Saturday Night Live kicked off Season 52 last night with its version of a big interview: Partway through “Weekend Update,” the co-anchor Michael Che brought on the Anthropic CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei (played by the cast member Jane Wickline) to address the crowd. Amodei would presumably use the moment to put viewers at ease about AI, after multiple high-profile incidents raised fears about the technology escaping human control. Earlier this month, the real Amodei had published a nearly 4,000-word paper arguing that the industry needed to pace itself; here, SNL imagined, was another big opportunity to appeal to an audience, assuaging their fears of AI’s growth while standing up for his company’s product, Claude.
“Weekend Update” hardly quelled any lingering concerns. Wickline, as Amodei, was bedecked in the co-founder’s signature round spectacles and white V-neck tee tucked under a cardigan—the same outfit that he wore during a sit-down interview with CBS Sunday Morning after the paper’s release. Amodei offered a weak attempt at reassurance: “I may have been alarming in my recent interviews, but I want to assure you that if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me.” When Che followed up with a question that Amodei should have been prepared for—“Can you just explain how your company isn’t going to kill us?”—the tech entrepreneur rocked back and forth for a few moments. Finally, after haltingly repeating the word so to buy time, he offered a nonresponse: “That’s a really hard question.”
Amodei may not be an obvious impression for Wickline, now in her third year on the show. During her previous two seasons, Saturday Night Live seemed unsure of how to best make use of her comedic gifts. A former TikToker known for monotone musical comedy and awkwardly staged micro-sketches, Wickline was hired in 2024. The decision was divisive among fans; some chafed at her dry line readings and deadpan expressions, while others adored the flecks of zany unpredictability. But Wickline’s take on Amodei deftly showcased her talents, as she nailed little details that have come to distinguish Amodei: his small smile that gives way to a smirk; nervy mannerisms, such as visibly tensed shoulders.
In a touch especially keyed to her wackier sensibilities, Wickline played Amodei as someone torn between two selves—akin to the Lord of the Rings character Sméagol,whose obsession with the titular ring causes him to lose himself in the process and leads to the emergence of an id-driven personality known as Gollum. “Come on, Dario,” Wickline’s Amodei said to himself at one point, his voice lilting with doubt. “Just reassure them.” His Gollum-esque other-self then responded with a growl, “I will.”
Wickline’s Amodei continued to flail throughout the interview, even as Che began to ask seemingly simple questions about AI’s benefits. The Anthropic co-founder failed to name a single one—a telling portrait of industry giants’ struggle to excite the progressively more worried public about AI’s potential as experts continue to caution users of the possible damage these products could inflict upon society. Those experts include AI companies’ own employees, past and present: One former Anthropic researcher warned grimly that the technology might “kill us all by the end of the decade,” adding that AI founders were apparently well acquainted with these risks; a current Anthropic safety researcher chimed in to claim that there was a more than 10 percent chance that AI could “kill all humans.”
Wickline’s Amodei, asked to explain how AI is supposed to make life better, offered Che a metaphor. “It’s simple,” he said. “If you could drink a milk that made your life easier, but there was a 10 percent chance it killed you, would you drink the milk?” He seemed shocked when Che immediately said no.
What would it be like to wake up one day with the ability to greet the world with warmth, patience, grace, and affection? This is what happens to the main character in the Pulitzer Prize winner Ayad Akhtar’s magnificent new novel, The Radiance. It is a tale of spiritual transformation in which Akhtar gives a detailed description of our inner landscapes. David and Akhtar talk about what it’s like to see the world with new eyes, and how difficult it is to move from the head to the heart.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: Ayad Akhtar is one of America’s leading playwrights and writers. His plays, like The Disgraced, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and his earlier novels, including Homeland Elegies, often describe what it’s like to be a Muslim American in the post-9/11 era. His characters, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, are often coping with rage, pressure, resentments, hostility, a feeling of being judged.
His new novel, The Radiance, is about a man whose spiritual state is transformed, who begins to radiate a glow which emerges from a kind of inner illumination. You could say he becomes one of those incandescent people you meet from time to time. I’m not exaggerating when I say it’s something of a masterpiece.
The book brilliantly puts into words that most ineffable thing—spiritual sensations and experience. If you read it, which of course I recommend, you’ll be led on a tour through those deep inner places that most of us struggle to see and understand.
When I started doing this podcast, I thought I’d have great conversations at an intellectual and emotional level that I feel comfortable with. But now, as I prepare to talk with Ayad, I feel like a person who’s about to jump off a high dive into a bottomless pool even though he can’t swim. I’m nervous and even a little afraid because I’m gonna talk to someone who knows about the realms I struggle to see and understand.
I’m beginning to get the sense that this job is going to demand that I enlarge and deepen myself in ways that I hadn’t planned for but may end up doing me some good in the end. If you come along for the ride, I think the conversation will have the same effect on you.
I’m David Brooks, and this is The Permanent Questions.
Brooks: Ayad Akhtar, welcome to The Permanent Questions.
Akhtar: Thank you, David.
Brooks: On the cover of your book is a blurb by Abraham Verghese, who wrote The Covenant of Water and other things, and the blurb is: “Simply put, a work of genius.” And when I read that—
Akhtar: I’m sorry. (Laughs.)
Brooks: —of course I wanted to kill you. But, I thought, Well, I’m a little suspicious. Maybe it’s just a friend. But this book, simply put, is a work of genius. I think it’s just gonna be one of the important books.
You know, it’s been a few years since we’ve had a novel that was really a literary occasion. And I’d say this book is that literary occasion, in part because of the stuff we’ll talk about, but in part because we’ve lived in an era where so many spiritual poisons have been let loose by politics, by technology, by the general rancor. And here’s a book that takes spiritual life seriously and really lays out the inner world and describes a landscape of it. And I found that remarkable.
And I have to say, I’m a little intimidated, because I try to think about the spiritual life, but it’s all a little fuzzy down there. I think one of the things the book did for me was give me words to describe some of the things you vaguely feel, and also just to think, Well, how does spiritual life develop and grow?
And so I guess, my first simple question is: Describe the premise and the concept of the novel.
Akhtar: So a writer who has my name and many of the facts of my life—which is something I’m sure we’ll talk a little bit about—leaves the city after writing a previous book in which he had done the same thing, given the narrator his name and many of the facts of his life, and moves to the country. And after being there for a while, is out on a country road on a bike and gets hit by a pickup truck from behind, thrown into a grove of trees, and wakes up in a hospital after a coma about 36 hours later. And as he awakens into himself, something’s changed. There’s a luminosity and a silence that is the ground of his experience. And then that experience seems to deepen and get more complex over the subsequent eight months. And the book basically tracks that eight-month period.
Simultaneously to this, he also has a friend who is teaching at a local college where he is asked to teach as well for a semester. And so the ongoing political divisions on campus, as well as within the local rural community, play a significant role as our narrator experiences what some friend of mine once called, in reading it, something like a “beatitude” or a “state of grace.”
Brooks: He’s luminous, he’s incandescent, and he’s having a great time. And the first thing I love about his state of consciousness is that it’s about perception. And the very beginning of the book, before you even get to the chapters, the sentence is: “This is a record of altered perceptions.”
Akhtar: Yeah.
Brooks: And what I like about that is, we used to think perception, the act of seeing the world, was this passive thing. You open your eyes, the world floods in, and you record it the way an old camera would record light. We now know from neuroscience that’s not the way it happens. But even more, I think we’ve learned that—it used to be, you thought, Well, you see the world, and then you think about the world, and then you act on the world.
