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If anyone were to be immune to America’s loneliness epidemic, it would be college students. For years, Americans have been going to fewer parties and spending more time alone. But college has historically been about socializing—or, let’s just say it, partying—as much as it has been about education. It’s where young people escape parental supervision, move in with roommates, and encounter thousands of potential new friends.
But the antisocial century has arrived on campus. Today’s students spend much less time socializing than past generations did. In 1994, 32 percent of college seniors spent more than six hours a week partying. By 2026, that was 21 percent, according to an analysis of survey data by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The percentage who spend more than six hours a week socializing face-to-face with friends fell from 74 to 65 percent over the same period. Meanwhile, the share of first-year students who reported feeling frequently isolated from campus life has more than doubled in the past two decades. (These surveys are not nationally representative, but they line up with what professors, administrators, and students told me they have observed anecdotally.)
Nationally, college students report higher rates of loneliness than adults do. On the National Survey of Student Engagement, run out of Indiana University’s Center for Postsecondary Research, more students report having positive interactions with professors than with peers. A rising senior at MIT told me that, despite being involved in Greek life and athletics, he eats alone most days. “I feel like I’m somebody who seeks social interactions,” he said, yet “I would say I am alone at least four or five days a week.” (He spoke anonymously because he didn’t want to be perceived as criticizing MIT when he still needs letters of recommendation from the faculty.) University leaders now find themselves in the odd position of encouraging students to spend more time goofing off with friends.
Researchers who track social interactions have several theories as to what’s going on. The first is that smartphones and social media are to blame. Much of the increase in loneliness occurred during the 2010s, at the same time that the iPhone was becoming ubiquitous, Daniel Eisenberg, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA, told me. Hours spent on social media crowded out time that people might previously have devoted to social interactions. And it’s easy for students to feel that their social life pales in comparison with what they see in highlight reels on Instagram and TikTok.
Meanwhile, extracurricular activities, once a mainstay of campus social life, have mutated into a way to stand out to employers in an era of grade inflation. Especially at elite universities, clubs now more closely resemble jobs than socializing opportunities. Finance and consulting clubs require students to submit résumés, sit for interviews, and prepare mock cases or deliverables. Improv, a cappella, and even some volunteering clubs accept only a distinguished few. Cat Moore, who spent six years as the University of Southern California’s director of belonging, told me that students were busier than ever with extracurriculars, jobs, and internship applications. Even when they tried to build in time for socializing, it frequently tipped into networking. “USC had over 1,000 student clubs, yet their loneliness is out of control,” Moore said. “So the answer is not more clubs. The answer is not more programming.”
The coronavirus pandemic seems to have had a lasting effect on in-person interaction on campus. This is partly a matter of psychology. Many current college students were in middle school when classes and activities went remote. They missed out on a crucial period of learning to interact with other people, Ryan Patel, an assistant director of psychiatry at Ohio State University, told me. “When you lose practice doing those things, it can affect your ability to do them now,” Patel said. College administrators have started to pick up on students’ stunted social development. Justin Schwartz, the chancellor of University of Colorado Boulder, told me that he and his colleagues now have to support students through challenges that many would previously have faced in adolescence, such as trying alcohol for the first time and having their first romantic relationships—and accompanying heartbreaks. From 2019 to 2024, the share of college students who said they’d never had sex rose by 10 percentage points, according to the National College Health Assessment.
The pandemic also led to changes in how universities operate. Universities now routinely offer remote courses, and professors are under pressure to record and post videos of their lectures. Before the pandemic, 15 percent of undergraduates were completely remote. As of 2024, according to federal data, that number was 24 percent. “Along the way, you’ve lost social interactions that you may have had with people,” OSU’s Patel said. “You walk down the hall and you pass by somebody, you hold the door open for someone, you go to the dining hall to eat, you walk over to class and you see people along the way—these kinds of social interactions, that just fell off.” The rising senior at MIT said that because lectures are posted online and grades are dependent mostly on exams, fewer than a quarter of his classmates are likely to attend a lecture on any given day. “I have a class where, on paper, I should have five of my friends in that class,” he told me. “But then I show up, and I just go the whole week without seeing my friends, really, which is tough.”
Of course, college, where many students are away from their family and friends for the first time, has always made some people feel lonely. And some of the apparent rise in loneliness could reflect a change in how students label their feelings, as opposed to a change in actual circumstances. “I don’t think there’s any question that loneliness has increased among young people,” Richard Weissbourd, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me. But he also thinks that the shift is partly a result of students viewing normal desires for more friends as unusual or even pathological. Previous generations might have felt similarly disconnected but chosen not to identify themselves as lonely. “This is the most psychologically literate and articulate generation in history,” he said. “People are much more proficient at and much more inclined to label their emotional states.”
This tendency creates a challenge for college leaders who hope to address high rates of loneliness. At USC, for example, Moore developed a course to teach students how to make friends, which MIT now uses. Drawing attention to the problem risks inflating the number of students who report feeling lonely. It’s normal, even important, for students to struggle as they adjust to a new environment, UCLA’s Eisenberg told me. That helps them grow.
Some administrators have explored more creative solutions. Brian Casey, the president of Colgate University, told me that he had new footpaths built across lawns on campus to increase the odds of students physically encountering one another. He has invested in landscaping to beautify the grounds and encourage students to hang out outside. And he has insisted that new buildings be designed with more common areas to all but force students to interact. “The more I can get students to run into each other, the better,” he said.
Whether through similar interventions or because the pandemic has further receded from view, there are some signs that student loneliness is beginning to decline. The Healthy Minds Study, which Eisenberg helps administer, has documented a slight drop over the past few years, to pre-COVID levels. The National College Health Assessment has tracked a similar trend, the American College Health Association’s chief research officer, Mary Hoban, told me. But even if numbers are returning to their pre-pandemic baseline, that’s about half of all students reporting being lonely. “It’s still wildly high,” she said. “We’ve got a problem and need to address it.” All that partying college students used to do? It might have served a purpose after all.
When Julia Curlee was a kid growing up in Hawaii, she dreamed of becoming an intelligence officer. In 2007, when she took her oath standing on the marble CIA seal, she achieved that goal. But she had another childhood dream too: She’d always had “an unshakable belief that I should have been born a woman.”
In 2013, Julia Curlee became the first CIA officer to transition openly and keep serving the agency. She felt more effective at her job living as the person she always believed she was—and years ago wrote about her experience under a pseudonym in The Atlantic. Her performance proved her effectiveness: She became the daily intelligence briefer for Vice President Pence during the first Trump administration and a director on the National Security Council in both the Biden administration and the second Trump term.
Less than 70 days after the president returned to office in 2025, Julia was fired from the White House without explanation. She returned to the CIA and, over time, began to feel a lack of support at the agency in an administration that was openly hostile to transgender people. Julia left her dream job with the federal government earlier this year. This week, she is telling her full story for the first time—in an Atlantic essay she wrote and in a conversation with Radio Atlantic.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Julia Curlee: After everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.
Adam Harris: As a high-level CIA officer, Julia Curlee had the ear of one of the most powerful politicians in America: the vice president of the United States. He relied on her to let him know what was going on in the world each day. She held prominent intelligence positions during the last three administrations: Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2. She is also a transgender woman.
For a long time, Julia had two dreams: to be a CIA officer and to be her authentic self. She realized the first in 2007, when she took the oath on the agency seal; the second in 2013, when she transitioned.
She made a promise when she did: never to hide who she was. Yet in 2017, she wrote two stories for The Atlantic under a pseudonym. She wrote about her experience; she wrote about what it meant for the intelligence community to accept people like her. The agency used it to help recruit on college campuses. Julia was using the discretion that came naturally for a CIA officer.
Now, after being pushed out of the White House and leaving an agency where she no longer felt supported, Julia is telling the rest of the story as herself.
I’m Adam Harris. This is Radio Atlantic, and today: a conversation with Julia Curlee.
Let’s get to questions.
Julia, welcome to the show.
Julia Curlee: Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me.
Harris: Absolutely. So Julia, you served the United States for more than 20 years in intelligence positions. What was it that drew you to public service?
Curlee: Well, I grew up a barefoot kid in Hawaii, and I always wanted to see what was over the horizon and see the world and all that. And then, at some young, impressionable age, I was ambushed by The Hunt for Red October and the analyst as hero, getting to save the day. And, I don’t know, it sort of came out of nowhere and it sort of bubbled up in my life. And my parents definitely instilled in me a desire to serve our country, and intelligence just caught something in me and I wanted to be a part of it.
Harris: When you joined, was it everything you imagined?
Curlee: Oh, many more late nights and long PowerPoint-presentation sessions.
Harris: So not quite like the movie?
Curlee: Not so much, yeah. I didn’t call in many drone strikes on my way to the PowerPoint presentation that you would sometimes see in the movies. Did not repel off a helicopter into a submarine too many times.
But it was an amazing and wonderful career. I got to travel to 35 countries. I briefed several presidents. It was just all I wanted to do, and I desperately wish I was doing that now. It’s the only thing I ever wanted to do and it was the only plan I ever had.
Harris: And today you’re writing in the pages of The Atlantic, telling your story for the first time under your own name. Why now?
Curlee: Well the institutions that I served through my adult life are under assault. The ability of officers to speak truth to power, to inform policy making so that they make the best decisions on behalf of the United States—that is being eviscerated. And the officers who deliver that, who spend their lives learning about foreign countries, learning how to systematically understand multiple sources of intelligence, convey uncertainty—all of that is being destroyed by an administration that wants to both cherry-pick the intelligence to only receive what they want to hear, and to punish the officers who have the courage to speak that truth to them, to do their jobs and to live up to the values that we inculcate in all of our officers. And so the only way to do that was to leave and to begin to tell my story.
I also felt like I needed to tell the other part of my story, which has nothing to do with my substantive experience in the world, and that’s being a trans person. And I know that the sustained assault on people like me is a part of a broader campaign to try to define who gets to be in public spaces, who gets to have positions of honor.
Harris: I want to talk about that service and about your transition while you were in the service. You transitioned in 2013, and did you have concerns when you were transitioning? What was that first day going into the office like?
Curlee: Well, it was the most terrifying day of my life. And that was in the wake of several war-zone assignments and being rocketed, and I didn’t know whether it would be the last day.
You know, as I already said, I’d always dreamed since I was a kid of being an intelligence officer. The other dream that I’d always had that was unexplainable was just an unshakable belief that I should have been more born a woman.
I didn’t know where it came from. It just was always lurking in the background. And over time in my life, it became this just unshakable darkness that clouded out everything else. And finally, I came to the conclusion I had to transition. The only problem, of course, is that there were no trans people. The last time someone at CIA had tried to transition had been decades before, and it had been terrible. The person had been driven out of the organization, in a hostile workplace, and management had not been supportive. And so I contacted the LGBT group to say, Hey, I’m here. I’m here to meet other people and get some help. And they said, Congratulations, but you’re the only one.
And that is what led me in 2017 to write in pseudonym in The Atlantic under the name Jenny Hall. And it was an opportunity to get the word out that people like me are a part of our national security, that we’re patriots, that we want to serve, that we don’t want any special rights. We just want what everyone else has.
And so I was very happy to get to do that. And in the years following that, CIA actually used those articles on college campuses to recruit people. And I was very proud of that, but I was also very, very happy to disappear back into my day job, in the work.
And so, you know, in short, my transition in those years was a big “nothing significant to report,” in the lexicon of my profession, and that was the best possible outcome.
Harris: So when you talk about the work, this is 2017; the first Trump administration has just begun. What were your concerns? Did you have concerns ahead of that first Trump administration about their policies, or the platform, regarding transgender people?
