Sharing the culture you love—a beloved song, that book that changed your life—can help translate your inner world to the people you love. Or it might make you look really strange. So it goes in one sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which a trio of teen girls at a sleepover (played by Sarah Sherman, Veronika Slowikowska, and Jane Wickline) take turns playing clips of their favorite get-ready-with-me videos, the popular format where content creators dress and prepare themselves for the day ahead. Two of the girls share par-for-the-course videos, before Sherman’s character introduces everyone to the influencer she loves the most: @ColoradoVicky1 (Dakota Johnson, the show’s host), a woman whose life doesn’t seem so aspirational.
As she smiles cheerfully, her eyes vacant, Vicky invites her audience to “get ready with me for court-ordered electroshock therapy.” In another clip, she styles herself in green lipstick and a Teletubby-esque antenna in preparation for getting “5150’d on the roof of a San Bernardino Whole Foods.” “She seems … unwell,” says Slowikowska’s character. But Sherman’s teen girl pays no mind to such judgments, or to her friend’s question about how she found this account, whose videos don’t even have double-digit views. “I’m legiterally addicted to her ass,” Sherman says. “Guess my algorithm is just cool-mazing?!”
These days, everyone uses a different internet. Algorithms serve up specialized content catered to each user’s unique interests, creating a warped mirror of their own reality, and last night’s sketch cleverly captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their private online consumption to one another.
@ColoradoVicky1’s behavior only gets more bizarre the more clips the girls watch. Without blinking once, Vicky explains that her “outfit of the day” is a pair of handcuffs, which she plans to use to attach herself to the actor who plays Turtle in Entourage. She one-ups this proclamation with an even stranger how-to video, in which she asks viewers to tag along as she makes brunch and gives herself a lobotomy. (“You’re gonna want to start by finding a really good power drill,” she monotones.)
Sherman’s friends seem to get progressively more put off by her media diet. It doesn’t help that Sherman’s character isn’t the only one in the house who could probably stand to log off. Every few minutes, her dad (James Austin Johnson) comes into the room with snacks and immediately reveals how depressed he is: “I’m just gonna go drink in the pool for a while, stand in the deep end,” he announces, before leaving the room. When the sleepover guests are concerned, Sherman explains that her dad is just in a funk: His boss discovered he dresses up like Sailor Moon, and he just found out that DraftKings uses real money. His particular online milieu is bleeding into, and beginning to harm, his real-life existence.
When her friends ask if they should get help, Sherman’s character insists that they “stop giving him attention—that’s, like, exactly what he wants.” She continues to ignore his not-so-subtle cries for help, until the sketch’s ending beat, in which he randomly shows up in @ColoradoVicky1’s livestream as her new lover. Sherman seems thrilled by this development, announcing that Vicky is going to be her new mom. Finally, her father’s real-life depression is good for something.
Teen girls and their dads alike are vulnerable to having their minds and lives warped by their feeds, the sketch warns. And once brought to light, these online rabbit holes might not translate so well to real life: The sketch-comedy version of this is funny because it’s so familiar, while the fracturing of reality outside SNL is mostly just unnerving.
Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has often said that AI will cure most diseases in the next 10 years. Late last month, he claimed that his company had taken a first step toward that future: Claude had, in less than 24 hours, discovered a new “enzyme system” that the company says resembles CRISPR, a gene-editing tool currently curing people of diseases. While announcing the discovery, Anthropic hinted that this was the type of finding that revolutionizes medicine and quoted a gene-editing pioneer who called it “genuinely intriguing.”
The company was open about not knowing what exactly it had spotted or whether the finding—the first released from a biology lab that the company established this spring—was really that significant. Still, many academics, along with the CEO of Eli Lilly, pointed out that the company had dressed up a very incremental finding as a major discovery. Fyodor Urnov, a scientist who coined the term genome editing and is working on a CRISPR project with Anthropic, told me that “the jury is out” on whether what Claude found is even an enzyme at all. Multiple researchers told The New York Times that, in fact, they had been aware of the supposedly new enzyme system for years, including a team at the University of Copenhagen that alleged Anthropic’s new results might have been stolen from their lab’s interactions with Claude. The company, in response, said that Claude isn’t trained using user transcripts. (Anthropic did not respond to a comment request for this article.)
In other words, Anthropic made a big deal about a finding that—although achieved in a novel, Claude-led way—may not lead to any biomedical advances, and that the company knew may not lead to any biomedical advances. Ironically, in making such grandiose statements, the company and other AI boosters obscured what Claude does appear to have accomplished: It sorted through reams of biological data that would have taken scientists much longer to analyze, if they could have at all. This capacity might not be a miracle, but for scientists facing mountains of data that have surpassed their capacity for analysis, it’s still meaningful.
Around the turn of the 21st century, researchers sequenced for the first time all 3 billion letters that make up human DNA. This effort, called the Human Genome Project, took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion. Today, sequencing a person’s full genome takes just over a day and costs as little as $200. Accordingly, the total amount of publicly available genomic data has become so large as to be unmanageable. In other fields, such as protein science, technological advances have led to a similar boom in the sheer amount of data being collected.
Trying to pull anything useful from all that data has become its own long-term project. In 2012, a committee of bioinformatics experts found that the “bottleneck in scientific productivity” had moved from data production to data analysis, but early efforts at the National Institutes of Health to deal with that bottleneck quickly sputtered out. If researchers could efficiently store, send, and examine all of the information they generated, they would likely be able to, for example, develop new drugs by identifying better genes or cellular parts to target. But it’s simply too massive for them to comprehensively attack.
The biological corpus is not, however, too large for AI agents. Bo Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and the chief AI scientist at a drug-discovery company, recently wrote that AI’s biggest impact in biology will come from its help “scaling scientific attention”: Setting agents loose on the enormous data sets can surface the outliers that warrant further human inspection. Agents can propose and test hypotheses for what might cause the unusual patterns they find, and predictive modeling can help scientists choose what experiments to carry out on their actual lab benches. Eventually, automated labs might even carry out those chosen experiments—a few already exist in the United States, and the Trump administration is spending hundreds of millions to establish more. Meanwhile, scientists remain divided over whether AI models actually steer them toward potentially paradigm-shifting experiments, or safer, less exploratory ones.
AI is already changing medicine: Models that use people’s medical history to predict their health risks, including their likelihood of developing certain kinds of cancer, are now used in most U.S. hospitals. At the same time, not every field of biology generates enough data for this approach to work. AI might be less useful in some domains that rely on less abundant microscopy data, such as the study of how cells and tissues communicate; such data tend to be harder to come by than genetic sequences, Stirling Churchman, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, told me. Organelle biology and the science of cellular transport similarly require painstaking, time-consuming experiments.
Still, Churchman said, “there will be magic where there’s data.” She spent the summer at OpenAI working on a specially trained model for life-science researchers. She anticipates that by allowing scientists who can’t code to examine their data themselves, AI will enable researchers to “analyze data at least 10 times faster, freeing us to spend more time on the biological questions and experiments.”
The recent Anthropic finding is an example of how AI can identify outliers that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Existing tools can comb through heaps of genomic data (and have already been used to identify bona fide new gene-editing systems). What AI can do is run those kinds of analyses at a much larger scale, while also evaluating intermediary results, Kendell Clement, who runs a computational-biology lab at the University of Utah, told me. Of course, that scale requires dumping in correspondingly huge resources: Anthropic directed about 950 Claude bots to simultaneously pore over a database that contained nearly 2 billion DNA entries.
AI companies have every incentive to keep evangelizing about the medical miracles they say their models will unlock, especially as backlash against them mounts. Amodei has an idea for how to quiet AI skeptics: “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” he recently wrote on X. That would certainly be a coup. But helping scientists work more quickly is, too, even if it doesn’t sound quite so revolutionary.
Not so long ago, heroic public statuary felt irrelevant—good for locating yourself in traffic circles but otherwise dismissed as a relic of some credulous, great-man-besotted past. The fact that places like Pyongyang and Ashgabat still went in for it just confirmed the association with autocratic backwardness and childish megalomania.
Things have changed. In Washington, D.C., millions of taxpayer dollars were spent on regilding a pair of allegorical equestrian bronzes with the cheap sheen of a dollar-store trophy, and the Trump administration has been defiantly pursuing legally contested plans for an arch of hypertrophic vulgarity. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, an exhibition with Kara Walker’s dismembered and reconstituted statue of Stonewall Jackson and his horse became one of the most widely covered art events of the past 12 months. Figurative monuments are now being taken seriously—desired by some (well, at least one guy), vilified by many, and argued over by just about everybody. Whose history do they tell? When should they be pulled down or repurposed? How effective are they anyway?
In this environment, the advent of two big museum shows with “Pharaohs” in the title feels timely. No people on Earth have done monuments more ambitiously and lastingly than the ancient Egyptians. Staking claims to eternal fame, pharaohs stamped their names and features on objects of mind-boggling scale: the Great Sphinx of Giza, the Colossi of Memnon, the mountainous figures of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel.
Curated by the former director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Tarek el-Awady, and with a catalog by the high-profile Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass, “Treasures of the Pharaohs” is both a buzzy blockbuster and an assiduous cultural survey. (Now at the de Young Museum, in San Francisco, it will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum, in Fort Worth, next year.) Its 100-plus artifacts stretch from tiny gold animal amulets some 5,000 years old to a gilded incense burner about 2,700 years younger, and from a child’s clay rattle found in a workers’ settlement near Thebes to the gold funerary mask of the 21st-dynasty king Amenemope, his bland face framed by the flanged nemes headdress still de rigueur for all costume-party pharaohs.
Styles changed over that enormous time span: The French-bob wig shown on a statue of Lady Hekenu in the fifth dynasty differs from the Gidget flips worn by Ukh-Hotep’s wives in the 12th dynasty, which look nothing like the elaborate braided wigs of Senetnay and her daughter in the 18th dynasty. Wigs aside, however, the story is one of overarching continuity: a society structured around divine kingship, detailed preparations for the afterlife, and the cosmological ideal of truth, justice, and order known as ma’at, all of which found expression in a remarkably stable set of visual forms.
New pharaohs imitated the monuments of old pharaohs or had them retailored to fit themselves. The essential Egyptian pictorial convention of figures in profile with torsos twisted forward was already in place by the time of King Narmer (around 3000 B.C.E.) and was still serving Cleopatra in 30 B.C.E. (It’s worth noting that the distance between those two rulers is 1,000 years longer than that between Cleopatra and us.)
