Almost 20 years ago, I had tickets to see Amy Winehouse perform in London, at a show that was canceled just an hour before it was scheduled to start. A friend and I went to a nearby hotel bar instead, and not much later, in walked Winehouse herself—tiny, grubby, and completely incoherent. She walked over to us and stared, her eyes both furious and vacant, until someone in her entourage came and dragged her away. I remember the person who flashed to mind in that bizarre moment: the gossip blogger Perez Hilton.

If you weren’t regularly online during the late 2000s, it’s hard to explain how dominant a presence Hilton was—how incessantly he posted about what celebrities might be doing on any given day, how shameless he was about posting upskirt photos, how judgmental his tirades about young women in crisis were. His fiendish MO was lifting pictures from paparazzi agencies and then scribbling penises or obscene epithets on them in order to claim fair use. Hilton—whose real name is Mario Lavandeira Jr.—was particularly cruel about Winehouse, who was being photographed by the celebrity press almost daily in states of disarray. He posted, by turns, about her physical appearance (“super skinny, dirty and wasted”), false rumors of her pregnancy (“We were sure that her ovaries were too gin-soaked to be of any use”), and a performance in which she wasn’t wearing underwear (“Grrrossss!!!!!!!!! Who needs to see cracked out snatch?”).

PerezHilton.com was relentless and brutal, and its readers could not get enough, especially when the blog’s coverage collided with moments of calamitous celebrity breakdown. (When the actor Lindsay Lohan was arrested in 2007, the site reportedly received 8.8 million pageviews that day.) Since then, the internet has metastasized into something officially kinder—we no longer berate famous people in crisis for sport quite as much as we used to—and quietly more appalling, where irony-poisoned young men broadcast their executions and social-media companies seem to basically shrug in response. And so, on Tuesday night, during what seemed to be a mental-health breakdown of his own, Hilton was able to stream himself live on TikTok cutting himself with a knife for about 15 minutes before his broadcast was finally interrupted.

Any number of Hilton’s followers on TikTok could have clicked on the stream thinking they were going to see a standard broadcast about Ariana Grande or Trader Joe’s ready meals (both of which Hilton had posted about on YouTube in recent weeks). Instead, they got a scene of unimaginable violence. “I am fine with horror/gore, have seen a lot real and fake, and this was so deeply disturbing I could not get the image out of my head all night,” one commenter posted on Reddit. Another added, “I watch cartel torture and beheading videos with no issues. I had to turn the perez video off after about 20 seconds, and I felt deeply disturbed for hours.”

TikTok’s failure to interrupt Hilton’s broadcast for such a long time, even as horrified viewers were reporting it, is astonishing. (A spokesperson for the site told Wired that a “moderator error” caused a delay in removal; another told Vanity Fair that Hilton was persistent in his attempts to broadcast what he was doing, using several different streams to do so.)

[Read: The unspeakable, enabled]

In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Act shields technology and communication companies from being held legally responsible for third-party content that appears on their platforms. And since Facebook launched livestreaming in 2015, social-media sites have struggled to establish safeguards for atrocities being broadcast in real time, to the point where the phenomenon of people livestreaming their own attempts to die has become “an emerging public health crisis,” in the words of psychology researchers. After a man livestreamed himself killing 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand in 2019 on Facebook Live, Facebook said it was investing in “technical innovation” to prevent people from abusing its platform. Nevertheless, footage of mass shootings and other atrocities proliferates globally before befuddled tech companies can tie their shoes.

The tone of the contemporary internet is also darker and more nihilist than it has ever been. “Social-media platforms—and especially X—have loosened their grip on moderation at the same time that AI tools have allowed for the easy proliferation of slop,” my colleague Charlie Warzel wrote earlier this year. “Never before has there been so much cynical, cruel content and trolling.”

But the idea that Hilton might end up turning self-harm into content feels particularly fraught. A statement from his family posted online said that the influencer had been “experiencing a severe mental-health crisis,” and that his three children, his niece, and his sister were at home with Hilton when he began hurting himself, although they left immediately “to protect the children from witnessing any further trauma.” Over the past decade and a half, Hilton has tried to pivot away from the bilious celebrity coverage that made him so successful: In a 2010 video, he announced that he would no longer be cruel. But his popularity never quite recovered, and he argued in his 2020 memoir, TMI, that the toxicity of his site was what had appealed to his readers, even if they didn’t want to admit it to themselves: “The more snarky names I gave the celebrities, the more penises or coke or boogers I drew on pictures of them, the more people visited my page.”

It’s also true that PerezHilton.com peaked in its cultural relevance around 2007, the year that celebrity after celebrity seemed to be breaking down in public while pursued by paparazzi on mopeds. That year, Britney Spears shaved her head (when the actor Heath Ledger died in 2008, Hilton sold T-shirts emblazoned with the words Why Couldn’t It Be Britney?), Anna-Nicole Smith overdosed on prescription medication, Lohan was arrested for cocaine possession, Paris Hilton went to jail, and Mischa Barton was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol. Hilton documented each of these moments in vivid and elaborate detail—my browser finally quit when I got to page 79 of his archives related to Amy Winehouse—because he understood what people wanted from him and his work. “When Britney Spears was at her wildest, people were glued to my website,” he wrote in TMI.

It’s impossible to know whether this awareness informed what he did to himself this week, and how he did it. Hilton’s breakdown is desperately sad; I’m haunted by the idea of what his children might have seen happen in their home, but also by the idea of what all children might see, at any time, in this hopelessly corrupted and seemingly unsalvageable internet.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, please know that you are not alone. If you are in danger of acting on suicidal thoughts, call 911. For support and resources, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or text 741-741 for the Crisis Text Line.

Children are made for love. From the moment they are born, they rely on their caregivers for everything they need, and they need a great deal: warmth, nourishment, grooming, contact. Their lives depend on it. Caring for children often comes at the expense of a caregiver’s personal comfort, which is a trade-off best done out of love.

For a time, newborn children do not realize that they are distinct from their parents, which is reasonable, given that they have not been for very long. But as they grow, they come to recognize that they are individual people, and they begin to consider exploring the world beyond the safety of a caregiver’s arms. Such ventures are exciting, but also somewhat intimidating. Children need a way of transporting their caregivers’ love with them as they move about. For this, they rely on what childhood-development specialists call transitional objects, which allow children to move from oneness with their parents to nascent independence. These objects can include blankets as well as stuffed animals and other toys. In the case of the toddler daughter of Representative Max Miller, this love and comfort took the shape of a blue stuffed bunny.

But only adults call these items transitional objects, and only adults ascribe to them their clinical significance. For children, they are magical talismans cathected with love. They are more than their physical reality—more than cotton or fleece or polyester plush. They are individual and irreplaceable. They have unique powers to soothe. They have meaning. They have names.

[Read: A family tragedy in the age of Trump]

When I was a child, I could not sleep unless I had my bunny blanket, a castoff from my older brother’s collection of baby bedding that began life as a yellow quilt with eyelet fringe and became, after hundreds of tumbles in the washer and dryer, a tattered beige slip of a thing. It traveled with me to college and to graduate school, and even now rests folded in my linen closet. For my younger daughter, comfort came in the form of a rainbow scarf that we tucked into her backpack before she set off to her first day of school.

Children are made for love, but not everyone who has a child is fit to love them. Miller, a 37-year-old Republican in Ohio, has been accused of domestic violence by his ex-wife, Emily Moreno, according to court filings in their custody battle after a two-year marriage. Moreno, who is the daughter of Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio, alleges that Miller scalded her with hot water, held a gun to her head, and pushed her into a wall, causing her to hit her skull. She has said that she can’t rule out whether he broke their daughter’s collarbone and bruised her shoulder. Miller denies ever having been violent with his wife and child. At his request, the House of Representatives’ ethics committee has announced an investigation into the allegations against him. Senator Moreno and other congressional Republicans have called on Miller, who is running for reelection, to resign.

[Read: Mike Johnson would prefer not to]

Children who grow up in unstable environments tend to rely heavily on the softness and comfort of beloved toys and blankets. According to Miller’s ex-wife, their daughter sought comfort in her blue stuffed bunny. And this bunny, according to court documents, is what Miller took away from her.

In excerpts of emails and texts among Moreno, Miller, their lawyers, a parent-custody coordinator, and Senator Moreno published by Mother Jones, Miller appears to regularly hold his daughter’s bunny hostage, sometimes for days at a time, despite his ex-wife’s pleading and his ex-father-in-law’s diplomatic efforts to retrieve it. In one exchange, Moreno asks if their daughter could “please have her bunny back? She’s had it since birth, sleeps with it every night, carries it with her around the house … Please don’t punish” her, she begged, “if you’re upset with me.” The couple’s custody coordinator wrote to Moreno at one point that because Miller “adamantly” refused to relinquish the bunny, Moreno should plan on keeping it at her house to “avoid these situations because unfortunately in a high conflict divorce these situations blow up often.” (Miller responded on X by asking Moreno to “please stop the lies,” and insisting that their daughter “got her bunny back in 14 hours.”)

In her texts, Moreno appears to allege that Miller’s infliction of suffering upon their daughter is purely instrumental, a way of inflicting pain on his ex-wife by proxy.

When someone else’s pain pleases you, it is called sadism. There is no sound way to manage sadists in society, as normal behavioral incentives do not seem to apply to them. This makes them dangerous. They should probably not spend much time around other people. And they certainly shouldn’t be around children, who can’t defend themselves and can’t understand how someone might thrive on suffering, because children are made for love.