Curlee: You know, going into that term, it really hadn’t been in the political realm very much. I mean, it honestly wasn’t a big issue. It only really became, in my consciousness anyway, a big political issue when the president, the first time, banned trans people in the military, which was a shock, because for a lot of us it was a rock-solid belief that progress is linear, that things you gained might slow down, but, you know, the long arc, and that things would get better. And this was a case of it regressing in a significant way.
And I knew several trans intelligence officers who were in uniform who were doing the same job that I was doing at CIA, and they were being told that by being honest, by which the previous administration had told them they could be, that they would be thrown out and that their careers would be destroyed just for being themselves. And so I also wrote about that to try to make the case in a good-faith way to our leaders that this was the wrong decision and that it would hurt our national security.
Harris: So you gave the president’s daily brief during that first Trump administration. Can you tell us what it means to do that job and what all it entails?
Curlee: Yeah, so as a baby analyst, you imagine yourself being that briefer in the room with the commander in chief or briefing on Air Force One. It was the thing that most of us aspired to at the end of a long career. And initially I was assigned to the deputy national security adviser in the White House. And boy, it was like cramming for a final exam every morning from midnight to 5 a.m. or so. And then at some point there, you’re whisked downtown and you come to the White House when it’s pitch black and you check in with the Situation Room, and you’ve got these pieces that you’ve been studying. And so I would get to the White House and I would find my—I’d be the first person that would see my policy customer when they came in the door in the West Wing, the deputy national security adviser, at first, and I would be in there for 15, 20, 30, 40, 50 minutes, and it would be 20 questions, and it would be firing things at me and asking me to follow up with taskings. And it was just exhilarating for a person that was a news junkie who wants to be plugged into the information universe, just wanting to be available to help these policy makers make good decisions. And I did that for two years in total for the Trump administration for the first term.
Harris: And so, while you’re in the Trump administration, you begin giving the president’s daily briefing, and you begin giving that briefing to Vice President Mike Pence. What was the experience of first meeting him like?
Curlee: Yeah, so I’d been in the PDB for a few months, and it was wonderful. And as much as I loved roaming the West Wing of the White House before dawn and no one caring apparently that a trans woman was serving the highest levels of the Trump administration, my boss walked into my office one day and said, you know, Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president? And I looked up at her and I said, This vice president?
And she said, Yeah, I think you’d be the right pick for this. And I took her word for it. And so, the first time I was standing in the driveway at the Naval Observatory when there he was, unmistakably, with his silver-white hair, and he turns to his outgoing briefer and said, You’re gonna abandon me with her? And it was his dad-joke humor, and there I was, and it was just me and Mike Pence.
And I discovered that he was an excellent intelligence customer. He took the book, he took the briefing almost every day, religiously. He took rapid notes and would be firing questions at me. And he really impressed me with how seriously he was taking the job of being this consumer of intelligence, this massive, multibillion-dollar apparatus we’ve built out to help our leaders make better decisions. And he was using it as I would have hoped he would. And in a broader administration where that was not always the case, I really felt like I could really do good, and support him as he participated in these policy conversations. And it was a real pleasure. It was truly the thing that I had been training and and wanting to do since I’d been a kid. It was like the experience that I dreamed of.
Harris: Yeah, so he was really relying on you for your expertise?
Curlee: Yeah, I mean, I would be one of the first people he would see in the morning. It has been described to me that a PDB briefer is—part of your job is, like, helping to filter the world so that a policy maker whose most precious commodity is time can know what are the really big issues to focus on. And I would play that part in his day, in focusing him on the key events happening in one part of the world versus another, teeing up information so that I would know what policy-making meetings he was going into or heading on a foreign trip, and I would be trying to anticipate his needs, and then when he asked a question, ensure that it was rapidly answered as quickly as possible. And so getting to travel with him around the world, getting to be a part of the team that follows the vice president, was truly an amazing privilege.
And for all of the fears and my own trepidations—I wasn’t ignorant of his public persona. It truly was a great experience, and I got to see our government operating as it should.
Harris: There’s probably some dissonance there, right, between that public persona and the private persona? How do you square the difference between the public policy and and the person who you engaged with on a regular basis?
Curlee: I don’t know, and I don’t want to suggest that I know his personal views. What I know is what I experienced. I experienced being treated with great respect, being treated as a serious professional, being trusted. When my tour was over, he asked me to extend. So that was a conversation to have with my wife.
But I had been raised in a CIA that had trained into us that we serve regardless of who sits in the Oval Office, that we are nonpartisan civil servants who will support them with the best information possible. And he was the vice president and needed the best information possible. And so what I would do is I would put that to the side.
It was the fulfillment of what I had always wanted to do, and there were moments like when my tour was finally coming to an end and he invited my family to the White House, and he took my mother’s hand—and this is my mother who had had a really hard time with my transition years before—and Mike Pence took my mother’s hand and says, You must be very proud of your daughter.
And I’m sitting there watching this and I’m thinking, We’ve arrived. There’s no more battles left to be won. I mean, it’s not, that wasn’t true, but it just felt like the two dreams that I’d had since I was a kid, which I had always felt were just completely incompatible.
Harris: You write about the moment that the vice president certified the election and how there was a certain sort of kinship between the two of you around that service, right? That you mentioned the, sort of, bargain, right? The exact quote was, “That was the bargain: service before politics, country before self.”
Can you tell me about that moment? What that moment signified for you?
Curlee: So, this was a few days after January 6 and I had been done briefing him for several months at that point. And he brought us all together, and we were in his West Wing office just down the hall from the Oval, and we went around talking about what serving in this role had meant to us. And I told him that moment, when he had prioritized the country, when he had certified the victory of his opponent in the election, that I was never more proud to have served as his briefer.
And he, you know, he took my hand; we shook hands, and he said that meant a lot to him.
And that is what the bargain meant to me, was the fact that despite our almost certain profound differences of views on many subjects, we could put that aside and treat each other with dignity and do what was right, regardless of our politics and the political cost. And it was a very special moment for me and everybody who was there.
Harris: So, after four years of the Biden administration, the Trump administration comes back for a second time, and people begin to decide whether they should stay or go. So what advice were you getting about what you should do?
Curlee: It was fairly uniform that we should all leave. So during the campaign I had been serving at the White House; I served for about 20 months in the Biden administration as a director for intelligence programs in the NSC. And all throughout that period, it was wall-to-wall TV. I remember standing in the sit room, looking up at one of the many screens and watching these scary images of people like me and hundreds of millions of dollars being poured to create this caricature that somehow trans people were a threat to America and tar the Democratic candidate with association with these scary people. And I’m watching this and in horror that I’m witnessing on the TV the same kind of dehumanization that I’d written PDBs about in my career.
And so, but, despite all of that, despite the warnings from our leadership that they were very afraid for us, that we would be targeted, that it would destroy our careers, that the online mob would be summoned against us—despite all of that, I was the trans woman that briefed Mike Pence. I believed fiercely in the idea of nonpartisan civil service to whoever is the president. And I was not going to walk away from this task that I had been given to help with the peaceful transfer of power of an administration.
And so, the only person in the whole White House, I have to say, who asked us to stay was the president. And I believed it, that was the right decision. And I still believe it still. But almost everyone that decided to do that has paid a price in some form or another.
And so when the politicals departed, about a week out from the turn of administration, I was asked to serve as the acting senior director for intelligence programs. And so I was there when the new team arrived on Inauguration Day. I was there in the West Wing as people were still finding their offices, as people were moving in the furniture and moving in the new furniture, when the vice president arrived and saw his office for the first time. I was there to help the new administration get off the ground. And I did. And for day after day, we did that until the third day, when the administration, while I was briefing the deputy national security adviser, summoned 160 NSE detailees from departments and agencies to a group call and told them they had 15 minutes to get off the compound.
I walked out of my briefing with a handful of taskings that I knew I needed to get to the intelligence community as quickly as possible. And my assistant intercepts me on West Exec, the road between the White House and the EEOB, where my office was, and says, Everyone’s fired except for you. And I was in shock at the recklessness and the callousness of it. And so over the next several days, it was a mess.
And so for the next 69 days, I and the few people from my team that I could bring back served until one day on a Saturday, I’m down in Roanoke, Virginia, with my family, and I get a phone call that says that my tour is over. The chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason why. You’re gone. You’ll be sent back to CIA. But if you don’t mind, we’d still like you to come in on Monday.
Harris: So you were removed from your position and asked to come back in.
Curlee: Yeah, in the same phone call, you know, fired on Saturday but needed on Monday. But I was warned in that call to be discreet. And I still didn’t understand what was happening until I got off the phone and my iPhone was was bombarded with friend after friend after friend forwarding me a tweet that said, that announced to the world, that there was a trans Biden holdover who hates President Trump in the intelligence directorate, and please give me this person’s name so that I can out them to the world.
And I was terrified of what that would mean for me and my family. But Monday came and I came to work anyway. And I served for another three days to help finish off an important budget item that I had been working on, to turn over a portfolio that I had managed at that point for almost two years, and it was that third night, my last day there, that a list of enemies within the administration was given to the president. And it was yet another purge of people with decades of experience, including my boss at the time.
And, you know, as I was leaving the White House for that last time, with my little box of mementos from two years of serving at the White House, you know, this dream come true, it really hit me what “Be discreet” meant in that point, after everything I had been through with my service to the former vice president, my briefing for this president in the first term, and my war zones, my 20 years, all of it, “Be discreet” meant We need you. We need your service. But we don’t want anyone to know you are here.
And that has stuck with me ever since, and why I have to tell my story, because they’ve taken from me my calling. I can no longer serve. I couldn’t use the bathroom. When I was at the White House, I had to cross the street to coffee shops across Pennsylvania Avenue in order to just get through the day. And the same restrictions followed me back to CIA. And the constant fear of being fired for being who I am just—I couldn’t continue.
But the one thing I can’t allow for me is for the fact that what has happened has already happened. It can’t be undone. And so telling my story is a part of putting that on the record, that someone like me can serve in the White House, can brief a president, can serve honorably, and loves their country.
And so I had to tell this story.
Harris: You mentioned the list of enemies landing on Trump’s desk, and the tweet hunting for the transgender intelligence person in the White House. That tweet and the list came from Laura Loomer, who is a far-right provocateur.
If she never posted that tweet, if that list had never gone out, do you think that you might still be in the White House?
Curlee: I think I probably would have reached my limit at some point in terms of my family, and it would have been time for someone else to come. But I fully intended to keep serving, and at the time it was funny. In that same conversation that I was in with the deputy national security adviser, briefing him on some very sensitive, important programs, he asked me when my tour was over, and I said, Well, sir, it’s been—it’ll be two years and just in a couple months, and, you know, I gotta get home and I’ve got a family. And he said, Hmm, June. I don’t think that’s gonna work for us. And so, I was already starting to think how I was gonna have this conversation again. But I wanted to keep serving, and keep serving at CIA. That was my only plan, and I’m just sad that it became impossible.
Harris: I want to home in on your expertise. You’ve said that what Americans should be concerned about is this wider assault on expertise in this administration, and especially in the intelligence community. So are we already seeing the consequences of that assault on expertise and elimination of expertise?
Curlee: I’m regretting to say we are, and it’s all around us in the evidence of disastrous policies. But to back up a second, you know, the same assault on trans officers, on other minorities, was accompanied by a parallel attack on the ability of our officers to speak truth to power.
