Editor’s Note:Washington Week With The Atlantic is a partnership between NewsHour Productions, WETA, and The Atlantic airing every Friday on PBS stations nationwide. Check your local listings, watch full episodes here, or listen to the weekly podcast here.
President Trump is facing low approval ratings, a weakening economy, and a prolonged conflict in Iran, but he seems focused on the Reflecting Pool and renovating the White House. Panelists on Washington Week With The Atlantic joined to discuss how this may impact the GOP in the midterms, and more.
Of all the challenges and setbacks for the president to address, he seems particularly focused on the U.S. courts that are “coming out against the ballroom construction,” Zolan Kanno-Youngs, a White House correspondent at The New York Times, said last night. “We’re talking about a break between the voters that Republicans are looking to build support with and the president and his attention and his priorities.”
Joining the editor in chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, to discuss this and more: Carl Hulse, the chief Washington correspondent at The New York Times; Kanno-Youngs; Jonathan Karl, the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News; Missy Ryan, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.
After first contact, under social circumstances that we cannot possibly imagine, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together; around the same time, in Asia, our species also procreated with another species, the Denisovans. Scientists know this because they have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan remains, and they can see fragments of their code in our genomes to this day. Now we are learning that still more of these fusions of blood and culture may have shaped our lineage. Last week, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University published new evidence in Science suggesting that two “ghost” ancestors haunt our family tree—not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but some other hominin populations.
DNA analysis is only one of the techniques that scientists have been using to cast narrow shafts of light into the dark abyss that is the human past. Researchers from several disciplines have been collecting and reinterpreting ever smaller traces of our forebears to reimagine how they lived, what they made, and what family secrets they might still be hiding.
The ghost-ancestors paper is the most recent example. The team from UC Berkeley and Hopkins analyzed some very odd sequences of DNA in the human genome, which were discovered 20 years ago. These don’t match up with those of any ancient hominin species that have already been sequenced, and their origins have been mysterious. But now we have some suspects. One of the strange sequences appears to come from a hominin who mated with us before we ventured out of Africa. The other may come from the great wanderer Homo erectus, who left Africa nearly 2 million years ago and ranged across Asia. Homo erectus may never have encountered Homo sapiens directly, but the researchers suspect that the hominin interbred with the Denisovans before the Denisovans interbred with us. Either way, all of these people—if it is right to call them people—played a role in our species’ story of becoming, yet we are only now learning the nature of that connection.
All year, scientists from different fields have been making revisions to the human-origin story. In January, one team announced that they’d found handheld wooden tools along an ancient lakeshore in present-day Greece—a refuge between glaciers where hominins of some kind butchered elephants about 430,000 years ago. These are surely not the first wooden tools ever to be made, but they are the most ancient that we’ve managed to find—and they were used during the Stone Age. That name—“Stone Age”—is misleading. It reveals more about the limits of archaeology than about the material culture of the people who lived through the period, who may not have thought of themselves as being defined by stone tools at all. We perceive them that way only because their knapped axes of flint and obsidian are likelier to have survived to the present day than the digging sticks that our forebears smoothed and sharpened.
Beyond stone and wood, these lakeside elephant butchers likely put all kinds of natural materials to clever use. They may have employed woven twine to sew animal hides together, but we wouldn’t know it, because twine unravels into thin, disintegrating filaments, and bacteria rapidly remove hides from the world. Wood tends to rot away too. In this location, the tools had the good geological fortune to be buried quickly under mud.
Stone tools have themselves been reinterpreted. Researchers recently detected traces of poison on an ancient set of quartz arrowheads that were dug up in 1985. The weapons were found in a South African rock shelter that was used by modern humans 60,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years earlier than what had been regarded as the oldest confirmed human use of poison. The ancient South African archers retrieved the neurotoxin from a plant bulb that grows as large as a honeydew melon and dabbed it onto the cold stone of their arrowheads, knowing that it would slow down any animal that they pierced. Some scientists are now calling for a reappraisal of other ancient arrowheads to see whether they too had been sheathed in poison by people whose ingenuity had previously been underestimated by science.
Piecing together the history of our species in this way is tedious work, because the evidence is so fragmentary. The Earth’s violent, self-renewing processes erase so much. During the planet’s cold spells, its glaciers steamroll from the poles toward the equator, grinding and scraping whole landmasses clean. In its warmer, middle zones, jungles can sprout up within decades, covering human ruins in a thick and devouring layer of green.
Scientists have recently learned that the Amazon rainforest has been concealing millennia-old earthworks on an enormous scale. A team of international researchers spent weeks flying lidar-equipped planes back and forth over a swath of Amazonia. Their laser scans revealed nearly 400 immense structures that were previously unknown to science. From the sky, they saw that these systems of raised banks and deep ditches formed geometrically precise circles, octagons, and squares, and were linked to one another by remarkably straight roads. The earthworks were built 1,200 to 2,500 years ago by the Aquiry civilization. Having surveyed only one small portion of Aquiry territory, the researchers suspect that tens of thousands more of these structures may be waiting silently under the region’s trees.
One hundred thousand years from now, the Aquiry ruins might vanish altogether, and in Earth time, 100,000 years is nothing. In 10 million years, even the skyscrapers and continent-sprawling infrastructure of our own civilization will be crushed into sedimentary layers. Nearly everything that we have created will be reduced to trace elements and isotopes, but for a few specimens lucky enough to be fossilized. For all of the other details of our world to persist in human memory, science would need to get better, or civilization itself would need to keep existing, and telling its own story, from now until then.
In the new film I Want Your Sex, characters are action figures in a staging of generational war.
On one side is Gen Z, its members portrayed as anxious little prudes. Twenty-three-year-old Elliot is bumbling and directionless. His high-achieving girlfriend is far more interested in studying than she is in him. (When he tries to initiate intimacy, she accuses him of “constantly draining my qi energy.”) His best friend, Apple, is angsty about her lack of interesting life experience—yet she almost always seems to be home, donning pimple cream and loungewear. None of them is having much sex.
Their Millennial foil is Erika Tracy: self-serving, insensitive, and ostentatiously sex-positive. She’s a visual artist who has hired a league of underpaid Zoomer assistants—including Elliot—mostly to chew gum and then affix it to a giant drawing of a vagina. She has said publicly that a one-night stand “knows you better than your mother or your best friend ever will.” And she has no problem crossing lines. Amused by Elliot’s innocent skittishness, she promptly suggests that they make their relationship sexual. Soon she’s handcuffing him and making him crawl on the ground. In the bedroom as in the office, she’s dominant and he’s submissive.
The film, directed by Gregg Araki, is hitting theaters at a time when many commentators (okay, myself included) are writing nervously about the “sex recession” and the “romance slump,” wringing their hands about why the youths aren’t getting laid. Some paint young people as coddled and fragile, too timid to put themselves out there. Meanwhile, many Zoomers point out that they’re not growing up in the same world that older cohorts did: They have plenty of valid reasons to feel inhibited (a pandemic, a housing crisis, a culture of constant digital surveillance) and plenty of other priorities (saving, studying, worrying).