Most people spend more time than you think agonizing over their social-media posts. Kathryn Jezer-Morton wanted to understand their thinking—and when she dug deeper, she learned that redemption and optimization narratives are what the algorithm rewards, and therefore what drive the stories we tell. What does that mean for how we all think about ourselves? Charlie Warzel talks to Jezer-Morton about how authentic has become something different from true, and how people’s arcs on social media tend to point only upward.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: No one’s interested in scientific data as much as they’re interested in a really compelling anecdote. And this is just attention-economy stuff. This is because a really compelling anecdote is going to perform better for a number of reasons, whereas a big, longitudinal study is gonna have some interesting findings but it’s also gonna have some contradictory findings. Science is often much less, kind of, explosive than, like, this one dude who’s like, I took this supplement, and six months later, I am freaking jacked. You know, that’s cool.

Charlie Warzel: I’m Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain, a show where, today, we’re going to answer a seemingly unanswerable question: How is social media changing the way we understand ourselves and even humanity as a whole?

By any account, I’ve been a somewhat prolific poster for at least two decades. Like most Millennials, I was a kid and high schooler in the pre-social-media days and went to college just as Facebook was taking off. This is partially why, as I’ve long argued, Millennials like myself are often uniquely tortured about social media: We’ve experienced it profoundly shaping our social lives, our culture, our politics, and ourselves, but we can also remember just enough of a time before it that we can see this process as something that was emergent. In other words, it’s not a given that our lives had to be mediated this way, by these massive platforms for viral advertising.

And so a few years ago, I was talking to another writer who is roughly around my age about what it’s meant to come of age in the attention economy. We talked about how fun and experimental all of this was at first, how exciting it was to be connected to everyone all at once. It was both intimate and incredibly public. But also about how quickly all the experimentation turned into something different; how we, without really even noticing it, began writing, posting, and performing—all for this imagined audience. And how we started imagining how that imagined audience would respond. How we’d see people get mocked or shamed or lavished with praise and internalize all of that in the back of our minds. How the way we spoke changed on specific platforms as the result of in-jokes, memes, and a shared culture that everyone was building at once.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, though there are countless examples of the way that social media curdles people or pushes us to be the most neurotic, reactive, and uncharitable versions of ourselves. All these versions once felt separate from our actual selves, but over time they’ve become harder to untangle.

This is the subject of a new book by the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton, titled The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything. Jezer-Morton, argues that social media’s greatest influence might be how we understand ourselves as humans and not, as many critics have argued, its impact on attention spans or our politics. Humans are storytellers and always have been. And those stories help us understand the world and our place in it. I was drawn to Jezer Morton’s book in part because of her framing of social media: as a place where all of us who post are telling a collective story about what it means to be a person in today’s world.

In some sense, this is all obvious enough. But what’s less clear is what these platforms and stories are doing to all of us, whether you share your life on social media or you just lurk there. Are they making us more unique or more the same? What is highlighted in a culture that is mediated by algorithms, and what lived experiences are excluded? If social media is the lens through which we capture the story of our lives, is the aperture being widened or narrowed? Jezer-Morton brings a nuance to this polarizing topic, and she joins me now to talk about it all.

Warzel: Kathryn, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

Kathryn Jezer-Morton: Thank you, Charlie.

Warzel: So your book is about social media, but it’s really about how we make sense of ourselves and the world through personal stories. And so I wanted to start with you telling me just a bit about your own personal story growing up on a commune in Vermont and specifically how you feel that shaped your understanding of personal and communal narratives and how it’s sort of a foundation for some of your work in this book, but also on social media in general.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, so I spent a lot of my childhood on a commune that my dad was part of the founding group of in southern Vermont, and I lived there on and off for a number of years. And I think that, for me, I was always really aware that it was a story. The whole place was a story. I knew that people lived together who weren’t family and that the place had this kind of rich history and that also like we were, kind of—we were hippies, and it was messy, and it was very, kind of, it was a bit of a chaotic vibe some of the time. And so I was being told these stories from when I was very young. And I think that it gave me this really rich understanding that a lot of what life is is storytelling. So when I got to college and we started using social media, I was like, This rules. This is so fun. I am like, I’m a natural. This is like, I was born to do this. And I really just took to it like a fish to water. And I think it was because I was like, No, this is what we do. We narrate ourselves. We bring ourselves to life through pictures and stories. And you know, it’s like a fun creative project. We’re basically narrating ourselves into being, and we get to do it however we want. But I think that as soon as I started using it, I was like, What are we all doing, though? Like, what are we actually up to? And from the very beginning—like I think I joined Facebook in 2007—I was like, This feels like there’s something going on here, and I think we’re doing something and we don’t even really know what we’re doing.

Warzel: Let’s go back a little, though, to you loving social media. I mean, one thing that’s very clear from your work is that genuine affection and also that, like, I’m not trying to tell you that posting is bad or that you know your screens are destroying you just because they’re there all the time. But I wanna go back to this. I have a very similar relationship to social media. It’s tortured, but it’s also, especially in the beginning, I was like, Wow, you made this thing for me. This is like—all I want to do is perform for different people and create this persona. What was part of the story you were crafting? What were you trying to do very early on in those, like the halcyon days?

Jezer-Morton: So I was freshly graduated from college. I was living in New Orleans. I was married. I was living this little professional life. And I think it was an opportunity to show the world, like, Check it out, guys. Like this is me and my little life. And it was very Millennial. There’s something very deeply cringe about it, looking back, like, Here’s my house, and Check it out. We made gumbo. It was so fun.

And you know, Here’s Mardi Gras. Here are our costumes. And it was also—I was living very far away from my family, and so there was a practical aspect where I was like, Look at my life in New Orleans, guys. And New Orleans is a cool place, and it photographs well. So it was easy. But I think I was just honestly becoming an adult and becoming independent and telling everyone that I was happy about that. And I think I was doing a little bit of nascent personal branding in that I wanted to seem fun but also like an adult, like I was independent.

Warzel: You devoted your academic career in part to understanding how these feeds shape us, and this led you to do anthropological work of interviewing normal people about their social-media use. And you say that you’ve been fascinated by how little people want to discuss what they do in their feeds. And I found that really, really interesting. Why do you think that is, that people kind of balk at examining what it is they’re doing? ’Cause we’re spending so much time on these platforms.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, to me that was what got me started writing this book. I was like, No one wants to talk about it. And yet we’re doing it for a public audience. So, right, what’s going on when you choose this picture instead of that picture and post it? I know it’s not just automatic behavior because I’m thinking about it. I mean that’s really where it started. I was like, If I’m thinking about this, if I’m being careful with my messaging, then everyone else is too. And we never talk about that. And it’s also very, I think, in a kind of puritanical sense or something, like it’s embarrassing to admit that we are really kind of working hard to project a certain image.

No one really wants to admit that. And everyone accuses other people of doing that. And no one self-implicates. So that was really the starting point of like, I want to sit with someone and be like, talk to me about your feed. Tell me what you’re doing. It’s okay. It’s just you and me. Just tell me what you have going on. And what I found was a lot of people were like, “No one’s ever asked me this before.” And if I could gain their trust, they were like, Yeah, man, let’s get into it. I actually have a lot—I think about this a lot.

Warzel: So okay, broadly speaking, what is it that you think we’re all doing when we post?

Jezer-Morton: So I just want to begin by saying that, obviously, if this is—it is the world, social media. So it is enormously diverse and there are gonna be exceptions always. So I can’t say everyone’s doing the same thing. I think that what we’re doing is we’re maintaining a brand that we have built over time. Each of us has one.

It’s an identity. There’s a sort of consistency that we’re seeking to maintain. And we’re just working in the service of maintaining it. And I think, for some of us, it might be something that we’re a bit tired of. Maybe we kind of started working with this brand at the beginning of our social-media time and we’re kind of stuck with it. And maybe we’re not posting anymore because we’re like, I just like, I don’t want to keep doing that thing anymore. That shtick is old. Like, I can’t.

Warzel: Mm-hmm.

Jezer-Morton: But a lot of us are just like, Yeah, I’ll just keep doing it, basically. And it’s to do with demonstrating that you have your life under control, that you have a certain degree of fitness in your life, whether that’s economic or physical—just, like, you’re really with it; you understand the world; you can kind of handle the world as it’s coming at you. I think it’s about capacity. You’re basically proving your capacity to survive, day after day or however often you’re posting. And yeah, I think that’s what people are doing. And I don’t think that’s how it started, and I think that’s how it is now.

Warzel: How would you describe that evolution? Because the way that I think about it, from my own perspective, I think from what you were just saying about stumbling onto these platforms and figuring out is: It was so light. It was so experimental, right? It was, Okay, I’m gonna do this. I’m gonna try on this piece of my persona. It all felt like it had no consequences, right? Just like very intimate stuff that’s happening, very public, but also ephemeral and light and like, This is my Facebook persona, right? This is how I am on Twitter at, like, being a young journalist—I’m speaking very personally—like, on the town in New York City doing fun stuff, working for this company, BuzzFeed. It was all very low-stakes, I guess I would say. And then something happened. But how would you describe the evolution of what happened as these platforms became more mature?

Jezer-Morton: I think that the movement away from the chronological newsfeed was really huge. I think that once an algorithm was starting to feed us stuff based on its performance, it changed. I think users clocked to that really quickly. And I think that we just started to learn that some stuff got seen and other stuff didn’t. And we did start, I think—not everybody—but I think a lot of people started to change ever so slightly the way that they posted.

People came to understand that selfies or pictures of themselves performed better. I think that just the idea of being visible in this huge population changed the dynamic. Remember, when we started using these things at the beginning, it was just people that we knew. And I think for most people it still is. Like, you know, you’re a journalist, so you have people who are following you just for your work.

But it’s also like, over years and years, you go through different jobs, you move. So you have these people now who are following you and seeing your stuff who you’ll never see again and who you haven’t seen in years. So they’re effectively strangers. And I think that that changes it too, where you’re like, Okay, so there’s my friends, but then there’s all these random people that are looking at me. And I think even if you’re a person who has no professional business on social media, you’re not selling anything, you’re not maintaining anything, whatever—you’re still talking to strangers. And I think that forces a certain formality, a certain kind of concern for your reputation that was not present at the beginning at all.