So, one of the things that happened early in the new administration was I was asked to send a tasking to the intelligence community on the status of this group Tren de Aragua, which was a Venezuelan street gang. And the tasking was whether the Maduro government had ordered this group to invade the United States, which is the predicate for invoking the Alien Enemies Act almost verbatim, and I tasked it out to the National Intelligence Council, where the chairman of the NIC, which is the most senior analytic body in the intelligence community, dutifully wrote an excellent assessment that reflected the consensus position of the intelligence community. And he and his deputy, when they delivered the product, which did not accord with what the administration wanted to hear, were told that they should rethink their assessment. And when they refused, they were ordered out of the building. And publicly firing one of the most esteemed officers in the intelligence community and their deputy for living up to the values that we inculcate in every young officer was a devastating blow to the whole organization.
And it has had ripple effects all through. And it is just further attacks on officers for assessments that they wrote a decade ago, because they don’t conform with what the president wants to hear, has taught this generation now of officers that your clearance can be revoked with a phone call if you say the wrong thing. And so a muzzle has been put on an organization that is vital to our national interest.
And when you wed that with the destruction of the National Security Council as a policy-coordinating body, which I got to witness firsthand through the purges that unfolded through the first few months of the administration, you’ve lost the very venue in which those concerns and experts and expertise can be delivered to help the president make good decisions. And so it’s not surprising when disastrous outcomes ensue.
So, just for the example, when the country was marching to war in Iran, America launched a full suite of airstrikes showing that the U.S. military is the finest fighting force in the world. And at the same time, the State Department somehow hadn’t planned for the evacuation of half a million Americans and diplomats and officers and their dependents in a war we started.
In any competent administration, regardless of the wisdom of the effort, there would have been a plan. And there would have been a plan to deal with the fact that the Iranians were going to close the Strait of Hormuz. There would have been briefings that would have made clear to the president that decapitating the leadership and killing the supreme leader would not immediately lead to the Iranians surrendering. All of these things are what the intelligence community and the National Security Council should exist to do, to head off these things, to ensure that things that are foreseeable and have been foreseen in multiple public war games for decades about the Iranians would have been delivered and provided context for the administration to make a sound decision or at least plan. And none of it happened.
And as a result, we’re in this debacle where there’s no clear road out, where all the choices are terrible. And we’re looking at ending the conflict in a worse position than when we begun. And there’s, I think there’s a word for that, and it’s called losing a war. And this is a direct result of a climate of fear that the administration has instilled on a workforce that it somehow sees as the enemy within rather than the civil servants who have given their professional lives to helping the country. And we’re all paying for it.
Harris: You wrote that your grandfather told you “Work hard; don’t complain; and the country will take care of you.” Do you still think the country is taking care of you?
Curlee: No, no. It’s hard to feel the sense of betrayal, a bit. And it’s not just me; it’s all of the people who devoted themselves to this ideal of nonpartisan public service, who have been callously thrown away. I’ve got many friends who are transgender in the military, who have faced ruinous financial and life circumstances and had something so important to their identities taken away from them for no reason at all, other than just animus for who some people are.
And that’s why I titled the piece “The Wrong Kind of American,” because it really is that. It is a decision to treat some Americans as not worthy of a full life, of positions of honor, and to treat them as if they’re some sort of threat to society. And it feels as if we’ve just turned our back on the most fundamental ideal that we try to teach everyone, which is that we can rise as far as our talents take us in this country. And that’s a terrible thing.
You know, nine years ago I closed my piece in The Atlantic saying trans kids should know that CIA is always recruiting, because I wanted them to know that there was this amazing life that they could have, that there were some people like them who got to do that, and now I could not in good conscience advise any LGBT American to apply to work at CIA. And that is awful. That is un-American, and I regret saying it, but it’s just true. And I hope that in the coming years that will change and we’ll do what’s right, and we’ll look back at this period in our history with shame and we’ll learn from it.
Harris: Julia, thank you so much for sharing your story and for joining me on the show today.
Curlee: Thank you. It was a privilege.
Harris: That’s all for today’s show.
This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Mike Pesoli and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Miguel Carrascal and has original music by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
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Committed anxious types like me rarely find a poem opening as enticing as this one from the late Mary Oliver:
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Why yes, I have worried about that: Will the natural order of things suddenly turn against itself? And what can I, a small, unremarkable being, do to fix it? The poem’s troubles go on to cover aging, illness, regret. And then, with a sigh, it resolves itself. “Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. / And I gave it up. And took my old body / and went out into the morning, / and sang.”
Much of Oliver’s now-famed poetry, including “I Worried,” sidles up right next to the reader, assumes a strong kinship, and then doles out a dollop of wisdom that might be interpreted as advice. Oliver rarely commands, but she frequently—especially in her most-shared work—offers statements or questions that read as counsel for the weary. Among many other examples, she slips “instructions for living a life” inside her poem “Sometimes”: “Pay attention. / Be astonished. / Tell about it.” “You do not have to be good,” begins the oft-quoted “Wild Geese.” And there is her more graceful take on YOLO, from “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Prompts such as these turned Oliver from a celebrated scribbler in the 1990s to a lyrical sage in the aughts to today’s still-reigning poet laureate of Pinterest. Her juiciest bits of guidance bounce around on social media like Mel Robbins quotes and are sold on mugs and T-shirts. There’s the burgundy corduroy cap that reads Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. and the bumper sticker (from the official Mary Oliver Shop) emblazoned with Joy is not made to be a crumb.
An upcoming PBS documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World, knows that popularity has made the artist’s reputation fraught, as popularity often does. It gently considers the question of whether someone so beloved by poetry neophytes can also earn the adulation of the critic class. As the writer Ruth Franklin points out in the film, Oliver never received a full-length review from The New York Times during her decades-long publishing career, even though that career included a Pulitzer Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Book Award. The attention eventually paid to her work seemed to come with an asterisk, as if to designate it as beloved and therefore depthless. In a 2025 essay titled “Is Mary Oliver Embarrassing?,” the poet Maggie Millner argued that Oliver’s critics have “a discomfort with her work’s digestibility, earnestness, and apparent disinterest in other people—and a fear about what the popularity of such work might say about them.”
Then again, what critics of Oliver’s work and celebrity might really fear is that the platitudes have become detached from the poems, that all those feel-good lines aren’t appreciated as poetry. The medium has always been delightfully co-opted this way. Even those who rarely touch poetry can probably name a few sayings that initially came from the medium, such as “a thing of beauty is a joy forever” (from Keats) and even “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” (a modification of Coleridge). But when a line of poetry zooms off from the rest of its body, it can’t lift up the whole of the genre with it—and poetry, with its quiet place in the literary firmament, would probably like all the boosterism it can get.
The people who have turned Oliver into their patron saint of undecorated wisdom don’t seem to care whether the literary establishment is on board. Some of the reasons for their reverent following? The advice Oliver offers was hard-earned—throughout a difficult childhood and a long struggle to have her poetry widely read—and didn’t come off as self-help opportunism. Her work, much of which is concerned with the natural world she observed on daily walks in Cape Cod, was personal but never self-obsessed. It left a small but meaningful space for the reader to step into.
Saved by the Beauty of the World provides the broad strokes of Oliver’s life. Raised in Ohio in the 1930s and ’40s, she grew up in a “very dark and broken house” where she suffered at the hands of her father; the woods and fields offered escape. She briefly attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, then worked at the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s upstate New York home, tried out Greenwich Village, and landed in her 20s in Provincetown, on Cape Cod’s tip, where she stayed almost until the last years of her long life (most of them spent with her partner, the photographer Molly Malone Cook). Oliver’s career didn’t explode until her Pulitzer win, in 1984, when she was 49. Before that, she worked at an military-surplus store and did typing for figures such as Norman Mailer; after, she was sought by rafts of admirers, including readers and the students she taught at various institutions, but maintained a private, almost elusive, existence, granting few interviews.
The work Oliver created over five decades isn’t as easily summarized as some of her detractors might say, though it does dwell on a few central themes. There is her earthy imagery—the song of the wren, the “gladness” of the beeches and the oaks and the pines, the glory of an August day. She is a high priestess of the ordinary—not someone who revels in trips to the dentist or afternoons spent giving kids lice treatments, but in finding grace in the fact that life is made of simple moments. The umbrella hanging over all of her writing is her penchant for observing and absorbing—as she puts it so perfectly, “attention is the beginning of devotion”—and her encouragement of her readers to do the same. The poetry is an attempt to ask, over and over, What am I supposed to do? It’s also, sometimes, an answer to that question.
Advice isn’t hard to come by these days: Fit-looking 40-something Instagrammers tell you how to slim down your middle-aged body; columns on manners and ethics or other interpersonal quandaries fill every big-name magazine and newspaper. And yet there is an (often unspoken) assertion that poetry ought not to give advice, that it should exult in the ambiguous. Poetry, perhaps more than any other writing genre, is unfairly assigned a value that is in direct opposition to its usefulness.
In an essay about O, the Oprah Magazine’s poetry issue, the critic David Orr snidely remarked of Oliver’s poetry, “One can only say that no animals appear to have been harmed in the making of it”; he also declared, “There’s a bunch of talk about using poetry to overcome personal challenges (if it worked as self-help, you’d see more poets driving BMWs).” But poetry, like any other writing, is allowed to work toward a goal—so long as it doesn’t lose its structural integrity. Perhaps the problem isn’t that poetry fails to help one overcome challenges, but that its reputation doesn’t give it enough credit for that very thing. (If it did, Ada Limón and Kate Baer might have Z4 Roadsters of their own.)
Even after allowing that poetry can of course offer advice, the question of whether Oliver’s advice is any good is worth debating. I quibble with her notion that one could easily give up worrying: SSRI-usage rates are too high for that to feel possible. And I wonder what she means, exactly, by “good” when she says, “You do not have to be good,” in “Wild Geese”—her next line likens it to walking “on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting,” but surely the matter of goodness involves a more complicated definition than just self-flagellation. Other lines seem so undoubtedly true that it’s no wonder they’ve ended up on apparel. She ends her poem “When Death Comes” with, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Do any of us? If poetry is, at least partly, the art of minute observation, Oliver’s work might come off as trite when it expounds so universally.
The claim her friends and admirers make in Saved by the Beauty of the World is that none of this was straightforward for Oliver, either. She wasn’t some sage from on high but a flesh-and-blood woman who struggled through heartache and counted her dollars and was occasionally, as her friend John Waters puts it, a “shit-stirrer.” Oliver professed herself an admirer of Walt Whitman, but the documentary suggests that she may have been more like his contemporary (and poetic opposite) Emily Dickinson—a woman who set herself apart from the world in order to make better sense of it on paper.
Oliver’s poetry was not an act of ease; instead, she rebelled against the way that life presses our head down, away from the wonders of the world. Her advice, for all of its lucidity, is not uncomplicated or effortless. It’s to do something so difficult that most people don’t even attempt it: to notice when we’ve wandered away from how we want to live and to nudge ourselves back. “There are things you cannot reach. But,” she writes, “you can reach out to them, and all day long.” And for that, I’m grateful to have Mary Oliver’s words floating around my Pinterest page. I’d rather live the questioning life of an Oliver acolyte than the certain life of her critics.
NW Orchard, LLC courtesy of the Library of Congress
Western military planners do not seem eager to talk about their nightmare scenario, much less prepare for it. But they tend to agree on how it would begin: a coordinated, near-simultaneous attack on opposite sides of the planet, in which Russia targets a NATO member in Eastern Europe while China makes its move against Taiwan. The U.S. military would need to react on two fronts at once—three if it remains at war in the Middle East.