Araki sketches each generation with a cartoonishly broad brush. But the caricatures help illuminate what each perspective might get a little bit right. In an era of shifting etiquette and vigilance against inappropriate behavior, the film seems to ask, can sex be liberating, transgressive, and respectful all at once?
I Want Your Sex knows that a person’s most intimate experiences can be shaped by their historical context. At first, the choice to make Erika a 30-something struck me as odd; Millennials, who’ve partnered later and less than prior generations, were the ones who kicked off the sex recession. But although they may have been having less sex in their 20s on average, they were also known as the “hookup generation.” Compared with older cohorts, Millennials were more tolerant of gay and premarital sex, and more likely to report having casual sex. And they enjoyed a culture of relative erotic frankness and optimism.
Araki, who is 66, grew into adulthood during the AIDS epidemic. In his 20s, he said in a 2023 interview, he felt as if “this black cloud of doom is hanging over you every fucking day.” By the time Millennials were coming of age, some of that darkness had lifted. The HIV pre-exposure drug Truvada was approved for use in 2012, when the median Millennial was about 24. The internet opened up access to information about sexual health and kink. Last year, Match Group’s Singles in America poll crowned Millennials “the horniest generation”: Of all the cohorts surveyed, they reported the highest levels of sexual desire and the most boredom with “vanilla sex.”
Erika is, in her way, a perfect encapsulation of the Millennial sex paradox: She has made the erotic a major part of her identity. But it’s not clear that she’s happier for it, or that she’s scratching whatever itch she has—one that might be more existential than physiological. “Sex is everything; it forges us as human beings,” she lectures Elliot. Later, when he reminds her of this, she amends that point: “Sex is everything. It’s also nothing.”
If more Zoomers are openly questioning the value of intimacy, perhaps it’s because they’ve picked up on some of that quiet ambivalence. And in the time since Millennials entered adulthood, the rules and expectations about sex have gotten even more complicated. The MeToo movement heightened people’s suspicion of uneven and potentially exploitative power dynamics—perhaps especially in the workplace, one of the primary places where romantic partners used to meet. After decades of relaxing societal norms regarding what’s appropriate to talk about and with whom, backlash arrived in the form of “boundaries”: a suddenly ubiquitous pop-psychology concept. And then COVID hit. By the time Americans emerged from isolation, many were socially rusty and fond of a good night in. The gaps between people aren’t generally getting easier to bridge.
Yet the idea of Zoomer sexlessness seems to have galvanized even just slightly older people to champion eroticism. In one slightly on-the-nose scene in the film, Erika confronts Elliot about what she sees as his age group’s failure of joie de vivre, in sex and in general. “Gen Z is all about FOMO, and yet you’re willing to miss out on the sexual prime of your life?” she asks. He replies earnestly about spending formative years amid a pandemic: “My peers have not been well served growing up in a time where nothing feels safe.” That’s what Erika thinks is the problem with his generation’s risk aversion, though. Why is feeling safe their overarching goal? “Being outside your comfort zone,” she tells him, “is the whole fucking point.”
I Want Your Sex isn’t an anti-MeToo movie; it takes manipulations and abuses seriously enough to show that Erika is, at some points, truly acting egregiously. But you also get the sense that she’s right about a few things. Elliot wants to let go of some control. He enjoys a lot of what happens between them. And what he doesn’t enjoy, the movie insinuates, he’ll learn from. Araki seems to be grieving a bygone era: one that felt a little looser, a little spicier, and perhaps more resilient. At one point, when Erika is encouraging Elliot to lighten up, she gives him a copy of Harold Robbins’s Never Love a Stranger, a raunchy novel that became the subject of an obscenity trial in 1949. Certain progressive impulses, the film suggests, somehow led the nation in a big loop—right back to a puritanical streak in which pleasure is seen as threatening enough to suppress.
In a perfect sensual landscape, everyone would feel safe and free all at once. I Want Your Sex doesn’t identify the secret to making that happen, of course—and the film arguably avoids the trickiest parts of its own debate by making Erika’s character a woman. Araki has said that the original script featured a young female intern and her male boss, but “after MeToo, I was like, I kind of don’t want to have a male dragging a female around by the hair.”
Still, by focusing on BDSM, he offers an alternative framework for navigating desire. The practice inherently involves power differences—but also a code of ethics. When I talked with Yehuda Duenyas, the film’s intimacy coordinator, he drew an analogy between kink etiquette and his own work: Having a clear permission structure and good communication from the start means that people might actually feel more able to lean into passion; they’re not worrying in the moment about what’s acceptable or desired, because they’ve already established it. His job isn’t to make people feel comfortable. It’s to foster clarity and openness.
Erika and Elliot don’t exactly model a healthy dynamic. But the film makes a point of emphasizing his agency, even at his most vulnerable. When an incident brings Elliot to an interrogation room to be questioned about his relationship with Erika—don’t ask why—he tells police that he was “way over my head” and “under her control.” And how does he feel about that? Thankful.
“I’m the first writer in the family,” the novelist Richard Russo once said, “but I’m not the first bullshitter in the family.” That honor belonged to his divorced father, Jim, a highway worker with no interest in books and an only intermittent interest in his son. Jim’s strongest connections were with his buddies at the bar. On summer breaks from college, Russo returned to Gloversville, in upstate New York, and his dad would get him on the road crew. When work ended, they would head home, hitting pubs along the way. At each stop, Jim would regale the regulars with a story about something that had happened on the job that day.
“He would pay attention to what worked in Roadhouse A,” Russo said in 2025, “so that when he got to Roadhouse B, he would remember what got a laugh and what didn’t, and so he would change the story.” Jim would tell the same story over many days, cutting and shaping, finding the beats. “There’s a word for that,” Russo said. “It’s called revision.”
Revision, a refined term that Jim would never have used, is a staple of M.F.A. programs, such as the one his son attended at the University of Arizona. When Russo graduated in 1980, the experimental fiction of William Gass and Kurt Vonnegut was in vogue, but he much preferred the shambling shaggy-dog novels of Twain and Dickens, whose humor arose not from formal innovation but from the foibles of flawed characters (like his dad), many of them poor and unlettered (ditto). Early on, Russo threw in his lot with Tom and Huck and Jim, with David Copperfield and Oliver Twist—characters whose humble beginnings offer a vantage from which to see the absurdity of an unjust world.
Beginning with the 1986 publication of his first novel, Mohawk, Russo has filled 10 novels, plus many essays and short stories, with portraits of men born with few gifts save their wits, making their way in an economy not set up to reward their kind. The bulk of his fiction is set in New York, in towns like Gloversville, where the good jobs have vanished (the glove-making trade there—once responsible for 90 percent of gloves sold in America—was by the 1950s already being replaced by imports). In these places, it’s unclear who is slinging more bull, the semi-employed men in bars or the educated civic “leaders,” such as mayors and bankers, promising that good times will return.