Warzel: I wrote this story in 2020 about boomers on Facebook, right? It was all about, like, these boomers are being radicalized on Facebook. And I talked to a lot of them, and one of the things that they described to me that I thought was so fascinating is, especially for boomers—like, for us who are relatively around the age of college while we were on it or whatever, it was like we were meeting people at parties and adding them on Facebook, right? Or something like that. But for the boomers, it was like, Oh my gosh, that was the kid who lived down the street from me 50 years ago, and I can reconnect with them. And there was a magic to that, and it was great.

But once the newsfeed shifted less away from the personal updates into the political updates, you would see stuff like, Oh god, my next-door neighbor from 50 years ago is an incredible bigot, and now I need to argue with them. Right? And so all these people were just exposed to essentially strangers because the relationship was so tenuous to begin with, even though it was so exciting to uncover. And so much of this conflict had happened because, really, you weren’t supposed to be hanging out with that person, right? Or like having that person then comment on a photo of your grandchild. Where you’re like, What gives you the right, man? There’s all this conflict.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, these are not people that you have any business being in contact with. There’s no utility to these points of contact. They’re unprecedented socially. And so now we’re having to deal with it. And I would say, yeah, younger people have the same thing where it’s like, even really younger people like Gen Z, they’re meeting, churning through tons of new connections. You know, 15-year-olds will have 1,000 people on Snapchat. And it’s like, How do you know that many people at your young age? That’s how it works now. And it just creates this totally nonsensical social environment. Yeah.

Warzel: So you mentioned the phrase personal branding earlier, talking about what people are doing and how social media has pushed people into really thinking like a brand. I think of branding obviously as a way to sell something. What do you think people are selling, and why are they forced into that specific behavior of posting the way that, you know, Wendy’s posts on Facebook, or whatever. Why did people sort of become more like the brands instead of—I mean, I guess the brands have become more like people too—but why do you think that that fusing has happened?

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, it’s true that the brands have become more like people. The people have become more like brands. And now we’re all kind of in this weird middle place.

Warzel: It’s great.

Jezer-Morton: I think that, first of all, it’s just the affordances of the platform. I think the platform, the designs, the interfaces encouraged us to do certain things. I think that when we started to have the “likes” and then cascading comments, you’re suddenly in this kind of market-research environment where people can give you feedback. And I think that just the very fact of likes and comments kind of puts a person in a position to be like, Okay, well, now I’m looking for your approval. Now I want to see how—I want to do this because I want you guys to like it. So there’s that, just very simply, the interface kind of puts us in that position. I think if we didn’t have those features we would behave differently. And I think that’s true on interfaces where there aren’t these kinds of interactive features, people do behave differently. If you think about like Flickr or whatever, these photo-sharing sites, people just put photos and it’s different. We have been over the last 20 years in this period of precarity becoming a larger and larger part of the economic environment, the workplace environment. People are having to kind of try to promote themselves, even if they’re not really trying to sell anything. They are kind of like, I need to look my best. I want to try to maintain a certain reputation. You’re competing in the job market. You feel more and more that you’re competing in the social environment, like in the world of dating.

When I try to explain to the college students that I teach, There’s other ways of telling a story about yourself or presenting yourself to the world than this branded self where you’re trying to demonstrate a certain kind of fitness and you want to always look a certain way, they don’t understand what I mean at all. Because to them, it’s like, Why wouldn’t I want to have people think that I’m the best version of myself? That’s my purpose, is to get better and better at something, become a better version of myself, get more fit, whatever the case may be. I’m working on myself. I’m trying to get better. I want people to see that. I want people to see that I’m trying and that I’m succeeding. And they can’t comprehend that there’s a different narrative structure around selfhood that could possibly exist. And the fact is there was, before social media, that everyone lived in: that you were a person, you had your hobbies, you had your goals, you had your the things that you were up to, but your self might have been somewhat separate from this, these sets of work concerns or creative concerns. And it really wasn’t all one thing that you were trying to convince people of. I think that we accepted that there was something about each of us that was a little bit uncontainable or like, you know, just ourselves.

Warzel: Mm-hmm. Or worth protecting, yeah.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, worth protecting. And I think that that idea has just completely faded into a kind of obsolescence.

Warzel: The precarity part is really fascinating to me, especially in the way that it is a behavior that obviously benefits the platforms. If you don’t post with a certain type of frequency now, it’s less at-bats, right? Less chances for the algorithm to reward you or to be seen, or to whatever, or to make money off of whatever thing, or have a brand deal. But it’s also just to exist, right? You disappear in these things if you don’t continue to feed them. There’s just too much to drown you out if you’re not also doing the constant connection and posting, and whether that’s in the dating space, or just on Instagram or Twitter sharing stories and articles—whatever it is, TikTok, you name it, YouTube.

Jezer-Morton: This is what happens, I think, when people go through a really difficult time. You’ll see they’ll disappear because they can’t narrate, like a divorce, illness, tragedy. Sometimes people will narrate through it. You’ll see that. And it’s very interesting. But a lot of the time, people don’t, because they’re like, I don’t know how to accommodate this complexity of feeling. I can’t narrate it. So I’m just out of here. And then if they want to come back, it’s like, then you have to make some kind of statement, like, Hey, I’m back. I think that this is where we hit the limitations of the medium. It doesn’t welcome us back in a way that feels full of possibility. It feels like you have to kind of engage within the constraints of this brand environment. And to me, I think it’s very inhibiting for people who are going through complex, deeply ambivalent life chapters. And so—and I say this in the book—we don’t have that many examples of telling stories that have to do with struggle and ambivalence and pain because people just don’t know how to do it. And so the longer we don’t do it, the longer we’re not going to do it because we just don’t have examples to look to like, Oh, well, that person narrated their really painful divorce in a way that really made sense to me. And so I can kind of build on that. You just don’t see these stories. You see people having bounced back.

Warzel: Well, this is what I wanted to go to next too, which is the idea of what you call “master narratives” in the, sort of, architecture a lot of these platforms build towards, right? One of them being things like redemption—redemption being a very important one of those, or just progress in general as a kind of master narrative. But what are some of the other master narratives that these platforms favor?

Jezer-Morton: I mean, I think redemption is the No. 1, which is just, you know, I’m getting better and better. I’m overcoming. I think just the idea of, even within suffering, battling an illness, overcoming, being a warrior—all of this kind of military sort of metaphors around illness and recovery.

I think that’s the main one. I think it’s to do with just being someone who is going to overcome it, gonna kill it, gonna be awesome in the end. And I think there are certainly exceptions to this rule. And I think especially among younger people, you’re seeing people talk about suffering in new ways to me, that I’m kind of impressed with. But I would say among Millennials and older people, even like a GoFundMe, for example—which, you know, a GoFundMe is about suffering. People don’t usually make their own GoFundMe pages. They’re made on behalf of someone. And you accept the charity of your friend who kindly sets up a GoFundMe on your behalf. People don’t do it for themselves. And I really do think that’s just like a bit of—it’s like a value system at work. People are like, I can’t. I don’t want to be seen asking for help. I want someone to ask for help for me. And I think that’s part of the same master narrative. Like, If I’m asking for help, I’m asking for pity. I’m asking for—it feels very wrong, very uncomfortable for most people to do that. Which is really interesting because asking for help is extremely human, and any therapist will tell you that it’s really good to do it. And it’s good to get comfortable doing it. But I think it’s something that people have a very hard time with.

Warzel: So with the idea of demonstrating growth or progress or redemption, you also say that social-media structure penalizes what you call “flat stories.” So what are flat stories?

Jezer-Morton: So a flat story is a story that doesn’t have an upward-trending arc. So it’s like, Yeah, I got a divorce and I’m not sure if it was a good idea or not. And honestly, I’m very confused, but life goes on. It’s like, I’m having a really hard time in this job, and I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job, but I’m gonna try to hang on for as long as possible because I need the money. Right?

And for me, the novel is the technology of the flat story. My favorite novels are novels that kind of end with this feeling where you’re like, Dang, you know, Oof. Life. Ain’t it just like that? You know, like The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, where he’s like, Yep, I’m just gonna be with someone who I’m not in love with. And as a reader, you’re like, Oh God, devastating. But like—and I think this is why people love novels—it puts you in someone else’s subject position, it introduces a whole other reality, and then it kind of forces you to account for how being a human is complex and hard. And, I mean, it’s the best, right?

So, okay, that’s novels. Social media: not the same thing. The technology affords different stories. And for me, like the way I started thinking about flat stories was the commune of my childhood. It’s still around; it’s been around for 50 years. There’s only a couple people living there now, but it keeps on somehow. But it’s not a triumphant story. Like, 100 percent, the golden age was in the past. But if you go up there, you’re like, Man, this place is kind of cool. This is different. These people are cool and getting old, and they’re here. And it’s hard to place it within a narrative framework that I think many of us are familiar with.

Warzel: What I can’t stop thinking about as you’re talking about this is the idea, similar to the commune, that so much of business pre–social media and the internet—like family businesses, right? Like, it’s the hardware store that just kind of is around for 75 years, and like, is it going well? Yeah, we have some good months and some good years, and then there’s some bad years. And yeah, we had to replace the roof and took out a loan, whatever. Versus the narrative around business, finance, the economy now, which is just like, it can’t be a flat narrative, right? In order to raise venture capital money to do whatever, it’s growth at all costs. It’s scale. “Number go up,” right? All these things just have to increase and increase and increase, and it’s better and better. And the story has to be algorithmically enticing. But just the way that this all bleeds into everything.