Until recently, this possibility sat at the more outlandish end of the threat spectrum, somewhere between a loose nuke and an alien invasion. Synchronized attacks would require a conspiracy too big for Beijing and Moscow to hide. Satellites would see their forces getting into position, giving the United States and its allies time to rally their defenses.
About a year ago, General Alexus Grynkewich, the top NATO commander in Europe, issued a rare public warning about the risk of a two-front war against Russia and China, and he called on European allies to help the U.S. prepare. But when I asked a range of military experts and strategists what the West would do in such a situation, the responses rang surprisingly hollow. Most of them expressed bewilderment and a bit of shame about how little has been done in recent years to study this risk in detail.
“Let’s just say this is the scenario we’re currently not ready for,” Florence Gaub, the director of the research division at the NATO Defense College, one of the alliance’s main academies for officers, in Rome, told me. NATO strategists remain “keenly aware” of this gap in their planning, Gaub, who specializes in the forecasting and analysis of future threats, said. But they have not taken steps to fill that gap.
Even as Russia and China have intensified their military cooperation, the West has held only a few low-profile exercises to analyze what would happen if the two launched a joint attack. Public discussion of this possibility has been remarkably muted among Western experts and military brass, who seem to lack the theoretical frameworks to process such a calamity and game out a response.
Mark Montgomery, a retired rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and a frequent participant in high-profile war games and strategic-planning exercises, told me that he and his colleagues last studied the idea of a two-front war against Russia and China roughly 15 years ago. “It didn’t go well,” he said.
Back then, the exercises showed that the U.S. did not have the weapons stockpiles or the industrial capacity to sustain a lengthy period of fighting on multiple fronts, and it could not rely on its allies to pick up the slack. Since then, Montgomery said, “Every one of those metrics has gone down. None of them has gotten better.” Under pressure from the Trump administration, U.S. allies have increased their defense spending. “But their forces have not yet shown improvement.”
The other sides have. Although Russia has been failing to achieve its objectives in the war in Ukraine, it has succeeded in shifting its enormous industrial base onto a war footing, and formerly civilian factories now aid in the production of missiles and tanks. The Russian experience in Ukraine has also made its forces adept at drone warfare. China, which produces most of the world’s drones, has not fought a war in decades and suffers from corruption in its upper ranks. But it has overtaken the U.S. in the number of warships and long-range missiles in its arsenal. Russia and China have also built stronger ties between their militaries under what their leaders describe as a “no-limits” partnership.
From their vantage point, the window of opportunity to strike the West might never have looked more tantalizing. The U.S. remains bogged down in Iran, having pulled a lot of its ships and aircraft out of Asia and Europe to backfill its forces in the Middle East. An estimated two-thirds of the American arsenal of advanced air-defense missiles has been depleted since February, and Donald Trump’s persistent insults and threats against NATO have turned the rift between the U.S. and its allies into a yawning chasm.
For most of his tenure as Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin has aspired to dismantle NATO, and its current moment of weakness offers him a rare chance to achieve that goal. He has already started testing its defenses. NATO members in Eastern Europe, such as Romania, Poland, and the Baltic states, have seen repeated violations of their air space by Russian drones, missiles, and fighter jets. Earlier this month, German authorities found a suspected Russian drone loaded with explosives at an airport in Leipzig, apparently preparing to blow up a Ukrainian cargo plane over NATO territory.
The most recent U.S.-intelligence assessments have reportedly concluded that Russia could try to test NATO’s resolve in the next few years, using a cyberattack or a small-scale incursion against a member of the alliance. Such a gambit would be more likely to succeed in weakening NATO if Russia timed it to coincide with a Chinese attack on Taiwan, Admiral Rob Bauer, a former chair of the alliance’s Military Committee, told me. As of last January, when he retired from NATO leadership, Bauer was not aware of any concerted effort inside the alliance to prepare a strategy for this “worst-case scenario,” as he called it. “What are we going to do? Who’s getting which troops?” Bauer asked. “I think it would be wise to think that through.”
Many military threats have seemed far-fetched until they happened. Before the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, in 1941, Joseph Stalin received repeated warnings from his own generals and spies. But he refused to believe them until the bombing started, hindering the ability of his forces to prepare. The U.S. likewise failed to prepare for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In the lead-up to the First World War, Europe split into two rival alliances, and no one predicted the scale of the destruction that their conflict would unleash.
“The indications were clear that they would clash, and we just weren’t ready for it,” David Santoro, the president and CEO of the Pacific Forum, a research institute in Hawaii that focuses on Indo-Pacific security issues, told me. In 2023, Santoro and his team organized a round of theoretical war games, known as tabletop exercises, in which two American allies called for help at the same time: Taiwan came under attack from China while North Korea seized its chance to invade South Korea. “We were struggling to keep up and divide labor,” Santoro recalled. “And we weren’t even talking about Europe. I can only imagine what would happen if you threw Russia in there.”
A great variety of tabletop exercises happen all the time. Most involve two teams of military experts sitting around a conference table and responding to one another’s moves, like a multiplayer chess game. The organizers try to keep the rules simple and clearly defined. Such tight parameters do not reflect the chaos of warfare, but they prevent the games from getting too hectic when players from different fields of research talk past one another. This bias toward orderly games helps explain why so little research has been done on what experts call “multi-crisis environments.” Almost by definition, such scenarios would quickly get confusing.
“It’s complicated, to be sure, but I don’t think it is too complicated to study,” Eric Heginbotham, an authority on war-gaming at MIT’s Security Studies Program, told me. “I just don’t believe that anyone has done it.” He cautioned that some secretive department within the Pentagon or elsewhere may have quietly analyzed this grim contingency and drawn up response plans.
The general topic of a two-front war now gets discussed among military experts “more than it used to be,” he said. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., published a lengthy report in June on the best ways for the U.S. to “counter an axis led by China and Russia.” But Heginbotham, who has worked closely with CSIS, said that none of the most prominent research institutes in the U.S. and Europe has organized war games on the subject. “You’d need two relatively big and elaborate games running simultaneously, with some sort of command authority setting priorities in the middle,” he said in an email. “Sounds very interesting.”
In the public statements of senior NATO leaders, the risk of a multifront war has come up over the past year or so, though not very often. In December, a few months after Grynkewich issued his warning to U.S. allies, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte mentioned the threat at the end of an interview that he gave to a German newspaper. “China is looking at Taiwan,” Rutte said. “And I am convinced that if China takes military action there, it will pressure its junior partner, Russia, under Putin’s leadership, to keep us busy here in Europe.”
One of the most detailed analyses of this possibility, at least in the public domain, comes from an obscure research institute in Prague called the European Values Center for Security Policy. Its 35-year-old director, Jakub Janda, told me that he began studying the idea of a “dual-theater” war in Europe and Asia after the institute opened an outpost in Taipei, in January 2022. At the time, the risk of a coordinated attack from Russia and China seemed remote or, as Janda put it, “not a major consideration.”
That began to change the following month, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. Putin had visited Beijing less than three weeks before he ordered the invasion. He has since made at least four more visits to China, and another one is planned for November. Throughout this period, China has become the main supplier of technology to the Russian weapons industry while propping up the Russian economy through the purchase of oil and gas. Although they have no mutual-defense pact, Russia and China hold regular military drills to help keep their forces in sync.
The first war game to simulate a joint attack from both of them took place at Janda’s institute in the spring of 2024. Finding experts with enough background knowledge to participate proved difficult for him. Most research institutions and think tanks have separate teams that specialize in their own regions, he said. “They work in their silos, with different expertise.”
Over time, the participants grasped the way that wars in Asia and Europe could overlap and reinforce one another. The institute has already held roughly 20 rounds of war games on this topic, gathering experts in a variety of countries, including Japan and South Korea. The results have been particularly alarming, Janda said, for the Europeans. In almost every two-front scenario that he has studied, the U.S. prioritizes the Chinese threat and transfers military resources from Europe to Asia, leaving its NATO allies to defend themselves against Russia.
In one hypothetical case, China begins the war slowly by banning the export of raw materials to Europe’s defense sector. It maintains the embargo for five months, long enough for European factories to run out of supplies and stop producing weapons. Then Russia, with full access to Chinese resources, invades a NATO ally in Eastern Europe.
All of the scenarios in Janda’s series laid bare the need for Western unity. In the event of a Chinese attack on Taiwan, for example, the U.S. might demand that Europe impose severe sanctions on China’s economy, effectively cutting off trade. “But European governments don’t want to do that,” Janda said, describing how that premise played out among the experts. “The problem with European capitals is that Taiwan is far away. They want to focus on the threat from Russia, and that’s what scares me.”
If Russia and China act in unison while the U.S. bickers with its allies, the chances of a Western victory in a two-front war begin to look bleak. The side that comes out on top, in other words, tends to be the one that moves with common purpose and remains united over time.
These are the facts that no one disputes: On January 24, 2023, Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children to death, then she attempted suicide by cutting her wrists and neck and jumping out of a second-story window in her Massachusetts home, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. The point of contention, as her trial has progressed, is whether Clancy should be held criminally responsible for her actions.
Clancy has entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. A jury will soon decide whether she was sufficiently mentally ill at the time of the murders to spare her a mandatory sentence of life without parole in a state prison. The problem for Clancy and her defense team is that although she appears to have been extremely sick in the months leading up to the tragedy, the jury may still find her legally sane. This is because the legal standard for insanity diverges from the clinical understanding of mental illness.
Insanity defenses, which are premised on the idea that people are not fully blameworthy for criminal acts that could be seen as outside their control, have existed since ancient Greece and Rome and have been a feature of jurisprudence for hundreds of years. The legal definition of guilt typically requires both action and intention, which means committing a crime while in a reckless, negligent, purposeful, or knowing state of mind. An insanity plea is premised on the assumption that people who are insane at the time of their crimes do not have the capacity for criminal intent, so they cannot be considered entirely guilty.
Christopher Slobogin, a professor of law and psychiatry at Vanderbilt Law School, told me that courts have applied different tests for establishing insanity over time, though none has overlapped fully with clinical descriptions of mental illness. In the Victorian era, courts seeking to determine whether a defendant could be excused from criminal liability by reason of insanity began relying on something called the M’Naghten rule, named for Daniel M’Naghten, a Scottish artisan whose paranoid delusions about a grand conspiracy moved him to shoot and kill a senior British civil servant in 1843. M’Naghten’s case inspired a rule that designated defendants legally insane if they did not understand the nature of their criminal acts or that their actions were wrong. This rule remains in use in roughly half of the United States.
According to Michael Perlin, an attorney and a professor emeritus at New York Law School, the insanity defense became controversial in the United States after the acquittal of John Hinckley Jr., whose defense attorneys had argued that his attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan in 1981 was a consequence of his schizophrenia and delusional obsession with the actress Jodie Foster, whom he wanted to impress. Outrage swiftly followed the 1982 verdict, stoked by politicians who called trial-jury members before a Senate subcommittee to interrogate them about their decision. Idaho’s legislature promptly eliminated the insanity defense that year, followed by Utah in 1983 and Kansas in 1995. Congress passed the Insanity Defense Reform Act in 1984, which narrowed the application of insanity defenses in federal cases.
In states that kept the insanity defense, views on how to apply it have continued to evolve. The closures of mental-health institutions across the country in the 1960s and ’70s increased the number of mentally ill people in the criminal-justice system, which created some urgency for establishing an adequate standard for legal insanity.
By defining insanity in terms of what a defendant knew at the time of the crime, the M’Naghten rule excluded defendants who had understood their conduct was wrong but nonetheless had been unable to resist or control their impulses. Some states addressed that limitation by expanding insanity defenses to include defendants who had acted under an irresistible impulse caused by mental illness or who had been otherwise unable to abide by the law. In Massachusetts, defendants may be found not criminally responsible if a mental illness left them unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct or unable to conform their conduct to the requirements of law.