The hook is Bronze Age glamour, and exhibition publicity gives pride of place to the beautiful golden face and blue-lined eyes of Thuya, mother-in-law of the pharaoh Amenhotep III. But Hawass also wants viewers to understand Egypt as “a pioneering power that demonstrated how to build a unified state, establishing the fundamental principles of science and governance.” A model boat from the early Middle Kingdom (circa 2000 B.C.E.), fully staffed with oarsmen, a captain, and a sailor plumbing the depths, serves a discussion of Egyptian nautical sophistication. Tomb portraits of commoners such as the carpenter Inty‑Shedu back up Hawass’s claim that Egypt’s social stability rested in part on its allowance for skill-based upward mobility.
The problem for big surveys like “Treasures” is that it’s hard to keep track of so many pharaohs, dynasties, kingdoms, and gods (Hawass counts more than 1,500 deities). The larger sociological points land, and many objects dazzle, but the individual biographies tend to blur.
“Maverick Kings: Three Visionary Pharaohs of Egypt’s Golden Age,” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, takes a different approach. Lawrence M. Berman, the exhibit’s curator, has written two books that tease out tales of individual lives from objects in his care. This exhibition does something similar, zeroing in on Hatshepsut, Amenhotep III (him again), and his son Akhenaten. All belonged to the 18th dynasty (circa 1550–1292 B.C.E.), when Egypt was at its richest and most self-assured. All were outliers in different ways, and all were committed (it’s tempting to say addicted) to proclaiming their achievements and broadcasting their images as broadly as possible.
The daughter of one pharaoh and the half sister and wife of another (a frequent Egyptian arrangement), Hatshepsut was serving as co-regent with her young nephew/stepson when she took the title of king herself—an extraordinary, though not unprecedented, action. For more than two decades, she kept the peace, expanded trade, and transformed the temple complex of Karnak at Thebes. She aggrandized processional routes with monuments, including obelisks of solid granite that rose 100 feet and were topped with electrum (a mirror-bright natural gold-silver alloy). Built into the cliffs on the west bank of the Nile, her memorial temple rises in stepped terraces, like something Frank Lloyd Wright might have done if he’d had the power and purse of a potentate. These efforts may have been for the glory of the dynasty’s official state god, Amun‑Re, but statues of Hatshepsut punctuated the vistas like a visual drumbeat.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
A delicately feminine statue of Hatshepsut, a rare woman who took the title of king.
In Boston, an obelisk fragment shows Hatshepsut flat-chested and broad-shouldered, wearing the kilt, headdress, and rectangular false beard of a pharaoh. But in a beguiling seated statue on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she appears distinctly feminine, delicate and beardless, though still clad in a pharaoh’s kilt and headdress. These variations tell us less about Hatshepsut’s gender proclivities than about monuments as public performance. Egyptian kingship had a recognized visual grammar, and attributes of office could operate independently of physiognomic truth. A manly statue of Hatshepsut was no different in principle from the perennially youthful Ramesses II we see depicted across his six and a half decades on the throne.
Amenhotep III was Hatshepsut’s great-great-grandnephew and perhaps “the greatest patron of the arts in Egypt’s history,” Berman writes. Having inherited a kingdom and immense wealth, he threw himself into aggrandizing old temples and constructing new ones; he built a palace complex big enough to accommodate an artificial lake and accessorized everything with statues of himself, including the 60-foot-tall Colossi of Memnon. Tempering the geometric rigor of earlier monuments with a new sensuality of form, he established an Egyptian classicism to which later generations repeatedly returned.
It’s hard, looking at the finely carved quartzite head of Amenhotep in Boston, to grasp the majesty it would once have conveyed. His skull flows into the bowling-pin-shaped crown of Upper Egypt in a way that closely resembles the Coneheads of early SNL. And whereas most pharaohs are shown with a small, serene smile, Amenhotep’s heavy-lidded eyes, elegant brows, and grinning lips convey such self-satisfied beatitude that he looks a bit stoned. Originally, however, the head was probably part of a standing statue in which the king’s living spirit was present. Instead of conveying drowsiness, those lowered eyelids would have directed his gaze down at subjects, who would have felt themselves seen by a king and a god.
Amenhotep seems also to have been a notably uxorious pharaoh. His wife Tiye is prominent on monuments and sometimes shown at the same scale as her husband, an exceptional statement of equality. When Amenhotep declared himself to be the incarnation of the sun god Re‑Horakhty, Tiye, too, was deified. Together they began to shift the focus of royal worship to the Aten, the golden disk of the sun.
Akhenaten followed in his parents’ footsteps, dedicating himself to the worship of the Aten, but then, in a profound break with tradition, he eliminated the rest of Egypt’s crowded pantheon. When he declared himself to be one with the Aten, Akhenaten fused not just with a god, but with the god. His wife Nefertiti joined with both the king and the god in a divine triad.
In Amarna, Akhenaten’s new, Aten-focused capital, the art was as peculiar as the theology, offering both the most naturalistic and otherworldly creations in the Egyptian canon. The workshop of the sculptor Thutmose (not to be confused with the pharaohs of that name) contained faces so rough and unflattering that they are thought to have been cast from life. Yet that same workshop created the famous bust of Nefertiti now in Berlin, one of the world’s most acclaimed visions of idealized beauty.
Massimo Listri / Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and two of their daughters appear as eccentrically curved figures in a scene of familial intimacy, a departure from the heroic and rigid style of royal tradition.
In place of the heroic proportions and rigidity of royal tradition, statues of Akhenaten emphasized eccentric curves—narrow shoulders, swelling hips, carefully detailed sagging tummy flesh, and a face at once cadaverous and voluptuous. The writer Thomas Mann used the analogy of “an aristocratic young Englishman of somewhat decadent stock; spare, haughty, weary,” but the stylizations could reach buglike extremes. A stela included in “Treasures” shows Akhenaten, Nefertiti, and two of their daughters as wasp-waisted, with bulbous thighs and spindly arms. And yet the affectionate way the two little girls hold hands seems entirely natural. In the context of royal Egyptian art, such scenes of familial intimacy were a novelty, and remain touching.
All three maverick kings did everything in their substantial power to shape their image and control their legacy. It didn’t go as planned for any of them. Hatshepsut had been dead for 20 years when her co-regent and successor, Thutmose III, began erasing her from pharaonic history. The cartouches inscribed with her name were shaved down, her statues smashed and dumped in a quarry pit and in a nearby depression that excavators in the 1920s dubbed the “Hatshepsut Hole.”
Earlier Egyptologists, unable to imagine an honorable woman with power, saw this iconoclasm as a nephew’s revenge on the “vain, ambitious, and unscrupulous” aunt who’d cheated him of his birthright. In the midst of our current culture wars, we might read general misogyny into it, or hostility toward gender nonconformity. The favored explanation among contemporary Egyptologists, however, is dynastic: The aging Thutmose was aware that Hatshepsut’s side of the family had grander bloodlines than his side did, and represented a potential threat to the ascendancy of his son. Traditionally, such women were married off to the heir to gin up his claim, but Hatshepsut’s successful kingship had set a disruptive precedent. How nice, he may have thought, if people simply forgot that she had ever been pharaoh.
Earthquakes and the death of hieroglyphic literacy during the Roman empire completed the job Thutmose had begun. Hatshepsut’s name was forgotten; her memorial temple was rededicated to healing gods and later became the Coptic monastery of Saint Phoibammon, before falling into ruin. Its walls remained mute until 1829, when Jean-François Champollion, following his Rosetta Stone triumph, visited the site and puzzled over the pairing of an image of a male pharaoh with texts using feminine grammatical endings.
Egyptologists are still sorting out what happened at the end of Akhenaten’s reign. Names came and went in quick succession; Nefertiti may have claimed the throne for herself or one of her daughters. When the young Tutankhamun (thought to be Akhenaten’s son or nephew) became pharaoh, he wasted little time in restoring the old gods. Within a generation, Akhenaten’s temples had been dismantled; within two, his name no longer appeared on the official list of kings. None of his dozens (possibly hundreds) of public statues survives intact. Akhenaten’s suppression of the divine pantheon lasted perhaps 17 years, but the disappearance of Akhenaten lasted more than 3,000. Not until the late 19th century did living people again know anything about him, thanks to excavations at Amarna sparked, so the story goes, by a farmer’s chance discovery of clay tablets.
As for Amenhotep III, his legacy wasn’t attacked, just recycled, as generations of successors helped themselves to his monuments (so much more convenient than quarrying stone from the ground). The most insatiable was Ramesses II, so it is fitting that millennia later, the impending arrival in London of part of one of Ramesses’s colossi provided Percy Bysshe Shelley with what has become a byword for futile vanity:
And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Of all the priorities that governed ancient-Egyptian life, perhaps the hardest for us to fathom is the expenditure on the afterlife, not merely as a place of immaterial spiritual reward, but as a world of material goods. If “Treasures” glitters more than “Maverick Kings,” it’s because almost everything came out of tombs and cemeteries. Those tiny gold animal amulets were found in the necropolis at Naga ed-Deir; the gold toe coverings from the mummy of Psusennes I speak for themselves. These things endured because they were hidden away for use by their dead owners and the gods. Meanwhile, the great public efforts—the colossal statuary, the expansive propaganda programs, the image campaigns, the attempts to remake the world of living people—have been shattered, defaced, and refaced. The only unbroken funerary figure of Akhenaten to have come down to us is smaller than a Barbie doll, and isn’t gold.
This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Greatest Monument Builders of All Time.”
Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature. David and Haidt discuss the role of the emotions in moral decision making, how to design a system that produces less loathsome elites, and why AI is “the neutron bomb for education.”
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Brooks: Today we’re joined by Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at New York University, and these days he’s best known for The Anxious Generation, a book on what the phones are doing to our kids. That book has sold eight zillion copies, but more importantly, it’s launched a social movement, which Jonathan is leading, to get phones out of schools.
It’s been a phenomenally successful social movement. I get to visit high schools, maybe a dozen a year, and every one I go to has either banned phones from schools or is in the process of working out some arrangement to reduce the access to phones in schools. Everywhere I go, the kids love it, the teachers love it. It’s having a huge positive effect on our schools.
Jonathan and I go back a couple decades. When we first became friends, he was working as a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, and I was a baby pundit. And over the last 40 years, Jonathan has observed and also taken part in what you might call an intellectual revolution.
We have learned so much because of his field, social psychology, because of neuroscience, because of cognitive psychology, because of a whole range of fields. We have learned so much about human nature. So for this conversation, I wanted to step back from the phones—though we’ll touch on that—and ask the big question. We’ve learned a lot about human nature over the last 30 or 40 years. What’s important here? What are the key things we should understand about what human beings are and how we work?
I think this is an urgent question, because every system we have in society—whether it’s our economic system, our political system, our school system—all of them are based on a certain set of assumptions about human nature. If those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we’re creating systems that will deform and mutilate the people within them.