In Russo’s best work, especially his classic trilogy, set in fictional North Bath—Nobody’s Fool(1993), Everybody’s Fool (2016), and Somebody’s Fool(2023)—his characters’ banter, crude and self-knowing, reminds us that the worst effects of the modern economy are present not in the landscape but in the soulscape, the fractured lives and identities of obsolete workers. Their barroom bravado is a front, masking inner hurt, or just bewilderment. In the novelist’s business of exploring what’s inside people’s heads—the way we all think more than we can say—Russo is the peer of Jonathan Franzen and Meg Wolitzer, even if his characters think in fewer syllables.
At 77, Russo has published a new novel, Under the Falls, that at first seems to be a break with his past work. The characters are young, mostly in their mid‑30s, and the protagonist, Tyler Sinclair, is honest-to-goodness rich. After high school, he left Stone Mountain, another of Russo’s fictional upstate hamlets, riding his guitar to stardom. When he blew out of town, he left behind a toxic love triangle and a paralyzed buddy, the victim of a near drowning that many blamed Tyler for. In the years since, he has milked the town, and a Mellencamp-like image as a boy from the sticks, for songwriting material. Now Tyler has come back to a place he never wanted to see again. Stone Mountain’s denizens feel the same way about him. At his much-ballyhooed return show, he and his band are pelted with eggs. On the way out of town, the band’s limousine is mysteriously driven off the road, and during his convalescence in Stone Mountain, Tyler gets caught up in local intrigue involving dope dealing, manslaughter, and police corruption.
Under the Falls is a short potboiling book, lacking the finer-grained mind reading and social texture that Russo excels at (the acknowledgments note that it began as a TV-pilot script). Yet in the Russo tradition, it’s about a boy whose hometown has mired him in grief but also given him the stories that will lift him out of it. And tucked into its harebrained (if thoroughly enjoyable) plotting is a line that could well be Russo’s artistic credo. Tyler is relieved, and a bit amazed, to see how Doc, his paralyzed friend, has made a decent life for himself, with his own trailer, wheelchair, and car (a hearse tricked out with hand controls), funded by his “vast criminal enterprise.” “As an artist,” Russo writes, “Tyler has more than once wondered whether, under the right circumstances, or maybe the wrong ones, simply living life might qualify as art, and it occurs to him that his duty here is simple: to surrender his reservations and simply admire the man.”
Among all the hard-luck men in these hardscrabble towns, the ones who compound their bad luck with bad choices interest Russo the most. His emblematic figure is Donald “Sully” Sullivan, the star of the North Bath trilogy, a saga about one man surfing the arc of the 20th century that invites comparison to Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe books and John Updike’sRabbit quartet, also anchored by troubled male protagonists. But Sully, whom we first meet in late middle age as a handyman with a bum knee—flashbacks fill in his tortured boyhood, his high-school-football career, his World War II service, his failed marriage—is on the opposite side of the class divide from those men. Bascombe is a writer, then a real-estate agent, and Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom dies rich, fat on sales from the car dealership he inherited from his father-in-law. Sully never has a penny extra until his old age, when he has some luck with the ponies and then inherits his landlady’s decaying house—and discovers how disconcerted he is by the taste of middle-class life. “He’d always suspected that life’s deck was stacked in favor of those with means,” Russo writes. Now what? For Rabbit and Bascombe, the American dream is real, or real enough. For Sully, the idea that he was “now and forevermore insulated against adversity” just doesn’t compute; it feels like a cruel joke.
And for Russo, the place that Sully inhabits is at least as interesting as the man himself—a signature of his fiction, which specializes in ensemble novels. “One of the good things about small towns,” Russo writes in his Pulitzer Prize winner, Empire Falls (2001), set in a postindustrial Maine hamlet, “was that they accommodated just about everyone; the lame and disfigured were all your neighbors, and seeing them every day meant that after a while you stopped noticing what made them different.”
The important thing is how they’re alike on the inside. In his sad-sack locales, characters face their predicaments with a mix of resilience, disappointment, and humor. They want love or connection, but they need money. Equipped with mostly meager educations and varying degrees of sophistication, they bounce off one another like bumper cars, everyone’s actions affecting everyone else’s. Gainful employment is in short supply; vices take hold, whether ugly addictions or minor gambling habits; and in Under the Falls, the criminality moves beyond small-time hustles. Russo’s townsfolk do one another the courtesy, when necessary, of pretending not to see what’s in front of them; they also fight, make up, make love, and, above all, tolerate one another.
We tend to think that, in hollowed-out towns such as the ones Russo writes about, those left behind are left behind in the apocalyptic sense: The chosen ones got raptured out, to better places with more work, more Starbucks, more Subarus. But Russo shows how anyplace is good enough if you’ve chosen it, or can tell yourself that you have. Class and cultural divides are sources of tension, but also of local cohesion, as Tyler discovers in Stone Mountain—and as Sully has known all his life. Just because Sully never went to college doesn’t mean he couldn’t have hacked it. North Bath is always suffering intruders, from downstate and especially from nearby Schuyler Springs—an obvious stand-in for Saratoga Springs, which has the college (Skidmore), the racetrack, the tourist season, and hence the money that Gloversville lacks.
Sometimes these interlopers want to buy and rehab a house, and that’s where Sully is indispensable. He and a partner do the fixing up on fixer-uppers. They just want to be paid, with money and perhaps a modicum of respect. After Miles Anderson, a university professor from downstate, keeps him waiting for an hour to talk about some repairs on his new property, Sully gets huffy, leading Anderson to ask, pissily, if Sully wants the work or not.
“ ‘Look, Mr. Anderson,’ Sully said, ‘I need the work. I’m just too old to jump up and down, okay? Inside, I’m all aflutter. Trust me.’ ” (The “aflutter” is a nice touch, hinting at the elevated vocabulary Sully can deploy when he wants to.) “ ‘Hmmm,’ Miles Anderson mused. ‘Well, I was also told you were insolent, though I suppose that’s to be expected. The gruff, frontier independence of the American blue-collar worker and all that.’ ”
The only thing worse than new wealth threatening to intrude is old wealth that has fled, leaving desolation. In Empire Falls, there are perennial rumors about what might become of the old mill—is it true that investors from Boston have plans for it? The prologue to Under the Falls features a moving paean to the long-shuttered Stone Mountain Amusement Park. “Remember what amusement parks were like before they became corporate,” Russo writes, “before there were special lines for people who have more money than you do.”
For Russo, amusement parks, with their rides and buffets and dining-room windows “left open to capture the breeze off the lake,” were once the great levelers, places where, for a day, “you’re not poor; you’re rich.” Stone Mountain Amusement Park offers an echo of the Ultimate Escape Fun Park, planned by Texas moneymen, that the town banker in Nobody’s Fool hopes to lure to North Bath. But the Texans, after flirting with North Bath, ultimately choose a more prosperous site, near Portland, Maine. It seems they were full of it all along.
Russo never intimates that his bullshitters in the roadhouse are better men than the ones in the C-suite, or the ones with tenure, or the rock stars. (He is especially withering, though, about the tenured bullshitters, the professoriat. His most beloved book may well be Straight Man, a campus satire in the tradition of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge.) There’s good and bad everywhere, and Russo is alert to self-serving delusions wherever they surface. “I made a man’s mistakes,” Sully’s absentee father, “Big Jim” (obviously named for Russo’s own father), says at the end of his life.