In the months prior to what Clancy’s defense team has described as a psychotic break, she had repeatedly sought psychiatric help. She was briefly hospitalized and had prescriptions for 13 medications to treat her intense anxiety, depression, racing thoughts, insomnia, and confusion. Her lawyers have argued that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis, a psychiatric condition that occurs after 0.1 to 0.2 percent of deliveries in women who don’t have a history of mental illness. At the time of their death, her children were eight months to 5 years old.
According to Veerle Bergink, the director of Mount Sinai’s Women’s Mental Health Center, postpartum psychosis is an acute episode of psychosis, mania, or psychotic depression in the months following childbirth. Symptoms include severe mood disturbances, delusions, hallucinations, confusion, and catatonia, and patients generally lose touch with reality. Bergink told me that a woman may come to believe that all the wars in the world are her fault, or that her child is possessed by an evil spirit. Because mothers diagnosed with postpartum psychosis are at heightened risk of suicide and infanticide, the condition is considered a psychiatric emergency.
Clancy’s desperate diary entries dated from the days and weeks before the murders recount such symptoms. She described feeling “incredibly sad and guilty” about not breastfeeding and suffering from “crazy brain fog.” She wrote that she was living “moment to moment waiting for the next nap time,” terrified that her infant son was becoming overtired, “because I feel I can’t help him.” She admitted to contemplating suicide. “I feel like I’m drowning every day,” she wrote. She told medical staffers that she was suffering from “intrusive thoughts,” and she checked herself into a psychiatric hospital on New Year’s Eve and spent several days there before being discharged.
Clancy, her ex-husband, and their attorneys have filed a medical-malpractice lawsuit against the psychiatrists who treated her during the months she spent spiraling. But regardless of whether a timely and accurate diagnosis could have saved Clancy and her children, she was plainly suffering from severe mental illness at the time of her crimes. Still, the jury may deny her insanity plea because the clinical understanding of postpartum psychosis—like those of a host of disorders—does not fit squarely within the legal definition of insanity.
Massachusetts prosecutors have argued that Clancy acted rationally and with clear intent, noting that she seemed organized, reasonable, and communicative in the days leading up to the murders, according to witnesses. Clancy’s diary entries and help-seeking indicate that she knew that her desire to harm herself and others was wrong, yet on the day that she apparently intended to kill her children, Clancy asked her then-husband to run an errand that would keep him out of the house. But the symptoms of postpartum psychosis, like those of bipolar disorder and schizoaffective disorder, are known to involve sudden and dramatic fluctuations, meaning that Clancy’s moods and cognition could have changed rapidly in the run-up to the murders—in defiance of most legal tests of insanity.
Regardless of the evidence, judges and juries regularly treat such defenses with skepticism. Although lawyers present this defense in only 1 percent of felony cases, Perlin told me that many people assume insanity defenses are overused—and suspect that defendants who plead insanity are faking their illnesses. Some are certainly trying to sell a story, but studies have found evidence that defendants falsified mental illness in fewer than 10 percent of cases.
For this reason and others, claims of mental illness at trial can be a “double-edged sword,” Slobogin, the professor at Vanderbilt, told me. He explained that juries regularly treat evidence of insanity as a sign that a defendant is inherently dangerous, best managed by being locked away—or put to death. In 1995, Scott Panetti was put on trial for the 1992 murders of his in-laws in Texas and was allowed to represent himself despite his history of schizophrenia. Panetti conducted his trial defense in a cowboy outfit and attempted to call more than 200 witnesses, including the pope, John F. Kennedy, and Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, Panetti’s jury found him guilty and sentenced him to death.
Panetti remained on death row until he died from natural causes in 2025, about two years after a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Panetti “lacks a rational understanding of the connection between his offense and his sentence of death and that his execution would therefore violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.” Yet his case and others have made defense attorneys wary of touting a client’s mental illness, even when it is overwhelmingly obvious and crucial to making sense of their crimes.
Another problem with an insanity plea is that many jurors are under the mistaken impression that the penalties for such verdicts are too soft. If Clancy is found guilty of murdering her children, she faces a mandatory sentence of life without parole. If she is found not criminally responsible, she will be admitted to a state psychiatric facility for observation, after which state officials can petition for her continued commitment, subject to periodic review. But this does not mean that Clancy will eventually be freed: Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her children while suffering from postpartum psychosis, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and remains in a state psychiatric facility to this day. (She received this verdict after a retrial was prompted by the discovery that the prosecution’s psychiatric expert had provided false testimony in her original trial.) Perlin told me that, in general, people who successfully plead insanity spend more time in state custody than if they had been found guilty.
Whether Clancy is committed to a psychiatric hospital or locked up in prison, her story is harrowing not only because of the abject horror of her actions, but also because of the eerie familiarity of her struggle with new motherhood. I can remember my earliest days with my second child—the restless hours, the boundless needs, the sudden doubling of diapers, the endless laundry rotation in our small apartment, the struggle to care for both a toddler and a newborn. But I also remember the sunshine, my daughter’s delight in her brand-new baby sister, the newborn’s tiny arms in a triumphant stretch fresh out of the swaddle, those first precious smiles.
Clancy’s illness caused her to drown in the overwhelming chaos of mothering, beyond the reach of such buoying joys. Although she survived her suicide attempt, her life was in many ways already over. Regardless of what the jury decides, she is already in hell, and has been for some time.
Editor’s Note: Watch the interview with Julia Curlee on Radio Atlantic.
At the CIA, they’d started an office pool on when I’d be fired.
President Trump would be sworn in for his second term at noon; the smart money had me gone by 12:15. But the smart money hadn’t counted on Trump’s first pick to run intelligence for the National Security Council being shredded by an online mob on suspicion of disloyalty. There wasn’t yet anyone in place to fire me.
After taking the oath, Trump spoke at the Capitol. “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”
“Did he … ?” an NSA colleague asked. She glanced at me and looked away.
“Yeah,” I muttered. The good news: I was one of those two genders. The bad news: The administration would have views as to which one.
I gripped my badge. I could take it off, leave the White House complex, walk out the north gate, and never look back. I imagined the story they would tell: See? Even she knew she didn’t belong.
I didn’t move. I’d wanted this badge since I was a kid. I’d chosen to be here.
“I know you all heard what the president said,” I told my team after Trump’s speech. “There’s a rumor of an executive order on bathrooms. If anyone asks, I’m using the coffee shops across the street.”
My whole team spoke up: Julia, we’ve got your back.
“Me being trans is not a secret,” I reminded them. “Promise me: Nobody covers for me.”
Back in my office, I closed the door. I cried quickly, efficiently, no sound—the way you do when the walls have ears, and everyone thinks you’re fearless.
Joe Biden’s political appointees had left the week before, and I was now the senior intelligence official in the White House. For the incoming Trump administration, the trans woman would man the gates.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve carried two dreams. The first came true in 2007, when I raised my hand, standing on the agency’s marble seal, and became a CIA officer. The second dream, I didn’t dare speak aloud; it came from an unexplainable conviction that I should have been born a woman. The longing, like homesickness, grew into an unbearable darkness.
On a sweltering June morning in 2013, I sat in the CIA parking lot, hands clamped on the wheel, preparing myself to live out my second dream. Terrified of my first day at work as Julia, I’d chosen a blue button-down and pants, hoping no one would notice I’d changed genders. At the turnstile, the guard smiled. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, and the badge reader flashed green. To use the lexicon of my trade, the after-action review would have read: “Nothing significant to report.”
In the years ahead—traveling to 35 countries, briefing former President George W. Bush, becoming a mom—being trans would sometimes seem like the most ordinary part of my life. But as much as I wanted to disappear into normal womanhood and the work, I knew there were others who needed to see that a life like mine was possible. So, in 2017, I wrote in these pages under the pseudonym Jenny Hall about how being openly trans at the CIA made me a better officer. CIA recruiters used the essay on college campuses, and new officers—not realizing they were talking with the author—told me that it had inspired them to apply.
Soon after the essay ran, a call went out for volunteers to join the President’s Daily Brief staff and serve the new Trump administration. Working the PDB meant staying up all night to distill the most sensitive intelligence we possessed into a book that the president and our senior leaders read at dawn. It was one of the CIA’s most coveted assignments—a proving ground for our best analysts.
Growing up in Hawaii, I dreamed of seeing the world. My grandfather gave me a simple promise: “Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you. We came to America for small things. No pogroms. No leaky roof. Paradise was a bonus.”
Service before politics. Country before self.
I clung to this promise as I became a man, a husband, a father, a CIA officer, a wife, a mother.
For two years I served the Trump White House, arriving at work around midnight, six days a week, roaming the West Wing before dawn. My wife learned to live with the silence at the dinner table.
Sometimes I filled in on the road—summers in Bedminster, winters in Palm Beach. On my first trip, I boarded at Joint Base Andrews and a card waited at my seat: Ms. Curlee, Welcome Aboard Air Force One.
Grateful for the welcome, I was less grateful to whoever had sat me in the middle of the White House press pool. So I stuffed my face with the best waffles of my life and kept small talk to a minimum. As we flew to Mar-a-Lago, the president’s aide beckoned me to the front of the plane. No one cared that a trans woman was briefing President Trump.
Then one morning, my boss walked in, a wide smile on her face. She had a new job for me.
“Julia, what would you think about briefing the vice president?”
“This vice president?”
Days later, I stood in his driveway at the Naval Observatory. I must be insane, I thought. Mike Pence had built his career on public opposition to marriages like mine—to people like me. But for all our differences, he was the vice president. He needed the best intel support possible, and this was my country too.
“Mr. Vice President,” I said, “it’s an honor to meet you. My name is Julia”—like I’d practiced a thousand times.
“You’re abandoning me with her?” Pence teased his outgoing briefer, with a line I’d heard he used with other people. He turned to me. “Okay, Julia, tell me something I don’t know.”
“Sir, did you know that a third of Purdue’s computer-science grad students are Chinese nationals?”
He nodded once. “Get in the car.”
I grabbed my case and climbed into the Beast, the nickname for the executive limo. I hunted in vain for a seat belt as Secret Service radios squawked, “On the move.” I dug in my heels as the floor pitched. Pennsylvania Avenue, the PDB, and me—alone with Mike Pence.
When I got home, my wife and I decided to keep my new boss’s identity a secret. In my community, his name was shorthand for everything we feared. I could imagine the optics, and God help us if someone called a reporter.
For the next year, I briefed him nearly every morning. As soon as the coffee was hot, Pence was ready to work. He ripped through the briefing book, firing questions at me, scribbling in the margins.
Down the hall, the president was using his phone to light up Twitter. The vice president preferred to use our multibillion-dollar intel apparatus to save lives. Some mornings he would push back on an assessment, but I would hold the line, explaining how the conclusions had been reached. That was the job. When my tour was almost up, he asked me to extend it.
One morning, as we approached the White House gates, the vice president turned to me. “Julia, do you know why they call it ‘the People’s House’?”
“No, sir.”
“Right up until the Civil War, anyone could come to the door and wait to see the president.”
As the steel gates opened, he leaned in. “You know, it’s a privilege to work here.”
“Yes, sir.” I held his gaze. “It is.”
When my tour finally ended, Pence invited my family to the White House. In his office, he took my mother’s hand and smiled: “You must be very proud of your daughter.”
