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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum discusses President Trump’s announced diesel deal with Russia, the administration’s abandonment of Ukraine, and why Trump is giving up so much to gain very little.

Then, David is joined from Kyiv by Illia Ponomarenko, a Ukrainian journalist and the author of the new book The Land of Tears and Hope. David and Illia talk about the history of Ukraine, its current state as the war with Russia rages on, and how and why the Trump administration seems so hostile to the country.

Finally, David concludes with discussion about why so little literature exists about the history of slavery in Eastern Europe.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion. But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans.

[Music]

David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Illia Ponomarenko, author of a new history of Ukraine, Land of Tears and Hope, available from Bloomsbury in the month of November. Illia and I will discuss the deep history of Ukraine, the recent onslaught of Russian drones and missiles on Ukrainian cities, and how Ukrainians feel about their abandonment by the Trump administration.

This week’s book will also be Eastern European–focused. It’s not a book that exists. It’s a book that I would like to read, and I set out a research assignment for some intrepid Eastern Europeanist to deliver a book I would like to know more about in, again, in the deep history of the lands that are now Ukraine, now Poland, and now Russia.

But before either the dialogue with Illia or the book discussion, some opening thoughts about the most shocking recent turn in the U.S.-Ukraine story.

When Illia and I recorded our dialogue, we did not yet know about this announcement that was pending from the Trump administration, declaring or imagining or proposing, or whatever the word is, for what is likely vaporware. Not a real deal; a big purchase, a massive—in the words of President Trump—a massive purchase of Russian diesel fuel for the United States.

Now, I wrote an article for The Atlantic this past weekend with the facts and figures about just how negligible an achievement this so-called deal really is. The United States is a diesel superpower. It’s probably the largest producer of diesel on Earth. We don’t exactly know that for sure, because we don’t know really how much China produces, but probably the United States is the largest producer of diesel in the world. It is certainly the largest exporter of diesel in the world. And it produces much more than it uses at home. So it exports about a million and a half barrels of diesel fuel a day.

The reason American prices have been rising so fast for truckers and farmers and others who use diesel fuel is not because of anything that’s happening in the U.S. market, or even the North American market. The United States imports a little diesel fuel from Canada because it’s easier sometimes to import from Canada and then to export from the Gulf Coast than to supply the United States entirely from its own resources. The reason that the price has been rising is because of disturbances in the global market. What matters is world demand and world supply of diesel, not U.S. demand and U.S. supply of diesel.

Now, if this Russian deal exists at all, it’s a matter of a few hours’ worth of U.S. production and U.S. consumption. It’s not a big event, and it won’t change world prices because Russia doesn’t have a lot of diesel to sell. Although Russia used to be a big diesel producer, Russian oil facilities have been damaged so intensely by Ukrainian missile and drone fire that Russia has very little diesel to contribute. In fact, Russia has had an export ban on diesel since July. If Russia has any diesel to sell, it’s going to take it from another consumer; India, maybe. And by diverting diesel oil from India to the United States, it doesn’t do anything for the United States, which has more than enough diesel here at home. It makes life a little tougher for India, and it doesn’t change the world price at all, because nothing happens in global supply and demand. The whole thing is a complete nothingburger.

But it does two things that are important. The first is: The Russians have dangled in front of the Trump inner circle the prospect of enormous wealth for them if American sanctions on Russia are dismantled. And it’s taken a first step toward the dismantling of those sanctions and put the United States on the path to confrontation with Ukraine, because President Trump now has to worry the only way he can get Russian diesel is if the Ukrainians stop attacking Russian energy facilities, which they are doing in retaliation for the Russian attacks on their cities and schools and historical societies and hospitals, on their civilian population. They have struck back against Russian energy infrastructure to cramp Russia’s war-making ability.

President Trump has now created a situation where his goal of seeming to do something about diesel and maybe also enriching a lot of people who are in his inner circle is in conflict with Ukraine’s self-defense, and the only way he can get what he wants is by ordering Ukraine to stop defending itself. And we have seen already Trump’s pressure on Ukraine: If you continue to strike the Russian energy infrastructure, you are making an enemy of me.

He is taking away Ukraine’s war-making ability for his own reasons, in ways that will not help American motorists even slightly, American farmers, American truckers. And of course, he is doing nothing to bring about a resolution of the conflict in the Persian Gulf, which has removed so much diesel fuel from Europe and Asia because that’s where those countries get their supplies from.

Trump from the beginning of this second presidency has taken Ukraine as a kind of personal affront. Now, a lot of this is a little hard to understand, but maybe we don’t need to understand it. You know, when I was working on my story about Trump’s vaporware diesel deal, an editor asked me, Do you think Trump believes it? Do you think he imagines that these few barrels he’s getting from Russia are, in fact, going to make any difference to American supply? Or is he totally delusional? And I had to answer, I don’t actually—of course, I don’t know the answer to that question. My instinct—it’s just an instinct—is that President Trump was much more of a self-aware con man when he entered politics a decade ago than he is now. He now may be kind of lost: truly in a world of illusions, where he no longer himself knows what is true and what is a lie.

But it doesn’t matter, because there’s a consistent through line, whether these are deceptions of others or deceptions of himself. The through line is: He just is tantalized by the prospect of vast wealth for himself and others by doing deals with Russia. And he’s willing to sacrifice the lives and security and independence of Ukraine to his ambition. And he treats Ukraine’s self-assertion and self-defense as an act of impudence and defiance—not against those who are trying to invade and aggress and annex Ukraine, but against himself. Because Ukraine bothers him, and he doesn’t like it, and he wants it to go away.

What he’s leaving all Americans with is one of the most shameful passages in the history of American foreign policy. A people that are defending their national sovereignty, that are fighting back under the most difficult conditions with the supremest forms of human bravery. Who ask only from the United States the wherewithal with which to defend themselves, and who are being denied that wherewithal by President Trump for reasons we can’t understand, but none of which look good. I hope anyone who can hear my voice will join me in sharing their dismay and their shame at what President Trump has done to the good name of American democracy and American world leadership.

And now my dialogue with Illia Ponomarenko.

[Music]

Frum: Illia Ponomarenko was born in 1992 in a small town in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine. He studied at Mariupol State University. When Russia invaded his home region in 2014, Illia began his career as a reporter. He has never stopped.

His first book, I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv, was published in 2024 to global acclaim. Illness closed his path to military service, so he turned to a deeper fight: the fight over whether Ukraine has a history of its own. His new book, The Land of Tears and Hope, tells the Ukrainian story from the Slavic tribes and the Vikings through the Cossacks, Soviet terror, and the Maidan to this very war today. It will be published next month. Order it now.

Illia Ponomarenko, welcome to The David Frum Show.

Illia Ponomarenko: Hello. Thanks for having me.

Frum: Illia, you have written this deeply moving history of Ukraine, and I want to address it in full, but the events of the past days in Ukraine have been so dramatic and so horrible I think we must start there.

So tell us, we’re speaking in the early part of October, tell us the situation as it is now and what has happened in the past days to your country.

Illia Ponomarenko: Well, of course, the centerpiece of any news and the spotlight is Kyiv, this capital city, and what’s happening. The air battle over Kyiv that’s going on nonstop for days and weeks already, with drones, missiles. Never stopping, day and night.

So the central attention is given to the defense of the capital and to preserving life in the capital. And Russians are really trying to abrupt the very existence of the city, to instill fear, to abrupt transportation, normal food supply, water supplies. Bridges over the Dnipro River that divides the city, which is extremely vital. So Russians have switched to this tactic of trying to absolutely paralyze the very heart of the country—to install fear, to enforce the capitulation, since they can’t get any substantial military success for the fifth year of this war.

But I must say that, you know, I live just outside Kyiv in suburbs, and also in several places in Kyiv Oblast, in the outskirts. But I spend as much time as I can in the city, in many ways just to be there with my city, in there. And I would say that over the last three days, which is what I said on social media, the air battle—this constant attack—the entire environment had become a little less stressful, a little calmer. I would say I think, this my feeling, that Ukrainians managed—the Ukrainian military managed to overcome this surprise and shock and managed to adapt to this new situation. And I think if the situation continues, we might say that Russians have weakened in terms of their ability to strike Kyiv on the daily basis. So Ukrainians have made another move to adapt to what Russia does, and it goes on and on and on. So it’s constant battle between Ukrainian adaptation and Russian attempts to paralyze the city.

Frum: Let me try a little context. I think from the point of view of a lot of people in the Western world, in the United States—we’re so far away. It seems like this is an endless story of Russian attacks, Ukrainian defense. But there was a true intensification of the Russian air attack on the capital of Ukraine beginning at about the end of September, with some new technologies, some new methods. And the first effect was very devastating. A much greater loss of life, much greater damage than had been the case until the later part of September, the beginning of October. And so it is this new campaign—this intensified campaign at the end of September, beginning of October—that you say is now running out of impetus and faltering a little bit?

Ponomarenko: It gets significantly visibly weaker in terms of the number of drones, Russian drones, that made it to the capital and strike. So there are far less booms in the sky over Kyiv over the last few days, which is good. Which is something that enlightens us, because the military also reports a lot of new technologies, counter-technologies that are being applied to intercept jet-powered Russian drones that are super difficult targets to get.

Frum: These jet-powered drones, this is the new—because drones, until now, have been slow. And they could be shot down with a .50-caliber machine gun if the weapon-wielder was fast and skillful enough. But a jet-powered drone moves much faster, and so can’t be intercepted by a machine gun. You need a much more sophisticated technology to catch the jet-powered drone.

Ponomarenko: Yeah. One of the bright pictures of life in Kyiv is always seeing, in the streets, pickups with machine guns—sometimes it’s M2 Browning machine guns—with the mobile air-defense groups that try to shoot these things down.

But when it comes to jet-powered drones, which is the next step essentially, and especially when it comes to mass-produced, jet-powered drones, it’s a huge problem. Because they move at velocity of 700, 600 kilometers per hour. So it’s an insanely complicated target to get. And they are cheap; they are easy, simple. They are massive. So could be swarms of them over the Ukrainian cities.

Nonetheless, within weeks we started getting new solutions to this. There are—you know, Ukrainian defense in many ways is comprised of many, many private companies that suggest many, many technical solutions. Right now we have five or six prototype interceptor drones that are engine-powered, or jet-powered, that are being presented by various companies in Ukraine. And they are simply showing the first results, just the first results, on videos intercepting these Russian jet-powered drones. So surprisingly, it goes fast. The entire Russian campaign against Kyiv was a shock. It was sharp. It intensified really quickly and shockingly. But at the same time, the Ukrainian response to this is very fast and very sharp. So our big question is whether we could launch the mass production of a successful prototype that works well. And this is exactly, essentially, how this war works.

Frum: Ukraine is striking deeply at Russian targets, especially energy-production targets, ever farther into Russia. And there are reports—I don’t know how much weight to put on them—of surrenders among Russian ground troops, of deteriorating performance among Russian ground troops, that make us think that maybe something deeper is happening in the war than just the strike, counter-strike—the cycle of innovation and counter-innovation you describe.

Ponomarenko: But also, another front of this war is actual battlefield war, that’s happening along from the frozen front line in Ukraine’s south and east. And we have a situation in which Ukrainian military, in one of the most important, if not the most important axis of Russian attack, which is near the cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk—the very core of the industrial part of Donbas that’s still under Ukrainian control, and also the belt of the fortress cities in Ukraine’s east.

The Ukrainian military, over the months of very careful, very clandestine operations, managed to inflict a very, very serious defeat to local Russian forces. So that’s why we get pictures of surrendered Russian troops, because they got encircled; they got captured. That’s how the Ukrainian military, and it’s pretty open, and it could be independently verified that Ukrainian military have tactical gains. And also they managed to cut off one of the accesses of Russian attacks on these fortress cities: the northern claw, as we call it.

So Ukraine, despite all the bombs, despite all the bravado from the Russian side, Ukraine has pretty significant tactical successes on the field, on the battlefield. Which are pretty impressive on the scale of this war, five years on.

Frum: What can you tell us about the present state of American assistance to Ukraine?

The Trump administration has cut off aid to Ukraine. Such American weapons as you get are paid for by your European counterparts and allies. Is there any American intelligence flowing to Ukraine? Is there any non-material assistance you’re getting? Or is the attitude truly as hostile in Ukraine as it seems to be from the point of view of Washington, D.C.?

Ponomarenko: Well, of course, we are very far from being in the place where we’ve been under the previous administration when we had consistent and very serious and very regular packages of assistance. Right now, you are right to say that what’s being delivered to Ukraine from the United States is being purchased as part of the Pearl program by European backers. It’s mostly about supplies, technical maintenance, things that help maintain the U.S.-made hardware in possession of Ukraine. Very important part of this American participation is, of course, the intelligence. And I must say that despite all the complexities or all the complications that Ukrainian administration has with the United States, this intelligence sharing is one of the most important things that Ukraine has from outside the country, because it’s about saving lives. It’s about giving early warnings about Russian missile attacks. This is what we get from Americans, essentially.

So in many ways, what you see, from the point of view of [President Volodymyr] Zelensky—the way he talks to Donald Trump, the way he tries to preserve a more or less stable relationship with the United States and with the Trump administration—it’s about intelligence. Because this is something that we would be extremely, extremely reluctant to lose. Because it’s about saving lives; it’s about air defense.

Frum: Can you offer any generalization about how Ukrainians today feel about their relationship with the United States? And what the United States has done for them as it has become less generous, but not yet zero generosity?

Ponomarenko: Well, I’m really trying to give you a very average attitude that’s been present in the Ukrainian public opinion. Of course, a lot of people are dissatisfied. A lot of people are stressed about this, because one of the things that we always thought of as unshakable, as static as the Earth itself, is the American support. Bipartisan support in both house chambers of the Congress, in the White House. We always thought that our interests are 100 percent complacent with America’s interests, and this is what we thought was unshakable and unmovable.

I am not going to lie to you that Donald Trump remains one of the least popular figures in Ukraine. Because of many reasons, mostly because of a lot of words that he said about Ukraine. And I cannot lie to you that this image also affects really badly on the image of the United States as a country, or on the United States as a people, in the eyes of Ukrainians. A lot of emotions are involved into this. We must understand that war, being at war, is a very emotional thing. It’s about a lot of strong words; a lot of strong thoughts about this.

But I would not say that a lot of people here still respect the United States, still consider America to be the leader of the free world, the cornerstone of this free world. And despite everything that has happened over the last couple of years, still consider America to be probably back anytime soon in terms of its presence and its posture and its leadership.

So I would say that, you know, of course, feelings are very complicated. Feelings are very emotional about Americans. I cannot say that I agree with a lot of those things that I hear from my fellow Ukrainians about Americans and American aid. I really try, and I think it’s extremely fair and just to separate what this administration, what politicians do, what they say about, about us, what they do. And also, I try to remind my fellow Ukrainians of how many Americans do support Ukraine up to this day. We have figures between 60 and 70 percent on both sides of the political spectrum. I cannot stress this enough that, after all these years, having so many people across the ocean being so eager in terms of supporting Ukraine—the country that they probably never heard about before this war—is something that is to be deeply appreciated and something that is very ours to have.

Frum: For those of us who, like you, believe in the role of the United States as the guarantor of the free world, and who believe that the phrase free world means something, this has been a shameful hour. And the patience, and maybe someday the understanding and even forgiveness of the Ukrainian people to this deviation from America’s role in the world, is felt here too, and should be felt.

Let me talk to you about your book. And again, the title is The Land of Tears and Hope. It is, as you say, it’s emotional. And it is not a classic history written with chapter one, chapter two, that we—you jump like a film director from scene to scene, and pass over a lot of years, and have a very arresting technique.

Frum: Ukraine is one of the world’s newest states. Or the present Ukrainian state is one of the world’s newest states, founded in 1991. You make us feel the antiquity of Ukrainian culture, language, sensibility. How do you manage this contrast between the newness of the government, the newness of the constitution, the newness of the state, and the antiquity of everything that the state is built on?

Ponomarenko: That’s a very interesting thing about modern Ukraine. By saying modern Ukraine, I mean the country that was built after the revolution of 2014, which is the newest phase of Ukrainian existence. Because Ukraine is very young in terms of being a political entity, especially when it comes to being very independently thinking, sensing itself as an independent nation-state, not someone’s backyard, not as also Russia. But in terms of feeling itself like an entity, a country, a nation with its own home. It’s a very new thing to Ukraine even compared to its just 35 years of its independence.

And at the same time, Ukrainians—and Ukrainian people in general as a people, as ethnicity—have a very long historical memory. And a lot of things that are dearest to us, that are part of our culture, of our everyday thinking about traditions, of the fairy tale that we tell to our children through the night, and many of those things date back to medieval times. Date back to the early modernity, like Ukrainian Cossacks. They date back to pre-Christian times, ancient Slavic tribes.

You know, when I was writing this book, it was a surprise even to me when I realized this: how many things we have from our everyday traditions, from our holiday celebrations, from our sayings that we get back from pre-Christian times, from thousands of years ago. A lot of things in our life go back to those times—when there was no Ukraine, neither as a nation, neither as a state, neither as in, even in a word in this. But they live with us.

Frum: I think this is something that Americans especially have a hard time understanding. Those Americans who want the United States to take a more pro-Russian point of view or who denigrate the Ukrainian cause—the vice president of the United States and the people around him—they will insist that this war is about NATO expansion, about verbal undertakings to Mikhail Gorbachev back when there was a Soviet Union. And then what, well, what does it say in the Budapest Memorandum of 1994?

But when you actually listen to actual Russians, they say, No, no, no; this is all about Yaroslav the Wise. And from a Russian point of view, this is not about NATO expansion, except when they’re talking in English to gullible Americans. For them, this war is about whether Ukraine exists—as a culture, as a polity, as a society—or whether you’re just sort of charming primitive, rural Russians who don’t understand that you need to belong to the greater entity of Mother Russia.

And you talk a lot about that in the book, about the distinctiveness of Ukraine. And maybe begin with this question: So, how many years separate the founding of the city of Kyiv from the founding of the city of Moscow?

Ponomarenko: Whoa. It’s even a complicated question to answer when the city of Kyiv, as we know it, was founded. Because there are lots of evidence, lots of arguments among scientists. But let’s try to set the beginnings of Kyiv as a continuous city around the fall of the Roman Empire’s time. And when it comes to Moscow, a lot of people barely realize that. They imagine Kyiv and Ukraine and what ended up being Ukraine, and then what ended up being Russia, as in the model that Moscow gave birth to Kyiv, gave birth to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of great Russian tradition. But at the same time, the situation was just exactly vice versa.

There was ancient Kyiv—ancient great kingdom of those people who are ancestors. And those people, once upon a time, many years after their best time, after their blossoming time, they established what was a very distant fort in the forest that was named Moscow. So essentially, those cities, those lands that ended up being the historical core of Russia—we’re talking about the city of Vladimir, of Suzdal, the very core of Russia—they were settlers. They were settled from, say, historical Kyiv to those places, because people were seeking land, new territories. So, simple truth is that what ended up being Ukraine gave birth to what ended up being Russia—not vice versa.

But at the same time I do give this information, I do provide the reader with these thoughts about the past and the common roots of Eastern Slavic peoples, Russians, Ukrainian people, Russians. But at the same time, I do not stick to this very nationalistic and very radical and simplified view that Ukraine is the only country that has the roots in this long past, and no one else does. I think that Russians and Ukrainians have a common origin, and also Belorussians.

But Ukraine—what we have right now in Ukraine—has the biggest share of these roots belonging to it. So that’s my position about this. And why I wrote about this book is that in Ukraine of today, a very important part of life is getting back to these roots, appreciating this. Stopping to think about us, ourselves and this country as the backyard of Russia—but a country that has its roots back through to the Middle Ages, to ancient times, that was the cradle of Christianity in this region of human civilization. That has very ancient and very beautiful and in many ways unique historical wonders in this land. A huge part of Ukrainian life right now in this national awakening is getting back to its roots, its ancient roots.

Frum: In more recent times, and by that I mean the past few hundred years, Ukraine has been entangled in very grim, bloody, complex relations with not only with the Russian neighbors, but with Poles and with its Jewish minority. And these swirl together in stories that are sometimes very powerfully resonant, but sometimes very ugly and bloody. And you talk about that a lot: about the Ukrainian-Polish duality, the Ukrainian-Jewish duality, as well as the Ukrainian-Russian duality.

Ponomarenko: I do talk about this. And my central point in this regard is that Ukraine is a very rich country. Ukraine is a very beautiful country. And because of this, it has a very tragic history. And Timothy Snyder, historian that is insanely popular in Ukraine, he was just brutally right to include Ukraine as part of the so-called bloodlands. Because Ukraine, with all its riches, with all its geographical position, it has always been a target for many empires that wanted to possess Ukraine and its riches. And its geographical positions, its human resources, its brains.

So in many ways, the Ukrainian history—and I realized it myself as I was preparing for this book—I realized that we are essentially as a people, Ukrainian people have been moving for many centuries in this closed circle of trying to get independence and its own nationhood, and losing it again. And becoming a powerhouse for new empires and a donor of resources for new wars, new empires. Such as the Russian Empire was in many, many ways built on the conquest and possession of Ukrainian riches. Same goes about Stalin’s USSR. Hitler wanted Ukraine badly as part of his Lebensraum, because Ukraine is a very fertile land. It’s a very pleasant land to be on.

Ukraine is a part of human civilization where it’s really good to be a master in. You have a really rich empire if you have Ukraine. And this moving on this vicious circle of history, it always comes with insane blood, with insane national intra-ethnic feuds, violence, social tensions. Such as with Jewish population, with Polish population. So my very central point of this book eventually is that it’s a land of tears because of many, many wars; many, many tragedies. Some of the worst tragedies of human history happened in Ukrainian lands between parties that wanted to possess this land. But also a land of hope, because we hope that with this independent Ukraine and in this war in which Ukraine may again lose its freedom and its independence, there is hope that at least at this time—for the first time in many, many centuries—we could break through this vicious circle, and upheld this democratic, free, strong Ukraine that would never be a powerhouse and a donor for new empires and new wars.

Frum: I grew up in Canada, which was the center of a lot of diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity. And I don’t want to make this too much of a generalization, but I would say, when I was young anyway, that diaspora Ukrainian intellectual activity tended very much to the reactionary side: ultra-nationalist and very defensive of Ukraine and all that it had done. And so there was a tendency to say, to think that the bloodshed between Ukrainians and Poles, it stretches back to the 1600s, but was very intense during the Second World War. The Ukrainians were innocent; the Poles were guilty. The crimes against the Jews, well, they didn’t happen, and if they happened, the Jews deserved them.

And what has been striking about Ukrainian culture since 1991, and especially since 2014, and very much in your book, is the ability to tell a story of national pride while integrating national shames, without letting those shames detract from the future. And understanding that Ukrainians and Poles had a very tangled history. Ukrainians and Jews have had a tangled history, a lot of suffering. And yet something new and modern and liberal can emerge from this by recognizing the full truth and all the components of the Ukrainian national identity.

Ponomarenko: In my book, I specifically stay away from radical views or idealizing the history of this land. I state it very clear, and I think it’s a very just thing to say that Ukraine is a very complicated place. It’s a very brutal place in history. It’s a very terrible place in terms of all the blood that was shed for this country, and in this country. It’s one of the crossroads of this world where many people wanted to be a master in.

So I specifically say that when it comes to, for instance, the killings of Jewish and pogroms. For instance, we have a national hero of Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who led the greatest and the biggest rebellion of Ukrainian Cossacks since the 17th century, that almost led to the installment of the Ukrainian nationhood within the old Polish crown. And right now, especially in the last 100 years, Bohdan Khmelnytsky is idolized. It’s his own monuments. He’s on Ukrainian money. He’s the symbol of the founding fathers of the Ukrainian nationhood. But at the same time, one of the darkest pages of Ukrainian history is the way the Jewish population was treated during those uprisings, because the uprising of Ukrainian Cossacks against the Polish crown in the 17th century was the outburst of anger of extremely poor people. Of extremely oppressed people in terms of their religion, in terms of their money. It was an outburst of anger against the very system they were living in, with nobles being absolutely unpunishable with religious oppression. So it naturally fell upon Jews, as part of this system that was also unjust toward them in this regard.

