In a world on edge still from the last pandemic, rumors of a deadly disease that could have escaped from a lab can cause some understandable distress—however speculative they might be. Late last week, reports emerged that a woman who died in a Siberian hospital may have contracted plague, or even that she had seeded a plague outbreak. The case almost immediately set off rounds of hurried speculation within Russia and abroad; officials have shared few details, inspiring elaborate theories about what killed the woman, who worked in a plague-research facility. The fervor around the case escalated on Sunday, when Axiosreported that the State Department was monitoring a “suspected plague outbreak” in Russia.
So far, the evidence that the death was caused by plague or something worse is thin, in part because Russian authorities—who have a poor reputation for transparency about biosecurity—have shared few clarifications. But scientists have a good understanding of how plague works. And if the lab worker did contract plague, that is no cause for international panic.
Here’s what is actually known. Sometime in the past week, a woman who worked at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East, not far from the Mongolian border, died of “pneumonia of an unknown cause,” Rospotrebnadzor, Russia’s agency for consumer protection and public health, said Sunday. Government officials have not confirmed her identity, but Russian media have reported that the woman was Daria Shipilova, a 27- or 28-year-old technician at the lab. A local official said that the hospital where she was treated has been placed under quarantine; local media, meanwhile, reported that several hospitals were under quarantine. And Igor Kobzev, the governor of the Irkutsk region, said in a statement on Friday that other people—local media later reported the number as 200—may have been in contact with a resident who contracted an “especially dangerous infection,” and were placed under medical observation. He did not identify the resident as Shipilova or say that the person had died. The public-health agency told state media that “no micro-organisms linked to her professional activity were identified in the patient’s samples” and that no contacts have experienced “health changes related to infectious pathology.” Meanwhile, an aluminum factory in the same town as the laboratory imposed a mask mandate for its more than 2,000 employees, TheWall Street Journal reported.
Plague might sound medieval, but it’s endemic among animals in many parts of the world today. Although Russia hasn’t reported any plague cases to the WHO since at least 2018, Mongolia has. An average of seven cases are recorded in the United States every year, typically from a flea bite or handling infected animals. More than 80 percent of U.S. cases are the bubonic form of the disease, which presents with swollen, pus-filled lymph nodes. Two other main forms of plague, all caused by the same bacterium, are also occasionally reported around the world: septicemic, which infects the blood, and pneumonic, which infects the lungs. Because the lab worker died of pneumonia, speculation that she’d died from plague centered on this last form.
Pneumonic plague is the sole form of the disease that can transmit between humans, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly likely to spread. David Wagner, the executive director of Northern Arizona University’s Pathogen and Microbiome Institute, told me that the respiratory droplets that can spread pneumonic plague—not to be confused with the tinier aerosols that can spread diseases such as flu and COVID—are only released during a cough or sneeze and only travel about three to six feet. “You have to be in very close proximity to someone with pneumonic plague to contract it from them,” he said.
Because transmission between humans is relatively difficult, the Russian government’s response to the mystery death from pneumonia—placing 200 people under medical observation—is “really incongruent with what you would expect for plague,” Amesh Adalja, an infectious-disease physician at Johns Hopkins University, told me. Daniel Jernigan, the former director of the CDC’s National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, told me that response was “above and beyond” what is typically required for plague cases. Perhaps, he said, the Russian authorities acted out of an abundance of caution; per Reuters, a local official recently said that most of the hospital workers who had been placed under quarantine have already been released.
Even if Shipilova did die of plague, fears of a larger outbreak are probably moot by now. Plague has an incubation period of only one to seven days, so anyone Shipilova might have exposed would have come down with symptoms by now, Jernigan said. Russian authorities have said that no one under medical observation has tested positive for plague. Generally speaking, the chances of a large outbreak of plague are slim. “Once you have an accurate diagnosis, it’s readily treated with multiple types of antibiotics, which is why we don’t have massive plague outbreaks and pandemics anymore,” Wagner said.
Very quickly, though, some scientists, security experts, and media outlets began speculating that whatever killed Shipilova was not traditional pneumonic plague, but a dangerous pathogen that had been somehow altered in the lab. The fear is that the pathogen could be resistant to antibiotics or other treatments, making it harder to prevent an outbreak. No evidence so far suggests that’s true or that the Irkutsk lab was modifying plague bacteria to make it more dangerous. Still, the host of unanswered questions surrounding this case has paved the way for conjectures about links to biological weapons and for conspiracy thinking about government collusion and vaccine companies set to profit off a plague pandemic.
Some Russian media outlets reported—and international outlets repeated—that the woman contracted plague after she broke a test tube containing a sample of the disease. (If that was the case, Adalja said, the lab should have followed the standard procedure of prescribing antibiotics immediately after exposure, which has not been reported.) And in the past, the Russian government has worked on bioterrorist agents and hidden the true cause of disease outbreaks. For example, Soviet officials attributed a 1979 anthrax outbreak that killed at least 64 people to contaminated meat. More than a decade later, President Boris Yeltsin admitted that the anthrax had come from a military biological-weapons facility.
The war in Ukraine has increased speculation about planned biological threats. In 2022, the Russian military began refurbishing a Soviet-era laboratory to handle deadly pathogens such as Ebola viruses, The Washington Post reported. “There’s just a standard lack of transparency from the Russian government that adds to the vacuum of information,” Adalja said.
The U.S. government, for its part, has given inconsistent signals about whether it believes that the incident has wider implications. Along with the State Department, the CDC and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response are reportedly working to learn more about the death. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio downplayed the possibility of danger to reporters yesterday, saying, “I don’t think it’s cause for alarm, but it is cause for focus and a cause to just keep an eye on it.” Today, he called on Russia to be more transparent and share more information. President Trump has offered his sympathies to Russia and said that the U.S. will offer help, though he didn’t specify what form that would take. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.)
The strong public reaction to the death in Siberia can likely be attributed to some surface-level similarities to the early days of the coronavirus pandemic—a mysterious respiratory disease, rumors of a lab leak, an initial response being handled by a secretive government. Still, the experts I spoke with were adamant that pneumonic plague would not be another COVID-19. Plague may not be totally relegated to the history books, but a major outbreak is low on the list of real threats.
At a dive bar deep in coal country, Derek Zoolander, male model, sits with his father and brothers after they’ve spent a long day in the mines. An ad for the beauty company Aveda comes on the TV—a spot that, as luck would have it, features Derek at his male-modeliest: hair gelled, torso nude, skin shimmering with body glitter. He also has a tail, a fishy pastel-green appendage that has been grafted onto his lower extremities via a protean form of CGI. “Moisture is the essence of wetness,” the ad’s narrator intones, as Derek (played by Ben Stiller) flaps around in an unconvincing ocean. “And wetness is the essence of beauty.”
Surf and turf, but make it fashion: The joke pretty much delivers itself. But it also functions, in Zoolander, as a plot device. As the ad plays, Derek seems thrilled: Finally, his family will see him. Finally, maybe, they’ll be proud.
Instead, they’re ashamed. Derek’s father (a steely Jon Voight) professes his relief that his wife, having died, never had to “see her son as a mermaid.”
The line is harsh—it might be the most piercing in the film—but if there’s one thing viewers learn about Derek Zoolander, it’s that he will, like a phoenix with a fish tail, persevere. Out of the awkward silence, inspirational music begins to swell. “Mer-man,” Derek corrects his father, the music growing louder around him. “Mer-MAN!”
If Zoolander is a bit like its namesake—absurdly farcical, endlessly watchable—Stiller’s chimeric turn helps explain why. When the film premiered 25 years ago, it had everything: an all-star cast (Owen Wilson as Derek’s nemesis, Hansel; Will Ferrell as the arch-villain; David Duchovny as the most celebrated hand model of all time), a gonzo plot (male models brainwashed to serve as assassins!), and a warm human heart. But it also had terrible timing. It debuted in theaters in late September of 2001. Its early earnings, in that grim moment, were tepid, its reviews decidedly bad. (Roger Ebert, so often a champion of cinematic absurdity, met Derek’s assorted contortions with a signature pose of his own: a thumb turned emphatically down.)
But Zoolander, in the years afterward, gradually ascended to filmdom’s version of haute couture: It became a cult classic, beloved for both its ostentatious idiocy and its insistence that dim-wittedness, seen from the right angle, can be wise. The film does more than merely hold up. Today—with its hero’s insistence that he can vamp to the camera, covered in body glitter, and still be a (mer)man—it looks downright prescient.
Zoolander arrived on the scene as the gender swap, that old cinematic trope, was losing its last traces of subversion. The film did not, on its face, deploy the gimmick; Derek is no Tootsie and certainly no Mrs. Doubtfire. But he gender-bends all the same. Derek is two things at once. As a model, he is a man doing work traditionally done by a woman—a guy whose job is to be gazed at and otherwise lucratively objectified. As a male model, though, he is doing a version of what his father and brothers do every day in the coal mines: asserting, and then typifying, an extremely legible version of manliness. The gender-bending is in one way Zoolander’s most basic joke. But it is also a provocation. Derek takes an insult traditionally lobbed at women—bimbo—and twists it around into a cherished and revealing archetype: the himbo.
The bimbo, from her earliest days, was most directly an answer to the vixen and the femme fatale. She enticed, yes, but she never threatened. She may have been voluptuous (she almost definitely was) but she was also fundamentally flat. The bimbo’s vacuity functions as an invitation, effectively, to the people who see her: Go ahead and look. Go ahead and fantasize. Go ahead and laugh. It turns a three-dimensional person into a two-dimensional image and then, in an elegant little trick, insists that she, herself, is responsible for the flattening. The bimbo is silly and empty and treated accordingly. Why consider the person behind the appearance when, the stereotype insists, there is none?
The himbo operates similarly. His attractiveness—his never-misses-leg-day show of masculinity—is his blessing and his curse. It elevates him as someone to be looked at, and it demeans him as something to be looked at. And Derek is a himbo in Platonic form. He is demeaned in terms usually reserved for women. He is a male model caught in the male gaze. Gender swapping can be a gimmick, but it can also offer insights. And as Derek tries bimbohood on for size, he demonstrates how silly the idea has always been.
Himbohood makes Derek mockable. But it also makes him relatable. It is one of the primary sources of his appeal. Derek is not, on the face of things, an obvious hero. He can be superficial (learning that his love interest was heavy in her youth, he responds with a knee-jerk “ew”). He can be vain (at the VH1 Fashion Awards, unable to fathom not being named Male Model of the Year, he barrels to the stage, so self-absorbed that he didn’t hear Hansel’s name being called). He is the kind of guy who will wear white to a funeral and use the eulogy as an opportunity to talk about himself—and then insist that eulogy is pronounced “you-goog-ly.”
But his himbohood redeems him. It is what allows him to work as Zoolander’s protagonist—and to be seen, in his lighthearted way, as worthy of celebration. A himbo’s charm lies in the discrepancy between what he might be and what he is: Big and burly, he could treat manliness as something to be wielded. But he is too gentle for that, too dim-witted, too pure. He is a hold-harmless clause in human form. And Derek, being exceptionally burly and exceptionally dim, is more reassuring than most. Even when he is brainwashed into violence, he is incapable of carrying it out.
That may be, for many of the men in Derek’s orbit—including his coal-miner father—a profound failing. But those men, in the end, are Zoolander’s true villains. And the tensions Derek lives out, as he makes his journey from successful model to failed model to brainwashed model, bring an avant-garde edge to the film’s absurdities.
Zoolander is, like its star, always more than it seems. It is a comedy that’s also a spy drama and a political thriller and a fast-paced action-adventure. (Its plot, Stiller has said, was inspired by The Manchurian Candidate; he filled it with cheeky callbacks to James Bond.) It throws on different genres like interchangeable outerwear. When Derek returns to his hill-country hometown, Zoolander briefly becomes a gritty—and exaggeratedly sooty—portrait of working-class life. A famous sequence pitting Derek and Hansel against each other in a “walk-off” becomes a boxing drama complete with a climactic prizefight, its two champions battling before a rabid crowd.
Fighter, killer, miner, spy: You might notice that each figure is distinctly, and stereotypically, masculine. Each identity is an option for Derek. And each is one he rejects. Maybe he’ll join his father and brothers in the mines. Maybe he’ll become an assassin. Maybe he’ll be conscripted into someone else’s war. None of that happens, of course, and only partly because Derek is the kind of guy who shows up to the mines clad in a snakeskin leisure suit. Those traditional ways of being manly are not his way of being manly. His version of masculinity is louder, and quieter. It is softer. It is inflected with femininity. It is a hybrid beast frolicking in the water with liquid ease—a mer-man.
The gender swap, in its Y2K format, considered the moment’s anxieties—the sexual revolution, its battles prolonged into cold war—but also its possibilities. The man as the nurturing nanny, the woman as the steely commando (think G.I. Jane) were gimmicks, but ones that invited people to imagine old binaries in new ways. Zoolander did the same but, amid all the farce, remarkably subtly. The film gave us a man who moved through the world like a woman: watched, judged, underestimated, misunderstood.
That Derek himself is too clueless to see those ironies makes him only more endearing. He is a male model worth emulating precisely because he would never see “male” as superior to anything else. His vacuity amounts to innocence—and his innocence amounts to enlightenment. Little wonder, then, that pop culture now teems with himbos: guys whose looks say “leading man” and whose actions say “useful idiot.” Andy in Parks and Recreation, Jason in The Good Place, the assorted magicians of Magic Mike—they and their many counterparts are also, in their own way, male models: men who, at a time when masculinity is so often talked about as a problem to be solved, hint at some kind of solution. They aren’t anxious about their masculinity. They aren’t scared of women. They are men who offer comic relief—and relief of a much broader sort.
One of the puzzling things about the online sports-betting boom that has swept through American culture over the past decade is the relative slowness of religious leaders to articulate a moral case against the vice.
In the past, churches were among the leading voices warning against gambling. Jerry Falwell denounced it as a sinful habit that preyed on the poor and left “little children” to pay the price. In The Atlantic’s December 1907 issue, a Unitarian minister made the case against “speculation.” “The long and costly experience of mankind bears uniform testimony against gambling,” Charles F. Dole wrote. “It is a dangerous or unsocial form of excitement; it hurts character, demoralizes industry, breeds quarrels, tempts men to self-destruction.”
But in recent years, as state legislatures have raced to legalize sports betting and gambling ads have flooded the airwaves and millions of young men have begun walking around with a casino in their pocket, spiritual leaders have been relatively muted.
Jonathan D. Cohen, a researcher who studies gambling policy, noted recently that the National Association of Evangelicals, which in 1985 called gambling and lotteries “socially, morally and economically destructive,” has barely addressed the new betting boom. Since 2018, the group’s official statements have mentioned gambling only once, as one item in a long list of “social evils” threatening the American family.
Why the silence? Perhaps the speed at which online gambling has spread simply caught religious leaders flat-footed. And perhaps some are wary of alienating their flock, among whom gambling has become normalized.
Whatever the reason, the result was predictable. In 2022, 71 percent of Americans said gambling was morally acceptable, the highest share Gallup had recorded since it began regularly asking the question in 2003.
I’ve noticed this anecdotally in my own faith tradition. While speaking on Utah’s college campuses about the explosion of online sports betting, I’ve been struck by how many young Mormon men have followed their peers onto DraftKings and PolyMarket with little consideration of the ethical or spiritual implications. Many of the students I met don’t think about gambling in moral terms at all; some don’t even consider sports betting or prediction markets to be gambling.
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has officially condemned gambling since its earliest years. Throughout the 20th century, prophets and apostles preached against the spiritually corrosive vice, and the Church encouraged members to oppose pro-gambling ballot initiatives. But the last time a senior Church leader addressed gambling at its General Conference—the Church’s semiannual global broadcast and most prominent pulpit—was in 2005. The long silence from the conference pulpit may have allowed some members to convince themselves that the Church had softened its stance—or that their Kalshi habit was not a religious issue at all.
The silence ended this past Saturday, when President D. Todd Christofferson, a senior leader in the Church’s highest governing body, used his General Conference address to condemn gambling. His remarks were well researched: He recited various statistics about the industry’s expansion, and spelled out the ruinous social consequences. He detailed the popular forms of online gambling and even offered a quick survey of the bets you can make on prediction markets—including the timing of the Second Coming. (“Where do you go to collect on that bet?” he wondered.)
But then Christofferson arrived at the real point of his talk.
“For us as Latter-day Saints, overarching all other concerns is the fact that gambling is morally wrong,” he said. “Gambling is built on the desire to obtain something for nothing. Its structure requires that any gain comes at others’ expense. It’s hard to reconcile that with the commandment to love our neighbor as ourselves.” He went on to say that Christians should be wise stewards of their God-given resources, and that “gambling produces nothing of value and enriches only its purveyors.”
He also addressed those in his audience who believe that they can gamble casually without becoming addicted. “Since your recreational gambling may lead a weaker brother or sister into temptation, just don’t do it,” Christofferson said. “Every soul is precious.”
Other Christian leaders have also recently become more outspoken about the issue. Last year, the Southern Baptist Convention formally condemned sports betting, and in February, leaders in the Assemblies of God, a large Pentecostal denomination with nearly 3 million adherents in the United States, warned that sports betting “erodes Christian character.”
The sports-betting industry has begun to draw more scrutiny in the mainstream media too. Last month, TheNew York Timesreported that DraftKings had developed an AI model to identify users most likely to lose money so that it could target them with promotions. When employees then developed a model that would have assigned “risk scores” based on users’ likelihood to develop compulsive behaviors, the company reportedly sidelined it. Meanwhile, an investigative reporter at ProPublica posed as a problem gambler on DraftKings to see how the company—which likes to boast about its “responsible gaming” safeguards—would react. He was barraged with promotions and invited to a VIP program.
Journalism like that can raise public awareness, shape legislation, and even inform sermons. (My own contribution to the genre—The Atlantic’s April cover story—was quoted in Christofferson’s talk, though he graciously referred to me as a “prominent journalist” instead of a “degenerate gambler,” my editors’ preferred descriptor.)
But journalists are not moral leaders. Neither are legislators or regulators. Those who are alarmed by the runaway gambling industry, and the way that it’s preying on America’s young men, should welcome an explicitly moral case against gambling, whether or not they share the religious beliefs of those articulating it. Until Congress decides to get involved, sermons like Christofferson’s might be among the few things that can move the needle.
On Saturday afternoon, several friends sent me the same Instagram video. It showed a pair of young Mormon men comically collapsing to the ground in devastation as they watched Christofferson’s talk on TV. The caption implied grudging repentance: “We had a good run, boys.”
Less than 50 years ago, the first child conceived by in vitro fertilization was delivered in Oldham, England. Louise Brown was heralded as a medical marvel—not only for her parents, who had struggled to conceive for a decade, but also for the world. “At 11:47 pm, on July 25th 1978,” the British paper The Observer declared, “hope was born.”
Thirteen million “test-tube babies” later, Brown is still too young to qualify for social-security benefits, and IVF has gone from science fiction to a household acronym. It accounts for almost one in 36 births in the United States, according to some estimates. In the meantime, another fertility treatment has become much more common: From 2014 to 2024, the number of egg-freezing procedures per year went from 6,000 to 39,000, a sixfold increase. By most obvious standards, the assisted-reproduction industry is thriving. It has allowed countless single people, same-sex partners, and couples dealing with infertility to become parents. It also happens to be worth tens of billions of dollars.
So I was particularly struck by a couple of statistics from this year’s “Singles in America” study, an annual survey of roughly 5,000 people conducted by the Kinsey Institute, in partnership with the dating company Match: From 2017 to this year, the share of respondents who said they would be willing to consider IVF fell by more than half, from 44 to 18 percent. Openness to egg freezing dropped from 33 to 17 percent. Those are steep declines, especially in a time when more people are choosing to become single parents, celebrities have shared their own IVF or egg-freezing stories, and use among the general public keeps increasing. (Singles’ interest in adoption also plummeted, the Kinsey researchers found—but actual adoption rates, too, have declined.)
The reasons are impossible to name with certainty. But while thousands of Americans are relying on fertility treatments, it may be that millions of others simply want to believe that they’ll never have to.
That participants have cooled on alternative ways to have children could reflect that Americans have, in fact, cooled on having children in general. In the 2017 “Singles in America” poll, 80 percent of respondents younger than 40 said they felt it was important to find a partner who wanted to have kids; this year, only about 38 percent of singles ages 18 to 49 reported wanting children. Half of all participants said financial stability (or lack thereof) is a major factor in that decision. If you’re unsure about parenthood—whether you desire it or whether you can afford it—arduous and expensive fertility treatments might not seem worthwhile. In the United States, a single cycle of egg freezing typically costs about $10,000 to $20,000, including necessary medications; the average cost of IVF is commonly more than $20,000 per cycle. Both processes require the patient to inject hormones, which can cause bloating, bruising, and mood swings, and then to undergo sedation for egg retrieval. They require a life-disrupting amount of time, with no guarantee that they’ll work.
Recent revelations about the fertility industry might be discouraging even to people who do feel sure they want kids. When I spoke with Justin Garcia, the Kinsey Institute’s executive director and the author of the book The Intimate Animal, he mentioned some high-profile cases of “fertility fraud”—including a doctor in Indiana, the home state of the Kinsey Institute, who secretly used his own sperm to father more than 90 kids. “People locally are just totally, totally freaked out by the idea,” he said. And more routine risks and limitations can spook potential customers too. One buzzy 2025 UCLA study found that less than 6 percent of women who froze their eggs from 2014 to 2016 had used them five to seven years later. (“That’s not a reason to not do it,” Garcia said. “It’s an insurance policy.”)
Stark figures have also been reported for IVF and intrauterine insemination, or IUI, a similar procedure; according to a 2022 CDC report, only about 40 percent of embryo transfers result in live births for women ages 35 to 37, and the chances drop precipitously at older ages. My Instagram feed is filled with women posting about their harrowing fertility sagas: years of doctor’s appointments, needles, aches, getting excited about embryos only to grieve when yet another ceases to develop. For viewers muddling through similar experiences, I’m sure, those videos could be comforting. For people like me, imagining someday being in that position, they’re terrifying.
Skepticism toward fertility treatments is creeping in at a time when many Americans, on the left and the right, are already suspicious of medicine and science—and particularly wary about taking hormones. TheNew York Timesreported last year that some of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s MAHA adherents in the White House are exploring ways to fund “fertility awareness” education: a strategy that involves abstinence from sex during fertile windows, rather than using hormonal methods such as the pill or an IUD, both of which they claim (without solid evidence) can harm one’s health and alter their personality. Alex Clark, who hosts the popular show Culture Apothecary (what she calls a “wellness podcast for cuteservatives”), has referred to hormonal birth control as “poison.” The 2021 documentary The Business of Birth Control, produced by Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein, “traces the feminist movement to investigate and expose the pill’s risks alongside the racist legacy of hormonal contraception,” according to its website. (Critics accused it of making dubious claims, including one talking head’s plea to “kill the pill before it kills you.” Lake and Epstein told Rolling Stone that they’re simply trying to “empower people to make informed decisions.”) In 2025, when La Trobe University public-health researchers analyzed 100 TikTok videos about contraception, they found that more than half rejected hormonal methods outright. The videos were riddled with misinformation.
