly declared himself “in a war of attrition” with the Pentagon’s bureaucracy, the secretary is more than willing to create a new command that would require more senior officers and civilians to staff it. (He also wants to establish an Office of Religious Affairs that reports directly to him; not only would this be more bureaucracy, but the last thing America needs is an office dedicated to religion that reports to a man who has made repeated efforts to imbue the military with his brand of Christian evangelicism.)
Once Hegseth got rolling, the ideas got sillier. He announced Project Meridian, an effort to engage in creative thinking about the military of the future. This is not a new concept; the military regularly works on such issues with various groups, including think tanks, civilian defense firms, and academics.
But then Hegseth announced the three wise men who would lead all this brainstorming about the future of warfare: Elon Musk, Newt Gingrich, and Palmer Luckey. Of the three, Luckey—who co-founded the defense firm Anduril Industries—seems a reasonable choice, but Musk has crackpot ideas on any number of issues, and Gingrich’s big plan for technological advancement when he ran for president in 2012 was to build a moon base. Fortunately, the damage this project could do will be somewhat limited because Hegseth has set a deadline of just 120 days for these men to report back. Then again, if Gingrich, Luckey, and Musk can’t redefine the future of national defense in four months, who can?
It was a day for acronyms and project code names, but the best was FORTRESS America, meaning “Federal Operations for Resilience, Troop Resources, Energy, Supply, and Survivability.” The expensive idea behind this one is that every major military base should be self-sustaining, including producing its own energy—apparently, in case of attack within the United States. You can almost hear the meeting where someone said “Fortress America,” and then a committee had to figure out what the acronym would stand for. (I am reminded of the classic TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E., whose creators thought “U.N.C.L.E.” sounded cool and then had to find words to fill the letters.)
Speaking of bases, Hegseth would like every governor to come to the Pentagon and pitch him, personally—and maybe even the president!—in a competition to win a brand new military base, a state-of-the-art facility with great housing and lethal capabilities. Does America need such a base? Would this effort draw money and time away from improvements to other military installations? None of that was spelled out, but Hegseth seemed excited about choosing the location in a military version of a reality-TV competition.
And on it went, with Hegseth spinning one bad idea after another, and managing to insult any number of Americans in the process. He did his usual riff of wanting “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals” in his macho military. (“The ideological clowns are out,” he said. “The patriotic cowboys are in, with testosterone testing on top.”) He also denigrated the graduates of America’s ROTC programs by implying that today’s universities are producing unreliable and unpatriotic officers. He wants to establish new military programs at six colleges, including Liberty University, Louisiana State University, and Hillsdale College—institutions, according to the secretary, that understand “the faith of Jerusalem,” and the Greco-Roman “pillars of our republic.”
Hegseth could not ignore ongoing problems such as the war in Iran, but rather than presenting a sober-minded and responsible discussion of the challenges to a military at war, the secretary instead leaned into his usual culture-war gripes. He also eagerly sowed division between the U.S. military and the society it serves: He told the assembled troops, repeatedly, that the media and higher education were their enemies, at one point saying that the American media were worse than Iran’s state media. Our press, he said, “intentionally smears the troops and the historic mission that they are undertaking,” actions that are “fundamentally anti-American. It’s sick. It’s a national betrayal. It’s treason.”
Hegseth’s speech proved, yet again, that he is manifestly unfit for his job. America can endure a bloated Pentagon with some generals in make-work jobs. It can stand to trim the waste in expensive programs and root out incompetent bureaucrats. What a democracy cannot—and should not—tolerate is a secretary of defense who trucks in propaganda and wants the people who serve in America’s military to be the armed instrument of his own resentments and biases.
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