Frum: Because the Polish nobles were far away, and the Jews were neighbors right next door.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; it was a very complicated social system. In which Jews, for instance, when it comes to 17th century—in that period, for instance—Jews were laid upon with duties like taxes, or they were the only ones that are allowed to with banking operations. And who loves people who you owe money, or who collect taxes, or who run bars, for instance. Who have monopoly on producing drinks, for instance.

So it was about a lot of hatred, about a lot of injustices. And try to explain to a very angry peasant—who has been robbed, who has been poor, extremely destitute, who has barely any education when it comes to basic things—when emotions go through, try to explain to these people, to this angry crowd ready to take up arms and commit massacres, that, for instance, Jews are not guilty of this; that they are surviving also on the last wheels.

So in general, Ukrainian history is full of such things. And in my book, I do not represent any radical. I do not provide any justifications. I explain how it happened, what happened. But I do not idealize. And I simply speak on behalf of very average, young Ukrainian that’s thinking about this country with no nationalism, with no radical points, with no attempts to idealize Ukraine and its history.

Ukraine is a complicated place. And what’s important also about this country, especially when it comes to the Ukraine of today, is that I see it with my own eyes from everyday life in my country. That we have overcome a lot of those things that drag us down from the past. We mentioned Ukrainian-Jewish relations. Despite all this past, despite such a bloody history of pogroms dating back to 20th century, what we have right now in Ukraine is that the chief rabbi of Ukraine is a hard advocate for Ukrainian victory, and he spends basically entire his life advocating support for Ukraine. His son, his adopted son, died fighting for Ukraine as a volunteer in the armed forces. When it comes to Islam, for instance, we have a chief mufti, former chief mufti of Ukraine—which is the top priest, or top clergyman, for Ukrainian Muslim community—he resigned from his position, and he’s a battlefield medic with the Ukrainian military.

We have Jewish presidents as of now.

Frum: Well, I sometimes think that it’s going to be fascinating to explain when my grandchildren or great-grandchildren visit Kyiv that the biggest statue in Kyiv is Khmelnytsky—who ranks along with, just behind Hitler as one of the greatest villains in Jewish history—and the second-biggest statue in Kyiv will be of President Zelensky.

Ponomarenko: I’m not sure about this, because Ukrainians tend to be highly critical towards the leader that they have as of the moment.

Frum: While he’s alive, sure.

Ponomarenko: Yeah; as of the moment, yeah. One of the things that really saved this country and continues moving forward is that we have a tendency of being extremely critical towards any sort of authority. So, Zelensky might, could have been like a war hero. He could be a president that was elected by a landslide. But it always happens that Ukrainians fall in love very quickly, and they get dissatisfied and extremely critical very quickly, even quicker than that.

But when it comes to—you have a very good point about monuments. I take a walk in downtown Kyiv, and I see a monument for Sholem Aleichem, the great Jewish writer. We have a museum for him in downtown Kyiv. We have—what’s the word for this? It’s the placard with the commemorative placard, commemorative plate. Toward, yeah—that marks the building where Golda Meir was born and raised in Kyiv. She’s a girl from Kyiv.

At the same time, we have a lot of Jewish places. There are Middle Eastern cuisine restaurants, and what’s important in this is that they often share the same street with Muslim places, with halal places for Muslims. One of the most important and popular Kyiv restaurants is, it’s called Musafir. It’s Crimean Tatar food. Like a Muslim place that gives you, essentially, gives you a vibe of a Muslim homecoming and Muslim cuisine. And I can give you a lot of examples of such things in a predominantly Slavic country with Christian churches and all those things.

But what I really appreciate about my country—and I really feel about this—is that I see that in this country, with its feeling of purpose that unites confessions, religions, many ethnicities. I really like this, about my Ukraine.

Frum: Well, let me ask you about another painful historical passage. And there’s been, especially in very recent weeks, an attempt to stoke Polish-Ukrainian animosities that date back to the events of the Second World War. Poland and Ukraine had claims on overlapping territories. The ebb and tide of wars sometimes favoring the Poles, sometimes favoring the Ukrainians. Led to terrible massacres. And Poland has been an indispensable ally of Ukraine in its struggle for freedom, but there have been attempts politically to sort of trigger, push those painful memories of the past in a way that would sever the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. How does that play in Ukrainian culture? How does that play in Ukrainian politics?

Ponomarenko: I too confidently can say that something that could be called “a Polish question” is absolutely absent in Ukrainian politics. Nobody talks about Poland. Nobody talks about the complicated Polish-Ukrainian history. Average Ukrainian—especially when it comes to those who are beside arguments on Twitter with Poles—average Ukrainian thinks about Poland as a neighboring country that has not wasted any time, just like we did, with its independence. That has gained enormous successes as an economy. Essentially the example of what could have happened to Ukraine if we haven’t wasted our time.

Frum: I mean, both of you—Poland in 1989 was almost as poor as Ukraine was in 1989.

Ponomarenko: Yeah, if not poorer. If not poorer, yes.

Frum: And Poland made a series of very bold free-market choices, ripped the bandage off, took a real—I was there in 1990. It was tough. But Poland has had this remarkable growth. The free-market policies have paid off, and Poland is now on its way to becoming a fully developed—if it’s not already a fully developed country, it’s minutes away from being a fully developed country.

Illia Ponomarenko: It’s very cool. It’s very impressive in this regard. And my entire point in my book, and in my entire presence on social media and everywhere, is that I’m trying to talk like an average, simple Ukrainian, that has no extreme political views of this. An average, simple Ukrainian says that Poland is a cool place. It’s very impressive that they have achieved this. Two million, if my memory doesn’t fail me, two million Ukrainians live in Poland and work in Poland. And we spend a lot of time using Polish airports, in general using Poland as a hub. Not only for, you know, the military supplies and everything, but also for substituting things that are not available to us because of the wartime.

Most of the people go—if we need airports, most of the people in Ukraine still go to Poland to cross the border and to get to the airports and travel for anything. So, it’s really sad to see that from the Polish side, we see that this complicated history between Ukrainians and Poles often gets used as a political tool within Poland.

I definitely can say that nobody talks about this in Ukraine, because we have far more pressing problems on our heads, to be honest. But I must say that it’s really sad, and it was pretty shocking to me to see that, beyond those fiery rhetorics and playing politics about this, we have pretty material things happening. Like continuing and shocking attacks on Ukrainians in Poland. That’s happening. They are popping up in the news, way too frequent, which is kind of shocking to disregard.

Frum: One thing that you very eloquently write about is something that Ukrainians, as you say, do feel strongly about, and that is the flag of the European Union. And you have this very poetic passage in the book where you describe as Ukraine was negotiating a kind of auxiliary membership in the European Union, just before the Maidan in 2014, that the European flags began to appear. And I think in most of Europe, the European flag is associated with regulations on fishing, food safety, air [control]—you know, what kind of coolant you can use in a refrigerator. A series of boring bureaucratic technicalities to make sure that goods and services can move across borders.

It isn’t any kind of inspirational idea anymore. It’s just a bunch of rules. But you describe very movingly how, for Ukrainians, it became an idea.

Ponomarenko: We have a pretty long history of this European Union flag of being a symbol. It dates back to 20, 25 years ago, when Ukrainians started massively thinking about going west, essentially turning away from Russia.

Essentially it’s about the emergence of my generation, of the people in their 20s and 30s. It is in our childhood that we started getting things like democracy from school. Human rights; the rule of law. We started understanding this as something very normal—something very good to aspire to.

So I’m not sure if I had this in my book. But there was, in early days of Euromaidan revolution, it was late 2013 in Mariupol. We had a little rally in support of signing this association agreement with the European Union, and I remember myself leading a small crowd of my friends, students, and also a couple of lecturers. And all holding this European flag and moving through Mariupol avenues.

It has always been a symbol of hope. It has always been a symbol of a generation that is pretty different from our parents. It has always been a symbol of us really wanting to be in this place where our biggest problem is regulations—you know, the temperature in our ACs, boring laws, these arguments over percentages. It’s just an idealized, very romantic dream of Ukraine overcoming a lot of things that drag us behind. And a romantic dream of Ukraine as a nation, as a state. Just getting closer to who we were. Very modern, very Westernized in our mindsets, in our tastes and everything. A generation that is really not different from any generation right now in the West.

But we had a state that was incompatible with our values, especially when it comes to hyper-corruption during the [Viktor] Yanukovych presidency. And this state, the mafia state, under the wing of Moscow, has become so incompatible with our values—with our aspirations for the future, with the way we think about our country, the way we want it to be—that it essentially led to a revolution. And the symbol was moving towards that place where people argue about ACs as their biggest problems, instead of us.

Frum: It’s now a dozen years since that revolution in the Maidan. Historians write about the past. I don’t know if you consider yourself an historian. I don’t know whether your next book will also be in history, but sometimes they’re tempted to make a comment about the future. Can you look out and say—if your future self could write one more chapter of the book, what would that chapter look like?

Ponomarenko: If I could, I would want to give an afterword in the history, in the book, about the way it came to be for Ukraine after the end. Because I end not on a strictly positive mode. My book’s ending is about hope. It brings a reader to a moment when the full-scale Russian invasion starts in 2022. And I’m not promising myself and the reader a victory. I’m not promising myself, and the victory a success. I’m not saying that Ukraine will win. I’m talking about hope, and essentially the last word in my book is hope. The hope that we will prevail—we will break through this vicious circle that we have been discussing right now.

And one of the images that I had in my head, and I expressed in my final words in this book, is this idea of Christmastime. Christmas Eve in Kyiv in the evening, in the frosty night, in the first Christmas after the war. Kyiv is one of the most beautiful places to celebrate Christmas in terms of the spirit, the spirit of Christmas here.

And I would want to write an afterword of how this first Christmas after the war in free, independent Ukraine would take place. Because it’s just like the European Union flag—it’s a dream. It’s something to aspire to. It’s something to hope for. And it would mean that our hope came true: of saving this country and giving it, handing it over to our children.

Christmas in postwar Kyiv, in independent Ukraine—that would be my afterword, I’d say. Yeah.

Frum: And Christmas is so symbolic for Ukrainians, because even the date on which you celebrate Christmas expresses your vision of the kind of future you want for your country. Whether that is December 25th, as would be celebrated to your west, or a different date, as would be celebrated to your east.

Ponomarenko: We officially switched to having two Christmases. Officially in Ukraine, there are two Christmases, so it serves both traditions. [December] 25th or January 7th. And, of course, it’s part of the de-Russification, the getting out of the Russian-style traditions. With—it goes along with the disgust with everything that’s represented by Russian church, Russian traditions, Russian way of life and everything. And I truly believed that this thing with Christmas on December 25th was more of a formal thing, or more about the youth, you know? Westernized youth; we want the same Christmas, just like on Home Alone day. It’s more about us being too westernized as distant from, you know, most of the population that sticks to the older traditions.

But at the same time, with every year of this war, I see it with every Christmas. That really, far more people that I expected do celebrate and switch to Christmas on December.

Frum: Whatever day it is, I wish you that future Christmas in peace and freedom. I hope it comes soon. Illia, thank you so much for joining me. The book is The Land of Tears and Hope. It will be published in November by Bloomsbury. As you said, it was written originally in English. It’s a very moving book. It is very cinematic, very dramatic. And it was both exciting and very touching to read, and I was grateful to have a chance to read an early edition of it. Illia Ponomarenko, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show.

Ponomarenko: Thank you. Thank you very much for this.

Frum: Bye-bye.

[Music]

Thanks so much to Illia Ponomarenko for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is not a book I have read. It’s not a book I can read, because it’s a book that doesn’t exist yet, but that I want to read. Let me explain.

Our modern world has been shaped by slavery and the traffic in slaves. Illia makes the point, in his remarkable history of Ukraine, that Ukraine was a target of slaving through much of the past 500 years.

That point is made briefly in Illia’s book, because there’s not a lot that is known about that compared to the other great slave traffics that made the modern world.

Imagine a map of Western Eurasia. Draw a line from the Ural Mountains that separates European from Asian-Russia through the Middle East, putting Iran on our one side of the line and India and what’s now Pakistan on the other side of the line, around Africa and into the Western world, North America, South America. In that world, in the past 500 years, there have been four massive, horrifying slave traffics.

By far the best known is the one that took African slaves across the Atlantic to the New World. That slave traffic is very well documented. If you want to learn more about it, you can go to the website slavevoyages.org, and there you will find a database of every known slave ship that crossed the Atlantic over the past 500 years. About 36,000 ships’ voyages, in all, that moved about 12 million people. Twelve and a half million people got on the boats; about 10 and a half million people got off the boats. Of those people—the 10 and a half million who got off the boats in the New World—about 46 percent went to Brazil, the rest to elsewhere in Spanish America. About three and a half percent went to what became the United States. Their fates, their destinies, their horrors, their sufferings: Those are as well studied as any topic in modern history.

But there are three other slave traffics that are not nearly so well known. Maybe the runner-up in terms of well-knownness is the slave traffic that took people from Italy, southern France, southern Spain, as far away as England and even Iceland, into the western part of North Africa, to what’s now Algeria and Tunisia, the Barbary Coast. That also is reasonably well studied, because the languages of the people who were enslaved are well known to Western scholars. They spoke French; they spoke Spanish; they spoke Italian. And the slavers spoke Arabic, a language that is also quite well known to Western scholarship. And there’s an estimate that in the 200 years or 250 years from 1530 to 1780, about a million people were taken from France, Italy, Spain—as far away as England, Ireland, and Iceland—into western North Africa.

The two other traffics, however, are not nearly so well known. The traffic from Africa east into the Middle East. That’s not so well known. And the traffic from what is now Ukraine, Poland, and Russia into what is now the Middle East, into what was then the Ottoman Empire, is also very poorly studied. And that last is the book that I want to read about.

The estimate that scholars have—and it’s a very rough estimate—is that over the past 500 years, about 2 million people were taken from what is now Poland, Ukraine, Western Russia, into what is now the Middle East, into the Ottoman Empire. The records on this are very poor, and they are in languages that are not well understood in the West. They’re in the Ottoman archives. They’re in other small languages of Eastern Europe. And of course, Eastern Europe has been subject to all kinds of horrifying violence in recent times that destroyed archives, that destroyed archeological sites. So it’s kind of a mysterious topic.

And the topic has also been distorted because, for much of the past 100 years, Eastern European history was channeled through institutions dominated by the former Soviet Union, which propounded a heavy-handed Marxism that—for reasons of its own ideological internal necessity—didn’t take seriously the slave operations. Of what affected the foreign slave operations. They’re very interested in serfdom: the people who were held to the land inside Eastern Europe. But not so interested in the people who were removed from it.

But as Ukraine and Poland and these other countries find their own destiny, this is a topic I think we need to know better. Slavery is violence. Slavery is inflicted by people more capable of organized violence on people less capable of organized violence. People and nations. What does it do to a nation to be on the receiving end of organized violence, foreign-organized violence, century after century in the way that Eastern Europeans were? How does it change them? How does it shape their national sense of themselves? That’s a subject I’d like to know a lot more about, and there isn’t the literature to tell me about it. But as Ukraine and Poland and the others find their place in the modern world, I think it’s a story that we need to know more about, and that I’d like to read more about.

So if there’s anyone out there who has fluency or familiarity or even competence in Ottoman archives—Turkish language, Polish language, Ukrainian language, Russian language—here’s an assignment for you: Help us understand what it did to Eastern Europe to be on the receiving end of this organized violence for so many hundreds of years. And how that experience feeds, if it does feed, into the rising national consciousness of Eastern Europe today.

That’s it for this week’s edition of The David Frum Show. Thanks so much for joining me. I hope you will share this program on whatever platforms are available to you. Remember, as always, the best way to support the work of this program, if you’re minded to do that, is by subscribing to The Atlantic. Please consider that. See you soon here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.

Home Depot, Instagram, Fidelity, and TikTok are just a few of the companies that have recently ordered their employees back to the office five days a week, part of a broader shift toward stricter return-to-office mandates. Such policies cut down on working from home, yet they don’t always cut down on remote work. Many employees now commute to the office only to spend each day on video calls with colleagues who are elsewhere, or even down the hall. They’re in the office but still working remotely.

We are two economists who have spent years studying how remote work shapes learning, productivity, happiness, and career progression. We have been struck by how often people picture the alternative to working from home as an office where nearly everyone is together. The modern office looks very different from that ideal. Today, the alternative to working from home is often working in a sea of mostly empty cubicles.

In a September survey of 1,835 college-educated American workers, we found that, on their most recent day at the office, more than 70 percent of respondents had at least one member of their team who was not in the building with them. As a result, roughly half of respondents had no fully in-person meetings. And more than a third had exclusively online meetings because their teams moved meetings entirely online whenever anyone was remote. For these workers, the commute to the office buys little more than a different background on their video calls.

The commute is costly. The typical American spends 54 minutes getting to and from work in a day, which they rank among their most hated activities. Yet when colleagues are actually together, this commute can be worth it.

[Stephanie H. Murray: “Commuting is bad”—particularly for women]

In-person connection often unlocks the best parts of work. It sparks creativity; in an experiment published in Nature, pairs who brainstormed in person came up with about 14 percent more ideas than those brainstorming online. Face-to-face work also boosts mentorship, increasing the comments that people receive on their work by about 20 percent. Perhaps as a result, people consistently do better work when face-to-face with their colleagues and rate this work as more meaningful than work done alone.

But these benefits are fragile. In our research, we find that having just one distant teammate weakens the connections among those sitting side by side, as team meetings move partially or fully online. Thus, any exposure to remote work in the office eliminates many benefits of the commute.

Working remotely from the office has become so common because we have yet to shed two remnants of the pandemic era. The first is sprawl: Teams stretch across multiple locations. A typical team might have, say, a few employees who work in the same city, a couple who are fully remote, and one who works in a satellite office far away. So even if every teammate were in their office, the team meeting would still be largely online.

During the lockdown, distance didn’t matter for jobs that could be done over Zoom. Many companies hired people far from their team’s central hub, and allowed existing employees to move farther away. In our analysis of data from one Fortune 500 firm, about 60 percent of corporate employees had at least one distant teammate after the pandemic, up from 20 percent before. Among small businesses, the distance between employees and the central office nearly tripled from 2019 to 2023, driven in large part by employees who live too far away to regularly commute to work.

Many companies have simply accepted this geographic sprawl. If a team is already dispersed, managers may see nothing wrong with hiring a candidate in Detroit even though the team’s center of gravity is in Denver. Our analysis finds that job posts among Fortune 500 firms now list multiple possible office locations five times as often as a decade ago.

Bad habits are another remnant of the lockdown. During COVID, many workers became accustomed to focusing on their own to-do list and churning through more tasks in less time. Now many still view in-office interactions with colleagues as distractions from their work. As they see it, going to the office means they spend time commuting just to lose more time chatting. That view misses the potential for these conversations to spark new ideas, propel others’ growth, and improve the quality of their work.

Consequently, many stay home as much as they can get away with. Our analysis finds that the typical worker commutes in one fewer day than companies require: Ask for four and you get three. This might not sound like such a big deal, but on any given day, someone is likely staying home and causing their on-site peers to be on Zoom calls.

When one person fails to show up, the office has less of a draw for the rest of the team. This is especially true for managers; if the leader stays home, the rank and file often follow suit. Pretty quickly, the people who initially followed the rules start to skip the commute too.

[Read: Revenge of the office]

Even when people do go into the office, many send out Teams or Zoom links rather than moseying over to a conference room. On their most recent day in the office, 52 percent of workers with meetings had at least one held online even though all the participants were in the same building. Skipping the schlep to the conference room can feel efficient. But this convenience cuts out the small moments that create deeper connections: the chat before the meeting starts, the debrief on the way back to your desk.

Rolling back this trend of working remotely from the office feels Sisyphean. Reuniting colleagues who have scattered to the four corners of a Zoom screen seems impossible. And showing up in a conference room feels pointless when the other participants are a few doors down on their laptop. Mandating more time in an office has neither ensured that colleagues go to the same office nor that they meet in person rather than online. The result is that bringing people back to the office often relocates—rather than reduces—remote work.

But an isolated workday doesn’t have to be the new norm. Companies could regather teams, by paying remote workers to relocate and refocusing hiring on each team’s central hub. When recongregating is impractical, they could hold regular off-sites. Companies could revamp performance reviews to reward the things that happen best in person: the creative breakthroughs, the mentorship moments. That way, conversations with co-workers would feel like essential parts of work rather than distractions from the solo tasks that people could do faster from home. Not every workday has to be in the office. But ensuring that in-office days are in-person days could make work feel more human.

Since September, giant snails have put one Florida neighborhood on high alert. No one in a roughly 300-acre zone in the city of Hialeah, just outside of Miami, is allowed to move yard waste or even a single brick into or out of the neighborhood without explicit permission from state authorities. Teams of scientists patrol the area in search of giant African land snails, enormous mollusks with tiny teeth, a foot bigger than a 5-year-old’s, and the tendency to spread the rat-lungworm parasite, which is exactly as delightful as it sounds.

The snails, which actually grow to about eight inches in length, but can stretch—if nothing else, for headline-writing purposes—to nine inches, have worried Florida authorities since 1969. Since then, the state has spent millions of dollars fending off three infestations. One such operation took a decade to complete. Now, whenever a snail is found, inspectors from the state agriculture department’s Division of Plant Industry start patrolling. They set out bait and drench hatchling-harboring soil with anti-mollusk poison. Then they distribute mug shots to the public. (That step might seem unnecessary, given that we are talking about snails the size of chipmunks, but the experts I talked with all emphasized the importance of anti-snail awareness.) An area is considered clean only after it has been monitored and treated for three years.

This time, the problem “seems to be limited to just one city block,” Paul Skelley, a main architect of the agriculture department’s crackdown, told me. But the response is full-bore. “We are serious about this snail in Florida,” Skelley said. “When you find these cancers, you don’t want to let them fester. You need to cut them out.”

Skelley was part of the response to the last big infestation, which lasted from 2011 until 2021, and he sounds somewhat keyed up on the phone. Giant African land snails (also known as GALS) really are giant, and meaty and sweaty-looking, like a boxer’s fist just out of the glove. “When you see the whole body out moving around,” he said, “it’s unbelievable.”   

Earlier this century, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared these snails one of the worst invasive species on Earth. GALS are prevalent across a thick belt of the globe, centered on the equator, and their slime trail is widening: After expanding their range from East Africa through Madagascar, India, and the Pacific Islands, they have lately been spotted in Argentina, Beijing, and, somehow, the Italian Alps. And as climate change makes more of the world warmer and wetter, they could conquer even more territory. Skelley considers his state a firewall. If the snails spread through Florida, “they could get quite a distance up the East Coast and inland” by hitching rides with humans, he said.

Once they arrive somewhere new, GALS quickly multiply, and then make trouble just by being themselves. They love eating—beans, melons, ornamental flowers, shrubs—which is why they’re a hazard to agriculture. When cars run them over, the snails’ pointy shells can puncture tires. In search of minerals needed to grow their shells, they target stucco, eating our houses to build theirs.

All of this can happen at a scale difficult to imagine. In the past, in Hawaii, brigades of the snails have blocked roads after rainstorms, eventually creating “a sort of mush of snail bodies and slime,” Robert Cowie, a snail researcher at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, told me. “Cars were skidding.” In Keralam, in India, where recent monsoons created the wet, humid conditions in which the snails thrive, teachers clear them daily from schools and playgrounds. In Florida, during the most recent big outbreak, Skelley’s team would purge a yard the size of a couple of parking spaces and end up pulling out maybe 2,000 snails.

On their own, the African snails move as one would expect, but Skelley jokes that they can go up to 70 miles an hour—“as fast as humans can move them.” And humans—whether they’re taken in by the snails’ charisma and impressive bulk, or just unaware of the threat—like to move them. Florida’s first brush with GALS began in 1966, when a young boy brought three home from a vacation in Hawaii. His grandmother found them, the story goes, and put them out in her North Miami garden. By 1973, those three snails had become 18,000, which the state located and destroyed.