That has the ring of nobility, until we remember that his manly mistakes included beating his family, cheating on his wife, and drinking away his pay. Nor is it lost on the reader that he got away with his malign hijinks because, as a big man in a small town, he knew everyone, was enabled by everyone: cops, neighbors, co-workers. In Under the Falls, the town sheriff knows about, and indirectly profits from, Doc’s drug running. He doesn’t approve, but in a small town, complicity is hard to avoid.
Here’s what characters like Sully come to understand about hometowns, at least in their wiser moments, and what Tyler has to learn: Achieving escape velocity is one of those aspirations, like being “now and forevermore insulated against adversity,” that is forever out of reach. “It kind of feels like you’re on the clock,” Tyler reflects about his unexpected wealth and success. “Like any day now somebody’s going to notice there’s been a mistake, after which you’ll go back to being poor.”
Which doesn’t mean you should simply stay put. Russo found Gloversville claustrophobic, as did his eccentric mother, whose mental illness—the subject of his 2012 memoir, the aptly titled Elsewhere—was surely exacerbated by being a dreamy, literate soul in a town of Babbitts. The two of them had to get out (Russo’s overattached mom followed him to college in Arizona), only to realize that the fight was never with the town but with themselves. After years of attempting to make a life elsewhere, she returned to Gloversville. So did her son, of course. He never really left.
Half a dozen years ago, Anthony Fauci was as popular as he would ever be. A respected physician and researcher for decades, he became in 2020 the public face of the pandemic response—calm, confident, and reassuring, a symbol of scientific authority. And the country turned him into a folk hero. He was on the cover of Time, named one of People magazine’s People of the Year, and played by Brad Pitt on Saturday Night Live. Vendors sold Fauci votive candles and bobbleheads. In April of that year, Kim Kardashian convened three dozen movie stars and athletes on a private video call so he could talk to them about masks and crowds—an hour of his time, he later explained, to reach millions of their fans.
Then it all came apart.
Last week, Fauci testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Rand Paul—a fierce Fauci critic who has said that the American people want the 85-year-old retired scientist “behind bars.” Acting on his lawyer’s advice, Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination more than 100 times, citing what he called Paul’s “unhinged obsession” with him. Yesterday, the committee voted along party lines to hold Fauci in contempt of Congress for refusing to answer questions.
The hearing produced an avalanche of ad hominem attacks, ludicrous claims, and accusations—most of them years old and long since answered. But two matter more than the rest, because so much of Paul’s case rests on them: (1) that Fauci funded the research that made the pandemic, and (2) that he lied to Congress about it.
Fauci ran the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, an arm of the National Institutes of Health that hands out several billion dollars a year in research grants. One of those grants went to a New York nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, which over five years passed a total of about $600,000 to a Wuhan, China, lab studying bat coronaviruses. NIAID awards thousands of grants a year; NIH staff signed off on the Wuhan lab as a subrecipient, and an institute director does not personally review such arrangements.
More important, the bat viruses that the grant paid the lab to study are so genetically distant from SARS-CoV-2 that they could not have produced it, a point that independent virologists have made repeatedly. That disposes of the specific charge that research that Fauci’s agency funded produced the virus. It did not.
As for the origins of the virus itself, nobody has established with certainty where the pandemic began. Chinese stonewalling means that we are unlikely to ever know. No outside investigator has been given the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s records, its early samples, or the medical files of its staff.
However, the scientific evidence favors a natural origin. This includes epidemiological evidence showing that the first COVID-19 cases clustered around one corner of Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where wild animals were being butchered. Environmental samples taken from that same area of the market contain, in the same swab, the SARS-CoV-2 sequence and DNA from potential intermediate hosts such as the raccoon dog.
The accusation that Fauci lied to Congress rests on his denial, in a 2021 exchange with Paul, that NIH had ever funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan lab. The point of such research is to learn what a virus would need to jump into humans before it does, so that vaccines and treatments can be ready.
The trouble is the term gain of function. In biology, it means research that gives an organism a new capability—engineering a bacterium to digest an oil spill is gain-of-function research. In politics, it has come to mean something narrower and more alarming: deliberately making a dangerous virus more dangerous. Federal rules use a third definition, narrower still. The federal framework adopted in 2017, after years of public debate, covers work to enhance a pathogen that is “likely highly transmissible and likely capable of wide and uncontrollable spread in human populations” and “likely highly virulent and likely to cause significant morbidity and/or mortality in humans.” It also excludes viruses, however dangerous, as they exist in nature. (The policy was revised in 2024.)
The gap between those definitions is the whole dispute, and it is why the perjury charge fails twice over. Fauci says that in 2021, he was answering Paul by using the regulatory definition of gain of function—the one that determines what NIH may and may not fund, and the only one that his answer was actually about. By that standard, NIH had reviewed the grant to the Wuhan lab before funding it and had concluded that the research fell outside the framework, on the grounds that the lab was studying wild-collected bat viruses that were not expected to produce severe disease in people. The two men meant different things by the same phrase. And even if you set that aside, perjury requires a knowingly false statement. Five years later, there’s still no evidence that Fauci said anything he believed to be untrue.
What was new last week was the discovery of a diary. Fauci kept one throughout the pandemic, and Paul—working with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, which located the files on a government server—released more than 1,100 pages of it, in entries spanning from December 2019 through Fauci’s retirement, in December 2022. Paul posted on X about Fauci, “What he wrote privately and what he told the country are two different stories.”
But two analyses—one by FactCheck.org, the other by PolitiFact—show that in the entries Paul highlighted, Fauci’s private notes did not substantially differ from his public statements.
The senator from Kentucky has been at this for six years now, pursuing a man who led his institute for 38 years, who advised seven presidents, and whose work has saved countless lives. Accusing him of crimes and deception wasn’t enough; the release of the diary was meant to inflict public humiliation on him. And to some degree, it worked. Fauci was swept up in his own celebrity—starstruck by the famous, thrilled by his invitations to A-list parties, keeping a running tally of his appearances in the press. It was not a good look.
But this thought occurred to me as well: If three years’ worth and 1,000 pages of your diary were published tomorrow, how would you fare? Most of us would count ourselves relieved if the worst they revealed was that we had been dazzled by Hollywood stars and flattered when they called. And nowhere in his diary did Fauci confess to paying hush money to a porn star or brag that when you’re famous, you can “grab ’em by the pussy.”
Anthony Fauci spent five decades at NIH treating diseases that most often kill the poor, the weak, and the marginalized. He developed highly effective therapies that made once-fatal autoimmune conditions survivable before most Americans had heard of him. In the 1980s, he took AIDS in America seriously when many in the federal government wouldn’t. He met with, and later became friends with, Larry Kramer, an AIDS activist who had called him a “murderer.” Fauci then spearheaded a major shift that allowed patients far greater access to experimental drugs.