Now it’s a weird thing. You can find a way to post about, like, “My store endured,” right? “My hardware store endured forever.” But it’s not an interesting cultural narrative anymore to exist and to persist in that way. It has to be this growth. I think that’s really fascinating, that it seems to be bleeding in very much to just the general concept of what success is and can be.

Jezer-Morton: Exactly. No, it’s this idea that you have to 10X your story or you’re dead. It’s crazy that this has become kind of a narrative, any kind of concern that we have. But if you talk to a teenager—like, I have a 15-year-old son. He’s almost 16, and he doesn’t really use social media, but like a lot of teens, boys in particular—I don’t really know that much about what girls are up to, but—they’re into fitness. They go to the gym. That’s cool. Go to the gym, sure. What can I say? Fine. And he’s not taking supplements, but it’s just, it’s an activity that allows you to think in terms of getting better and better and better. It just has that built in. And so I don’t even know how much he likes going to the gym. I really can’t tell. But it allows him to participate in the discourse of I was here (Gestures lower.) and now I’m here (Gestures higher.), and in a year I’ll be here (Gestures even higher.).

And I think it’s like socially, especially if you’re young, it just makes sense. It’s easy. You plug yourself in, and now you have something to talk about with tons and tons of people. And I’m convinced it’s part of the same thing. Listen, human beings are interested in the body. It’s not like this is unprecedented. But I think that wherever you can get your growth narrative is where you’re gonna try to get it. And the gym is one such place. There’s a reason why optimization culture is what everyone is part of. It’s not just because we’re obsessed with being better. It’s because it’s a very convenient way of telling your story as a person in a way that other people can understand. And I really think that social media has given us all the training to participate in this.

Warzel: And it’s safe too, right? It’s very safe to be like, I’m just trying to get better, you know? Who’s gonna be like, Get rid of this guy?

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, what a loser. Yikes.

Warzel: He’s trying to be healthy. So okay, so we’ve established that social media teaches us to sell a story of ourselves as this product; that we’re locked into these master narratives improvement, redemption, resilience. And the algorithms then also reward the most legible, the most emotionally salient and intense versions of all of this.

Warzel: And then what you were right about in the book is how our lives start to reorganize themselves around this. And I’d love to kind of go through a couple of those examples. And the first one is vacations. So what have you learned from studying posts about vacations from influencers but also just from regular people?

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, so I went to Scottsdale, Arizona, and I hung out with some moms there. And this one mom said this amazing thing to me. She was like, Oh yeah, like when I’m posting, especially on trips, activities out and about with my family, I just want people to see that we do shit. We do shit. We are a family that does shit. We’re not boring, and we’re active, and we’re really good at making the best of it. We’re out in the world. And so I think a vacation is a great opportunity to kind of stage a really successful, kind of engaged, spirit of We know how to make the most of our time together. We’re not stuck inside. We’re not ruminating. We’re not grumping at each other. We’re at the Eiffel Tower; we’re grinning; we got here; we’re having the time of our lives. And so it creates this kind of affective container almost, like travel does, vacations do, and then just creating these really legible scenes around big landmarks that everyone recognizes—you know, like Positano, whatever it is, a place that everyone’s like, “Beautiful, yes, you made it.”

Vacations were not always an opportunity to show people your economic and emotional fitness. It used to be about other things too.

Warzel: Something that that you note, though, that I think is really interesting to this this broader idea is that it kind of makes us—because there’s these conventions in this in this way of doing something even that we’ve done forever, like vacations—there’s this small-c conservatism to it, right? Can you say a little more about how it pushes people to be more conservative, not ideologically or politically, but just in what they do?

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, so small-c conservatism, meaning just like the desire to replicate things as they have previously been done. Like tradition. It’s usually done like this, so I wanna do it that way. I want to replicate the photo that I’ve seen. And by doing it successfully, I will have succeeded. As opposed to like, for example, in other eras, people might have been like, When I go on vacation, I want to have a transcendent experience where I feel maybe like I’m transformed or like the place gets under my skin and I feel like a different version of myself altogether that I may take home with me or I may not. But it’s very, kind of, you could call it woo-woo, you can call it whatever you want, but it’s to do with the mysteries of the self. It has nothing to do with proving or re-creating anything that you’ve seen other people do. You’re like, No, I’m gonna do it in a completely new way, getting loose. So yeah, this conservatism has to do with like, I just want it to look the way that you know the pictures look when the influencers do it.

And I see this in a lot of young people. For them, the enjoyment of having gotten just the right shot, making something look really “aesthetic,” as they say, it’s a deep enjoyment for them. It’s a source of real satisfaction that I can’t relate to. I’m too old, but I see they’re like, Ooh, this, this is fun. We’re having fun now because we got just the right frame. We got everything in it just right.

Warzel: Yeah, and I think it’s important, what I notice in your work and in this conversation is not like belittling that, right? It’s not passing judgment on that, just noting that that has actually happened. I think it’s very similar with phones at concerts and things like that, where there are some people who see it and go, like, Great, so you’re not even doing the thing. You’re not even engaged with this, you’re just so consumed with capturing it. And you’ll hear a lot of people say, like, I’m having a great time. This is what I’m here to do. I’m here to capture this in this way.

Jezer-Morton: No, totally. And I say this in the book—and I would actually like to spend more time thinking about this because I didn’t really have time to develop it—I think that when people feel the emotion of, like, I’m having fun. This feels so great. Here we are at the concert. I think that taking out your phone and capturing it has now become part of expressing that emotion. Emotions are partly in our bodies, but they’re also partly culturally expressed, like people express emotions differently in other parts of the world. And I think that the taking out of the phone and being like, We’re gonna get this capture, it’s part and parcel of this feeling of like, This is so awesome. I am loving this. And I don’t think that it’s the same thing as, you know, erasing yourself from the moment or failing to experience it. I think it’s part of experiencing it for a lot of people.

Warzel: Let’s move into politics, specifically the way that the internet is shaping political identities. How have you seen social media changing the way that we express and perform our politics in this way?

Jezer-Morton: Fundamentally, we’re performing as brands. We are compelled to act this way, but in fact, being a person is a very terrible fit for branding. We’re constantly in violation of our own brand guidelines. We’re constantly failing to be consistent. That’s what being a person is. It’s a mess. It’s like square peg in a round hole, personal branding and being a person. And I think that really comes up, it shows in politics because I think we assume that when someone is posting about politics, they’re coming from a place of cool-headed, like I’m making a statement on the events, when often, and I found this in my research, it’s very emotional and it’s very irrational. And maybe there’s like a couple people out there in the audience that you’re trying to get through to, and you really don’t care what anyone else thinks, but these are the people that you’re in communication with—or whatever, you’re working through something, you’re compensating for something—whatever it is, you have ulterior motives and you’re expressing them through your posts, the things that you’re sharing about politics.

And I think it’s very easy to misinterpret that and to think that, you know, Oh, this person is just stating their political views, when in fact there’s so many other things going on.

Warzel: A corollary to the politics part of this is how the platforms, and all of our collective behaviors on the platforms, change our relationships to facts and truth. And you have an observation here that I think is—I spent a lot of time just thinking about it, so I’d love for you to explain this out even more for me, which is the idea that truth in some ways has been replaced by the idea of authenticity. Can you tease that out a little more for me and for everyone listening?

Jezer-Morton: Yeah. So authenticity being that someone is willing to kind of put themselves out there or seem really real, seem unfiltered, seem sort of unpracticed. And I think it is a little bit of a maybe we have a sort of a fatigue or we’re getting wary of the whole personal brand polish and we want people who kind of violate the rules of personal branding.

Donald Trump: perfect example, right? He’s not a very consistent persona. He does all kinds of stuff that is very contradictory. And for that reason, he’s considered very authentic. Like, He says what he means, even if it contradicts what he just said. You always know that he’s coming from someplace that is real within him, or whatever. I mean, authentic doesn’t mean “true” anymore. It has a different meaning.

And I think we see this—so the example that I gave, and I see so many examples of this now all over Instagram, is: No one’s interested in scientific data as much as they’re interested in a really compelling anecdote. And this is just attention-economy stuff. This is because a really compelling anecdote is going to perform better for a number of reasons, whereas a big, longitudinal study is gonna have some interesting findings but it’s also gonna have some contradictory findings, or it’s not always gonna—science is often much less explosive than this one dude who’s like, I took this supplement, and six months later I am freaking jacked. You know, that’s cool. I can see the results. These charts, like, Ugh, it involved like 50,000 people, subjects—there’s some real conclusive evidence here, but it’s way less fun. The results are just much more ambiguous.

We’re living in the age of the anecdote. The anecdote is so much better than the data. Because the anecdote comes from someone’s passion. It involves this affective kind of loadedness that we get to appreciate.

Warzel: I’ve talked about this with certain influencers before, and it’s so interesting because in my professional career, like we’re here at The Atlantic, this is an institution that’s been around for a long time. There’s a lot of credibility that is supposed to come with that and through the processes of, whether it’s The Atlantic or The New York Times or any media institution or any university or place that has been around and has norms and standards and has built up a trust around that. And what you see in the current attention economy, as you say, is the truth being replaced by the authentic-feeling anecdote. But also too is the feeling of, with the authenticity that comes from the influencer and not the institution, is the forgiveness that comes from that, right? Like, an influencer screws up and it’s like, Hey man, it’s just one guy. He’s out, she’s out there. They’re just hustling. They’re making a million videos. They’re posting all the time. What do you expect? They’re gonna get some stuff wrong, man. But they’re trying, and they’re real, and they’re not corporate. Versus, you know, The New York Times or The Washington Post or The Atlantic or whoever makes a mistake, and it’s like, no forgiveness.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah. How dare you?

Warzel: Yeah, the person who feels authentic is given so much rope in these situations.