Part of what makes such content alluring can be the idea of returning to what’s “natural”—and fertility treatments clash with that value in every possible way. They’re technologies that allow people to extend childbearing years, or to have biological children when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to. But perhaps just as important: They can lead to nontraditional families, which aren’t exactly romanticized by young people at the moment.
On the contrary, Gen Z survey respondents report relatively high levels of support for strict gender roles and old conventions: women staying home and caregiving, for instance, while men work. Garcia has observed this “nostalgia trap,” as he called it, among students where he teaches at Indiana University. Many of them are planning to find a straight relationship and marry young. They tell him that they want to have kids while they’re “still fertile,” he said, “the quote-unquote natural way.” He doesn’t think they realize how impossible a life course is to control. Maybe they’ll marry their college sweetheart and try for kids right after graduating, only to find that they can’t get pregnant. Or maybe they’ll find themselves single at 35, afraid they’ll miss the chance to become a parent. IVF and egg freezing might seem worth considering after all.
I wondered whether this attitude shift might foreshadow a dramatic drop in assisted-reproduction rates—but Garcia said that would surprise him. Prominent Republican leaders have criticized both IVF and egg freezing, and IVF in particular has been targeted by anti-abortion activists who oppose the discarding of embryos (which they argue are living beings). And yet, most Americans seem to support those procedures in theory. In a 2024 Pew Research Center poll, only 8 percent of participants said they were against IVF. The popular sentiment is less wrong for you and more not right for me. But ultimately, “you don’t know until you know,” Garcia said. “Until you’re in a situation where you’re in a doctor’s office and saying, We’ve been trying for a year. And what’s the next step?”
Perhaps the “Singles in America” result never showed a true rejection of any treatment or type of family. More than anything, it might just reveal a failure of imagination.
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The scenario is right out of a Stephen King novel: At a medical lab stashed away in a remote Siberian city, a pretty young technician was exposed to a deadly pathogen. She died, the lab went into lockdown, and soon rumors emerged that the Russian security services were on the scene. Now the world waits to see whether some monstrous microbe is going to make its way out of Russia’s forests.
What’s going on in Russia is bad, but—at least so far—not that bad. We know that someone working at a research institute that studies various forms of plague has died of pneumonia, which suggests that she mishandled a sample of pneumonic plague. That’s about it. Medical observers are rightly concerned: Pneumonic plague is nasty stuff. But it’s also not some unknown bug; a few hundred cases appear every year, and it is easily cured with antibiotics if diagnosed quickly enough. Counterintuitively, the pathogen’s deadliness limits the disease’s ability to spread: It kills its victims before they can infect too many other people. (ln this case, the remote location of the Russian facility might also help to contain any outbreak.)
Nevertheless, the situation in Siberia raises unsettling questions, and international experts, along with U.S. diplomats, are asking for more transparency. What kind of experiments are being conducted at this lab—the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia and the Far East—and are they possibly related to biological warfare? Did the researcher die of a known variant of the pneumonic plague, or some new, deadlier strain? Why are the Russian authorities reportedly quarantining hundreds of people?
Don’t expect honest answers from the Russians about any of this. The main source of information about this incident has been Russia’s Federal Service for the Oversight of Consumer Protection and Welfare, known by an abbreviation, Rospotrebnadzor (“ras-pah-treb-nah-dzor”). The name is rather anodyne, but the many duties of this organization include supervision of some of Russia’s biological-research institutes. For years it was part of the Russian Ministry of Health, but in 2012 it was reassigned and now reports directly to the Russian central government, elevating its importance and its broader mandate to act as Russia’s main overseer of epidemiological research.
Not that Rospotrebnadzor has been all that helpful in making sense of the crisis in Irkutsk. Regarding the death of Darya Shipilova, the lab worker, for example, it said: “No micro-organisms associated with the employee’s professional duties were detected in samples taken from the patient,” a careful construction that says almost nothing. What were the employee’s professional duties? What organisms were detected? Shipilova died of something; what was it?
Rospotrebnadzor said in an official statement that the woman died of “pneumonia of unknown cause,” but the region’s governor, Igor Kobzev, might have let the cat out of the bag when he revealed that Anna Popova, the head of Rospotrebnadzor, traveled to Irkutsk last week. CNN reports that Kobzev posted on Telegram that she came to town for an “extraordinary meeting of the regional sanitary and anti-epidemic commission,” in connection with “a suspected case of a regional resident with a particularly dangerous infection.”
A U.S. State Department spokesperson over the weekend encouraged “Russian authorities to share accurate information quickly and openly.” Good luck with that. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov closed the noninformation loop with this helpful advice: “The lead agency with expertise in this area is Rospotrebnadzor. People should rely on its official statements and disregard rumors, speculation, and so on.”
One innocent explanation is that the Irkutsk institute is trying to come up with better ways to prevent plague, and someone mishandled dangerous material—and the Russians, with their mania for secrecy, are making it all seem more ominous than necessary by clamping down on any further information. But maybe something more ominous is, in fact, going on. Dr. Ashish Jha, the former dean of Brown University’s school of public health and a former member of the Biden administration’s COVID-response team, pointed out in a thread on X on Sunday that “Russia is well known to have an active military biological weapons program.” He additionally noted reports (so far unconfirmed) that units of the Russian security services have been escorting vehicles to local hospitals.
Moscow has a long history with biological-weapons research going back to the Cold War. The United States unilaterally renounced research into biological-warfare agents back in 1969; the Soviets signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention, but in reality they never abandoned such programs. The Russians claimed in 1992 to have ended those efforts, but they are currently expanding a sizable facility that had once been used for biological-warfare research. (The Russian Ministry of Defense, predictably, has no comment on these construction activities.)
If the Irkutsk incident turns out to be the result of an accident in a Russian biological-warfare lab, it won’t be the first time. Back in 1979, the Soviet Union tried desperately to cover up an outbreak of anthrax in a city near the Ural Mountains, Sverdlovsk (now called Yekaterinburg). They nearly got away with it.
In the fall of 1979 and early 1980, a Russian-language émigré newspaper based in what was then West Germany ran reports about some kind of germ-related disaster in the Urals after an explosion at a lab. Evidence that dribbled in from Sverdlovsk over time, including the fact that the Soviet minister of defense personally visited the city, suggested that something big had indeed gone down. Descriptions of the illness spreading through the area pointed to anthrax, and in the early ’80s, the Americans—this was during the Cold War, after all—loudly accused the Soviets of working on an anthrax weapon.
The Soviets pretended to be deeply offended at such an accusation, and explained that the deaths and illnesses were the result of people eating tainted meat—it was all just a simple case of food poisoning. (After all, what nation doesn’t blockade roads in a major city and send their military chief to check on some locals eating bad beef?) The Soviet explanation was hooey, of course; a defector who worked in Soviet bioweapons programs, Ken Alibek, later theorized that the lab in Sverdlovsk making the anthrax had neglected to replace a filter and had ended up venting spores into the area.
Thirteen years would pass after the outbreak before anyone in Moscow admitted the truth. In 1992, then–Russian President Boris Yeltsin told the Americans that Soviet biowarfare experts had indeed been doing anthrax research, and that these experts had repeatedly lied to him about the 1979 event. The official death toll from the Sverdlovsk accident stands at 68, but no one will ever know the true numbers: The KGB at the time immediately seized and destroyed important evidence, including medical records. One might think the Soviets were chastened by this experience, but one would be wrong: After the Sverdlovsk facility was closed, the Soviets built another one in Kazakhstan, where they reportedly worked on strains of anthrax even more virulent than the stuff released in Sverdlovsk.
If something terrible has happened in Irkutsk, don’t count on the Russians coming clean about it anytime soon. Russia is led by an aggressive dictator who has been making war in Europe for four years, and Moscow’s incomplete explanations about what’s happening in Siberia cannot be trusted. The possibility that the Russians are working on existentially dangerous biological weapons is one more challenge to American—and global—security.
By now, people who have been paying close attention to this year’s midterm elections have a pretty good idea of the state of play: Democrats hope to gain four seats in the Senate and three seats in the House to flip both chambers and have more power to check President Trump’s policy agenda. Republicans, fearing a rout amid the Iran war and its impact on Americans’ lives back home, are hoping to hold on where they can.
But the national picture tells only part of the story. When reporters talk about “what voters want,” they are really talking about individuals living lives in different contexts. Every House and Senate race has a unique flavor depending on local problems and which candidate voters believe can help solve them.
This week on Radio Atlantic, my colleagues Russell Berman and David Graham join me to zoom in on the races they are paying special attention to as November approaches—for their national implications this time around, and for 2028 and beyond.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Russell Berman: The map has become so wide for Democrats, and this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October. It’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. They have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now.
Adam Harris: Control over the House and Senate hangs in the balance of this upcoming midterm election. Republicans hope to retain thin majorities in both chambers. But Democrats are hoping to gain four seats in the Senate and three in the House of Representatives, control Congress, and curb President Trump’s power in his final two years. That’s the big picture, but it doesn’t necessarily offer the texture of why Democrats believe they can win back power. The national trends give some indication; Democrats are focusing their message on salient issues: the price of gasoline and household items—often boiled down to the catchall of affordability—and the president’s sinking approval ratings in the shadow of the war in Iran. But national trends can only explain so much.
This is Radio Atlantic, I’m Adam Harris, and this week, my colleagues, Atlantic staff writers Russell Berman and David Graham, join me to share the five races they are following most closely this midterm cycle. We’ll discuss why they’re following these contests—beyond the fact that the polls say the races are close—and what they’ll be looking out for in the closing weeks of the campaign.
Let’s get to questions. David, Russell, thank you so much for joining me today.
Russell Berman: Great to be here.
David Graham: My pleasure.
Harris: So over the weekend we asked you to think about the five most interesting races to you, and we appreciate your doing so. And today, we’re gonna work through those lists together. We asked you not to share your lists with each other, so everybody’s coming to this fresh. David, I’m going to go to you first. What’s the first race that you want to talk about that you think is important and why?
Graham: Let’s talk about the Maine Senate race, which is maybe one that people will be familiar with, but I think one that is just really important and worth talking about. This is where Susan Collins, the longtime Republican incumbent, is running for another term. And she is, after a raucous primary and then withdrawal by Graham Platner, facing off against Troy Jackson, who is another sort of populist Democrat in, I think, an interesting test of both national currents. And also, Maine is a weird state politically, and I think we’re gonna see how that plays out in this race.
Harris: Yeah, Russell, I saw you nodding as well. It seems that Maine was on your list too.
Berman: Bingo! That was my first one as well. This one should be one—on paper, it should be an easy one, or maybe the easiest, for the Democrats to flip. It is by far the bluest state of the Senate seats where Republicans have an incumbent on the ballot.
But as David mentioned, Susan Collins has become a white whale for Democrats over the course of her career. In 2020, she won the state; she beat the polls; she won the state by nine points on the same day that Joe Biden won the state by about the same amount. And that was a huge shocker. And we don’t see as much split-ticket voting as we used to. And so she’s certainly not only one of the more moderate Republican senators, but perhaps the most resilient.
And Jackson is more authentically working-class than the last candidate that the Democrats had, Graham Platner. He’s less flawed, as far as we know, but he’s also less charismatic. And so I think that’s one reason why we’re seeing the race go down to the wire, even though the environment is so favorable to Democrats.
It was unthinkable that the Democrats could win back the Senate without Maine. And now it’s possible that even if the Democrats win the Senate, as we’ll talk about in other races, they still might have trouble beating Susan Collins.
Harris: Why is Susan Collins so strong politically in Maine? Why does she have such staying power?
Graham: You have this kind of politician that just sticks around forever, and I think she is one of the few remaining of that type. And to the questions about how Maine is an unusual state—from a national perspective, she does look like a flip-flopper and she has these weird views and she expresses concern about things like Roe v. Wade, but then votes for justices who most people believed correctly would vote to overturn Roe. So she’s in this strange place. But I think maybe that represents some Mainers accurately. And I also think that Maine is a small enough state that she is somebody who people feel like they know. And so she has a credibility with voters that extends past the brand of the Republican Party and extends well before the Trump era as well.
Berman: I would add that Democrats in New England in particular—it’s a little bit of a weird thing, which is such a blue area—they like voting for Republicans or moderate Republicans occasionally. So you see this in Vermont, where they’ve elected and reelected a moderate Republican, Phil Scott, as governor, even though they elect and love Bernie Sanders, the most progressive, as of now, senator in the country.
And then in Massachusetts, fairly recently, they elected a moderate Republican governor, Charlie Baker, as well. We’re seeing that less in Congress and on the federal level, but Collins is sort of the last of this breed of Republican in New England—or one of the last. And her approval ratings are lower now than they were six years ago, so that’s giving Democrats some hope that this will be different. But Republicans say that the Democrats are basically running the same campaign they’ve run in the past against her and just hoping it’ll work this time.
Harris: And does Troy Jackson’s late entry into the race actually change the context of anything? Does it put him in a disadvantage against Collins?
Berman: I think it does because Platner was such a lightning rod, obviously, but he had such deep support among people, and it seemed like people who weren’t regular voters and the type of low-propensity voters that Democrats need to get. And Jackson is not as well known—he was a logger before he entered politics up in the northern, more rural part of Maine. He talks like he’s from northern Maine. So that can be compelling but, of course, people have to get to know him, and he hasn’t had as much time. It’s a little bit of the Kamala Harris effect that we might see from two years ago.
Harris: So Russell, we’re gonna move out of Maine into your next pick. What’s the next one on your list?
Berman: Well, I’ve got one that, Adam, you and I have talked about before—the Michigan Senate race. As we’ve talked about, Democrats need to flip four Republican seats, but that’s only if they hold all of their own seats. And Michigan is the one seat that they currently hold—where the incumbent, Gary Peters, is retiring—that Republicans have a decent chance to flip. And of course, the candidates are Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers.
And the big question is whether Abdul El-Sayed, somebody as progressive as he is—he’s another Bernie Sanders type of Democrat. He’s running on Medicare for All. He’s a harsh critic of Israel. He would be the first Muslim elected to the Senate. And can he win in not a blue state like Vermont, but in a purple state like Michigan?
And Rogers, of all the Republican candidates—aside from maybe Susan Collins—in the races that we’re watching, is a really strong recruit for Republicans. He is supportive of President Trump, but not super MAGA. He doesn’t have a ton of scandals in his past. He’s a former longtime member of the House with national-security experience, and most importantly, nearly won the state’s other Senate seat just two years ago; he lost narrowly to Elissa Slotkin. And so he’s a middle-of-the-road in this modern era of Republicanism. The polls have El-Sayed up, and I think that’s partially because the national environment is so favorable for Democrats. So this is one that, even though he has a lead, is worth watching until the end.
Harris: David, it seemed that Michigan was also on your list.
Graham: It was also on my list. And I think it’s interesting—to Russell’s point, I think Mike Rogers is maybe about as close as you can get to a generic Republican in a race. He is a conservative, but he’s not wildly out-there. He is supportive of Trump, but he is not a very clear MAGA candidate. And so you have this almost generic Republican, albeit one with a long reputation in Michigan politics, running against a Democrat who is very much atypical. In his background, he is a medical doctor. He’s atypical in his politics. He’s run for positions before but hasn’t won a statewide race. And so I think it’s a very interesting clash of different styles in that race.
Harris: If Democrats lose the seat in Michigan, is there another likely pickup for them? Is there somewhere else that they would be looking if they don’t feel that the seat is as secure?
Berman: Well, the map has become so wide for Democrats. And this is the big surprise of the year right now, as we’re talking in early October, is that the answer is yes. Like with Maine, it’s possible that Democrats could lose Michigan and still win the Senate. Now, could they lose Michigan and Maine and win the Senate? Probably not. But they have a chance in other red states—Texas, Alaska, even Kansas seems to be very close and competitive right now. North Carolina is one that they’re probably going to win if the polls are close to right. So it’s possible that they might not need Michigan, but they certainly don’t want to take that risk.
Harris: So David, what’s the next one on your list? We’ve got Maine and we’ve got Michigan.
Graham: That’s actually a good segue to my next one. I have flagged the Ohio Senate race. And part of this is just home cooking; I grew up in Ohio, so I feel a little bit parochial about this one. But I think this is a really interesting race.
We have former Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, running against current Senator Jon Husted, a Republican. Polls have been close. They suggest that maybe Brown is up a little bit in some polls, but it’s fairly close.
I think this is interesting. Brown has been such a dominant figure in Ohio politics for a long time. There was a story recently about how voters think of him as the incumbent and don’t really realize that Husted is the incumbent.
Berman: That was fascinating; I remember that.
Harris: Is it because of the name ID, or?
Graham: Yeah. Husted has been in state politics for a long time, but doesn’t have the same sort of name ID and has just been in the Senate for a short time. The last Democrat to win a statewide race in Ohio was one Sherrod Brown. That was in 2018, when he won a Senate seat that he then lost six years later, two years ago.
And so to see someone from the Democratic Party win, even one as unusual as Sherrod Brown, I think would be a remarkable moment. I don’t know if it would be a turning point for Ohio politics or just another weird outlier. But I would note that Amy Acton, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate, has also been leading in some polls against former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, which is not something I would have predicted six, eight, 12 months ago, certainly.
Harris: Russell, did you have Ohio?
Berman: I didn’t, but only because I was pretty sure David would, given his pedigree in Ohio. But no, it’s a very important race. This part of the country is where Democrats are trying to win back. Iowa is another place where Trump has won after Obama won twice that Democrats might be on the comeback trail.
I think the governor’s race, as David mentioned, is fascinating. The other thing for Republicans is that they don’t seem to love any of their candidates, or a lot of their candidates in Ohio. There’s Ramaswamy, and Ramaswamy has other issues in that he can come off kind of arrogant, and he was flying out to the U.S. Open in the middle of the campaign to have a prominent seat there, which wasn’t a good look.
And so there’s a question of whether the Republican base, the turnout in Ohio, is worth watching. And so that you might have an interplay up and down the ballot for some of these races.
Harris: So what was the third one on your list then?
Berman: For me, we have to talk about Texas, right? Is this the year that Texas goes blue? And Democrats, in politics we’ve been watching this for the better part of a decade now, with demographic trends and watching the Hispanic vote, which is obviously huge in Texas. And Democrats have kind of needed a perfect storm, and they might actually have it this year.
They have a strong candidate in James Talarico, who’s young and charismatic. They have a ridiculously flawed Republican opponent in Ken Paxton, the attorney general, who had a messy divorce, where his wife is now actually on camera in an ad telling Republicans to vote for the Republican ticket without mentioning the fact that she sued her ex-husband for divorce and he’s the Senate candidate. And then, of course, the Democrats need a strong national environment, and that’s what it looks like they have here.
The Hispanic vote is gonna be key. We’re seeing polling out of some House races in southern Texas that looks like the Hispanic vote is swinging back pretty hard toward Democrats after trending toward Republicans in the last couple of elections. And it would just be a huge—to use the cliché—a huge tsunami politically if Democrats did win this Senate seat. We’ve talked about the importance of each of these races for the balance of power, and of course that’s important, but more the symbolic significance of Democrats winning Texas. Then we’d immediately start talking about whether Texas is in play on the presidential level in 2028, which would change the entire political map for both parties. And then, of course, Talarico, if he were to win, would immediately go into the conversation for future national office—because that’s how things work these days—whether it’s in 2028 or later. But Texas is big for a reason, and the Senate seat is fascinating.
Harris: David, it seems like Texas was in yours as well.
Graham: I did not have the Texas Senate race, partly because I suspected Russell might, but I have a third race that is also in Texas, which is the Fifteenth House District. And Russell is sort of touching on this. This is where Monica De La Cruz, a Republican incumbent, is running for reelection. She won, I believe by 14 points, two years ago; Trump won this direct district by 18 points. And it’s in the Rio Grande Valley, an area that non-Texans got to learn about after the 2024 election as a place where there’s a huge swing from a historically Democratic area toward Republicans and toward Trump, and we were talking a lot about Hispanic shifts in the vote and how enduring this would be.
If this race is an indication, it may not be all that enduring. Democrats have a really strong candidate, they believe: a guy named Bobby Pulido, who is a well-known Tejano singer; he has a couple Latin Grammys. He’s a moderate Democrat. I think he’s a really compelling individual, and he seems to be a relatively compelling candidate also. This race looks really close. I think a Pulido win would be a huge moral victory for Democrats and contribute to a potential House majority. I think even if he loses, seeing where the vote comes out in that district will be a really interesting indicator of the Hispanic vote and of the Rio Grande Valley and maybe of the future of Texas as well.
Berman: The Democrats actually put out an internal poll—so take it with a grain of salt—that had Pulido winning by 13 points in this race. And this is not, was not seen as like a toss-up race, like one of those dozen or so races that we knew were gonna be close. This is a race that started pretty favorably for Republicans, in part because I’m pretty sure it was made even redder in their gerrymander that they did last year.
But of course, when Republicans did all that gerrymandering in Texas, they were basically betting that the Hispanic shift that we saw in the last couple of elections would hold. But if it doesn’t hold, then they could be up the creek, so to speak. This could be a big problem. There’s a couple of other house races in Texas where we could see Democrats win that Republicans kind of thought that they had put in the bag.
Harris: When we come back, we work through the rest of David and Russell’s lists.
[Music]
Harris: So David, we have Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Texas House. Russell, so far we have Maine, Michigan, Texas Senate. Russell, what’s your fourth?
Berman: My fourth is another red state where Democrats have a decent chance to win for the first time in a while, and that’s all the way out in Alaska. They have a pretty strong centrist type of candidate in Mary Peltola. She has won statewide in Alaska before. She briefly held the at-large House seat there. She lost narrowly in her reelection bid in 2024. And she’s going up against the incumbent, Dan Sullivan, who’s a fairly standard-issue Republican, similar to Mike Rogers in Michigan. But the crazy thing about this race—one of them—is that he’s not the only Dan Sullivan on the ballot. There is another Dan Sullivan who, much to the chagrin of Republicans in Alaska and nationally, was able to get on the ballot. And he could siphon away votes from the senator Dan Sullivan in a close race.
The other wrinkle with Alaska is that they use ranked-choice voting. And so it’s possible—we’ve seen ranked-choice voting, as a system, does not advantage either party. But in Alaska, it has seemed to help the more moderate candidate, which tends to be the Democratic candidate, or the other one example there is Lisa Murkowski, who is another moderate survivor among Republicans in the Senate.