Harboring the snails anywhere in the United States without a permit is illegal. Still, federal, state, and customs inspectors continue to confiscate GALS from pet owners and breeders, from schools, and from the occasional religious practitioner who (allegedly) drinks their mucus. So far, Florida’s giant-snail infestations have all been in cities and suburbs, far from farmland or protected ecosystems. But “we’re scared to death that it’s going to be found in the Everglades, some national park,” Skelley said. “That’s the worst case.”

Brazil is already there. An agronomist brought the snails into the country in 1988, most likely from Indonesia, in an ill-advised attempt to create a market for giant escargot. He sold snail-rearing kits to hundreds of hopefuls, who raised GALS in their backyards. “He had a very good intention,” Silvana Thiengo, the head of the Malacology Laboratory at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro, told me. But unfortunately, “Brazilians are not used to eating escargot.”

The snails were soon discarded on streets and in rivers. Now Thiengo receives snail specimens from around the country, and most of them are giants. They’re in urban gardens, tempting dogs to play with them; in croplands, eating bananas, beans, and soy; in the middle of the Amazon and in the country’s massive tropical wetland, the Pantanal. She and her colleagues worry about how large numbers of giant snails might compete with native species “for food, for space, for everything.”

A particular worry is the rat-lungworm parasite, which can infect humans, pets, livestock, and wildlife. In humans, the worms burrow into the brain and can cause coma and death. Although the disease is quite rare, Thiengo and her colleagues have found that human cases of it have been ticking up in Brazil. But at this point, the snails are so widespread in the country that little can be done about them. Although Brazil once ran national anti-snail campaigns, all have been phased out.

In some cases, trying to get rid of these snails has caused more problems than it has solved—and again, not through any fault of the snails. In Hawaii, where GALS were originally introduced by a gardener who thought they would make a fun yard ornament, the Hawaii Department of Agriculture tried to control the giant-snail population by introducing more than a dozen new carnivorous snails to the islands in the 1950s. One of the new species, the rosy wolf snail, developed a taste for Hawaii’s hundreds of species of endemic land snails, or kāhuli. It ate so many that more than half of those species are now extinct.

Still, once GALS have settled into the places they’ve invaded, something mysterious tends to happen, Cowie, the University of Hawaii snail researcher, told me. Their numbers die down. And the snails themselves get smaller. Hawaii’s snails are now at “a handleable level,” he said. “Maybe not acceptable, but you can deal with it.” The state has given up fighting them.

Cowie hasn’t. After it rains, he goes out into his garden with a pair of tongs and a garbage bag. He picks them up, giant out-of-place snail after giant out-of-place snail. He can’t stop the forces—globalization, ignorance, human folly—that ferry snails from place to place. But he can stop the snails in his own yard. He considers it his responsibility to move them one last time—into his freezer, and then into the trash.

Sometimes, disasters can be clarifying. Not so long ago, the Houthi warriors who have ruled northern Yemen for the past decade seemed more like a nuisance to Saudi Arabia than a threat. The Saudi leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was busy glad-handing with tech bros and AI executives, talking up the kingdom’s future as a tourism destination. Then, on Saturday, a Houthi missile struck two terminals in the Saudi capital’s main airport, sending fire and smoke through the halls and causing ceiling tiles to collapse on terrified passengers. Pilgrims making their way to Mecca rolled their suitcases through trails of blood.

Although Houthi strikes are not new in the kingdom, Saturday’s attack on the Riyadh airport, which killed 13 people and wounded hundreds, signaled something different. The Houthis apparently have the ability to evade the kingdom’s dwindling supply of missile interceptors by launching coordinated waves of drone swarms, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles. Saudi Arabia is now a country where the ruler must shuttle among palaces equipped with underground bunkers.

“Total disbelief,” a friend in Riyadh told me. “I don’t think people thought this could happen to them.”

Saudi Arabia cannot realize the crown prince’s dreams of economic and social transformation—or even continue luring foreign investors—if this kind of mayhem becomes routine. But the Houthis have become ever more intransigent, and the limits of Saudi Arabia’s ability to contain them ever more apparent.

[Read: The Houthis have a rich sense of irony and timing]

“It is starting to look as if there is no diplomatic third way,” Adam Baron, a fellow at the New America Foundation, in Washington, who specializes in Yemen and the Gulf, told me. “The Saudis will have to try to push the Houthis back militarily or accept a settlement that essentially leaves the Houthis in control of Yemen.”

Both of those possibilities are risky. Experience has taught the Saudis that only a sustained ground offensive will make real headway against the Houthis, who have survived multiple bombing campaigns over the past decade, including last year’s seven-week air war by the United States. But the Saudis don’t have a ground force equal to the task. They depend on the perennially divided armed forces commanded by Yemen’s weak, internationally recognized government, based in the country’s south.

Last month, the Houthis captured the area around the Bab al-Mandab Strait, a crucial conduit for global oil supplies, and the Saudis responded by coordinating a new offensive to recapture the lost terrain. That effort has had mixed results; the Saudi-backed forces retook some ground, but the Houthis have unleashed a new level of firepower at the kingdom, including the strikes on the Riyadh airport.

The Saudis hope to build a larger military coalition against the Houthis and have held talks with the leaders of Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey. But those countries have made clear that their support goes only so far. They might be willing to help defend the kingdom’s borders in the event of a major ground incursion (one of the nightmare scenarios being discussed in Riyadh), but they will not become involved in a war to recapture northern Yemen.

This reluctance is rooted in history: The Turks suffered legendary defeats in Yemen in the 17th and 19th centuries. Egypt got drawn into a civil war in Yemen in the 1960s—a draining conflict that has been called Egypt’s Vietnam.

The Saudis could instead seek some kind of settlement with the Houthis in exchange for peace, but this seems equally elusive. The United Nations has been mediating talks in Yemen since 2012. It helped negotiate a 2022 truce that ended a seven-year war between the Houthis and a Saudi-led coalition. But the Houthis, who adhere to a revolutionary ideology rooted in an offshoot of Shiite Islam, have grown steadily more aggressive in their demands.

Although the Houthis are fiercely independent and have their own ideas about ruling Yemen, their strategy appears to be carefully coordinated with Iran, which is still locked in its own struggle against Israel and the United States. Tehran has helped train and arm the Houthis over the years, and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps advisers are widely said to be taking part in the current fighting. The Houthis appear to be using fiber optics supplied by China to build a far more sophisticated drone force. All of this makes any kind of reliable settlement with the Houthis more difficult to achieve.

[Graeme Wood: The only thing the Houthis have done successfully]

“If you listen to the speeches by Houthi leaders, they basically say there is no such thing as Saudi Arabia—they see the kingdom as totally illegitimate and want to see it fall,” Bernard Haykel, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Princeton University and an expert on Saudi Arabia and Yemen, told me. “And unfortunately, they are able to draw on a deep well of resentment against the role that Saudi Arabia has historically played in Yemen.”

In recent months, the Houthis have stepped up their demands, insisting that the Saudis withdraw all support from the internationally recognized government in the south, lift all sanctions, and pay reparations. But they have a long-standing habit of moving the goalposts in negotiations.

“What would it take to placate the Houthis?” Haykel asked. “Can you live with them?”

Many Saudis fear the answer is no. But the alternative is a war that could turn the whole country into a battleground.

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Driving through Arizona on a Saturday morning, I saw a line of cars nearly a mile long stopped along a high-desert highway. I slowed, thinking there had been an accident. Then I realized that all of those people were waiting in line for food. 

Weeks later, I went back to the area and met Kandy Soto. The retired administrative aide and courtroom clerk had once been a regular donor to her local food bank. But when I met her last month, she was a recipient of other people’s generosity, preparing to fill a bag with groceries that her family could no longer afford. Soto told me that the cost of canned vegetables seemed to creep up nearly every time she went to the store. After checking prices against her budget, she might buy some cheap fish fillets or canned meats, but beef or poultry were out of the question. Sometimes she left empty-handed. 

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. When she voted for Donald Trump two years ago, Soto counted on him to fulfill his promise to “make America affordable again” following painful spikes in inflation under Joe Biden. She wonders what kind of life Trump and his family are living, because she sees no signs of the roaring economy he talks about. Her own family has had a run of bad luck: Her husband had to stop working after injuring his neck and requiring surgery. Then they learned that their modest retirement income made them ineligible for public assistance. All the while, prices for gas and groceries climbed. The situation grew so dire a few months ago that the 66-year-old Soto had to set aside any feelings of shame and drive 20 miles to the Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott. “It takes an older person a lot of giving up to do something like this,” she said. 

In the surrounding county, Yavapai, Trump took 66 percent of the vote on his way to winning Arizona two years ago. In 2016, he staged a final campaign rally here before Election Day. Trump is counting on the region to help blunt what polls forecast to be a Democratic rout next month, and will hold a rally Wednesday in Bullhead City, about 200 miles to the northwest. But the president’s grip appears to be loosening, and the state of the economy explains why. 

The toll of rising prices has been especially acute in Arizona. About half a million residents have lost their food stamps since the summer of 2025 because of changes in Trump’s signature tax legislation, which limits assistance and penalizes states that make mistakes when they grant benefits. The law is still being phased in, and Arizona was among the first states to enact the changes. 

Nearly everyone I spoke with in the area last month, including Trump supporters, said they feel worse off than they were before the 2024 election. Unemployment in Arizona stood at 3.8 percent in August 2024; this August it was 4.9 percent, according to federal data. Many people I spoke with in the county said they are working, but their paychecks haven’t kept up with increased prices for gas and food. Almost all told me they are angry about Trump’s decisions to start a war and spend hundreds of millions of dollars ornamenting a capital city they will never see. They were incredulous to hear him claim that their lives have improved with him in office. Many said they are also disillusioned with Congress and with both political parties. They lamented the corruption they see as endemic in the government and in large corporations, and denounced billionaires, whom they view as capitalizing on their pain. 

[Read: Trump voters are over it]

People told me they are anxious about many things: future employment opportunities, feeding their children healthy meals, keeping small businesses running, affording car repairs. Trump has said that “the American dream is back.” But not for the people I spoke with in Yavapai County.

Victoria Dombrowski has found a way to help her family in this economy: the barter system. 

She lost $800 a month in food stamps after state officials, who administer the program, took aggressive action to comply with new eligibility requirements mandated by the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Dombrowski, a stay-at-home mother of two young children, told me she had completed the renewal paperwork and had made it all the way to the end of the process, which included an interview with a caseworker about her financial situation. But even after waiting on hold for days and enlisting help from a nonprofit group, she couldn’t get through to staff at the Arizona Department of Economic Security. “And so I just gave up,” she said. I met Dombrowski at a dollar store, where she now shops because she can no longer afford Walmart. 

Dombrowski’s husband works at an auto-parts store, but his income isn’t enough to support the family. So she occasionally began picking up boxes of free food that were offered in the community. But more often than not, she said, the food was expired or the offerings were sugary desserts that didn’t give her kids the nutrition they needed. “My fridge is still empty,” she said. Dombrowski once prided herself on making her family hearty home-cooked food, such as meatloaf and potatoes. Since losing food aid, she has had little choice but to serve cheap microwavable meals. She and others have started bartering for services. For her son’s birthday this summer, she trimmed a dog’s nails; in exchange, a friend brought animals to her home for a petting-zoo-themed party. 

Across Arizona, food banks are seeing profound need. They served, on average, 626,881 people monthly in 2024; about 786,366 Arizonans have used a food bank each month this year, according to the Arizona Food Bank Network. Wages aren’t rising as fast as expenses, and more Arizonans continue to lose their food stamps due to changes from the tax bill.

The Community Cupboard Food Bank in Prescott recently received a call on behalf of 17 veterans in the community who had “no food, whatsoever,” Jim Phelps, the organization’s executive director, told me. Workers made an emergency haul one night, packing a Tesla with two loads of food to distribute. Ron Brannon was one of the people waiting for something to eat. Brannon, a tall and lanky disabled Army veteran, told me that if he worked really hard at it, he could stretch his Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits until the tenth of each month. His monthly total was recently cut to $60, and when his balance hits $0, “I just go without,” the 68-year-old said. Sam Riske, a 32-year-old former military police officer who wore her baby in a carrier as she waited in line for food delivered by the Community Cupboard, told me that she’s been trying since February to get answers from state officials about the status of her application for temporary cash assistance for low-income families. This summer, she said, her family lost about $780 in monthly food benefits because she didn’t keep up with her eligibility paperwork. To make ends meet, she has taken up dog sitting. Her partner has taken odd jobs. 

[Read: Public anger is rising]

Outside a popular carnicería in Prescott Valley where federal officials carried out immigration-enforcement operations this summer, a woman who declined to give me her full name out of fear of drawing attention to her situation complained of high food prices and a shortage of laborers that has squeezed her family’s roofing company. But all of that is the least of her concerns, she said as she loaded groceries in her car. Her husband was recently deported, and she’s just trying to make it through the day, running her household and managing employees. “It’s hard right now,” the 37-year-old said. She isn’t counting on anything to get better anytime soon. Inside of the meat shop, banda music blared. A manager politely asked me to leave, explaining that the immigration operations had made customers fearful. Business had been down since then, and she didn’t want the presence of a reporter to make it worse.

Many Republicans I talked with said they supported those immigration crackdowns, even though they brought pain and fear to many people in their community. Dawn Zimmerman, a cosmetologist who owns a studio in Mayer, Arizona, told me that Trump, whom she voted for in 2024, is “doing a lot.” But with out-of-control costs, she added, people are “freaking out.” Prices for hair products have exploded, she said, and her clients are now buying them for less at big-box retailers or online. Fewer people are coming to get their hair done. But she is reluctant to raise prices, because so many clients are older or on fixed incomes. Zimmerman didn’t vote in the primary election, she said, but does intend to vote in November. When I asked if she planned to support Republicans, she was noncommittal: “It’s hard right now because there’s a lot of—there’s more deceit.” I asked what she meant. She cited Trump’s tendency to offload blame for why people can’t see “how good the country is doing”—and how disconnected he seems from her pain. 

Sign up for Over/Under, a new newsletter on the latest in prediction markets, gambling, and the evolution of everyday risk.

Welcome to Over/Under, a newsletter on prediction markets, gambling, and the culture of risk in America. Platforms such as Kalshi and Polymarket are changing how people interact with modern life—politics, video games, movies, and even the weather. Sports gambling is booming. If you have a hunch, and an internet connection, you can bet on almost anything.

Even for those who don’t partake, this phenomenon is difficult to ignore. Athletes are signing multimillion-dollar sponsorship deals to expand their reach. Livestreamers spend hours playing slots and other online casino games while millions watch. News organizations (not ours!) are entering into corporate partnerships with top prediction markets. Last month, a titanic image of Sydney Sweeney appeared on a billboard in Times Square, coaxing viewers to log on and trade. And the betting itself is just a few taps away on our smartphones.

In some ways, this all feels reminiscent of the crypto boom I covered in the early 2020s, when a once-niche industry was repackaging itself for the mainstream, and opportunistic ecosystems were sprouting up all around it. Today, users are betting on things that would make at least some of the bookies of the past squirm: war, disease, and natural disasters. Politicians are betting on their own odds of being elected. A master sergeant in the Army allegedly deployed insider knowledge on Polymarket to profit from the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Federal prosecutors are just starting to crack down on the insider-trading problem—and the industry is still figuring out how it wants to respond.

You probably have questions. I know I have questions. In this newsletter, I hope to explore not just how betting works today, but also how the risks we take shape the society we live in.

The mythical story of the Buffalo Bills could be told like this: Their fans are crazy and live in the snow. They shovel this snow out of their stadium to help their godforsaken football team, which, until recently, was most famous for losing the Super Bowl four times in a row in the early 1990s. According to one theory, those failures fed into Timothy McVeigh’s derangement before he planned and executed the Oklahoma City bombing. The franchise was an utter disaster, for the most part, until the 2018 arrival of an otherworldly quarterback named Josh Allen, who has exhibited many heroics. But he has yet to bring his team to the Super Bowl.

Four of his playoff runs have ended with haunting losses to the quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The others were cut short in unromantic fashion—­most recently by one of the sloppier performances of Allen’s career, against the Denver Broncos.

From the outside, you might ask: “Can he really do it?” But in Buffalo, the words Josh Allen come out like “Good morning.” On a Sunday afternoon in September, I sat down in an ancient tavern near the Buffalo River to eat chicken wings and watch the Bills’ division rivals, the New England Patriots, play the Pittsburgh Steelers. An older man joined me and asked, unprompted, if I liked Josh Allen. “Who doesn’t?” I said. He revealed that he was wearing a Josh Allen shirt under his sweater, said that he would get another one for me out of his car, and then did.

Josh Allen is everywhere in Buffalo. He appears in murals and on billboards; road signs are doctored to feature his name and face. At the grocery store, you can buy Josh Allen Crunch Time cereal and cantaloupes grown on the Allen family’s farm, in Firebaugh, California. There is hardly a business in the city that does not possess at least one life-size cutout of the man. (Shortly after I left, an 11-story banner of him went up downtown.)

In a parking lot near the team’s brand-new Highmark Stadium, I chatted with Jenny Kless, a kind-eyed woman who tailgates out of a refurbished Volkswagen bus. When it came time to talk about Josh Allen, she put her hand over her heart. “What a beautiful person he is,” she said, and assured me that Bills fans believe he can do anything. “I’m gonna spell that for you: B-I-L-L-I-E-V-E.”

I found Andy Dikens and Gary Thomas tailgating by a Tesla Cybertruck. They told me they’d been following the team since the ’80s and now had the same opinion on Josh Allen, which they expressed in tandem:

Dikens: He’s a stud.
Thomas: He’s the best player in the league.
Dikens: Best player in the league by far.
Thomas: Definitely a stud, I agree.

Leo Roth, a longtime sports columnist for the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, about 60 miles east, told me that Allen is the best player Buffalo has ever had, and claimed that even Jim Kelly, the first-ballot Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Bills to those four consecutive Super Bowls, would agree. (When I emailed Kelly to confirm, he answered, “Yes, I’m not scared to admit that.”) As many sports people see it, Roth said, Allen may be the team’s best, last hope of redemption. “If you can’t win it with this guy,” they say, “you probably never will.”

To saddle one man with the hopes and dreams of an entire city is a heady gamble with, well, the hopes and dreams of an entire city. But Buffalo’s circumstances may inspire a little shooting-for-the-moon. It’s a highly segregated, economically stagnant, postindustrial city that has been struggling for decades. Buffalo has a fascinating history and many great qualities; it would be unfair and inaccurate to say the people there have nothing but football. Yet football plainly matters far more to its modern-day sense of self than anything else.

Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University who has lived in the area for 30 years, was the first person I spoke with who directly acknowledged the risks involved in belief. “I suppose I look at Josh Allen like I would look at an economy that was based on one agricultural product,” he said. In that situation, you have to pray.

The Bills’ new, $2 billion stadium, a gigantic silver spaceship plopped among converted mills and manufacturing plants, was partly paid for by Erie County and New York State taxpayers; the state leased the place to the team’s owners, Terry and Kim Pegula (who also own the Buffalo Sabres). The stadium is named—as its predecessor was—for a health-­insurance company. Inside, the design and decor nod to local folkways, most notably in the form of a 20-foot sculpture of a broken folding table—the cheap kind that you would buy for a backyard barbecue or school fund­raiser.

This is a monument to a Buffalo tradition. Sometime in the 2010s, fans began body-slamming foldable tables at tailgates. Although now understood as something people do in good humor, because they are drunk and love the Bills so much, that’s not how the ritual started. “They were doing stuff like that because the team was so bad,” Mike Catalana, the sports director of the ABC affiliate in Rochester, told me. They needed to entertain themselves somehow. My husband’s childhood friend Dan, whose family is from Buffalo, put it differently: The table-breaking habit was a display of dark humor—­half-ironic self-harm carried out by people who were miserable.

I grew up in a small town south of Rochester, which also gets a good deal of lake-effect snow. Still, I remember a general feeling that our neighbor city was full of eccentrics who, for un­fathomable reasons, had chosen to live in a depressed Arctic-like region rather than someplace normal. The Bills were part of their sad lot. We had some true-blue fans in my hometown, but in general our community regarded the Bills with a degree of remove—we wished them well, but we didn’t necessarily want to get involved. My classmates instead concocted reasons to root for better teams: the Steelers, the Patriots, the Colts. Today, many people I grew up with are now Bills Mafia. But I know—and they know—it wasn’t always so.

I don’t begrudge anybody their porch flags or bumper stickers, however they behaved in decades past. The spirit is catching, and what else are you going to do? A couple of Christmases ago, my uncle—a farmer who is known locally for his Bing Crosby eyes and sometimes-mean-­spirited sense of humor—told me that he’d been rooting against the Bills because he didn’t like to see other people getting so excited. But, he said, he’d had to stop. Even he couldn’t root against a guy like Josh Allen.

On paper, the Bills’ chances may be better than they’ve ever been before. (By week four of this season, the Vegas odds were giving them the best shot at winning the Super Bowl.) The Bills’ defense has gotten younger and faster; they traded for the very talented wide receiver DJ Moore. Many of the fans I met in Buffalo suggested that Allen is also getting better—that he’s more mature as a player and a human being, having married the actor Hailee Steinfeld and become a family man. They love her too, and call her the queen of Buffalo.

By the week of my visit, the Bills had already won their first game of the season, in Houston, on a touchdown throw from Allen after the two-­minute warning. Now they were set to play the Detroit Lions, in what would be the first-ever regular-season game in a stadium that all manner of T-shirts call The House That Josh Built. A few controversies about the building had already emerged—fan backlash against the soaring cost of attendance, a confusing sod debacle—but in the tailgate areas on Thursday afternoon, people were simply amped and optimistic.

When I arrived at Hammer’s Lot, a popular site down the street from both the remnants of the old stadium and its gleaming replacement, the first person I saw was shirtless and, frankly, pantsless. He wore a gladiator-style skirt constructed entirely out of Labatt Blue boxes. I’d guess that 80 percent of the men were wearing Josh Allen jerseys. But the crowd was diverse. I saw super-pregnant women in red-and-blue zebra-striped leggings, older women in red-and-blue-bedazzled jeans, and teen girls in sweatshirts with red and blue hearts on the sleeves.

There are some generational divides and hints of factions within the Bills fandom, and you might sketch the boundaries of these groups based on their relationship to this parking lot. The longtime owner, local resident Eric Matwijow, is beloved by a huge crowd of regulars; he claims that some of them have spread their family members’ ashes on his gravel. Matwijow also told me that “woke” or “nose ring” Bills fans do not like him. Nor do the table-slammers, because Hammer’s Lot prohibits that activity (on account of its being dangerous and stupid). He also openly resents the people who call themselves the “Bills Mafia” because he is old enough to remember the actual Mafia in Buffalo, which, as he mentioned to me, was all about murder and torture and stealing and other crimes.

To be fair, Del Reid, a 50-year-old former web developer, coined the term Bills Mafia accidentally, in 2011. It was a tongue-in-cheek response during a Twitter feud with a sports reporter that took on a life of its own. Reid and Matwijow have very different styles and a degree of personal animosity, but they come together on one thing, which is, of course, Josh Allen. Neither was bothered that their hometown quarterback is from California. He’s not from California California, they each separately explained, but from the Central Valley. He’s “not a surfer dude,” Reid told me. “He’s a farm boy,” Matwijow said.

The way they talked about him reminded me of how A. Bartlett Giamatti once described New Yorkers’ feelings toward the great Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, who also came east from California, bringing miracles. “He contrasted completely with the part of the country he was known to come from,” Giamatti, a future baseball commissioner, wrote in 1977. People who had little in common with Seaver loved him because he was “a working guy who got rewarded,” “who went by the rules and made it.”

Although Allen isn’t a Buffalo native, he fits in as though he were, Reid added. “We love him, and he loves us back.”

In the plaza in front of Highmark Stadium, enormous steel bison puffed steam from their nostrils. Inside the stadium, the energy was even more rock-and-roll.

Before the game, an introductory video declared the new Highmark “a beacon of blue-collar football built for Buffalo, by Buffalo.” The crowd’s full-throated celebration was followed by the boom of fireworks. More than 60,000 attendees had been given light-up bracelets that were designed to flash red, white, and blue at dramatic moments, such as when Allen ran onto the field for the first time.