And we used to think the action is in the middle. It’s in the thinking. But in my view, it’s in the perception. It’s in the seeing and the way you see and the quality of attention. And that quality of attention you bring to the world determines what you see in the world. If you’re distrustful, you’re gonna see threat, and if you’re loving, you’re gonna see people doing the best they can.
This is where I’m hoping to walk you into. Mystics have always paid a lot of attention to perception. And the one I know best is Simone Weil, who was a French mystic in World War II and said that attention is the ultimate form of generosity. Your primary form of morality is what kind of attention you bring to the world. And one of her followers, Iris Murdoch, who was a novelist and a philosopher, says our goal is to cast a just and loving attention on others.
And so what you see with this character is a man learning to attend the world in a radically different way than he used to.
Akhtar: Well, I think that’s fascinating the way you laid it out. I think that’s right. I think in thinking about the book, there was a difference between rendering new experiences and rendering processes that were the result of something that was experiencing itself. That is to say, a change of the one who is experiencing. So it’s not just states.
There’s also a moral dimension to the change that he doesn’t really understand. He’s not trying to be a good person. He’s just trying to understand what’s happened and spends a fair amount of time at the doctor’s office trying to figure out what’s going on.
Brooks: Trying to be a good person—there’s all sorts of ways to do that. People think, Well, you build up these muscles. I got a courage muscle. I got an honesty muscle. I’m gonna build my muscle, and I’ll be a good person. But I don’t think that’s the way morality works. It’s the quality of love you bring to your perception of the world.
Akhtar: I think there is something about the self-evident nature of relating to the world in a certain way. Emerson has a beautiful thing that he says, that virtue is the secret pillar that holds up the world. Which, in a way, is a way of saying that virtue is an efficient cause—that the best way to get something done is to be virtuous. It may not be the quickest way, but it might be the best way in the end.
These are not ideas that he’s trying to follow. They’re just experiences, and he approaches those experiences with just as much skepticism as pleasure. Because keeping that question alive—about what is happening, why does this matter, what are the implications of it?—felt to me important for a reader today.
Brooks: So for him, it comes as this weird gift as the product of a nearly fatal accident.
Akhtar: As it happened, by the way, for Montaigne. Montaigne was thrown from a horse and spent the next four days in a kind of beatitude that totally transformed his life.
Brooks: The Montaigne story, I’ve always loved it, because he was worried about how to die, and then this happens to him, and he records his own body as he’s near death having had this accident. And he says, “Oh, the body knows how to die. I don’t have to worry about this anymore.”
My father passed away about three or four months ago. He was the only person I’ve ever walked to death. And I was like, “Yeah, the body really knows what to do.” That was a great comfort to me.
Now, you have a piece forthcoming in The Atlantic, which is not really an excerpt from the book, but it’s in the neighborhood of the book. It’s sort of a nonfiction piece, and it’s really more about you directly. You didn’t have an accident, but you had a process. And so describe that.
Akhtar: In college, I started to have a very alarming experience that I couldn’t ignore, that there was some sort of a hole opening up inside me, and it was a curiously physical sensation. It was very, very concrete.
My parents are both doctors, so I spent some time trying to figure out what the medical genesis of this was and could not get any clarity on that. My mom sent me to a psychoanalyst, who was more interested in my sex life than any kind of hole that might be opening up inside me.
But I started to pay attention to this experience. And the psychoanalytic sessions got me interested in Freud. So I started reading Freud, and I read The Interpretation of Dreams and started to have some very, very vivid dreams and started paying attention to my dreams. And then had a mentor who also paid attention to her dreams and taught me a little bit how to pay attention to my dreams. And close attention to my dreams for many years I think opened up some different kind of space in my psyche, in my being, in my life, and led me down a path where I started to spend more and more time focused inwardly.
We might call it meditation. But I’m not sure folks would recognize what I was doing as meditation. And I think that inner attention got me focused on a level or a layer of subtle experience we’re always having.
And the more attention I brought to it—just as with dreams, the more focus I spent writing my dreams down, the more vivid and more dreams I had. At one point, I was waking up every 45 minutes to write my dreams down. This lasted two years. I literally have thousands and thousands of written dreams. But similarly, with this subtle layer of experience, the more attention I paid to it, the more it seemed to open up. So similarly in the book, as the writer is writing about this experience, it seems to somehow deepen it.
Brooks: The sense of a hole.
Akhtar: Yeah.
Brooks: Now, I have a sense of a shallowness sometimes, like I’m just living on the surface. And I sometimes don’t know how to do what you just described, which is look inside. And you did it through dreams because dreams opened up different states of knowing, I guess?
Akhtar: I mean, to quote something out of your own idiom, David, I think the need created an intense desire. I was a young person with a real sense that something was wrong.
I’m not really going into full detail as I do in the essay about just how bad the experience was. It felt clear to me that I might not survive, that I would do something that would hurt me or hurt somebody else, or I might kill myself. So I think the experience was not just in a disembodied hole. The experience was all-consuming.
When I read Thomas Merton’s [The] Seven Storey Mountain, I remember sort of recognizing in the spiritual crisis that he had at Cambridge and Columbia some aspects of what I was experiencing. For me, a solution could not be to go to a monastery or go to the church. I had lost my religious faith, and restoration of my religious faith was not gonna solve the problem.
I had to somehow be attentive to the experience I was having and to trust. I don’t know why I had the trust that if I was, that something would emerge from that, some orientation would emerge from that that would help. And it did, it took a long time, and it’s one that I wanted to convey in the book, but I needed a more truncated and more dramatically impactful way to do so.
Brooks: One of the things that strikes me is your instinct when you feel this void is not to go to psychology.
Akhtar: I tried.
Brooks: Oh, you did try. I mean, the Freud.
Akhtar: My mom sent me to a psychiatrist.
Brooks: But I have a friend who suffers severely from depression. He’s written about this, so it’s not a secret. He gets institutionalized from time to time, and the psychologist will not go to—he says, “My problem is spiritual. You don’t understand. It’s not psychological. It’s not my mom, or something like that.” And they can’t go there.
Akhtar: Look, at the root of the word psychology is psyche, and psyche in Greek means “soul.” Modern psychology is burying the lede. We are concerned with issues of the soul, but that’s a word that we can’t really use anymore, and I get why we can’t use it. And part of the project of the book, and part of the project of this essay, was to try to find a language that was secular, for inner experience, that defies the secular frame and what it would mean to be paying a certain kind of attention to that experience.
I think there are psychiatrists or psychologists who do understand this, and there is one in the book, actually. She has an openness to some of this stuff. The importance of it is not necessarily that we land on a model that is right, but we land on a model that’s useful to the one who is undergoing whatever process they’re undergoing.
Brooks: When you gradually turned the corner, was there a moment, or was it this process of dream analysis? And then did you experience the radiance that the character in the book experiences?
Akhtar: As for whether I experienced what the writer experiences in that book: Well, I couldn’t have written it if I hadn’t. (Laughs.) But I certainly am giving it shapes that it doesn’t have in my life. Because even though he has my name and many of the facts of my life, we are not the same person.
Brooks: I started writing down—because all spiritual experiences are ineffable. They’re hard to describe. And so I started—because I was so fascinated by how you did it—writing down all the different phrases you used to describe this state. You know, things like “a sublime burning calm,” “inner silence,” “effortless patience,” “a disembodied halo of self-awareness,” “a visionary tenderness.”
And one of the things I think they all capture, you all sort of are getting closer to that state.
Akhtar: A state which is always different.
Brooks: What do you mean by that?
Akhtar: Plato has this wonderful idea that we are caught between. We are in the metaxy. We live between the forms and the matter. And when we, in Plato’s terms, rise to the real, we’re not always rising to the same place. There’s different configurations.