And so Alaska is one of these states—because the population is so small, it doesn’t take a big shift of voters for it to go the other way. And that’s what Democrats have seen here. On the presidential level, it hasn’t looked completely out of reach. Democrats, some of them joke that they really just need to take, like, 50,000 Democrats from Brooklyn or Washington, D.C., and have them move to Alaska and it could really change the entire equation for them.
So this one is interesting. And the Democrats did—unlike in Texas, more recently at least than in Texas—they won a Senate seat in Alaska during a good Democratic year. I believe that was in 2008 with Mark Begich, and he served for a term before losing his reelection bid. So those are the dynamics there. And again, this is one of those races that either could pad—if the Democrats have a really good night—their majority or make their majority. Or it could save their majority if they end up losing in one of these other races that we talked about, like in Maine or Michigan.
Harris: All right, we are down to our final race for each of you. David, I’m gonna go to you first. Where are we on the map?
Graham: I am once again doing some home cooking, and I’m hoping I can keep Russell on his toes a little bit with this one. I’ve picked out North Carolina’s First District. He saw this coming, probably.
Berman: Not exactly, not exactly, but I was like, There’s one of those House races. He’s going against the grain here. (Laughs.)
Graham: So in this race you’ve got Don Davis, who is a moderate Democrat who is running for reelection against Laurie Buckhout, who is a Republican. And he’s running for reelection, but it’s not really in the same district. So this is a race that was—we talked about this a little bit with Texas. This is a map that was redrawn by North Carolina Republicans when President Trump was pushing a lot of Republican legislatures and Republican states to redraw their maps.
North Carolina has seen a lot of gerrymandering already, and so there was only so much squeeze left in this map. But they thought they had drawn a map that would be very hard for Don Davis to win. Davis decided to run anyway, which not everyone was sure he would do. And he seems to be running a pretty close race. The polling on this—House polling can be really unreliable; most of the polls are partisan. The Republican polls show Laurie Buckhout up; their Democratic polls show Don Davis up. So it’s hard to know. But I think it’s a really interesting test of this Republican gerrymandering and whether we might be pushing into what they call dummy-mander territory, where you just stretch your voters out so much that you end up not being able to win these districts.
I was out in this district a couple months ago, and there were billboards up that said Don Davis, he’s one of us. Not Don Davis, he’s a Democrat, notably. And so I’ll be curious to see also, regardless of who wins this race, where it comes down and what that tells us about the gerrymandering push that we saw around the country.
Harris: And Russell, what’s your big five?
Berman: Well, we’re staying in the same region and we’re going down to South Carolina. And that’s the First District there. This is in and around Charleston; the Low Country, around Charleston, includes Hilton Head.
And so this is the race that is the seat that is currently held by Nancy Mace. She is a social-media star, if you will, but she is not very popular anymore in her district. And she’s not running for reelection—she ran for governor and she lost pretty badly. And the fact that she’s unpopular in her district is one of the factors that’s helping Democrats. And the Democrats have a very interesting candidate in Nancy—another Nancy—a Nancy Lacore, who is a former Republican and she was the chief of the Navy Reserve until Pete Hegseth fired her last year. She was among many military leaders that he fired and continues to fire; many of them are women or people of color.
And this is a seat that’s not a toss-up. This is one where if the Democratic wave is pretty big, it’s going to continue—again the metaphor and the cliché—to wash over places like South Carolina’s First District. Because this is a district that does still lean Republican. Democrats actually won the seat in their last wave year, in the Trump midterm in 2018. A moderate named Joe Cunningham, in pretty big surprise, won this seat, and then he lost two years later to Nancy Mace. And then the Republicans gerrymandered the seat to make it a little bit more Republican and help them hold it. And so that’s making it still a pretty tough seat for Democrats to win.
But the Democrats—as David mentioned, these polls are partisan, but they have a poll showing that it’s very close. They seem cautiously optimistic, in part because of Mace’s unpopularity there. The Republican candidate is a woman named Jenny Costa Honeycutt, who seems to be a perfectly fine candidate, but it’s telling that she’s running a campaign where she is running against what she calls clickbait politics, which seems to be a not-so-veiled reference to, I am not Nancy Mace; I will be a different type of member of Congress. So this is one that I’m actually heading down to report on and I’ll be watching closely.
Harris: We’ve zoomed in a lot, y’all. I wanna broaden us back out to bring it to a close. If you had to draw a through line out from your list heading into the midterms, what is the through line to your list?
Berman: Well, it’s not on all of them, but on a lot of them it’s Democrats trying to make inroads in red areas in a way that can really unlock a lot of new territory for them in future elections. If they’re able to make these connections with voters, if they actually win these races and then govern in a way that the voters like, it could change the political map going forward in a way that we haven’t seen on the Democratic side since really the Obama era in their first midterm win, during the Bush years in 2006 and 2008, with Obama. And so I think that is a through line. And then of course, the obvious one is just how unpopular President Trump is and the impact that’s having on Republican candidates in, again, these states that they usually win pretty easily.
Harris: And David, for yours?
Graham: One other thing that I note going through my list, through most of these races, is just these candidates who have particular connections or routes to electorates. You look at a guy like Bobby Pulido, you look at a guy like Sherrod Brown, who seems to be the only Democrat, maybe, who can win a statewide in Ohio. You look at Don Davis, somebody who’s saying he’s one of us. You look at Troy Jackson, who’s a logger, but also Susan Collins, who’s had that race for a long time.
And so, although there are big national waves and big national currents, and I think the economy and Trump’s unpopularity are so dominant, what does make a lot of difference in these races are the way voters connect with individual candidates and the way candidates can connect with the voters.
Harris: Well, David, Russell, thank you so much for helping us process the big national picture and understand it at a more local, granular level as we head towards the midterm elections. You’ve given a lot for us to think about. And thank you so much for joining me this morning.
Proponents of the war with Iran have taken recent increases in crude-oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz as proof that the U.S. strategy is finally working. President Trump is so confident in this that he recently rejected a seven-day plan, set forward by Iran’s foreign ministry, to end the war and open the strait. The United States is “winning tremendously,” Trump boasted.
A confused administration is conflating tactical dominance with strategic success. Seven months into a war that its planners suggested would last four to five weeks, the Trump administration’s understanding of Iran remains deeply flawed, and increases in oil exported through the strait don’t mean that the U.S. is close to ending the conflict on its terms.
The president’s self-assurance doubtless derives in part from his reported belief that this conflict will come down to which side is able to endure economic pain the longest. The countdown clock on Iran’s economy appears to be ticking ever faster: The U.S. Navy’s blockade on Iranian ports has been ruthlessly effective, as, to a lesser extent, has the Treasury Department’s Operation Economic Outcast, announced in August as “an unprecedented campaign to sever every remaining economic lifeline sustaining the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran’s economy was in bad shape before the war. Now it is in deep crisis. The Iranian rial is trading at a record rate of more than 2.5 million to a dollar, versus a prewar exchange rate closer to 1.2 million. Year-over-year food inflation was more than 125 percent in late August, according to Iranian-government statistics. A country accustomed to cheap, plentiful gasoline now has severe shortages, and its government is progressively scaling back subsidies. The International Monetary Fund projects that the Iranian economy will contract by 5.4 percent in 2026, and the U.S. administration has assessed, as Treasury Secretary Bessent said early last month, that Iran is in a “death spiral,” desperate to make a deal.
The administration appears to believe that the clock on American economic pain, meanwhile, has been slowed by Iran’s decreased ability to close or even significantly constrain maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s grip on that choke point, through sea mines and attacks on tankers, had reduced the daily transit of oil from 20 million barrels a day before the war to fewer than 3 million a day by March. But in late August, the U.S. military claimed a “major milestone”: It had cleared the strait’s transit routes of mines. A mid-September Centcom press statement said that the strait was “open for transit.”
Regional oil exports rose significantly in September. According to a JP Morgan assessment that circulated on social media late last month, regional exports rebounded to just 11 percent below prewar levels. The maritime intelligence company Kpler reported the September daily average of oil through the strait at 10 million barrels; an additional 6 million barrels left the area by means of ports and pipelines that avoided the strait. A late-September headline on CNN seemed to capture the general assessment: “Iran has lost considerable leverage in the Strait of Hormuz. It can’t go on like this forever.”
One reason for the resumption of oil flows is that Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, and Kuwaiti oil companies, working with the U.S. Navy, have started pulling off risky transfers that evade the Iranian anti-ship missiles and drones threatening the strait. Shuttle tankers inside the waterway turn off their transponders, load up with oil, and, watched over by U.S. Navy fighter jets and attack helicopters, leave the strait by hugging the Omani coast. Once in safe waters, they transfer their crude cargo to larger supertankers for onward transport.
But the new status quo in the strait is neither sustainable nor scalable. Ship-to-ship transfers are dangerous and expensive, and they rely on active U.S. military operations, which currently involve two Navy aircraft-carrier strike groups already in the region and a third on its way.
Meanwhile, transit through the strait remains dangerous. At least eight tankers have been attacked in the week ending October 5, and the multinational Joint Maritime Information Center, based in Bahrain, still assesses the threat for strait passage as “severe.” According to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization, strait traffic remains 75 percent below pre-conflict levels. The global supply of crude and refined products trails demand, and regional exports of refined products are at only 58 percent of prewar norms. As the Kpler trade-risk analyst Ana Subasic recently told The New York Times, the passage of more ships and oil through the region than earlier in the war “doesn’t mean we’re seeing a normalization of flows.”
Trump could well be right in believing that Iran’s economic pain is increasing faster than America’s. But the Iranian regime, engaged in a fight it believes to be existential, will tolerate pain levels much higher than those acceptable to a U.S. administration mired in an unpopular war. The soaring price of gasoline and diesel could be a problem for Republicans in the midterm elections next month. By contrast, the Iranian regime, with its extensive and tested infrastructure of popular repression, has shown its willingness to slaughter its citizens en masse and is not calibrating its policies to the ballot box.
The Trump administration seems not to realize that Iran’s leaders—more militarized and hard-line than those the U.S. and Israel killed at the start of the war—are operating on the assumption the United States is dead set on toppling the Islamic Republic. They see compromise under pressure as hastening, not delaying, their own destruction. In response to intensifying U.S. economic pressure and a worsening strategic situation, they are far likelier to escalate militarily than to capitulate.
Shortly after the Vietnam War ended, an American colonel talking with his Vietnamese counterpart is reported to have asserted, “You never defeated us on the battlefield.” The Vietnamese colonel allegedly thought about it, then replied, “That may be so, but it’s also irrelevant.” The same could be true with Iran. Yes, the U.S. has destroyed huge swaths of Iran’s military. Yes, it is crippling Iran’s economy and immiserating ever more of its citizens. And yes, it is getting more oil out of the region than earlier in the war. But none of that is getting America much closer to a win.
Samuel Alito is, with Clarence Thomas, one of the two most conservative sitting Supreme Court justices. In his 20 years on the highest bench, he has reliably voted for conservative positions—especially on social issues, criminal procedure, voting rights, discrimination, and religious liberty. He wrote the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned the constitutional right to abortion. During the second Trump administration, he has so far voted more often than any other justice to uphold its initiatives. And in speeches, Alito has taken an unusual step for a sitting justice: He has become an active participant in the culture wars, opposing affirmative action, progressive campus orthodoxy, attacks on religious freedom, and hostility toward Judeo-Christian values.
Alito has now collected adaptations of 19 talks (all but six of them from the past decade) in So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country. Many of the wide-ranging essays are charming and genial, which will perhaps surprise those primed to expect an acerbic, embattled style. He includes an ardent fan’s primer on baseball’s lessons for life and law, a tribute to the “long-term vision of national greatness” in the Gettysburg Address, and an appreciation of the “long, deep, and sometimes scarring experience” of religious liberty’s great defender Karol Wojtyla, before he became Pope John Paul II.
As the subtitle suggests, the most important talks concern “originalism”—the view that the Constitution should be interpreted according to its meaning at ratification. Originalism is the credo of the conservative legal movement that since the 1980s has traveled from obscurity to triumph, marked by the arrival of a Supreme Court supermajority that is dismantling the revolutionary progressivism of the Warren (1953–69) and Burger (1969–86) Courts. Yet Alito’s embrace of the originalist label is also likely to come as a surprise to people on the left and the right.
Close observers of the Court have long seen Alito as a skeptic of orthodox originalism, and So Ordered, far from a paean to the philosophy, delivers a vigorous critique. In its place, Alito offers an approach that at times sounds like a conservative version of the judicial activism that originalism aimed to combat when liberals held sway on the Court. And the style of judging he defends, which he has practiced for decades, has now acquired currency: It dovetails with a Trump-era New Right conception of law that is unshackled by restraint and focused solely on conservative victory.
Alito joined the Reagan Justice Department in 1981 at age 31, just as the conservative legal counterrevolution against the Warren and Burger Courts was getting under way. There he argued cases before the Supreme Court and advised the White House and attorney general. He also became an active participant in the Federalist Society, founded in 1982, which quickly emerged as the intellectual home of conservative and libertarian legal thinking. In the government and out, Alito made plain his conservative bona fides and was immersed in formative discussions of originalism.
The doctrine was fashioned as a response to a liberal conception of judging called “living constitutionalism,” which celebrated the ability of the document’s “great principles to cope with current problems and current needs,” in the words of Justice William Brennan. Conservatives hoped that originalism would limit or reverse the progressive transformation of American society set in motion by Supreme Court decisions that had expanded criminal-defense rights, ended prayer in public school, recognized the rights to contraception and abortion, strengthened voting equality, and supported affirmative action and busing. Originalists also claimed the mantle of democratic legitimacy. The doctrine elevated what the American people had ratified in the past over unelected judges’ revisions to the Constitution based on modern values and personal preference.
Alito watched as Antonin Scalia, who joined the Supreme Court in 1986, became originalism’s greatest champion. Scalia, a former law professor, was a theorist who worked out originalism in academic lectures. His brilliant judicial opinions went on to make the theory and methods a creditable enterprise and, eventually, the defining conservative legal dogma. But when President George H. W. Bush made Alito an appellate judge in 1990, originalism had not yet achieved its central place in the movement. During a decade and a half on the court of appeals, Alito established a reputation as a careful jurist who wrote tightly reasoned opinions that were as conservative as the law would permit. Originalist argument played no significant role in his decision making.
In 2005, Bush’s son nominated Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court after his initial nominee, the White House counsel, Harriet Miers, withdrew amid bipartisan questions about her fitness. Alito was the credentialed, establishment legal conservative she wasn’t, a judge with a Federalist Society pedigree and a long record of case outcomes that proved he wouldn’t stray. During his confirmation hearings, critics dubbed him “Scalito” due to his conservative affinity with Scalia (and their Italian heritage). But originalism was barely mentioned in those hearings, and Alito made no concrete jurisprudential commitment to it.
When Alito joined Scalia on the Court, he maintained his traditionalist, lawyerly bent; eschewed theorizing; and paid close attention to case particularities. He continued to arrive at consistently conservative results, more forcefully articulated now without the constraint of possible Supreme Court reversal. He often broke with Scalia’s originalist decisions, especially when they aided criminal defendants, and he rarely dove deeply into original meaning. Alito famously poked fun when Scalia asked about the views of the Constitution’s ratifiers in a 2011 case about California’s regulation of minors’ access to violent video games. “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games,” Alito said, to laughter in the courtroom. “Did he enjoy them?” More often, however, his skepticism remained muted.
A low point for the Court’s conservative wing came half a decade later. The 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision announced a constitutional right to same-sex marriage based on what Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote on the bench, called the Court’s “reasoned judgment in identifying interests of the person so fundamental that the State must accord them its respect.” Scalia’s dissent condemned this logic as a “judicial Putsch” that lacked “even a thin veneer of law” and rested solely on the preferences of “a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine.” Alito joined neither Scalia’s dissent nor Thomas’s lengthy orthodox-originalist one. His own dissent emphasized same-sex marriage’s defiance of tradition and expressed concern that “those who cling to old beliefs” would, in the decision’s aftermath, “risk being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
When Scalia died seven months after Obergefell, the conservative legal movement seemed near failure. Republican presidents had appointed three-quarters of the justices since Earl Warren had retired in 1969. The Federalist Society had trained two generations of lawyers and developed a formidable network that dominated federal judgeship hiring. Yet the Supreme Court still practiced living constitutionalism. When President Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace Scalia, the Court seemed likely to tip decidedly progressive.
But then Senate Republicans denied Garland a hearing and Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton. By the end of 2020, Trump had put three young conservatives—Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—on the Court, which promptly veered to the right. With Scalia gone and a conservative supermajority on the Court, Alito grew more confident in expressing impatience with orthodox originalism and in charting a new course for legal conservatism, especially in his extrajudicial writings and talks.
So Ordereddecries judges who aim to be theorists and lays out a “working judicial” brand of originalism that reflects Alito’s decades of “hands-on experience.” In many respects, his approach inverts the orthodox view. He jettisons “restraint” as a goal and counsels that originalism “sometimes calls for bold action.” In marked contrast with Scalia, who believed that a judge who “always likes the results he reaches is a bad judge,” Alito tells jurists “who welcome occasions when their originalist analysis leads to results they dislike” to “shed this insecure mindset.” He also thinks that originalists should call attention to the value of the outcomes that their decisions produce. Unless the theory “is widely viewed as generally producing good results,” he argues, it won’t survive. He never explains what makes a result good and never considers that he and his colleagues—and the American people—disagree on that question.
Alito usefully highlights important theoretical conundrums for originalism. A central one is how to tell whether the invariably fuzzy meaning of an old term (equal protection, for example) should be applied in specific contexts that the Framers never imagined. Scholars offer an array of complex and clashing solutions to this and related difficulties. Alito invokes judicial “judgment” as the global solution. “Broadly worded constitutional provisions can be regarded as delegating a degree of authority to apply those provisions to new situations that could not be anticipated at the time of adoption,” he maintains. “Identifying just how far this delegation of authority extends calls for the exercise of judgment.”
The obvious problem is that this sounds suspiciously like the judge-specific, discretion-laden “reasoned judgment” that Kennedy invoked in the gay-marriage case—precisely what orthodox originalism aimed to eradicate. Many important constitutional clauses—not just equal protection but due process, freedom of speech, executive power—are broadly worded. And many issues that arise in connection with these terms could not have been anticipated in 1791 or 1868. To escape Scalia’s “judicial Putsch” verdict, Alito must explain why the judgment that he believes his kind of originalist justice often must exercise won’t be guided by ideological or other personal factors. But his explanations are thin and slippery.
Alito holds up Edmund Burke’s teachings about prudence and tradition as “invaluable” guides for the “many times when originalist jurists must exercise judgment.” But he otherwise defends Burke’s relevance to American judging only by noting that he and many other conservatives esteem him. Unexpectedly, Alito also voices great respect for the work of the Harvard Law professor and fellow Catholic Adrian Vermeule, an arch critic of originalism. Vermeule argues that the theory’s moral skepticism, “defensive crouch,” and allergy to considering outcomes render it “an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law.” He favors interpretation aimed at “the common good,” a concept associated with Catholic social teaching.
Although Alito resists some elements of the theory, his account of proper judging seeks to accommodate Vermeule’s criticisms—a contrast with the response of his Catholic and orthodox-originalist colleague Amy Coney Barrett, who dismisses it as marred by “all of the defects that originalists critiqued” in the 1980s. Alito also says his own version of originalism “furthers the common good,” and he even asks whether “an assessment of what the common good requires” might inform the Court’s judgment when original meaning cannot resolve an issue. It’s a question he refrains from answering.
Like Alito’s dissatisfaction with restraint and his insistence that originalists attend to outcomes, his reliance on ill-defined principles to steer judicial judgment when originalism is stymied will fuel the widespread view that he reads his conservative views into the Constitution. Nor do Alito’s several insightful essays on the art of good judging as a practical task grounded in “personal observation and experience” help much. He has a deserved reputation as a fine judicial craftsman, but his judging is filtered through a deeply traditional conservative outlook evident in almost every essay. This is the ideological element that invariably informs judicial judgment—left, right, and center—however much both orthodox originalists and Alito may purport to shun it.
Alito’s nominal adherence to originalism even as he struggles to revamp it is but one indication that the doctrine is becoming a zombie creed that functions more as a shibboleth than as an actual guide to conservative constitutional decision making.
Originalism certainly does not explain the Court’s sharp rightward turn since Barrett joined the bench in 2020. Only Thomas, Gorsuch, and Barrett regularly try to practice originalism, and they do so very unevenly. Most of the important recent conservative victories—including overturning Roe v. Wade, ending affirmative action in higher education, and giving Trump criminal immunity—were not resolved on the basis of original constitutional meaning. And countless non-originalist precedents remain untouched. The Roberts Court is becoming the “Conservative Warren Court,” as Richard Re of Harvard Law School has argued, because it has a “strong majority ideological alignment” that “wields its power in pursuit of its ideological goals” and has soft-pedaled many of the limiting principles, including orthodox originalism, that once defined the movement.
Yet even as the conservative Court has moved right, it has managed to anger the much more right-wing second Trump administration. It has upheld many aspects of Trump’s program, most notably his “unitary executive” power to fire heads of independent agencies. But the Roberts Court was trending toward this ruling before Trump came on the scene. More remarkable than how many Trump 2.0 initiatives the Court has validated is how often the moderate conservatives on the Court (some combination of Roberts and the three Trump-appointed justices) have joined liberals to block initiatives—on tariffs, birthright citizenship, National Guard deployment, deportations under the Alien Enemy Act, Federal Reserve independence, mail-in ballots, and more. These decisions have enraged the president and his supporters, who have excoriated the orthodox-originalist Barrett, Scalia’s former clerk, in especially vicious terms.
Their fury is more encompassing. Federalist Society lawyers and “originalist judges” are blamed for tying the president’s hands during his first term, for inadequately unwinding progressive constitutionalism, and for disloyalty in not backing Trump when he challenged the 2020 presidential-election results. The president himself has denounced the Federalist Society and hired personally loyal lawyers unburdened by jurisprudential niceties who are eager to implement the administration’s self-described “radical” constitutional agenda.
In their attacks on the Court and its moderate conservatives, the Trump administration and its allies are articulating a New Right idea of conservative judging. That view despises originalism’s value-neutrality, prizes conservative results, admires judges with the “courage” and “loyalty” to uphold Trump’s program, and views adverse decisions as evidence of timidity, establishment capture, or betrayal.
This New Right has its own think tanks and advocacy groups. It has made inroads in Federalist Society chapters on campuses, including my own. The administration is grooming dozens of conservative lawyers to share its view of the law, and has placed at least one New Right stalwart, Emil Bove, on the federal bench. The old conservative legal movement is very far from dead. But its centrality has waned and its originalist commitments are no longer sacrosanct among conservatives.
Alito claims no association with the New Right, but his essays and work on the Court make plain why its legal camp venerates him. Alito, along with Thomas, has supported the Trump administration in every second-term case of importance, including with dissents in every major Trump loss. His results-focused jurisprudence, his culture-warrior profile, and his scorn for fainthearted conservative jurists mesh with the Trump-inspired movement.