Years before, my mother had told me that in her grief, she’d felt that—somehow—I’d killed her son. Now I’d done the impossible: lived both dreams, becoming an intelligence officer and a woman. Now the vice president was holding my mother’s hand.
No one has affirmed my gender identity quite like Mike Pence. On my last day, I gave him a letter. I wrote: “I’m a transgender CIA officer, a wife and mother—and I served the Vice President. Anything is possible in America.” I told him many people at the CIA hadn’t believed that a trans officer like me could serve someone like him.
“Well,” he said, “I’m glad I passed the test.”
In that moment, it felt like the battle had been won.
Courtesy of Julia Curlee
Vice President Pence with the author at the White House in 2019
For years, friends told me people need to know that a gay trans woman had worked for Mike Pence and that the world hadn’t exploded. No—I was adamant—we serve in silence. But I kept the photos of that time.
After January 6, 2021, the vice president invited his former PDB briefers for a farewell picture in the West Wing. The place was quieter than I’d ever heard it. As we said our goodbyes, my voice shook.
“Sir,” I said, “what you did last week—I’ve never been prouder to have worked for you.”
He nodded. “Thank you,” he said. “That means a lot to me.”
We shook hands. The mob at the Capitol had chanted for his hanging. He’d done his duty to the country, certifying the vote. I’d done mine to him. That was the bargain. Service before politics. Country before self.
Two and a half years later, after a stint back at the CIA, I returned to the White House as a director for intelligence programs on President Biden’s National Security Council.
Days after Trump’s 2024 election victory, the intelligence staff gathered in our boss’s office. He was not a man who frightened easily. But he knew what was coming. “I need to strongly advise you to leave before Inauguration Day,” he said. “There’s a world in which you’ll be targeted individually.” He didn’t say my name. He didn’t need to. “They know how to use the tools this time. Install loyalists at CIA, FBI, and Justice—turn clearances and investigations into weapons.”
I told him I wasn’t resigning. Then the CIA’s deputy director sat me down. “Julia, look at me. You don’t have to do this. You have a target on your back that others don’t.”
“With respect, sir—this is what we do.”
He searched my face, looking for a crack. When he didn’t find one, he nodded. “Good luck.”
Days before the inauguration, Biden gathered the staff in the East Wing. “Now, folks, here’s the deal. Trump doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you. It’s important for the country.”
Of all the senior government officials who spoke with us before the new administration took office, Biden was the only one who asked us to stay.
On Inauguration Day, I stood in the West Wing to brief the new national security adviser, minutes after he’d taken office. Down the hall, the president signed an executive order banning me from restrooms in all federal buildings. I would start to plan policy meetings around bathroom stops across Pennsylvania Avenue.
The next day, my team fanned out to brief the new leadership on our nation’s highest secrets. Then these leaders stripped my insurance coverage for the estrogen that keeps me healthy, voided my discrimination protections, and declared me “male” to foreign governments on my passport. I would keep briefing them anyway.
On the third day came the purge—160 career NSC staff members sent home. Then new White House officials asked me to read them into classified programs; they called me around the clock, desperate for access to intelligence. Programs crucial to U.S. interests sat unmanaged; the officers who had been in charge of them had been escorted out. When NSC leaders realized what they’d done, it fell to me to call the people they’d humiliated and beg them to come back. They did.
One week in, the administration I served reinstated its ban on trans people in the military. Decorated officers such as my friend Colonel Bree Fram were thrown out for the crime of being honest. In the White House, people called me “indispensable.” I still was not welcome in their bathrooms.
A month later, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard fired 100 intelligence officers, many of them trans, for taking part in an LGBTQ group chat that conservative media had cast as sexually explicit. The next day, I ran an intel briefing—for her—because that is what we do. The following week, the president stood before Congress and called trans children a lie.
Then, one Saturday, I was sitting in a rib joint in Roanoke, Virginia, when my phone buzzed. “Julia, sorry to bother,” my boss said. “I have bad news. Your White House tour’s over. Chief of staff called. I can’t give you a reason.”
I was elbows-deep in brisket, the sauce congealing. I’d beaten the “Fire Julia” office pool by about 68 days. I was being sent back to my home agency. My boss cleared his throat.
“Um, Julia—we still need you Monday. But please. Be discreet.”
Fired on Saturday. Needed on Monday. But stay invisible?
Then my phone exploded—a dozen friends forwarding the same tweet. “SCOOP: A transgender, Biden holdover who hates President Trump is still working in the NSC intel office,” the right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer had written. “If you are aware of this person and have their name, please send it to me and I will post their identity.”
Monday arrived, and cherry blossoms framed a perfect spring day in Washington. I reported to the White House. I had no badge, and my accounts had been revoked. I spent three marathon days helping the administration that had fired me finish the budget, and handing off the portfolio I’d overseen for two years. As I packed up, a string of senior Trump appointees stopped in to say goodbye. One took my hand. “Thank you for staying as long as you did,” he whispered. “Not many would have.”
That night, a list of hidden “enemies” in the administration provided by Loomer landed on the president’s desk. But an internet activist like Loomer doesn’t come up with names on her own, or just walk into the Oval to give them to the president. Someone in the building had helped her. Most of those fired, including my boss, were rock-ribbed Republicans, experts in their fields, who had been courteous and professional.
As I walked out the north gate with my small box of belongings, I finally understood the warning: “Be discreet.” The White House had needed me. Trump officials had known I was trans from day one. This hadn’t been an issue until it was public—and then nothing else I’d done mattered. Not my service, not my war-zone tours, not even which restroom I used.
I was the wrong kind of American.
One morning after returning to the CIA, I passed a tour group in our museum, clustered below a photo of me high on the wall, near one of the 33rd president. “Here next to President Truman,” the guide said, “is a PDB briefer on Air Force One. Our highest secrets, collected at vast expense and great risk.”
“How do you become a briefer?” someone asked.
The guide smiled. “Very competitive. Years of experience. Our best.”
The tour moved on to the Osama bin Laden raid. I stayed. My eyes drifted over the photo, from my face in black and white to the vice president’s PDB in my lap. I’d spent decades fighting for my place—from a beach boy who dreamed of seeing the world to an officer who served her country. Now my photo hung as an artifact of a time when the CIA proudly said the quality of the work was more important than the gender of the person doing it.
My eyes fell to the door below—the door to the restroom I was barred from entering.
Courtesy of Julia Curlee
The author in Baghdad in April 2005
Every year since my first day as Julia, I’d sent a Pride Month email to my colleagues. But by June 2025, they’d banned the CIA’s LGBTQ group. Pride flags that had flown for decades were suddenly gone. My finger hovered over the “Send” button. Two sentences:
“Happy Pride. You are not alone.”
I froze. Someone would report this email to drive me out of the agency, just like at the White House. Don’t end up the last openly trans CIA officer, I told myself. I deleted the email, breathing through the urge to do something heroic and stupid. In the screen’s dark reflection, I saw my face—exhausted, angry.
That was the moment I knew I had to resign. I’d weighed my family’s health insurance against two sentences of solidarity and chosen to surrender my integrity. The agency that had taught me to tell hard truths was now teaching me to be invisible. It was time to go.
I loved the agency. I loved its mission. I love it still. I served under four presidents and through three wars. I lived by my grandfather’s words: Work hard, don’t complain; the country will take care of you.
I kept my end.
In 2017, I closedmy Atlantic essay with the words “And trans kids should know, CIA is always recruiting.” That promise has been broken. I cannot in good conscience advise LGBTQ Americans to join the CIA—and that sentence is the hardest thing I have ever written.
The agency has been gutted as part of a deliberate plan, the director of the Office of Management and Budget once boasted, to put the people who defend our country “in trauma.” Analysts have been fired in public or questioned by the FBI; decade-old assessments have been denounced by the CIA director in the press. The president calls analysis “virtual treason” when it contradicts his preferred reality, and uses the CIA to undermine public confidence in American elections.
Fear has done its work. Irreplaceable officers with crucial language and technical skills, and decades of experience, have walked out the door. Those who remain within an agency built to deliver hard truths are being muzzled.
Twenty years ago, I sat in a bunker in Iraq, praying I would survive the night, in a war begun after our intelligence community had failed to do enough to challenge what the White House wanted to hear. Our agency spent the next two decades repairing the trust that failure broke. I know institutions can be rebuilt. Officers can come back, but only if someone is willing to tell the truth. In the entrance of our Original Headquarters Building, across from the stars for every officer slain in the line of duty, you can still read the words carved in marble:
And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.
I know that the CIA friends I left behind are holding the line under impossible circumstances. The country needs them more than ever. And I understand my colleagues who left but can’t speak up. Their livelihoods depend on clearances and contracts that can be revoked with a phone call. But we all swore an oath to the Constitution.
Naima Green for The Atlantic
The author in Washington, D.C., in August
I’m afraid too. This administration has already taken most of what I had to lose. I know that the White House and its online mob will come for me. My ancestors fled pogroms; they knew a fear I never expected to feel in the United States. I was offered an untenable bargain: Don’t make trouble. Take the insults—deviant, diversity hire, man in a dress—from those who have never faced enemy fire, who asked for my assistance in private and then signed the orders to erase people like me because “transgender ideology” was a threat to Western civilization.
Flailing regimes dehumanize minorities to distract from their failures. When the economy collapses or a war goes badly, they find a tiny group of people, make them the enemy within, and rally the country against them. This is how it’s gone in Iran. Hungary. Russia. I wrote PDBs about it. This will not stop with trans people. It never has.
But that caricature works only if people like me don’t exist—and I exist. I speak now because somewhere, a trans kid is watching. I want that kid to know that they are not alone. I was a trans kid too, and I’ll be damned if I let another generation grow up the way I did—told that they don’t belong, that they don’t deserve a job, a bathroom, a future. If I could brief presidents and serve in the White House—twice—so can they.
I had planned to spend the rest of my career serving my country at the CIA. This White House took my calling, but it will not take my pride, or tell me that I don’t belong, or that I must disappear. I once wrote under a pseudonym so I could keep serving. I write now in my own name for the same reason.
Julia.
This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Wrong Kind of American.”
Children still learn long division even though calculators exist, and many people continue to study languages even as AI translation becomes faster and more accurate. Is there a deeper purpose for learning that technology will never touch?
In this episode of How to Touch Grass, the co-hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck hear from Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University who studies technology and learning. She explains that although the changing tides of tech may shape what and how we learn, as humans we still have the autonomy to build the minds we want.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
Michelle Miller: Learning is how we build ourselves as individuals, and it’s how humanity shapes its course.
Julie Beck: Michelle Miller has thought a lot about the purpose of learning. She’s a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University focused on attention and memory and how technology shapes education. As she said, learning is a very human endeavor. But what we learn and the kindsof learning we value are shaped by the changing tides of technology.
Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic.
Beck: This is How to Touch Grass.
Brennan: Julie, that sentiment—that what we learn changes with the tides of technology—feels really relevant to a change I’ve noticed in the last decade. I think of coding and how big of a push that was when I was in college to Learn to code or you’ll be left behind. But just a few years later, now my coder friends are really worried about job security, and the thing we’re being pressed to learn is learning how to correctly prompt AI so that it can code.
Beck: Mmm. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. And the thing that I keep thinking about now that so many people are starting to outsource so many things to AI—coding and other things—one of the biggest questions I keep coming back to is: What is the point of learning something when you no longer have to? When a machine could just do it for you?
Brennan: Well, this is one of those questions that keeps coming back around, right? Why do I need to learn math if a calculator can do it?
Beck: And yet, generations of children still continue to learn math!
Brennan: True.