The Bills loped down the field on their opening drive, which ended with Allen running for a touchdown and the Jumbotron instructing everyone to sing “The Bills make me want to SHOUT!” The Bills scored another touchdown on their next drive, and we stood to “SHOUT!” again. When Allen ran it in toward the end of the third quarter, we were on our fifth rendition. The final score was 41–31, and the Bills were 2–0 by midnight. “I can’t wait to watch the highlights,” a woman in front of me said, with a sigh, to a friend as we walked to our cars.

Just before I left Buffalo, I sat with my laptop in the café section of a Wegmans—where customers could impulse-buy a chunk of turf from the old stadium for $99.99—and listened to the old men nearby chat about the game over coffee and doughnuts. It was good news and bad news. Allen looked perfect, but the defense needs to gel, they said. Things were going well, but nobody knows what will happen in a long season. Sports are sick and twisted. Even the hottest start can fizzle out, as Buffalonians know in their bones. (They would lose to the Patriots in week four.)

The Bills curse is vague. The fans feel cursed, but they have never settled on the place to pin this feeling. One theory holds that Buffalo is destined to lose because President William McKinley was assassinated in the city, at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901. Mark Poloncarz, the county executive who helped negotiate the terms for the new stadium, told me that he’d joined Mayor Sean Ryan to lay a wreath at a monument to McKinley in downtown Buffalo this year, and that Ryan had asked McKinley to release the city from his vengeance. Other theories about the Bills’ misfortune involve more classic stuff—for instance, that the old stadium had been placed nearly on top of a small cemetery, and occupied land that once belonged to Native Americans. (The new stadium is at least 1,000 feet from the cemetery and has signage that acknowledges the Seneca Nation.)

Phil Passafiume, a Buffalo fan I spoke with in Hammer’s Lot, suggested one more factor: The old Highmark had featured O. J. Simpson on a wall among the team’s other legends; the new one leaves him off. The city and team have addressed so many of their potential curses this year; if the Bills finally do win, they’ll never know which one was really the source of their troubles.

That their day of triumph will come, this year or sometime soon, feels inevitable to me—if only because it’s too dark to imagine otherwise. The Sunday after my trip, as I sat in a Brooklyn sports bar watching the Bills with my hands pressed to my face, fully converted to the cause, I thought back to what Roth, the newspaper columnist, had said about Josh Allen: “If you can’t win it with this guy, you probably never will.” Knock on wood and God forbid.

*Illustration source images: Kevin Sabitus / Getty; Bryan M. Bennett / Getty; Ric Tapia / Getty; Juan Alejandro Bernal / Shutterstock; Quintin Soloviev / Wikimedia.

This article appears in the December 2026 print edition with the headline “The Most Cursed Team in American Sports.”

I’m your new press secretary, Katie Zacharia! You may know me from my appearances on Fox News; I am pretty sure that is how the president knows me. That is how he identifies all possible candidates for jobs: turning on the TV and pointing. My successor will be a Kalshi commercial.

I also might be a lawyer! Where did I pass the bar, you ask? After I moved to China. No further questions! (See, I am getting into the press-secretary spirit already.)

When you consider that this is my first time reading words out loud, today was actually a pretty impressive performance. I swear that I have seen a sentence before, and I know where one stops and. Starts. And whether? To speak. With a rising inflection? This lends an air of trepidation to every one of my prepared words, as though saying any one of them aloud might cause a trapdoor to open beneath me.

I’m bringing a kind of “unlicensed bus driver” energy to this speech: unsteady at best, with many seemingly random stops in unexpected places. Just call me Vote by Mail, because my delivery is raising a lot of questions in the White House.

I am excited for this job because—well, let me use my exact words: “I get to do what I was doing on the outside already, which was hoping to amplify, multiply, and expand upon President Trump’s incredible agenda for the American people. And what I hope to do in this position is to take that into an official capacity and only build on, only amplify, and only multiply, to the extent possible, all of the wins he’s making for Americans, for, for Americans to understand how much has changed in this brief period of time—what he’s been able to accomplish. My goal is to be able to communicate that in complete tandem with the president, as he is his own best spokesperson and will absolutely be leading the way as with that.”

So there you have it. Wasn’t it Dan Quayle who once said that “verbosity leads to unclear, inarticulate things”? I assume he meant that positively!

Am I enjoying this job? In a word: no. I thought there would be more saying “HOW DARE YOU” to people asking questions, which I felt equipped to do. By the way, how do you think this is going so far? I have referred to my husband as “my president” only one time! That’s good, right?

Let me preempt some of your questions for me. No, this is not spoken-word poetry. No, I am not what turns up when you Google woman who has just seen the letters of the alphabet for the first time and is frightened of all of them. No, I am not a malfunctioning AI. Did you see me drink water even a single time? Yes, I am the best person for the job, provided the job does not involve reading any more words or answering any more questions.

This is the kind of meritocracy we’ve come to expect from the Trump administration. As Pete Hegseth and I like to say, it’s not meritocracy if it doesn’t include me.

No further questions! And look at that—it’s been 14 whole minutes already. That’s time! Good thing I will never have to do this again.

What’s the point of playing? Games don’t provide an organism with food, water, or shelter. They distract from the pursuit of survival and reproduction. And yet play is found across the animal kingdom; the act separates creative, joyful, living creatures from “merely mechanical things,” as the Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga once put it. In his famous 1938 study on games and play, Homo Ludens, Huizinga asserts that the behavior represents something fundamentally absurd: Humans “play and know that we play, so we must be more than merely rational beings, for play is irrational.”

Huizinga’s analytical understanding of leisure remains influential in the fields of philosophy and game design. Perhaps this is why the British writer Joanna Kavenna, halfway through her zany, cerebral romp of a novel, Seven, quotes at length from Huizinga. Play is necessary, she quotes him as saying, even if “we live in a demented world.” Humans aren’t robots, Kavenna seems to be reminding us. And her novel, which lands during a moment when the biggest question about robots is whether they’ll kill us all, offers a jaunty insight: When we embrace our irrationality, we deepen our understanding of what separates us from our computers.

The plot and thematic structure of Seven are guided by an invented board game, Seven, which resembles chess and involves a spiral-shaped board known as the “box.” The game involves seven movable pieces and two six-sided dice, and its rules are flexible; the novel itself is punctuated by four separate sets of instructions. (This slipperiness will become important later on.) In the same way that chess has been used by writers and artists as a metaphor for war or existential struggle, Seven becomes a symbol for how humans attempt to make sense of their world’s incoherence.

Kavenna’s characters are deadly serious about their game, but the author is willing to poke fun at them. The action begins in a university philosophy department in Oslo, where the nameless, genderless narrator works as a research assistant to an Icelandic philosopher named Alda Jónsdóttir. The professor’s area of study is called “box philosophy,” and it focuses on the problem of “Thinking Outside the Box About Thinking Outside the Box.”

What does the assistant’s job look like in practice? They spend time getting too drunk at faculty dinner parties, doing menial work for Jónsdóttir, and “asking questions,” but their first matter of serious business is “working on none of the above.” They try to clarify: “I don’t mean that I didn’t work on anything I’ve just mentioned, but that I worked on the category of None of the Above.” This deadpan joke serves a narrative function, priming the assistant—and the reader—to start thinking beyond the rules, and to enter a more expansive realm.

[Read: Open AI just carpet-bombed mathematics]

Jónsdóttir sends the narrator away on, essentially, a wild-goose chase to Greece; their mission is to hunt down a man named Theódoros Apostolakis—a poet, dentist, and Seven enthusiast who is “big in boxes.” This journey across Europe includes several professional Seven competitions, during which the rules keep changing. Everything the assistant learned in Norway seems useless except the central lesson—to think outside the box. These games abroad lead the narrator to start contemplating the role of recreation, the limits of human ingenuity, and the meaning of consciousness. Soon this will bring them face-to-face with the novel’s ultimate threat, an artificial-intelligence program that undermines everything that Jónsdóttir and the Seven players care about: creativity, curiosity, play. “How do you play a game without rules?” Kavenna writes. “Do you just make stuff up and hope for the best?”

These thoughts coalesce in the second half of the novel, when an AI bot named the Quail is introduced. Invented by a Seven player named Indrek Laar, who, Kavenna pointedly notes, believes that “AI was very clever and therefore had experiences,” the Quail is named for qualia, a term borrowed from philosophy. (It’s meant to capture a quality of consciousness, though the narrator dismisses it as “a baroque way of saying ‘experience.’”)

The bot is “designed to play Seven” and nothing else, Kavenna writes. “It couldn’t give you relationship advice or sympathise when you were feeling sad, or translate the Iliad or write your homework. It just played Seven.” And it does its job well. The Quail manages to beat the world’s reigning Seven champion, Ashok Deo, in a humiliating match that the narrator calls both the “greatest Seven game of the millennium” and “the worst game ever”—technically impressive, but absolutely demoralizing. “No one had enjoyed it,” Kavenna writes, “because the Quail couldn’t experience enjoyment and the Quail’s proxy—Indrek Laar—was horrified.”

Ashok’s loss echoes real-life incidents in which computers have won games against humans, such as the 1997 victory of IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer over the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov and the repeated defeats of the Go champion Lee Sedol by Google’s program AlphaGo in 2016. Culturally, these results represented a significant shift in how we understand the relationship between humans and computers. The Kasparov match “had the impact of a Greek tragedy,” one audience member told The New York Times. But its reception wasn’t all bad: Another champion commented, “Nice style!” while watching Deep Blue take another round. The machine, she admitted to the Times, “made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.” Deep Blue, and AlphaGo after it, seemed to do more than just win by brute force: They encroached on the human flair for creativity.

[Read: Yet another literary prizewinner seems to be AI]

Those machines—and the fears they inspired—can look quaint when compared with today’s technology. Some AI-safety researchers see it as an existential threat to humankind. Earlier this year, an OpenAI model not meant to have open access to the internet managed to break out of its “sandbox” and hack the databases of another tech company, Hugging Face. Cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated and more prevalent. AI-company employees are publicly quitting, raising alarms about the safety culture inside major firms. Popular conversations are inundated by pessimism—and at the same time, companies are advertising their services by urging onlookers to “stop hiring humans,” as in one controversial San Francisco– and New York–based billboard campaign. The stakes of the conflict between human and computer capabilities can feel bleak and funereal.

Kavenna’s portrayal of the battle of man versus machine is leavened, however, by her sense of humor. Machines may be able to beat us, but has a computer ever written an effective joke? Beyond being funny, the novel also defies machines by eschewing binaries (“I was neither one thing nor another,” the genderless, nameless, race-less narrator observes of their mental state. “I was mostly in a state of / .”) But Kavenna’s pitch for human superiority really comes together in the novel’s denouement. Eventually, the narrator meets a Seven champion named Eleni Hikaru Jones. She’ll point out that when Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the latter “carried on playing the game. He accepted that Deep Blue was better than him, but he was still the best human player.”

This idea inspires the characters to one-up machine intelligence by changing the rules of the game—or, in Kavenna’s framing, thinking outside the box. While Ashok plays the Quail, Indrek, the bot’s inventor, recognizes the turmoil he’s unleashed. Human loneliness, not malice, was his motive: “He made the Quail so he would always have someone to play with.” Knowing this, Eleni persuades Indrek to join forces with her. Together, they cook up a scheme to create an AI bot that can beat the Quail, and call it the Red Fox.

As these two AIs spend an evening rapidly moving through Seven matches against each other, the humans find better things to do: In the time it takes Eleni and Ashok to play a single leisurely game of Seven, the Red Fox beats the Quail 147 times. But the new device hasn’t accomplished anything of value to either person. In the end, a human Seven champion does indeed beat the Red Fox—but not by winning a Seven match. Instead, she accomplishes something like breaking out of her sandbox: Although Eleni “hadn’t won the game, she had won the game,” the narrator tells us cryptically, as though reciting a riddle or koan. What use, after all, is winning without enjoyment, or real struggle? The iterative process of trying, failing, exploring is far more interesting than the Red Fox’s joyless plod to victory. The emotional stakes for Eleni and Ashok are real, but their true triumph exists in the region of what if—that space of possibility in which one might either win or lose, with no determined outcome: the realm of play.

At the end of the novel, the narrator is back in Greece, sitting outside where “the waves were lapping the shore and the stars were innumerable.” They realize that their quest—to study “how we box in the dots”—was really just another form of “boxing in” imaginative thinking, which is to say human creativity. In Seven, Kavenna suggests that because we fear how artificial intelligence can outmaneuver us, we have overlooked the reality of the situation: Having invented both AI and the games that AI can beat us at, humans still have the choice to knock over the table. We can walk outside; we can look away. People, so unlike Deep Blue, AlphaGo, Claude, and the Quail, can decide on a whim to care about something other than winning.

A large majority of the Republican Party, including many officials who initially viewed Donald Trump with deep skepticism, decided early in Trump’s first term that the investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election were the hysterical product of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the Deep State and the media. There was no mystery to solve, no scandal to uncover, in Trump’s affinity for Vladimir Putin. And yet this strange alliance continues to bedevil American foreign policy.

On Friday afternoon, Trump announced that he had held another call with Putin, and came away once again depicting the Russian dictator as a cherished friend to whom he owes a great deal. “I have just concluded a highly successful discussion with President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, wherein it was agreed that Russia will immediately supply over 300,000 Tons of Diesel Fuel to the American and Global Marketplace, another 500,000 Tons during the month of November, and 1,000,000 Tons immediately thereafter,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Later that day, Trump reemphasized his debt of gratitude. “I want to thank President Putin, to be honest with you. We have massive amounts of oil coming into our country, and it’s diesel, which is what we want. So, thank you,” he told reporters outside the White House.

[Read: Why is Kash Patel planning to visit Russia?]

Many of Trump’s comments make little sense, and these were no exception. But he was using a particular kind of illogic that conflicts with his standard brand of nonsense. Trump typically depicts international trade in starkly mercantilist terms. Exports, in his mind, are a form of profit, and imports are a loss. Trump sees trade deficits as a form of theft, and conceives of a “good deal” as one in which the United States reduces its imports or increases its exports. This holds true of all goods, including oil. “We don’t need their fuel, we don’t need their energy, we don’t need their oil and gas. We don’t need anything that they have,” Trump said dismissively of Canada last year.

Yet when it comes to imports from Russia, Trump inverts his standard accounting methods. He presents Russian oil as a kind of gift, something Putin plans to “supply.” (A more accurate verb to describe this transaction would be sell.)

In reality, diesel fuel exists in a global market, and adding a small amount of Russian diesel into this enormous international supply would have a barely detectable effect upon its price. A more important effect would be on the Russian economy. Economic sanctions have hampered its ability to attract foreign currency, and the Trump-Putin plan would suspend sanctions on Russian diesel exports. Doing so would in fact appear to violate American law, which prohibits importing oil from Russia unless it makes peace with Ukraine, though illegality does not usually deter Trump.

The most immediate outcome of this plan has been to present Ukraine as the cause of economic turmoil and Russia as the innocent victim of Ukrainian warmongering. Trump almost immediately began to praise Putin and assail the Russian dictator’s adversary. Volodymyr Zelensky “could have settled this war many times—many, many times—and he chooses not to,” Trump told reporters on Friday outside the White House. “He wants to make problems for the world. He wants to make problems for our farmers, our ranchers, with diesel fuel, because Russia supplies a large portion of the diesel fuel throughout the world.” Trump’s solution? “I suggest they get a new leader who can make a deal. Because they could have made many deals, and for some reason, he never does.”

There is no universally agreed-upon explanation for why Trump has remained so consistently faithful to Putin. One theory holds that Putin masterfully strokes Trump’s ego. Although Trump does respond to flattery, the flaw in this hypothesis is that other leaders have tried, and often failed, to mimic this formula. Europeans have met Trump’s second term with obsequious displays and gifts. Ukraine floated a proposal to rename the Donbas region “Donnyland.” Poland proposed christening a base “Fort Trump.” Yet these countries have remained largely frustrated.

A second theory holds that Trump simply admires dictators. This one contains a bit more truth, as seen by Trump’s swooning over Xi Jinping and even Kim Jong Un. But the dictators running Iran and Venezuela have hardly managed to duplicate the Trump-Putin partnership.

A third theory depicts Trump as merely amoral, driven by transactions and indifferent to moral concerns. Yet he has continued to defer to Putin even as the Russian dictator has undermined Trump’s own standing by aiding Iran in its war with the United States. Meanwhile, Zelensky’s assistance against Iran seems to have bought him no goodwill whatsoever. Trump’s view of the war is moralistic—he simply blames the victim rather than the aggressor. “You don’t start a war against someone 20 times your size and then hope that people give you some missiles,” he said last year of Zelensky.

Explaining the depth of Trump’s identification with Putin may require looking at a possibility that conservatives have been dismissing out of hand for a decade: manipulation and corruption.

During the 2016 campaign, Russia dangled a lucrative deal to develop Trump-branded properties in Russia that would deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in profit with no risk. More recently, The New York Times reported that Trump advisers and Russian officials have floated deals that would enrich Trump’s inner circle as part of ending the war.

Russia has tried to bribe foreign officials, especially by handing out pieces of its resource wealth, in numerous countries. It would be strange if Putin didn’t try to replicate this tried-and-true method in the United States.

[Anne Applebaum: Trump’s message to Ukraine is now crystal clear]

Perhaps the best evidence against corruption is that Trump now has access to so many other sources of wealth that he hardly needs any financial incentive to tilt toward Russia. Yet Putin seems able to bring the American president around to his way of thinking, if not effortlessly (their most recent phone call reportedly consumed an hour and a half) then at least reliably.

There is obviously no investigation at the moment into Putin’s efforts to influence American foreign policy. Instead, incredibly, we have an investigation into the Russia investigation. The Trump administration is working to gin up criminal charges against former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey, and other American officials whose crime was to explore whether something fishy was going on between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

My colleagues Jonathan Lemire and Simon Shuster report, “Some of Trump’s closest advisers have privately wondered what Putin has done to so thoroughly enthrall the president.” Perhaps instead of dismissing the people who were trying to shed light on this mystery and then attempting to throw them into prison, these advisers should be taking their concerns seriously.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Donald Trump is the quantum president: simultaneously all-powerful and also a wee, innocent figurehead, blithely unaware of what his aides are doing.

The first Trump, the one who declares that he “alone can fix it,” was in the Oval Office last week, asserting his unfettered power to persecute his political opponents. “I could have done very bad things to Hillary Clinton. I could have done very, very bad things to Joe Biden. I could have done very bad things to Barack Hussein Obama,” he said. “I can do whatever I want, if I want.” But after federal law enforcement conducted a search at the Washington, D.C., home of Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, yesterday morning, Trump insisted he was completely uninvolved.

Without more information, the search—conducted by agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a division of ICE that handles complicated probes—is deeply troubling. The Trump administration has deployed a series of probes, searches, and indictments, many of which are plainly pretextual or political, against outspoken critics. (This is a crucial distinction from an August 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago, which yielded many boxes of highly sensitive material, haphazardly stored.) Black women, including Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, have been particular but not exclusive targets. The search also breaks a norm against public action in highly political cases in the 60 days before an election. Attempts to intimidate or criminalize an opposition party are hallmarks of authoritarianism.

There is much about the search that we do not know, including what evidence was used to obtain the warrant (though The New York Times reports it “was the subject of significant back and forth between prosecutors and the federal judge who eventually approved it”); what agents might have found; and what charges, if any, the government might be contemplating. Some reporting states that prosecutors are exploring whether Omar’s late father lied or made omissions on immigration applications. (The administration has focused on trying to strip citizenship from people who gave false responses on applications.) The congresswoman came to the United States as a child and became a naturalized citizen at 17.

To hear Trump tell it, he also knows little about the probe. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said yesterday. “I have nothing to do with it.” (The Department of Justice told the Times that the search was part of an ongoing investigation but declined to comment further.) This is a pattern I previously identified: When faced with difficult questions or strong pushback, the president tends to insist that the lawyers are in charge and he’s not apprised of what’s going on.

But his claim is hard to believe. Trump has repeatedly said that he has a “right” to direct federal prosecutors to investigate whomever he wishes, and although he generally insists that he has not done so, evidence suggests otherwise. Last September, Trump posted on Truth Social instructing then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to take action against critics, including James, former FBI Director James Comey, and Senator Adam Schiff. “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” he wrote. Several news outlets later reported that the missive was intended as a private message. Bondi was removed this spring, reportedly because of Trump’s frustration that his attempts at retribution were moving too slowly.

In February, FBI agents searched an election center in Fulton County, Georgia, in pursuit of evidence for Trump’s assertion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. (Their warrant was largely based on debunked claims.) The following day, Trump spoke directly to some of the agents involved, an extraordinary intervention.

Comey was ultimately charged with threatening the president, after he posted a photograph of shells he found on a beach that read 86 47, a set of numbers that supporters have said connotes wanting to remove Trump from office. DOJ has insisted the post was a threat of violence (which Comey has denied). Documents released by Comey’s lawyers this summer show that Trump was closely involved in the case, demanding briefings and notes from interviews with Comey prior to his indictment.

Adding to the impression that the Omar case is a White House effort, Katie Miller, the former Trump aide and the wife of Stephen Miller, posted about the story on X yesterday, saying, “Promise made, promise kept.” She later deleted the post.

But even if Trump is not personally engaged, he has made clear through his statements that he wants Omar investigated and punished. In 2019, he suggested that members of the progressive “Squad,” which included Omar, should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came.” A few days later, after he criticized Omar at a rally, he watched as a crowd chanted, “Send her back!” In December, he called Omar “garbage” and said that Somalis should leave the U.S.: “Their country stinks, and we don’t want them in our country.” The next month, when Omar was attacked at an event, Trump accused her of setting it up. This March, Vice President Vance told an interviewer, “We actually think that Ilhan Omar definitely committed immigration fraud.” The message from the White House is clear enough to make King Henry II blush.

If Trump is as engaged in prosecutions of his political opponents as public evidence indicates, then his behavior is inappropriate and damaging to the rule of law. If, however, he truly knows nothing about what’s going on, then he’s not the heroic, powerful leader he claims to be. Which would he prefer the public conclude?

Related:

• Trump is hiding behind his lawyers.
• Trump shrugs off the Ilhan Omar attack.

Our sense that life is meaningful depends, perhaps more than we realize, on our confidence that humanity will go on after we die. If we came to believe that humanity had no future, the philosopher Samuel Scheffler argues, much of what we value would lose its meaning or motivating force. What would follow would be widespread “apathy, anomie and despair.”

That is one reason why the threat of artificial intelligence feels so different and disorienting. When some of the most knowledgeable people within an industry suggest that their work could, within a matter of years, lead to global catastrophe and even human extinction, it’s decidedly unnerving. AI-driven anxiety is now showing up in therapy offices across the country. Much of what has given people succor in the past—faith that there are good things and good people who will outlive us, and that the story will go on—feels like it might be suddenly removed.

Consider the dread, even the paralyzing fear, you might feel if you were told as you prepared to fly that your plane has a 1-in-100 chance of crashing, or perhaps even a 1-in-10 chance. You probably wouldn’t board the aircraft. With AI, though, there’s no opting out. Even worse, if the plane you boarded did crash, it would be a terrible, localized tragedy. But the world would go on; your children would outlive you. Some of the primary architects of AI, though, are talking about the permanent end of the human species. Perhaps they are wrong; other experts are less concerned with AI destroying humanity than with it being unreliable, misused, or recklessly deployed. Their warnings, though, are hard to ignore.

[Juliette Kayyem: Destroying humanity is against the law]

It is better that we name the fear honestly rather than avoid it: All of us may soon perish, and everything we have made may go with us. Then we need to separate the urgent practical questions—what do we do to prevent the worst from happening?—from the existential. How should we live in light of the possibility, however remote, of the end of all that we have known and loved and has ever been?

As the focus on the existential threats posed by AI increases, people will exhibit a range of responses. Robert Jay Lifton coined the term psychic numbing to describe what he saw among survivors of Hiroshima: a protective shutdown of emotional responses in the face of catastrophic events or potentially overwhelming trauma. It allows us to keep functioning. There can also be denial—a sense that the prospects are so awful that they can’t be true, and even if they are, there’s nothing we can individually do about it.