And so some of those states that he’s experiencing are more inflected by emotional tenderness, some by a certain kind of brilliancy of vision and clarity. Each of the experiences phenomenologically is a soul experience, and to have all of those experiences at the same time, I don’t really know how I would give language to that.
Brooks: But they are in a movement.
Akhtar: They are.
Brooks: You have a quote from Dostoyevsky who writes, “An abnormal intensity if minute of sensation remembered and analyzed afterwards in health turns out to be the acme of harmony and beauty and fires the feeling unknown and undivided until then of completeness, of proportion, of reconciliation, of ecstatic devotional merging of the highest synthesis of life.”
Akhtar: Yeah. Beautiful.
Brooks: That’s a beautiful description. One of my favorite descriptions of joy comes from Zadie Smith. I read this somewhere, and she was out at a nightclub in 1999. It’s crowded and her feet hurt, and she can’t find her purse, and suddenly a song from the group A Tribe Called Quest comes on the sound system, and some stranger, a guy she doesn’t know, grabs her. He pulls her onto the dance floor and he says to her, “Are you feeling it? Are you feeling it?” She says, “I am. I am.” And she says, “Our heads exploded, and we gave ourself up to joy.” I’ve always loved that description of these highest states of transcendent beauty.
I don’t know if you’re prone to those, but they’re delicious when they happen.
Akhtar: Well, he certainly is. Another experience that he’s having in the book, which is an unusual one but one that’s reported by a lot of traditions, is that he starts to experience the localization of his consciousness or his awareness not in the head, but in the heart. That’s what I hear in Zadie’s description, that somehow the head explodes. That somehow the localization in the mind changes. You’re no longer just in your mind or even in your mind.
Brooks: I don’t know if you share this as part of a central feature of your life, but my parents were academics. We grew up with a lot of books. So I’ve spent most of my life trying to move from my head about 18 inches down to my heart. That’s been my whole life, with some success and some failures. And you have a phrase, you refer to it as “the curious seeing with my chest.”
Have you gone through the same struggle against overintellectualization?
Ayad Akhtar: For sure. I had a wonderful mentor, remarkable mentor, Jerzy Grotowski, a Polish theater director of some renown. Most famously, I think for people, My Dinner With Andre is largely based on Andre’s experiences in a Polish forest with Jerzy Grotowski.
So I worked with him in my early 20s, and I remember almost the first day that we started working together, he said, “You’re not gonna read. You’re gonna stop reading. That’s it. No more reading for you.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Because you think too much. We need to get you into your body. I need you to be operating from a different part of yourself.” So I basically didn’t read for eight months.
It was an interesting experience. The work was very physical and very vocal, and so not having that escape hatch to try to figure out what something meant or the defense of why it was okay I wasn’t able to do something—all of that still going on, but it was not as prevalent because I wasn’t spending the evenings when I was back home trying to sort it through by reading, which is something I’ve always done. But then I went back to reading. (Laughs.)
Brooks: Well, clearly, because you can’t write if you don’t read. John Stuart Mill was raised by his father, who was a big utilitarian, and his father’s friend Jeremy Bentham, and they just fed the kid books.
He could read Greek when he was 3. He was incredible. And then he has a complete mental breakdown when he’s 20. And he realizes that an overemphasis on reading and analysis wears away feeling, and he finally recovers when he discovers poets—Wordsworth and Coleridge and those kind of guys. And that’s been a central problem with my own life. I sometimes worry that—career as a journalist and writer—I’m always on lecture mode, even to myself.
Which I think is a way of making yourself unavailable for the resonance that you’re talking about, the falling into the deeper registers, because the voice is going, the voice, the voice. But when you need to quiet—
Akhtar: Well, I have a practice. And the practice is about focus, inward focus, and the points of focus can change depending on how the practice is evolving. I’ve done all different kinds of stuff over 30 years, and so I’ve accumulated a—Laurence Olivier once said about building a performance that rehearsal was all about figuring out what buttons he needed to push. And the performance was just about pushing those buttons.
So I’ve got a lot of buttons that I’ve accumulated. And I just figure out what buttons I need to push on any given day. As long as I have time to do it. And I think to me, that’s what I’ve discovered is that it really is about application of will in time. Commitment. And if I do it regularly, then sometimes I feel like I can have a more steady movement of the head to the heart, to use your language, or to quiet the mind or whatever it may be. And if I don’t do it, then that doesn’t happen.
Brooks: And what exactly are you doing when you say you’re pushing the buttons?
Akhtar: It’s so elaborate and so specific. A lot of what’s going on in the book is really me sharing various buttons. Different kinds of inner focus and seeing, focuses on different parts of the body, focus on different kinds of thoughts. Ibn Arabi, the great Sufi mystic visionary, talks about the higher use of the imagination, that the imagination is actually a tool to get us to the real.
As Dante: Heaven is the “high fantasy.”
Or Blake will use the imagination to approach some higher way of seeing. So similarly with Ibn Arabi, just the judicious use of the imagination can create states of absorption.
Brooks: I think you can slip into—in journalism or whatever job people are in, finance—prosaic modes of consciousness that make this really hard.
Akhtar: That’s right.
Brooks: And I noticed when I first started praying, I was editing it. It was like, Oh, this prayer is so repetitive. It lacks coherence. And I remember once I was at a service, and the pastor asked us to pray for deaths in Syria, and we gathered with groups of three, and we’re supposed to pray, beseeching God to help those who were suffering in Syria. And I said, “Lord, please help pass UN Resolution 242, to provide safe zones for the—”
I prayed an op-ed piece, basically. And I look back on that, it’s like, I suck at prayer. Would you say you—obviously you don’t believe in God—but something like that?
Akhtar: It’s not that I don’t believe in God; it’s just I don’t see the utility of engaging in belief as a way of addressing my experience. Emerson has this wonderful—I’ve quoted Emerson a bunch just because I read him so much, and I know that there’s mind share between us around Emerson. I think Emerson once described prayer as a disease of the will. I think he means a certain kind of prayer—prayer for commodities, whether those commodities are intangible or tangible.
And there’s maybe a different order of prayer that I can resonate with. I don’t necessarily pray, but I can resonate that it’s a different order of attention, a different kind of focus. But I think, if I do that regularly, if I build it into my life and I’m loyal to it, I get a good benefit, and if I don’t, then I don’t get the benefit.
Brooks: When I came to faith, I was shocked at what faith was, and that I used to think it was about belief. You had to believe certain propositions. And, of course, it is about belief. It’s not totally void of belief. But I experienced it more as a longing than as a set of beliefs.
Dorothy Day, my heroine, wrote a book called The Long Loneliness, and by loneliness, she did not mean solitude. She meant her longing for God. And one of the beautiful moments in her life comes at the end, where she’s asked by Robert Coles—she wrote this memoir, Long Loneliness, when she was young—and at the end of her life, she was asked, “Did you ever think of writing another one the rest of your life?”
And Dorothy Day, for those who don’t know, was a woman who not only served the poor, but lived amongst the poor, a life of selfless love. And so she said to Coles, “I thought about writing a memoir, and so I got a legal pad and I wrote ‘A Life Remembered by Dorothy Day.’” And she said, “And I sat there, and I sat there, and I sat there, and I thought of the Lord and His visit to us those many centuries ago, and I was just grateful to have had Him on my mind all that time.”
What’s so entrancing for me is that it’s serenity. Somehow she’s reached that spot of serenity, a simple serenity that the voices stop. So it’s a beautiful practice that she had to live through her whole life to get to that spot.