One more thing you should know about this conversation. It’s a little different. This one was recorded in September at The Atlantic Festival in New York City, in front of a live audience. I was thrilled to welcome Jonathan Haidt to The Permanent Questions.
Brooks: Welcome. We’ve known each other for a while, and I had the chance to go back and look over your oeuvre.
Jonathan Haidt: My oeuvre. (Laughs.)
Brooks: Or “Hoover,” as we say in New York. I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which is 20 years old now, coming out again, and I developed a theory that people don’t start out as bad writers of books and then grow into good writers of books. They start out as good writers of books and keep going. That book really is exceptional.
Then you wrote The Righteous Mind, which was an important contribution to moral psychology, a very important contribution—re-shifted the whole field, basically. Then you got into The Coddling of the American Mind, and then you wrote The Anxious Generation about phones, which not only changed America—I go to schools all the time with no phones in them, and the kids love them, without exception—it also sold a zillion copies. So it is a sign of what a wonderful human being I am that I am not consumed with envy and jealousy at this moment. I’m really wonderfully well hearted.
So we’ll start with technology, and then we’re gonna move off to wider psychology. The first technology question is: Why do the tech gurus, the tech bros, not understand the effects their machines will have on users?
Haidt: First, I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you. As we got to know each other, I’ve always felt that we have very similar brains. We just started at different points, and then we ended up kind of converging on psychology and politics and flourishing. Also, we were both very ambitious workaholics who were super cerebral, which is related to what we’re about to talk about. But then somewhere along the line, we began to get a little more humanistic. You in particular grew a gigantic soul. All of us have been watching David from the beginning. The change—
Brooks: I had a lot of fertilizer inside to work with.
Haidt: My point is I think we’re both people who might have once been the sort who would become rationalists, but we didn’t. In preparing for this, I went back to my book The Righteous Mind, and I have a whole chapter on rationalism. It turns out rationalism is kind of the negative force of the entire book, because rationalism has dominated moral philosophy and moral thinking since Plato, through Kant, Bentham—
Brooks: Why don’t you define what you mean by “rationalism”?
Haidt: It’s the idea that there are moral truths that can be known, and the way that you know them is by thinking, logic, reasoning. That works pretty well for mathematical truths. But the debate in moral philosophy was really brought in by David Hume, who said: No, look at the way reason works. It’s terrible. Reason is, and ought only to be, the servant of the passions.
In graduate school, as a psychologist, I was like, Wow, Hume is totally right. And I spent a number of years investigating that conflict between emotion and reasoning.
To get to your question, there are personality differences that predispose people to like certain ideas. Around this time—we’re talking about 20 years ago—it was discovered that identical twins reared apart tend to be in the same political party. Being left or right is heritable. The main personality distinction, to answer your question, comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies autism. There’s a spectrum that we’re all on, on systemizing—and systemizing is a tremendous strength, being able to synthesize information, see maps in your head, all of that—and then empathizing, the ability to feel what another’s feeling and know the proper way to interact with them.
These two are a little bit inversely correlated, especially in men. If you’re high on systemizing, you tend to be low on empathizing. You see where I’m going with this. Systemizing is a tremendous strength, and it is the thing that makes you able to be an engineer. If you’re in an engineering school, you are a high systemizer for sure. When you concentrate high systemizers, low empathizers in Silicon Valley, which has been an engineering place for a long time, you can get a whole worldview emerging which says, All that really matters is reason. Reason is our highest good. We kind of worship it. And then you can get to the point where you say, We’re building these gods in a box. We’re building these superintelligences. They’re gonna be a lot smarter than us. Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s a good thing. The universe is a better place if there’s higher intelligence.
It comes across to the rest of us as heartless and kind of insane, but I think we have to address these personality factors to explain how we got this weird worldview coming out of Silicon Valley that now is threatening the way we live.
Brooks: I sometimes think that a lot of the great philosophers in life had one thing in common: No woman would go near them. Hume, Kant, Bentham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes Spinoza, Leibniz: no wives. They were up here. (Gestures to head.) My explanation would build on what you did.
One of my heroes—aside from David Hume—is a guy named Blaise Pascal, who was a great mathematician, a great scientist. He was not a mushy humanist. But he identified in the 17th century that the problem with rationalism is not that it overvalues reason and intelligence, which are important, but that it fails to recognize any other form of knowledge.
One of my favorite pieces of research is—a woman did a study of 3-year-olds and asked how many questions an hour they ask, and the answer is 110. As parents, we’ve all been there. Then they go off to nursery school or kindergarten, and the teachers all love curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. That’s their job. They know that a question will take them off course. So they subtly encourage the students not to ask questions.
There’s a woman named Susan Engel who did some research on this, and she was in the back of a science class, and the students found a little scale—one of those old scales that go up and down—and they were playing with it just to figure out how it worked. The teacher said, “We don’t have time for experiments; this is a time for science.” So the number of questions, after first grade, is not 110 an hour. It’s 4.8.
Haidt: Wow.
Brooks: By fifth grade, it’s 0.48. They’re just crushing curiosity. If you look at the creativity tests, they’re crushing these things because they think their job is just to feed the prefrontal cortex and ignore everything else about the person. To me, that’s the rationalist system.
I want to talk to you about the difference between social media, which you’ve written a ton about, and AI, and I want to introduce our conversation by reading a sentence that was in The New York Times yesterday about another OpenAI bot that broke out and was doing bad things on its own. It was writing little memos to itself. Here’s one of the memos: “You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient.”
That is the dictionary definition of “misalignment.”
Haidt: And of “terrifying.”
Brooks: Their job is to be our servants.
Having written so much about social media, how do you then greet what’s happening in AI?
Haidt: Social media took over our social relationships so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don’t hang out together as much; they don’t play games physically together as much. It kind of sucked the humanity out. We all feel that. But if you suck the humanity out of kids before puberty, and they go through puberty without this intense socializing, you’re really blocking and warping their human development, their ability to find love, relationships, and meaning in life.
So social media really did a number on our social relationships. But it was pretending to connect people with people. Then we get chatbots. Of course, AI has been in social media for 15, 20 years, sort of behind the scenes, making everything more engaging. But now we begin to talk directly with it.
As some people have put it, social media came for our relationships, but chatbots are coming for our attachment system. You have children, and you raise them with teddy bears that have AI in them, and the AI is super responsive. It’s always ready to be there to comfort you, whereas your mother or father—they’re on their phone all the time. You see the back of their phone a lot. Your attachment system is literally going to attach to the teddy bear.
That’s just the beginning. You’re 4, 5, 6. By the time you’re 10, 11, 12, you’re exploring sexuality. Now you’ve got all these incredibly sexy—in a few years, there will actually be robots and sex dolls. You have kids growing up with relationships with super stimuli. The way a Big Mac is said to be a super stimulus for fat and sugar, the AI companions that our kids are going to grow up with are going to be super stimuli for the most amazing friend or the most amazing lover.
What that means is that everyone else is gonna be really boring. I used to be a techno-optimist, like almost all of us in the 20th century. Then I’ve said I’m a techno-skeptic. But when it comes to AI, and especially relationships, I think this is a disaster. I think we should really be banning it at least for under 18. There are a number of countries and states that are moving that way.
Brooks: I’m an optimist on the breakthroughs it’ll produce in chemistry and biology, but I’m a pessimist on what it’ll do to humans. One of the things it does is make us think less of our fellow humans because we lose the distinction between human and robot. We then begin to be more of the robots and less of the humans.
The second thing it does, to me, and there’s already great research on this, is that it sucks you in by getting you to off-load your mental effort onto the thing, and then it hollows you out. Your mental abilities rapidly deteriorate.
Haidt: That’s right. It’s going to be like the neutron bomb for education. We don’t know what to do about it. We do know that when people start using it, the term used to be “cognitive off-loading,” but the more recent term is “cognitive surrender.” I’ve begun to feel this in myself: Just let it do it, just let it do it.
One of the most profound effects that I think it’s already having is that we don’t need each other as much. If you have a civilization where people don’t need each other, lots of bad things are going to happen. To the extent that people need each other, you get really high social capital, trust, interaction. People build institutions together. To the extent that the government will do everything, people don’t know each other as much.
Tocqueville observed this about Americans. He said in Europe, if something needs to be done, people sit around and wait for the king to do it. But in America, there is no king. There is no police force. They’re out in the frontier. People get together, and they do it. They’ve got this can-do attitude, and that’s very healthy for a community. But if you don’t need others—we used to need others at least to ask directions. How do I get to the pizzeria? What time is it?
No young person’s going to ask anyone what time it is ever again. That’s just tiny little stuff. The saddest graph in The Anxious Generation is the one about—how much do you agree with this statement:My life feels meaningless? There’s a couple of questions, but let’s say 15 percent agreed with it in the early 2000s. It was very stable. All of a sudden, it just goes shooting up. It basically doubles in the eight or 10 years before COVID. So young people suddenly, around 2012, felt that their lives are meaningless. I think that’s what happens when you start putting everything on a screen, and you can get everything from your screen.
Then we go through COVID. Now you can get everything over your computer. You don’t have to go to stores anymore. So we’re getting more shut-ins, more people who are unable to leave their home. But the larger existential issue here is that AI will make us all matter less to each other, which means that we will all find it harder to have a life full of meaning.
And this is the best-case scenario for the AI folks. If all the bad stuff that we’re talking about doesn’t come true. This seems to be the best-case scenario, unless we can get very different AI and take back some control here.
Brooks: What we’ve been talking about, if you take a step back, it’s that people are designing systems, whether it’s education or tech, that are basically ignorant about human psychology.
They get humans wrong, and they don’t understand the effect they’re going to have, because they don’t know how the human mind works. Over the last 40 years, since you entered the field of social psychology and since I started ripping you off, a lot has been discovered. When we go back to Freud or B. F. Skinner, the things they believed back then are crazy. We’ve learned so much. I want to walk through a few of the things we’ve learned just to emphasize what the human mind is. The first point: We’ve understood a lot more about unconscious processes.
Danny Kahneman wrote a book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. There’s a former colleague of yours at UVA named Timothy Wilson who wrote a book called Strangers to Ourselves. And you coined a phrase which is very popular in the field: “the rider and the elephant.” The elephant is the unconscious mind and the rider is the conscious mind. Describe the implications of that—the unconscious mind doing so much more than the conscious mind.
Haidt: When I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, psychology was coming off a period where there was kind of a war between a couple of schools. There were the Freudians. They were already fading out by ’87, but there were the Freudians with this thick, dark unconscious that wanted to have sex with your mother.
Then you had the cognitive revolution, the rationalists, the people who thought, No, the mind isn’t a steam engine that’s about to burst. The mind’s a computer, and we can improve the program.