Beck: So we’ve come to some consensus that there is value to learning long division even if you don’t end up using it much as an adult. But the question feels especially relevant rightnow, because the kind of things that technology is currently threatening to replace are more wide-ranging and complex than just arithmetic.
[Music]
Miller: I look back and I say, At every big turning point in history, how many times was it: and then we learned how to? This is what forward motion really is.
Beck: We really wanted to talk to Michelle about this because she has a really expansive view of what technology is and how it shapes us. Not just whether tech is good or bad for learning, but what kinds of tech help or hurt, under what circumstances.
Brennan: And it all depends on how we use that technology.
Beck: Exactly.
Michelle, I’m curious: Have you learned anything new recently?
Miller: Oh my gosh. Well, one of the things that I’m working on right now is barebow archery.
Beck: Oh, okay!
Miller: So really low-tech, you know, think really traditional wooden bow and so on. And I have a coach, and I share my archery range with a lot of individuals who are doing more of the actual hunting type of archery with the big compound bows. So that’s not me. I’m the lady who’s over shooting at 15 yards just with my little quiver of arrows trying to just get a little bit better every single time.
Beck: I love it. You’re like Legolas.
Miller: (Laughs.)
Beck: I was gonna ask if, you know, technology was involved in anything that you had learned recently, but I mean, I guess a bow is technology of a very ancient sort.
Miller: It absolutely is. And it is funny, though, that even something that is so almost primal in that very physical, what we think of as low-tech, although it would’ve been high-tech at some point in human history—
Beck: In the Bronze Age or whenever that was, yeah.
Miller: —it’s still complemented these days by technology. And I think of something else that—I went through a relearning journey about starting 20 years ago, which is knitting.
Beck: Mmm.
Miller: But it is fascinating that there, too, you think of something that’s so tactile, so physical, and it’s really enjoyed a resurgence in the modern age because of technology. Because we have the ability to, you know, I no longer have to depend on maybe my great aunt or the lady down the street to show me, Oh my gosh, how to get out of this problem? I have my choice of instructional videos. There’s communities. There’s whole sites that are just devoted to this. So—
Beck: That’s definitely true when it comes to my hobbies. But I want to step way back for a sec, for the big philosophical view. Are you ready?
Miller: Okay.
Beck: What, to you, is the ultimate purpose of learning?
Miller: Ah, the ultimate purpose of learning. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we as people and our minds and our brains evolve and change over the course of our lifetimes, and some of those are kind of out of our control. They’re sort of “nature takes its course.” But the changes that are wrought through learning are the ones that, in a sense, we have the most agency and control over, that we can self-direct. Whether it’s saying, I wanna learn a new crochet stitch, and this would be a way to make something that’s unique or to spend time with people I care about, or to test myself and my own creativity and limits. The way that we can do that is learning. And we’ve talked about the technology angle of it, but it’s still also something really social. I think that teaching another human being how to do something—that is one of the highest and best expressions of humanity that there is. It’s one of the best and most positive ways that we interact with and contribute to one another. So I do think it comes back to that core, our self-agency and our connection to this great web of humanity. I mean, it comes about through learning.
Beck: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, it seems like we’re kind of coming away with: The point of learning is that you are able to kind of direct your own experience in this life in a way that you might otherwise, in a lot of ways, just be kinda tossed about on the tides of, like, history and aging. Is that fair to say?
Miller: I think that’s fair to say. And, I mean, to maybe even elevate it a little bit more, especially as a kind of an introverted person myself, I think of my own mind is that’s where I live. That’s ultimately, well, literally at the end of the day, that’s where we’re at. And our mind is our experience, and learning builds the mind that we live in.
Beck: Yes. I mean, ultimately, we are all just, like, in the black box of our own skulls, unfortunately, when it comes to how we engage with the world. We can’t really get out of there. When do you think technology helps with that purpose, and when does it get in the way?
Miller: So I like how you put that question of not good or bad, but more when. And I would add to that how. So instructional designers will always say, You have to start with the end in mind. So, you know, a professor will walk in and say, Well, I heard about this technology or this application, this quiz game or whatever at a conference. Should I do it? And they will always take a breath and say, What are you trying to accomplish? Or sometimes, What problem are you trying to solve? Where do you know that students are going to struggle? That’s where, sometimes, the boost of a technology tool can be helpful. And one case in point that really illustrates this, I think pretty clearly, is this: So there’s this principle or phenomenon called “retrieval practice.” We often contrast it with, for many students, good-faith effort. They think the way to study, say, a list of vocabulary terms, they think, Okay, I’m gonna reread that part of my textbook over and over. I’m gonna highlight, and I’m gonna read it again, and I’m gonna read it again. I’m gonna kind of have a general little gut check and say, ‘Uh, did that feel familiar? Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.’ But what will deliver the ability to retain that stuff you’re reviewing is to close the book and answer questions, even if you don’t know the material very well. It just produces these huge, long-lasting effects that are very, very versatile.
Beck: Socrates was right. (Laughs.)
Miller: Yeah. So how does that figure in with technology? Well, first it was CD-ROM databases that had lots of quiz questions that students could answer, and you could track how the whole class was doing, and students could get immediate feedback. They didn’t have to wait for me to grade. It was great. And then we moved on to things like these little in-class clickers, where the whole class could do retrieval practice and answer a question. And now with AI, AI can generate lots of really high-quality questions, even open-ended questions. We’re no longer locked into multiple choice. So that’s a great example of how—it’s not just like, well, grab a phone, open an app, learning happens. But here’s a principle that helps accelerate this one particular aspect of learning. An expert has gone through and selected and said, Well, here’s what you need to know. And so we marry those two together, and then we get something that actually does deliver something that’s positive for students.
Beck: And when is it not helpful?
Miller: Where it detracts. If there’s something that you want to experience and remember in the moment, that's a different form of memory. That’s what we call episodic memory. So if I’m finally visiting, say, in my area, the Grand Canyon, and I want to see this and remember this moment, that’s where technology is not necessarily going to help. Even things like—it’s very ironic: We take pictures to remember an experience, but there’s research showing that we remember less from an experience when we’re walking around taking pictures of it. And it’s really just an attention effect. Just these little phones—even if you have it on “Do not disturb,” setting up the shot takes away, takes you out of that moment.
Beck: Right.
Miller: So when that is the concern, technology is not your friend.
Beck: Hmm. That’s so interesting. As you were saying that, I was thinking about, you know, people— whenever you go to a concert these days, right, everybody just has their phone up and they’re recording the video of their favorite song or they’re taking a picture. And I hadn’t thought about it as learning, but I guess in a way it’s sort of like, your memory of your life is like learning the story of your life. So maybe you are not retaining that concert so much.
Miller: Perfect example. Yeah, we don’t have different, you know, pieces of the brain or parts of the memory that are like, Okay, here’s learning;here’s serious learning, and here’s all the other stuff.
Beck: Learning is just everything.
Miller: Learning is an experience.
[Music]
Beck: I guess to drill into it a little more, what is specifically the value of learning a thing that you can just easily outsource to technology and you don’t ever need to do it? Like, I would like to remember my trip to the Grand Canyon, like sure, but I don’t ever need to calculate a tip ever again in my whole life. I’ll just do it on my phone.
Miller: Yeah. And I mean, if that’s really the case, then I say: Have at it; pull out the phone.
Beck: Mm. But is there still, I don’t know, whether it’s philosophical, spiritual, cognitive value of learning a thing that you don’t have to learn? For instance, learning a foreign language when you can just translate it with AI, or learning how to code when, from all reports, it seems like AI is kinda taking over that industry. Is there still value to learning those things regardless of that progress?
Miller: Yeah, and as I’m kinda standing—I think of myself kind of standing at the bottom of a mountain of: I wanna become expert in. And let’s take, for example, I wanna be an expert in fashion design. You know, where does that step start? It starts with really getting into the nuts and the bolts of the construction of what you’re doing. So maybe, if that’s my goal, I wanna learn how to knit a sweater from hand or sew a pair of pants. And even as an expert fashion designer, how many times am I gonna just sit down and sew a garment for a client or just knit something by hand?
Beck: Probably send it to the factory, right?
Miller: Yeah, you send it to the factory! But to really understand How does fabric behave?Why do I wanna make cable stitches in a particular way?And how is cashmere different than cotton when I work with it? I wonder if there really is no substitute for sitting with it. So it’s not—I don’t wanna make it sound like, Oh, you gotta take your medicine and pay your dues. I don’t think it has to be like that. I think it’s more in the spirit of exploration and the spirit of actually physically seeing: How do the building blocks that I’m gonna work with from here on out, how do those behave? So that’s an argument for learning from the ground up, even when we can look it up.
[Music]
Beck: Okay, this is gonna sound very stupid, but why is or how is AI different than a calculator?
Miller: Okay. AI and calculator. Oh my gosh, talk about a conversational football that we’ve been throwing back and forth in my field right now. I mean, at its core, it does offer a few ways to do things that were time-consuming and maybe even sometimes do them more accurately. Well, that’s where a calculator perhaps is even better than AI in that way. Calculators don’t hallucinate. They are one-trick ponies, but boy, they do that trick really, really well. So that’s one perhaps smaller difference. But AI is not like a calculator in that it can mimic authentic human communication. In, say, contemporary higher education, you hear horror stories of students who are like—you ask them an icebreaker question like “What’s your favorite movie?” and they have AI pick a favorite movie and fill that out. And you’re just going, Oh, why? And here I am on the other end, pouring my heart and soul, and not AI, into this course. And who’s even on the other end? So I think it raises more questions about what’s kind of the contract between professor and teacher and student?
Beck: Yeah. Well, thinking about the calculator comparison, I mean, that’s something that I just hear a lot from people who are, you know, very excited about AI or not too concerned. Just sort of saying, Calculators made us more efficient. They let us just do things better. And we don’t generally consider using a calculator to be morally bad or a sign that we are degrading our ability to think because we did our tip calculation on a calculator. But does AI fall into that similar category to you, where it’s like, Ah, this is just progress. We can outsource stuff we don’t need to do, or is something about it inherently different?
Miller: Well, I do think that it challenges in a new way, in a perhaps a more painful way, our ego, frankly, and our value as educators, and that’s something that I also encourage people to think about. How much of this resistance, if you have it, is because you’re saying, Well the knowledge that I have for you, what I had prepared, what I want to profess, has a different value now than it once did. And I don’t know, but I would wager that there were people back in the day, individuals, who could add, subtract, and divide. That was a high-end skill. And somebody came along with an abacus, and now any old person can do it. Or being able to use a slide rule like my grandfather could do as an engineer. So I kinda keep falling back on those as well. But I think the upside is also potentially so much more vast than a simpler, more targeted one-trick pony like a calculator.
Beck: Hmm. The way that I’ve been thinking about it is like, are you outsourcing a task? Which could be good or bad or neutral, depending on the situation. Or are you outsourcing your own thought process? Which to me is like a betrayal of your own humanity. Is that a reasonable way to think about it or would you frame it differently?
Miller: Mm-hmm. I mean, if I would reframe it at all, kind of the way you’re coming at this, it’s also to me a matter of who’s in control of it? I think that we’re starting to, those of us who’ve tried AI, we’ve started to have that feeling of like: When is it driving the conversation and just doing the thing? And when am I giving instructions? I’ve even played around with— I wish that we could say, instead of, “Oh, ask AI,” “Tell AI.” Wouldn’t that be a different world? Because that’s where AI shines, is when it does exactly what you, the human user, tells it to do. So I would love for us to kind of charge into this, um, with that sense of, I am the boss of you. I am giving instructions. I am telling you. Don’t do—I mean, we learn pretty quickly. That’s one of the most useful phrases that you can share in something like a ChatGPT is, “Do not write or draft or change until I tell you to.” So perhaps we can start to approach that and share with our students more planful and intentional ways of getting to that point, where there’s a boundary, and the human is putting in the creativity, and the human makes the final call.