Akhtar: Grotowski used to tell this story. We were translating something together. I spent a great deal of time with him in one period, and he told me this story on a couple of occasions. It was a kind of a technical story, trying to convey some technique to me about something. There’s a Hindu parable in which an aspirant goes to God and says to God, “I love you so much, God. You know how much I love you.” God says, “Oh yeah, you love me a lot.” And he says, “So how many lifetimes is it gonna take for me to get out of this birth and re-death and all this stuff?” And God says, “Well, you love me a lot. Seven. It’s gonna take you seven.” So he says, “Okay, all right, seven. So if I hated you, how many more would it take?”
God says, “Well, if you really hated me, it would take you three.” The guy says, “What are you talking about?” Says, “If you really hated me, you’d think about me more.” And it was Grotowski’s way of conveying to me that really what mattered was intensity and application. And not so much intention or the moral valences around the intention.
It’s a challenging proposition to think that you could experience something like a radiance without being committed to being a good person. But certainly that narrator is not necessarily committed to being a good person or a bad person. He’s just living the consequences of this grace.
Brooks: I’m gonna pick up on that intentionality, the yearning which I was talking about. One of the things we tend to do in our society is we try to define human beings by what separates us from the other animals. We come, starting in Plato and up to the present day—reason. Reason is what distinguishes us from the animals. And I think that’s not true, but I was struck—
Akhtar: You think it’s not true because you think animals also have a degree of reason?
Brooks: I think that’s not what centrally defines us. I think your desires, your yearnings are telling you where you’re gonna go, where you’re gonna devote your energy. Reason is there to help you figure out how to get there. So it’s downstream, and emotions are there to tell you if you’re getting closer or further from where you wanna go. The part of the brain that really is most important to us is not the one that distinguishes us from the animals; it’s the one we share with the animals.
Which is that longing, that yearning which comes from the rewards.
Akhtar: And fear.
Brooks: And fear. Absolutely. So that helps me think through where I want the center of my conception of myself to be.
Akhtar: Which is?
Brooks: Which is the stuff that doesn’t get measured on an SAT score.
Akhtar: And it’s measured how, if at all?
Brooks: I think it’s measured by sanctification and degradation, a feeling. There’s a line in C. S. Lewis that there’s some piece at the core inside of yourself, and every act you do turns that little core piece inside of yourself into something a little more holy or a little more profane.
Akhtar: What does it mean for you for it to be more holy? What is the phenomenological experience of that? What does it actually feel like? If you had to give language to it.
Brooks: This is why I’m not you. I have a friend who lived in India, and he said, “What I liked about it, in India, everything was on a vertical axis as well as a horizontal axis.” So you are having a moment of beauty, spiritual beauty. It feels like beauty. And more like a swelling out of the heart.
That’s how it would feel. And I think of the moments in my life where I experienced the greatest sense of spiritual peace and joy, like the Zadie Smith story. One of mine was—I was pulling into my home. My kids were little back in those days, and we lived in the suburbs. We had a driveway that spun around the side of the house, so I could see into the backyard. My kids had one of those little balls that you get at the supermarket, and they were kicking it up in the air. I just sat there in my car looking through the windshield at my three kids tumbling over each other and laughing. I just sat there, and I had a swelling. Tears come to your eyes. It’s something touching you.
I think I would call it—and I wanna return to this word you’ve used a couple times—a swelling of the soul. And now in your Atlantic piece, and I think in the book too, you’re uncomfortable with the word soul. I think you at one point call it an anachronistic concept. And yet you use it.
Akhtar: Well, I’ve learned from Shakespeare that the best way to assert a meaning is to negate it with equal force. Any time a reader feels that you’re aligned with one thing against another, they naturally array themselves against you. So the way to create space for them to have freedom is to assert both poles with equal conviction.
So the book, obviously—and I in my own intellectual life and with myself—because I notice that that tendentiousness is something that my own cognition partakes in, that if I’m too aligned with some particular thing, there’s some other part of me that begins to bark, Well, you didn’t think about it like this.
So being equally committed to both orientations is a way to have more freedom. And it’s also a way to have the reader make up their own mind, if you will.
Brooks: Is this a literary device or a personal reality for you?
Akhtar: What’s the difference? All the great traditions—and certainly the Kabbalistic tradition is very, very clear about this, that reality is composed of oppositions and that you can’t have one thing without its opposite. That’s the warp and woof of everything. So I think that the extent to which language reflects that deeper truth, it is probably reflecting it in a literary form. And for me, Shakespeare is the one I spend the most time reading. I was reading him this morning just to try to get—he’s like Mozart for babies’ brains for me. It just kinda wakes me up a little bit. I get a lot of lessons from reading him, and that’s the big one.
Brooks: Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote probably in the ’40s or ’50s. He was president of the University of Chicago. And he said there’s an eternal great conversation that we’ve been having as humans for thousands and thousands of years. And it’s between fitting in and standing out. Between individualism and belonging, between freedom and equality, between all the dialectics of life.
And his point was these questions never end. You never get to a resting spot. It’s just you’re looking for the thing that’ll work at that moment.
Akhtar: I think the pieties of any given cultural moment are fueled by the illusion that there is a resting place in that conversation.
Brooks: Now, I wanna come back to the soul, because one of the really high watermarks of this book is a scene with Allan Bloom, who I knew at the University of Chicago. I was never part of the cult. He was a philosopher, and he wrote a great translation of The Republic, which I think is still read today.
The narrator in the book is in love, and we’re gonna get into this, with a woman named Lucy. Lucy’s a brilliant woman, and she’s with Allan Bloom at the moment he tells her what a soul is. If you could walk us through that scene.
Akhtar: I did a lot of research on Bloom for this book and that era at the University of Chicago, where Lucy was an undergraduate. One thing that many of his students who kept faith with Bloom’s teaching over the course of their years, whether as teachers or as people in their lives, kept referring to was this sense that somehow when he talked about the soul, you had a feeling—even though you couldn’t define it and he never really defined it—that you all knew what you were talking about. Which is a fascinating proposition.
In this scene, young Lucy, who’s 22 years or 21 years old, is in his class, and she has been sitting in back because there’s never any chairs. And she shows up late because she’s got a class across campus. She comes down to the bottom of the auditorium after class and after all the courtiers have kissed the ring and left, and asks the great Allan Bloom, “You talked about a soul in today’s lecture. What exactly do you mean by a soul?” He then proceeds to ask her to close her eyes. He talks her through a bunch of questions, and she answers, and he responds, and she answers, and finally lands on an experience that she articulates in her own language that he then reflects back to her as a definition of the soul.
She even says, “I’m not sure what this proved, and yet somehow everything was different, that my contact with whatever it was I had been inquiring about enlivened me.” So that’s the scene.
Brooks: And then she comes to the belief the soul is the first mover.
Akhtar: Well, it’s Plato. The soul is that which moves but is not moved by anything. You move your arm, you’re moving it. So what in us is always moving, but we’re not moving it? That’s what she connects with.
Brooks: I would say something was lost and gained when we lost the concept of soul in public conversation. It’s true, vast majorities of Americans believe they have souls. But in most public culture, we just don’t talk about it.
Akhtar: It’s discredited.
Brooks: But I think it’s very hard to understand oneself without this concept of a soul.
Akhtar: I think subjectivity is discredited. I think subjectivity is embraced as a radically individualist, totally relativistic idea or notion. I think the possibility there might be subjective facts is something that we are not equipped, intellectually, as a culture to grapple with.
That’s what I’m suggesting by saying I think we need to have a conversation about things like the soul, even if we are gonna put them in quotes, because I think there’s a whole order of our experience, maybe the most important order of all of our experience, that we’re not actually having a conversation about.