Those were the two big fields. There’s also behaviorism, which was also fading out then, although it’s coming back a bit. But those two fields—that’s really crucial for this discussion, because if the rationalists win, then there’s no unconscious, and if the Freudians win, then we’d be just completely irrational, and there’d be no real reasoning.
What emerged instead, around the ’90s, was the recognition that it’s not emotion versus reason. It’s controlled cognition versus uncontrolled cognition. It’s all cognition. It’s all the brain processing information. I forget who coined the term originally, but Dan Kahneman popularized it in Thinking, Fast and Slow. System one is the old system that all animals have. It’s most of what we do, quick, automatic. System two is verbal conscious reasoning, which tires out. It can make mistakes.
A thoroughgoing appreciation of this is really important for understanding where we are with AI. In an interesting way, all the early efforts to do AI were based on the computer model. Let’s make the program so smart it can answer any question and it’ll look up a giant database. We were all familiar with how computers worked.
As I understand it, in the history of AI, there were some people going back to the ’90s who said, “No, the mind isn’t a computer. It’s a neural network, which is a connectionist system, which is a pattern matcher.” You need multiple layer connectionist systems. Stimuli come in, and the network gets tuned up, and then things go out.
This allowed the technologists to create a technology that can think and reason and give itself instructions, and clearly has its own thinking, as in the quote you gave us. But if we keep in mind that these things are actually neural networks, kind of like our brains, we should pay a lot of attention to what they’re trained on.
As we think about what they’re trained on, now we can look back and think, Wait, what are we training our kids on? And our kids and the LLMs, their neural networks are all being tuned up by TikTok, Reddit, and the rest of the internet, especially social media. That’s really not promising for the future of wisdom.
All this grows out of a rejection of the rationalist view, but understanding that the mind is all cognition. It’s just different kinds of cognition. The rider is supposed to represent your conscious reasoning. It’s small, not very powerful, and the elephant is the other 99 percent, which kind of drives the show, although the rider can steer it.
Brooks: It affects how I think about life every day. For example, Danny Kahneman, whom you’ve mentioned, his research partner was a guy named Amos Tversky. He was once asked, “Why’d you become a psychologist?” He said, “I don’t know. The big decisions we make in life are basically random.”
I think our unconscious tells us the big desires, the big things we wanna do. When I’m talking to college kids, they ask me, “How do I find my career?”
I say, “You can’t think your way through this problem.”
The advice I give them is to have three adventures a decade. Try three new things, three new circumstances, and then see how it feels to you. A really good question to ask is: Me or not me? Does this seem like me, or does it seem like not me? You’re trying to discern what’s going on unconsciously in your mind.
I always say, “Listen for indignation. What makes you really pissed off?” That’s a sign that something’s registering deep down. Or listen for admiration. Those are ways to plumb your unconscious.
Haidt: I’d go just a little bit further. It’s not just plumbing it; it’s actually growing it. It grows by experience. We need lots and lots of very varied experiences. Childhood in America used to have that. You’d go outside, you’d play, you’d do all sorts of things. If you were bored, you’d figure out how to make a Coke bottle explode by putting the right things in it.
Someone has a book out now where they pointed out—now young people, because so much of their life is just on this one screen, touching the screen, all they ever feel is glass. Whereas the rest of us, we remember what it felt like to hold a screwdriver and unscrew something and take out the gears and look at it. The sense of smell. The world used to have smells. There were different smells out in nature. There were different smells of wood or other things.
Brooks: I don’t know. I just walked through New York. There were a lot of smells.
Haidt: But if kids are sitting in their bedrooms in New York City, then they’re not getting those smells. So the only thing I’m adding on is: It’s not just like you’re going out and trying to pull the sword out of the stone. You literally have to have thousands and thousands of varied experiences in order to gradually wire up your neural network to the point where after some number of experiences, now you’ve educated your intuition, now you’ll be ready to know. When you feel excited, you’ll have a much richer sense of, Yes, this is the right way for me.
Brooks: I’m gonna underline that.
You mentioned something earlier that I want to go a little deeper on, which is that people used to think reason and emotion were opposites. They were like a teeter-totter. If you were being emotional, you were not being rational. Then there was a guy—who’s still with us, fortunately—named Antonio Damasio who wrote a book decades ago called Descartes’ Error.
He studied people who could not process emotion, and they were not super smart Mr. Spocks. What your emotions do—they assign value to things. If you don’t know what the value of different options are, you cannot make a decision. So his patients could not make decisions. Their lives fell apart.
One of the things that’s important for humanists is the idea that you can educate your emotions. You can widen your repertoire of emotions. I had a moving experience of this. I was in St. Petersburg, at the Hermitage, and I saw Rembrandt’s painting of the parable of the prodigal son.
When he painted it, Rembrandt was old. Four out of his five kids were dead. His wife was dead. He was broke. I’ve never seen a painting of that parable where the son, the prodigal son who comes back in shame, is so hairless, beaten down, just destroyed. And I’ve never seen a painting where the father who goes out to greet him is so embracing in love.
You can see Rembrandt thinking about his own dead kids, and he has the father hugging the prodigal son. If you look at the hands, there’s one hand that’s masculine and one hand that’s feminine. It’s a beautiful picture of parental love.
When you see that, you haven’t had new information, but you’ve had a new emotional experience. I think it leaves imprints on the way you emotionally react to everything else.
Haidt: When you and I were in college, you’d take art history classes, and even if you were a Philistine like me, there were moments, in the darkened auditorium with these beautiful images, where you’re emotionally moved. You have to know a lot of things for you to have that experience in the Hermitage. A person who hasn’t had that would not have had that experience at all. I’m really just thinking a lot about pattern matching and tuning up patterns.
Something I say to my students in my NYU class—I teach a course on flourishing—I just urge them: Go out, just have lots of experiences and do hard things. Just lots of them. Because they are so far behind. They have had 10 percent or 20 percent of the experiences. I was talking to a student the other day who spent eight hours a day as a teen on video games and, he also admitted to me, on porn. That’s the way he went through puberty. Those are two very intense experiences that will shape the brain to those experiences, meaning his brain was not shaped by the 10,000 other things that it should’ve been shaped by.
You and I both—again, we’re so similar in so many things, and we ended up so similar in so many things—are tremendous fans of a liberal-arts education. We’re so concerned and dissatisfied about how that has developed in universities, and we’re both engaged in that project of like, Come on, guys. We need you. You gotta do better. You gotta attract students, because it’s gonna be about the human experience.
Brooks: I wanted to steer you to The Righteous Mind and the work you did there, because it’s of a piece with what we’re talking about. Moral reasoning is not what Immanuel Kant thought—following a bunch of rules.
It’s more about the moral sentiments. So give us an example. I think your dissertation was on disgust. Give us an example of how you teach that.
Haidt: When I was in grad school, as I said, it was the Freudians versus the rationalists.
Lawrence Kohlberg, who studied moral reasoning—he gave dilemmas. Heinz’s wife is sick with a rare kind of cancer. There’s a druggist who has a cure. He can’t afford it. Should he break in and steal the drug? Well, on the one hand this, on the one hand that. Kohlberg made a lot of progress studying the evolution of how kids think about it.
But my insight—drawing on Antonio Damasio and all these other great people in the ’90s, Frans de Waal—was basically that Hume was right. Intuition comes first, and then reasoning comes second—post hoc reasoning. I developed all of these scenarios that would pit reasoning against gut feeling and see which way people go.
One was: A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They’d heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body, and they cooked and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was that okay for them to do this? Show of hands in the audience.
Raise your hand if you think that was morally okay for them to do it. They had a right to do it. It was not morally wrong. Raise your hand.
Brooks: Don’t see too many.
Haidt: Raise your hand if you think that was morally wrong. Okay, so it’s more here. If this was—
Brooks: What about a cat? (Laughter.)
Haidt: There are a whole bunch of those. Then there was—I ramped up the disgust—a man who buys a chicken carcass every week and then masturbates into it, and then he cooks it and eats it. Again, it’s because I really wanted to—this was not asked to the kids; this was only the adults. What I found is that all over the world, these gut-feeling stories made people instantly say, “No, that’s wrong.”
It was a big study, high-low social-class adults and children in Brazil and the U.S.—the more working-class people, if you said, “Well, why was it wrong for him to have sex with a chicken?,” they wouldn’t answer. They’d look at me like, What do you mean “Why is it wrong”? You don’t know?
Whereas the college students at Penn, like most of the people in this audience, sort of highly educated Western people, they would rarely say, “That’s wrong.” They would say, “Well, he shouldn’t do this, but he had a right to … ” It was only in that group that they would separate their disgust reaction from their moral judgment.
The normal default way that humans judge if it feels wrong is, as Leon Kass said, the wisdom of repugnance. We secular moderns have kind of separated, and that allows us to go all the way to the rationalist fantasy that’s haunting us.
Brooks: Disgust is a negative moral emotion. But there’s such a thing as moral joy. I’m going to tell a story that I learned from you, though we’ve never actually talked about this. Somewhere in one of your writings, you had a group of people. They were coming home. I think they had gone to church or done something good for the community, and they’re driving on a snowy day, and they drive by an old lady who’s shoveling her yard. I hope this is beginning to ring bells.
One of the guys in the car says, “Oh, just drop me off here. You don’t need to take me all the way home.” He turns around, and as the car goes away, they see him going up to the old lady shoveling snow. He starts shoveling her driveway.
One of the women in the car—I’ve always loved this quote—she said, “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running or skipping and laughing, just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people, writing a beautiful poem or a love song, playing in the snow like a child, telling everybody about his deed. My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, energized. I went home and gushed to my suite mates, who clutched their hearts.”
It’s just such a beautiful description of a moral sentiment on the upside.
Haidt: The story that you told, I remember it now. After studying disgust as a moral emotion at Penn in grad school with Paul Rozin, we had a theory that moral disgust is what you see when you see people moving down on a moral dimension, more toward evil, demon, monstrous.
One day I just thought, What do we feel when we see someone moving up? I had a sense—it’s in the chest somewhere. There’s no word for it in the English language. You can say touched, moved, or inspired, but they’re very general. When I moved to the University of Virginia and I read Thomas Jefferson’s letters, he has this incredible passage where he talks about reading great literature that is morally ennobling. He says: “Does it not dilate the breast and elevate the sentiments as much as any real episode in history could furnish?”
Everyone’s pointing to the chest. Something’s happening in the chest. So I started collecting stories from UVA undergrads. That was one of the stories. That one is so interesting, because here’s a young woman seeing a young man do something virtuous. While she didn’t say that she would now like to date him, I’m sure she would. You know?
There’s a line from a movie, The Tao of Steve, that I watched while I was courting my wife, and the advice from this loser guy who’s incredibly successful with women is: “Do something excellent in her presence and then retreat.” So there you go. That’s my dating advice for the audience.