Two decades into the epidemic, as AIDS was killing millions in the world’s poorest countries, he was a key architect of PEPFAR—the emergency plan that President George W. Bush launched in 2003 that provided funding and medical resources to combat the global HIV/AIDS epidemic. It is estimated to have saved more than 25 million lives, most of them in sub-Saharan Africa.
When anthrax spores arrived in the mail in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks, Fauci led the federal research response and laid the foundations of the biodefense system that we still rely on. He was also central to the development of mRNA vaccines. In the 1990s, he helped persuade President Bill Clinton to fund the NIH Vaccine Research Center, then recruited world-class scientists to staff it. One of them was studying mRNA as a platform for a MERS vaccine when the pandemic began. Because that expertise was already in place, the design for the protein that the COVID mRNA vaccine would use was finished within 48 hours of the viral genome being published. Within roughly 11 months, the first vaccine was authorized for use. The Commonwealth Fund estimates that more than 3.2 million lives were saved as a result of the vaccination program in America from December 2020 to November 2022. The development of mRNA vaccines for COVID was a stunning medical achievement.
In 2014, Fauci managed and directed the funding for research for an Ebola vaccine. When a Dallas nurse caught the virus while she cared for a dying man, Fauci put on protective gear and went into the isolation room himself. Eight days later, he walked the nurse out in public and hugged her.
This is the man whom Paul, Kennedy, Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, Republicans in Congress, the MAGA movement, and Donald Trump have decided to defame and vilify, and are intent on destroying?
So what explains the rage directed at one of the most distinguished scientists of his generation? Some of it is the result of an era in which a major political party—in this case, the Republican Party—has become deranged and captive to conspiratorial thinking. It draws energy from the dark passions. Many people within the party, especially within its leadership and the right-wing ecosystem, delight in destroying institutions and individuals. Fauci has a target on his back because during the pandemic, he refused to live in the Twilight Zone. He called out those who did. And for MAGA world, that is unforgivable.
Some of the fury aimed at Fauci may also be unprocessed grief and anger about the pandemic and its painful memories. My colleague David Brooks, then at The New York Times, wrote in 2020 that pandemics—unlike some other natural catastrophes—tend to drive people apart. In the aftermath of pandemics, people either try to forget them or find others to blame for them. Viruses can’t be punished; people can. Attributing the pandemic to fate or random chance isn’t all that satisfying; a lot of people need a villain, even if, in this case, the villain is one of the men who helped end the pandemic that was ravaging the world.
In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the protagonist, Dr. Bernard Rieux, is an admirable if imperfect character. When others flee Oran, he stays. He works until he’s exhausted, even while knowing that many will die. An atheist and a humanist, he ultimately stands with victims, finding meaning through helping others. He doesn’t think of himself as a hero so much as a decent man doing his job. Neither does he pretend to understand suffering; instead, he fights against it. He is one of the “true healers.”
At the conclusion of the novel, Rieux concludes that plagues ultimately teach us that “there are more things to admire in men than to despise.” There is much more to admire in Anthony Fauci than to despise. The same cannot be said of many of his critics.
On the first Saturday of every August, the Saint Jerome Catholic Church in the tiny town of Fancy Farm, Kentucky, hosts a picnic renowned for its mutton-and-pork barbecue. Since 1880, the scent of smoked meat has attracted people; the whiff of votes then attracted politicians. The picnic long ago morphed into the premier event in the state’s campaign season, attracting its most famous officeholders. As attendees eat sandwiches, browse for We love Jesus and BBQ too T-shirts, or try to win a hunting blind at bingo, they also encounter candidates of all parties, who share one outdoor stage and are given only a few minutes to address a rowdy, heckling crowd.
This year, however, Fancy Farm was most remarkable for who did not show up: Mitch McConnell. Now in his 42nd and final year as a senator, the Republican has been a fixture of the event, attending 30 times. As GOP leader in the Senate for 18 years, McConnell became famous for his bare-knuckled, Machiavellian approach to politics—a method grounded in gradually amassing control through unflashy strategy and exploiting leverage for partisan ends. No man has so thoroughly thwarted Democratic ambitions, which he did both by championing the filibuster and by securing a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court. Despite the longtime Senate leader’s absence from Fancy Farm, the specter of McConnellism hung over the event. And it will hang over America for years, too.
On June 14, McConnell, who is not running for reelection, was hospitalized, taken by ambulance after he was found unconscious at his home in Washington, D.C. The 84-year-old has not been seen in public, let alone Congress, since. The two proof-of-life photos that his staff released have only provoked feverish speculation. Onstage at Fancy Farm, Charles Booker, the Democratic nominee to replace the senator, invoked Carmen Sandiego. “Where in the world is Mitch McConnell?” Booker asked. “What is going on with Mitch McConnell?” Supportive Democrats broke out in sporadic chants of “Where’s Mitch?”
Kentucky’s Democratic governor, Andy Beshear, a potential presidential contender, has not shied away from stirring up suspicion. Late last month, he sent a letter urging McConnell “to directly and verbally address the people of Kentucky and provide proof of your capacity to serve, or resign.” The implication has been that the master Republican tactician may be incapacitated, perhaps even deceased, but left instructions to hide this fact until after August 3—at which point Beshear would have severe difficulties installing a replacement. (Beshear has insisted that this deadline, now passed, has “no legal impact.”) Even in the twilight of McConnell’s influence, Democrats feared that he was capable of one last great trick.
On Thursday, however, McConnell announced that he had been discharged from a rehabilitation center and would be working from home. The explanation for his absence turned out not to involve any convoluted conspiracy. McConnell had suffered a serious fall, just as he has in the past, and contracted pneumonia. In 2023, a similar incident resulted in a concussion and a fractured rib. Then, too, his office released only sparse and cryptic details about his condition. Eventually, McConnell returned to work and to doing what he did best: stymieing the Democrats.
Recently I asked the reporter Al Cross, considered the dean of Kentucky journalism, whether McConnell had anything that could be called an ideology, or whether he was merely interested in amassing power. Without hesitating, Cross answered, “The second.” He noted that McConnell and his first wife, a feminist scholar, had had a pet named Rocky, after Nelson Rockefeller—a hero of the GOP’s now-extinct liberal wing. “He was a Rockefeller Republican,” Cross told me. “And only when the party began moving to the right did he move to the right, because he wanted to be a leader in the party. You know, this is a guy who never wanted to be anything but a politician.” McConnell’s greatest personal policy commitment seems to have been to deregulate campaign finance, which the Supreme Court eventually delivered. What most earned him both his power and the disdain of Democrats was his devotion to party above all else.
The GOP for which McConnell tirelessly worked is now firmly in the hands of Donald Trump, a man whom McConnell deeply detests and yet whose ascent he has repeatedly enabled. Had McConnell not held open a Supreme Court seat after the 2016 death of Antonin Scalia, perhaps Trump would not have gained enough support from anti-abortion voters to win that year’s presidential election. Had McConnell tried to whip votes in favor of Trump’s conviction after his supporters attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, perhaps the party could have exorcised him. McConnell got what he wished for—the first line of his obituary will note that he was the longest-serving party leader in Senate history—but at what cost?