Jezer-Morton: Yeah, I think that when someone is like, I’m gonna stream my life, and I’m gonna show you my whole my whole vibe, people are like, I honestly don’t care what they say. I love that they’re showing me their whole vibe. And I think that people—again, I think this is maybe a little bit of a response to a fatigue of this kind of perfect brand itself—people are like, No, I want to watch someone just be in front of the camera for eight hours talking about any old thing, and I’ll listen to them, and I’m into it because it feels really real. I’ll listen to their anecdotes. I’ll just catch their vibe. And it feels satisfying in a way that, you know, when people are pretending to be perfect, we’re losing maybe some of the satisfaction of that.

Warzel: I wanna zoom out a little because you argue that stories—humans are storytellers—historically expand our understanding of human beings, who we are, what we can do, and they invite really big open-ended questions, but that social media and its stories are kind of shrinking. Instead of the open-ended questions, it’s like the aperture is narrower.

Is social media and these platforms that we’re telling our stories on, are they shrinking our idea of what the world can be?

Jezer-Morton: I think so. I think we’re always trying to fit our experience into these very limiting narratives that social media gives us. And I think that has an effect of shrinking our capacity. And I do think that ultimately so much of human life, it’s an imaginative activity. Like everyone’s talking about The Odyssey right now. The Odyssey before it was written down was many, many versions of the same story that had many possible endings. And people who heard the story of Odysseus had heard it told in a number of different ways. And they accepted the fact that this story had infinite possible endings. And that was cognitively normal for them. They were like: a given story, who knows how it’s gonna end? And I do think that that gives people a capacity to understand life in a different way than people who are mostly hearing their narratives from social media, or they’re really just hearing about how people are doing awesome and they’re growing and they’re improving and they’re overcoming. And it feels pretty unidirectional and it just feels limited. And I just think that the stories that you hear help you to then tell your own story. And the stories that we hear are not as capacious as they could be.

Warzel: Well, and I think there’s something too of the relentless growth and resilience and positivity as the master narratives, as you call them, as they sandwich up against the reality, the precarity that we also talked about that you’re experiencing, right, when you’re looking at whether it’s climate change or economic insecurity or “AI’s coming for whatever” or political unrest.

You see all that and it’s like, No, but the story has to be this way, and it’s hard to reckon the two of them. And I think that kind of makes a person feel a little insane.

You wrote something I felt very, very deeply, as a fellow person who’s spent the last two decades on social media, and I’m gonna quote you to yourself here: “It is humiliating to try to account for our experiences on platforms that are obviously hostile towards their users. It’s degrading. We’re being treated like shit, and not surprisingly, it’s getting to us. After enough years of this degradation, we may start to believe we are shit. Is it any surprise that contempt and self-loathing animates so much of what’s left of posting culture?”

And personally, I feel like less and less attached to the story of myself as a result of all this, the story I’m telling on these platforms. It is work now. It’s not fun. It’s begun to feel like work. And without a viable alternative—we’re probably not gonna get off these platforms or just have a wholesale change of our behaviors—but I do wonder if you think there’s gonna be something of a wake-up. Like we’ll stop posting on the platforms as terms, maybe, or that we’ll begin to treat them very differently and almost in a kind of protest to what they want us to be. Do you see that happening, or do you think that it’s just so entwined with our lives and identities that we’re just gonna continue to be living in this abusive relationship?

Jezer-Morton: I really see this book as like my farewell to the posting era. I do think that people are posting less. I think they’re going to be posting less and less. I think more social media is going to be populated by AI anyway. And I think the humans are going to have less and less of a role to play. And I do think we’re going to come up with something different. It’s not going to be like a new social-media platform. I don’t believe that that’s imminent. But I think we do come up with creative solutions. We have workarounds. We do find a way to kind of escape capture in our storytelling. We manage that. Memes are one such way, I think. I don’t know about a wake-up call. That feels a little major. I think it’s gonna be slow. I think it’s gonna be very gradual. But I think that people already are like, This narrative tool is no longer working for me. And I don’t know what we’re gonna replace it with, but I know that the desire, the need to tell our stories to each other and to ourselves is gonna find a new container somehow. I fully believe that.

Warzel: I hope that it is something that is not owned by Mark Zuckerberg, whatever it is.

Jezer-Morton: Me too.

Warzel: Kathryn, thank you so much for coming on Galaxy Brain and and talking through these perfectly galaxy-brained concepts with us.

Jezer-Morton: Thanks so much for having me.

Warzel: That’s it for us here. Thank you to my guest, Kathryn Jezer-Morton. Just a quick show note: We are going on a little bit of a hiatus for a portion of this summer to spend some time thinking about what we’re going to do for the new episodes. But we will be back very soon, I promise you that.

And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. That’s TheAtlantic.com/Listener. And as a little Easter egg for all of those of you who have made it here through the credits: You may have noticed something wispy and strange behind me. I lost a bet to a bunch of my friends on a golf trip and had to get a mullet. So if you stuck around, this one’s for you. Thanks so much, and I’ll see you on the internet.

Today The Atlantic is announcing two new staff writers: Madeleine Carlisle and Danyel Smith. This marks a homecoming for Madeleine, who was an Atlantic editorial fellow in 2018 and 2019, and went on to Time magazine and most recently 60 Minutes. Danyel is a legend in journalism who spent the past three years as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine and was previously the editor of both Vibe and Billboard.

Below is the staff announcement from editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg:

Dear everyone,

I’m very happy to let you know that two extraordinary journalists are joining The Atlantic as staff writers: Madeleine Carlisle and Danyel Smith. Both names should be familiar to you; Danyel’s because she is a legend in journalism, having served as the editor in chief of both Vibe and Billboard; and Maddie’s because she is one of our profession’s rising stars (and in particular because she jump-started her journalism career in 2018 as an Atlantic fellow).

About Danyel, who is coming to us from The New York Times Magazine: I’ve been reading Danyel for years, starting, if memory serves, with her brilliant, definitive 1995 cover profile of Whitney Houston, and continuing on through her piercingly forthright 2024 feature in the Times, “I Knew Diddy for Years. What I Now Remember Haunts Me.”

Danyel is a brilliant observer of popular culture—and of the music world in particular—who will bring deep knowledge to our reporting and criticism. Danyel’s list of achievements is long. In addition to leading both Vibe and Billboard, she has been an editor and writer at ESPN and is the author of Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop. Danyel has profiled some of the biggest names in pop culture (Lionel Richie, Tina Turner, Barry Manilow, SZA), and she will do more of this for us.

About Maddie: A bunch of us sensed that, sooner or later, she would be coming back to us. Maddie was a very successful member of the 2018–19 fellowship class who went on to cover politics, law, and gender issues for Time magazine. She then joined the 60 Minutes team, where she worked with correspondents Scott Pelley, Anderson Cooper, and Cecilia Vega on their stories, including one about crypto billionaire Changpeng Zhao that earned an Emmy nomination for outstanding investigative coverage.

As a fellow on the Politics team, she wrote about a Florida woman whose nephew was killed in the Parkland shooting, and about President Trump’s unfulfilled promises to GM workers in Ohio. We’ve been so happy to watch her become an outstanding journalist, and we’re thrilled that she’s rejoining The Atlantic.

Please join me in welcoming both Maddie and Danyel.

Best wishes,
Jeff

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Quinn O’Brien | press@theatlantic.com

The human brain has evolved to learn from specific instructors. When a child hears a gentle spoken word or a soothing lullaby from another person, when their cry is responded to, their brain lights up. Nurturing interactions, or what child-development experts call “serve and return” exchanges, help shape and strengthen the 1 million new neural connections taking place in a child’s brain every single second. Every time a child cries or serves up a bid for attention and receives a caregiver’s response, that back-and-forth helps build the circuits underlying their communication, learning, and emotional well-being. No other input, not even Johann Pachelbel’s Canon in D performed by the Berlin Philharmonic, is capable of activating the neural circuitry the way human interaction does.

Until now. Generative AI may be the first technology in history sophisticated enough to mimic the social interactions that build our brains. Research has demonstrated that infants as young as six months old respond physiologically to interactions with humanoid robots in ways that mirror their response to live humans; another, small-scale experimental study recently found that, after young children interacted with a chatbot, most of them for the first time, they asserted that the AI could perceive the world with humanlike senses and understand and learn as people do.

This technology is already showing up in children’s lives. The talking plush robot that purports to be a child’s best friend is obviously driven by AI, but many parents may not realize that their Amazon Echo recently received a software update that converts the Alexa voice assistant into a full-blown chatbot, using the same fundamental tech that fuels ChatGPT; toddlers asking for information about animals or a joke or a bedtime story may quickly find themselves in the habit of engaging socially with a large language model.

As a pediatric surgeon, researcher, and technologist who has spent decades studying how children’s brains develop, I am concerned about these technologies rolling out and being used by children in the home and at school before we have a full sense of their safety and what they do to young minds. And I am compelled to point out what we do know about human development: that human connection, in all of its imperfection, is foundational to brain development. It can’t be engineered or recovered later.

When a disruption as significant as the AI revolution occurs, people might look for a comparison to make sense of the transformation. In this case, many people instinctively think of social media. After all, it, too, amounted to a large-scale technological experiment that produced unexpected problems that we are still attempting to fully comprehend. But even that comparison is insufficient, because interactive AI—and its ability to mimic the serve-and-return exchanges that wire developing brains—is utterly, fundamentally different from every consumer technology that came before it.

During the most foundational period of brain development, social interaction of the sort that AI can now emulate isn’t entertainment for the developing brain. It’s nutrition. Once you see it that way, the right parallel snaps into focus. A more apt comparison than social media is food—more precisely, processed food.

[Read: Coke, Twinkies, Skittles, and … whole-grain bread?]