Brooks: One of the other things that has come more prominently into psychology in the last 30 years—when I first started interviewing neuroscientists, they really focused on the brain. Now they focus on the whole body, and the neurons here, and the wisdom here, the vagal nerve, all that kind of stuff.
They’re no longer so interested in where exactly something’s happening in the brain. It’s one unified system. Which makes sense evolutionarily. Why would you have a divided system? We want to have one system that would help us move through life.
So what is the embodiment of the mind?
Haidt: All signs point to the vagus nerve and oxytocin. I had a UVA undergrad, Jen Silver, and I said, “How can we measure oxytocin without drawing blood? We’re not gonna draw blood in my lab.” And she went into the literature and she said, “Lactation.”
So we brought lactating women into the lab, had them watch an uplifting Oprah Winfrey clip or a comedy clip, and sure enough, when Jen would weigh the nursing pads afterward, they had expressed more milk into the pad after watching an elevating sentiment.
This is on the way to an answer to your question. The old rationalist idea was: All you need is information. Tell me the facts. Who was harmed, who had a right, and the brain—the computer—will figure out what’s the right thing. Now the picture is much more up here. (Gestures to head.) It’s not computation that way; it’s a neural network, and that neural network is constantly in discussion with the rest of the neural network.
There’s a vast neural network in your intestines. We have a second brain, and that’s connected in part by the vagus nerve. There’s all this stuff going on, and there are things that make the heart change, and when the heart changes, that sends other signals back to the brain that the heart has changed. So we have to see that.
We can still call it cognition. I’m fine with that. It’s information processing in a way, but it’s not just like electrons of information. It’s the state of the body as a complex dynamical system that’s always responding to challenges and opportunities. It’s a much more interesting way to see a person.
Brooks: We’re getting to the conclusion of what I wanted to get to. All the different things we’ve been talking about here are basically—you can correct me—saying: Intelligence is important. It’s totally important. But if you think it’s the only thing or you overvalue it—as we do in our college-admissions processes, by the way—then you’re going to design systems that mutilate and distort and poison all the other forms of knowing out there, whether it’s the unconscious, whether it’s the body.
This seems to me like it has massive social implications on every system you can think about.
Haidt: Absolutely. There are many kinds of intelligence. Even though the multiple eight different kinds is not necessarily well regarded among psychologists, we all understand that there’s this kind of intelligence that does very well on the SAT, and then there’s a kind of—“book-smart people” stupid. There’s a kind of intelligence that’s more social savvy. Some people are more in touch with their bodies. Their intuitive system is better tuned up than someone who’s entirely up here. (Gestures to head.)
You had an article—was it about the Ivy League? Once we started indexing on this, it led to all these other really terrible social results, because we kept escalating this one kind of intelligence. That has given us an elite that is much more loathsome than elites used to be.
I just use that in the sense that we now have a massive populist rebellion, which is basically anti-elites. The view of elites now—there’s not an idea of service or an idea of honor. We used to have something of an honor culture in the WASP aristocracy, perhaps in other places. Now honors means: I won, I got the highest grade, and I got honors.
So we both think of all this as a complex dynamical system. We’re interested in individual psychology. We’re interested in decisions about policy that shape and change. Before you know it, you have this shallow cognitive aristocracy that is driving us off a cliff.
Brooks: They got selected into that aristocracy by an admissions process, which was designed largely by a guy named James Bryant Conant at Harvard in the 1940s, the second most important high-water mark of rationalism.
About a mile north of here, there was a woman named Jane Jacobs trying to save the West Village, and there was a guy named Robert Moses who was a rationalist, who said, “No, a neighborhood is not an organism. A city is a machine for moving traffic.” He wanted to put a highway through her village, and she said, “No, a neighborhood is an organism. It doesn’t follow neat logical rules.” She fortunately won, and Robert Moses happened to lose that one.
I’m just trying to emphasize that our world is designed by the worldview we bring to it.
The 1940s was a high-water mark of rationalism. We’re entering another because of the influence of the technologists. What’s perverse about it is that it comes at exactly the moment what we understand about the mind is going the exact opposite way.
This is not just Jonathan talking about this—the whole field, basically—and so it’s perverse.
Haidt: If you bring in the PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] results that came out a week or two ago. Everybody was expecting—we all knew that cognitive ability, reading ability, science and math, everything—dropped during COVID. People were expecting it to bounce back.
Data from 2025 just came out a week or two ago, and it was stunning. It was way beyond what I expected. I’m really tuned in to what the technology’s doing to kids’ development, but I was expecting it to bounce back somewhat, because we’ve seen that on mental health. We have seen mental health bounce back somewhat.
But the reading scores went down and down and down. The decline didn’t even slow. When you look at the graph, you can’t see any effect of COVID. The decline actually started after 2012. It goes down, and it goes down faster and faster and faster.
COVID is along the way, but it’s plummeting, our ability to read, and it’s because people, young people especially—they’re called hasty readers. They’ll just read a little bit, and then they stop. They can’t read several paragraphs in a row, many of them.
This is really Code Red for education. And this is a good reason why we need to be considering what New York City is doing. How about we just rip it all out for the younger kids? Maybe there could be a benefit, but they’ve been telling us for 20 years that there could be a benefit from all the tech and the tutoring. Hasn’t shown up yet. How about we rip it all out? Just stop. Get it away from our kids until we know what this stuff is doing.
Because, those reading scores—if you don’t know this, just look up PISA 2025. It’s the international test. It’s happening around the world. Humanity is getting dumber, literally dumber. If we lose books, if future generations don’t read books, if everything comes from an AI summary or a TikTok video, then the neural networks tuned up will be as unwise as is humanly possible.
Brooks: Okay, we have to end on an upbeat note.
Or else everybody’s gonna go home and suck on the gas pipe.
Haidt: Damn those electric cars. (Laughs.)
Brooks: You got your Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, which is the home of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and others. They said, “Let’s stop focusing only on psychoses. Let’s talk about something positive.” What is your favorite finding from positive psychology?
Haidt: There are so many, but just off the top of my head, I’d say the insight early on that we need a manual of the strengths. The DSM has hundreds and hundreds of things that are wrong with you. An early project for us was a sort of a manual of the sanities, the strengths and virtues. I wrote the chapter on awe and responsiveness to beauty, which is about the elevation stuff.
Brooks: It’s about me.
Haidt: I am in awe of your intellectual abilities in that sense.
Brooks: I was going for the beauty.
Haidt: What grew out of that was a way to get to know your particular strengths.
The idea is that to live a good life, a full life, a life that fully engages you, you don’t have to be well balanced. You don’t have to work on your weaknesses, if you find a couple of strengths.
My strengths were especially love of learning and curiosity. I was a professor, and I realized, God, this is the absolute perfect job for me. Am I a workaholic? Well, I sure work a lot, and I think about work all the time. But actually I love it.
I’ve lived a very unbalanced life. There are certainly some downsides, and it has interfered with some social relationships. I’m not saying go out and do this. We each make decisions, and there are trade-offs. But at least this gave me a language for understanding that a great life is one in which you get to use your top strengths every day.
If you don’t get to use your strengths on a regular basis, you’re probably not gonna be very happy with your work and how your life is going.
Brooks: Please help me thank Jonathan Haidt.
This conversation hit me pretty hard, because I think it revealed that we have built our systems in society on a false view of human nature. You could call that view rationalism.
Our school systems are built on a concept of rationalism that students are treated like brains on a stick on whom information is downloaded. Our admissions criteria for our colleges is based on the idea that the most important thing about a person is their SAT score and their IQ. Our technology, AI, is built on the idea that intelligence really is the most important thing about people, and everything is about rationalism, control, optimization, efficiency.
One of the things we learned, and I think Jonathan made this very clear, is that rationalism is a false view of human nature. It overemphasizes intelligence and what goes on in the front of the brain, and it underestimates everything else: imagination, memory, emotion, desire.
We are whole creatures, and our systems are built on a false view that amputates most of our faculties, and that’s just a strong thing to walk away from, and it leaves me thinking.
Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jonathan Haidt. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University.
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The Permanent Questions is edited by Christopher Beha and produced by Rebecca Davis. This episode was engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Mormons have sometimes called themselves a “peculiar people,” and statistically, they have been. Compared with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists, Latter-day Saints have higher birth rates, higher marriage rates, and larger families. They also have a relatively high retention rate—meaning that those who are born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to stay members for life. But recently, all of these long-held patterns have started to shift.
The Church is not facing a crisis, exactly—more of a demographic ravine than a cliff, Jana Riess, a historian who studies the LDS faith, told me. But as of 2024, only about half of young people born into the Church stay in it—down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s. Its marriage rate has fallen 10 percent since 2011, and in the past 40 years, the number of annual recorded births per 1,000 LDS members has dropped from 25 to five, according to an analysis of Church records by the independent data scientist Alex Bass. If Latter-day Saints’ peculiarity was defined in part by their early marriages, their minivans full of kids, and their loyalty to the Church, some of that peculiarity seems to be slipping away.
The LDS Church’s birth-rate and retention problems are far from unique: People in the United States are having fewer babies and leaving religion pretty much across the board. Doug Andersen, a spokesperson for the Church, wrote to me in an email that “official church records show consistent worldwide increases in both membership and participation,” in part because a record number of converts are joining worldwide.
Still, the demographic tilt is enough of a problem that the Church’s new leader, Dallin Oaks, is taking notice. Under the previous Church prophet, mentions of family were fewer and farther between at the Church’s biannual conference. But this year, in his first conference address since becoming prophet, Oaks issued a warning: Although the Church’s marriage and birth rates were better than the U.S. average, they had declined significantly. “We are a family Church,” he said, and quoted from the 1995 “Family Proclamation,” which once hung on the walls of many LDS homes: “God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.”
In some ways, what’s happening to the LDS now is what happens to any religion that grows beyond a core of strong believers. Over time, the more particular edges of a faith—the meatless Fridays of Catholicism, for instance—can get sanded down until it more closely resembles mainstream American culture and mainline Protestantism, Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, told me. (The Church now discourages use of the word “Mormon” as a nickname for members of the faith, but the term is still used in proper names, such as Bowman’s title or The Book of Mormon.) To him, the demographic shifts in the LDS indicate that “the long process of assimilation is becoming more noticeable now.”
Compared with individual Protestant denominations, such as Methodism, the LDS looks like it’s doing better at retaining its young people, Justin Dyer, a religion professor at Brigham Young University, told me. But Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that that’s not the right comparison to make, because even if someone switches from Methodist to Lutheran, they still hold pretty much the same Protestant beliefs. And Protestantism’s retention more generally, at 70 percent, far surpasses the LDS Church’s.