Still others are tempted toward “information avoidance,” in which we ignore information because we’re afraid of an unpleasant outcome. Some set the threat aside as best as they can, a bit like avoiding a visit to a doctor out of fear that the physician will confirm a serious, even life-threatening illness. Still others drift toward a nihilism that ends in despair. Our time horizons will also shift. When the future itself seems in doubt, the long-term commitments that sustain a meaningful life can start to seem pointless.

My own reaction has been to search for footholds of reasonable hope. I’ve looked to knowledgeable voices for reassurance. I don’t have certainty that things will turn out just fine, but I want to believe that there are promising paths forward and what we do still matters. I should acknowledge, too, that the idea of an extinction-level threat doesn’t yet fully register with me. Because nothing like this has ever happened before, my instinctive assumption is that it never will. And, of course, it may not. But it would be foolhardy not to contemplate the possibility.

Viktor Frankl found meaning in life amid the horror of Auschwitz. Though we cannot control external events, he believed, we can retain control over our interior world. We choose how we respond to circumstances we did not create, to cups we would prefer to let pass. This “tragic optimism” is the capacity to say yes to life despite enormous suffering. Meaning can be chiseled even out of anguish. The impermanence of things is no reason for despair; instead, it increases the urgency to make meaning of the time we have, the moments in which we live, and the things we choose to love. The question is always what life is asking of us in every situation we face. And the answer is that life asks us to live lives of integrity, honor, and devotion to things and people outside of ourselves, to celebrate truth and beauty even in dark times.

“A thought transfixed me,” Frankl wrote, in Man’s Search for Meaning. “For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and the highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved.”

He added, “For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of the words, ‘The angels are lost in the perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.’” Meaning is found not only in what we accomplish but also in beholding what we love.

ALBERT CAMUS’ 1947 NOVEL, THE PLAGUE, is a tale of horror, survival, and resilience in the face of a devastating epidemic. The story’s protagonist, Bernard Rieux, is a dedicated, resolute physician in the Algerian city of Oran. He embodies what Jean Tarrou, a visitor who organizes volunteer sanitary squads, calls a “true healer.” Rieux fights the plague day after day, with no expectation of winning. He does so not because of heroism or religious faith but out of common decency. He believes that the only honest response to suffering is to do what one can to relieve it. That is what gives meaning to his life. The goal of Rieux and others was, in the words of David Bellos, a scholar of French fiction, “to preserve human dignity and to last the course, and in so doing to develop and to promote those virtues which misfortune can call forth: co-operation, solidarity, and the art of small kindness.”

Rieux names the threat posed by the epidemic early and honestly, when others are in denial, and then he acts. Camus, an agnostic, didn’t look to God or a higher power for meaning; he believed that the universe is inherently indifferent. Meaning, he argued, is found in human solidarity and the alleviation of suffering. Those remain intrinsic goods even if the world were to end tomorrow.

Living under the shadow of a grave threat shouldn’t be paralyzing; it should inspire resistance to injustice, despite the knowledge that such a struggle can never be fully won. C. S. Lewis, in his 1948 essay “On Living in an Atomic Age,” said that if the atomic bomb comes, it should find us doing sensible, human things: praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, chatting with our friends, and “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”

Perhaps that quiet courage came because for Lewis, a Christian, the end of the world did not represent the end of everything that matters. We are inhabiting an irrational universe, he believed, but we aren’t derived from it. Nature is alienated from its Creator too, he wrote—“though in her, as in us, gleams of the old beauty remain.”

HOW, THEN, SHOULD WE LIVE in light of the threat posed by AI? We should name rather than ignore the danger and do everything within our power to contain it. Experts are actively debating the right way to do that. Their suggestions include a laissez-faire, do-nothing approach; voluntary compliance within the industry; bilateral and international agreements; and state and federal regulations in America. But there’s clearly an urgency to act before we lose control of events—and our future.

Beyond that, it seems to me that we should acknowledge the fear that death, especially the prospect of mass death, brings up in all of us. Frankl and Camus had their approaches; we should answer what each moment asks of us. Decency and kindness don’t require external validation, whether a catastrophe is avoided or not. The psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, in his book Staring at the Sun, expressed the hope that an “awakening experience” might inspire us to rearrange our priorities, find compassionate connections, and love others and beauty more deeply.

[Ian Bogost: The thrill of wanting AI to destroy the world]

Yalom invoked Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, in which the protagonist, hours from death, having experienced horrifying pain, recognizes the shallowness and emptiness of what appears to have been, on the surface, a successful life. Because of his connection with his young son, who presses Ivan’s hands to his lips and weeps, Ivan “fell through and saw a light, and it was revealed to him that his life had been wrong but that it was still possible to mend things.” In the end, he does.

He searched for his old habitual fear of death and didn’t find it. Where was death? What death? There was no fear, because there was no death. Instead of death there was light. “So that’s it!” he suddenly said aloud. “Such joy!”

Ivan Ilyich’s final thoughts are “Death is finished. It is no more.”

T

olstoy, through Ivan Ilyich, was echoing a verse from the New Testament Book of Revelation. Written at the end of the first century, Revelation is an apocalyptic work filled with symbolism, vivid imagery, and coded references to the Roman Empire, which was oppressing Christians.

Revelation is hardly a favorite book of mine except for this: In the 21st chapter, we read that “there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.” And God promises, “Behold, I make all things new.”

I have cited those words to others, and to myself, more times than I can count. It is not a promise that the current world won’t end—after all, many New Testament writers believed that they were living in the end times—but rather that the world will then be renewed. The old order will give way to a new one, where creation is healed and justice is restored and God will ultimately reconcile every creature to himself.

Skeptics of Christianity will say this is wishful thinking, and perhaps it is. But wanting something to be true doesn’t make it false. Wishful thinking, tethered to reality, is another name for hope. Sometimes hope is all we have, and sometimes hope is enough.

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Back in March 2025, the Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, dropped news in the dead of night. “Good work by @NASA this week,” the post said. “Eliminated their unused purchasing Cards (~80%) -Terminated ~$420M in unneeded contracts, including $45M ($15m each) to three separate consultants.”

The irony should not require explanation, but as my colleague Josh Tyrangiel details in his new cover story, Musk’s company, SpaceX, might not exist today without the $1.6 billion contract it received from NASA back in 2008, when it was days away from missing payroll, to resupply the International Space Station. “The company had gone from near death to indispensable in a single quarter,” Tyrangiel writes.

Musk’s space ambitions are no secret—and they are matched, perhaps, only by the ambitions of Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. In 2018, a decade after Musk’s company became the first private one to launch a liquid-fueled rocket into space, Bezos said the only way to “deploy this much financial resource is by converting my Amazon winnings into space travel. That is basically it.”

Private individuals have long been a part of America’s relationship with space, but the nation is now reliant on one or two people to ensure that they can achieve the goals they set. On Radio Atlantic, Josh joins me to talk about how the relationship between NASA and these companies developed, the competition between the two men, and what it means for all of us down here on Earth.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Josh Tyrangiel: Part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business. But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

[Music]

Adam Harris: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Adam Harris, and today we need to talk about the new space race.

Public and private partnerships have defined the nation’s relationship with space for a long time. Some of the 20th century’s earliest astronomical discoveries would not have been possible without financial support from Andrew Carnegie.

Now the future of space exploration finds itself at the behest of a trillionaire and a multibillionaire, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and their companies SpaceX and Blue Origin.

Over the last two decades, the two have become indispensable to NASA. If they can put aside their intense rivalry, it could benefit America’s new frontier into space.

But what is the future of space exploration if they don’t?

Today, I’m joined by my colleague Josh Tyrangiel, whose story in this month’s issue of The Atlantic explores both companies and the men who run them.

Let’s get to questions.

Josh, thank you so much for joining me today.

Tyrangiel: Oh, it’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Adam.

Harris: Absolutely. Can you first just sort of lay a foundation for us, right? We have Musk and SpaceX, Bezos and Blue Origin, and both are building capacity for literal moonshots and beyond, right? But what can they actually do right now?

Tyrangiel: So where they are right now is that SpaceX is indispensable and critical infrastructure for the United States of America. It is how we get astronauts and materials to the International Space Station, which is really important. That’s how we get our—getting rides up there is really pretty, pretty great.

The other thing that SpaceX does incredibly well is launch satellites. And so when Elon Musk was beginning SpaceX, he really pursued it actually just as a, almost as a kind of lark. He had made some money from PayPal. He was always fascinated with space, and he thought he wanted to do this kind of, like, science experiment/publicity stunt where he would get a rocket, send it to Mars, put a robot on it, scoop up some soil, and plant the first interstellar plant. And what he discovered was that actually, it’s really expensive to buy a rocket. He went to the Russians. One of the Russians literally spat on his shoes. And so he built this rocket capacity, and we can talk about how he did it, but what he discovered pretty quickly is, like, it’s not a great business, launching rockets. It’s very expensive. There aren’t—there isn’t that much demand.

And so about 10 years ago he figured out that where there is a lot of demand is telecom, like, good old-fashioned telecom, and that became Starlink, which is a really incredible product. He has—most of the satellites in the world, he has launched through SpaceX. I believe the number is about, 80 percent of the mass in orbit is launched, has been launched by SpaceX, which is shocking. The next-closest competitor is the government of China. So when you say, like, What can they do now? Well, SpaceX kinda runs space, like, pretty clearly.

Now, Blue Origin, for all sorts of reasons, got off to a much slower start, and right now it is trying to get in the game as a competitor, largely around launch, largely around the ability to launch satellites both for itself—Amazon has satellites; Blue Origin has launched a satellite project—but also for other customers. And there are a lot of space-satellite customers out there. And it’s also working on a lunar lander for NASA that might get there by 2030. But they’re far behind, and even the CEO of Blue Origin would be the first to tell you, like, it’s not a close competition at the moment. But these two are pretty important players in the space ecosystem. Without SpaceX, you would notice. You would actually notice both from a government point of view and from a satellite point of view.

Harris: I thought it was interesting—earlier, you mentioned space travel is expensive at, like, a very base minimum, right? And really any piece about space exploration, I feel like I always get kind of bogged down in the numbers, because they just don’t compute. They seem fake, right? $50 billion here, $4 billion there. This is a lot of money to spend on something that’s not necessarily ever a guarantee. There’s no guarantee you make it to the moon. There’s no guarantee you make it to Mars. Why is space travel and the sort of space exploration, these space pursuits still worthy pursuits? Why are they still worthy pursuits?

Tyrangiel: It’s a great question, and if you talk to people in the scientific or the, sort of, NASA community, there’s a healthy debate about, what’s the right return on investment?

Let’s say it was your money, right? And you wanted to understand more about space. You could create vehicles. You could have an astronaut program. You could take on the tremendous risk to loss of life, which you don’t want. Or you could send drones. And one of the great programs right now that very few people know about is we have these two vehicles on Mars sending back photos every day that are just astonishing. It’s not an expensive program. We’re learning things about that planet that frankly—you know, if we were to wait for a human to get there, we’d be decades away. Not to mention, like, wouldn’t get them nearly as far. So there is a debate about that.

What I would say is that if you are a captain of industry and you can afford to take some pain, there’s nothing better than losing money early to create a moat around a business that at some point might be transformed from bad to incredible. And so part of what Musk and Bezos are seeing is that right now space is an okay business. It’s not great. Satellites: better business.

But down the road, if you can get satellites connected to data centers in space, and you have AI models that are super thirsty for computing power and for energy, all of a sudden you have a very virtuous loop that makes it really hard to compete with you in any part of that vertically integrated business.

And so, I go back to the SpaceX prospectus, which I think I referred to in the piece as, like, kind of this incredible document that, in parts, seems like a very rational plan for how to colonize space, for how to make the East India Company of space, and, in other parts, seems like a diary of a CFO’s weekend on mushrooms, right? Like, it’s crazy.

But when they say that SpaceX has a total addressable market of about $30 trillion, what they mean ultimately is creating this kind of vertically integrated loop where rockets launch satellites and data centers; data centers go through the satellites to feed compute back to Earth, running these AI models that run all of our heavy industry; and all of a sudden what looks like a lousy investment becomes an incredible investment.

And so that is how both of those men think. That’s why to people like you and me it’s like, Boy, that’s a lot of money going out the door right now. They are not worried about “right now.”

Harris: You know, and they often, sometimes they will, in order to talk about the investment, right, they will couch it in the civilizational concerns, right?

Our resources are finite here on Earth. We’re going to need to find another place. In the colonizer mind, it’s like, We are going to colonize the moon next as a sort of base to begin to look elsewhere. Do they both have that sort of civilizational concern? Is that a real concern of theirs or is it just a—

Tyrangiel: No, 100 percent sincere. I genuinely think that both men look at the state of the planet and very scientifically think, Okay, well, we need an off-ramp. In Bezos’s mind, it’s really O’Neill colonies, which is—Gerard O’Neill, in the 1970s, created this notion that you basically export all of our most polluting industries into space or onto the moon and then you kinda turn the planet into this beautiful park. And Bezos has been talking about this as long ago as his high-school-graduation speech. So he’s very sincerely focused on this notion. Musk largely thinks about Mars in the same way, which is that we need to become an interplanetary species.

That doesn’t mean they also don’t see a tremendous business opportunity. And it doesn’t mean that the rest of us, who haven’t really, um, had much say in how these resources are being allocated or whether we would prefer, in fact, that we actually just work on saving this planet—it doesn’t mean that we can’t be annoyed about it, frustrated about it. But I think all of those things are true in this case.

Harris: Could the government achieve any of the SpaceX ambitions, um, on its own? Or does it need these, sort of, mega-wealthy people in order to achieve what it’s trying to do?

Tyrangiel: You know, it’s funny. When I, um, started reporting the story and I really dove deep into the subculture of space and government and heavy industry—you know, to a person, almost everyone agrees that the Commercial Space Act, or COTS, is one of the best pieces of public policy the United States has created in the last 40 years. And that basically what it did was create competition where previously there was bureaucracy, right?

And so as a result, I think without question people would say Musk has made space move faster and farther, often at a discount to the federal government, and so that’s great, right? We actually wanna encourage that.

And by the way, as much as these are complicated and at times troubling guys, we also want people who dream this big, and we want them to be in America, right? It’s great; it’s great. We want that. The challenge of course is, where do you draw the line about authority? And so what, what I saw and what we’ve seen in the last five, 10 years, is that when you control things like Starlink, you also control things like war. That puts us in a very, very strange place.

Harris: You made this argument at the beginning, right, which is just the sort of reality of SpaceX being so far ahead of Blue Origin. What’s the best argument for hoping that Blue Origin catches up to SpaceX, and what would it look like for Blue Origin to catch up to SpaceX here?

Tyrangiel: So I’ll tell you what the CEO, who’s a guy named Dave Limp, told me. And Dave Limp worked for Bezos at Amazon for somewhere between a decade and decade and a half. Knows him extremely well, which is a very important part of making Blue Origin successful, right? Is channeling what Bezos wants, being able to challenge him when necessary.

So Dave Limp said, Look, SpaceX is ahead. But we don’t need them to fail for us to be successful. What we need is for there to be reasonable competition in the market for space launch, right?

And right now Blue Origin needs to get its act together. And what I mean by that is they’ve been at it for about 26 years. And they’re just getting to a place where they are launching, landing reusable rockets, which is the key to driving down the cost. When you’re launching a new rocket or experimenting with a new booster or a new engine, one in three is gonna fail, right? And it takes time. I think the thing that we most want to root for is for Blue Origin to get on a cadence where it is driving down cost, getting competition, right?

Getting other competitors, satellites, and other things into space beyond their own, right? What we don’t want is an environment where SpaceX controls most of the launch in the United States and most of its payloads are Starlink satellites or future AI satellites, and we don’t want that on the Blue Origin side.

Now, we have lots of ways to make sure that people don’t have that kind of monopoly. But we’re not exactly in a moment where the Department of Justice is exercising those. You know, it’d be healthy for America to have, uh, two big competitors. It’d be healthier to have four, healthier still to have eight.

Harris: When we come back, we talk to Josh about America’s ambitions in space, and whether or not they overlap with Musk and Bezos’s own ambitions.

[Music]

Harris: For the last half century, NASA has been the, sort of, benchmark for American ambition in space, and I’m often reminded of John F. Kennedy’s speech in 1962, his moonshot speech, where he says—

John F. Kennedy: But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, Why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

Harris: We choose to go to the moon because it was the hard thing to do. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard. What is America’s ambition now in space?

Tyrangiel: So there’s a new NASA administrator named Jared Isaacman, and Isaacman had a tough time getting confirmed, in part because he’s a self-made billionaire, and he was a SpaceX pilot. He did the first commercial space walk in history, and so his ties to Musk were an issue in his confirmation hearing. But he did get confirmed. And everybody I speak to about Isaacman says, He’s young; he’s eager; he is all in on the mission. And they don’t always love his decisions, but they think he is a legit leader. And what he’s trying to organize everybody around is the moon. He wants American boots on the moon by 2028, and so he’s pressing Blue Origin, which is making a lander; he’s pressing SpaceX, which is making a lander. He wants both in competition, and ultimately, the reasons for that are sort of a, this kind of hairball, right? Some of it’s national security, the dark side of the moon. There are people in the national-security community who say, Well, we need to get there before China does. There are others who say, Not really, and, and that when they talk to China, it’s not actually that big a deal.

But there are good reasons to go back. There’s mining on the moon. There’s rare earth minerals on the moon. And there is beginning to be this kind of space economy developing around the possibility of us getting to the moon, mining it, setting up data centers. There’s lots of buzz about nuclear reactors on the moon. That seems a little scary to me, but nevertheless that buzz is there. And so Isaacman has them pointed in that direction. And, and one interesting thing—we’re at this kind of lucky moment for America. Basically, you know, Blue Origin said, Well, let’s go to the moon. Trump sees the MAGA value in the moon. It appealed to Mike Pence, who really loves spaces. But—

Harris: The creation of the Space Force.

Tyrangiel: Yeah. Most of the time what happens is a NASA mission gets created, and four or eight years later, it gets dumped.

And the Biden administration had the, kind of, unsung civil-service hero who was on the transition team, named Bhavya Lal, who’s a really a fascinating woman, and the administration came in, and Biden’s team said, Well, this, this is probably stupid, right? She’s like, No, no, no, no. It’s not stupid. Stay the course.

And so we’ve had, for the last 10 years, actual continuity, and that is incredibly rare. And so what Isaacman has been very shrewd about is staying as close to the political middle as he can because he knows space deadlines are kinda worse than New Year’s resolutions.

Like, I don’t know of anybody who looks at a space deadline as, like, Cool, let me make sure I’m there on that date. It just doesn’t happen. So knowing that it’s likely to slip, he’s been very shrewd about positioning himself in the middle so that if there is a new party in power, the moon mission might actually persevere, and that’s a hugely important thing to us getting back to the moon.

Harris: Yeah. That sort of consistent goal. And we have that—I know that they’ve had that pretty consistent goal of getting back to the moon by 2028 with the Artemis crew. What role will Musk and Bezos, sort of, play in that mission specifically?

Tyrangiel: I mean, one of them would like to win to carry those astronauts on a Blue Origin or a SpaceX lander to the moon—to the surface of the moon, which you can imagine, if you’ve been working at this for a quarter century, would be a huge personal and professional triumph. So they’re very invested in that. Whether that competition is the right thing for the United States I think is a little bit debatable. How Isaacman approaches declaring a winner—he did not speak to me for the piece, but, like, it is a subject of heated debate inside the space community. It’s like, Which one of these vehicles is actually right for this? Are either of them right for this? And how do we choose a winner here when both have tremendous political influence?

Harris: Thinking about that idea of a winner too—you write in the piece about the ways that if they just worked together, right, we, we all might be in a better place.

Is there a world in which Musk and Bezos do actually work together?

Tyrangiel: The answer is no, definitively. They’re not gonna work together voluntarily. It’s just not gonna happen. And by the way, we do want them in competition because that competition drives price down, that competition drives creativity. Like, I think that’s great.

What we also want is a federal government that can remind what are essentially—forget the billions attached to them, forget their outsize personalities and profiles. They’re vendors, right?

We want our federal government to be able to say Okay, and, and this is really where I get to, not to spoil the piece because obviously I know people have been reading it while we’re talking, but basically when you look at, um, SpaceX’s plan for how to get to the moon, and you look at Blue Origin’s plan, they’re quite complementary.

SpaceX does one thing extraordinarily well. Blue does one thing extraordinarily well. Jared Isaacman could very easily say, Okay, SpaceX, you’re gonna be the refueler. Blue, you’re gonna be the lander. Work together or do nothing. Right? That’s what we’d love to see. It’s just an exercise in reminding everybody the nation matters more than people’s egos or people’s business plans. The problem with that is that while the leverage we have is the glory of getting to the moon, the leverage each individual has is to say, Screw you! I don’t wanna go to the moon. And guess what? Then we’re not getting to the moon.

And so that’s back to the sort of original piece of this, which is, we’re in this weird moment where we have empowered the space race; we have given federal money to these companies; we’ve given them lots and lots of support, even down to the educational system, which produces so many of the engineers working at these companies. But we’re not entirely in control of their ambitions. And even with something like the moon—you know, if they decide it’s not economically feasible, if they decide they don’t wanna work together, all that leverage is gone and we’re not getting back to the moon.

Harris: Even if the government threatens to revoke their contracts, they could just say, We have more money than that. We don’t need your contract?

Tyrangiel: So, at some point, yes, right? And SpaceX is not—SpaceX gets money from the government, but SpaceX is also funneling lots of its own money in, and it also is the launch provider of choice to satellite companies. So yeah, there is a moment at which we lose control of these companies.

Now, traditionally, we have things like the Defense Production Act. You can nationalize things. I don’t think there’s any political will for that at this moment, and so we’re navigating this really awkward conversation across the table with two guys who are not used to negotiating, giving in, working together, and so it will have an impact on our national ambitions at some point. Like, I think that’s inevitable.

Harris: Yeah. And there’s no way out of it? We’re stuck with our two billionaires/occasional trillionaire?

Tyrangiel: I mean, we can continue to encourage competitors, and there are a lot of space start-ups, but they’re pretty far away from being mature enough to compete with SpaceX, let alone Blue Origin.

So for the time being, meaning the rest of my adult life, I imagine this is how we’ll be dealing with space. Yeah.

Harris: Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me. You’ve given us a lot to think about, and as always, it’s great to talk to you.

Tyrangiel: Great to talk to you. Thanks for having me.

[Music]

Harris: That’s all for today’s show.

This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Hadley Robinson.

It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak.

Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

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

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Until next time, I’m Adam Harris.

Earlier this year, a woman posted on Threads that a man she had been dating dumped her after discovering that she had a library card. She shared a screenshot of what she said was the man’s “breakup text,” in which the writer accused her of “wasting hours” like “some little kid playing pretend smart” and excoriated her for failing to satisfy him sexually: “Reading books? Really? While I’m sitting here with actual needs!!”

The internet, of course, reacted. Memes and think pieces abounded. These responses weren’t just gasps of outrage at the man’s dismissal of literacy and his base sense of entitlement. They also captured a particular kind of anxiety about a sometimes highly sensitive question related to romantic compatibility: What happens when you and your partner are on a different intellectual plane?

I didn’t always have language for this type of gap. Growing up and attending church, I heard a lot about the biblical caution to “not be unequally yoked” to a mate, invoked to warn Christians against consorting with nonbelievers. As I developed my own intellectual practice, during which I grew to believe that many sacred texts were best read figuratively, I came to understand the biblical advice differently. To be equally yoked meant to walk forward together without one pulling harder than the other. Basically, you don’t want one member of the pair to be missing the beat.

Over the years I worked on my doctoral dissertation, about the brilliant and tortured John Milton, my adviser and mentor was the acclaimed Miltonist Francis C. Blessington. In many of our conversations, he spoke fondly about the wit and wisdom of his wife, Ann Taylor, also a professor, and a writer in a completely different field. As a young person, I think I took for granted the kind of similitude this couple shared. At Blessington’s memorial service last fall, I eulogized him and met Taylor in person for the first time. She spoke about their intellectual companionship with such love and specificity that it stopped me. They didn’t work in matching fields, and they didn’t have identical minds. But they were two people whose depths met.