Yet it would be a mistake to read Alito’s attempts to articulate a judicial philosophy as mere camouflage for a hard-right jurisprudence. So Ordered leaves the clear impression that he sees himself as a serious lawyer adhering to principles. If the principles are not as coherent as they might be, that does not distinguish him from most justices, now or in the past. What is curious is that Alito has articulated a semblance of a judicial philosophy at all, given his wariness about theory as a guide to judging. In the end, his essays serve as a marker of our bitterly fractured constitutional moment. And Alito himself remains an elusive yet powerful presence—the face on the Court, however unintended, of the Trumpian legal agenda.
This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Zombie Originalism.”
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Heading into yesterday’s first round of presidential voting in Brazil, the incumbent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was thought to be a narrow favorite. When the results came in, though, Lula was behind his challenger, Flávio Bolsonaro, 45 percent to 47 percent. The two men will compete in an October 25 runoff to determine the winner.
Those surnames will likely be recognizable even to casual watchers of global elections: Lula, a leftist, has been the dominant force in Brazilian politics this century, and was president from 2003 to 2011. Bolsonaro’s father, Jair, was a right-wing president from 2019 to 2023 but was defeated by Lula in a comeback bid; Bolsonaro the elder then attempted a Trumpian autogolpe to stay in power but failed and was later convicted and sentenced to prison for it.
Now it’s Lula who’s struggling with voters. He was hurt by crime concerns as well as a corruption scandal, but he’s also a very familiar figure to Brazilians—perhaps too familiar. “Brazil wants change and I am very happy with the results,” Bolsonaro fils said last night. What kind of change, though?
When Donald Trump completed his own presidential comeback in the 2024 U.S. election, one common explanation was that a fundamental change had occurred in American politics, realigning demographics, parties, and policy for the long run. (As I have written recently, that claim looks shaky today.) A competing narrative, especially popular among comparative scholars, focused on a wave of anti-incumbent results in elections around the world. In this view, the results were more a rejection of Joe Biden’s administration and his vice president, Kamala Harris, than they were an embrace of Trump—and part of a broad trend of dissatisfaction among voters in many countries.
The specific motivations of the global anti-incumbent wave have never been entirely obvious. They include a post-COVID hangover but also deeper running dissatisfaction with democratic systems of government. Whatever the reasons, the trend is an important shift. Parties lose power from time to time in any country with free and fair elections, but political scientists have long observed that incumbents have an electoral advantage. In the modern United States, for example, Trump’s and Biden’s single presidential terms were outliers. If voters’ default stance is to throw the bums out after only one term or a few years, parties and leaders will struggle to create lasting policy changes. This creates instability and conflict, as politicians try more extreme tactics to achieve their goals.
Lula’s poor showing in the first round, at least, is a sign that the anti-incumbent wave has not receded since 2024. Indeed, politicians across the political spectrum have faced serious voter anger this year. In Hungary, a broad coalition emerged to eject the right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán, who, my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker noted, had been viewed as un-oustable. In Denmark, the governing coalition lost seats, though Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, a centrist, was eventually able to form a new, weaker government. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz is unpopular, and his future looks precarious, as parties on both the left and the right have gained in state elections, leaving his centrist government teetering. And today, the center-left Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, called for a November 29 snap election for Parliament, with polls showing his party trailing behind the center-right Popular Party.
The power of the anti-incumbent wave is demonstrated by the fact that it now threatens to wash out some of the same parties and politicians it previously carried in. Lula’s victory in Brazil’s 2022 election was in part a testament to voters rejecting the government of the incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro. Now the same dissatisfaction could swamp Lula and elect Bolsonaro’s son.
In the United Kingdom, anti-incumbent currents helped defeat a long-running Conservative government in 2024. The result was a landslide: Conservatives lost 251 seats while Labour picked up 211 and a huge majority. But Prime Minister Keir Starmer lasted just two years in office before sagging popularity led to his effective toppling by another Labour politician, Andy Burnham. In what may be a canny reading of the global mood, Burnham has rejected suggestions that he call an election before he is required to do so, in 2029.
Finally, there’s Trump, who benefited from anti-incumbent sentiments in 2024 but may be burned by them in November. Voters may not have liked Biden, but now that they’ve seen Trump back in the White House, they like him even less. Among other issues, the inflation that hurt Biden (and other global incumbents) in 2024 has persisted and sometimes worsened under Trump. Midterm elections in the U.S. are usually defeats for the sitting president’s party, but many analysts now forecast a larger-than-normal Democratic victory. Trump has begged voters to act as though he is on the ballot, but that may be imprudent.
Anti-incumbency is a global trend, but it can have big effects on domestic politics. In the United States, Trump treated his narrow 2024 win as a huge popular mandate. Although that was a political overreach, he has managed to radically reshape the federal government and foreign policy. In Brazil, a new Bolsonaro presidency would jerk the country back toward the right after a leftward lurch under Lula. As long as voters remain this dyspeptic, however, any new approach should be treated as fragile and fleeting.
The Supreme Court opened its new term by hearing a case over whether Boulder, Colorado, can hold Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy liable for local damages from climate change. The justices focused on whether federal law blocks such lawsuits and whether the Court has jurisdiction to hear the case; a ruling could potentially affect dozens of similar cases nationwide.
A researcher at a Russian anti-plague institute died from a suspected case of pneumonic plague, and as many as 189 people are reportedly under medical observation. The World Health Organization said the cause has not been confirmed and that no contacts have shown symptoms so far.
The U.S. military removed all of its bombers from a British air base used for strikes on Iran yesterday after a suspected terror plot targeted the base. Six people have been arrested and released on bail in the investigation.
Dispatches
Video Village: Introducing a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.
Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: GPO / Getty; Hulton-Deutsch Collection / Corbis / Getty; Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group / Getty.
What Is Zionism?
By Adam Kirsch
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.
But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.
Watch. A sketch in the most recent Saturday Night Live episode (streaming on Peacock) captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their social-media feeds to one another, Valerie Trapp writes.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is again focusing his attention on junior officers and noncommissioned officers. In a speech delivered September 30 at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia, he invoked a verse he has frequently cited, Isaiah 6:8—
And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying:
Whom shall I send,
And who will go for us?
Then I said: Here am I; send me.
Understandably, in these remarks he does not quote a rather more applicable previous verse:
Then said I:
Woe is me! For I am undone;
Because I am a man of unclean lips.
Isaiah volunteered for the solitary and dangerous task of reproaching a corrupt court that confused ritual with faith, filled with those who oppress the widow and the orphan, “grind the face of the poor,” and “declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not.” He was, according to the Talmud, eventually sawed in two by the evil king Manasseh. The eighth-century B.C.E. prophet was not joining a military of well more than 1 million men and women with competitive pay, excellent lifelong benefits, and the right to board an airplane ahead of an 80-year-old grandmother.
Hegseth is a ludicrous figure in many ways—the strutting sycophant who has promised a military with “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos”; the flaunter of push-ups that are performative but out of regs; the grown man stuck at the development level of an angry first lieutenant; the testosterone-obsessed infantry officer who, unlike most of his peers, never managed to earn a Ranger tab. Even so, we should take what he is saying seriously.
Following the Quantico speech, Hegseth spoke to cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy before the annual Air Force–Navy football game. In what is now his stump speech, he called them “the real one percent” of our society who have “a perspective that 99 percent of Americans do not have.” For 251 years, he said, America has required “the absolute best” to stand up and redeem the rest of us.
It is not only balderdash, but dangerous balderdash. With the greatest possible respect for the work of the all-volunteer military of the past 50 years—with acknowledgment of its hardship, suffering, and loss—the fact is that the armed forces of the United States have fought the country’s most important and difficult wars not with the one percent, but with all the rest of us: the doughboys and the GIs who cheerfully or reluctantly went when called, and who yearned to get the job done, go home, and resume civilian life.
George Washington’s Continentals were vital to winning American independence—but so, too, were the thousands of militiamen who harried British troops. The Civil War was won with mass armies; the American Expeditionary Force of World War I was filled by soldiers inducted through the Selective Service System, as were the armies of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. In American history, only our lesser wars were fought exclusively with volunteers, and many of those who fought them were recent immigrants looked down upon by those who got here before them.
In the fall of 1863, Abraham Lincoln contemplated conscription for the Union armies. In his cool appraisal, he noted:
At the beginning of the war, and ever since, a variety of motives pressing, some in one direction and some in the other, would be presented to the mind of each man physically fit for a soldier, upon the combined effect of which motives, he would, or would not, voluntarily enter the service. Among these motives would be patriotism, political bias, ambition, personal courage, love of adventure, want of employment, and convenience, or the opposites of some of these.
Just so. People enlist for all kinds of reasons, but not necessarily because they are morally, physically, or mentally the best.
Moreover, the brute fact is that the challenges faced by our professional forces have been different from and smaller than those confronted by America’s previous mass militaries of short-term volunteers and conscripts. Again, with respect and gratitude to today’s American soldiers, the Iraqis, Taliban, and Iranians were lesser opponents than the Wehrmacht, the Korean People’s Army, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and the People’s Army of Vietnam.
Against its more recent enemies, the United States has brought to bear infinitely superior weapons, an array of allies, and usually greater numbers. It is a far cry from American sailors up against Japanese heavy cruisers and German U-boats; American soldiers staring down the barrel of the 88-millimeter gun on a King Tiger tank from a much-flimsier Sherman or watching bazooka rounds bounce off a T-34; or airmen jousting with Russian-piloted MiG-15s over the Yalu River.
What is even worse than biblical illiteracy and historical ignorance from this product of Princeton and Harvard Universities is a project about which he seems to be deadly serious: the cultural isolation of the military. His speeches subtly denigrate the general officer corps and focus on the most impressionable segment of the military, those old enough to have bought into the system but young enough to be naive about its merits.
What Hegseth is saying amounts to this: You are better than 99 percent of your fellow Americans. You are better physically and morally. You are crusaders, and they—particularly the media and the intellectuals—are not only uncomprehending of your merits but ready to subvert you. They are traitors. We want to select you from a specific slice of society: We want socially conservative young men and (very few) women from Liberty University and Hillsdale, not from liberal research universities and colleges. We want you to be isolated on bases from the rest of this corrupt society, which we despise, as should you.
It is profoundly dangerous stuff, the antithesis of what soldiers such as George C. Marshall or Dwight Eisenhower believed, that the soldier is a citizen first, that one cannot adequately defend this society without believing in its values and its essential goodness, that an air of contempt is incompatible with a life of self-abnegation.
A Hegsethian cult of military superiority over civilians is not only unwarranted, but actively dangerous. If allowed to fester, it will breed a military detached from America, poorly educated, and contemptuous of the press and all politicians save those of the Trumpian stripe. The force will be narrowly recruited, unrepresentative of a magnificently diverse country, insular, and obsessed with technical matters. It will resemble nothing so much as the Imperial German Army that led its country to disaster in World War I. That the secretary of defense, himself bearing a Crusader tattoo, begins this project by quoting a lonely man of faith is little short of blasphemy.
David Ramos / Getty
Members of Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls build a human tower during the 30th Concours de Castells competition in Tarragona, Spain, on October 4, 2026.Albert Gea / Reuters
Castellers de Vilafranca start to form a tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.Josep Lago / AFP / Getty
A child that will attempt to climb to the top of a human tower wears a helmet and safety glasses during the La Mercè festival on September 24, 2026, in Barcelona.Matthias Oesterle / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters
Castellers build a human tower on October 3, 2026, the second day of the Tarragona human-tower competition.David Ramos / Getty
Castellers lean and support one another in Tarragona on October 3, 2026.David Ramos / Getty
Members of the Xics de Granollers prepare to build their tower in Tarragona on October 3, 2026.Matthias Oesterle / ZUMA Press Wire / Reuters
Members of local collas build their human towers during the La Mercè festival in Barcelona on September 24, 2026.Albert Gea / Reuters
Castellers de Vilafranca form their human tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.David Ramos / Getty
Members of Colla Vella dels Xiquets de Valls fall while attempting to build their tower on October 4, 2026, in Tarragona.David Ramos / Getty
Members of the colla Moixiganguers d'Igualada recover after falling while building their human tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.David Ramos / Getty
Members of Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls work on their human tower on October 4, 2026, in Tarragona.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Members of Castellers de Vilafranca react as their teammates complete their human tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Members of the Colla Vella form a human tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.Cheng Min / Xinhua / Getty
People build a human tower during the La Mercè festival in Barcelona on September 24, 2026.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Members of Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls fall during an attempt at the Human Tower Competition in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.Emilio Morenatti / AP
Members of Xiquets de Tarragona fall in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.Laia Solanellas / Europa Press / Getty
A tower is formed on the final day of the 30th castells competition in Tarragona.Josep Lago / AFP / Getty
Members of the Colla Vella team celebrate after forming their human tower in Tarragona on October 4, 2026.
Members of the Colla Joves Xiquets de Valls build a human tower during the 30th Concours de Castells competition in Tarragona, Spain, on October 4, 2026.
Mike Isaac is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer later this year. In an announcement, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance write: “You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.”
Last week, The Atlantic announced the hires of Sophie Haigney and Robert F. Worth (who had been a contributing writer) as staff writers; Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Jebediah Reed, and Alex Stockton as senior editors; Lindsey Sitz as a producer for video podcasts; and Kevin Roose as a contributing writer.
Today’s staff note is below:
Dear everyone,
We’re writing with exciting news this morning: One of the country’s best reporters, Mike Isaac, is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. For the past 12 years, Mike has been the leading technology reporter for The New York Times. You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.
About Mike: In addition to having broken some of the most consequential stories of our time, Mike is also a brilliant writer and fantastically creative. On a personal level, he is also hilarious. He is drawn to the biggest stories and most difficult reporting challenges, and knows Silicon Valley better than most anyone. In addition to his daily coverage of AI, the strange economics of the modern information system, and the most powerful people on the planet, Mike is also a best-selling author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, which was adapted into a Showtime series of the same name. (Those who have followed Mike’s reporting as closely as we have over the years will remember when he uncovered the existence of the company’s secret Greyball program.)
Mike is a journalist who matches the mission of The Atlantic—someone who brings great reporting firepower and tremendous writing talent, plus a deep love of magazines, and an uncommon level of ambition and creativity. We could not be more excited to welcome him and cannot wait for him to get started. Mike starts in December and will remain based in the Bay Area.
A decade ago, an Apple executive named Phil Schiller had a message for people using computers that were more than five years old. “This is really sad,” he said, with apparent sincerity, to scattered applause during an iPad Pro launch event. The remark was meant, seemingly, to encourage those poor souls to toss their obsolete devices aside and upgrade their way toward the future. (In other words: buy more Apple products.)
That was 2016, during the era when Apple announced new products to great fanfare, the average iPhone user traded in their device about every 23 months, and releases came with promises that buyers would “never want to go back to old technology again.” Over the years, more and more Americans have begun to rethink this upgrade formula. Some of them are turning to secondhand-tech marketplaces; others are combing eBay to pick up obsolete gadgets that remind them of a more offline time. But there exists another segment of the population that’s taken a different approach: They’ve refused to replace their devices at all.
Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. The holdouts I spoke with don’t necessarily reject technology. Instead, they told me, they just want to use it on their own terms.
Some members of this community are older and put off by the prospect of learning a new interface. Others are minimalists who appreciate the simplicity of older technology, or anti-consumerism advocates looking to retain a sense of autonomy. Many aren’t driven by any sort of principle at all besides mere practicality: When I asked Larye Parkins—the proud user of a Compaq computer released in 2007, the same year that Superbad hit the box office and Myspace dominated social media—what he would call himself, he came back with a simple reply: “I’m just cheap.”
In some cases, their devices are old enough to now be on display in museums. Mike Tyran, a 66-year-old nurse, has long jammed out to ’80s glam bands on his 2003 iPod, a subsequent model of which can be found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tyran also uses a smartphone, computer, and television that are all nearly a decade old and goes by “Old Turkey” on iFixit, a website dedicated to tech repairs. There, he dispenses and gathers tips on maintaining aging gadgets. Like many other holdouts, Tyran has no interest in contributing to e-waste heaps or shelling out five figures for gadgets with AI capabilities. “I have ‘NI’—natural intelligence,” he told me. “I’m good with that.”
The common enemy of upgrade holdouts is planned obsolescence, or deliberately designing products to have short lifespans. The term was coined nearly a century ago by the real-estate broker Bernard London. “There is little demand for new goods when people make their old and worn-out things do, by keeping them longer than they should,” London wrote. Today, no industry is more closely associated with the practice than Big Tech. Take Apple, which in 2020 agreed to settle lawsuits alleging that it was secretly slowing down older iPhones. Beyond “batterygate,” the company has also long engaged in “parts pairing,” the practice of preventing certain third-party parts from working in a repaired device, and discontinued hardware service for hundreds of its products over the years.
When it comes to continuing to use early smartphone models, just getting them to connect can be a problem. The 2G and 3G cellular networks they ran on have been largely phased out across North America (the latter can be found only in certain geographic enclaves). One of those pockets is in Saint John, New Brunswick, where Gary Flanagan—among the 2.3 percent of customers still using Koodo Mobile’s “legacy” network—managed to call me from his iPhone 5S, first released in 2013. Flanagan, a 54-year-old nonprofit consultant, occasionally finds himself unable to download apps or watch YouTube videos, and his younger co-workers rib him. But for the most part, he’s content. “If it works, it works—and I still use it,” Flanagan, who also still wears a pair of Radio Shack headphones he was gifted in 1983, told me.
Nathan Proctor, the right-to-repair campaign director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told me that some devices are made obsolete overnight, while others die a slow death as software updates are gradually halted. In order to keep using them, holdouts must contend with constraints in their day-to-day lives. Mark Turner, the owner of a nearly 10-year-old smartphone, told me he’s delayed buying a newer version of his hearing aids because their pairing app isn’t able to run on his device. Others, such as Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist and University of Michigan professor who uses an AT&T flip phone, find work-arounds to navigate a world powered by QR codes—for Toyama, that means borrowing his wife’s old smartphone.
Such trade-offs can be a small price to pay for maintaining a sense of control over one’s digital presence. As a freelance copywriter and editor, Josh Fredman says laptops are essential for him. But the 44-year-old has put off replacing his computers—a 16-year-old Toshiba and a 13-year-old HP model—because they serve as an oasis from today’s digital spaces, free from the constant notifications and update alerts of modern operating systems. One of Fredman’s laptops can no longer connect to the internet and has become his “art computer,” used for writing fiction and composing music. He’s replaced faulty fans and hard drives on the other laptop, and installed a gaming package from 2009 that allows him to play Solitaire without the interruption of advertisements.
Keeping old hardware alive is often a communal effort. Last year, iFixit helped host several “install parties” of Linux, an open-source operating system that can breathe new life into obsolete computers, at cafés and libraries across the country. A simple search on YouTube brings up numerous how-to guides on jailbreaking Kindles in order to free older models from Amazon’s software restrictions. And a decade ago, fans of the discontinued smartwatch brand Pebble grouped together to create Rebble, a platform of web services that reinvigorated technically defunct smartwatches. Wayne Seltzer, who got his Pebble watch as a Father’s Day gift in 2015, told me he appreciates the “kindred spirits” nature of the project.
Similar sentiments against tech consumerism are materializing—albeit in a less radical manner—in broader movements toward refurbished gadgets, and in a resurgence in retro electronic devices led by younger generations fatigued by today’s digital overload. But keeping up the lifestyle is a challenge. Most of the people I spoke with either have tech and engineering backgrounds that primed them for implementing complex hardware and software fixes, or are retired and able to put time and effort into learning them.
In some cases, even the most ardent holdouts have been forced to give up. Seltzer eventually sold his Pebble watch after struggling to download certain medical features on it. Flanagan recently discovered that he will have to finally give up the iPhone 5S when the 3G network it runs on is dismantled next spring. And Tyran, or “Old Turkey,” is feeling pressure from his family to upgrade. His daughter, in particular, gets frustrated when he can’t see the emoji she sends him. But he’d rather live in a world with some inconveniences than have a new one imposed on him. So, for now, he’s still holding out.
The principle that government ought to be administered for the benefit of all citizens, not on behalf of one political party, lies at the core of America’s democratic enterprise. The Trump administration couldn’t care less: It appears to see the federal government not as something to steward on behalf of all Americans, but as an opportunity—a set of levers it can pull on to protect its reign.
America’s adherence to this principle of executive neutrality has never been perfect, but as a norm it has been honored more than breached. When I served as a political appointee in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, the idea that the secretaries of defense or homeland security or the attorney general would have ever appeared at a political rally was unimaginable. Their roles were too important to national security to risk being perceived as partisan operatives.
Not so in the Trump administration. Its members are willing to use the public power at their disposal to do what they can to give Republicans an edge in this fall’s elections—to campaign for candidates from their public pulpits, to push broadcast-news coverage in a more favorable direction, to try to strong-arm the U.S. Postal Service into regulating mail-in balloting into oblivion, to threaten withholding FEMA relief funds from those states that don’t elect Republican candidates, to release pro–Donald Trump propaganda funded by taxpayer dollars, and, the most crass offense, to offer $5,000 checks to voters if Republicans win. Some of these tactics are in a legal gray area; others are plainly forbidden. But all of them are violations of the precept that the party in power should not tilt the electoral scales toward itself.
The most egregious area of activity has been the total disregard administration officials have shown for the Hatch Act. The law, passed in 1939, imposes limits on certain government employees to ensure that these officials in their executive functions are above partisan political activity. Federal employees may not use their official authority to influence an election, though they can engage in political activity when they are off the clock, and restricted employees (which includes all national-security and law-enforcement personnel) may not “take an active part” in any political campaign.
The law is still being enforced, but only against everyday federal employees. For example, the DHS inspector general recently found that some FEMA disaster responders had violated the Hatch Act when they skipped providing assistance to homes with pro-Trump signs after Hurricane Milton.
But in Trump world, the law is for thee and not for me. Attorney General Todd Blanche has turned out to be something of a serial campaigner. He traveled to Long Island to give a speech at a rally for Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for governor of New York. He gave a speech at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention. He stumped for Michael Whatley, a Senate candidate from North Carolina.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to the Iowa State Fair to support Republican Representative Zach Nunn. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy gave an August speech at a super-PAC event supporting GOP candidates in Michigan in which he mixed official business with praise for a Republican candidate. And, as The Atlantic has reported, Trump even went so far as to have a secret points-system competition among his Cabinet members to see who could travel to the greatest number of competitive House districts over the summer (though, to be clear, not all of that travel was overtly in violation of the Hatch Act).