Brooks: Completely agree. Let’s talk about the care and feeding of the soul. I’m gonna insist on this word. How to enlarge the soul. Or how to purify or, I don’t know, make it more what it should be—let’s put it that way. So not to prejudge.
There are different philosophies of how you purify your inner state. And one of them is self-emptying. You renounce desire; the Stoics had this belief in apathy. You just achieve tranquility. And there’s a lot of that in Eastern mysticism. And so you renounce the self, you take yourself out of the way, and you’re just quiet.
Akhtar: That’d be great if I could do it, but I can’t do that.
Brooks: I can’t do that either. Maybe by default, I’ve gone to another way of feeding the soul, which is—another of my heroes is Gregory of Nyssa, who was an early Church father and living in, I think it was what is now present-day Turkey.
He was surrounded by Greek philosophies that had the idea that happiness is rest. You work hard, you achieve your goals, and you just rest and you can relax. That’s what happiness is. And he was like: My main goal in life is to know and understand and love God perfectly. But if I could do that perfectly, that would imply that God is finite, which He is not. Therefore, rest cannot be happiness. There must be something else.
He has a sermon on—there are a lot of sermons on the Song of Songs. This is the sexy part of the Bible. The bridesmaid is chasing her beloved, and he withdraws, and she chases. With each chase and withdrawal, there’s an encounter. Each time, her love is more deep and her experience is more soaring. And so Gregory says, “No, it’s not in rest; it’s in pursuit.” That, to me, makes sense. It’s when I fall in love with something, and then something outside touches something inside and sets off an explosion, and I’m in pursuit of that thing. I think that’s when my soul is happiest.
Akhtar: When you can trust your desire. What I would say to that, and what I think I tried to use the book to explore and for myself, was that attention to a certain kind of experience, attention to a certain subtle coursing continuity in my awareness, began to deepen and open into different terrains. And that exploration—maybe a kind of pursuit that you’re talking about—was not activated by a sense of longing or desire, in my case, but more activated by a curiosity. So I think we’re in the same ballpark.
Brooks: Yeah, curiosity is a form of longing and desire. It’s a desire for understanding and clarity.
Akhtar: Aristotle has it—we are defined as creatures, as the creatures who wish to know. So being in pursuit of knowledge is a different way I read what Gregory is talking about.
Brooks: I think that’s right, though the longing to know can sometimes be a very weak passion in a lot of people.
Akhtar: Well, there’s two words for “know” in French. One is savoir and one is connaître. And savoir is to “know about.” And connaître is to “know.” And one might be oriented toward an objective understanding of something, and the other a subjective understanding.
Brooks: In the Bible “to know” obviously, famously, can mean to love, it can mean to have sex with, it can mean to enter into a covenant with. It’s a whole-body experience.
And maybe in the Enlightenment or somewhere else, we divided that, and that division did great injury to how we understand ourselves, because it allowed—
Akhtar: It created the modern world.
Brooks: It did do that.
Akhtar: We could go back to Descartes and say Descartes had a similar night of not being able to sleep and then decided to create this world that we now live in. And so there’s obviously been benefits, but we’ve lost a lot by not allowing that kind of knowledge, which again, is what I’m trying to focus on. It’s a knowledge that—I don’t know what it means. I just know that I’m experiencing it.
Brooks: There’s a lot of love in the book, which I liked, and one of the most interesting relationships in the book is for the narrator with this woman, Lucy, who was the University of Chicago—lady we’ve been talking about.
Akhtar: Who becomes a professor later.
Brooks: And it’s literally Platonic love. So describe that love he has for her. Because he is pursuing her and fascinated by her and amazed by her, and she, by the way, has a wonderful marriage, which he does not wanna interfere with.
Akhtar: I’ve had some extraordinary mentors in my life, and a number of the most important mentors have been women and have taught me about so much.
And I resonate particularly—as we said earlier, there’s a lot of Plato in the book, and there’s a lot of Phaedrus in the book, one of the dialogues. And something else that there’s a lot of which I don’t talk about is the Symposium.
In the Symposium, Socrates tells a story about how he learned about love and that there was an older woman who mentored him named Diotima. So Lucy’s a bit of that kind of a figure. Somebody who really has an understanding of eros in the higher sense of the word. What would it mean to relate to eros not out of a desire to possess, but to be animated by the aliveness in knowledge?
So anyway, very high-minded, but I try to give it some juice in the book.
David Brooks: C. S. Lewis, in his book The Four Loves, makes the distinction between “Need-love” and “Gift-love,” and Need-love proceeds out of a void, and it’s the desire to possess, to control. And Gift-love just flows out of a blessing.
Akhtar: In Plato, this proposition in the Symposium is basically that love has a ladder, that you learn love in one form, and if you’re open to it, it leads to another kind of love, which then leads to another kind of love. It maybe starts with the body, but it elevates out of the body into some place higher.
So, similarly, the book is exploring the possibility of what it would mean in a secular age to be related to your own experience and the experience of the world, not through a kind of materialist separation or wanting to accomplish or desire, but really just being attentive to the aliveness of that experience.
Brooks: Now I’m presuming, and it’s really through your writing, you’ve had these numinous experiences. Have you had transcendent mountaintop experiences that William James used to write about, or that sort of thing?
Akhtar: As time has gone on, over 30 years of various kinds of investigation and practice, I’ve had lots of different experiences. And I think more and more the experience that’s the most valuable to me is a kind of continuity of connectedness in the everyday, and feels to me more and more a better definition of the transcendent than some of the wild, dynamic, knock-your-socks-off experiences that I may have had, and that the narrator certainly does have in the book.
Brooks: So connected to experience, that’s like, I am in the world.
Akhtar: Connected to the continuity. There’s a continuity between us. Continuity with my ancestors. All of that stuff. That it’s here, it’s with us now. So being connected to that in a lived sense without self-consciousness That to me feels like a better definition of the transcendent.
Brooks: I get that. Way before I had any faith, I had this sense of what you might call historical ecstasy. The moment of touching something or being someplace, like Chartres Cathedral or Gettysburg Battlefield, where the procession of people who’ve been there has left a residue.
I was once at a home that was purported to be the home of Mary, outside of Ephesus in Turkey. I don’t know if Mary ever lived there, but centuries of prayers and mourners move through that space, and something is emanating from it, a sensation of the procession. I don’t know if I’m correctly interpreting what you’re describing.
Akhtar: That’s certainly a version of what I’m talking about. I think what I’m talking about is even more prosaic. But yes. And by the way, the book does end in Chartres, interestingly.
Brooks: I noticed that.
Now, you have quoted Thomas Merton, and people like that, Augustine. Meister Eckhart comes up. A lot of your spiritual companions or guides, they took this, and they took it to religion. You accompany them part of the way, but you don’t take it to where they took it, which was the Bible or the Quran.
Now, is that just: “I just don’t feel that. It just doesn’t feel authentic to me,” or have there been advantages and disadvantages to this spiritual sense that’s not tied to an institutionalized religion?
Ayad Akhtar: It’s such a beautiful and cutting question. I don’t know. I think I’m trying to live by an empirical ethic, an ethos of being attentive to my experience, being attentive to those who’ve written about their experiences, trying to accumulate whatever wisdom over time that I can, recognizing that they are making connections both which I value and others which I don’t understand.
I don’t wanna take anything on faith because to me, faith is not about an object. It’s about an orientation. I think I put it in The Atlantic essay—it is a living form of relationship with the unknown. That feels like its own worthy form of knowledge, to be in living relationship to the unknown. And not for it to have a name, because the name can sometimes get in the way of the practice. Doctrines are often things that were once practices that have now been turned into meanings. Now we consume them as meanings, but we have lost connection to the practice that led to some experience.