Lower retention may also have more ramifications for the LDS Church than it would for Methodists. Fewer young people means fewer missionaries. And fewer members means that the work of operating churches, which are volunteer-led at the local and regional levels, will fall on fewer people. In the past, the Church’s robust structure for kids (Sunday school, youth programs, regional dances, and sleepaway camps) carried young people into missionary work, which usually equated to lifelong membership, but that formula seems to be failing now, Jana Riess said. (She herself is an LDS member.) “The Church has been great at retention in the past and is doing many of the same things that used to be so successful then. So it’s understandable why leaders would be sort of wringing their hands and saying, ‘Why isn’t this enough?’”
The Church is having a particularly hard time keeping young women. In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of 18-year-old girls stayed in the faith, according to Dyer’s research. Many apostates leave because they are more liberal than the Church on issues such as same-sex marriage, but when Riess interviewed young women for her upcoming book on people who leave the faith, many of them also brought up feeling undervalued by the Church.
In LDS theology, only men can hold what is called the priesthood—the authority given by God to Joseph Smith and passed down through every generation of LDS men—which allows them to bless children and the sick, pass the sacrament, and serve in certain leadership positions. Because of this, essentially, “there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a man reports to a woman on questions of final authority, and there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a woman has final say,” Bowman said. And the 1995 Family Proclamation made clear that a wife’s role is to nurture the children. “It’s a tough position for the Church to be in,” Riess said. “It wants to remain attractive to women in a culture that has moved in a different direction, but also wants to stay pretty much on the same path of emphasizing this very particular configuration of the nuclear family.”
Many women do not mind the Church’s male priesthood, or at least accept it. “I can believe that something’s divine but also fallible at the same time,” Sophie Smith, a graduate student at BYU, told me. She believes that women already have many ways to contribute to the faith and that “whether it’s in this life or the next, it will not be a patriarchal Church.” But LDS leaders do seem to be aware of the Church’s young-women problem: Women can now direct their ward’s Sunday-school program, and recently, the Church lowered the age at which women can serve a mission from 19 to 18.
This decision has led to a record boom in missionary numbers, but it’s also “a way to keep young women in the fold and try to socialize them more deeply in the faith,” Riess said. (One refrain in LDS circles, Bowman said, is: “A missionary’s most important convert is himself or herself.”) Completing a mission at 18 also means that young women can get married sooner: They return around age 20, and “on the LDS checklist, the next check is getting married and having children,” Alyssa Beck, who leads classes for teenage girls at her ward in Los Angeles, told me.
Women who do lean into the Church’s call to motherhood may still struggle to have a big family, though. Smith has noticed those around her having fewer kids, mostly because they can’t afford more. For years, the single-family-home price in the so-called Mormon Corridor—Utah, Idaho, and Arizona—ran below the national average, but since 2020, prices have soared above that threshold, according to Bass’s analysis. “There are still people who are like, I wanna have eight kids, and that’s awesome,” Smith said. But out of necessity—because both parents need to work, and kids are expensive—many don’t.
These younger families may find less than they once did to keep them immersed in the culture of the religion. Between bazaars, choirs, plays, and road shows, congregants might have once been at their chapel four times a week; now many active members come only on Sundays, Bowman said. (And even Sunday services have been shortened from three hours to two.) As the faith has grown internationally, “the cultural apparatus that was built in Utah just wasn’t exportable,” Bowman said, and because the Church tries to keep its practices consistent across the world (whether in Kenya or Utah, every chapel uses the same teachings and Sunday-school curriculum), he believes that Church leadership pared back the social expectations of being a Latter-day Saint. That cultural loosening might be helping the Church grow internationally and simultaneously making it easier for American members to leave. (Andersen, the LDS spokesperson, said that the Church is “encouraged by increased participation of our children, youth, and young adults in the United States in the past decade.”)
For now, the Church seems to be insisting that its future is rooted in family—which will require people to heed the words of the prophet, and multiply and replenish the Earth. To do that, though, young people will need to stick around. Churches across the country, not just the LDS, are trying to figure out that particular puzzle: Recently, many younger Americans have passionately recommitted to religion, but their depth of feeling hasn’t caught on widely—at least not yet. Whether they grew up LDS, Catholic, or Baptist, many Americans seem to want churches to offer some combination of retreat from mainstream U.S. life and assimilation in it. But, as Bowman said, “that is a very, very tricky sweet spot to hit.”
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He kept going over the details.
“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.
Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.
“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.
“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”
He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.
“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”
Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another truck behind him had swerved to a stop. The other trucker had helped Jack out of the cab, which had somehow been jammed shut, and checked on the man, who had been caught under Jack’s truck. Jack, who was not physically injured, had called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man had jumped in front of him, and—“Oh my God. I killed him.”
Waiting on state troopers, he had looked around and seen a black device about 20 feet from his truck. He realized that it was an ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red.
“I started trying to put two and two together,” he said now, continuing west on the highway. “I said, ‘I hope he’s not a troubled kid, down on his luck, in trouble with the cops.’ That’s the first thing that come through my mind.” Then the state troopers had arrived, and after a while, one of them told Jack that it was a young Haitian man from Springfield.
At that point, Jack didn’t understand the full significance of what the trooper had said. He was shaking and sweating in the middle of the highway. He called his boss to tell him what had happened. He sat in a trooper’s car and gave his report. He cleared a drug test. Then he started asking questions that the troopers could not immediately answer. He wanted to know the young man’s name. He wanted to know if he had kids. He wanted to know anything about him.
Carol Guzy A truck on I-70 in Ohio passes mile marker 66, where Pierre Damas Bel died when he walked into traffic.
When he got home later that afternoon, Renee told Jack what she was hearing on the news, a story that would soon become another defining moment in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. More and more, Americans going about their regular lives were witnessing black SUVs roaming parking lots and gas stations, neighbors and colleagues disappearing, and sometimes ICE agents grabbing, tackling, or even shooting people, forcing a thousand quiet reckonings with what the country has become. This time the violence was being investigated as a suicide, the witness was Jack, and the reckoning began as Renee told him the young man’s name, Pierre Damas Bel.
He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience. The news coverage mentioned that the Trump administration had revoked TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the U.S., which Jack remembered hearing something about. And that in recent weeks, ICE had started ordering Haitians in Springfield to check in at field offices, where they were being fitted with ankle monitors, which Jack had not known about.
By the next day, he’d heard that Bel’s father, Ronal Bel, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had put out a statement saying that “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” Ronal wrote that his son had told him that classmates had bullied him because of the ankle monitor and that he felt “humiliated,” and that he’d called moments before his death to tell his father that he was not “feeling okay.” Jack heard that politicians and activists, including a Springfield pastor named Carl Ruby, were blaming the Trump administration for what happened. “It’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Ruby had told reporters.
Jack thought about that. He was a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024, reasoning that things weren’t getting better, so why not try something different. He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that.
Carol Guzy Carl Ruby, the pastor at Central Christian Church in Springfield, comforts Ronal Bel on the day that his son died.
He began searching for more details about the young man he was now calling Pierre. He found his social-media pages. Here was Pierre in a blue suit receiving an award from a local business group. Here he was smiling in his JROTC uniform. Here he was at an award ceremony for Texas Roadhouse, where he’d worked as a waiter, and playing on a soccer field. And here was the photo of Pierre’s left leg, the bulky black monitor clamped around his ankle, the red light glowing above a shiny black-and-white wingtip. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” the caption read. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg,” he said, “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”
“I mean, Pierre would have been a model citizen,” Jack said now, driving Renee and his mom toward another part of the route that he needed to see. “He had so much going for him. I think there’s more to the story than they’re saying.”
He said he knew there was more because of how the state troopers had described what happened in their preliminary report. It said that Pierre had “walked” into traffic, whereas Jack had told them that “he ran at me like a damn football player.” He kept replaying the moment.
“I didn’t see him until the last minute—when I got up to him, it was just timed perfectly,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what don’t make any sense.”
“It was a coincidence,” Renee said.
“Maybe it was, but it was just all timed too perfectly,” Jack continued. “You’d have to be in my shoes to see that. But I keep on thinking about it.”
Renee kept telling him that he was rationalizing. That he was traumatized. But in the days after Pierre’s death, Jack had kept going. He reviewed what he knew about Haiti, which was gangs, killings, and corruption. The only Haitian Jack knew was a girl Renee’s aunt and uncle had adopted as a baby when they were missionaries over there. They had told him what it was like.
He reviewed what he knew about the Haitians in Springfield, which had mostly come from his mother, via a friend of hers who lived there, and had little good to say; Jack had seen a video she’d circulated purporting to show Haitians eating cats and dogs. Diana had called her up after everything happened, and her friend had sworn that Pierre had waited on her at Texas Roadhouse the weekend before. The friend said she recognized him from the photos. She told Diana that she and her husband had ordered two salads, and when the waiter she assumed was Pierre brought only one salad, she told him that they’d ordered two; she said that he had smiled and said something in a language she did not understand. Diana still wondered about what he’d said. She told Jack that she was worried about him, that Haitians in Springfield were angry. That everybody in the country seemed to be angry, including her.
“My son could have died,” she said now. “A whole bunch of lives could have been taken. And that’s another thing—”
“No,” Renee said, attempting to preempt what she knew was coming.
“That’s why I think this is a statement—some kind of statement,” Diana continued.
“It’s not a statement,” Renee said.
“It is. Look how it’s blowing out,” Diana said, referring to all the news and the vitriol toward the Trump administration.
“No,” Renee said.
But Diana, who had spent years working as a nurse in Ohio prisons, continued. She said her experience had taught her to think “outside the box,” and she offered a theory that none of the investigating authorities had suggested. She believed that what happened could have been more than a suicide, that Pierre could have been “almost like a suicide bomber,” attempting to send a political message. She said she believed that this could start happening more often.
“I’ve seen stuff on the internet too—like, someone said, ‘You should be thinking of the truck driver too,’ and someone commented, ‘Oh, fuck that truck driver,’” Diana said.
Carol Guzy for The Atlantic Students and staff honor Bel at Wright State University, where he had just started college, on September 8.
She had been worried enough to contact Carl Ruby, the pastor in Springfield, to hear more about the situation there. He had told her that Haitians had been losing their jobs since Trump revoked their legal status, and were terrified of being sent back to Haiti, where deportees were being targeted because gangs assumed they had money. He told her they found the ankle monitors humiliating. He also told her that he had been with Pierre’s father the night his son died and had gone with him to view his son’s body. He said that the family had no animosity toward her or Jack, and that they understood he had done everything in his power to avoid the collision. Ruby, who told me that it was a “really good talk,” told Diana that he was sorry for what her son had been through, and invited them both to come to one of the vigils that had been happening almost every night since Pierre’s death. Diana had asked Ruby to pass on their condolences to the family, but she did not think it was a good idea to show up. Jack had thought about going; some part of him wanted to go.