Who is supposed to do anything about any of this? That responsibility falls to the Office of Special Counsel, whose head Trump fired early in his second term. He then nominated as his replacement a host of a far-right podcast, whose past behavior and qualifications were so poor that even the Senate Republicans could not support him. Despite not having a permanent leader, the OSC has managed to launch a Hatch Act investigation of one person of great interest to the president: former Special Counsel Jack Smith. The investigation is in response to a complaint that Smith sought quick criminal-trial dates for Trump as a means of influencing the 2024 election.
Perhaps less egregious but no less troubling has been the erosion of the traditional neutrality of the Federal Communications Commission. For years, the FCC’s equal-time rule (not to be confused with the broader, now-repealed fairness doctrine) was the legal embodiment of the principle of the government’s neutrality among the different political factions. The rule required that if a broadcaster allowed a candidate to appear, it “shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates” for that office. Exceptions were possible for bona fide news events. The rule has generally been interpreted quite leniently—allowing, for example, programs such as Access Hollywood, Today, and The Howard Stern Show to host political candidates on the air without requiring their opponents be allowed the same.
Under Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, the agency has perfected the use of its authority to threaten broadcasters it perceives as anti-Trump. In late January 2026, the FCC issued new “guidance” aimed at late-night-TV hosts, effectively reversing the long-standing leniency. Some networks responded by changing what they put on their shows. CBS pulled an interview of James Talarico, the Democrat from Texas running for Senate, from Stephen Colbert’s late-night show.
Without a doubt, the single most noteworthy effort the FCC has undertaken involves its obsessive pursuit of ABC. The effort to influence the network’s programming began in late 2025 when Carr urged ABC (owned by Disney) to pull Jimmy Kimmel from the air after he inartfully commented on Charlie Kirk’s death. Appearing on a right-wing podcast, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead”—seemingly a not-so-veiled threat of licensure action. Though Kimmel was suspended, he eventually returned to the air.
Not content with this (or perhaps angered that Kimmel was put back on the air), Carr moved, in April, to conduct an early review of all eight FCC licenses held by ABC. As purported grounds for the review, the FCC questioned the diversity and inclusion practices of the network. ABC filed a lawsuit in August, seeking to forestall the review, claiming that it was retaliatory and in violation of the First Amendment.
The FCC contends that ABC’s lawsuit is premature—that it has yet to decide whether to take enforcement action against the company. But the mere threat of a review is bad enough. The Trump/Carr pressure campaign is working.
In July, Trump gave an address to the nation, and ABC decided not to broadcast it. But it did put it on livestream (which it would not normally have done) as a way of mitigating the threat of retaliation. Likewise, The View, which historically has hosted political candidates, has stopped doing so after the FCC began an investigation following an appearance by Talarico. ABC has now, on the cusp of the election, decided to withhold a Kimmel interview of Talarico from its on-air broadcast, punting it to YouTube instead.
There can be no doubt whatsoever as to the political nature of these enforcement actions. Immediately after warning late-night-TV hosts (a group Trump loyalists perceive as liberal) about the applicability of the equal-time rule, Carr clarified that talk radio (known for its conservative tilt) was not subject to this guidance. As the lone Democratic-nominated FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, put it, the action was part of the “administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech.”
Finally, consider one effort to bend the institutions of government to Trump’s political benefit where he has (at least to date) been less successful—mail-in voting, a case which, mercifully, Trump lost in the Supreme Court last month.
Correctly or not, Trump seems to believe that Election Day voting favors Republicans, and thus he has attempted to use his power over the government to make mail-in voting more difficult.
This anodyne formulation concealed, as a Massachusetts district court described, a rather more draconian final rule which would have required state and local election officials to submit their ballot envelopes to the USPS for approval and thereafter provide the identity of each mail-in voter to the USPS for input into a federal government-run electronic portal. The enforcement mechanisms for these requirements would have been stringent: Absent approval of the ballot envelope, no voter data could have been input. And without ballot-design approval, intelligent barcodes, and voter-data registration, the USPS would have refused to deliver mail ballots to voters.
Every state’s mail-in-ballot process would have been subject to federal approval under the guise of mailing-envelope standards. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the solicitor general likened this requirement to “analogous preparation requirements for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives.” He further contended (notwithstanding the title of the executive order) that the rule was simply a regulation of the USPS and not meant to federalize control of the elections.
Even though it has, thus far, been unsuccessful, Trump’s misuse of the postal service is of a piece with his overall project of using the federal government to his party’s advantage. It is effectively a repudiation of the postal service’s “universal service” obligation—the mandate not to refuse mail unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress—with intent to convert the USPS’s neutrality into a political cudgel.
When politicians repurpose government action to help themselves maintain power, they are breaking a fundamental promise of governmental impartiality in providing services and benefits. Trump’s assault on this principle of executive neutrality has not yet taken root in American culture. If it does, we will lose far more than control of the House or the Senate; we will lose the possibility that the will of the people can prevail.
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Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Movies are back. For many of us (including quite a few of you, I imagine), they never went away, but 2026 has been a year of guarded optimism in Hollywood. Ticket sales are up, the box office is booming, and, most heartening of all, superhero movies aren’t propping up the industry largely by themselves. The diverse success of large-canvas storytelling such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and out-of-nowhere tiny-budget hits including Curry Barker’s Obsession have demonstrated how this art form still can seize the zeitgeist like few others.
If you’ve ever read my movie coverage in The Atlantic over the decade-plus I’ve been here, my feelings of triumph and relief at this sanguine state of affairs should come as no surprise. I work primarily as a film critic, trying to spotlight popular art that matters, unearth little gems trying to make noise amid a crowd of “content,” and provide some thoughtful context on why the films I don’t like don’t work for me. I also love talking with filmmakers about their influences, the arc of their career, granular scene and shot choices, as well as writing wide-angle analysis, looking at the ways the industry responds to current events, and how the big-screen experience has fought for survival since the pandemic.
Video Village, which will arrive in your inbox every Thursday, will have all of that to offer—criticism, recommendations, and commentary on what’s happening in the world of movies.This newsletter takes its name from the industry term for the nerve center of a movie set: a collection of monitors where the director and their crew can watch footage live, making sure everything is looking good. But I also want to curate my own little nerve center with this community, bringing everyone together to share in this passion with unbridled enthusiasm. I’ll be suggesting fun viewing projects for you to undertake, and flipping through streaming offerings, new releases, old classics, and even random DVDs I have piled up. If you share in my cinema obsession—even at a fraction of my intensity—it’ll be a fun ride.
Rachel Somerstein thought it would be “really wonderful and fun to have three children.” That is, until what happened happened.
When she was delivering her first baby, many years ago, Somerstein spent nearly 24 hours in labor before the baby’s heart began decelerating. The physician recommended a C-section. She received anesthesia, but as soon as the scalpel touched her skin, she knew something was deeply wrong. “I felt that,” she recalled saying as her legs bucked from the pain.
As Somerstein wrote in her 2024 book, Invisible Labor, she felt all of it—the entire surgery. In the following years, Somerstein developed PTSD and would panic during medical procedures; she told her husband she wasn’t sure if she’d ever want to have another baby. She remembers thinking, “I just don’t know that I can get over the fear,” she told me.
She ultimately did: Four and a half years later, she had her second baby. But she now thinks that, if not for the horrible first birth, she might have had another child in between. Somerstein’s experience was extreme, but her deliberations over her family size reflect a typical trajectory: Many women start out with a notion of their ideal number of children, and then finances, health, relationship status, and other factors can push that number up or down. Sometimes, women have more children than they initially intended, but, more commonly these days, they have one or two fewer than they’d hoped.
As politicians and academics puzzle over what, if anything, to do about America’s shrinking fertility rate, lost in the conversation is that many people would like to have more kids—but their personal circumstances prevent them from doing so. Rather than simply promoting the idea of being a parent, then, one way to boost the country’s birth rate may be to make it easier for parents to say yes to additional children.
Since roughly the 1970s, if you were to ask a random 20-year-old woman how many children she’d like to have, the odds were pretty good that she’d say “two or three,” several researchers told me. But this was less a true, firm preference than a reflection of the social norm, which is that for several decades, the majority of women were having two or three kids. “Saying you want two kids when you’re 20,” Sarah Hayford, a sociologist at Ohio State University, told me, “is not telling us that much about you”—or how many kids you’ll go on to have. (Although men, of course, also have opinions about the number of kids they want to have, few studies have been conducted on their preferences, Hayford said, and thus I’ll mostly focus on women in this article.)
Over the past decade or so, the picture has shifted: More and more, women say they aren’t sure how many children they’ll have, if any. In a study published last year, Hayford and two other researchers analyzed a nationally representative survey of more than 40,000 women and found that in 2018, 48 percent of childless women who hoped to have children were uncertain whether they actually would, compared with 40 percent in 2002. This change may reflect an understanding that having children can be derailed by various obstacles—the first being that most people want to be married before they have kids, Julia Behrman, a sociologist at Northwestern University, told me. The marriage rate is declining, and although plenty of people have children on their own or with a partner they’re not married to, many unmarried women won’t go on to have one child, let alone multiple.
Being married or partnered, however, does not determine how many children a person will have. Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, described fertility intentions as a learning process of sorts. A couple might have a baby and discover that they love being parents and want to do it again and again; others might find that day care costs far more than expected, making another child unaffordable. “Before you have kids, you are imagining what parenthood is like based on your friends’ experiences, based on what you’ve seen on TV, based on what you see out in the world,” Guzzo said. Only once people have a child do they know what parenthood is really like, and the experience might be better or worse than they had imagined. “People who are pretty determined about having that first kid can often find a way to do that,” Guzzo said. But “increasingly, that second kid is, Let me evaluate where I am right now and see if I can fit another kid in here.”
A number of factors can determine whether a couple has a second child, Rachel Margolis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario who has also studied family formation, told me. “People who I know who stopped at one,” she said, “either they met each other really late in life, or they disagreed about how many kids they wanted.” Or, she continued, they weren’t happy with how they were allocating child-rearing responsibilities, or they had stressful jobs that didn’t accommodate parenting, or they’re in a same-sex partnership and it was harder for them to have more than one kid, or, or, or. Life comes at you fast.
As in Somerstein’s case, a difficult birth and postpartum period can make someone hesitant to do it all over again: Margolis found in a 2015 study that Germans who had a pronounced drop in well-being after having their first child were less likely to have a second child than those who had no decline. Similarly, a study of women in the U.K. found that those who experienced postpartum depression after one birth were less likely to have additional children. Somerstein, who now leads birth-trauma groups, told me that the question of whether to have another baby “comes up in every single meeting.”
Another reason people may vacillate about having kids, or having more of them, is that many Americans have been sent—and have absorbed—the message that “you should not have a kid until you’ve got all your ducks in a row,” Guzzo said. Finish school, get a job, get married—don’t be an unwed mother. People may feel pressure to live in a good neighborhood with good schools, where housing tends to be more expensive, and to have a partner who wants that too. Oh, and make sure that partner takes on half the physical and mental load. “I think people want to have kids,” Guzzo said, but they might also think: “Some of those things that I think need to be in place before I have kids might not happen.”
Social and policy changes might address some of the obstacles that prevent people from having a family of their desired size. Guzzo said that if child-care infrastructure were stronger and if paid leave were more plentiful, America would “probably see a bit of a boost in birth rates, particularly the second- and third-birth rates.” If young people felt established enough to marry and buy homes earlier in life, they might start having children sooner, which could increase the likelihood that they’d have a second or third kid. And if more medical providers took women’s pain—both physical and mental—seriously, fewer women might have the kinds of traumatic births that discourage them from trying again.
When Somerstein was 41, after she’d had her two children, she got her appendix taken out. A friend suggested that she get her fallopian tubes removed at the same time—a procedure that can lower the risk of ovarian cancer without the need for a separate surgery. “I just couldn’t do it,” Somerstein said. “I was like, Maybe I want to have another baby.” Uncertainty can take another form too—that of leaving the door ajar.
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When Freddy Marquez was 12, he was hit by a motorcycle while biking and smashed his face into the pavement. He healed fast, but as adolescence reshaped his boyish features, the scar started to tug on his upper lip, leaving his mouth ajar. “Mom,” he said, “I’m going to high school. I don’t want to look like this.” So in September 2024, his parents found a surgeon in central Florida, where they live, to do a scar revision.
On the morning of his surgery, Freddy went into the operating room around 9. His mom, Joana Jardin, settled into a waiting-room chair, expecting to drive him home in a few hours. Noon came, then 1 o’clock, then 2, then 3. “Where is my son?” Joana began to ask. “Where is my son?” The staff couldn’t tell her anything, except that she had to wait. She watched as other parents picked up their kids from surgery and left. At 4 o’clock, she realized she was the only one in the waiting room.
When Joana finally got to see Freddy, around 5, he was barely conscious. His eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He was just sleepy, a nurse reassured her, because he’d gotten Benadryl after a hive-like rash broke out—but not to worry, the monitors tracking his vitals showed nothing else awry. Eventually, Freddy managed to slump into a wheelchair, his eyes still closed. He was sent home.
The next day, Freddy woke up. Then he threw up. He was still drowsy and now irritable. His head hurt. Joana took him to urgent care and later to the ER, where doctors who evaluated him figured he was just recovering from surgery. But in the coming days, his symptoms became stranger and more disturbing. Freddy started losing control of the muscles in his face. He developed tremors. He choked on his saliva. He lost his balance. He felt what he could only describe as electricity coursing through his brain. “Please, Dad, pray for me,” he would cry when the “electricity” struck.
At the hospital where Freddy was finally admitted, doctors ordered two separate MRIs of his brain, and, to keep him still during the scans, they put him under anesthesia. Both times, he took hours to regain consciousness. Both times, he emerged worse than before.
Freddy lost the ability to walk. His body spasmed and twitched as his muscles took on a life of their own. When Joana saw her son in the hospital bed—eyes staring at the ceiling, limbs flailing wildly—she remembers thinking this is how people once believed you could be “possessed by a demon.”
The scans found spots of white in Freddy’s brain—signs of dying and dead neurons—but no explanation as to what had caused them. In the coming weeks, he got better and then worse, worse enough that doctors ordered yet another MRI. His parents begged the hospital not to use anesthesia again. Don’t worry, Joana remembers being told; the doctors can do it safely. They do it all the time. Joana felt that she had no choice but to trust them. As Freddy slid into unconsciousness, she once again started ticking off the hours waiting for him to wake up: 1 p.m., 2, 3, 4. “Where is my son?”
Freddy never woke up. His body went into cardiac arrest, then respiratory failure. He died on December 29, 2024, at age 14.
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
Photographs of Freddy Marquez, who died at 14, shortly after routine surgery under anesthesia
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
Freddy’s mother, Joana Jardin
Before that final MRI, in one of their last conversations, Freddy had blurted in a half plea, half accusation, “You don’t understand what is happening to me, Mommy.” He was old enough, by then, to have lost faith in his parents’ omniscience but young enough to still yearn for it. His ordeal had revealed to him that the adult world is riddled with unknowns; that the assurances of even doctors in white coats can mean very little. “I promise that I’m going to understand. Until my last breath,” his mother told him. “I’m going to understand.”
And she would, eventually. Joana did not know it then, but Freddy’s death would be linked to dozens of cases of unexplained catastrophic brain damage after routine anesthesia, all in children or young adults. Several, like Freddy, died. Others became permanently disabled.
The mystery of why Freddy died would ultimately collide with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of medicine: How does anesthesia work in the first place? How is it that anesthesiologists can induce a state that some have called “functionally equivalent to brainstem death”—only to reverse it? This process happens 60,000 times a day in operating rooms across the United States. Yet it remains poorly understood. What happened inside Freddy’s brain, some researchers now think, may be an extreme version of what happens inside any of our brains when we slip into unconsciousness under anesthesia.
This past May, in Germany, I watched a doctor give a talk to her colleagues about two eerily similar cases almost two decades apart. One was Freddy’s. The other was that of a boy in Germany who went under anesthesia for a broken arm in 2006. Like Freddy, Ulrich “Uli” Gabriel Gobin Hernández was 14. Like Freddy, he took hours to wake up and then gradually lost control of his muscles. But unlike Freddy, Uli survived. The woman giving the talk was not Uli’s doctor. She was his mother.
Yaremy Hernández Castillo, who is soft-spoken and modest to a fault, wore a white coat with sensible sneakers as she flicked through slides of her son’s brain scans. Most of her colleagues at the cardiac-rehab hospital where she worked had no idea that she’d spent the past 20 years—outside her job as an internist—trying to decipher his condition. Early on, she had intuited that what happened to her son could be explained only by something still unknown to medical science. “Uli Gabriel, patient zero,” she came to think of him. But in the initial lonely years of her investigation, his doctors doubted her. Her own medical colleagues did too. “Everyone told me it was absurd,” she recalled to me, even as they could muster no better explanation.
These were the facts of Uli’s case: On Saturday, January 14, 2006—a beautiful day to hit the slopes—he went snowboarding near his family’s home in the Bavarian Alps. Uli took a jump way too fast and landed on his right arm; the humerus bone did not withstand the force of impact. He ended up at the local clinic, where Yaremy worked at the time, and where she trusted he was in capable hands. On weekends, the alpine-village clinic treated an influx of skiers with mangled bones.
But as the hours passed and Uli did not wake up from surgery, Yaremy began to worry. When he finally did rouse—confused, vomiting, and talking “like a drunk man”—her instincts both as a mother and as a doctor screamed that something was wrong.
The trauma surgeon came to check on Uli’s arm and declared it perfect—his own job was done. No one else seemed to share Yaremy’s growing alarm at her son’s mysterious neurological symptoms. The word she kept using to describe this period was alone. To get an MRI of Uli’s brain, Yaremy personally arranged for an ambulance to take him to a larger hospital. On the MRI, two ghostly white spots appeared in his basal ganglia.
The death of brain cells in the basal ganglia, which coordinates movements of the body, explained Uli’s symptoms, which progressed to erratic twisting, painful muscle spasms, and involuntary protrusion of the tongue. But what had caused the damage? No one knew. Uli could still walk and talk, albeit with some difficulty, and he remembered everything: the confusion, the pain, the seven dwarfs from Snow White plastered all over his pediatric hospital room, which, as a 14-year-old, he found tragically uncool. He was impatient to get better and to get out; he had tickets to a Foo Fighters show less than two weeks later. But the day of the concert came and went, and Uli remained stuck in the hospital, his symptoms unresolved, their underlying cause still unknown. The tests that doctors ran all came back negative.
Had his anesthesiologist made a mistake? Yaremy couldn’t dismiss the possibility. How does a perfectly healthy kid become so sick from routine anesthesia, other than because of a terrible mistake? Malpractice could give grief a direction and a shape, suggesting a person to blame (a doctor) and a means of redress (a lawsuit). Friends kept telling Yaremy to sue. In the end, she did, filing a lawsuit against Uli’s anesthesiologist, Ludwig Düthorn, a senior colleague whom she regularly passed in the hallways of their clinic. At the very least, she figured, the lawsuit could help uncover what had really happened.
At the clinic, Yaremy began to avoid the ICU, where Düthorn worked, unsure of what to say about the tragedy that had rattled both of their lives. Düthorn, too, was haunted by the case. He replayed the surgery in his mind, searching for any hint of the debacle to come. Uli’s blood pressure had dipped briefly—but that wasn’t uncommon during anesthesia, and would not have been enough to cause this level of brain damage. Düthorn had counteracted the drop with a routine dose of noradrenaline, and that had worked as intended. All of Uli’s other vitals were unremarkable. All of the dosages had been double-checked by a nurse.
Afterward, whenever Düthorn had to anesthetize a healthy young boy, he would think of Uli. “I was personally devastated,” he told me. “I thought, I did the anesthesia. It is my fault. But on the other hand, I could find no mistake.”
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
Uli was an active kid, skiing at 3 years old and playing soccer in elementary school.
The death or serious injury of a healthy child from anesthesia is so unusual as to be universally shocking to doctors these days. Anesthesia is known to pose risks to the elderly or ill, but even then it is far safer than it once was.
In the 19th century, as many as one out of 2,500 patients died under chloroform, then a popular anesthetic. But patients were willing to take the risk, because the alternative was pure, visceral horror: During the pre-anesthesia era, hospitals would put their operating rooms in towers, so as to spare other patients from all the screaming.
Like many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of anesthesia was something of an accident. Doctors became aware that ether, a popular party drug at the time, made giddy revelers insensitive to pain. They decided to give it a try in the operating theater: The first public demonstration was carried out on October 16, 1846, when a 21-year-old man under ether had a malformation removed from his neck at Massachusetts General Hospital. (The name anaesthesia, from the Greek for “without sensation,” was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the eminent doctor and essayist who also gave this magazine its name, in 1857.) At the time, doctors did not understand why ether worked; that it did was good enough.
General anesthesia today is often likened, colloquially, to sleep. But what it does to the brain is stranger and frankly spookier: A patient who is merely asleep would not lie still and take a bone saw to the chest. To render someone so deeply unconscious, anesthesia shuts down multiple distinct functions in the nervous system, making a patient insensate, paralyzed, and unable to form memories. The brain under anesthesia is suppressed to such an extent that Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Harvard and MIT, has compared it to coma or brain-stem death.
“The key thing is that it’s reversible,” Brown told me. When anesthetics stop being administered, the patient starts to rouse within minutes. Their consciousness flips back on. The spell breaks. This total reversal has happened millions of times in millions of people, the magic of it now mundane. But Uli had needed hours to find his way back to consciousness, his brain adrift someplace too deep and too dark to return from unscathed.
In the months after his accident, Uli’s symptoms became manageable enough for him to return to school. Still, he could be unsteady on his feet. On a walk with friends and their dog one day in 2007, he took a tumble and fractured his collarbone. His mother hoped the bone would heal without surgery, but his erratic limb movements from the damage to his brain kept jostling the broken bone. Surgery became inevitable.
Wary of anesthesia, Yaremy asked his doctor to avoid the type Uli had received for his arm surgery. She had no scientific evidence to cite, but she hoped he would listen to her, as a worried mother and as a fellow doctor. He did not.
This time, Uli did not wake up for days. Yaremy thought he was going to die. She would open his eyelids to check his reflexes. Nothing. When his eyes finally stayed open on their own, Uli was delirious. He screamed whenever an unfamiliar nurse entered his room. He had trouble following conversations. His skin became hypersensitive to touch. He lost more control over his limbs. He would never again be able to play guitar in his band or impress girls with snowboarding tricks. He would never even walk or talk on his own.
Yaremy struggled to care for him at home, and she began to contemplate her life in small-town Germany. She had grown up an ocean away, in the boisterous city of Caracas. At 21, she met a German man at a disco in Venezuela, who became her husband and then Uli’s father, and who persuaded her to move to this tiny ski town, where her new in-laws ran a hotel. When she arrived—with 1-year-old Uli in her arms—she spoke little German. For a long time, she was the only foreigner in town. She missed the warmth of the Venezuelan sun and she missed her large family, who she knew would rally to help her back home.