In reflecting on my mentor and his wife, I couldn’t help thinking that Mr. Breakup Text, in revealing what lay within his depths, at least did the woman he’d been dating a favor. Better for her to know about his disposition sooner rather than later. I also had no doubt that John Milton himself—who in 1643 nearly destroyed his reputation arguing that intellectual incompatibility should be legal grounds for divorce—would have agreed with me.

In the summer of 1642, Milton married Mary Powell. In short order, she left him.

Milton’s response was to do what many intellectuals do when their personal life implodes: He turned his crisis into theory. In 1643, he published The Doctrine & Discipline of Divorce, which made a bold claim that marriage should be dissolvable when spouses are cerebrally incompatible. The backlash was immediate and severe. Divorce in 17th-century England was nearly impossible, granted only for the most extreme circumstances (abuse, for instance, or infidelity). But Milton wasn’t arguing about tangible, provable transgressions. He was arguing about loneliness—the specific, suffocating loneliness of living with someone whose mind you cannot reach. For doing so, he was effectively canceled.

His argument was anchored by a close reading of Genesis. When God created Eve as a “help meet” for Adam, Milton suggested, she was not meant to be simply a body for procreation or a servant for labor. If that were all Adam needed, God could have given him anyone. What Adam required was a person he could speak with—a source of “apt and cheerfull conversation,” someone with whom to share thoughts, to reason, to find the companionship of mind that makes solitude bearable.

And when that communion is absent? Milton had a word for it: bondage. He wrote that to couple two souls whose minds don’t meet is to join “a living soule” to “a dead corps.” Marriage devoid of intellectual intimacy isn’t merely disappointing. It is a form of living death, worse than being alone, because at least in solitude you aren’t confronted daily with the failure of connection.

[Read: The tyranny of the relationship gap]

Milton’s most radical claim was that intellectual incompatibility is a more serious problem than adultery. “He who affirms adultery to be the highest breach,” he wrote, “affirms the bed to be the highest of mariage, which is in truth a grosse and borish opinion.” Adultery within a marriage can be overcome, he believed. A mismatch of intelligences cannot. He then went further, mocking the Church of England for being more concerned with resolving a lack of conjugal relations—“the disappointing of an impetuous nerve”—than with “the ingenuous grievance of a minde unreasonably yoakt.” To him, intellectual companionship outranked sex not just as a nice feature of marriage but as its entire foundation.

That was a radical notion in 1643 (and, I would argue, it remains so). Milton’s insistence that wives be intellectual companions to their husbands was progressive for the 17th century because it implied that women were capable of rational thought and meaningful conversation. His view ran counter to prevailing beliefs, which said that, at most, a wife should be educated enough to converse with her husband but not so educated that she might challenge his authority.

Across the centuries, other writers and philosophers have considered the importance of intellectual parity between the sexes. In the mid-1700s, a group of Englishwomen known as the bluestockings created salons where serious conversation was the point, and where women’s minds were not secondary to men’s. (That the term bluestocking became a slur demonstrates how threatened broader society remained at the idea of women as intellectuals.) Nearly 250 years after Milton, Nietzsche engaged with the question of cerebral compatibility from a slightly different direction. In his 1878 book, Human, All Too Human, he argued that marriage is fundamentally a long conversation, and that when choosing a partner, you should ask whether you can talk well with that person into old age.

Like Milton, Nietzsche characterized intellectual communion as fundamental to a lasting union, not as a bonus. I align with the thinking of both. But the person who really helped me answer the question of what matters in romance, the mind or the body—or whether those distinctions are even useful—was not someone I read. It was someone I listened to: the lyrical philosopher known as Prince.

I’ve spent a good part of my career thinking about music as a form of knowledge. But Prince had me long before any of that. I was captivated by his creative fluency, the way he moved from intellect to physicality to spirituality without ever treating them as separate domains, let alone ranking them.

If I were to sketch a longer trajectory of those rankings on the way to Prince, it might go something like this: Saint Augustine built a bridge between the sacred and the profane that Western thought has been living inside ever since. In the 14th century, the Italian scholar-poet Petrarch elevated love by spiritualizing it, positioning the beloved as an untouchable muse—adored from afar, beautiful precisely because she was unreachable. Milton imagined intellectual communion as divine but didn’t connect it to the body. In the 19th century, Percy Bysshe Shelley argued for a fusion of souls, describing the concept of the “twin flame”: “We shall become the same, we shall be one / Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two? / One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew.” Nietzsche abandoned the sacred entirely and kept only the mind. And much of 20th-century pop culture (especially in music) swung the other way, reducing attraction to the body alone.

Prince knocked all the walls down. Where Petrarch’s lover might have written “I love you so much I could die,” Prince took the conceit and made it visceral, carnal, immediate—then turned around and insisted that the mind was what he was really after.

Many people register Prince’s hypersexual image and miss the consistent thread of yearning for intellectual intimacy running through his music. In “If I Was Your Girlfriend,” he doesn’t position himself as a conqueror. He asks to be repositioned as a confidant, someone granted access to a woman’s unperformed interior world. The song isn’t seduction. It’s a plea for the kind of knowing that Milton called “meet help” and that Nietzsche called “a long conversation.” Prince just set his lines to a drum machine.

[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]

Even in “Sexy M.F.,” in which the surface is pure provocation, Prince insists that what he wants is “not your body, your mind, you fool.” The argument for intellectual intimacy is embedded inside the most overtly physical song imaginable because Prince refused to separate the categories. On “Love 2 the 9’s,” you can hear him testing what some psychologists refer to as “cognitive tempo” in real time. The track is structured as rapid-fire banter with the artist’s creative collaborator and eventual wife Mayte Garcia, a back-and-forth in which wit, timing, and verbal dexterity are the point. It’s flirtation, but the flirtation is the assessment. Can she keep pace? Can she volley? Prince isn’t just charming her. He’s running Milton’s compatibility test on tape.

The artist’s 1996 three-disc album, Emancipation, released simultaneously as a declaration of freedom from Warner Bros. and a celebration of his marriage to Garcia, fuses romantic partnership with creative autonomy. The track “Friend, Lover, Sister, Mother/Wife” collapses every form of intimacy—companionable, lustful, familial, marital—into one person. His vision wasn’t Milton’s hierarchy or Nietzsche’s abstraction; it was total fusion. He wasn’t asking whether his partner knew what he knew. He was asking: Can we know each other completely?

Though Prince’s vision was extraordinary, not even he could sustain it, in practice. His marriage to Garcia ended in divorce after the loss of their son; his second marriage also ended in divorce. Which brings us back to the question: What, in practice—and amid the chaos of modern life—is actually achievable? I have come to believe that what sustains intellectual intimacy is not a shared knowledge base or level of education but rather three elements operating together. When even one is missing, the whole thing may falter.

The first element is curiosity. Here, I don’t mean that people must be curious about the same things. Rather, each needs to show a willingness to care about what the other person deeply cares about. What are you reading? is a question about someone’s day. What are you enjoying about it? is a question about the person.

The second element is a shared language—the ability to pick up what the other person is putting down, without a decoder ring—meaning the shorthand that you use, the references that land, and the nuance that doesn’t need to be spelled out. In the field of rhetoric, this is described as a “discourse community,” a relationship between individuals that is solidified, in part, by their norms of communication.

The third is mental timing: having the same cadence of wit, the same processing speed, the ability to volley and return. This is what Prince showed off in “Love 2 the 9’s.” It’s what researchers studying interpersonal synchrony are now measuring at a biological level, because when people truly click, they’re literally falling into rhythm, matching heart rates and brain waves.

In musical performance, coherence doesn’t come from sameness but from attunement. Musicians listen for structure, timing, and possibility. They respond, adjust, and extend. They are, in a sense, thinking together. Relationships work the same way. What we experience as being “seen” is often a shared capacity to track and respond to each other’s signals. Two people can inhabit entirely different domains and still meet each other with immediacy, grasping nuance, appreciating enthusiasm, building on each other’s ideas rather than flattening them.

The real intellectual gap in relationships, then, isn’t between knowing ball or knowing Aristotle, to paraphrase Taylor Swift—because the issue isn’t whether your partner knows what you know. More important is the difference between disinterest and curiosity, between aloofness and care, between “You’re boring me” and “I don’t get it yet, but tell me more.”

Some people may think that worrying about intellectual compatibility is precious or elitist. But centuries of thinkers agree that minds matter, conversation matters, and being mentally alone with someone you share a life with is a particular kind of suffering worth taking seriously. My advice? Find a person who wants to hear about what you’re reading, not just someone who waits for you to close the book.

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In The Atlantic’s November cover story, “Choose Your Overlord,” staff writer Josh Tyrangiel profiles Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who are in a race to control outer space. Tyrangiel writes that together, in fierce competition, “these two billionaires are in the early stages of a race to vertically integrate the galaxy—a process that involves rockets, moon landings, enormous satellite constellations, and space-based data centers running AI models fueled by computing power that no terrestrial supplier can match. Both say they hope to preserve human life from the specter of climate change and expand mankind’s understanding of the universe. Both would also like to dominate a market that, unlike every other market they’ve previously conquered, has no ceiling and few established rules.”

For most of human history, Tyrangiel writes, “the power to decide where a civilization went next belonged to governments, monarchs, or despots. It’s a measure of how much has changed that a retail executive from Seattle and a South African–born engineer are well positioned to exercise that power. Nobody voted for either of them. And they may be the only ones who can check the other’s power.”

But as Tyrangiel writes, one of them clearly has the upper hand. In 2025, Musk’s SpaceX launched 83 percent of the mass sent into orbit—about 10 times more than its nearest competitor, the Chinese government. His satellite company, Starlink, has 11,000-plus satellites, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all active spacecraft orbiting Earth.

Tyrangiel points out that America “needing Bezos’s extraordinary concentration of private power to mitigate Musk’s extraordinary concentration of private power is probably not what the Founders had in mind.” When Tyrangiel asked Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut, whether he trusted either man completely, Kelly replied, “Kind of a loaded question.” Kelly, Tyrangiel reports, says he wants SpaceX to “continue to be a successful company because it is in our national-security interest that that’s the case. I also want to see Blue Origin be successful.” Tyrangiel writes: “The pragmatist’s position, shared by most of the national-security community, is that one company capable of getting you to space is better than none, and two is better than one. But even if Bezos is the less mercurial billionaire, Blue Origin is not yet a reliable substitute for SpaceX. So the government can’t use Blue Origin as leverage.”

The government is not negotiating from a position of strength, but Tyrangiel writes, “Bezos and Musk have a shared vulnerability: Both say they would like to go to the moon—for their empires, for glory, and because their youthful love of space has never settled into something more rational. To put it in terms they and the president would all understand, the moon is leverage.” And in their race to the moon, Tyrangiel writes, “most people I spoke with have reached the same conclusion: On this, Blue Origin is ahead. It has completed thermal-vacuum testing on Blue Moon, and, as of August, its structure, propulsion, and avionics were fully assembled; it’s already communicating with NASA’s satellites and deep-space network … The crux of the difference is that Blue Origin—the smaller, slower company in need of a win—seems to have built a product to fit the brief, while Musk has built a giant rocket designed for his satellite business and his personal goal of deep-space travel to Mars. Making Starship work for the moon is like adapting a cargo ship to win a yacht race.”

Josh Tyrangiel’s “Choose Your Overlord” was published today at TheAtlantic.com. Please reach out with any questions or requests.

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At Café Soul, a semi-regular party in New York City, $30 buys you a chance to belt R&B hits, sip margaritas from commemorative glasses, try out Awkward Games’ icebreaker cards, and—as the ticket page promises—form “genuine connections.” When I arrived 45 minutes after the rooftop party started on a recent Saturday afternoon, the few 20- and 30-something guests were mostly sitting on mid-century-modern couches, looking at their phones. But Tionne Barmer, who dreamed up the event, promised me that, in two hours, the rooftop would be packed: People would be enjoying the Patrón-sponsored bar, trying the brown-sugar cold brew (underwritten by On the Way Coffee), using Awkward Games cards to skip small talk, and maybe even flirting. (The event was also sponsored by Tinder.) They’d have a chance to make genuine connections, which is what Barmer was really selling. “People will pay for the entertainment,” he said, “and, on the side, they get community.”

Barmer has always had a talent for bringing people together, and now he’s making a living out of it. Some people call this job “event curator”; others have started using the term community builder. People like Barmer are, in essence, professional scene-makers. They were student-body presidents, sorority leaders, slumber-party queens, that one guy in the friend group who threw the best parties—and now they organize knitting circles, silent reading parties, adult summer camps, run clubs, and life-story sharing sessions to help young adults find one another. They sell their guests the opportunity for friendship, and they sell brands access to the groups they’ve gathered, not on Instagram or TikTok, but in real life.

If Barmer and others like him can make this a full-time profession (he quit his finance job only when his side gig as a community builder could match that income), it’s in part because Americans are in desperate need of shindigs. As The Atlantic has reported, in the past three decades, pretty much every measure of socializing—hosting dinner parties, going on picnics, volunteering—has dropped by double digits; in 2023, only 4.1 percent of us managed to make it to a social event or host one on an average weekend or holiday. “Everyone wants to attend parties, but no one wants to throw them,” Ellen Cushing wrote in this magazine last year.

Planning a party is, after all, a lot of work. Umama Kibria, a co-founder of Play Social Club, grew up helping her father host picnics for their Desi community. He’d cater meals and create elaborate The Price Is Right–esque games. Although he sold tickets to cover the cost of the food, he’d spend his own money on the decor, activities, and prizes. Kibria saw how the events drained his energy and finances. When she graduated from college, she started hosting large gatherings of her own, including grown-up field days and her own Desi picnics. Unlike her dad, she charged enough to make a profit.

What really shocked her father, Kibria told me, was how she was able to find brand partners who’d contribute $10,000 sponsorships so that she could periodically host free events. Between ticket sales, affiliated codes, equity deals, and consulting gigs, she made her dad’s hobby her full-time job. If she provides her peers with the social life they crave, she realized, “people will pay.”

They really will, Joan Li, an associate principal of wellness-industry insights at the market-research firm Mintel, told me. Many Americans now see social connection as a purchasable good. Just as DoorDash offers food delivery for people who don’t have time or don’t want to cook, solo entrepreneurs and businesses offer social calendars. This so-called IRL economy is in some ways a reaction against the internet and the ills of the influencer economy: People want to get off their phones and go somewhere to make an actual friend. But the job of “community builder” is also an outgrowth of influencer culture, Brooke Erin Duffy, a communications professor at Cornell who studies influencers, told me. Because social media is now saturated with creators monetizing their followers, anyone who can get people together offline and in-person could command a premium.

That’s part of the pitch that Pie (short for “People I Enjoy”), a new platform for hosts to advertise and monetize events, is making. “Think about the value of how much influencers get paid to make a video to, hopefully, get someone for three-to-five seconds in a feed, versus sticking someone IRL in front of a logo or a product for an hour. The value is so much higher there,” Nadya Okamoto, an influencer and a co-founder of Pie, told me. The thought of Michaels sponsoring knitting circles so that the company can stick its logo in front of people for longer might give some of us pause—it certainly bummed me out—but Pie, along with platforms such as Onbrand and Offline, which match brands with events to sponsor, is pushing to build a world in which socializing is also a marketing opportunity.

Right now, Pie offers participants in its Pie Creator Club, including Barmer, an average of $445 and up to $3,500 a month to organize gatherings. The company also co-hosted a dinner this summer at which community builders swapped best practices for “communitymaxxing.” It’s currently using venture capital to pay its creators, but long-term, Pie is wagering that businesses will pay community builders like they do online influencers, for access to their guests. And some brands are already betting on this new economy: Tinder launched an “Events” section of its app this past spring, and by the end of the year, plans to feature events in 75 cities, mainly through partnerships with party organizers like Barmer.

As I wandered around Café Soul, which was part of a series that Barmer had designed to get people off their phones, signs reminded guests to LIVE IN THE MOMENT. And as the party picked up, they were doing just that: Hundreds of people formed a dance circle, then opened it up for a man in head-to-toe stone-washed denim, who dropped it low, backed it up, and gave his new friends what may be one of the most electric performances of T-Pain’s “I’m Sprung” ever given at 3 p.m. on a Saturday. But people did also have their phones out to film themselves dancing and lip-synching; one guy in plaid culottes and tiny green sunglasses was filming on a tripod. These events still need to generate online content to be financially viable, Andrew Roth, a co-founder of Offline, told me. Most people find out about these communities through social media, and companies expect that any event they sponsor will generate posts featuring their products. Still, he said, influencers get paid millions of dollars to keep us on our phones—why not reward the hosts getting us (mostly) off them? Roth described a future in which “you already have your monthly book club, and it just so happens this one you’re going to get paid for.”

This proposition is akin to an older phenomenon—the Tupperware parties of the 1950s, Duffy said, when women hosted friends in their living room and exhibited the latest and greatest in food storage. Plenty of people have also paid to socialize at their country club or local Rotary chapter; others have found ways to turn their hobbies into a business, without a venture-backed app to help them do it. At its worst, a world in which a book club is sponsored by Barefoot Wine could make people feel like their every waking moment is a marketing opportunity, even more than they already do. When I played a round of icebreaker cards with two women—who had first met, they told me, at a makeup class at Nordstrom, hosted by another so-called IRL community called Girls That Gather—I had fun, but I felt a bit like I was inhabiting a simulacrum of “community.” Yet all the hosts I spoke with seemed like they were earnestly trying to make sure that their events did not feel that way.

Many of them asked me which communities I was a part of. I’d tell them about Sundays at church and Wednesday Bible study in my living room. A couple of them told me that they were essentially trying to build a secular community from the same template: Churches give people a physical place to repeatedly congregate in a large group setting, and also offer ways for smaller groups to gather throughout the week. Safi Aziz, another full-time community builder, told me he sees events as helping fill the gap left by the decline of public institutions. “If we’re no longer gathering as much over religion” or other organizational ties, he said, “all we really have left to gather over is common interest.” (In his case, that common interest is game nights, which he runs through his company, Joust.)

But unlike these IRL communities, church doesn’t promise a great time. Authentic communities can’t be optimized, because they’re fueled by friction: showing up when it is inconvenient; being kind to one another even when Barbara is being a pain in the neck. They build trust because they ask something of you, besides just money, as the price of admission.

So far, professional community builders mostly seem to be offering people an easy way to party—and thank God for that. Even if someone goes to an event and doesn’t connect with anyone, they’ve still gathered with a group of people that weekend. That is the first step of being part of a community, and something America certainly needs.

Villains, in 21st-century literature, are hard to come by. Very few novelists write real Bad Guys or build their books around clear struggles between good and evil—and with reason. Such storylines, when executed poorly, can easily become didactic; a villain can turn into a cartoon. Yet some of the most satisfying stories out there, the ones that people have adapted and retold for centuries, are tales of good versus evil: Paradise Lost, Le Morte d’Arthur, a decent chunk of the Brothers Grimm.

As recently as the mid-20th century, literary novelists were still writing evil characters: “Big Bads,” we might call them. Yet the gap between the sinister Cathy in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and the somewhat redeemed version—the girl boss of the brothel, as The New Yorker’s Alexandra Schwartz recently put it—in Zoe Kazan’s new Netflix adaptation indicates that writers are leery of villains now. Reading the canon suggests that this might foreclose on a rich vein of drama and meaning. So does reading the distinctly contemporary work of the Appalachian writer Madeline ffitch.

ffitch is a longtime environmental activist, and her 2019 debut novel, Stay and Fight, follows three women raising a child off the grid in eastern Ohio while battling a natural-gas company that becomes their nemesis. Still, though the company has a slimy functionary, it’s essentially an impersonal version of evil. But in her newly released follow-up, Avalon, Rise, ffitch gives her villain a face and a voice.

The novel is again set in Appalachian Ohio, in a small town where an internet-famous neo-Nazi has just moved. Its characters have to struggle against not only the extremist herself, but also her quickly spreading influence, while still dealing with their preexisting troubles, which include isolation, addiction, and one mother’s seeming compulsion to hit her child. These are serious matters—and yet some of the clearest influences in Avalon, Rise are children’s books. In fact, Pete Seeger’s Abiyoyo, the tale of a boy and his father who save their village from a giant, seems to be the book’s guiding star.

Avalon, Rise is a sophisticated novel, intellectually complex and slyly funny at every turn. Like Abiyoyo, it is also a very direct story about facing evil with courage. Avalon, Rise makes the case on nearly every page that opposing the Big Bad is necessary. But that basic principle, the book suggests, does not make standing up to those who would destroy a community easy. Indeed, the ever-shifting balance between clarity and complication is central to the novel.

ffitch is able to maintain this balance largely because she seems to have little interest in demonstrating purity—either her own or that of her characters. Avalon, Rise doesn’t care if its characters do the precisely correct thing. As a result, it achieves the rare feat of having a distinct sense of right and wrong, without ever becoming preachy or heavy-handed. It becomes an exploration of how confusing and hard it is to be good.

Abiyoyo is set in a village united, as one of Avalon, Rise’s characters puts it, by annoyance and fear. The annoyance is at the dad and son, who are such inconsiderate neighbors that the town exiles them; the fear is of Abiyoyo, a perhaps-mythical man-eating giant. But when Abiyoyo actually shows up one morning, the ostracized father-son duo comes up with a clever strategy to defeat him, saving the town and redeeming themselves in the process. All of these plot points—and really, these characters—appear in ffitch’s novel.

In Avalon, Rise, the village is Avalon, Ohio, which seems to be loosely based on the real town of Athens. Its menacing giant is white nationalism, embodied by a true believer named Stasia—the “Volk Mother” or “OdinistMama” online—who moves to Avalon and begins recruiting in its community. But rather than having one parent and a child to defeat the villain, ffitch fills Avalon, Rise with a sprawling, endearing, enraging group of characters who are, if not outcasts, distinctly at the town’s margins.

There’s Avalon’s social worker, who holds herself a bit apart from the community she serves; there’s the wishy-washy librarian who, by trying to agree with everyone she talks with, ends up going back constantly on her word; there are the anti-fascist organizers with bad attitudes and too many piercings. Over the course of the novel, which has the conviction of a manifesto but the relaxed, raucous narrative quality of a good shaggy-dog story, ffitch gets all of these characters to come together to deal not only with Stasia but also with the residents of Avalon who are willing, and in some cases eager, to enable her.

[Read: A diagnosis for social conflict that gets lost along the way]

Stasia’s leading enabler, Woody, is, perhaps counterintuitively, also Avalon, Rise’s moral center. What I mean is that he’s the character who struggles the hardest. He is a printmaker and an addict (any reader who was disappointed, as I was, by Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead will get a more nuanced and less dramatic portrait of drug addiction in Appalachia here). His prized possession is a milk crate of children’s books—including, pointedly, Abiyoyo—that he refers to regularly as sources of artistic inspiration, comfort during withdrawal, entertainment for his 4- and 7-year-old nephews, and guidance for when he doesn’t know what to do.

Woody gets sucked into Stasia’s orbit after she commissions him to print flyers for her “European Heritage Rug Braiding” workshops. Stasia’s barn contains an old Vandercook, a 20th-century printing press that Woody reveres so much that he has “memorized its anatomy.” ffitch, who loves detailed terminology, luxuriates in Woody’s pleasure at just knowing “there was such thing as a half-­pica lever, a sliding knee stick, a slug cutter, a cylinder eccentric,” let alone using them. Stasia allows him access to the press, and dangles the possibility of giving it to him. In Woody’s imagination, owning it would give him a real life as an artist, which, in turn, might help him stay clean. This desire, along with his addiction itself, makes him highly susceptible to Stasia’s manipulation, even as his mother and best friend lead very different efforts to organize against her.