I think mystics in general are focused on experience. And so maybe I just share that kind of granular phenomenological interest in experience itself. And I’m much more interested in that than I am in what it means. Because I’m not gonna get any kind of clarity about what it means. I may get clarity in a moment. But as the brain scans of nuns and Tibetan monks tell us—they are having very similar brain scans, but the language they use to report what their experience is is almost opposing: “union with Christ” or “emptiness.” So what does it matter what the concept is unless the concept is helping to activate technically? Does that make sense?
Brooks: It does. And I’m not judging here or comparing. We’ve had two different experiences of this.
Akhtar: Yours might be better. When I said it was a cutting question, I think that what my orientation lacks, which is important, is community. Because I’m a renegade out there on my own. I’ve never really talked much about this stuff. I’ve alluded to it a couple of times in interviews, but I’ve kept to myself about it, because it’s been an investigatory thing. It’s my pursuit. So I don’t have it to share with other people, which maybe suits me fine as a writer and as an observer and as an outsider, and maybe that’s my life choice, but I think it does deprive me of community.
Brooks: Shiva, say, the Jewish mourning ritual, is a beautiful, very spiritually and intellectually very sophisticated way to handle grief. It also gives everybody in the congregation—they know what to do. Everyone knows exactly what to do.
And I would say religion has provided me with a broader sensation, at least the way I process spiritual experiences. I was having one of these numinous experiences in Colorado. I was on the top of a mountain by a lake. And because I’m me—and even I was not a big believer then, I was still wandering in those days—I brought up a book called The Valley of Vision, which is a collection of Puritan prayers. I happened to open it when I’m having this very moving and beautiful experience.
And the first prayer is a very famous one: “Lord, high and holy, meek and lowly, thou hast brought me to the valley of vision, where I live in the depths and see thee in the heights. Hemmed in by mountains of sin, I behold thy glory. Let me learn by paradox, the way down is the way up. To be low is to be high. To be brokenhearted is to be a healed heart. A contrite spirit is a rejoicing spirit. A repenting soul is the victorious soul.”
And when I read that, it’s really a prayer of the beatitudinal wisdom. All these spiritual inversions. It gave me something to hold on to. And it also gave me a sense, which I remember thinking, that there is a moral order to the universe. I had a sense of this moral order before I had a sense of God, that this is so beautiful, these inversions. And there’s a structure to them, and it’s sort of an intellectual encompassing of everything that I love.
I have a friend named David Wolpe who was a rabbi in L.A. He’s retired since. He had a passage which has rung in my mind, which I wanted to read to you to get your reaction. And he does not believe in “spiritual without religious.” And he writes this: “Spirituality is an emotion. Religion is an obligation. Spirituality soothes. Religion mobilizes. Spirituality is satisfied with itself. Religion is dissatisfied with the world.”
Akhtar: I think my book is a direct contradiction of that orientation. I respect that quote a lot, and I think that it’s largely true, but it’s also clearly not.
I’m interested by this idea that you’re at the top of the mountain and you’re having an experience, and in that moment you reach for language. I don’t. That’s the difference.
And I don’t know what value that difference has for other people. I know that for me, reaching for language in that moment fixes the experience. And I want the experience to continue to exhibit that continuity that I was talking about earlier.
That’s a technical matter, actually. By allowing it to be, it is allowed to have a different evolution. That’s just something that I’ve learned, that the meaning I could derive from the experience is ultimately less lasting and less valuable than continuing to relate to the experience.
Brooks: But someone in your book says to the character, “You’re seeking states, not truth.” Now, when you’re talking about not reducing it to language, how do you retain it?
Akhtar: The aspirant who hates God only has to be around for three more lifetimes. If you focus on it, you’re gonna retain something. Language is not a way to retain it. Language is a way to no longer relate to it. In my experience. So that’s why the challenge of the book was how to articulate this experience in a language.
Between my last book and this book, I learned something about the sentence. Sentences for me before this book were about a meaning conveyed between punctuation. In this book, somehow the sentence became a way to move inquiry and energy across punctuation into the next sentence.
And so it was like, in a way—like the scene with Bloom, what is the force that’s moving? There’s a movement that once it begins shouldn’t stop, and it should not be stopped by any meaning. It should not be stopped by any scene. There has to be some absorbing continuity that the reader is drawn into.
Brooks: That gets me back to my friend Gregory of Nyssa. He’s about spiritual movement. I once read a book by a guy named John Coates, who’s a neuroscientist, who said, We didn’t evolve to solve problems. We evolved to move across a landscape. And he says, If you think of the brain as an organ designed to foster movement, you will never see yourself the same way again. And that’s true: Since I read that sentence, I’ve never seen it the same.
Akhtar: And that’s what happened to me with the sentence, the writing of a sentence, understanding how a sentence could function with this book. That it functioned to move, not to fix.
Brooks: Now, there’s a moment, and I keep ruining our conversation with neuroscience, but—
Akhtar: There’s a lot of neuroscience in the book.
Brooks: I know. That’s what I’m getting to. There’s a scene where the character’s like, What is going on in my brain that all this is happening? So he goes to a doctor. He says, Oh, your insula—which is a part of the brain—it’s growing.
Akhtar: Thickened.
Brooks: Now, should I see that scene as a de-sacralization of his experience, of his condition? I was somehow disappointed. He’s reducing it to the insula? And I’ve been guilty in the last conversation to do that, but—
Akhtar: We all are. I think when the medical vocabulary enters our experience, it becomes the final vocabulary. It is our way of materializing that immaterial terror of death that we have. Because we’re so frightened of death, rightly so—or as Montaigne would say, not rightly so—that medical language, which is the primary language of mortality, and morality on some level in our culture becomes the final way to talk about anything. So it was impossible to write this book without including the medical map, without including the medical language.
It’s been demonstrated that activation of this area of the insula that’s up against the temporal lobe creates religious experience. So what are the implications of that? What are the implications of there being a physiological corollary to the experience that the narrator’s having?
Does it disqualify that experience? There’s lots of instances of the uncanny in the book as well. So that presumably is not explained by the brain scans, and yet all those things have to coexist because those are the languages of the 21st century.
I didn’t wanna write a book that was not responsible to the languages that we live in. I wanted to write a book that at least attempted a process of restoring a magic—at least for me as a writer as I was writing it—of the inner life, because it felt to me that that was something that we’re all more and more sensitive to and longing for.
David Brooks: C. S. Lewis, before he was—alongside of being the writer of the Narnia stories, he was a medievalist. He wrote about medieval literature. He said something was lost when humans used to look up to the night sky and they would see magic, enchanted. Now we see balls of gas burning that lie far away.
Akhtar: That’s the opening quote of my book, by the way. György Lukács. There was a time when we would look up at the starry skies and see the map of all possibilities.
Brooks: Have we lost something, or is there something we need to be on the watch out for as our culture has trended in this direction?
Akhtar: I don’t know. I know that I don’t wanna lose it. And so my focus is not losing it. I focus as much as possible on that invisible, immaterial inner part of us that is the substance of our moral life. The Russians wrote about it beautifully. It’s why we still read the Russians. I don’t know why we got so timid writing about such things. So yeah, I think we certainly have lost something, but I don’t wanna lose it.
Brooks: I do think that’s why I read the Russians too. That moment when, say, in Tolstoy, Prince Andrei is on the battlefield somewhere and he looks up at the endless vastness of the sky, or Levin is cutting grass and he has this experience of—
Akhtar: Or Ivan Ilyich at the end is consumed and subsumed by a radiance.