And so, soon after the disastrous second surgery, Yaremy boarded a plane with Uli, now 17, to Caracas. Her younger child decided to stay in Germany with their father. They all planned to reunite in Venezuela later, but Yaremy knew her marriage was already over, its existing cracks widened by the new challenges of caring for their son.
The move proved, in one way, fortuitous. A few years into living in Caracas, Yaremy encountered the first hint that what had happened to her son had also happened to someone else. When picking up medication for Uli—Botox to relax his clenched muscles—she met another mother doing the same for her own son. The facts of his case sounded awfully familiar: anesthesia, delayed awakening, brain damage, loss of muscle control. The mother told Yaremy about a spate of anesthesia complications in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo in the early 2000s, which were blamed on a contaminated batch of sevoflurane, then a fairly new anesthesia drug in the country. Her son, this mother said, was one such case.
Uli, too, had gotten sevoflurane during both surgeries. The colorless and faintly sweet gas has since become one of the most widely used anesthetics worldwide. But Uli’s surgeries were two years apart and 5,000 miles away in Germany, which had had no reports of contaminated sevoflurane. Yaremy couldn’t see how the incidents in Carabobo could be connected to her son’s. Still, she filed them away in her mind.
Not long after, Yaremy began chasing down a second clue, which emerged as Uli’s malpractice case wound its way through the German legal system. The lawsuit itself was unlikely to succeed, now that Uli had suffered the same complications under a different anesthesiologist, but an expert examining the facts of the case made a crucial observation: The two symmetrical white spots in Uli’s basal ganglia, he said, looked much like the brain damage found in people with inherited mitochondrial disease.
Mitochondria are the tiny structures inside our cells that act as power generators. When they become dysfunctional, cells are first starved of energy; then they die. The most vulnerable cells are the most energy-hungry ones; neurons are particularly susceptible, especially those in the basal ganglia. In children with mitochondrial disease, neuron death can be triggered by physiological stress of any kind: fasting, illness, dehydration, and, yes, anesthesia. Perhaps the fault lay with Uli’s mitochondria too.
In 2013, Yaremy managed to secure an appointment at a leading genetic-disease lab in Houston. She boarded the plane with Uli, convinced that the answer awaited them at their destination. There, specialists ran a series of blood tests on Uli and searched his DNA for mutations that cause mitochondrial disease. “I felt like I was going to see the light,” Yaremy told me over breakfast in May. “But nothing happened.” She sighed, her shoulders tense with disappointment.
The tests found no mutations known to cause mitochondrial disease. Moreover, Uli had never exhibited other symptoms; mitochondrial dysfunction affects numerous parts of the body, including the heart and muscles, and symptoms frequently manifest in childhood. Uli had been a healthy and energetic boy: walking before age 1, skiing at 3. Yaremy wondered if her son’s reaction to sevoflurane could be caused by a novel mitochondrial mutation. Uli remembers hearing the doctor, who did not know he understood English, mention her belief dismissively to his medical students.
Yaremy and Uli returned home to Caracas, where they had been building a new life. Uli enrolled at Venezuela’s largest university; using an eye-tracking device to communicate, he graduated with a degree in modern languages. Yaremy worked her way up to professor of medicine at the same university.
Then, in the mid-2010s, Venezuela’s petroleum-dependent economy cratered. Public hospitals lacked equipment as basic as disposable gloves; inflation soared to more than 1 million percent. Even with her connections, Yaremy began to struggle to obtain Uli’s medications. She decided in 2018 to uproot their lives once again, taking Uli back to Germany, where he could receive more reliable care.
By then, Yaremy was closer to finding the explanation for Uli’s condition than she knew. She already held key pieces of the puzzle. But it would take a second tragedy in her family for her to realize how they fit together.
In June 2020, Yaremy got a call from her younger cousin—and Uli’s godmother—María Fernanda Pozo Castillo, or Mafer. They are close, having grown up together in Caracas. Because Yaremy is the doctor in the family, Mafer told me, everyone bugs her with their ailments. (“Yaremy, I have a headache,” she said, slipping into an imitation.) But she was calling about something much more serious. Her 13-year-old son, Matías, had just had knee surgery after a bike accident in Austin, Texas, and he’d struggled to wake up. He had gotten sevoflurane.
“Mafer, no!” Yaremy said.
Even as she began to relive the cold dread of waiting for Uli to wake up, Yaremy pulled herself into problem-solving mode. “Don’t leave the hospital without an MRI, okay?” she told her cousin. “If the doctor says it’s not necessary, it doesn’t matter. You demand an MRI.”
Mafer remembers that the doctors were reluctant to order a brain scan for her son—he’ll be kicking a ball again in three weeks, they told her. But she kept asking and asking until they acceded. Sure enough, the MRI—which was done without further anesthesia—showed two white lesions in the basal ganglia. “Same places,” Yaremy immediately said when she heard this. “Same places as Uli Gabriel.”
In the coming days, Matías started experiencing involuntary limb movement. He developed muscle contractions, even more severe than his older cousin’s, that left him screaming in pain. The contractions have persisted, even with high doses of muscle relaxant delivered straight to his spinal cord. This past summer, Matías’s pain became so excruciating that he had to be hospitalized in the ICU. His mother cares for him full-time. Before we spoke on the phone, she kept apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute to tend to him.
Yaremy was devastated for her family; so was Uli. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he told me when we met in the spring, tapping the sentence out letter by letter on a board that he uses to communicate.
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
Uli has been unable to walk or talk on his own since his second surgery. He uses eye-tracking devices and letter boards to communicate.
Yet amid her grief, Yaremy’s scientific mind got to work: One kid in her family? Okay, a fluke. But two? It had to be genetic. She thought of Uli’s mitochondrial-DNA test from seven years earlier. The sequencing had found no mutations known to cause disease. But the report did note some “variants of unknown significance,” including one called m.11232T>C, meaning that the 11,232nd letter of his mitochondrial genome had been altered from a T to a C. No one made much of the finding; all of us have variants of unknown significance in our genomes, most of which are of little consequence, like minor typos that do not obscure the meaning of a sentence. But maybe this mutation was, in fact, significant.
Mitochondria carry their own loop of DNA, separate from the chromosomes that make up the rest of our genome, and are inherited through the maternal line. Yaremy’s mother and Mafer’s mother are sisters, so they and their children share the same mitochondrial line.
Could a single typo in their mitochondrial DNA be responsible for all of the catastrophic brain damage in the family? And what was the connection to sevoflurane?
Yaremy now began searching for a scientist to study her family. She suspected that Uli and Matías carried the same mutation, as might other relatives. Two of her mother’s sisters, she realized, had also suffered complications after surgery that now seemed to trace back to anesthesia. Were others at risk too?
She found Julio Montoya, an expert in mitochondrial disease at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain, who saw her email in a waiting room as he was about to undergo emergency surgery for a detached retina. With his one good eye, he read it and replied immediately. He was keen to investigate.
Montoya and his colleague Eduardo Ruiz-Pesini had, it turned out, seen the m.11232T>C mutation before. In 2018, they had found it in a Venezuelan boy at a Barcelona hospital. This patient had become severely ill after surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids—and deteriorated even further with subsequent rounds of anesthesia in later years. The Spanish team decided, along with Yaremy, to put together a formal research proposal. The boy from the Barcelona hospital would become patient one in their study; Uli became patient two, and Matías patient three.
Over the years, Yaremy had talked with colleagues in Venezuela about Uli so relentlessly that word sometimes came back to her of similar cases: nearly always kids, nearly always after routine surgery. An introvert by nature, Yaremy had to learn to badger anyone and everyone for a useful crumb of information.
She began running down some of these rumors: The wife of the son of a friend knew a neurologist who knew an anesthesiologist who knew of a boy who had fallen ill after surgery on a broken forearm. He became patient four. Patient five was the boy whose mother she’d met picking up Botox in Caracas. A physical therapist told her about a boy who’d had cleft-lip surgery—patient six. An old friend from medical school, an anesthesiologist, had examined a boy who developed symptoms after surgery for a cochlear implant. The friend had once been skeptical of Yaremy’s theory, but now he helped her gather data. This boy became the seventh and final patient in the study.
All of the patients who ended up in the study were boys, but Yaremy heard of girls affected, too. For every patient she managed to track down, she followed other trails that ran cold. Families who’d filed lawsuits were reluctant to talk; others were lacking complete medical records. The allegedly contaminated sevoflurane in Carabobo, Yaremy learned, had been widely discussed among doctors at the time, but news coverage of the events 20 years ago had disappeared from the internet as a result of the regime’s media crackdowns and poor digital recordkeeping. She managed to get hold of one newspaper article—a printout saved by the mother picking up Botox in Caracas. But she was not able to find any other families whose children had died or become disabled in Carabobo.
A haunting pattern appeared in the cases she was able to pull together. All seven patients in the study had received sevoflurane. Most of them could trace their maternal relatives to Carabobo; Yaremy’s own maternal grandmother was from the state. And all seven had the same T-to-C mutation. This mutation is extremely rare, even in Venezuela, but it is an estimated 15 times more prevalent in Carabobo, where it is believed to have originated many, many generations ago. The Spanish researchers hypothesized that this old mutation had taken on new, potentially fatal importance in the era of modern anesthesia.
General anesthesia today is usually achieved through a cocktail of drugs, both inhaled and intravenous. Of these, sevoflurane is one of the most popular, particularly for children. It is easy to administer, quick to work, and not irritating to the airways. But sevoflurane seemed to behave differently—and dangerously—in the presence of the T-to-C mutation.
To prove this, the Spanish researchers would need to collect cells with the mutation and subject them to sevoflurane in a lab. Yaremy volunteered her own. In the fall of 2024, she found a colleague to draw her blood and a lab to biopsy a ribbon of her skin. Her cells soon made it to Spain, where the team got to work.
As the lab experiments were ongoing last summer, tragic news came out of Chile. Five children there had suffered terrible outcomes after routine anesthesia; four were dead, according to an alert from the Chilean Society of Anesthesiology. All five children were Venezuelan.
The news spread within the Venezuelan diaspora. In the past decade, more than half a million Venezuelans have moved to Chile, where they have not always found themselves welcome. Now some of the parents alleged that poor medical care and discrimination had killed their children. They filed lawsuits and demanded justice on social media. In videos the parents shared of their children on Instagram and on TV, they are all bouncy and bright: a 4-year-old girl swinging in gymnastics class, a 2-year-old boy in a Messi jersey kicking a soccer ball.
Chilean investigators were able to collect genetic samples from only three cases—out of what had grown to a total of seven in the country—but all three patients had the same T-to-C mutation. One of the children who died in Chile, Yaremy later learned, was the cousin of a patient in her study. As word of the mutation spread around the world, doctors started reporting cases in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Peru, and Guyana.
“I suffered with each kid, each mother,” Yaremy told me. Even when a child survived, she saw ahead to their “lifetime of complications.” She often thinks about the boy with the cleft lip from her study, who, abandoned by his mother, lives in a poor village in Venezuela with his grandmother. His family can’t afford Botox or other treatments. In videos she has seen, his muscles are always clenched, his limbs unusable.
Back in Spain, the researchers raced to finish the experiments. They ultimately found that cells carrying the mutation were indeed hypersensitive to sevoflurane. This mutation could explain why Uli—and Matías and all the other children—had stayed unconscious for so long after surgery. The study, with Yaremy as a co-author, was the cover story of the June 2026 issue of Anesthesiology, the official journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Accompanying it was an editorial written by two physician-scientists in the U.S., Richard Levy, at Stanford, and Philip Morgan, at Seattle Children’s Hospital.
I had first spoken with Levy a few months earlier, after the ASA issued an alert—following up on the one in Chile—about terrible complications from anesthesia, primarily sevoflurane, in people with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. In our conversation, I asked what seemed like a basic question: How does sevoflurane work? “If you can figure that out, you have a Nobel Prize,” Levy told me. “The reality is, we don’t know.” We don’t know how any inhaled anesthetics work. But this novel mutation out of Venezuela, he and Morgan thought, might hold a clue.
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
More than a decade after his injury, Uli became a case study in a scientific paper, co-authored by his mother, about how anesthesia interacts with a rare mitochondrial mutation.
Anesthesia likely taps into something evolutionarily ancient in the body. A one-cell protozoan, a Venus flytrap, and a human are all susceptible to anesthesia—and two of those things don’t even have a brain.
For most of the 20th century, scientists clung to the idea that these drugs perturb the fatty membrane of living cells—a hypothesis based on how the gases behave in olive oil. But by the 1980s, a new dogma began to take hold: Anesthetics bind to proteins on the surface of brain cells, which interrupts their signaling. This is best understood in a drug called propofol, which is a common anesthetic but not an inhaled one; the milky-white liquid is delivered via IV. In an elegant set of experiments in the 2000s, scientists identified propofol’s primary target as a protein called the GABA receptor. Yet the same experiment, when repeated with a common inhaled anesthetic, failed to find an analogous target. Decades later, it remains elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist.
Today, the general consensus regarding the mechanism of inhaled anesthesia is that the gases bind weakly to many proteins in the brain, which together add up to complete loss of consciousness. Most practicing anesthesiologists don’t think much about this. Sevoflurane works. The proof is in the operating room every day. What more do you need?
But a group of researchers dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on proteins, including Levy and Morgan, has been slowly building the case for an alternative hypothesis: Actually, it’s the mitochondria.
When these researchers heard about children with a mitochondrial mutation dying from anesthesia, they immediately saw the implications. Scientists have long relied on rare mutations to probe the mysteries of biology. In another Venezuelan state called Zulia, for example, families with a shared mutation for Huntington’s disease have been crucial to our understanding of the condition. Rare mutations are a kind of natural experiment.
Morgan, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Margaret Sedensky, had once run lab experiments looking for mutations that altered sensitivity to anesthesia—though only in a tiny, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. When they induced random mutations in the worm, they found that the relevant ones were clustered in the mitochondria. Their findings didn’t make much of an impact among their fellow anesthesiologists, though. “We’re like the comic relief at our big national meeting of 15,000 anesthesiologists,” Sedensky told me. “ ‘Here come the worm doctors.’ ”
But Morgan and Sedensky kept working out the details of their theory. Inhaled anesthetics such as sevoflurane, they now argue, work by inhibiting the mitochondria, inducing a kind of temporary brownout in the brain. The bubbles used to transport brain chemicals become frozen in place, like cars that have run out of gas. They restart as soon as anesthesia is discontinued. But in some hypersensitive patients, the mitochondria could become so impaired that their brain cells die. Morgan had found some of these hypersensitive patients before, but he believes Uli’s mutation could help pinpoint more precisely how anesthesia works on mitochondria. This past summer, cells with the mutation—derived from Yaremy’s blood sample—arrived in the couple’s lab in Seattle.
Understanding how anesthesia works, Levy told me, could enable scientists to design better drugs that precisely target the brain, without lingering side effects. Though modern anesthesia drugs are generally quite safe, they are imperfect. They affect the cardiovascular system; they affect ostensibly unrelated areas of the brain, such as the region that controls nausea. And they have been linked to cognitive decline in the elderly after surgery—though the degree to which the drugs are responsible, as opposed to other factors such as the physical effects of surgery, is still being debated. How much of that can be avoided?
Before her study was published, Yaremy had someone she needed to call: Ludwig Düthorn, Uli’s anesthesiologist after the snowboarding accident. She had not seen Düthorn since testifying against him at the malpractice trial years earlier. She’d lost the suit; legally, he had already been absolved. Personally, she felt she had to apologize.
Düthorn was gratified to know what Yaremy had found, but even now, he told me, he feels a doubt gnawing at him in the operating room. Uli had a silent and novel mutation in his DNA. Could his next 14-year-old patient have a different one?
Cases like Uli’s unsettle everyone they touch. In the 2000s, Rafael Legórburu, then an anesthesiologist in Caracas, treated a young boy who would not wake up after sevoflurane—a case he now suspects was connected to this mutation. The boy suffered profound brain damage. Legórburu still finds it difficult to talk about 20 years later. “I have a scar,” he told me, “for the rest of my life.” Today he lives in Spain, where he practices aesthetic medicine, administering Botox and fillers; he says he’ll never touch sevoflurane again.
Doctors are now revisiting a number of old malpractice cases—some of which resulted in large settlements—that might be explained by the T-to-C mutation. An anesthesiologist whose hospital had settled one such case involving their patient told me they felt relieved, and vindicated. (They spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the hospital to speak publicly.) At the same time, they could not entirely shake their sense of responsibility. “It was the worst experience of my life,” they kept telling me.
A group of Venezuelan anesthesiologists—largely based in the U.S.—recently formed the Venezuelan Anesthesia Perioperative Risk society, or VAPOR, to raise awareness of the mutation among health-care workers, and to promote guidelines for screening and treating patients with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. A quarter of Venezuela’s population—8 million people—has left the country in recent years, meaning the mutation is scattered more widely than ever. Yet within Venezuela, no lab is testing for it, and anesthesiologists do not routinely have access to the specialized equipment needed to administer anesthesia without inhaled gases.
Yaremy is working with scientists to continue studying the mutation, about which many questions remain: Do other anesthetic drugs, inhaled or administered via IV, pose a danger? Are children more vulnerable, or have we simply not looked hard enough yet in adults? The oldest known patient to be affected was 31 years old.
In her own life, Yaremy has finally found a measure of stability. She and Uli live in Radolfzell, a bucolic lakeside town in southern Germany, where she works at the cardiac-rehab hospital. It’s calmer than the ICUs where she’s worked in the past. “B-O-R-I-N-G,” Uli joked, tapping out the letters in English. But the calm is welcome after years of upheaval. Uli has his own apartment and a rotating cast of full-time assistants; he works as a translator for medical records. (He is fluent in English, Spanish, and German.) He is a doting uncle to his niece and nephew, the children of his younger sibling, Levi.
The mutation still lurks in their lives. Both times after giving birth, Levi, who uses they/them pronouns, developed an infection in the uterus and needed surgery. Yaremy made sure that they did not get sevoflurane. But what about Levi’s kids, who also have the mutation? What if they’re rushed into emergency surgery on their own? Levi had closely followed the news of the children who died in Chile. “They could have been my kids,” Levi remarked as we parted ways after a family lunch by the lake. The water was a brilliant clear blue that day; so was the sky.
A few days after I left Germany, Yaremy learned about a new suspected case: a 12-year-old boy who’d had trouble waking up after surgery in Caracas. “How can this still be happening?” Uli wrote to me. “I mean what the ****!?”
Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic
Uli and Yaremy now live in the lakeside town of Radolfzell, Germany. Uli works as a translator for medical records.
Joana, Freddy Marquez’s mom, first caught wind of the suspected mutation in the summer of 2025, when she heard on social media about the children who’d died in Chile. She, too, is originally from Venezuela. And she made the connection instantly. Months earlier, when Freddy had been hospitalized, his doctors had ordered a genetic test that turned up a variant of unknown significance. Freddy had the m.11232T>C mutation as well. This information never made it into his chart for the same reason Uli’s mutation wasn’t initially taken seriously: No one understood its importance at the time.
Joana began commenting about Freddy on every related post she could find. One by one, she linked up with others who told similar stories: another mother in Florida, the family of a girl who died in Houston, Yaremy’s cousin Mafer in Austin, and so on. Joana got added to a WhatsApp group for the parents in Chile, which has since evolved into a de facto global support group for parents of children with this rare mutation. Through the group, Joana also learned of Yaremy. They spoke for the first time in February, and recognized in each other a maternal instinct that is both steely and tender. “She was in tears,” Joana told me, “and I was in tears.”
In February, Joana appeared on Instagram Live in a zebra-print shirt to talk about Freddy, alongside other affected mothers. The zebra print was a reference to the old medical adage “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”—meaning: think of the common explanation, not the exotic one. But sometimes, it is zebras. Freddy died because what happened to him lay just outside medical knowledge. His particular mutation is rare, but encounters with the unknown in medicine are not. Joana was asking for some humility, some openness to the possibility of zebras. Since Freddy’s death, she has made advocating for people with rare mitochondrial conditions her life’s mission.
Joana can still picture him: swimming, playing basketball, riding “like crazy” on his bike as Gordito, his Alaskan malamute, raced alongside him. “His flipping dog is now chasing me wherever I go,” she said. And Joana continues to propel herself forward. She’s cold-calling researchers. She’s going to medical conferences. She’s offering up her own cells to study. She is keeping the promise she made to Freddy before he died.
This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Going Under.”
Uli Gabriel Gobin Hernández suffered brain damage during surgery for a broken arm in 2006. His mother, a doctor named Yaremy Hernández Castillo, was determined to figure out what had gone wrong.
Hours after the United States snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas in a Special Forces operation, Marco Rubio strode into the side chapel of Saint Augustine Catholic Parish in Miami surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Sunday-evening Mass had just begun when the priest saw Rubio enter. The rest of the congregants saw him too. Their heads turned in unison. The city’s favorite son had helped oust a longtime Miami nemesis, and now their hero was among them.
Toward the end of the service, the pastor, Richard Vigoa, walked to Rubio’s seat and administered Communion to the secretary of state, according to several church members who described the scene. The parishioners stood and applauded. Vigoa and Rubio are both Cuban American, as is the overwhelming majority of Saint Augustine. Implicit in the congregation’s euphoria was an expectation: Cuba was next. After 65 years of waiting, Miami’s Cuban exiles believed that the Trump administration—with Rubio at its center—was poised to overthrow the socialist government. “There was this feeling that ‘finally, it’s our moment,’” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez Jr., one of the congregants, told me.
That was nine months ago. Since then, those sky-high expectations among South Florida Cubans have given way to repeated disappointments. U.S. negotiations with Raúl Castro’s grandson appear to have stalled. Talk of a Venezuela-style strike in Havana has dissipated as the military remains mired in Iran. Rubio’s tone toward Cuba, meanwhile, has softened—leaving people here worried that they’ll be let down yet again.
Older Cuban exiles still remember the anguish of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Younger ones recall the false hope attached to Fidel Castro’s death and the false start of President Obama’s reconciliation effort. Now Miami finally has a secretary of state whom it trusts to act in Cuba. But even Rubio seems unable to deliver on the community’s singular demand.
Ysa Perez for The Atlantic
Guests gather at an event hosted by the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce, held at the Miami residence of Dr. Jorge Suárez-Menéndez.
In Miami, the intricacies of geopolitics can feel very local. The congregants of Saint Augustine still see Rubio most Sunday evenings. Gutiérrez’s wife walks by him with the church collection plate, but it’s an inopportune moment to ask about U.S. foreign policy, she has decided. Like other Miami Cubans, her family has sought out intermediaries. The exiles are searching for insights into the secretary’s planning—and they want to make sure he knows what they’re thinking. One man told me that he had been working through a dentist who gives Rubio’s son helicopter lessons. Another boasted that his daughter had gone to prom with Rubio’s son. Gutiérrez has been emailing a contact at the State Department whom he knows has seen his messages. When I visited him at his home in Coral Gables, he pulled out his phone to show me the proof. “Look—it says, ‘Received. Thanks,’” he said, pointing to the email.
Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to gain Rubio’s ear. Gutiérrez has become one of the leading crusaders for Cuban exiles seeking restitution for their family properties in Cuba. He said his own family had lost 100,000 acres when the Castro regime redistributed and nationalized private property across the island. Gutiérrez is now working with more than 1,000 families in similar circumstances. He wants Rubio’s support in that quest.
Others in Miami have urged the secretary to prioritize the estimated 1,300 political prisoners still jailed in Cuba. Some have ideas about how the economy could be liberalized, or who should run the country, or how to rebuild the electrical grid. They have invited him to conferences and cocktail parties and fundraisers, but he has rarely shown. They’ve been left to decipher Rubio’s public account of what the U.S. has in mind for Cuba.
Immediately after the Maduro raid, Rubio seemed to hint at a looming military operation: “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” he said on January 3 at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. President Trump began talking approvingly about the “Donroe Doctrine” and all of the ways in which his administration would dominate the Western Hemisphere. Rubio, operating as national security adviser as well as secretary of state, seemed perfectly positioned to steer the U.S. away from distant conflicts and back to subduing adversaries in its own backyard.
But then Trump decided to go to war with Iran. As the U.S. again focused on the Middle East—and as the old Venezuelan regime maintained its hold on power, only without Maduro—Rubio seemed to grow more cautious about an intervention in Cuba. At the United Nations General Assembly last week, he struck his most restrained note yet: “Cuba has a golden opportunity to place itself on an irreversible path towards a better future. And we are prepared to be helpful in that regard if they are open to it.”
The group chats and email threads of Miami lit up. Was Rubio preparing the city’s Cubans for another era of disappointment?
Ysa Perez for The Atlantic
Cuban historical documents, photographs, and archival materials from Nicolás J. Gutiérrez Jr.’s personal collection, photographed at his home in Miami
The Sixto brothers, Juan and Rafael, stood on the patio of a Miami mansion. A crowd of Cuban American entrepreneurs was arrayed in front of them. Biscayne Bay glittered behind. Rubio had been invited, but so far, he hadn’t shown up. “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” Rafael said in a speech to the crowd. “We need detailed solutions. We need a plan of action.”
The brothers and their colleagues had formed the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce in the days after the Maduro operation, when it seemed almost certain that regime change was coming for Cuba. They formed 14 committees. They strategized about a future Cuban stock exchange. One of their members flew to Cuba to inspect the country’s oil terminals and report back about future energy investments. It’s possible they were getting a little ahead of themselves.
There are about 1 million Cubans and Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County, more than a third of its total population. Some arrived just as Castro seized power, in 1959. Others came with the Mariel Boatlift, in 1980, or on small rafts in the mid-1990s. Another wave arrived from 2021 to 2024, as the island’s humanitarian crisis intensified during an economic collapse. Among them were spies dispatched by the Castro regime, as well as anti-Communist militants stockpiling weapons. But mainly, they were an ever-growing mass of exiles praying for the moment when the existing order would unravel in Havana. “Florida is that part of the Cuban stage where declamatory exits are made, and side deals,” Joan Didion wrote in 1987. “Florida is where the chorus waits to comment on the action, and sometimes to join it.”
The exiles have long resisted any attempts by the U.S. government to make nice with the regime. The majority of Miami’s Cuban exiles say they will invest in Cuba only when the Communists are gone. An April Miami Herald pollfound that more than half of Cuban and Cuban American respondents in Florida disapproved of the Trump administration’s negotiations with the socialist government. Yet Rubio, it appeared, was supporting talks, seeking an arrangement like the one he had brokered with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela, which prioritized economic reforms over a political transition. “South Florida’s Cubans Made Their Wishes Clear and That Must Weigh Heavily on Rubio” was the headline the Herald ran above an editorial about the polling results.
When the Sixtos’ speeches were over, small groups chatted by the pool. One man came up to Rafael. It was clear that the Trump administration’s momentum on Cuba was slowing, he said. For so many decades, exiles in Miami had prepared for Cuba’s future—building legal frameworks and conducting feasibility studies. Now things appeared to be stalled, again.
“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked Rafael.
“We need a contingency plan!” Rafael said, his own language suggesting diminished expectations. “We need to be ready.”
Ysa Perez for The Atlantic
Rafael Sixto was among the co-founders of the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce.
Rubio’s parents migrated to Miami from Cuba in 1956, before Castro seized power. From the beginning of his political career, he described himself as the son of exiles, even though his family hadn’t been subject to the same political repression as those who left after Castro’s rise. It was a part of the story he told throughout his political ascent—from the first Cuban American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives to the first Cuban American secretary of state.
The group that gathered at the Miami mansion did not want to believe that Rubio, steeped in the politics of el exilio, would accommodate the Castros. Maybe, people told me, he was angling for a secret deal that would lead to the expulsion of the entire regime. Maybe—maybe!—they would tolerate a short political transition, if Rubio promised it would mark the end of communism.
“I don’t trust Trump on Cuba,” one man told me at the party. “But Marco Rubio is our savior.”
By 8 p.m., Rubio still hadn’t shown up. On the printed agenda for the night, there was mention of an unnamed special guest, which excited some of the invitees. Could it be the secretary? Or someone else from the administration who could offer clarity? But when it came time to introduce that cameo, the owner of the mansion, Dr. Jorge Suárez-Menéndez, had disappointing news.
“I’d like to introduce my friend Mary Flynn,” he said. The special guest was the sister of Mike Flynn, Trump’s onetime national security adviser and a leading purveyor of right-wing conspiracy theories. She had little to say about Cuba but shared thoughts about the Democrats and child trafficking. Dinner was served. People gave up on the long-shot possibility that Rubio would appear. Juan Sixto pulled me aside next to the pool. “Rubio supports us,” he told me. “If he was in Miami, he would have been here.”
The consensus was that Rubio was trying his best during an impossible time. Trump had chosen war in Iran over regime change in Cuba, people said. That wasn’t Marco’s fault. (Many people at the party referred to him by his first name, whether they knew him or not.) Two men in their 80s walked by me and Juan as we spoke. Both had been prisoners during the early days of the Castro regime. They had built successful businesses in Miami but still toasted to “next year in Havana” at meetings. “We’re going to move all the money from here to the island,” Juan said. “This is the only group that can do it.”
Ysa Perez for The Atlantic
The residence where Cuban American entrepreneurs gathered last month
When the cocktail party ended, the guests trickling past the Roman-style fountains in the front yard, I drove west from the mansion toward Hialeah. I passed storefronts that have popped up across the city catering to Cubans looking to send supplies to the island—Envios a Cuba and Todo para Cuba. The best sellers are basic food items and battery packs—signs of how extreme Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has become. The World Food Programme has reported an increase in people going hungry. A 12-by-12-inch box of supplies costs $29 to send from Miami.
The U.S. this year increased sanctions on Cuba and on foreign companies doing business with the regime, an economic vise intended to weaken the government but that Cuban officials say restricts the flow of food and medicine. Roughly 2 million Cubans have left since 2020—about a fifth of the island’s population. Many of them have landed in South Florida, a generation of exiles, most of whom are poor and without permanent legal status. Most still have immediate relatives in Cuba, and they scrape together the money to send boxes of basics to those who could not leave.
Rubio has spoken publicly about the immense human suffering on the island. “The truth is Cuba has already fallen,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity last Monday. But a humanitarian crisis did not mean the regime had collapsed or was on the verge of collapse. Remittances and aid from Miami had helped Cubans eke by, and the regime had eked by too.
With U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes tied up in the Middle East, there are limited resources available for a Venezuelan-style operation in Havana. Even if the Trump administration wanted to pursue a military option in Cuba, it’s unclear whom its target would be and what a succession plan would look like. On the diplomatic front, too, little seems to be happening. Miami’s exiles have followed the U.S. negotiation with Raúl Castro’s grandson, also named Raúl, with caution. But those talks stalled after the U.S. demanded that the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, step down. The result is stasis. Even those in Miami who have spent their days angling to contact Rubio have had to admit: The secretary of state doesn’t seem to have a secret backup plan. “I don’t think that he bears the position of power to make the final decision,” Rosa María Payá, a leading member of the Cuban opposition who says she has discussed Cuba policy with Rubio, told me.
Payá’s father, Oswaldo, had once been considered the most prominent democratic challenger to the Castro regime, before he died in a car crash in Cuba in 2012. An independent investigation later determined that the regime had killed him. Afterward, Rosa María moved to Miami for her own safety, joining the exile community. She observed that those exiles “never really disconnected” from the island. They had waited—and waited—for some combination of U.S. action and domestic conditions to break the regime.
It now appears they have longer to wait. But this is a place that is used to waiting. Along with the disappointment that the Trump administration hasn’t yet acted is a growing sense of inevitability—that the situation in Havana is unsustainable, that regime change is a foregone conclusion. And above all, there’s the belief that Miami’s man in Washington still has a long career ahead of him.
This article originally said Marco Rubio attended Mass at Saint Augustine Catholic Parish on a Saturday evening and that parishioners see him most Sunday mornings. In fact, Rubio attended on a Sunday evening, which is when he typically attends.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.
But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.
Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”
It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party. To understand why, all you have to do is type the word Zionist into the search bar of any social-media platform, and review the rancid results.
The border between the internet and real life has become alarmingly porous. In May, Maureen Galindo, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a House seat in Texas, posted that if elected, she would turn an ICE detention center into “a prison for American Zionists,” where “most of them” would be castrated for being pedophiles. The notion that Zionism is a perversion or sickness is shared by extremists of many stripes. The far-left pundit Hasan Piker has called it “a mental illness,” and the far-right pundit Tucker Carlson has said that Christian supporters of Zionism are victims of a “brain virus.” The same ecumenism can be seen in the career of the term Zio: Originally popularized as an anti-Semitic slur by far-right white supremacists such as David Duke, it is now casually used by anti-Zionist Jews such as the actor Odessa A’Zion, whose now-problematic name compelled her to clarify on social media that she is “not a zio!”
The belief that Israel should continue to exist, which is what most people who call themselves Zionists mean by that word, does not seem to entail Nazism, insanity, or a taste for political conspiracy or sexual perversion. But the goal of this rhetoric, and the more genteel equivalents used in parts of academia and the culture industry, is not to provide an accurate definition; it is to make the word Zionist so toxic that people will be afraid to claim it.
And Jews have gotten the message. Last year, the Jewish Federations of North America conducted a public-opinion survey on “Jewish Life Since October 7th.” It found that 88 percent of American and Canadian Jews “believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state,” but that only 37 percent were willing to call themselves Zionists. Yet it’s clear that most Jews are not opponents of Zionism—only 7 percent of respondents called themselves anti-Zionists. Their problem is not with the idea of Zionism, but with the term itself.
Ironically, nothing would have suited the founders of Zionism better than for the world to stop talking about it. Their aim was to create not an ism, but a country; once that was achieved, the ism could be discarded, like scaffolding from a completed building. Anshel Pfeffer, a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist, has written that “Zionism ended on May 14, 1948,” the day the State of Israel was created. Today, Israel is not an idea but a real place, complete with shopping malls and sports teams and commuter trains, where 10 million people, three-quarters of them Jewish, live mostly ordinary lives. In this sense, hating Zionism in 2026 is a category error—like railing against the idea of American independence a century after the Revolution.
When people say they hate Zionism, Pfeffer argues, what they really mean is that they hate the conduct of the state Zionism created: “‘I no longer believe in Zionism’ seems to have become just another way of saying ‘I’m thoroughly pissed-off by the policies of successive Israeli governments.’” And there is no doubt that the collapsing reputation of Zionism has been driven by outrage at the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war in Gaza. The most illuminating part of the Federations survey asked respondents how they define Zionism. A popular answer among those who call themselves non- and anti-Zionist was “supporting whatever actions Israel takes.”
If that definition were accurate, even the president of Israel couldn’t be considered a Zionist. In a speech in May, Isaac Herzog fiercely denounced Israelis who commit violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, saying that ultrareligious settlers “defile our home and depart from every basic norm—moral, legal or Jewish.” But then, the language of American anti-Zionism can’t be understood simply as criticism of Israeli actions. There is something deeper at stake when a politician calls for Zionists to be castrated, or when the group Jewish Voice for Peace associates its opposition to Zionism with the struggle against “white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, colonialism, militarism, and capitalism.”
No nation is without enmities and rivalries, yet somehow no Ukrainian has ever bombed a Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S., the way a Lebanese émigré drove a truck full of gasoline and explosives into a synagogue in Michigan in March. No sympathizer with Tibet or Taiwan has ever murdered people at a China-sponsored event in the U.S., the way an American killed two Israeli-embassy workers at a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in 2025.
To inspire this kind of hatred, the policies of a foreign government are insufficient. It requires an idea—an evil principle that must be eliminated for the good of humanity. The word anti-Semitism is now used to condemn prejudice against Jews, but it was invented in Germany, in the late 19th century, as the name of a proud political movement. Members of anti-Semitic parties wanted to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned Jew-haters; their target wasn’t religion but “Semitism,” which sounds like the name of an idea. If defeating “Semitism” meant exiling or killing the millions of Jews who lived in Europe, so be it; the disease was so bad that any cure was justified. Today, anti-Zionism follows a similar logic. Opposition to an ism cloaks a desire to exile or kill the millions of Jews living in Israel, and to punish Jews in other countries who object to this prospect.
So there is a dreadful inevitability about the way anti-Zionism has rediscovered the ancient themes of Jew-hatred. One example can stand for many: In January, an X account called “illuminatibot,” which has 2.4 million followers, posted that “Zionist tunnels were discovered under synagogues in NYC. Stained mattresses and baby high chairs were found inside.” The word Zionist here has no connection to Israel or to political ideology. It is simply a placeholder for evil, and the suggestion that Jews are doing unspeakable things to children in synagogues would have been perfectly familiar in 14th-century Europe.
In this sense, the persistence of the term Zionism in 2026 is the clearest sign of the failure of Zionism itself. For Zionism believed that creating a Jewish state would demythologize and detoxify Jewishness, making the Jews a “normal” people. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, wrote that “the Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies.” To understand why that prediction turned out to be so wrong—to judge what Zionism accomplished and what it failed to accomplish—you have to go back to the beginning of the story.
Before Zion was an ism, it was a place—a hilltop fort conquered by King David in his campaign against the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe. According to the second book of Samuel, it was on the site of this stronghold that David founded his new capital, Jerusalem, importing carpenters and stonemasons from Lebanon to build himself a royal palace. The king changed the name of the hill to City of David, but the original name wasn’t forgotten—there’s a Mount Zion in Jerusalem today, though it’s probably not the same one the Bible talks about. More broadly, Zion became a synecdoche for Jerusalem and, by extension, for the whole kingdom ruled by David and his successors.
Even in biblical times, Zion was more often ruled by foreign empires than by the Israelites. The land of Israel was conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, with interludes of Jewish self-rule. Still, it remained the home of most of the world’s Jews until 66 C.E., when a radical faction in Jerusalem rebelled against the Roman empire and launched a war for national independence; it minted coins with the inscription “For the Freedom of Zion.” After several years, the Romans crushed the rebellion, and in the course of the fighting, the Temple in Jerusalem—the center of Jewish worship—was burned to the ground.
Until the Holocaust, this was the worst catastrophe in Jewish history. The historian Josephus, who fought in the rebellion as a general in the Jewish army, wrote that more than a million Jews were killed, many by starvation, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. After a second failed uprising in the 130s C.E., the Romans set out to destroy what remained of Jewish society. To signal this policy, the emperor Hadrian changed the name of the province from Judea to Syria Palaestina, after the people known in the Bible as the Philistines. This is the origin of the name Palestine, which the land bore for the next 1,800 years under the rule of successive empires—Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, British.
By the Middle Ages, most Jews lived in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and only a small number remained in the biblical land of Israel. Yet Zion continued to play a central role in the Jewish imagination. Over the centuries, Judaism developed a complex theology and mysticism of exile, seeing the loss of the Jewish homeland as a punishment inflicted by God. It followed that only God could decide when the exile would end. Mainstream Jewish tradition specifically prohibited settling in large numbers in the land of Israel, though individuals could live there—and through the centuries, despite the obstacles, a determined few returned.
Jews instead imagined the return to Zion as a sudden, supernatural event, which would take place when God sent the Messiah to redeem the world. Like the Second Coming for Christians, Jews believed this was certain to happen eventually, but it was impossible to know when, much less to bring it about through human action. All they could do was pray, and the Jewish prayer service is threaded with petitions for an end to exile. Three times a day for almost 2,000 years, Jews have asked God, “May our eyes behold your merciful return to Zion.”
Today Jerusalem is once again the capital of a Jewish country, and some 600,000 Jews live in the city, alongside nearly 400,000 Muslims (and 15,000 Christians). Yet observant Jews around the world still recite the prayers asking for an end to exile. This paradox points to the most important fact about Zionism: It fulfilled the ancient hope of return, but not in the way Jews had always dreamed of, by a miraculous redemption. Instead, it used politics and diplomacy to create a secular state.
The word Zionism encodes this mismatch—a biblical name joined to a modern ideological suffix. It was a product of 19th-century Europe, the birthplace of so many isms—liberalism, nationalism, socialism, communism. In fact, most of the early theorists of Zionism came to it after being disillusioned with one of these other ideologies, which kept failing to solve the problem that concerned them most personally: the persistence of Jew-hatred.
The first thinker to follow this trajectory was Moses Hess, a German philosopher who started his career as a collaborator of Karl Marx’s and spent decades agitating for a socialist revolution. Then, in 1862, he changed course and wrote a book called Rome and Jerusalem, which anticipated Zionism by considering Jews not as followers of a religion, but as members of a nation. “The Jewish religion,” he wrote, “is, above all, Jewish patriotism.”
This way of thinking broke with traditional Judaism, which defined the Jewish people by its relationship with God. But it was also a sharp rebuke of modern Jews who hoped to assimilate into European society. After the French Revolution, many countries in Western and Central Europe “emancipated” the Jews, removing old legal barriers that made them second-class citizens. But Hess observed that legal equality had not led to true belonging: “In spite of the degree of education to which the Occidental Jews have attained, there still exists a barrier between them and the surrounding nations, almost as formidable as in the days of religious fanaticism.” Rather than trying in vain to become German or French, Hess argued, Jews should recognize that they constituted a nation of their own, and work for “national regeneration.”
Rome and Jerusalem didn’t reach a large audience at first, but other thinkers kept finding their way to similar conclusions. Leon Pinsker, a doctor from Poland, grew up in the mid-19th century trusting that Jews would one day be accepted in Russian society; he learned to speak Russian, was one of the first Jews to attend a Russian university, and edited a Russian-language Jewish magazine. But late in life he could see that his hopes had been disappointed, and in 1882 he published a pamphlet titled Auto-Emancipation, arguing that it was time for Jews to take charge of their own fate.
Why was it, Pinsker asked, that hostility toward Jews was so enduring and took so many different forms? “To the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the property owner a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.” The reason, he argued, was that the Jews had lost their nationhood. Exiled from their ancient homeland, they were doomed to wander the Earth like ghosts without a body. The only way the Jews could rescue themselves, physically and spiritually, was by leaving Europe to settle in “a land of our own.”
Initially, Pinsker didn’t believe that this land had to be the biblical land of Israel. But around this time, a number of groups calling themselves “Lovers of Zion” started to organize for emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, and in 1884 Pinsker led a conference to unite them into a movement. These groups were tiny: One of the first was made up of 14 university students from Kharkiv, who helped establish an agricultural settlement called Rishon LeZion, Hebrew for “First to Zion.” Today it is one of the largest cities in Israel, with a population of about 250,000.
The most consequential Zionist awakening took place in 1895 in Paris, where Theodor Herzl was working as a foreign correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s leading newspaper. Herzl was a shining example of what Jewish emancipation was supposed to achieve. He was a successful journalist and playwright who spoke German rather than Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish masses. In fact, Herzl knew almost nothing about Judaism. Yet for his whole adult life, he wrote in his diary, “the Jewish Question grieved me bitterly.” If full assimilation couldn’t stop Jews from being excluded, hated, and attacked, what could?
Herzl came up with a staggeringly ambitious new answer. In his pamphlet The Jewish State, he called for the mass emigration of European Jews to Palestine—and, unlike earlier writers, he set out a plan for how it could be done. Jews would sell their property in Europe and use the proceeds to buy land in Palestine, working collectively through a new political body, the Society of Jews, and a new economic organization, the Jewish Company. The task was immense, but Herzl insisted that it was not impossible. He estimated that transferring the bulk of European Jewry, millions of people, would require an initial investment of $200 million (the equivalent of almost $8 billion today) and take about 20 years.
The first Zionist Congress was held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897. (Universal Images Group / Getty)
Herzl wasn’t the first person to entertain such a vision. The reason he’s remembered as the founder of Zionism is that he created institutions to make it a reality. In August 1897, he convened the first Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, where more than 200 delegates from 17 countries founded the Zionist Organization, a real-world version of Herzl’s Society of Jews. Zionism was now not just an idea but a movement, with leaders, a program, and the stature to negotiate with governments.
A skeptic would not have found the congress very impressive—just a collection of self-appointed activists who met for three days to make speeches. But after it was over, Herzl wrote in his diary: “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”
Fifty years and eight months later, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared independence. Herzl didn’t live to see his prophecy vindicated: He died of heart disease in 1904, at the age of 44, and was buried in Vienna. In 1949, his remains were taken to Jerusalem, where they were interred in the new country’s national cemetery, on Mount Herzl.
Herzl may have been right about the timing, but the process of creating a Jewish state turned out to be completely different than he imagined. Radical movements generally underestimate the obstacles they face; it’s hard to be a realist and a revolutionary at the same time. As soon as Zionism evolved from an idea to a practical enterprise, most of the early theorists’ assumptions proved to be wrong.
The first mistake was to underestimate the difficulty of nation building. Zionism quickly became popular among Eastern European Jews, by offering a vision of dignity and renewal to an oppressed people. But attending Zionist meetings in Poland or Ukraine was far more appealing than actually packing up and moving to Palestine, a poor and remote place that few European Jews knew anything about. From 1881 to 1914, when the First World War cut off emigration, roughly 2 million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to America; only about 70,000 went to Palestine, and many of them left after discovering how difficult life was there.
The ones who stayed tended to be young and ideologically committed, and professed a combination of Zionist and socialist beliefs. This cohort included many of the future founders of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, who emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1906, at the age of 19. These Jews didn’t want to continue the European way of life at a different address, the way Herzl imagined. They wanted to create a new civilization, with its own language—a revived and modernized Hebrew—and an economy based on labor unions and collective farms.