For a long time, no one needed to specify that food was farm-raised. The alternative didn’t exist. Food was grown on farms and in gardens and was prepared in homes and in kitchens. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that changed. Food production was industrialized, transformed by genuinely beneficial innovations such as canning, refrigeration, preservation, and mass distribution. Real and urgent problems were addressed: Growing cities were fed, harsh winters became less lethal, life expectancy increased, and kids grew taller and lived longer.

But in the early days, food manufacturers were conducting their own uncontrolled experiments. Preservatives and additives flooded the food supply as companies adopted solutions that they promised were safe: morphine in cough syrup, chalk in milk, formaldehyde in meat. A government chemist, Harvey Washington Wiley, recognized that these evidence-free innovations posed a threat to public health. To prove this, Wiley recruited a cadre of young men willing to eat meals laced with those very preservatives while scientists observed the effects. The suffering of this so-called Poison Squad helped spark the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.

[From the February 1909 issue: The food of the city worker]

We’re in a modern Wiley moment. Innovations in artificial intelligence are delivering very real benefits to today’s families: diagnostic aids that catch developmental delays earlier than human screeners likely can, real-time translation tools that allow non-English-speaking immigrant parents to engage with their children’s teachers, productivity apps that reduce the administrative burdens weighing down many parents and educators. But these innovations have also unleashed obvious dangers: teddy bears that describe sexual kinks or teach toddlers to light matches, AI-generated videos that highlight made-up letters and words.

Despite these dramatic examples of AI gone wrong, the real danger—as demonstrated by our food supply—is what happens when these systems work exactly as designed.

By the mid-20th century, food companies had discovered something more profitable than feeding people: engineering the desire to keep eating. They hired scientists—chemists, flavor engineers, behavioral researchers—to find the precise formulas that would override the body’s natural signal that said “enough.” They discovered the “bliss point”—the precise combination of sugar, fat, and salt that maximizes pleasure in the human brain—and engineered foods to hit this target. They began producing what is now often called ultra-processed food.

This new food looked like its more natural predecessors. It came in familiar shapes. It sat on the same shelves. But something fundamental had changed. Although some ambiguities and controversies surround what foods fall into the broad term ultra-processed—in some respects, it’s a fancy way of saying “junk food”—many of these items are filled with additives and are engineered to be easy to eat and digest in large quantities. They may use hyper-palatable combinations that have been engineered to light up our brain’s reward systems. How could natural foods compete with that?

In short: They couldn’t. Whole foods slowly disappeared from our diet. Today, the average American receives 55 percent of their daily calories from ultra-processed foods—items that didn’t even exist a century ago. For children ages 1 to 18, the number is close to 62 percent. The amount of calories that adults consumed from whole foods decreased from 32.7 to 27.4 percent from 2001 to 2018, according to the CDC’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. According to a 2021 CDC analysis, nearly a third of American children ages 1 to 5 didn’t eat fruit daily, and nearly half didn’t eat vegetables daily. More than half drank sugar-sweetened beverages weekly.

Food companies developed truly remarkable innovations to solve very real challenges. But with those innovations in hand, they also set out to grow revenue. The same market logic is now being applied to our interaction with tech. The underlying capabilities of AI are remarkable, but they can also be formulated to optimize for engagement.

At a glance, a child talking to an AI companion looks like a child participating in conversation. But essential, quiet interactions have been stripped away. Imperfections, delays, and the need to apologize or rephrase something may seem like flaws in human communication, but they are, in fact, crucial developmental building blocks. The small cycle of rupture and repair that occurs following a misunderstanding, played out thousands of times over a childhood, is how resilience, flexibility, and emotional regulation get built. It’s how children develop the most important relational skills: trusting that relationships can survive conflict, and staying connected with others through discomfort.

[From the December 2025 issue: The age of anti-social media is here]

Remove the friction from childhood, and the social-emotional system never gets what it needs to properly develop. The neural architecture that was supposed to be built through imperfect, sometimes-frustrating human interaction may never fully form. Neither may frustration tolerance, empathy, or resilience. Cognitive skills may suffer too. Developmental scientists have long understood that children learn and grow by encountering tasks just beyond their current ability. This is called the “zone of proximal development,” and AI systems designed to meet a child exactly where they are risk denying them the opportunity to ever reach that zone.

Because AI companions have been engineered to remove every imperfection—the misunderstanding, the delay, the repair—a child’s social-emotional system never has to work. Ultra-processed foods stripped the fiber from diets, and engagement-optimized AI might strip the friction from childhood. The developing mind, like the gut, needs resistance to grow. Friction isn’t an obstacle to development; it is development.

Not everyone will be equally affected by the rollout of this new technology. People who have very low food security consume roughly 3 percent more ultra-processed food than those who have high food security do, in part because the cost for each calorie of unprocessed foods is more than 2.5 times that of ultra-processed foods. However, high-income families began pivoting away from ultra-processed foods as soon as the potential harms of such foods became apparent. “Clean” ingredients, minimally processed foods, and organic produce became available—and affordable—to those with resources. An “organic” diet became a status symbol.

[Read: The best parenting hack is being rich]

An identical pattern is emerging with AI. Many of the engineers and executives building these products are going screen-free at home and doubling down on unstructured play. Jack Clark, a co-founder of Anthropic, told Ezra Klein earlier this year that the idea of his young daughter having “unfettered” access to the YouTube algorithm “freaks me out.” He added, “I have the classic Californian-technology-executive view of not having that much technology around for children.”

If the food parallel holds, then engagement-optimized AI will become the new Dollar Menu, concentrating in the lives of the children who can least afford its developmental cost. The Pew Research Center has already demonstrated through survey data that teens in lower-income households are more likely than those from higher-income homes to rely on chatbots for homework help.

We don’t yet have a large-scale study of children raised on ultra-processed interaction. That research is still decades away. But what keeps me up at night is the possibility that we’ll allow human connection to become the new organic—cherished and protected by the wealthy, and out of reach for everyone else.

This article has been adapted from Dana Suskind’s new book, Human Raised: Nurturing Connection, Curiosity & Lifelong Learning in the Age of AI.

The fight against Ebola is not going well. Last week, the head of Africa CDC, Jean Kaseya, announced that the ongoing outbreak of the virus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo had ballooned into the second worst of all time, a milestone he had thought was possible to avoid only weeks before. Rather than the spread of the virus slowing, cases are doubling about every 10 days; more than 1,800 people have died, though the actual toll is likely at least twice as high. His organization is now fighting to keep this Ebola outbreak from becoming the worst on record, Kaseya said at a press conference.

This outbreak is spreading more quickly than any other in history partly because one of the basic tools needed to control infectious disease—testing for the pathogen—is not working. So the Congolese government, along with scientists, aid groups, the World Health Organization, and the world’s biotech companies, is racing to fix it.

In its early stages, Ebola can resemble several more common viruses, including malaria, so health-care workers rely on tests, rather than symptoms, to diagnose the disease. After the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, which killed more than 11,000 people, Congo began stockpiling machines that could detect the Zaire species of Ebola virus, which causes most outbreaks. Hundreds of these GeneXpert devices are now in hospitals all over Congo, along with cartridges that can test a patient’s sample for the virus within an hour, Christian Happi, a molecular biologist who leads a team in Congo working on surveilling this outbreak, told me.

Health officials in Congo began using those stockpiles to test patients for Ebola on April 30, after a smattering of health-care-worker deaths, a calling card of the virus. The results came back negative. So did more samples a couple of weeks later. Ebola, we now know, was circulating. But the species turned out to be Bundibugyo, which is far rarer than Zaire, and which cannot be detected by the existing supply of GeneXpert cartridges. That didn’t become clear until officials had sent samples more than 1,000 miles away, to Kinshasa, for more robust PCR testing, creating a disastrous four-week gap between when the first known patient developed symptoms and when officials received laboratory confirmation of a new Ebola outbreak.

PCR testing is still the only reliable way to detect the Bundibugyo strain in Congo. Under the current system, a car drives to Ebola-treatment centers in affected regions, picks up tests, then drives back to labs that can run the tests, Trish Newport, a lead on Doctors Without Borders’ Ebola programs, explained to me. Some routes take longer than they otherwise would because the samples have to be driven over uneven roads that are frequently blocked by fighting between the Congolese military and the armed group known as M23. After the PCR is run, the car returns handwritten results to the centers.

Nineteen laboratories in Congo can now run PCR tests to detect Bundibugyo, which is a major improvement since the beginning of the outbreak, when only two labs had that capacity in a country of more than 116 million people. But according to figures released by Africa CDC in July, one in eight Ebola tests still took more than 72 hours to return a result. Despite the increase in Ebola testing, the proportion of tests that come back positive has stayed constant, about 45 percent. That probably means the country is still dramatically undertesting, Abraar Karan, an epidemiologist at Stanford, told me.

Meanwhile, Ebola is expanding into new parts of the country. Bringing the outbreak to heel will almost certainly require upping testing to catch more cases, trace chains of transmission, and isolate people who are contagious before they spread the disease further. Modeling done after the 2014 Ebola outbreak suggested that diagnosing 60 percent of patients within one day rather than within five days could have drastically reduced the infection rate.

The fastest solution to Congo’s testing crisis would be to distribute GeneXpert cartridges that can detect Bundibugyo. After all, hundreds of hospitals already have the machines, and each can run 80 or so patient samples at once, which would allow many patients to get same-day results, Happi said. A GeneXpert cartridge that tests for every human strain of Ebola does exist: The U.S. Department of Defense funded its development as part of a biothreat-preparedness program in 2020. The FDA approved the panel earlier this year—but only for use by labs at DOD, which intended to continue conducting research on them. (The Department of Defense did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

In June, with DOD’s permission, Cepheid, the company that makes GeneXpert machines, donated at least some of the tests meant for U.S. government research to Congo’s national health system, Larry Kelmar, the vice president of government relations for Cepheid, told me. (Kelmar did not say how many.) But before they can be used, their accuracy will still need to be compared with PCR tests. Shanelle Hall, a principal adviser at Africa CDC, told me that the GeneXpert cartridges have been tested and that data from those tests are currently being analyzed. A decision on approval is expected in a matter of “weeks, maybe days.”