Woody’s mother, Eloise, is Avalon’s people-pleasing librarian, a lifelong liberal activist who believes in civil discourse above all. On Stasia’s arrival, though, her commitment to this value is immediately shaken by the more forceful resistance proposed by the novel’s ragtag group of anti-fascists, which includes Woody’s childhood best friend, Leroi—a sweet, earnest mama’s boy who dreams of getting out of Avalon and becoming a vagabond. The novel’s goals include bringing its Lerois and its Eloises together, prodding them to collaborate despite their many disagreements.

[Read: A biting satire about the idealistic left]

But the novel’s deeper effort is to use political work—an “ordinary and necessary” part of life, ffitch has written—and the dissidence and quandaries it creates, to ask that each of its characters be brave in their own way. In every case, this means dealing with Stasia. For Woody, it also means reckoning with addiction, and for Eloise, recognizing that her desire to be a nonjudgmental mother has led her to facilitating his drug abuse.

For Eloise’s older child, Emma, who has two young sons, it means admitting something even harder. ffitch is uncommonly good at writing, tenderly but without sentimentality, about people who both adore their children and make colossal errors in raising them. Emma, especially where her 7-year-old son, Martin, is concerned, falls into this category. Of their dynamic, ffitch writes, “Emma loved Martin helplessly. Yet, just as helplessly, she wanted to hit him”—and she does. It’s only toward the end of the book that Emma admits that hitting her son isn’t a maternal instinct but rather a sign that she, herself, needs significant help.

By braiding these stories, and many more, into the tale of Avalon defeating its giant, ffitch tells a layered, sophisticated story that expresses a clear, ethical point of view without hammering readers on the head. Not many novels for adults do this successfully, but in children’s literature, it is one of the standards for a great book. ffitch includes many in Avalon, Rise: Abiyoyo but also Frog and Toad, Herschel and the Hanukkah Goblins, The Dead Bird. Each of these books demands that its characters face their situation with courage; each one takes something that seems simple—burying a bird, celebrating Hanukkah, all sorts of mundane tasks in Frog and Toad—and surrounds it with not just emotional complication but also mischief, humor, and delight.

So, too, with Avalon, Rise, as it demonstrates that white supremacists are unwelcome in town. What Avalon, Rise understands as well as the classics of children’s literature is that when you’re a small, fallible, confused person, everything is exciting but almost nothing is easy. What it understands as well as any great adult novel is how hard it is to get people to work together, no matter how high the stakes. In bringing these two clear yet complicated pieces of knowledge together, ffitch has written a remarkable book.

At one point or another, The New Yorker’s Janet Malcolm construed each profession or art form she wrote about as a mug’s game. She asserted that the “crowning paradox of psychoanalysis is the near-uselessness of its insights,” though she filled her work with Freudian tropes and paradigms. (She herself spent eight years in analysis.) The presumption of innocence underlying criminal trials had a “hollowness” that called the whole judicial system into question. Biography was a genre that Malcolm practiced and investigated, and she has now become a subject of it with the publication of Eve Sneider’s The Absent Woman. But all biography struck Malcolm as “transgressive,” an “impertinence”; its readers would be better off accepting that “if anything is our own business, it is our pathetic native self.” Which isn’t to say that readers should favor autobiography. The “original sin” of that undertaking is to wallow in “memories of conflict, resentment, blame, self-justification—and it is wrong, unfair, inexcusable to publish them.”

The quotations above come from five books produced over five decades, and this catalog of futility and ethical compromise does not even include Malcolm’s most famous animadversion, which she lobbed against her own craft and calling: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” These words open The Journalist and the Murderer (1990), Malcolm’s account of the lawsuit brought by Jeffrey MacDonald (the murderer, an Army captain convicted of killing his wife and children) against Joe McGinniss (the journalist working on a book about him), who’d maintained MacDonald’s cooperation by writing him letters that conveyed the clear impression that McGinniss believed in his innocence. The book McGinniss finally published, Fatal Vision, squarely affirmed MacDonald’s guilt.

This literary treachery seemed to agitate Malcolm more than the slaughter of MacDonald’s family. It was all of a piece with her certainty that nonfiction writers made reality and fact as pliable as they are for attorneys facing off in a courtroom. Journalistic accounts of trials all impose falsely coherent plotlines on actuality. According to Malcolm, nonfiction is always aspiring to the authoritative “completeness” and seeming inevitability of fiction. (Notice that the notorious first line of The Journalist and the Murderer, which lays down a universal law, has a cadence similar to the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice.) In The Silent Woman (1994), her study of the ever-multiplying biographical literature about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Malcolm took things further: “The ideal of unmediated reporting is regularly achieved only in fiction, where the writer faithfully reports on what is going on in his imagination.”

[David A. Graham: Janet Malcolm the magician]

Journalists were outraged by Malcolm’s account of MacDonald versus McGinniss not just because of what she included in the long New Yorker articles where The Journalist and the Murderer first took form, but also because of what she omitted: the fact that she herself was then embroiled in litigation launched by Jeffrey Masson, a flamboyant psychoanalyst whose professional adventures she had chronicled while massaging and repositioning interview quotations from him beyond accepted norms. She could produce tape recordings of most of the quotations in their raw form, but a handful of the more inflammatory ones were in written notes that she couldn’t locate; in the first of two trials, she was found guilty of libel.

Malcolm insisted that her adaptive techniques had once been “a commonplace of New Yorker nonfiction” composed by writers such as Joseph Mitchell, who brought his subjects to levels of articulateness they couldn’t reach by themselves. In an afterword to The Journalist and the Murderer, an appendage necessitated by the uproar over the New Yorker articles, she argued that “when a journalist undertakes to quote a subject he has interviewed on tape, he owes it to the subject, no less than to the reader, to translate his speech into prose.” This is at wild variance with all mainstream journalistic ethics. The written genre in which characters, for the reader’s convenience, speak better than they would in real life is, of course, the novel.

However much Malcolm acknowledged the queasiness she felt about her own participation in journalism, she barreled ahead. She could not have pulled off her mental acrobatics and compelling portraiture without a brilliant mind and a wickedly piercing style. During John Roberts’s Senate confirmation hearings in 2005, the “constant play of expression on his features put one in mind of nineteenth-century primers of acting in which emotions—pleasure, agreement, dismay, uncertainty, hope, fear—are illustrated on the face of a model.” The best of her observations merit something beyond Alexander Pope’s famous phrase: They’re not things oft thought but ne’er so well expressed; they’re things probably never before thought at all. Consider these remarks about having really good seats at Il Trovatore :

The inequality of audience experience is intrinsic to the performing arts and unique to them. Literature and painting and sculpture are mediums of equal opportunity. A rich reader’s experience of Anna Karenina is no more intense than a poor one’s. The hedge-fund owner and the secretary see exactly the same Raft of the Medusa. But only the hedge-fund owner gets to see the expression on Azucena’s face when she relives throwing the wrong baby into the fire.

Malcolm had an aphorist’s desire to turn anything she apprehended into an across-the-board truth. A steady snow of inclusivities—“every,” “all,” “we,” “always”—falls upon her pages:

Children are always feeling secretly ashamed or anxious.

All families of suicides are alike.

There is a law of human nature—let us call it the Confidant’s Law—that dictates that no secret is ever told to only one person; there is always at least one other person to whom we feel compelled to spill the beans.

One usually waits in vain for a single example to support these ostensibly omnipresent phenomena. And yet, Malcolm’s mordant power of tone makes a reader register and silently assent to a great deal of this ex cathedra stuff. Her style alone keeps her worthy of our attention. But the particular way she challenged assumptions of objectivity is what makes her a figure intriguing enough to merit her own biography. In her exposés of literary malpractice, she was unafraid to use some of the very manipulations she was decrying. The writs she issued to others were also blank checks made out to herself.

Sneider’s subtitle, The Genius of Janet Malcolm, makes one fear a book of fangirl gush, probably the last thing Malcolm herself would have wanted. One flinches further upon learning that Malcolm had invited Sneider to tea after she, then still a Yale undergraduate, curated an exhibition of Malcolm’s papers in the university’s Beinecke Library. But seven years after that tea, Sneider, now a contributor to The New York Review of Books, has produced a book that assembles the biographical facts about Malcolm with admirable brevity, if not always precision. As for her subject’s writing, Sneider more or less concurs with a widespread verdict: “Malcolm acolytes will tell you that she is everywhere and nowhere within her work.” If traditional literary biography seeks to illuminate the work through the life, this one mostly reverses direction. The Absent Woman is a play on the title of Malcolm’s Plath book, and a kind of challenge that Sneider issues to herself and to readers: Go find the person in the books she wrote.

Sneider’s voice is a lot breezier than Malcolm’s (whose isn’t?). The casual coarseness of her texting generation’s style (“pissing other people off,” “a little fucked up”) makes one imagine her blithely dropping crumbs on Malcolm’s carpet during that tea. Sneider does share a few basic techniques with her subject, such as taking the reader along on her research, making the work on the book part of the book itself. She also breaks into the first person (“I would be remiss not to mention”) when that seems useful.

Sneider tells us that Malcolm arrived in the United States, a Jewish Czech refugee, along with her parents in July 1939 (not a moment too soon), when she was almost 5 years old. Members of the Winn (originally Wiener) family assimilated with considerable speed and success, even as they remained closely tied to their fellow Czechs in Manhattan’s Yorkville neighborhood; Jana, now Janet, continued to speak Czech with her parents. In 1951, she went off to the University of Michigan. The most surprisingly titled chapter in The Absent Woman is “The Humorist,” which covers Malcolm’s writing and editing for the school’s frolicsome undergraduate magazine, The Gargoyle. When Sneider mentions a later New Yorker colleague who said Malcolm “has not one drop of humor—not one,” she interprets the comment as “ironic,” but a reader of Malcolm’s work will find little to support such an interpretation. Cold wit abounds, but precious little warmth and laughter.

Before leaving Ann Arbor, Janet Winn married Donald Malcolm, her editorial predecessor at The Gargoyle. After graduation, the two moved to Washington, D.C., where both wrote for The New Republic, and a few years later to Manhattan, where each began a long association with The New Yorker. Now the mother of a young daughter, Malcolm wrote about shopping and interior design before becoming the magazine’s photography critic. Sneider observes that Malcolm’s “writing on photography could be read as a commentary on her own craft. She was fascinated by the medium’s quest for realism, by its murky relationship to truth-telling.” Donald died young, in 1975, by which time Janet had already begun an affair with Gardner Botsford, another New Yorker editor. She insisted to William Shawn, the magazine’s top editor, that Botsford continue to edit her stories even after she married him.

Sneider properly gives a great deal of attention to Malcolm’s style, characterizing it as “terrifyingly sharp,” “commanding,” and “cutting.” There is such a subzero severity to it that on the rare occasions when Malcolm uses an exclamation point, it’s as if someone else has plunked an emoji onto the page. One friend of hers noted that “the impersonality of how she writes is really the personality.” But Malcolm saw even the chilly projection of impersonality as just another self-interested construction. As she put it in The Silent Woman, “writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness. The pose of fair-mindedness, the charade of evenhandedness, the striking of an attitude of detachment can never be more than rhetorical ruses.”

Malcolm affected these postures herself, and on occasion she could be almost cruel in the pursuit of some small thematic end. In The Silent Woman, she describes a visit to the home of one source, an elderly man who decades earlier had spoken with Plath the night before she died. Her prolonged description of the house’s awful filth and hoardings is apparently justified by how it “stirred my imagination as a metaphor for the problem of writing”—namely, the need to rid one’s “vastly overfilled mind” of all but the essential points before starting. One has to ask whether this famous scourge of nonfiction’s distortions didn’t sometimes use metaphor only to crush reality beneath the gallop of her own hobbyhorses.

[From the April 2004 issue: Sylvia Plath, domesticated goddess]

If Malcolm, who died in 2021, had a “late style,” it was somewhat looser, less guarded. In her 70s, widowed and living by Manhattan’s Gramercy Park, she continued to make and exhibit collages in which text and photographic images sometimes combined in a process vaguely akin to the one she uses in Still Pictures (2023), a posthumously published memoir that allowed Malcolm to approach her own memories obliquely, through family photographs. Those physical objects seem as if they should offer factuality, or at least clues that unassisted memory cannot. But like letters and trial transcripts and so many tools of the trades that Malcolm scrutinized, the pictures sometimes let her down. Examining one snapshot of her very young self, taken several years before her first conscious memory, she writes, “No feeling of identification stirs as I look at her round face and thin arms and her incongruously assertive pose.”

The profile writing that she collected in Nobody’s Looking at You (2019)—which includes portrayals of the pianist Yuja Wang, the clothing designer Eileen Fisher, and the three sisters running Manhattan’s Argosy Book Store—tended toward the gentle and appreciative and even the self-mocking. (In the Fisher portrait, she hears herself “babbling about the ethical dilemmas of journalism.”) These articles don’t always go very deep; there’s no mystery to solve or fraud to expose. They come from a writer whose incandescent energy has subsided to a more ordinary professional level.

Sneider herself admits that Malcolm “threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall” when trying to justify her tampering with Jeffrey Masson’s interview quotes. Even admirers of Malcolm will concede this and likely wish that Sneider herself were more skeptical, less tolerant, than she appears to be of some of Malcolm’s peculiar behaviors and explanations. A year after the second trial, as Sneider summarizes it, “Malcolm’s two-year-old granddaughter Sophy pulled an inconspicuous red notebook off a bookshelf in her country home that, at long last, contained the handwritten notes she had been missing throughout the lawsuit. Three of the five quotes Masson took issue with were now more solidly on the record.” She seems to accept this story at face value, and perhaps it’s true. But if you had been involved in the fight of your life for what Sneider rightly describes as “twelve long, trying, tedious years,” wouldn’t you have at least run your hand along every bookshelf in your city apartment and country house to make sure that you hadn’t inadvertently put the crucial missing notes somewhere in your library? Without any expression of unease, Sneider informs us that Malcolm “opted not to part with the little red notebook” when she sent her papers to Yale; she instead supplied “photocopies of the relevant pages.”

Sneider correctly cites “control” as a core feature of Malcolm’s presentation, because at least the appearance of control (and its resultant authority) remains even when Malcolm is engaged in small fiddlings and concealments, or in her signature overstated generalizations. (Pronouncements that Sneider calls “bold” might better and more often be labeled “bald.”) Malcolm learned to discard one persona for another not only on the page but during her great legal crisis. Long after her courtroom troubles were over, she paid tribute to Sam Chwat, the acting-and-speech coach who helped her achieve a measure of vindication at the second Masson trial, in 1994, where she was cleared of libeling the psychoanalyst. She regretted how, at the first trial, well trained in the “accustomed New Yorker manner”—reticent and remote—she “came across as arrogant, truculent, and incompetent.” For the second trial, Chwat got her to address the jury, instead of Masson’s lawyer, when she was being questioned. He also orchestrated a makeover of her wardrobe, moving her from “skirts or trousers with jackets in black or subdued colors” into “pastel-colored dresses and suits, silk stockings and high heels, and an array of pretty scarves.”

The metamorphosis didn’t just succeed legally; it appealed to Malcolm in a visceral way. Chwat’s “gentle correction of my self-presentation at trial,” she wrote in a New York Review of Books essay, “took me to unexpected places of self-knowledge.” It convinced her that she could perform the tricks whose exposure continued to be her life’s work.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Journalist and the Manipulator.”

Photographs by Lesha Berezovskiy

Updated at 5:24 p.m. ET on October 14, 2026

I. 2,087 Questions

The Pale of Settlement is teeming with ghosts, and why shouldn’t it be? At the turn of the 20th century, some 5 million Jews lived in this region between the Baltic and Black Seas, and by 1945, almost all of them had been murdered. If they slouch now like scarecrows over the tilled black earth, or float between wooden shacks, or even peer over the shoulders of the babushkas selling neat piles of used clothes in front of the bus station in Rivne, this is to be expected. What I hadn’t quite anticipated was just how many questions they had left unanswered—2,087 to be exact. A long list of queries covering nearly every particular of how they lived their lives, from circumcision to shiva, sat on my lap as I stared out the window on a 10-hour car ride from Warsaw to Kyiv, through the heartland of what was once the Pale.

31. Is there a belief that if a pregnant woman steps on the spot where a mare has rolled around, she will carry her child for 12 months?

269. With what do people frighten a child so that he will go to sleep more quickly?

1,280. Is it a custom to drink red liquor if the bride turns out to be a virgin?

1,281. Is it a custom to eat hard cheese if she is a virgin? What does this signify?

1,714. Do people ask for forgiveness from a dead child?

I was on my way to visit the archives, once thought lost, of the early-20th-century Jewish writer Shloyme-Zanvl Rapoport, better known by his nom de plume, S. An‑sky. He was the author of this insanely granular questionnaire. I could have spent my car ride reading any number of other works by An‑sky, who, among his many eccentricities, had a touch of graphomania. His collected writing comprises 15 volumes. He left behind thousands of pages of diaries, essays, short stories, and plays, including his best-known work, The Dybbuk, a masterpiece of Yiddish theater. But I decided on the long list of questions because An‑sky saw them as the culmination of his life’s greatest endeavor: an ecstatic, obsessive attempt to wrap his arms around an entire people just as it was disappearing.

These 2,087 questions were the first part of his Jewish Ethnographic Program⁠—⁠and the only part that was published, in 1914, under the title Der mentsh, which simply means “The Person.” (An-sky’s introduction and questionnaire were translated into English by Nathaniel Deutsch and published in his book The Jewish Dark Continent.) “The Person” was the beginning of a survey that An-sky hoped would cover “every aspect” of Jewish life. “Death, life after death, demonology. Holidays, everyday life, abstract questions,” An‑sky wrote to a potential donor. “In short, we’ll have over 10,000 questions.” Looking out the window, I kept imagining a poor surveyor trudging through the mud of a shtetl with a clipboard, asking, Do you have a couple of months to spare?

Some of the questions are open-ended (897. How did people treat an old maid in the past, and how do they do so now?), but most are hilariously leading. Why would you ask, for example, whether children ever engaged in pranks like gluing their rabbi’s beard to the table when he fell asleep (484) if you didn’t already have intimate knowledge of such a beard gluing? In fact, An‑sky had done his research. The questionnaire was the fruit of an ambitious ethnographic expedition that he’d carried out from the summer of 1912 to the onset of World War I, two years later.

This sort of ethnography is now a mostly outdated social science, a relic of an imperial age in which certain peoples, such as the Inuit, were unthreatening and near-extinct enough to be placed behind glass in a museum. But An‑sky’s was a kind of self-ethnography, a work of salvage and redemption. He was born into the shtetl world in 1863 and grew up in the town of Vitebsk, in present-day Belarus (Marc Chagall’s hometown as well). Raised in poverty by a single mother who ran a tavern, An‑sky rebelled against tradition. In his late teens, he was expelled from a nearby shtetl for trying to persuade the young yeshiva boys he was tutoring to abandon their studies and become freethinkers. When he finally left the Pale, in his 20s, he intended never to look back. He began a peripatetic life as a revolutionary, working in salt mines in the Donbas region alongside Russian miners, living in Berlin and Paris and Bern, developing his writing and his political commitment to radical reform. This is what led him over time to ethnography, which was a way of elevating cultures that were being trampled by the Russian empire.

Only in his 40s did An‑sky realize that the insular but vibrant world of the Jews could be the subject of such ethnography as well. “There is no people that has talked about itself as much and knows itself as little as the Jews,” he wrote in his 1908 treatise “Jewish Folk Art.” He may also have been thinking about himself, and the “emptiness” he frequently described in his letters. In 1912, he secured funding for an expedition from a financier, Baron Vladimir Gintsburg, and set out with a photographer and a musicologist—a small team that would grow the following year—to explore the Pale. Slogging through mud “so deep you could die” (as the Hebrew poet Haim Nahman Bialik put it), he gathered all he could, including songs—he brought along an Edison recording device that could capture sound on wax cylinders, making An‑sky the Alan Lomax of the shtetl.

The final tally of what the expedition managed to collect after two years—visiting more than 60 towns and villages—gives a sense of An‑sky’s intense ambition: some 1,800 folktales, 1,500 songs, 1,000 melodies, 100 historical documents, 500 manuscripts, 700 sacred objects, and 500 wax cylinders of music.

An‑sky didn’t intend for his collection to be a time capsule. He saw it as raw material that could help Jews build a secular national identity for themselves. But a time capsule is exactly what it became. Because in the years that immediately followed, the armies of Russia and Germany clashed in that mud, and each took its wrath out on the shtetl Jews, killing more than 100,000 of them; because Jews would leave the Pale after 1917 for cities such as Moscow, Berlin, and New York; because during World War II, the Nazis would bury what was left of this way of life in an archipelago of mass graves. What An‑sky ended up collecting became not the mortar for building a modern Jewish culture, but shards from a now-extinct civilization.

The archives of this expedition had essentially vanished for most of the 20th century, and were rediscovered only after the end of the Cold War—mostly in St. Petersburg institutions and Ukraine’s national library. Now the country is in the fourth year of what Ukrainians uniformly refer to as the “full-scale invasion” (“war” would imply mutual aggression). With Kyiv under bombardment, a good number of the An-sky materials are again endangered.

I was traveling there to see what remained. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, a century-old organization now based in New York City that works to preserve Yiddish culture, had come to an agreement with the Ukrainian government to digitize An‑sky’s papers. Jonathan Brent, a historian and the organization’s head, had invited me to tag along with him and his chief of staff on their trip to the country to make it official.

There was a terrible feeling of continuity, heading into Ukraine right now for this purpose. An‑sky was desperate to save all that was strange and beautiful about his people; Ukrainians have been dying for four years by the tens of thousands for largely the same reason. They are fighting to preserve their autonomy, which includes the uniqueness of their national and cultural identity—a front line that An‑sky would recognize.

As he began his expedition at the end of June 1912, An‑sky wrote a letter to Gintsburg, his benefactor, in which he felt compelled to spill out his feelings: “I am very nervous, as if standing before the great unknown. How will this all turn out?” Would these villagers regard him as an interloper, or one of their own? “And yet, at the same time, I have a great feeling of joy in my soul, that the most treasured dream of my life is beginning to come to fruition.”

II. A Bird and a Cat

When I strode into the Vernadsky National Library of Ukraine, I assumed that the traces of An‑sky’s expedition were mine for the finding if I just asked nicely. I was wrong. What I discovered instead was the shabby attic fortress of the Judaica department and its head, Tetyana Batanova, who greeted me with pinched lips and a look of exasperation before I even opened my mouth.

I had originally thought the An‑sky archives would be housed in the main branch of the Vernadsky, which I’d ogled online before arriving in Kyiv. This giant modernist slab of a building, which opened in 1989, seems frozen in late-Communist style, with rows of card-catalog drawers and socialist realist murals depicting proletarians plowing fields. In fact, the An‑sky material, along with the rest of the Judaica collection, was located in a neoclassical relic, one of the original library buildings in the city’s center. This was a musty edifice whose interior was painted a faded sky-blue. A grandfather clock sat at the top of a grand stairway, chiming every hour, beneath portraits of the library’s elaborately bearded founders.

The Judaica department, tucked away on the top floor, was almost cozy by comparison. Houseplants crowded the windows. As I entered, along with the YIVO contingent, an air-raid siren went off. The Ukrainians in the room took out their phones, as though consulting a weather app. “There are 50 Shaheds, but not near us,” one of the librarians said, tucking her phone back into her pocket. Drones rather than missiles. The tour continued.

The reason for Batanova’s wariness of YIVO—and, by extension, me—seemed obvious. As the head of the Judaica department since 2019, she was protective of this material, which had barely survived the 20th century, and she did not seem all that excited to share it with outsiders who presumed they were its saviors. Brent saw his claim to An‑sky’s papers as part of his organization’s mission to preserve Jewish heritage. Batanova saw the same papers as integral to Ukrainian heritage. These were not easily reconcilable positions. But Batanova’s reaction was more than just defensiveness. I also picked up another, conflicting emotion as she led us through the dilapidated stacks: shame.

One look at the large water stains on the ceiling—the roof had been leaking for years, Batanova told us—made it clear that the situation for these thousands of precious books and manuscripts was not great. Century-old newspapers were stacked on top of one another, moldering on shelves that seemed about to topple over. Batanova pointed out where flimsy blue and red construction-paper folders that held the An‑sky material sat in the open. The building lacked any climate control. In the winter, the temperature inside dipped well below freezing, but that was better than the summer, Batanova said with a sigh. Humidity was the enemy of this yellowing paper. As we walked through, Brent muttered, “What a fucking shande.”