He and the president are intertwined in history, Scott Jennings, a former McConnell strategist turned prominent Trump defender, told me. “Twenty, 50, or 100 years from now, what will be remembered most about the era and their time together is that McConnell and his political decisions enabled Trump to win the presidency, change the Supreme Court, cut taxes, and, frankly, take a pretty firm hand on international matters,” Jennings said. McConnell did not just shatter political norms by depriving Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee of a hearing in 2016. He also pushed through Trump’s nominees and, more than any other person, influenced the selection of appellate judges who will shape America for decades.
His influence over the political system will persist in other, subtler ways. “McConnell’s people were superb at taking young Republicans under their wings and nurturing them,” Stephen Voss, a political scientist at the University of Kentucky, told me. “And those folks are spread out all over the state and also Washington, D.C.”
In his home state, McConnell commands respect. He routed huge sums of federal money to Kentucky—$65 billion, by some estimates. He personally remade state politics. McConnell also regularly intervened in local elections, from the state legislature all the way down to county clerks. Democrats dominated the state when he started his career; today, they are largely shut out of power. Beshear won the governorship only to have his vetoes routinely overturned by a Republican supermajority in the state legislature. “It’s a Mitch McConnell–constructed party, even if some of the people at the grassroots don’t like him. It’s impossible to deny that he is the architect of it,” Tres Watson, a Republican strategist, told me. That is why the state GOP headquarters, in Frankfort, carries his name.
One week after the November 2024 election, which returned Trump to the White House, I watched McConnell receive the Irving Kristol Award from the American Enterprise Institute. Robert Doar, AEI’s president, asked McConnell if he had any regrets. “Yeah, but I’m not going to tell you,” he replied.
Despite stating in 2021 that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for his supporters’ attack on the Capitol, McConnell said that he could not vote to convict the president in an impeachment trial, because Trump’s term had expired. Cross told me that, during that period, McConnell was convinced that Trump was doomed in the party. McConnell told Michael Tackett, his biographer, that his position differed from that of Liz Cheney—who sacrificed a promising career leading Republicans in the House of Representatives—because “I didn’t see how blowing yourself up and taking yourself off the playing field was helpful to getting the party back to where she and I probably both think it ought to be.” After the trial, McConnell and Trump did not speak again for almost four years.
McConnell gave up his leadership role right as Trump returned to power. In his final Senate term, in which he returned to being a legislative backbencher, McConnell lodged his protests against Trump by voting against several of his nominees (Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and strongly supporting Ukraine and free trade.
At Fancy Farm, McConnell’s fellow Republicans largely papered over the schism between the biggest figure in national politics and the biggest figure in state politics. In a mark of how important McConnell has been in fostering Republicans in the state, the primary race to succeed him was between three Republicans who had all worked for him previously. Nate Morris, a man who once interned for him and then made his fortune by founding a trash-and-recycling company, tried to win by repudiating him. He released an ad showing himself riding a garbage truck saying that he was a “Trump ‘America First’ conservative” who was here “to take out the trash” by dumping McConnell. This strategy did not succeed; before the primary could occur, Morris was whisked away by Trump for the prestigious post of ambassador to Colombia. Instead the victory went to Andy Barr, a McConnellite congressman from Lexington. When I asked him what McConnell’s legacy would be, he cited three things: building up the GOP in Kentucky, “opposing unconstitutional restrictions on political speech,” and “working with President Trump to deliver a conservative supermajority on the U.S. Supreme Court and a conservative, originalist federal judiciary.”
For the country as a whole, though, what McConnell’s many political victories leave behind is more dismal. His lasting contribution to the Senate is its calcification. Few people understood leverage and Senate procedure as well as McConnell; the routine use of the filibuster (which Democrats are also guilty of) has now set a precedent in which the party in power can confirm judges and pass tax bills but struggles to accomplish much else. The lack of a functional Congress has hastened the executive branch’s arrogation of the legislature’s previous responsibilities. This diminishes the separation of powers that McConnell (and his strictly constitutionalist judges) claim to be upholding.
The negative consequences for Republicans may become apparent only when Democrats have a turn at power in McConnell’s beloved chamber. Because of his specific decisions—to hold open a Supreme Court seat on the theory that it was too close to an election in 2016, before doing the exact opposite in 2020—it is now inconceivable that a Democratic-led Senate would confirm another Trump justice if a vacancy arose. McConnell’s political career is ending, but his legacy will last much longer. Unfortunately, it has left America much harder to govern.
When Bob Buckter, a 79-year-old housepainter who also goes by “Dr. Color,” began his career, in the 1970s, the job was a lot more fun. Acid-tripping hippies in his hometown of San Francisco wanted “wild-ass color combinations” for their facades, he told me. Armed with mustard-yellow, lime-green, and vermilion paint, Buckter happily transformed drab Victorian and Edwardian homes into vivid eye candy.
Today, almost no one seems to be looking to the hues of jelly beans for inspiration for their home—or car or couch or fridge or practically anything else. Since the late 2000s, Buckter has watched with dismay as essentially colorless colors—think white, beige, gray—have taken over. “It’s not even three shades, or four shades, of gray. It’s just one dark gray,” he said. “It’s an ignorant way to paint your house.” A study of homes in Washington, D.C., last year found a similarly sharp rise in the number of gray homes, especially in the most rapidly gentrifying wards.
Color trends used to come and go. But the color recession that began early this century has dragged on far longer than the heyday of avocado green in the 1960s or hot pink in the 1980s. “Our top color from 2000 to 2010 was ‘Pelham Beige.’ We thought that would never change,” Sue Wadden, the director of color marketing at the paint company Sherwin-Williams, told me. The next decade, she said, “gray was dominant. Like gray, gray, more gray.” Sherwin-Williams’s current list of its most popular colors for home interiors features “Ice Cube” and “Crushed Ice” (both white), and “Agreeable Gray” and “Passive” (both gray). Colors are now getting warmer again, Wadden noted hopefully, but they’re “warmer whites.” The company’s color of 2026 is “Universal Khaki”—otherwise known, unfortunately, as “greige.”
The color drought doesn’t affect just paint companies. According to Pantone, a color-technology company influential among designers and manufacturers across industries, 2026’s “Color of the Year” is “Cloud Dancer” (yes, white).
The share of new cars in grayscale colors rose from 60 percent in 2004 to 80 percent in 2023. Production of purple cars dropped 93 percent over that period, gold by 97 percent. “I don’t know how many different variants of silver and gray there could possibly be, but I think BMW and Mercedes have discovered it,” Karl Brauer, the analyst behind the report, told me.
Some color trends may look like a matter of whim. In the 2006 film The Devil Wears Prada, the imperious fashion editor Miranda Priestly (played by Meryl Streep) delivered the now-famous monologue in which she berates her assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) for being “blithely unaware” of how her own cerulean-blue sweater was in fact a product of a high-fashion embrace of the hue “by the people in this room.” Twenty years on, in this year’s The Devil Wears Prada 2, Sachs is gently discouraged from wearing anything colorful. “This is quiet luxury,” Stanley Tucci’s Nigel Kipling explains while assembling a wardrobe of grays and taupes. “That,” he adds, gesturing at the pink garment in her hands, “is like a screaming guitar solo.”