Brooks: And they’re not all happy people. They had the radiance, and they—
Akhtar: I don’t think a fundamental orientation in soulfulness is about happiness. I think that the great saints and in all the traditions—and in your own tradition, Christ, he’s not happy. The lesson is not happiness. And I feel like that is part of the problem of our orientation to some of this stuff.
Brooks: He could’ve been like, “Six life hacks to be a happy Messiah.”
Akhtar: Happiness is overrated. Happiness of a certain ilk, I think, is overrated if you really wanna talk about this kind of stuff.
Brooks: I would say some of the things that challenge my spiritual life are my achievement orientation, time orientation. There’s a lot you have to let go of, which I have trouble doing.
You mentioned earlier—maybe we’ll close on this, because it’s a fascinating part of the novel and your own life that I can’t explain and don’t understand, which is you talked about your dreams and these coincidences that you often dream. Describe some of that and what it means to you.
Akhtar: I still don’t understand it. I started keeping track of my dreams in college and then really accelerated that sort of focus on my nightlife, if you will, between the ages of 22 and 26 when I was sleeping with a pencil tied to my finger to remind me when I would get into that hypnagogic state that there was something I needed to write down. So I’d write down every dream.
And during this period, one thing that started to happen with a degree of unpredictable regularity was that I would dream of something that seemed to then happen. I talk about it a little bit in The Atlantic essay, and it’s usually pretty prosaic stuff, but still didn’t make any sense why this would happen, and seemed to point to the fact that maybe space-time was not what we think it is. Even if I had no other way of knowing that.
This has recurred throughout my life, as I’ve continued to pay attention to my dreams. Unfortunately, I’ve never seen any lottery numbers. So I don’t know what it means, but it clearly is a mystery and does point to there maybe being more in heaven and Earth than is contained in the kinds of books that I, and all of us, tend to read.
That’s part of the novel as well. The psychoanalytic tradition does deal with this a bit because it’s a phenomenon that occurs relatively regularly within analytic settings at times. They have some sort of way of working with it, but it’s interesting. I don’t know what it means.
I’m not sure what the utility of this strange proclivity that I’ve had, but I know that it’s a fact. It’s a subjective fact that I have to deal with. And it must tell me something about the world that I’m living in, which is different in essence than how it appears.
Brooks: I hope people have listened to us and got a sense of how valuable and important this book is. I really mean that, because sometimes we’re feeling we’re fighting the shallowification of life. Maybe you would call it the rationalization, or Max Weber, the iron cage, or we’re now in a silicon cage. And to delve into these regions strikes me as the most important thing we can do to preserve our humanity. It’s not always easy, and it’s not always clear, but it’s where our efforts should be, and people should definitely buy this book. I don’t know if you have any closing thoughts.
Ayad Akhtar: I’m just grateful, David. I’m so gratified to have this conversation with you, and I think the name of your new endeavor here, The Permanent Questions, is beautiful and right on.
Brooks: One of the highlights for me of my conversation with Ayad is when he pushed back on the David Wolpe quote I read, criticizing people who are spiritual and not religious. He is spiritual and not religious, and I have to say he is more spiritually evolved certainly than me and maybe more than a lot of pastors I know.
He has put in the work, done the reading from Plato to Meister Eckhart to Thomas Merton, and he’s constructed a spiritual sense. And it’s humbling to see that. The thing I 100 percent agree with him on is that we do our culture harm when we try to bleach spiritual talk out of our public conversation, public debate.
Human beings, religious or not religious, are metaphysical creatures, and if you take that element out of our lives and out of our common lives, you’re doing real damage to your society and to the people in it.
Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Ayad Akhtar. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University. New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube channel, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you wanna support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. See you next week.
Don’t you dare go inside the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts! It’s much too dangerous. They have had murders there for 39 straight years—every night, and some matinees too. And they still haven’t caught the culprit. Nightly murders, with groups of middle schoolers sitting there, applauding. Murders in a hair salon, of all places! Sheer madness.
It is not just the murder capital of Washington. Revolutions happen there, frequently. They built a barricade on one of the stages and tried to take down the whole French government. And they sang the whole time. This is the kind of thing that the Kennedy Center harbors and abets. They shot Alexander Hamilton there, not just once, but nightly, to make sure he was really dead. People went Into the Woods and got trampled by a giant. A rat king danced there. Valkyries rode there. Fairies forced people to fall in love, then out of love. It all happened in this building. The falling ceiling is the least of anyone’s concerns. Everything else about this place is far more threatening.
And it’s not just murders and revolutions and dancing rodents. Horrifying transformations happened. They tested out new technologies there, called “plays.” (They even tested a couple of mine.) People got handed sheets of paper to read from and stood behind music stands and became other people. A very dangerous device, the play, and the Kennedy Center encouraged it.
The most diabolical thing was that you did not always need to pay for these things. They just gave them away, free, every afternoon, for decades, to anyone who wanted to come in and watch. They gave them away online too! And nobody prevented this!
This place encouraged other, equally frightening things. Dance, music. These performers didn’t even speak with words, just moved their bodies around and blew wind through metal tubes and reeds and scratched at strings—and people left the room in tears. What was the music saying? What were the bodies saying? The audience seemed to understand, but there were no words to help them.
If people can communicate like this, then how can speech be properly controlled? If people can understand one another just by scratching a bow across taut strings—perhaps this is a form of witchcraft. No place that tolerates it must be permitted to stand.
A blue figure stood guard outside. Dancing? Kicking? There was ambiguity, and that was scary.
Sometimes people recorded podcasts there. Sometimes they watched movies on the lawn outside. Sometimes they played the tuba. They gathered together and experienced things together, and that, we can agree, was dangerous.
There was comedy and drama and voices you only dreamed of hearing in person. There were discussions and readings. People learned things of which they had been previously unaware. There were chimes and fountains and overpriced intermission snacks.
They dared to invite children into this place too. They dared to sit them down and tell them stories, on a stage. Do you know what a story can do to a mind? Do you know how long that story can linger before exploding into life, decades later?
The Kennedy Center is the deadliest condemned building in America.
For 55 years, people have been going in and coming out changed. Not physically, not visibly, but inside, carrying dangerous stories with them. Carrying music that could sustain them through times of trial, or the encouragement of shared laughter, or the seditious sense that they were not alone. Root it out! Stamp it out! Knock it down with a wrecking ball! This building is much too dangerous.
The world has watched Russia’s war against Ukraine largely through the movement of its front lines. But behind those lines, Moscow is building something more durable: a hidden state inside Ukraine. Across the Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson, Russian institutions are steadily replacing Ukrainian ones and reshaping the routines of everyday life.
Schools teach Russian curricula. Official documents, such as mandated Russian passports, tie residents to the Russian state. Russian systems govern access to housing and public services. On June 13, Vladimir Putin told Russian officials that Moscow’s task is to unify these Ukrainian territories into a legal, economic, educational, cultural, and information space under Russia by 2030. The objective is permanence: to make Ukrainian civic life hard to maintain and Russian rule hard to undo.
This agenda predates the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Crimea became an early laboratory for it after Russia annexed the peninsula, in 2014. Moscow quickly imposed Russian citizenship on Crimeans and made documentation—most commonly passports—necessary for employment and access to basic services. It introduced Russian law in Crimea and replaced Ukrainian institutions with Russian ones.
The Ukrainian territories occupied after the 2022 invasion have been more difficult to wrangle. The eastern provinces house major industrial assets, hundreds of thousands of people who consider themselves Ukrainians, and active resistance networks. Moscow initially relied heavily on occupation administrations, military coercion, and improvised measures. Gradually, however, it has introduced a more durable architecture to yoke the territories to the Russian state.