Wartime had not helped. In the fall of 2022, two cruise missiles slammed into the park across the street and a nearby intersection, killing several people and shaking the building. In early September, a missile struck within a few blocks of the archive’s many vulnerable windows. But limited resources had long been a problem. A researcher who worked there in the 1990s told me she’d been warned that she should bring her own toilet paper. I assumed she was describing a post-Soviet situation of economic hardship, but when I asked Batanova where the restroom was, she pulled a packet of Kleenex from her purse and handed it to me. As part of the deal with the Ukrainians, YIVO was going to pay the library—Brent wouldn’t tell me how much. In short, Batanova knew she needed help, but she didn’t want to need help.

Yet it was a miracle that anything had survived at all. In an academic article, Batanova’s predecessor had described (with Slavic understatement) the “misadventures” of this archive. In 1929, when nearly 30 percent of Kyiv’s population was Jewish, an Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture was established with the goal of collecting every Yiddish periodical, book of poetry, newspaper, and manuscript it could get its hands on throughout the new Soviet empire. By 1934 it had more than 100 employees and housed a quarter of a million volumes—including the contents of five suitcases and boxes that An‑sky had left in his will to be preserved. Then, in 1936, as part of the Great Purge, Stalin shut the institute down and executed its founding director. Parts of the collection were carted away by the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, or burned in the courtyard.

Not long afterward, the Nazis showed up. The occupiers looted what was left of the collection, which had been moved to the Vernadsky, stripping out valuable items to send to Berlin. After the war, the degradation continued. Stalin’s 1949 anti-cosmopolitan campaign targeted Jews and Jewish institutions, and led to the killing of most of the Soviet Union’s leading Yiddish cultural figures. Around this time, almost all of the Judaica collection was taken out of the library and hidden in the dank catacombs of the medieval Vydubetsk monastery, where it remained until 1968. From there, it was moved into a private basement, languishing until it was discovered in the 1990s and eventually transferred back to the Vernadsky.

Misadventures, indeed. After the YIVO folks left, I was alone with Batanova and her staff of four. Letting their guard down slightly, they began showing me An‑sky items. In one folder were some drafts of short stories in his handwriting, including “A goyisher kop,” a 1912 tale of a Jewish man who attempts to assimilate and pass as a Christian. An‑sky’s neat Cyrillic cursive slanted across long, thin strips of paper. The folders were full of such strips, pages that seem to have been sliced in half, apparently his preferred writing material. His signature was at the bottom of one page, with its idiosyncratic hyphen. (No one knows for certain where the hyphen came from; one of the many reasons An‑sky offered throughout his life was that it was originally a printer’s typo he’d found charming.)

What I really wanted to see were notes from the expedition, but every request seemed to meet Batanova’s resistance. When I mentioned this afterward to people familiar with the library, I was told that a Soviet attitude still prevailed in such institutions; the default was to withhold information. I started throwing more darts, asking for random folders. I saw some strips on which An‑sky had jotted down legends he had heard about the Baal Shem Tov, the mystical 18th-century founder of Hasidism. These were surely from the expedition. One folder revealed a long numbered list of signs that would indicate the Messiah had arrived—including that children would spontaneously clasp hands and start to dance.

I asked to see the wax cylinders and Batanova said no, they were too delicate. At this point I started to worry that coming all the way to Kyiv had been a mistake—if there were ghosts here, they were definitely in those cylinders. When I had spoken with Lyudmila Sholokhova, the musicologist who’d helped discover the abandoned recordings in the early 1990s, she described the first time she heard them as a moment of total awe. “I still remember the shock when actually hearing the voices and laughing and coughing. It was super exciting. People would introduce themselves, saying their name and how old they are, and then they would start to sing.”

But Batanova said that every time the original cylinders were played, they degraded. The best she could do was bring me one of the canisters in which they were packaged. I gazed into the darkness of the empty beer-can-size receptacle with EDISON written on the side in large letters, next to a photo of the inventor. This was what anticlimax looked like.

What about some of the pinkassim that An‑sky had collected? These were local record books, some of which went back hundreds of years. The historians I’d talked with before I left for Ukraine told me they were probably the most precious items I could see at the library. Batanova brought out three from the town of Berdichev, part of the 109 in the collection. The pages were covered in calligraphic Hebrew script. One book was from a “Brotherly Love Society,” which a group of tailors established in the mid-19th century. It included bylaws and some fantastic illustrations, among them a drawing of a lion wrestling a snake.

The reading room was about to close for the day. As Batanova began gathering up the folders, a photograph slipped out of one of them. It was of An‑sky—a strange picture. He is standing in a street, squinting into the sun, wearing a black coat and vest. His salt-and-pepper goatee, thick swept-back hair, and dreamy look give him the appearance of a Jewish Don Quixote. But the strangest thing about the photo is that he is cradling a cat in his arms while a bird is sitting on his shoulder. Everyone, even these two enemies, looks copacetic and calm.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Judith Shulevitz on Ukraine’s “zombie history”]

III. A Severed Finger

Somehow this photo of An‑sky managed to make me forget my frustration, because it revealed something of his magic. He got people (and apparently animals) to relax in his presence. Those who traveled with him from shtetl to shtetl said he was often mistaken for a holy man. He was 48 when the expedition began but looked like he was in his 60s, which, as one of his biographers pointed out to me, was actually a benefit: Being preternaturally aged was a sign among rabbis of God’s grace.

An‑sky lived a vagabond existence from the time he was a teenager. “I have neither a wife, nor children, nor a house, nor even an apartment, nor belongings, nor even any settled habits,” he once admitted. On the expedition, he developed a method for quickly gaining trust. He would show up at synagogues and study houses to pray with the local men, disarming them. A crowd would usually gather around him after the service and then follow him to the local inn where the expedition members were staying. Abraham Rekhtman, who joined the group in its second year, recorded his memories nearly 50 years later, describing how, “over a glass of tea or, more often than not, a shot of liquor and a bagel for a snack, An‑sky would at last ask questions.” On his long strips of paper, he would jot down stories and sayings and local legends.

His most successful technique, however, was to bring out the phonograph. The shtetl folk may have heard of such machines, but most had not seen one before. An‑sky would demonstrate by recording a familiar song but coughing or laughing or making a mistake halfway through. He would then play the cylinder back and watch the mouths drop as they heard the recital, coughs and all. This was enough to break the ice, and men would then offer up wedding songs, lullabies, and wordless melodies called nigunim. I’ve now heard dozens of these digitized recordings, and they are eerie and sublime and a little sad. To take one example, Shloyme Kulish, a 24-year-old shopkeeper from Ludmir, was recorded singing on July 17, 1913. For 36 seconds, you can hear him lose himself in a song that sounds, as many of them do, halfway to a sob: Oh dey dey mama mey / Oh dey dey mama mey.

An‑sky was particularly interested in healers and exorcists, mostly older women, who seemed to hold a special power in every town and village. Rekhtman described them in his memoir as performing “magic with knives, socks and combs; they poured wax and poached eggs and knew hundreds of ways to cure a patient.” They also closely guarded the secrets of their spells, amulets, and remedies. An‑sky would often invent a tale of catastrophic bad luck, explaining that he had once been a rich man—and now look at him! He could pay to reverse the curse. The healer would usually pity him and oblige, for a fee. The incantation would then get written down and added to the collection.

Out of an intense desire to save all that he was seeing, An‑sky also started to gather artifacts, whether intricately embroidered kippahs or ritual objects such as the silver plaques used in synagogues to indicate east, the direction of prayer. The pinkassim I saw fell into this category. I also saw an album he’d made that included pages from illustrated Passover Haggadahs; some of these booklets dated back to the 16th century. No manner of ephemera was too small for him. Somewhat blasphemously, he even collected kvitlekh, the little notes left on the graves of famous Hasidic rabbis by people asking for intercession on their behalf. When young Jewish men were called up to serve in the czarist army, they sometimes tried to avoid the draft by cutting off a finger. But they usually saved these, because Jewish law demands that a body be buried intact. An‑sky met an old man in Proskurov who sold him his own finger, severed when he was a teenager. It was to be displayed in a planned ethnographic museum.

An-sky managed to persuade people to part with their songs and community records and even fingers not just because he was charming or because he could pay well—though both were true. I imagine that people felt safe with him because they sensed that he was recovering pieces of himself. There aren’t too many firsthand accounts of An‑sky doing his collecting, but I like what this little tidbit from Shmuel Shrayer, a member of the expedition, reveals: “Our phonograph stood in the corner and recorded the Hasidic melodies with all the ‘bimbumim.’ Sometimes An‑sky would get into the groove and he would sing along like one of them.”

IV. Sem Sorok

On my second morning in Ukraine, I woke up to a video of a buzzing kamikaze drone careening into the side of a building in the center of Lviv, exploding in a bloom of flames and debris. The attack had taken place the previous day and nearly destroyed the city’s historic archive. The sirens I had heard while touring the Judaica collection were part of Russia’s biggest air assault on Ukraine since the start of the invasion, involving nearly 1,000 drones and 34 missiles. Lviv’s archive, which caught fire, holds some of the oldest documents relating to Ukrainian history, including three 12th-century manuscripts composed on birch bark.

I happened to have an appointment with Anatolii Khromov, the head of the Central State Historical Archives, who showed up with his tie loosened and nervously sucking on a cigarette. The Lviv attack had left him in shock, he said. We met on the outskirts of Kyiv, where the country’s main archives are kept, and he pointed to an enormous construction site nearby, where an underground bunker was being built to safeguard the collection. “We need to build faster,” he said.

Later, in the center of the medieval Kyiv neighborhood of Podil, I noticed a small tower of wooden panels protecting a statue from shrapnel. Peeking through the cracks, I saw the bronze face of the Ukrainian philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. For Ukrainians, the stakes in this conflict are nothing less than their survival as an intact culture. Russia is not just a military aggressor; its invasion is premised on the idea that Ukraine doesn’t even exist.

Oksana Semenik, a young art historian, has made it her mission to “decolonize” Ukrainian art, using social media and podcasts to revive the works of forgotten Ukrainian artists, but also to reclaim cultural figures such as the painter Kazimir Malevich, who has long been considered Russian despite his Ukrainian roots. In Ukrainian House, an enormous concrete structure once known as the Lenin Museum that felt like the inside of a missile silo, she showed me around an exhibit of early-20th-century modernist paintings by Ukrainian women. Semenik seemed to apologize for the sparseness of the paintings and drawings. “We are lucky to have what we have,” she said. Most of these painters’ work was suppressed or destroyed during the Soviet period.

Her desperation to salvage Ukrainian culture is not that far off from An‑sky’s efforts to rescue his own. “With every old man who dies, with every small-town fire, with every exile, a piece of our past is lost, and the most beautiful expressions of traditional life, with its customs, traditions, and beliefs, disappear,” An‑sky wrote in the foreword to his questionnaire. When I mentioned this parallel to her, Semenik stopped walking and looked at me intensely. “When I was young, it shocked me whenever I thought about the Jews who once lived here,” she said. “The idea that a whole people could just disappear. Could a people just disappear?”

Despite a history of murderous anti-Semitism on the part of Ukrainian nationalists, the country’s current vision of national identity is a pluralistic one that includes Jews—such as Volodymyr Zelensky, the country’s wartime president. Semenik told me about a new show she was curating for Ukrainian House about Chernobyl, with the goal of changing the perception that the city is defined only by the nuclear disaster that occurred there. It was also once a major spiritual center of Hasidism.

Seeing Ukrainian history through a Jewish lens means clashing with some patriotic narratives. On his expedition, An‑sky collected traumatic stories about 17th-century massacres carried out by the Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky, which killed tens of thousands of Jews. Many shtetls preserved similar legends about a local couple about to be married who were murdered together by Khmelnytsky’s men, and whose common grave became a talisman. But for Ukrainians, Khmelnytsky is no villain. He led an uprising in 1648 that established the Cossack Hetmanate, the first independent Ukrainian state. A region of the country is named after him, and an enormous statue of him on a rearing horse stands in the center of Kyiv. My hotel was on Khmelnytsky Street.

When I returned to the Judaica reading room the next day, Batanova had warmed a bit. She even let me see the wax cylinders after I put my hands together in supplication. I went down to another, freezing room in the Vernadsky; signed a number of ledger books so that I could be granted admittance; and then saw dozens of smooth black tubes, kept in the kind of wooden crates in which you might store paint cans.

I asked Batanova whether her family and friends thought it was strange that, as an ethnic Ukrainian, she had devoted her life to Jewish culture, becoming a teacher of Yiddish and a keeper of this Judaica collection. Yes, she said, some members of her family did think it was pretty odd. An encounter with Yiddish as a student had changed her life. After years of trying to master German and failing, she took a Yiddish class. It was “like my language,” she said. “I understand the humor and the pain of this language. It’s in its structure. It’s in everything.” She smiled. She also felt a kinship between Yiddish and Ukrainian, two languages that she learned had both been dismissed by Russian imperial officials as zhargon, or “jargon”: disposable dialects.

Jewishness was part of Ukrainianness, she insisted. It shows up everywhere. In the 2000s, she traveled all over Ukraine to explore Jewish cemeteries, reading the lost histories of those towns on the tombstones. She also found artifacts with “Hebrew words or sayings incorporated in local Ukrainian.” Batanova told me about a dance that is popular at Ukrainian weddings, Sem Sorok, which sounds like traditional Jewish klezmer music—even though the people dancing in the middle of a circle holding a handkerchief between them have no idea about its origins. Sem Sorok means “7:40”; this was the name given to a commuter train that once arrived daily at that time in Odesa, bringing Jewish merchants home from all over the country. On YouTube, I found a video of a Ukrainian teenager with a blue mohawk breakdancing to the tune.

V. A Lullaby

On my third and last day in Kyiv, the archive began to satisfy my demands that it speak to me. This was not a foregone conclusion, even now that I had Batanova’s help; so much had gotten lost and scattered over time, and An‑sky’s expedition itself had been cut short by war. Rekhtman, the member of the group who later wrote a memoir, remembered all he had to leave behind when he fled rampaging Ukrainian militias in 1915. “I did not manage to take along with me the great collection of ethnographic pictures (approximately 1,500), as well as the few hundred journals containing notes on the expedition. Everything remained in my hometown Proskurov,” he wrote, and the material “vanished” during the anti-Jewish violence that convulsed Ukraine after World War I.

I was operating somewhat blindly in this huge archive, and my requests to see more and more items in the hope that An-sky’s expedition might come into view were met with some distress. “How long are you in Kyiv?” a few of the librarians asked me, anxiously. Soon I came across what appeared to be a dirty little saying jotted down in a notebook: “When I become drunk from the liquor, a pretty girl is essential” (this sounds funnier in Yiddish, because the words for “drunk,” shiker, and “essential,” iker, rhyme). Then I began opening folders that contained hundreds of pages of what appeared to be lyrics, which one of the expedition’s musicologists had neatly transcribed in small notebooks. Immediately, I encountered yearning. One song was attributed to a 24-year-old man named Dovid Keller:

Ach, there in the woods stands a tree,
The tree is bent and stooped
And there and there stands a lover
With two eyes filled with tears

Ach, there and there stands a vineyard
The vineyard has not yet been reaped
I wasted the years of my youth
Like a gambler with playing-cards

A gambler who plays, plays to win
Plays his cards with the goal of a win
I have lost the years of my youth
I will never win them again.

There were a number of lamentations like this: songs of longing, of lost love. And a few truly tragic and disturbing ballads, such as one that seemed like it could have been sung by Johnny Cash, about a boy who follows a girl he loves “one nice night on a summer’s day” and demands to know if she will marry him. Her parents forbid the match:

As soon as he heard this,
He got very upset
He took out a revolver
And shot her on the spot.

When he shot her like that
She fell like a stone
He then turned the gun around
And shot himself alone.

I also liked the lullabies, because I could picture a mother or father rocking a baby to them. This one, a lullaby within a lullaby, was attributed to a man named Hersh Perlokh Kaliker:

In the Holy Temple in a corner
The widow Bas Tzion sits alone
She rocks her only son, Yidel
And sings him a beautiful lullaby:

La la la Yidel’e, when you become a rich Yidel’e
You should remember this little song:
Raisins and almonds, that will be your trade,
Sleep, my dear Yidel’e, sleep. Sleep, dear Yidel’e, sleep.

Here was the treasure I was after, distinct voices from that lost, muddy world. (The translator Rose Waldman helped me reveal more of their color.) They should have been strange and unfamiliar, but they weren’t really. The emotions were so everyday, so known. I’m sure every culture that ever was had versions of songs carrying these sentiments—the desire to matter, to find love requited, to get a baby to fall asleep.

An‑sky didn’t focus on the universal, though. What felt exhilarating to him about his discoveries in each of these shtetls (“The happiness I feel from this work is limitless,” he wrote) were the inventive ways Jews confronted the human condition—all those ditties and amulets and dirty jokes. I looked through a collection of the photographs taken on the expedition, the originals of which are in St. Petersburg: a man transporting matzah on his back in a large wicker basket. A circle of schoolchildren during recess. A rabbi, with his long white beard, lying down for a nap. Taken by the photographer Solomon Yudovin, these images are incredible. But they don’t move me in the same way as the songs, because the photos are passive; they tell us what people wore, how they worked, and how deep that mud actually was. But folk culture is active—the record of how grief could transform into the stitch on a white burial shroud, how joy could turn into a rhyme belted out by children to accompany the skipping of stones across a lake.

When An‑sky was in his 20s, working in the mines of the Donbas, he began writing down the songs that miners invented to pass the time. Even though these men had been uprooted from their villages—“some kind of nomadic tribe, torn away from one shore but not having reached the other”—they were meeting their new reality by generating new culture, an act of adaptation. When he finally returned to the shtetls on his expedition, this was what he understood ethnography to be: capturing the product of this living process. Never given to understatement, An‑sky said that he was gathering nothing less than “another Torah, an Oral Torah,” one that was “on par with the Book, with the great Written Torah.” What Jews normally called “oral Torah” referred to the history of rabbinic interpretation and reinterpretation of the biblical laws, recorded in works such as the Talmud. An‑sky used the term to refer to something else entirely, created by “the people, themselves, especially the common folk.” This oral Torah “reflects the same beauty and purity of the Jewish soul, the gentleness and nobility of the Jewish heart, the height and depth of Jewish thought.”

What I’d finally seen at the Vernadsky were remnants of this Torah. Batanova, who wore white gloves as she carefully flipped each page, certainly would understand this. YIVO would as well, because this justified the great effort of digitizing it all. It suddenly seemed right that the transcription of a song sung more than 100 years ago and preserved in a little blue notebook should be the subject of such competing attentions. When I made my way down the linoleum hallways of the library for the last time, I had a strange, An‑sky-inspired urge: to go back and kiss the thin pages I’d just seen. Every Jew knows, after all, that when you come across a Torah, this is what you do.

VI. The Tightrope Walker

An‑sky wrote The Dybbuk while on the road, in trains and horse-drawn carts, pouring into it the same curiosities and artifacts that went into his 2,087 questions. I chose to read the play on my return trip to Warsaw, which included an eight-hour wait to cross the Ukrainian-Polish border. The alternative title of The Dybbuk is Between Two Worlds, and that is how I felt while idling in line with dozens of other cars. The eerie dialogue of the play only heightened the sense of being in-between. As the young bride, Leah, is about to be possessed by a dybbuk, a demon, she says to her old nurse, “They are here with us. A person is born to live a long life. But if he dies before his time, what happens to his unlived life, his joys and his sorrows, the ideas he did not have time to develop, the deeds he had no chance to do? What happens to the children who were to have been born to him? What are they? Where?”

The Dybbuk depicts the shtetl as a place saturated in magic, where the dead mingle with the living. A poor young student named Khonon is disturbed that Leah, the woman he loves and believes he is cosmically fated to marry, has been betrothed to another man. Khonon pursues all kinds of magic to stop the wedding. But, as he says, “they didn’t help—not the fasts, not the ablutions, not the mortifications of the flesh, not the kabbalistic spells!” He dies from the intensity of these efforts and returns as a spirit to possess Leah’s body. The last two acts of the play are an extended exorcism, a ritual that An‑sky must have observed.

The stories and customs gathered from the expedition are present in nearly every line of the play—one critic dismissed it as simply “an ethnographic museum.” I even found in it a story I’d seen on one of those thin strips in An‑sky’s own hand, one of the many legends he collected about the Baal Shem Tov. In it, the Hasidic sage joins a crowd to watch an acrobat do a tightrope act. His students wonder why the rabbi is paying attention to such silly entertainment, and he answers, “I came here to observe how a person crosses a deep abyss. And as I watched I thought: If a person were to put as much effort into developing his soul as he does into training his body, how many and what deep abysses would his soul be able to traverse on the slender thread of life.”

The Dybbuk is much more than a patchwork of archives, a way of preserving the oral Torah. It also expresses the horror of experiencing a world in collapse. When I watched the 1937 film version produced in Poland, I jumped at the moment the possessed Leah, about to be wed, shrieks in a voice that is not her own, “You are not my bridegroom!” This cry of dislocation could be An‑sky’s primal scream, addressed to modernity itself—to the waves of murder to come. “We are too late,” Reb Azriel, the exorcising rabbi, says as he rushes into the synagogue in the last moments of the play, to find Leah dead.

When the First World War broke out, in the summer of 1914, An‑sky got himself commissioned by a relief organization to embark on a new kind of expedition, working frantically to save Jews trapped in the crossfire between German and Russian forces. What he witnessed, and then recorded in a four-volume diary published with the title The Destruction of Galicia, was apocalyptic. Hundreds of thousands of hungry refugees, bodies strewn in the streets of abandoned shtetls, survivors of rape, synagogues burned to the ground—and in places where he had been just a year before, recording songs on his phonograph. In a photo from this time, he is dressed in a uniform with a fur hat on his head and a Red Cross armband over his coat. He looks ancient, and exhausted. An-sky also never stopped trying to save Jewish culture. In Lutsk, which I passed on my drive out of Ukraine, he encountered the frazzled remnants of the community, which had become a “ghost town,” he writes, and they handed him a trunk filled with objects from the synagogue, including a silver Torah crown from the 18th century and a gold-embroidered curtain for the ark. An‑sky managed to get them to St. Petersburg.

In the upheavals of 1917, he would lose track of these items from Lutsk and almost everything else he collected from his travels. He had to leave behind even his draft of The Dybbuk. The first phase of the Russian Revolution actually found An‑sky elected to the Russian Constituent Assembly as a Socialist Revolutionary, representing his hometown of Vitebsk. But when the Bolsheviks took power in the fall, he had to flee, first to Vilnius and then to Warsaw. He was already battling heart disease and diabetes, and in November 1920, just after a meeting of a new ethnographic society he was trying to form in the Polish city, he died of a heart attack. He was 57. He did not live to see the worst of it.

I can’t think of a better testament to An‑sky than his play, and I am struck by the self-awareness in that title, Between Two Worlds. He had himself traveled as deftly as a tightrope walker between two worlds—Jewish and secular, traditional and modern—but he also witnessed the passing of one world into another, and it made him determined to hold on to what he came to understand mattered most, and to avoid the abyss. I spent most of my short time in Kyiv frantically trying to put some flesh on those ghosts. As I waited for the border to open, it occurred to me that maybe this manic urgency was what brought me closest to An‑sky.

Will the Ukrainians fare better? I hope so. Struggling to keep fighting, dodging missiles, surviving, gets you only partway there. An‑sky recognized this. Writing in 1916, looking back on his travels through lands now decimated, he still held on to the truth of his expedition: “A nation lives not in suffering, but in the ecstasy of the realization of its ‘I,’ in joyful creation, in pride in its culture, in the poetry of its daily life. Only in that.”

This article has been updated to acknowledge the work of Nathaniel Deutsch, whose book The Jewish Dark Continent contains the only English translation of An-Sky’s questionnaire. The article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Ghosts of the Pale.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.