What’s plain, in the Prada sequel and nearly everywhere else, is that color fads are no longer dictated from on high by style gurus. Remarkably, shoppers’ personal taste may not be much of a factor, either. Although some studies show that people tend to feel more cheerful in the company of oranges and yellows, more calm among blues and greens, and sometimes more depressed around too much gray, their spending habits say otherwise. Two decades into the color recession, the observable preferences of landlords, homeowners, car buyers, and consumers have grown detached from what people claim to like. And little evidence indicates that walls or cars or appliances in hues other than greige are coming back anytime soon.
For thousands of years, color was an aristocratic luxury. From the 14th century B.C.E. to the 15th century C.E., only Mediterranean royalty, priests, and nobles wore anything dyed Tyrian purple, because acquiring the color could involve slicing out the mucous glands of special sea snails, fermenting them in salt for days, boiling them for days more, and then pouring urine on newly dyed garments to bind the color to the fabric. (A single gram of the dye required at least 10,000 snails.) The deep red of kermes crimson in ancient Rome involved grinding dried female kermes insect corpses. By the Middle Ages, some landlords accepted the dye as rent. The lurid verdigris that adorns the dining-room walls of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate was a labor-intensive status symbol, achieved by oxidizing copper plates with vinegar vapors and then mixing the resulting patina with oil.
In 1856, after an 18-year-old English chemistry student named William Henry Perkin accidentally invented synthetic dye while trying to cure malaria, a range of colors—including his own, snail-free Tyrian purple—became widely available for textiles. Suddenly, anyone could don the color the Roman emperor Caligula allegedly killed the King of Mauretania for wearing.
Perkin’s discovery spurred other lab-made dyes, which lowered costs and applied color to a widening variety of goods. Indiscriminate demand duly followed. By the early 20th century, Sherwin-Williams’s ads were encouraging homeowners to repaint every season: warm colors for winter and cool shades in the summer. Henry Ford may have once said that buyers could get a Ford Model T in any color, “so long as it was black,” but even he succumbed. In 1927, nearly two decades after the first Model T rolled off the assembly line, Ford hoped to revive interest in his car by painting it red.
“The effects of our chromatic revolution are everywhere apparent,” a 1928 Saturday Evening Post article called “The New Age of Color” observed. “Cars are borrowing their hues from the waters of the Nile, from the sands of Arabia, the plumage of birds and the fire of gems.” The ’20s were roaring; stocks were climbing, Hitler had yet to rise to power, and the cars plying American highways bore the Day-Glo colors of tropical birds. What could be more delightful?
By mid-century, a put-together, color-coordinated lifestyle “was what it meant to be middle class,” Regina Blaszczyk, a color historian, told me. Buyers matched their shoes to their suit and hat, and their car to the exterior of their home.
Mad Men–era color oracles in high-rise offices offered industry executives predictions that promised to boost sales and solve problems. In his 1945 book, Selling With Color, the color consultant Faber Birren wrote about the value of using warm and light colors for hospital-patient rooms but a more clinical blue-green hue for operating rooms (to reduce eye fatigue by posing a contrast to the red hue of innards). Alexander Schauss, a biologist, found in 1979 that a shade of pink—known as Baker-Miller Pink or Drunk-Tank Pink—could calm inmates and reduce fights in prisons.
The postwar decades, in short, were gloriously colorful in the United States. The decline would be precipitous.
Institutional constraints on color were already starting to emerge during this period. Postwar developers, for example, worked to meet the immense demand for housing by building entire neighborhoods with a handful of floorplans and a limited palette. In the name of protecting property values, homeowner associations attached to these developments decided that “uniformity is actually a positive,” Evan McKenzie, a University of Illinois Chicago professor who studies HOAs, told me. Many mandated earth-tone palettes for home facades, and even restricted the colors of street-visible features such as mailboxes, roofs, and curtains. Instead of resenting these limits, buyers came to see greige paint as securing their investment. “You’d want a neighborhood where you can restrict your neighbor, because your neighbor might do something crazy,” McKenzie said.
Meanwhile, in the auto industry, the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 narrowed the range of financially feasible colors for cars. Roy Kerney, the head of product strategy at the car-painting company Axalta, told me that the more eco-friendly coating that replaced lacquer paints was more expensive, which raised the cost of delivering variety. Stocking neutrals, which sold reliably, was far easier and more cost-effective than testing the appeal of various hues.
Time has reinforced those constraints. Given that ever more auto sales are for used vehicles, shoppers sensibly prefer to buy cars in inoffensive colors in case they need to resell. “When it comes to car colors, it’s not just about personal preference or what makes you happiest,” Kelley Blue Book warns. “If you’re looking to retain your car’s value, it’s best to play it safe and choose neutral colors.”
Never mind that resale-market data defy this conventional wisdom. A 2024 study of 1.2 million three-year-old used cars found that yellow, orange, and green cars depreciated less than silver, gray, and white ones.
Big purchases breed risk aversion. A 2025 survey of real-estate agents by Better Homes and Gardens found that 84 percent recommend repainting house interiors in white, gray, or beige before selling—particularly if the walls are red. Yet this market-appeasing logic doesn’t always satisfy the market. One Zillow study last year found that olive-green and navy-blue walls actually boosted home prices compared with white.
Even so, Alana Cowan, a graphic designer, still found herself puzzling over the difference between “Chantilly Lace” and “Alabaster” recently while figuring out what to paint the walls of her new house, in Arkansas. “Apparently, there’s 30 shades of white,” she told me. She was too plagued by doubt to consider anything more adventurous: “What if I hate it? What if I get tired of it? What if the next buyer doesn’t like it and that’s the reason they don’t buy the house?”This logic repeats itself from one room to the next, a phenomenon some decry as “the HGTV-ification of America.” Among renovating homeowners, 72 percent choose inoffensive stainless-steel appliances, according to one recent report. White and off-white dominated kitchen-wall colors and backsplash tiles. Amy Woolf, an interior decorator and color forecaster, told me that she’s seen “cocooning”—or seeking safety in one’s purchases—solidify gray’s dominance in every product sphere. When people buy a sofa now, they “don’t want to hate it in two years, so they’re not going to go with orange,” she said.
Yet grayification isn’t as “neutral” as buyers believe. A review last year of more than 100 studies of the effect of color on emotion found that gray consistently triggered fatigue, boredom, or sadness. Stephen Westland, a professor who studies color science, attributes the rise of gray to the fact that people are “scared of using color,” he told me, even though “the use of color can make you feel happier, psychologically.”
I wish I could say that change is on the horizon—that after decades in retreat, color is making a comeback.