Russia has extended the dominion of its administrative state across occupied Ukraine. Russian federal courts claim jurisdiction there, and Russian taxation, migration, security, and military apparatuses hold authority. In 2025, Moscow integrated the occupation administrations into the monitoring software it calls the Governor’s Dashboard, which keeps track of local construction projects, budgets, and administrative compliance in real time across Russia.
One aim of this integration is to sever occupied Ukraine from Kyiv and pull its residents firmly under Russian oversight and control. Ukrainians are required to get Russian passports, without which they cannot receive pensions, get jobs, collect state benefits, or pursue studies. They can’t even use phones: Local mobile operators now require Russian identity documents for SIM cards. A young man who left Kherson because he feared being detained for his pro-Ukrainian views, or conscripted into the Russian military, described how he was forced to obtain a Russian passport. “They put a gun to my head,” he told us. Like other Ukrainians we spoke to from these territories, he asked that his name be withheld for fear of retaliation against his loved ones.
Many Ukrainians living under occupation have become convinced that independent Ukraine is unreachable. Russia took, replaced, or made unusable the Ukrainian documents that residents once had. Sophia, a 24-year-old from occupied Donetsk, told us that the occupation authorities repeatedly informed residents that Kyiv had abandoned them, and that only Moscow would issue them passports now. Without documents, Sophia felt trapped: Russia “was the only place I could legally go,” she said, even though she did not want to live there.
To men aged 18 to 65, Russian citizenship brings military registration and punishment for noncompliance. From February 2022 to the end of 2025, in direct violation of international humanitarian law, the Russian army forcibly mobilized approximately 50,000 Ukrainians to fight against their own country.
At the same time, Russia has been systematically expropriating Ukrainians’ property. Many who fled the territories under Russian occupation left real estate behind. Some of their homes have been classified as ownerless or unregistered, paving the way for their confiscation. Those who wish to retain their property must reregister it under Russian law by the end of the year. Doing so requires Russian citizenship and personally returning to the occupied territory.
Since 2024, Russian authorities have confiscated, or identified for confiscation, at least 34,000 properties belonging to Ukrainian citizens. And they have begun allocating some of these homes to Russian citizens, whom they encourage to settle in occupied Ukraine, with the alleged goal of increasing the territories’ total number of Russians to 1 million by 2045. This year, occupation authorities began transferring plots of Ukrainian land to Russians, with preference given to servicemen and those who have signed military contracts.
The state that Moscow is building in occupied Ukraine is more isolated and poorer than the one from which it was wrenched. Since 2022, Moscow has worked to cut off the occupied regions from the Ukrainian information space by blocking independent media, restricting messaging services, and replacing the communications infrastructure with Russian-controlled networks. Hundreds of Ukrainian and independent websites are inaccessible, and residents struggle to access Telegram, WhatsApp, and VPNs.
Since 2022, Moscow has poured billions of dollars into reconstructing occupied Ukraine. Officially these funds are meant to rebuild housing, roads, and public services. In reality, they have facilitated patronage and resource extraction.
Moscow has built up infrastructure that supports Russian military objectives, while living conditions for civilians deteriorate. It has closed or repurposed about 90 percent of the industrial facilities in occupied Ukraine. Many of these Ukrainian factories have been absorbed into Russian defense production, and Moscow has commandeered mines, machine-building plants, metallurgical facilities, and chemical plants for military use.
Since 2023, Moscow has expanded road and port infrastructure to support military logistics and resource extraction. It has spent about $425 million on railroads, including new routes farther from the front lines to move ammunition and military equipment to its forces. Russia has also integrated the occupied ports of Mariupol and Berdyansk into its maritime network, using them to export grain, energy, minerals, and other products to Russia and elsewhere. In 2025 alone, Moscow exported more than 2 million tons of grain from occupied Ukraine.
Russia’s militarization of the economy in these regions has left few jobs and low salaries for Ukrainians. One resident of occupied Luhansk told us that many men prefer to take temporary or unofficial work for one reason: “Official employment means going straight to the military-enlistment office.”
The worsening economic situation has deepened social tensions, and many residents describe feelings of despair and a sense of “frozen time.” One person in Kherson spoke of “moral exhaustion” from the occupation. Another told us, “Those who live better are those collaborating with occupation authorities.” The Russians brought into the territories, meanwhile, are reportedly paid substantially more than locals.
The Kremlin knows that the Ukrainians living under these conditions are potentially hostile. And so its occupation authorities have adopted what some of them call a “preventive threat elimination” approach, which assumes that most civilians are disloyal and treats even passive dissent as a security threat. Having Signal, Ukrainian apps and media, pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels, or suspicious contacts in your phone can attract scrutiny and, in some cases, lead to detention or beatings. From February 2022 to August 2025, according to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Russian occupation forces detained about 15,000 civilians, although the true number may be significantly higher.
As a result, Ukrainians are self-censoring. Many remove Ukraine-related material from their devices or use a second phone while traveling. Some avoid speaking in public places for fear of being reported and detained. A resident living in occupied Zaporizhzhia told us, “There shouldn’t be anything unnecessary on your phone so there won’t be unnecessary questions.”
About 1.6 million Ukrainian children live under occupation, and Russia has made their ideological education a state priority. The objective is to Russify them and shape them into future military recruits.
Schools in the occupied areas stress hostility toward Ukraine and the West and glorify Russian national symbols. Teaching in the Ukrainian language is verboten. A resident of occupied Kherson told us that “anything that reminds people of Ukraine, even the colors, is strictly forbidden.” Volodymyr, a young man also from Kherson, told us that school officials and Russian representatives warned students against speaking freely, opposing Russian occupation, and maintaining contact with relatives in Ukraine or abroad. This year Moscow has introduced a new curriculum at all levels, from kindergarten through university, aimed at strengthening Russian identity and glorifying “defenders of the fatherland,” including participants in the war against Ukraine.
At the same time, Moscow has expanded patriotic, military-linked youth groups into the occupied territories. Membership has grown rapidly. “They did not ask whether I wanted to join the Russian youth organization,” Volodymyr told us. Rather, he said, it was: “You, you, you, and you—you must join today.”
The Movement of the First, often described as the successor to the Soviet Pioneers, has more than half a million members in occupied Ukraine. Yunarmia, which Putin has called a “school of life,” has at least 44,000 members there. VOIN, a network of military sports-training and patriotic-education centers, has swept up at least 10,000 young people since 2024. These organizations operate under the close supervision of the Kremlin and even Putin himself. They introduce children, some as young as 6, and young adults to firearms, tactical medicine, drone piloting, survival skills, reconnaissance, and sniping.
Oksana, a caregiver from Kherson, left the occupation with her family after pressure grew on her sons to enter Russia’s military system. She described schools where academic subjects had been pushed aside by militarization and indoctrination. “In the first place—military training. In second place—propaganda,” she told us. “From kindergarten, they already start teaching them to march.”
For a child living under occupation, four years is enough time to reshape an identity—to learn or forget a language, and to set the course of education, friendships, and future plans. For those who have lived under Russian occupation since 2014, this is no longer a temporary disruption. It is the formative experience of their lives. A child who was 6 when Russia first occupied Crimea or parts of the Donbas is now an adult who has never known life under Ukrainian rule.
The institutions Russia has built behind the front lines are hardening. For Russia, they are the groundwork of annexation. For Ukraine, they are an obstacle, even if Kyiv one day wins those territories back.
Russian indoctrination and coercion could be a security problem that will outlast any cease-fire. And every passing year that Russian institutions endure increases the difficulty Ukrainians will have in restoring their country’s sovereignty, reconnecting their families, regaining their property, and providing young people with a meaningful sense of belonging.
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