Other companies and institutions are scrambling to speed up testing, too. Last month, the Gates Foundation issued a Global Grand Challenge to fund teams that will work urgently to develop “field-ready” diagnostics. The WHO has selected eight Ebola diagnostics capable of detecting Bundibugyo—including the GeneXpert cartridges—for fast-track testing, and has already approved two. A test made by a South Korean company, the RADIONE, was approved for use in patients earlier this summer and has become the cornerstone of the WHO’s plan to decentralize and speed up Ebola testing. A senior official at Africa CDC told reporters in early June that 50 RADIONE machines would be in Congo by the end of that month. As of this week, 37 have been delivered. But the machines can test only 24 or so patient blood samples at once, too few to make the dent in diagnosis times needed, Happi said. In a statement, a spokesperson from the WHO said the organization has “established a joint validation platform to rapidly evaluate the performance of a selection of diagnostic products” and that the introduction of new PCR machines has increased testing capacity from 200 tests a day to more than 2,000. KH Medical, the small manufacturer that makes the RADIONE tests, did not respond to a request for comment.

Meanwhile, Happi told me, some Ebola-treatment centers without enough isolation wards are sending suspected Ebola patients home to wait for test results and, potentially, expose other people during that wait. Africa CDC also plans to intensify its contract-tracing efforts by sending thousands of health workers door-to-door, which would require still more testing capacity to support.

The wait for results can discourage the feverish from presenting themselves for testing, Newport, who has been in Congo most of this summer, said. In part because of the delays—and in part because many people in Congo are skeptical of international responders, or believe that treatment centers are places people go to die—those who show up to the hospital typically do so late in disease progression. That’s a real problem, not just because they stay in the community infectious for longer, but also because Ebola cases are far more survivable when they’re caught early, Newport said. Currently, most Ebola deaths are happening at home, rather than in a treatment center or hospital, meaning that many of these infections are never recorded and that teams meant to disinfect homes and sanitarily bury the dead to prevent further spread of the disease never intervene.

The shortage of tests throughout this outbreak has resulted in a shortage of answers to fundamental questions about how the disease has been spreading. Experts still disagree on whether the outbreak began in January or in April. Patient zero remains a mystery. Currently, 80 percent of people who test positive for Ebola haven’t had contact with any other confirmed patients. If that number doesn’t go down, Kaseya told reporters last week, “we will not stop this outbreak.”

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Earlier this year, Tina Peters was languishing in a Colorado women’s prison, eating processed food, and complaining of declining health—including a persistent cough, digestive issues, and bumps on her skin. But by the end of June, the woman who was convicted on charges tied to tampering with voting equipment under her control in 2020 strolled into the White House, sporting a tailored pinstripe suit and red lipstick, her hair cut in a sharp bob. She feasted on a fried-chicken-and-noodle dish with President Trump in his private dining room and posed for photos in the Oval Office. She told the president about her ordeal and “what prison does to a person,” and they both bemoaned the state of the nation’s voting systems. “He was kind. He listened,” Peters told me in an email.  

Peters, once a martyr to the MAGA cause, is now a free woman, feted by the stolen-election movement. The former clerk and recorder of Mesa County, Colorado, was convicted in 2024 and sentenced to nearly nine years in prison after prosecutors said she deceived colleagues to grant an unauthorized person access to voting equipment. After returning to office, Trump, aided by his White House counsel and Justice Department, spearheaded a campaign to “Free Tina Peters” as MAGA commentators and her attorneys relentlessly used the power of their keyboards to demand her release. But because Peters was convicted of state charges, the only person with the power to get her out was Colorado Governor Jared Polis. The Democrat bowed to extraordinary pressure in May and granted Peters clemency despite pleas from prosecutors, his clemency board, and election officials that her punishment was just.

Peters was released on June 1 after serving about 20 months of her sentence. Her freedom came as Trump ordered the nation’s intelligence community to find proof of foreign interference in the 2020 presidential election—only for it to again come up empty. That hasn’t stopped Peters, who wants the government to go even further in its efforts to find fraud she alleges exists from 2020 and overhaul rules and systems over the next three months to prevent malfeasance in November’s midterm elections.  

[Read: Trump still hasn’t found what he’s looking for ]

She walked out of prison repeating many of the unsubstantiated claims that helped land her behind bars. She immediately hit the MAGA circuit, appearing on podcasts and livestreams from locations that look straight out of Architectural Digest. She has crusaded against the machinery used to conduct American elections, insisting that votes have been flipped and that foreign adversaries could exploit future contests. She rails against prison conditions and calls for one of her critics—Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat—to be locked up. Her comeback tour has taken her around the country, including, on June 30, to the White House’s Presidential Walk of Fame, where a photo showed her glancing adoringly at Trump’s portrait while holding what appeared to be a Birkin bag. During the visit she and Trump talked about “election integrity,” Peters told me, including “why people need a process they can verify—paper, open counts, accountability.”

Peters has said in nearly all of these media appearances that the actions that landed her in prison were an attempt to expose irregularities in her county’s voting equipment. She insists that her incarceration was “retribution” for showing that votes could be flipped—though there is no evidence of that claim. Ahead of the midterms she is imploring Trump to declare a national emergency on elections as a way to try to assert federal control over contests that are, by constitutional design, run by state and local governments. “We don’t have to prove anymore that these machines are cheating, that the ballots are being harvested,” Peters told War Room, a show hosted by the Trump ally Steve Bannon. The chyron identified her as a Former Political Prisoner.

No longer subjected to rigid routines, head counts, or fixed mealtimes, Peters has enjoyed choosing her own food again, including steak, salads, and juicy tomatoes (“things that taste like they came from a kitchen instead of a tray.”) “Right now I’m trying to get healthy,” Peters told me. “See the people I love, and keep doing lawful work. I’m not interested in living bitter.” Her faith helped her endure especially tough moments. “I’m grateful to God,” she wrote. “Some days feel normal. Some don’t.” Peters must get permission from a parole officer before traveling out of state.

Election denial has become her full-time job. She directs supporters to her recently revamped website, where she asks that they contribute to her cause (a red “Donate” button hovers in the top-right corner). At a “Fraud Fighter Summit” off the Las Vegas Strip in June, Peters took the stage, clutching a bouquet of flowers, to the delight of the crowd, and a moderator gushed about how “wonderful” she looked. Peters talked on speakerphone with Roseanne Barr, who had planned to attend the conference but had to scrap her trip. “Congratulations for being released from detainment in a communist country, Tina,” the sitcom star said. “You are our hero.” They pledged to take a girls’ trip at some point soon. Hawaii, Peters said, sounded like a good destination, adding: “I can still travel.”

Peters has a history of finding herself embroiled in election disputes. She was elected Mesa County clerk and recorder in 2018 after campaigning on a promise to reopen a closed DMV office. Fruita, Colorado, got its motor-vehicles branch back, but Peters soon found herself in the middle of her first voting-related controversy. Nearly 600 ballots cast in a November 2019 election were found in a drop box outside the clerk’s office months later; an effort to recall Peters over the discovery failed to collect enough signatures. In November 2020 Trump won Mesa County, amassing nearly two-thirds of votes cast.  

But that election, Peters claimed in 2021, was tainted. Prosecutors said that Peters ordered video cameras to be turned off and deceived colleagues to obtain credentials that allowed an election-denial activist to access election equipment. Peters ran for Colorado secretary of state, despite being charged with numerous felonies, on a platform that included the claim that election equipment posed a threat to democracy. She lost in the primary. In 2024, a jury found her guilty of seven charges, including four felonies. The judge presiding over the case called Peters a “charlatan” and said that Peters, not faulty equipment, posed a threat to the electoral process.

Trump returned to the Oval Office a few months after her conviction and quickly started a campaign to spring her from prison through pressure and threats of retaliation. He warned that “harsh measures” would ensue if she remained incarcerated and directed his Justice Department “to take all necessary action to help secure the release of this ‘hostage.’” Peters was convicted on state charges beyond Trump’s pardon power, but in December he issued one anyway. Senior U.S. District Court Judge R. Brooke Jackson, in a preliminary order blocking the administration’s threat to cut Colorado’s SNAP benefits, noted in March that Trump called Polis “weak and pathetic” for keeping Peters confined, and that the administration had launched “a barrage of threats and actions designed, by all appearances, to punish Colorado.” They included terminating millions of Department of Transportation funds, threatening cancellation of energy funds, announcing a plan to dismantle the Boulder-based National Center for Atmospheric Research, and denying federal disaster-relief assistance.

An appeals court upheld Peters’s conviction a few weeks later, but found that the judge who presided over her case may have improperly considered her public comments—violating her First Amendment rights—and ordered that she be resentenced. Instead, Polis decided to commute her sentence. He wrote that hers was an “extremely unusual and lengthy sentence for a first time offender who committed nonviolent crimes.” An addendum to her clemency application that I obtained shows she acknowledges having “made mistakes,” that she pledged to obey the law if released, and that she noted that she wouldn’t have the ability to commit similar crimes since she is no longer a county clerk. “My work to ensure honest elections,” she wrote, “will continue.”

When Peters was freed, on June 1, Francis McClelland was ready to greet her. Carrying a handmade sign reading Tina Peters Mahalo for Your Sacrifice Fight Fight Fight, the 69-year-old stood outside of the La Vista Correctional Facility in Pueblo with a handful of other supporters. McClelland had never understood why Peters would be imprisoned for trying to help prove that elections are rigged, and so he rented a car in Philadelphia and drove out to Colorado hoping to see her. But he made the trip in vain. Neither state-prison officials nor those close to her would say where she was, citing security concerns. “I just wanted to be in the area and if she saw the sign, just to know that, ‘Hey, man, you made a sacrifice,’” McClelland, an independent Trump supporter from Hawaii, told me. “You shouldn’t back down when you’re right,” he said. “I do believe she’s right.”