Here and there, some consumers are letting color back in. Amy Freed, a retired lawyer from Maryland, decided to repaint her home and hired Woolf to help pick out the best shades of gray. Freed was shocked when Woolf suggested orange for the entryway. The color seemed “too bold and aggressive, and so out of my comfort zone,” Freed told me. “I don’t like color.” Nevertheless, Woolf persuaded her to try it out, and the foyer quickly “became this incredibly fun, joyful thing for me,” Freed said.
But her experience is notable precisely because it’s unusual. Millennial Pink in the 2010s, Barbie Pink in 2023, and Brat Green in 2024 were welcome counterpoints to the color recession, but they were also short-lived. They never quite translated into real-world buying habits for most consumers.
Color experts across multiple sectors told me, with varying degrees of wistfulness, that bright shades are ill-equipped to return. The structural obstacles to color are not going away. Almost 70 percent of new single-family homes were built into HOAs in 2024, the second-highest year on record after 2020. In a data-driven car marketplace, the color recession has become self-reinforcing. The preponderance of grays ensures that there’s too little information to even gauge demand for other colors.
Color enthusiasts are now largely stuck sneaking bright hues into gray. “Color is coming back,” Nancy Lockhart, a co-director of the Inter-Society Color Council, a nonprofit professional group, assured me. “But it’s coming back so subtly that you almost don’t notice it.”
In a show of defiance, Axalta did pick “Solar Boost”—“a warm and inviting orange tone”—as its automotive color of the year. But Kerney, the company’s product-strategy head, told me that the company doesn’t actually expect many orange cars to roll off the assembly line anytime soon. The choice of Solar Boost was simply to nudge the market in a livelier direction. The hope, Kerney explained, was that “a gray car out there may be gray, but may have a slight twinge of red.”
A marginally brighter gray might not seem worth celebrating. Dr. Color, the San Francisco housepainter, certainly can’t understand why so many people are denying themselves the pleasure of vivid, kaleidoscopic hues. His house is painted in no fewer than 11: “yellows, golds, ochres, cinnamons, with touches of blues, reds, and gold leaf, and purple and green,” he said. His home, in all of its peacocking beauty, stands out on Google Maps.
His neighbors, however, are playing it safe. Their homes are painted in different shades of greige.
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If at first you don’t succeed, appeal to a higher federal court. And if you even lose at the Supreme Court … just try again anyway.
This seems to be President Trump’s approach to limiting birthright citizenship. Last year, he issued an executive order that purports to end the practice of automatically granting citizenship to babies born in the United States—as has been the norm since the late 19th century. Despite Trump visiting oral arguments in an apparent attempt to intimidate the justices, the Supreme Court struck down the order this June.
Yesterday, Trump attempted to do some of the same things via new executive orders. One is intended to deny automatic citizenship to children born to people living in the United States while working for a foreign government and children of people declared to be terrorists or adversaries of the U.S. It would also deny citizenship to people born in U.S. territories if Congress passes a proposed law allowing that, creating a new group of stateless people. The second order is intended to prevent the practice of “birth tourism,” in which people visiting the United States on tourist visas give birth to babies who are then U.S. citizens.
Legal experts and advocates say the orders are unconstitutional, and they are certain to be challenged in court. Trump’s loss at the Supreme Court seems to make these orders a long shot. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his opinion for the Court, “children born of parents unlawfully or temporarily present in the United States” satisfy the relevant conditions and thus “under the Constitution, they are citizens at birth.”
The language in the orders about “alien enemies” is another likely area for dispute, not because anyone is eager to welcome the children of bona fide adversaries but because this administration has made absurd claims about illegal immigration constituting an “invasion,” which makes no sense on its face and has been rejected by federal judges.
Trump’s announcement of the orders at the White House yesterday was full of fabrications, exaggerations, and lies. Trump claimed that the Fourteenth Amendment “was meant for the babies of slaves. It was—it was right after—one week or two weeks after the Civil War ended.” In fact, it passed three years later, in 1868. The presidential adviser Stephen Miller echoed the same idea, saying that the amendment “had no other meaning and purpose outside of that, and that’s been clear, obviously, since the day that it was passed.” When a politician uses the word obviously—like frankly—that’s a good sign that what follows will be neither obvious nor true. If this had been obvious since 1868, the U.S. wouldn’t have acted otherwise for more than a century, and the Supreme Court would have ruled in favor of the administration.
Trump’s claims about birth tourism were even further off base. The president isn’t making the idea up—just wildly exaggerating it. Asked by a reporter how many people are engaging in the practice, Trump said, “I can tell you right now. Hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands.” This number appears to be pulled out of thin air. During Supreme Court oral arguments, Solicitor General John Sauer, arguing on behalf of Trump, was asked how commonly birth tourism occurs and replied, “No one knows for sure.” In 2020, the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports much stricter laws, estimated the number at between 20,000 and 26,000 births each year, out of roughly 3.6 million babies born in the United States.
By attempting to end or restrict birthright citizenship in order to address these issues, Trump is trying to use a bulldozer to achieve a task that calls for a small mallet. The law already prohibits fraudulent visa applications, and the Justice Department has prosecuted people for birth tourism in the past. Trying to undermine birthright citizenship risks jettisoning one of the fundamental bases of modern American society to deal with a minor challenge.
Trump could have tried another path. Justice Brett Kavanaugh offered the White House a potential lifeline in his concurrence in the birthright case, suggesting that despite the plain language of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress could pass a law altering birthright citizenship. The likelihood of such a bill succeeding seems very low, and pushing it through would require sustained attention from Trump. Instead, he’s trying to achieve his goals through executive orders, which are both easily reversed by a future president and have already proved unsuccessful.
But the president has a demonstrated weakness for this kind of grand, overreaching presidential gesture. Last month, after a member of the U.S. men’s national soccer team was suspended for a game in the World Cup, Trump decided to use his position to exert some pressure, calling FIFA President Gianni Infantino to try to get the suspension waived. In a direct sense, it worked—FIFA allowed the player to participate—but it may have backfired. Belgium, the American opponent, was incensed, and trounced the United States 4–1. Trump ended up looking obnoxious and corrupt, but didn’t even get a victory out of it. The player in question, by the way, was Folarin Balogun—a U.S. citizen by birth because his mother, while pregnant and visiting family, got stuck in the United States.
Senator Bill Cassidy said he will vote for Todd Blanche to be the next attorney general, giving Republicans enough support to confirm President Trump’s nominee despite opposition from GOP Senators Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins.
The U.S. economy unexpectedly lost 23,000 jobs in July, while the Labor Department lowered May and June’s job figures by a combined 103,000, adding to signs that the labor market is weakening.
A 14-year-old student in Thailand killed his grandparents and fatally shot five teachers and staff members at a school outside Bangkok, before dying by suicide, authorities said. Twenty-three people were wounded, nine critically, and Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul said the government would pursue a stricter gun law following the country’s second school shooting this year.
The human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call “serve and return” exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child’s brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver’s response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being. No other input, not even Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is capable of activating the neural circuitry the way human interaction does.
Watch (or skip). Netflix’s true-crime documentary Maternal Instinct tells the story of a woman who committed two murders—and what’s remarkable is how much it leaves out, Elizabeth Bruenig writes.
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