Theodor Herzl on a boat sailing to Palestine in 1898. (Universal History Archive / Getty)
This agenda brought them into direct conflict with Jewish religious authorities. Most traditional rabbis vehemently opposed Zionism, seeing it as a secular movement that led Jews away from God. They considered the very idea of settling the land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah to be heretical. For their part, many Zionists blamed religion for Jewish weakness and passivity. Others simply saw it as a relic, irrelevant in a modern society. When Herzl designed a flag for the prospective Jewish state, it included no Jewish symbols—just seven gold stars on a white background, representing the new country’s progressive seven-hour workday.
But with religion too, Zionism underestimated the complexity of the task it had set for itself. It reconceived Jewishness as a political identity, rather than a religious one, but how could a Jewish state avoid having a profound connection with Judaism? The depth of the connection became clear at the Zionist Congress in 1905, when the delegates considered the British government’s offer to designate a territory in Africa for Jewish settlement.
The “Uganda plan” made concrete a question that Hess, Pinsker, and others had asked. Did a Jewish state have to be in Palestine? If the goal was securing a place where the Jews could control their own destiny, couldn’t it be located anywhere? But after a bitter debate, the congress voted to reject the Uganda plan. Zionism couldn’t deny the implications of its name: The biblical land of Israel was the only homeland the Jews could accept.
Zionism’s most consequential mistake was its failure to anticipate that Palestine’s Arab population of roughly 450,000 would resist the Jewish claim at every step. In his seminal 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, Edward Said wrote that “the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism” was “a struggle between a presence and an interpretation”—that is, between the Arabs already living in Palestine in the late 19th century and the Zionists’ understanding of the country as the past and future Jewish homeland.
At first, Zionist theorists minimized that conflict. Herzl predicted that the Arabs of Palestine would welcome Jewish settlement, because it would raise the standard of living for everyone. Ottoman Palestine was poor and sparsely populated, but the assumption that its inhabitants would simply be grateful for the blessings of European civilization was self-serving. As early as 1891, Arabs in Jerusalem petitioned the Ottoman government to forbid the sale of land to Jews. After making a tour of Jewish settlements in 1912, Ahad Ha’am, a leading Zionist figure, warned that “many natives of Palestine” were beginning to “look askance, quite naturally, at the selling of land to ‘strangers,’ and do their best to put a stop to this evil.”
Palestinians at Abou Ghosh take the oath of allegiance to the Arab cause of fighting against Jewish immigration in 1936. (Matson Collection / Library of Congress)
What was clear on the ground, however, seemed less important to Zionist leaders in Europe, who were focused on the bigger geopolitical picture. The movement was divided between “practical Zionism,” which pursued incremental growth of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and “political Zionism,” which aimed to win control of the country via a diplomatic coup. Once that was achieved, the political Zionists imagined, mass immigration would quickly create an overwhelming Jewish majority.
And for political purposes, public opinion in Palestine was irrelevant. At the time, there were no independent Arab countries in the Middle East; the whole region was ruled by the autocratic Ottoman empire, and the only vote that counted was the sultan’s. Herzl tried to convince the Turkish ruler to grant a charter for Jewish settlement. When that failed, Zionists lobbied European governments to bring pressure to bear. One of these unofficial diplomats was Chaim Weizmann, a chemist at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, who would become the first president of Israel.
These efforts paid off during the First World War, which found the British and the Turks on opposite sides. In the last months of 1917, a British army marched north from Egypt and drove Turkish forces out of Palestine in a swift campaign, reaching Jerusalem in six weeks. Britain and its ally France now had the power to redraw the map of the Middle East, carving Ottoman territory into Arab states that still exist today—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.
As for Palestine, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, announced in a public letter on November 2, 1917, that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The Balfour Declaration didn’t explicitly promise a Jewish state, but it looked like the fulfillment of Zionist hopes. The British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called the Balfour Declaration “the greatest event in Jewish history since the destruction of Judea.”
The Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, by contrast, calls it “a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population,” the start of a campaign to “force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Khalidi’s book is titled The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and in a real sense, the war in Gaza is the latest and most terrible episode in an armed conflict that has been going on since the end of World War I, when Arab resistance to Jewish settlement turned violent. In 1920, Arab and Jewish militias clashed in the village of Tel Hai. It was a minor skirmish that left 13 dead, but it looms large in Zionist history, for two reasons: It was the first battle involving a Jewish military unit in 1,800 years, and it signaled that the future of Palestine would not be decided by diplomacy alone.
Ottoman troops retreat from Jerusalem by the Jaffa Gate in December 1917. (Print Collector / Getty)
In the 1920s, the question of how to respond to Arab opposition led to the most important split in the history of the Zionist movement, one that has shaped Israeli politics ever since. Should Jews in Palestine adopt a defensive position, relying on British protection while continuing to buy land and recruit new immigrants? Or should they recognize that Arab hostility was permanent and British support unreliable, and stake out an aggressive position in the conflict that was sure to come? The majority of Zionists, including Weizmann, the official leader of the movement, took the first course. Vladimir Jabotinsky demanded the second.
Next to Herzl, Jabotinsky is the most important figure in the history of Zionism, but he was and still is deeply divisive. A man of letters like Herzl—he wrote novels and translated Edgar Allan Poe into Hebrew—he was radicalized by the persecution of Jews in the Russian empire, and even changed his first name to the Hebrew Ze’ev, meaning “wolf.” During World War I, he organized a Jewish unit to fight in the British army, but no sooner had he settled in Palestine than the British put him in jail, for collecting weapons to arm a Jewish militia.
Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionist movement revise its strategy, and his followers became known as Revisionists. In an influential 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” he argued that mainstream Zionists were deluding themselves about the situation in Palestine. The conflict between Jews and Arabs was not a “misunderstanding” that could be solved “if we can only make it clear to them how moderate our intentions really are,” he wrote. It was a genuine clash of national interests, which became inevitable the moment Zionism set its sights on a Jewish state.
“There is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached,” Jabotinsky wrote. “So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say ‘non’ and withdraw from Zionism.” If Jews wanted to build a state, they would need the protection of an “iron wall”—that is, an armed force. Jabotinsky believed that Arabs and Jews would eventually live together in peace: “I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone,” he wrote. But peace would come only once Jews had proved that they could not be ejected, either.
Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe arrive in Palestine in the 1920s. (General Photographic Agency / Getty)
The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 84,000 in the 1922 census to 175,000 in the 1931 census, and then to an estimated 450,000 in 1939. This Jewish society—known as the Yishuv, from the Hebrew term for “settlement”—was the foundation of the State of Israel, and it could not have come into being without British sponsorship. But Jews never came close to being a majority in Palestine before World War II. The mass immigration that Herzl imagined did not take place, for several reasons. The country lacked the economic capacity to quickly absorb millions of people, and European Jews were reluctant to leave the places where they had lived for centuries, unless it was absolutely necessary. After Hitler came to power, in 1933, for instance, more than 50,000 German Jews left for Palestine.
But in the 1930s, the British began to limit immigration as their commitment to a Jewish “national home” waned. In 1936, the Arabs of Palestine began a revolt against Jewish immigration and British rule that continued until the start of World War II, three years later. Britain had crucial economic interests in Arab countries, and British India had the largest Muslim population in the world. Britain’s leaders began to wonder whether it was worth antagonizing so many for the benefit of so few. In 1937, a commission proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; some Zionist leaders wanted to accept, but Arab leaders refused. In 1939, the British announced a new policy: Jewish immigration to Palestine would be capped at 75,000 total over the next five years, then effectively prohibited.
By revoking the Balfour Declaration on the eve of the Holocaust, the British ironically confirmed the most powerful argument for Zionism, from its beginnings to the present day: The Jewish people need a state of their own in order to survive. “We are facing an elemental calamity,” Jabotinsky testified to the committee considering partition in 1937. “We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of rehousing one third of the Jewish race, half of the Jewish race, or a quarter of the Jewish race; I do not know, but it is a question of millions.” By closing the door to Palestine, the British ensured that those millions had nowhere to go when the Holocaust began. By 1945, the Jewish population that Zionism was created to rescue, and that it imagined would populate the Jewish state, had been annihilated by the Nazis.
It’s widely believed that Israel was created as reparations for the Holocaust. That’s one reason the country’s opponents have found it politically effective, since long before the war in Gaza, to characterize it as a genocidal state: If a country that exists as compensation for genocide is actually an agent of genocide, the rationale for its existence is negated. This is often paired with the charge that Israel is a product of colonialism—just another example of white Europeans stealing land from an Indigenous people.
A closer look at the events leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence shows that neither of these interpretations fits the facts. The revelation of the Nazi death camps did not lead Britain to hand over Palestine, or any part of it, to the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors remained in displaced-persons camps in Europe for years after the end of World War II because the British continued to restrict immigration to Palestine, and no other country—including the United States—was willing to let them in. In a notorious episode in July 1947, a ship carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and the passengers were sent back to an internment camp in Germany.
What finally convinced Britain to withdraw from Palestine was a Jewish national-liberation movement employing the same tactics that drove European empires out of Asia and Africa—including terrorism. After World War II, the Revisionists’ military wing, known as the Irgun, embraced terrorism to pressure the British into withdrawal. In 1946, the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British had their administrative headquarters, killing 91 people. The head of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, became prime minister of Israel in 1977; the political party he founded, Likud, is now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
British soldiers dig their way through the debris in search of survivors at the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, after an attack carried out by the Zionist military group Irgun that killed 91 people. (Fox Photos / Getty)
Menachem Begin, the former head of the Irgun, became prime minister of Israel in 1977. (AFP / Getty)
Similar stories could be told about Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and other former colonies where erstwhile terrorists became national leaders. If progressives who admire those nations’ liberation movements abhor Israel, it is because Zionism cuts across the usual political categories.
Zionism was born as a reaction against European bigotry and violence, but unlike other peoples victimized by Europeans, the Jews mostly lived in Europe, so their self-emancipation required leaving to create a new country somewhere else. The place they fixed on was their indigenous homeland, from which the Jews had been largely expelled centuries earlier by a genocidal empire. But the land of Israel was now Palestine, and the Jews could make a home there only against the will of its Arab inhabitants. Zionism was able to take root with the support of the British, but that support lasted barely 20 years, and then the Jews had to fight both the British and the Arabs.
By 1947, the British empire was in retreat everywhere, exhausted politically and economically by World War II. In August, British rule in India ended after 200 years, and the territory was hastily partitioned between Hindus and Muslims. The result was massive chaos and violence that killed up to 2 million people and left India and Pakistan mortal enemies to this day.
In November of the same year, the United Nations voted to partition the much smaller territory of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, with similar results. The Arabs of Palestine had never accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish presence there, and when Israel declared independence, they took up arms, supported by armies from five states. In the war that followed, Israel conquered part of the territory designated by the UN for a Palestinian state, and 700,000 Arabs were driven out or fled—an event remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” Some 6,000 Jews, 1 percent of the Jewish population, were killed in the fighting.
Palestinian refugees driven from their homes by Israeli forces ride into exile in the back of a truck in 1948. (Bridgeman Images)
The history of Zionism involves so many paradoxes that some basis can be found for almost any characterization of the movement. It was European and anti-European, religious and anti-religious. It can also be considered both a success and a failure.
In the summer of 1895, Theodor Herzl read an early draft of The Jewish State to a friend, Emil Schiff. When he was finished, he saw that Schiff had tears in his eyes—not because he was moved, but because he thought Herzl was in the grip of mental illness. “My dear friend, there is something wrong with your nerves. This book is a product of sickness. You must see a doctor,” Schiff recalled saying.
It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction. The notion that the Jews, who for 2,000 years had been synonymous with homelessness and powerlessness, could build a country of their own—not when the Messiah came, but within a human lifetime—sounded delusional. Yet in the epigraph to a later book, Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no dream,” which became a Zionist slogan. The creation of Israel demonstrates that the most important force in human affairs isn’t wealth or numbers, but the power of an idea.
Zionism may have succeeded in creating a Jewish state, but it failed to solve the problem that the Jewish state was supposed to solve. The “sole purpose” of the movement, wrote Max Nordau, one of its early leaders, was “to normalize a people which is living and suffering under abnormal conditions.” Jabotinsky said the same thing: “Every nation on Earth, every normal nation, they all have states of their own,” he testified to the British commission. “That is the normal condition for a people.”
Part of the normal condition of a state is to have enemies. In predicting that the Jews would have no enemies once they had their own country, Herzl was thinking of the hatred they would escape by ceasing to be powerless; he did not think about the hatred they would attract by exercising power. The key contribution of Revisionism to the Zionist project was to understand this fact and take it seriously. Jabotinsky was viewed by the Jewish liberals and intellectuals of his time as little better than a fascist, because he insisted that Zionism’s goals could not be achieved without force.
The history of Israel, from 1948 to the present, shows that he was right. If not for its military power, the Jewish state would long since have been destroyed—by invasion in 1948, 1967, or 1973; by terrorist assaults like the one perpetrated on October 7; or by Syria, Iraq, or Iran, whose attempts to develop nuclear weapons have been thwarted by Israeli attacks. Today, however, the most serious dangers facing Israel—terrorism, international isolation, the radicalism of far-right politicians and religious settlers—can’t be overcome by force. In different ways, they are all products of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a century of violence has shown that, despite the fantasies of extremists on both sides, this conflict cannot end in military victory. If it is to end at all, it can only be by achieving something even more difficult: peaceful coexistence.
When Israel’s war of independence concluded with an armistice, in 1949, the new state, intent on preserving a Jewish majority, refused to allow the Arabs expelled during the fighting to return. About 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, constituting 20 percent of the population. But no country of Palestine came into existence in the part of the territory designated by the UN for an Arab state, because it was annexed by neighboring Arab countries—the Gaza Strip by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan.
A refugee camp in the Jordan Valley for Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli forces, 1948. (Bridgeman Images)
Then, in 1967, Israel conquered those areas in the Six-Day War, gaining control over most of historic Palestine. This was the goal of Revisionist Zionism, but the Revisionists had assumed that it would happen because of mass Jewish immigration. “There will always be two nations in Palestine—which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority,” Jabotinsky wrote in “The Iron Wall.” Today, however, the Jewish and Arab populations “between the river and sea” are roughly equal, about 7.5 million each. This means that the Jewish state’s control over all of historic Palestine cannot be maintained democratically. Roughly 2 million Arabs are citizens of Israel and participate in the country’s elections. More than 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation, and 2 million in Gaza are ruled by Hamas.
Neither Jews nor Arabs believe this situation is desirable or sustainable, but no one has found a way out of it. From the 1930s to the 1990s, repeated proposals were made to settle the conflict by partition—creating two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. But for two countries to live in peace in a territory the size of New Jersey would require a degree of mutual acceptance and trust that seems even less attainable today than it did in the past. In 2012, 66 percent of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and 61 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution; in 2025, those figures were down to 33 percent and 27 percent.
Another way for the conflict to end would be for one side to expel the other once and for all. When expelling Palestinians is proposed by far-right Israeli politicians, the world condemns the idea, and rightly so. But when the converse is proposed—dismantling the State of Israel and expelling the Jews—it is applauded by much of Western enlightened opinion, under the name of anti-Zionism. An illustrative example came in the summer of 2025, when Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City and a protester berated him for saying that Israel has the right to exist. Mamdani, who is as anti-Zionist as they come, meant that the country can continue in some form, but not as a Jewish state. That wasn’t good enough for the protester, who accused the future mayor of hypocrisy for saying Israel can exist at all while also embracing the slogan “Free Palestine.”
The protester was insisting on a fact that the politician preferred to obscure: Anti-Zionism is the only contemporary political movement whose goal is to destroy a country. Rather than describing this as a struggle against Zionism, a malign abstraction, anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel should be obligated to explain in concrete terms what would happen to the approximately 7.5 million Jews living there. Would half of the world’s Jewish population be “driven into the sea,” as Arab propagandists long threatened—that is, murdered, as on October 7? Would they “go back to Europe,” as protesters on American college campuses sometimes demand—where 6 million Jews were murdered, and despite the fact that today, half of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa? Many anti-Zionists openly endorse these ideas. In March, the prominent Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa responded to a video of Israel’s defense minister on X with this comment: “these parasites will be sent back to Eastern Europe, if not the gallows.”
Other anti-Zionists, including Jewish ones, are more likely to say that Jews and Arabs will live together peacefully in a multiconfessional country. This was the vision that Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist currently fighting deportation from the U.S., shared in an April interview with the Forward, a Jewish publication. He acknowledged that “it might sound like a very ideal utopia.” But the idea of Israeli Jews living under a government that would include Hamas or Hezbollah isn’t utopian. It’s a recipe for the kind of sectarian civil war that has devastated Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq for decades. No wonder the idea of a single state is overwhelmingly opposed by both Palestinians and Israelis.
It can seem that the only alternative left is despair. In September 2025, a Gallup poll found that only 21 percent of Israelis and 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “think that a permanent peace between Israel and Palestine will ever be achieved.” But perhaps the idea with the greatest potential to shape a better future in Israel is the same one that has shaped the country since the beginning: Zionism.
Jerusalem, with view of the Wailing Wall, in 1967 (Leonard Freed / Magnum)
For those who have turned the word into an obscenity, it may seem bizarre to suggest that Zionism can be a constructive force. They believe that it must be vanquished, along with the state it brought into being, for the good of humanity. This is a role that Jews and Judaism have played in the Western imagination for thousands of years. For adherents of medieval Christianity, of the Enlightenment, of biological racism, it was obvious that Jewish collective existence was the chief obstacle to human progress. Today, Zionism is seen the same way. If, as the radical Swedish thinker Andreas Malm put it in the title of a recent book, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth,” then the survival of humanity depends on the elimination of the Jewish state.
But though this logic is emotionally compelling to anti-Zionists, its actual tendency is to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unsolvable. By insisting that Jewish statehood is an illegitimate aspiration that appeals only to evil people, anti-Zionists confirm Zionism’s central argument: that without a Jewish country, the Jewish people are defenseless in a hostile world. In the face of such hostility, Israelis consider it suicidal to give up military power or territorial control.
The effective target of anti-Zionism is not Israel but Jews in the United States and Europe. Since October 7, they have had their first taste of a kind of pressure that earlier Jewish generations knew well: to win individual approval by repudiating collective identity. On social media, on college campuses, in professional organizations, Jews know that they can be called upon at any time to reject Zionism and Israel, in whatever terms the caller demands. But as with other kinds of bullying, this demand cannot be satisfied, because it doesn’t want to be satisfied. Giving in is always interpreted as a sign of weakness that encourages further demands.
History, and the experience of some of today’s leading Jewish critics of Israel, shows that individual Jews can’t dissociate themselves from the status and fate of the Jews as a whole, even if they try. Earlier this year, the New York City politician Brad Lander defeated an incumbent in a Democratic House primary, partly on the strength of his outspoken criticism of Israel. But in August, when Lander joined a demonstration against a Hindu-nationalist speaker at Madison Square Garden, he was attacked by his fellow protesters for not being anti-Israel enough. “We don’t want no Zionists here. Get the fuck out!” one shouted.
Instead of seeing the persistence of Zionism as a historical or moral error, it’s more accurate—and more useful—to understand that persistence as a political opportunity. The reason Zionism didn’t disappear in 1948 is that its mission went beyond creating a Jewish state. The state is necessary for the Jewish people to survive; that belief has been abundantly and tragically vindicated. But the history of Zionism shows that it is compatible with many different conceptions of the Jewish state: territorially expansive or limited, religious or secular, socialist or capitalist. This openness made for bitter divisions in the Zionist movement before 1948, as it does in Israeli politics today. What’s certain is that, by any standard, the national life that Zionism envisioned—a “normal” existence, not one based on domination and fear—has yet to be achieved. The work of Zionism will remain incomplete until Jews and Arabs live in peace in the land that both have the right to call home.
Sharing the culture you love—a beloved song, that book that changed your life—can help translate your inner world to the people you love. Or it might make you look really strange. So it goes in one sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which a trio of teen girls at a sleepover (played by Sarah Sherman, Veronika Slowikowska, and Jane Wickline) take turns playing clips of their favorite get-ready-with-me videos, the popular format where content creators dress and prepare themselves for the day ahead. Two of the girls share par-for-the-course videos, before Sherman’s character introduces everyone to the influencer she loves the most: @ColoradoVicky1 (Dakota Johnson, the show’s host), a woman whose life doesn’t seem so aspirational.
As she smiles cheerfully, her eyes vacant, Vicky invites her audience to “get ready with me for court-ordered electroshock therapy.” In another clip, she styles herself in green lipstick and a Teletubby-esque antenna in preparation for getting “5150’d on the roof of a San Bernardino Whole Foods.” “She seems … unwell,” says Slowikowska’s character. But Sherman’s teen girl pays no mind to such judgments, or to her friend’s question about how she found this account, whose videos don’t even have double-digit views. “I’m legiterally addicted to her ass,” Sherman says. “Guess my algorithm is just cool-mazing?!”
These days, everyone uses a different internet. Algorithms serve up specialized content catered to each user’s unique interests, creating a warped mirror of their own reality, and last night’s sketch cleverly captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their private online consumption to one another.
@ColoradoVicky1’s behavior only gets more bizarre the more clips the girls watch. Without blinking once, Vicky explains that her “outfit of the day” is a pair of handcuffs, which she plans to use to attach herself to the actor who plays Turtle in Entourage. She one-ups this proclamation with an even stranger how-to video, in which she asks viewers to tag along as she makes brunch and gives herself a lobotomy. (“You’re gonna want to start by finding a really good power drill,” she monotones.)
Sherman’s friends seem to get progressively more put off by her media diet. It doesn’t help that Sherman’s character isn’t the only one in the house who could probably stand to log off. Every few minutes, her dad (James Austin Johnson) comes into the room with snacks and immediately reveals how depressed he is: “I’m just gonna go drink in the pool for a while, stand in the deep end,” he announces, before leaving the room. When the sleepover guests are concerned, Sherman explains that her dad is just in a funk: His boss discovered he dresses up like Sailor Moon, and he just found out that DraftKings uses real money. His particular online milieu is bleeding into, and beginning to harm, his real-life existence.
When her friends ask if they should get help, Sherman’s character insists that they “stop giving him attention—that’s, like, exactly what he wants.” She continues to ignore his not-so-subtle cries for help, until the sketch’s ending beat, in which he randomly shows up in @ColoradoVicky1’s livestream as her new lover. Sherman seems thrilled by this development, announcing that Vicky is going to be her new mom. Finally, her father’s real-life depression is good for something.
Teen girls and their dads alike are vulnerable to having their minds and lives warped by their feeds, the sketch warns. And once brought to light, these online rabbit holes might not translate so well to real life: The sketch-comedy version of this is funny because it’s so familiar, while the fracturing of reality outside SNL is mostly just unnerving.
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