[Music]
Beck: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: Does outsourcing our learning pose a threat to democracy?
[Break]
Beck: I’m really curious how you think about all this when it comes to civics and, not to put too fine a point on it, the continued existence of democracy. (Uneasy laughter.) Just because, you know, if people start to abandon learning or, maybe less extreme, abandon control over their own learning like you were saying, what might we lose or what might happen on the level of society and democracy?
Miller: Oh my gosh. That is a really big challenge, and it means that when we go around and say, Well, our fellow citizens should just, you know, develop critical thinking, I, as an educator, go, “Okay, yes, they should, and oh my gosh, that’s hard.”
Beck: And like critical thinking for what?
Miller: Yes, critical thinking for what? And it’s simply hard. I sometimes say that critical thinking is like learning to walk on your hands, you know, or any kind of formal reasoning. We can do it if we’re motivated to do it. Nobody does it as a default. Nobody comes in and says, Oh, here’s something in my feed that says, you know, lemon juice will cure every disease I know, and I should just drink lemon juice. I think we’ve all seen those blog posts that go by.
Beck: Yeah, the terrible ads at the bottom of articles. “One mom discovered the secret to anti-aging.”
Miller: Yeah, discovered the secret to anti-aging. You need to think critically about that. But you need something on the order of six weeks, a whole semester, or more to really produce measurable gains. So we do not need to fear that the presence of AI is gonna wipe out critical thinking. In fact, though, we do need new critical-thinking skills. There’s even research on visual critical thinking, which all of a sudden we need to know, like, how do you look at a photograph and get some immediate red flags of: Is this AI-generated or not?
Beck: Oh yeah, that stresses me out.
Miller: It stresses us all out. So we need it, and this is the time for us to speak up and say, What are the ways that we can use our technology to develop critical-thinking skills, and how can we challenge ourselves to resist those biases that are at the center of a lot of critical thinking? So things like: Don’t just cherry-pick what you agree with or feels good on a gut level. Don’t just go with anecdotes. Be sure you understand correlation versus causation. All of those things are incredibly important, and technology can be a positive here, but only if we’re very, very deliberate about it.
Beck: Mmm. Often when we talk about technology, right, we mean a pretty small slice of technology, like modern digital computing-based technologies. And as we were saying, like, knitting is technology; archery is technology. Many things are technology. They’re just not new. So I wonder, would expanding our minds about what technology actually is make a difference in how we think about using technology to learn, how we learn alongside technology? Do you think that would change anything?
Miller: Well, I think yes, in the sense—especially in the sense if we talk about our relationship to it. And we sometimes do speak about it like something that came from outer space and was just sort of imposed on us. And we have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. And so it is part of us. And sometimes I, you know, instead of thinking of it as this external thing that showed up, think of it as a mirror. And I would also steer us away from, if I could, thinking of it as this environmental pollutant. And that’s hard because that is a very sort of clickbaity—we wanna see, like, Oh my gosh, exposure to technology does X, Y, and Z to kids, or is affecting my brain in some way.
Beck: Like it’s a carcinogen.
Miller: Yes, it’s almost like it’s like smoke or, you know, electrical waves from some place. But it’s not a pollutant. It’s not a carcinogen. I don’t think that that’s an appropriate metaphor. And when we talk about it that way, it does steer us into that binary, right? Like, should children be around cigarette smoke? No, they should not. Probably nobody should be around secondhand smoke. But with technology, it’s like, well, all right, but what was the type of use? What was the level of use? We see this all the time in research on technology. It’s not the hours on a smartphone, for example, that makes the big difference in cognitive or even mental-health factors. It’s: What were you doing when you were on it? So getting back to: What are you doing with it? Why are we doing it that way? Why did we even build a technology that could do this at such a high level, and why did people want it so badly? In my ideal world, that’s how we would talk about technology.
Beck: I wanna go back to something you said about standing at the base of the mountain. You wanna become an expert in something. Even if you’re standing at just a little hill, right? And you don’t even wanna be an expert in something, but maybe you just wanna be okay at it. For instance, I’m trying to learn Korean right now. My in-laws are Korean. It’s hard. My brain is aging. I don’t retain vocabulary as well as I used to. I could just hold the phone up and have it translate for me, but I feel like that wouldn’t be the same. So I guess I’m curious, not just when you’re on a journey to becoming an expert in something, but when you’re just trying to learn anything to be a little bit better at it, or to be pretty good, is there still value in learning that thing that you could outsource or that you don’t have to learn?
Miller: Languages, as always, they’re kind of their own special category, right? And the thing with spoken language: They’re real time. The substantial amount of time and energy. I mean, there’s always opportunity cost, especially in learning a language. I can think of nothing else where it’s like, if you’re gonna—it’s not gonna be a hill. It’s going to be a mountain, and you’re going to need to climb and climb and climb, and there’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to let go that you can’t learn and you can’t do if you choose that one. But that’s up to you, and you’ve got this clear picture of: Here’s where I’m gonna be on the other side.I am going to be able to speak in my own voice with no delay, with no weird barrier in between us, to these people who I love and care about. And that feeling too, you’re probably experiencing that, and I think this is common to lots of things that are difficult to learn. Barebow archery, I mean, when you hit that bullseye, wow, you feel it. And when you have the words coming out of your own mouth and your own brain? That feels really, really good. I mean, that’s your brain’s reward systems kicking in. Our reward systems don’t just kick in over, you know, sugar and doom scrolling. They kick in when we get it right, and that’s your opportunity to get it right.
Beck: Yeah. That’s so true. And going back to the, like, building the brain you wanna live in, like you said, I mean, people will always say, and I find this to be true, that if you think in a different language, like you do think differently. You are almost a slightly different person in a different language, when you embody a different language, than in your native language. And so if you outsource that, then you maybe lose that opportunity to find out who you are in Korean, to find out who you are in French, or whatever it may be.
Miller: Yes, and a plug for language learning as well. I mean, we haven’t quite gotten into this other highly practical aspect of learning, but time and again, we’ve seen that really substantial learning projects, like learning a language in particular, may offer a buffer against, you know, some of the typical changes that come with age and possibly against some age-related diseases and disorders. Now, that said, I always caution people: Don’t think of the brain as a muscle and you’re just gonna build it up. But when it comes to something like actually jumping in and learning Korean. I mean, you’re physically building whole new structures in your brain, and that can actually help. So we could see some real improvements if we did make even greater—if we did invest even more as a society in serious lifelong learning.
[Music]
Brennan: Julie, from what I am hearing from your decision to learn Korean is that a core part of the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this episode—why we learn things we don’t have to—is that to you, that intention matters right? It’s a way of showing your devotion.
Beck: Yeah, I mean, a machine might be able to say what I want to say in grammatically perfect Korean. Or maybe not; I do think machines sometimes miss out on cultural nuances. But regardless, I have to imagine it means more to people hearing me try and make mistakes and make that effort to connect.
Brennan: Right, like trying is the meaningful part.
Beck: Yeah.You know, there’s this quote from the writer Oliver Burkeman that I really like. And he wrote, “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
Brennan: Yeah, likethat feels like the point of learning to me. Learning is a way to engage more deeply, whether that’s engaging with a relationship, engaging with the world around you, or engaging with your own mind. Like Miller said, building the brain you want to live in. Whatever you’re learning, learning is a way to invest care.
Beck: Yes, totally. And that really brings me back to the question of: What is the connection between learning and democracy? Or between learning and being a good citizen? And I think it’s that. Like, do you care enough to engage, or don’t you?
[Music]
Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.
Beck: Next week:
Jenny Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like think about it, like when do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? The person picks up their phone, what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit lives between people.
Beck: I talk with author Jenny Odell for advice about how to break some of those habits and maybe heal your attention span in the process. That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.
Last winter, Donald Trump plunged recklessly into war with Iran. The United States is now losing that conflict. Iran remains defiant, much of the world economy is more threatened now than it was six months ago, U.S. military resources are overextended, and munition stores are dangerously depleted. Trump and the United States have suffered one embarrassment after another; last month, he had to sneak away from the region on a backup plane because of a possible assassination threat from Tehran.
And so the president of the United States has taken the logical next step: He is punishing South Korea, a loyal American friend, and tempting U.S. enemies to doubt America’s will to defend its allies.
Early Sunday evening, Trump instructed the Defense Department to “substantially reduce” its participation in an annual joint military exercise with the South Koreans. He did this, he said in a post on Truth Social, in part because such activities are expensive, but worse, they are insulting to his friends in North Korea, a country that has been “unthreatening and respectful” while he’s been in office. (Trump seems unconcerned about the dozens of nuclear weapons Pyongyang is pointing at U.S. and South Korean forces—many of them developed on his watch. Just a reminder: There are roughly 28,500 American troops currently stationed in South Korea, some just a few miles from the DMZ.)
More to the point, he complained that the South Koreans have not helped him defeat Iran:
While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, “No thanks!”
When Trump makes the effort to say something is “unrelated” to his actions (and then adds a coy question mark) it usually means it is completely related—and probably his central motivation.
Scaling back the exercise is, of course, an insane decision, which does nothing but hurt an ally, and tempt an adversary to think—correctly—that American leadership is feckless. You could be forgiven for wondering why South Korea and the rest of the free world must pay for Donald Trump’s failures. Such confusion is understandable, except that in Trump’s world, every loss, every defeat, is a personal insult. When things go wrong, someone must be held responsible—and that someone is never Donald Trump.
America and the rest of the world are now witnessing a public exhibition of narcissistic rage. Trump embarked on a war for personal glory, and what he got instead was ongoing humiliation. He clearly finds it all unbearable.
Trump both fears and respects the autocrats who rule Russia, China, and North Korea, and so he dares not cross them. Instead, he is seeking to assuage the psychic injury of his loss in Iran—including the American public learning of the shameful conditions to which he has subjected U.S. forces—by kicking America’s allies, the nations he can punish without fear that they will kick him back.
The Iran war was not the president’s failure, you see. Others failed the president. Those disloyal South Koreans, who every few years drag him into a needless confrontation with that respectful and peace-loving young man in Pyongyang, refused to help him topple the Iranian regime. And because Trump is unable to subdue Iran, unable to replenish stocks of U.S. weapons he should never have expended in this war, unable to take care of the service personnel he has put in harm’s way, someone is going to pay. The most convenient target he could find, at least for the moment, was South Korea.
At a better moment in American history, an enraged Congress would step in and demand answers about such dangerous idiocy. They would rush to the White House, talk to the press, hold hearings, and in general act like responsible stewards of American power. Those days, at least among legislators of the president’s party, are long past. They will take whatever Trump dishes out. Our allies might for the time being similarly ignore Trump’s tantrums, but they have power and agency of their own, and even now are likely planning for a world in which the Americans are no longer men and women of principle who stand by their word and by their friends.
The Chinese and the Russians and the North Koreans are certain to draw the appropriate lessons from this deranged policy. They have been shown, yet again, that when Trump fails, he hurts those he feels safe hurting. Already, North Korea is dispatching missiles and thousands of soldiers to aid Russia in its war on Ukraine. If a conflict should break out in the Pacific or on the Korean peninsula, or if the war in Europe spreads farther west, the world’s dictators might well count on Trump to focus American wrath not on the enemies of the free world, but on the nations that have always pledged to stand side by side with the United States in a mutual defense of freedom.
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