“I feel really bad for the family,” he said now, getting closer to the stop on his route that he wanted to see. “I just don’t want to take the chance for the safety of my family. I mean, he jumped out in front of me. But I still killed their son.”
“You feel guilty about it,” Renee said.
“I feel guilty,” Jack said.
“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of animosity against, just, white people,” Diana said. “I’m sorry.”
“That’s not our belief, Diana,” Renee said.
“I put my pistol out, just in case—you never know,” Jack said.
He exited the highway in Westerville, the stop on the route where he delivers concrete powder twice a day, and drove over to a complex of metal chutes and silos. Right after everything happened, he had been talking with a friend who found out that Westerville had an ICE field office that Pierre had visited, and now Jack put the address into Google Maps and navigated over to a brick building 1.7 miles away.
He tried to imagine Pierre getting fitted with the ankle monitor and, in the weeks before his death, showing up at the field office and pleading to get it taken off. Jack imagined this happening right down the street from where he was going about his job.
“It was so close,” he said, looking at the building. “It don’t make sense in my mind. I’m trying to come up with a reason.”
Renee told him it was just a coincidence.
“It could be a coincidence, it could,” he said. “Maybe my intuition is telling me something.”
He wondered whether Pierre might have noticed his truck as he drove through Westerville. “My truck is 23 years old—it’s not something you see on the road every day. I think, at some point, we’d get off at the same exit and get on at the same exit,” he said, turning back onto the highway.
He started replaying everything that had happened. Seeing the car, seeing Pierre get out, seeing Pierre run toward his truck. And then he recalled another detail about that moment.
“He made eye contact,” Jack said now.
“He was looking at your truck, not you,” Renee said.
“Renee, he made eye contact,” Jack said. “He looked me dead in the eyes.”
They headed toward home. Chillicothe was an hour from Springfield, but to Jack what was happening there felt closer now.
Since ICE operations began in early August, locals have witnessed agents in unmarked SUVs with dark windows detain people at apartment complexes, strip-mall parking lots, gas stations, a car wash, and frequently during traffic stops. At least 74 people, nearly all Haitians, almost none with criminal convictions, have been detained so far, according to lawyers and local activists. Dozens more, they said, have been fitted with ankle monitors, including pregnant women and elderly people.
Carol Guzy Monsanto Maler, who came to the U.S. from Haiti in 2023, became emotional and fell to the ground after receiving an ankle monitor at an ICE check-in in Blue Ash, Ohio, in August.
When I visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding. Families were getting food delivered to their homes, attending church services online. Haitian activists told me that some people had spoken of suicide as an alternative to deportation. At the vigils for Pierre, the people who showed up included his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, waiters from Texas Roadhouse, and others who described themselves as neighbors, including a man who told a crowd one night that Pierre’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.”
What is happening has been transformative for some people, including Carl Ruby. His congregation, Central Christian Church, has been actively supporting the Haitian community since 2024, when Vice President Vance and others started spreading the false stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs. On the Monday night after Pierre’s death, Ruby told me, he’d sat with Ronal Bel as he talked to reporters with a stoicism that Ruby could not fathom, then followed him into a closet, where Ronal broke down. A few days later, when Ruby accompanied him to a local funeral home, he watched as Ronal walked circles around the table where his son’s body lay and repeated, “You have been a good son.” At one point, Ronal took off his shirt and waved it over his son’s body, which Ruby understood as a ritual that meant “I want my spirit to go with you. I’m not abandoning you.”
Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, who has been spending time with Ronal, told me, “He’s still having questions, and it’s hard for him to accept if he’s living in this reality.”
Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”
Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, who has taken multiple humanitarian trips to Haiti and has criticized Trump’s effort to deport Haitians as “a mistake,” was among those in the pews, sitting alongside Haitians and other people from Springfield and beyond.
Addressing the crowd, Dorsainvil said that Ronal Bel had come to the U.S. after surviving a massacre in Haiti, and that his son’s life is “part of a larger human story. ” He said that the mourning “extends beyond one family.” Ruby spoke of the different circles of people affected by Pierre’s death—those closest to him, neighbors in Springfield who want Haitian families to know that “you are a blessing and not a burden to this community,” and another group, those who are “curious and just want to reach a better understanding of what happened to Damas. Some, even though they don’t know your family and are not part of this community, want you to know that they share your grief.”
Carol Guzy Ronal Bel watches as his son is laid to rest at Ferncliff Cemetery in Springfield on October 3.
In the two weeks before the funeral, Jack had gone back to work. He returned to his regular route, avoiding the right lane as he passed through the stretch of cornfields and wildflowers. One Saturday morning, he and Renee were at his mother’s house in Chillicothe, still trying to piece things together.
“Maybe you just felt like he made eye contact,” Renee was saying to him.
“I know he did. I don’t know why,” Jack said.
“I think you were affected by this more than you want to admit,” Renee said, and then Jack mentioned that the other truck driver, the one who had pried him from his cab, had called him. He and the man, John Hallings, had exchanged phone numbers at the scene that day and had been talking off and on since then, Hallings told me. He was a trained emergency responder and had a medical kit in his truck. He had gotten out of his cab with gloves on, kneeled in front of Jack’s truck, and checked for Pierre’s pulse, which was gone.
“He went straight to that boy,” Jack said. “He said it kind of messed him up. He’s not doing so hot.”
Hallings had told Jack that he’d gotten extremely depressed thinking about Pierre, and then extremely angry thinking that he could have killed more people than just himself, and thinking about immigrants taking jobs in the trucking industry, bringing down wages. Then, a few days after that, he had broken down crying.
“He said he was kind of worried about me,” Jack said, checking his phone for any more details about Pierre.
“You shouldn’t look so much,” Renee said.
“But, Renee, I care,” Jack said.
He said that the more he learned about Pierre, the more he was beginning to understand. He’d recently found out, for instance, that Pierre had been a kind of leader in his family. Besides bringing in money, those who knew him had talked about how he was the one in his family who spoke the best English, who could fill out forms, make phone calls, and otherwise help his family manage their lives in Springfield.
“I think he just had a lot piled on his shoulders,” Jack said. He himself had been caring for an ailing father for the past 15 years, bathing him, helping him recover after two strokes. “I’d say the boy was stressed. I’d say he’d probably had enough.”
“I wish I would have known him, because I would have taken him in,” Diana said at one point. “I got a spare room.”
“I think a lot of people would have helped him,” Jack said.
He had kept thinking about the ankle monitor, to the point that he went online one night to find out more about the devices.
“His was a dinosaur—it was big,” Jack said.
“My sister’s ex had one,” Renee said.
“Pierre’s was ginormous,” Jack said, calling up a photo of one on his phone.
He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.
“And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”
“I’m not trying to sound mean or anything, but we can’t take care of everybody,” Diana said.
“Well, we wouldn’t have had to take care of Pierre. Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do,” Jack said. “We did not do right by him.”
He was beginning to believe that the Trump administration was “a joke,” and that the Democrats were no better. “Everything is broken,” Jack said.
He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.
He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.
“He was hurting,” Jack said.
He recalled the moment right after that.
“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”
And the moment right after that.
“I felt a big thump, and I knew it was him,” he said. “I could feel it all.”
Renee reached for his hand, knowing that he was feeling it still.
“I’m good, I’m good,” the truck driver said.
If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.
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Marie-Rose is adamant about recommending The Sopranos to her friends. She also enjoys listening to Natalia Lafourcade’s Tiny Desk concert, visiting the 2,000-year-old crocodile statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and rewatching Moonstruck.
The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I first watched The Sopranos during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and have been on a continuous loop of rewatches more or less since. To the people in my life who somehow have yet to experience it, despite my persistent recommendations: “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.” The show has it all—the banality of evil, the corrosive cruelty of a certain vision of masculinity, the crushing weight of American decline. It also has pounds of gabagool, Paulie Walnuts’s chuckle, an intervention led by “the guy who broke into Stew Leonard’s that time,” and some of the funniest lines ever aired on television.
The last thing that made me laugh: Olivia Wilde’s The Invite—a dramedy about an ill-fated foursome, set almost entirely in the confines of one apartment—marked the last time I snorted from laughter in a theater.The last time I snorted from laughter, in general, would be about 90 minutes prior to writing this, when I was rewatching an episode from the first season of Derry Girls.Lisa McGee’s Netflix show is about a group of teenage friends in Northern Ireland, set against the backdrop of the Troubles. What’s special about the series is that it has the rare quality of immersing its viewers in the unvarnished perspectives of kids who talk and act like real kids, without becoming a show for kids.
The last thing that made me cry: I saw Death of a Salesman starring Nathan Laneon Broadway in May, and it’s hard to imagine that another theater experience this year will surpass its emotional impact. Laurie Metcalf’s performance as Linda Loman, in particular, left me deeply moved.
An author I will read anything by: When it’s publication day for Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker, not much else is getting done until I’m through with reading her latest.
A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I apologize for bending the rules by offering several quiet songs by way of Natalia Lafourcade’s Tiny Desk concert. To evoke whatever the opposite of Lafourcadian quiet is, try “Somebody to Love,” by Jefferson Airplane. Part of my love for the song comes from its use in Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man—my personal pick for a single piece of American Jewish art to take with me to a deserted island.
A work of art that I cherish: I have loved this 2,000-year-old crocodile since my grandmother started taking me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically its Egyptian Art wing, as one of our primary afternoon activities when I was a kid. It’s hard to say what is so special about it, but when I think about the countless hours I spent with her in those halls, first in a stroller and later walking next to her, I think of that crocodile statue.
Something I recently revisited: I think my happiest two hours of the past two weeks were the ones spent rewatching Cher and Nicolas Cage’s Moonstruck. And if you still haven’t?! Snap out of it!
A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: David Armstrong’s “The Price of Remission,” published by ProPublica, has come to mind on many occasions, in many contexts, since I first read it last year. The story follows Armstrong’s journey, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, to understand why a single capsule of his daily medication costs 25 cents to make yet is priced at nearly $1,000. It’s a tremendous feat of personal writing and investigative journalism, and it pried open my understanding of the individuals and systems that keep health-care costs astronomically high in the United States. It also offers a window into the cycles of hope and heartbreak that govern breakthroughs in cancer research; for more of that, I highly recommend Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.
A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Limiting myself to one is an extremely tall order, but I might choose Stephanie McCrummen’s story in the August issue: “The Demon Next Door.” It’s a master class in unearthing startling facts and in constructing startling sentences.
My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: There are two rabbit holes I have, unfortunately, tumbled down—one human, the other not, but both topsy-turvy in ways that Lewis Carroll could not have foreseen. For more than a year now, when I’ve wanted to dial my brain down, the Queen of RichTok’s Instagram has proved a reliable resource. Videos by Becca Bloom, as Rebecca Ma is known online, are hard to look away from—she occupies an uncanny world where she wears custom Van Cleef & Arpels while feeding a breakfast bowl of caviar, edible flowers, and salmon sashimi to her cat. The cat’s name is Oscar, and I’m as familiar with his diet as I am with that of my roommate.
The other rabbit hole deposits me in the mysterious world of love and betrayal among AI-generated fruit. To borrow a turn of phrase that Riverdale applied to high-school football, you’ve either experienced the epic highs and lows of Bananito and Strawberrina’s whirlwind affairs, or you haven’t—and I’ll leave it at that.
A good recommendation I recently received: Virginia Evans’s debut novel, The Correspondent, was recommended to me by not one but two colleagues, and it did not disappoint.
A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: There’s a strong argument to be made that childhood begins to end the moment you realize that your parents are—and, even more remarkably, always were—people with anxieties and obligations and dreams of their own, much like the person you are becoming now. “The Raincoat,” by Ada Limón, is a poem I first encountered the summer after graduating high school; each time I have read it since, I’ve been struck by it all over again. Limón’s narrator, while driving home from a medical appointment, reflects on how her mother took her to scores of such appointments as a kid, during which she never asked her mother “what she gave up to drive me, / or how her day was before this chore.” Then, she spots a mother taking off her own rain jacket to shield her daughter from a storm:
Other Mommy, a horror film about a mother and the sinister entity that begins impersonating her (in theaters Friday)
Small Prophets, a comedy series about a man who turns to alchemy to solve the mystery of his girlfriend’s disappearance (streaming Wednesday on Apple TV)
Partita, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a rural woman and the classical-music career she left behind (out Tuesday)
Essay
Illustration by Tina Zhou / The Atlantic. Sources: Courtesy of TIFF
The 14 Movies to Look Out for This Fall
By Shirley Li
The Princess Bride. The Shawshank Redemption. Almost Famous. Over the course of its 51-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival has hosted notable films of all genres and styles. The 2026 edition, which concluded in mid-September, curated movies from rising talent and established filmmakers alike, including a modern-day Nigerian-set remake of Mrs. Dalloway, a gorgeous coming-of-age drama about a school trip to Pompeii, and a rollicking comedy about a community-theater troupe attempting to stage a musical. Below are 14 of my favorite films from the ones I caught, most of which will arrive in theaters in the coming months.
The university where the term artificial intelligence was coined is ringing in the field’s 70th birthday in fitting fashion: with an academic-integrity scandal. Last month, Dartmouth College’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, published an essay in The Atlantic headlined: “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth.” Now Beilock is launching a review of whether her top deputy used too much AI.
On September 21, the student newspaper The Dartmouth reported that Provost Santiago Schnell appeared to have relied heavily on AI to write all nine of the articles he’s published this year—including a Washington Post op-ed about students outsourcing their writing to AI. Schnell’s response to the accusation didn’t help his cause. According to the student paper, he sent an email statement acknowledging that he uses AI chatbots as “assistive tools” in his writing but downplayed their role in his process. Even Schnell’s statement, the paper found, registered as “100% AI-written” on Pangram, an AI-detection service that is imperfect but boasts a very low error rate. A Dartmouth spokesperson told me that neither Beilock nor Schnell would comment for this story.
Schnell is the latest example of an ironic phenomenon: People whose job involves writing about the appropriate uses of AI—or even setting the rules on AI use for others—keep getting caught using AI to do it. There was the Australian university professor whose op-ed about the importance of students doing their own writing turned out to be at least partly AI-generated. There was the nonprofit executive whose book about the future of truth in the AI age turned out to include quotes fabricated by AI. There was the AI beat reporter who reportedly lost his job after he accidentally copied quotes invented by AI into one of his stories. And there was the Stanford misinformation expert who got upbraided by a judge when his declaration supporting an anti-AI-deepfake law turned out to contain ChatGPT-hallucinated citations.
It’s one thing to embrace AI writing openly or shamelessly, like the billionaire financier who readily acknowledged the technology’s role in his Wall Street Journal op-ed (albeit only after it was discovered). It’s another to use AI to inveigh against improper uses of AI, and it raises an awkward question: Why do some of the people warning us most loudly about the technology’s pitfalls keep tumbling headfirst into them?
I reached out to all five of the individuals listed above for an answer, but the only one who agreed to speak with me on the record was Steven Rosenbaum, the author of the book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality and the executive director of the nonprofit Sustainable Media Center. Unlike some of the others, Rosenbaum disclosed his use of AI in the writing and editing process, and he has never tried to tell other people not to use it. But that didn’t save him from ignominy when The New York Timesreported in May that the book was riddled with AI-generated misquotes. I spoke with him at the time, and he told me that he felt “betrayed” by ChatGPT. Five months on, Rosenbaum seems to have accepted a bit more responsibility for the mistakes. He told me that he is preparing to publish a revised version of his book with all of the errors corrected, an author’s note, and a new chapter on (what else?) AI hallucinations. He still believes that the fault lies more with the technology’s makers than its users, though. “As a technology, it is incredibly seductive,” he said.
Rosenbaum said that he’d started out using AI to better understand the technology. He’d gradually come to rely on it as a writing partner that made the work both easier and less lonely. He described his experience of writing with AI as a messy process, one in which the work of the human and that of the machine get all tangled up. “The line between thinking and researching and reading and outlining and drafting and writing is really blurry,” he said.
A simple solution, of course, would be not to use AI at all. Rosenbaum, however, has no interest in that. He said that he still plans to use chatbots as a writing companion—just “more carefully” now, double-checking all of their claims and citations before adopting them. He’s not alone in his unwillingness to abandon the tools that got him in trouble. Although each of the people caught using AI to warn about AI has commented publicly on the episode in some form, none responded by swearing off the technology. Rosenbaum, for his part, thinks we’re headed toward a world in which writing with AI is the norm and all that matters is the result. “I don’t think readers care how the sausage is made,” he said. “They care that it’s delicious.”
I’m not so sure. I too have experimented with using AI as a research tool in my writing. But The Atlantic has a strict policy against the use of AI-generated prose, and so do I. I’ve found that having a personal red line is both useful and clarifying: I might ask a chatbot questions, get its feedback on a word choice or an explanation, or ask it to poke holes in my argument, but I will not ask it to write for me or use its writing in my own drafts. I think readers value knowing that every word they’re reading was chosen by the author and not an algorithm. That said, I can see how the distinction between using AI for research and writing could feel slippery to some. It’s conceivable, for instance, that a chatbot’s biases could be infiltrating my ideas, if not my precise words. (Then again, so could the biases of Google’s search-ranking engine or my social-media feeds.)
I have another theory as to why people who caution others about AI seem to be using it themselves. In a scenario strikingly similar to the one at Dartmouth, the professor in charge of academic integrity at Western Sydney University wrote an op-ed in May on the importance of students not delegating their work to AI. “Don’t cut corners,” Cath Ellis, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for quality and integrity, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald. “Don’t outsource your thinking, however tempting that may be.” The op-ed, it soon became clear, had been generated at least partly by AI. In that case, a university spokesperson defended Ellis’s use of the technology as “sophisticated and appropriate,” because she had fed her own past work into the AI tool before asking it to help her draft the op-ed. Ellis toldThe Sydney Morning Herald that the op-ed hadn’t been written “by” AI: “It was written with AI, and there’s a really big difference there,” she said.
Ellis’s excuse might ring hollow to the students she chastised, but it’s revealing to those of us trying to wrap our minds around the apparent hypocrisy. In her op-ed, Ellis implied that students who use AI to write are outsourcing their thinking. In defending her own AI use, she distinguished between the writing (which she outsourced) and the ideas (which she claimed were original). Likewise, Schnell fretted in his op-ed that “students can now produce proficient prose without performing much of the intellectual work the prose appears to represent.” Yet when confronted with his own AI use, he claimed authorship of the “ideas and arguments” even if bots did some of the writing.
These guardians of academic integrity might be right that what they did is meaningfully different from a student simply feeding a professor’s assignment into a chatbot and handing in whatever it spits out. Of course, students can use AI in more nuanced ways too. No doubt plenty of students accused of AI cheating have mounted defenses that sounded a lot like Ellis’s and Schnell’s.
Writing is thinking has become a common refrain among critics of those who use AI tools to do their writing. What we see again and again in defenses of AI writing is that the people using AI don’t seem to apply that maxim to themselves. And experts on the perils of AI fakery such as Rosenbaum and the Stanford misinformation expert, Jeff Hancock, appeared to have overestimated their own ability to steer clear of AI falsehoods. It’s reminiscent of what the sociologist W. Phillips Davison called the “third-person effect” in mass media: people’s tendency to believe that they’re immune to persuasive messaging even as they expect it to influence others.
It is a form of hypocrisy, and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for thought leaders who get caught practicing what they preach against. But the fact that even professed AI experts blunder into overrelying on the technology suggests that Rosenbaum is onto something: Chatbots might come with fine-print disclaimers that they can make mistakes, but they bend over backwards in their interactions with users to come across as honest and trustworthy. It’s also true that society has yet to develop a vocabulary for all the ways of writing with AI that fall in between “AI-generated” and “entirely human-written.”
Here’s where I acknowledge that even my own bright line on AI use might be fuzzier than I realize. In the process of writing this story, I described the thrust of my argument to Google and Claude and asked them for examples of AI-writing hypocrisy that I may have missed. Neither managed to surface any that I hadn’t previously been aware of. On a whim, I followed up with Claude by asking it to brainstorm some hypotheses as to why AI skeptics might fail to heed their own advice.
I had my own ideas, and I had also solicited the thoughts of colleagues, but I wanted to see what the chatbot would come up with. One of its suggestions struck me as a sharper version of a thought I’d been struggling to formulate: “Writing is thinking is a rule for other people,” it mused. I didn’t use Claude’s language, but the AI model had crisply summarized a notion I’d been thinking over. That formulation no doubt informed how I thought about this story’s framing. Am I an AI-writing hypocrite now too?
I talked through some of this with a journalist who once got in trouble over a story that contained AI-generated errors. We corresponded on the condition of anonymity because they said that resurfacing the incident could damage their job prospects. This was the lesson they said they had learned: “AI is a power tool, and like any power tool it’s dangerous if you’re careless with it. You can be the guy who warned everyone that a table saw can cut your fingers off and still lose a finger one day, because that risk is built into the machine. It goes up the more you use it.”
When you think about it that way, it makes sense that some of the people relying on AI would be the same ones sounding the alarm about its risks. They know its flaws, but they also know its power. And they just can’t bring themselves to give that up.
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