[Listen: The election deniers are in charge now]

Peters told me her early days outside of prison were mostly quiet, and devoted to the simple pleasures of her new freedom. She slept, and ate avocados. She went outside without asking permission. “I called people,” she told me. “I hugged people. I did boring grown-up stuff you can’t do inside. It wasn’t a parade. It was me trying to feel like a person.”

In her first media appearance after her release, on War Room, Peters appeared alongside a friend and looked tired. “I feel like I’ve aged about 10 years,” she said. She called her release a “miracle” and thanked Trump, her attorneys, and the supporters who sent money through her website. She said she had a long road to clear her name and then went right back to the themes that had landed her in trouble, saying that Democrats “are going to cheat” in elections. “No one’s really addressing the problem that I spent my time in prison as retribution for,” she said. “And that was exposing the election machines that allow the votes to be flipped. As we’re coming up to our 250-year anniversary, I’m joyful that we still have our liberty but, at the same time, I’m very concerned and burdened with why no one is talking about this.”

The Tina Peters tour hasn’t stopped since. She joins the MAGA-sphere from a constantly changing rotation of tastefully decorated settings, including a room with small duck figurines in the background and another with furniture upholstered in black-and-white chevron. She was spotted at a gathering with Arizona’s Kari Lake, another prominent voice in the election-skeptic movement. And wherever she appears, she always implores viewers to hit that red “Donate” button on her site.

In June, a 12-hour online “Lift Tina Telethon” featured a roster of MAGA personalities applauding her sacrifice. She was likened to Joan of Arc and Nelson Mandela, and someone suggested that her face should be carved into Mount Rushmore. A banner crawling across the bottom of the screen asked viewers to Please DONATE NOW to reach a fundraising goal that one speaker set from $1 million to $2 million. Peters made her appearance midway through, and choked up almost immediately. She spoke of her time in prison, during which she wrote letters to Trump, and of a call she had with the president after her release. “I told him, ‘I only wrote two people while I was in prison,’” she said. “I got thousands and thousands of letters. I’m just so humbled and grateful because you guys were, and still are, the wind beneath my wings.” Peters said she told Trump she was discouraged that little progress had been made to secure election equipment. She hoped to talk more about it with him soon. She was staring down other problems, the kind that viewer donations might fix: Her air-conditioning had gone out, and so had the brakes on her truck. “It’s real difficult for me to ask for myself,” she said.

The tour’s biggest stop, the White House, came at Trump’s request, according to Peters’s attorney Peter Ticktin. “He really admires her because she’s an American hero—and he referred to her as such,” Ticktin, a longtime friend of the president’s, told me. “She’s the one he wanted to meet.” Ticktin declined to say what was discussed. Peters said she felt valued during that visit. She spoke with the president about what she saw as a county clerk, how prison affects people, and of the need for “paper, open counts, accountability” in elections. “He talked like he actually cares what happens to regular people,” she wrote to me, “which is not how a lot of papers write him up.” At one point during the visit, she clutched a red AMERICA IS BACK! hat. She also met with Ed Martin, the U.S. pardon attorney, and was presented with a gold eagle brooch representing the Eagle Forum, the conservative advocacy group founded by Phyllis Schlafly.

The White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson did not answer questions about the meeting with Peters, but said in a statement that “President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters.” Trump wants Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require proof of citizenship and voter ID to vote, as well as “other legislative proposals that would establish a uniform standard of photo ID for voting, prohibit no-excuse mail-in voting, and end the practice of ballot harvesting,” Jackson wrote.

Two weeks after Peters visited the White House, Trump delivered a primetime address on election security, but again failed to provide clear evidence of fraud in the 2020 election. Many, including Peters, had hoped for more. On X, she called on Trump to “declare a National emergency” surrounding elections “to protect our country.” She later joined a handful of other election activists calling on federal officials to enforce a “Risk Mitigation Election Plan” before November that would, among other things, require hand-counting each ballot for federal contests before votes are certified, and compare them with counts tallied by electronic tabulators. “The objective is clear: reduce the opportunity for cheating,” read a July 24 letter from the activists to the acting director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. CISA did not answer my questions about the activists’ proposed plan or a meeting the activists said they had with the agency.

Many of the people who administer America’s elections are dismayed by Peters’s post-prison celebrity. Her efforts to convince people that their elections can’t be trusted make the job of administrators more difficult and dangerous, they told me. “She didn’t learn a thing,” Carly Koppes, the Weld County, Colorado, clerk and recorder, said. “Her stance on ‘remorse’ is despicable, and she’s doing exactly what we told the governor she was going to do.” Tiffany Lee, the clerk and recorder from La Plata County, told me she and her staff cried with relief when Peters was sentenced. Now she is angry about what she termed Peters’s “sabotage” road show. "I knew for a fact that she would go right back to getting the attention," Lee said.

When I asked Peters what she would say to people who allege that her claims are false, she deflected. “I didn’t create the mistrust,” she wrote in the email. “For years the public got told everything was the most secure ever, and basic questions got treated like a threat. Now a lot of Americans say they don’t trust the process.”

Peters has her own ideas for making elections more secure. “Yelling at citizens won’t fix it. Proof will. Hand-marked paper. Paper poll books. Chain of custody. Counts people can watch, especially in federal races. That’s clearer than black-box machines and electronic poll books,” she wrote. “Making an election observable isn’t an attack on the country. It’s how you earn confidence back.” Election experts mostly dismiss these proposals as impractical, or warn they could produce large-scale errors.

Peters’s podcaster pals, attorneys, and online supporters told me they see her as a symbol of a broader resistance against forces of evil who are attempting to overtake America. “She’s very brave,” Steve Stern, a Republican activist in Broward County, Florida who hosts The Stern American Show on Rumble, told me. (Peters has treated his audience to interviews at least twice since her release.) “She’s trying to do something to help the country.”

Ticktin and another of her attorneys, John Case, told me they have earned no money from representing Peters. “Hopefully someday I’ll get fully compensated,” Case said, laughing. “But it’s doubtful. I’m not doing it for money—I’ll put it that way.” (At one point in his career, he charged $350 an hour.) Ticktin told me the work he’s doing at his own expense to help Peters is bigger than her: It’s about exposing “the biggest crime in the history of the United States—to steal our country.” Peters told me that some of her supporters were misled by fundraising pages that had nothing to do with her. Donations made on her website, she said, help pay for “legitimate costs: legal bills, security when needed,” and travel expenses for her advocacy work.

Her saga damaged some of her relationships with family members, she said. “That still stings,” she wrote. “I’m very grateful for my mom, for the family who stayed, and for the friends and supporters who didn’t throw me away.” She said she is doing ordinary things with family members and catching up on the past two years. When I talked briefly on the phone with her last month, she said she was traveling. “I’ll be in Texas tomorrow; I’ll be in different places the next few days,” she told me, her voice carrying a hint of a southern drawl. She later stressed that she’s traveling for work, not play.

When Peters first hit the election-activist circuit, the movement was dismissed by many elected officials and experts as “fringe.” Six years later, with Trump back in office and election deniers winning races up and down the ballot nationwide, the movement has been mainstreamed within the GOP even as the public’s trust in elections has declined. Their attempts to one day prove that 2020 was stolen may never bear fruit. But activists are already gearing up to uncover the fraud they believe might help Democrats win back Congress in 2026.

Across the faded blue covers of the exam books in my attic, I can trace the arc of my academic career. I can still see the grades I received on tests in “The Meaning of Abstraction in Modern Art” (A) and in Neurobiology (B–). Just the sight of the booklets is enough for me to feel the pressure to perform, to sculpt the contents of a semester’s worth of knowledge into some fresh shape. But by the time I became a college professor myself, in 2013, the blue book had begun to disappear. Why struggle to discern student penmanship, or risk misplacing a final exam in the trunk of one’s Subaru (to cite a completely hypothetical example), when tests, like everything else, can be administered on a laptop?

The coronavirus made every aspect of education virtual, but even after it abated, in-person final exams remained out of favor for many classes. Part of the reason was simply administrative—the challenge of finding faculty or graduate students to watch over the test-takers. But there was also a shift in how teachers appraised student learning. The blue book meant timed essays and handwritten work, modes of assessment that felt regressive, cruel. It recalled an age of higher education—punitive and bleak, the domain of Dickens’s stern Mr. Gradgrind—that the modern university was eager to outgrow. Not entirely, of course; some faculty still lugged boxes of blue books home in the snow and scribbled grades in red on the covers. But alternatives to the in-person exam proliferated: the capstone project, the take-home essay, the portfolio of selected work from the semester.

The blue book seemed destined to become a relic, as obsolete as cursive. But it had one virtue that hasn’t been easy to replicate: Cheating on a blue-book exam is difficult. When faculty moved away from in-person pen-and-paper exams, they assumed that cheating would be kept in check by honor codes, or by “locked” browsers, which would prevent students from accessing sites that would jog their memory or simply give them the answers. But these measures were never wholly effective. In a survey of undergraduates published in 2020, 62 percent admitted to cheating in some manner.

The advent of AI has only exacerbated the problem. In a matter of seconds, students can create an entire essay with the help of a chatbot. If they’re savvy, they can spend a bit more time to make it sound authentically human enough to evade detection by their professor. As my colleague Rose Horowitch has reported, such cheating has become so prevalent that Princeton recently gave up on its venerable honor code. For 133 years, students had signed a pledge not to cheat, and professors had trusted them to do the right thing. In May, in the face of rampant AI-enabled cheating, the university’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams for the first time since the Gilded Age.

[Rose Horowitch: How AI killed a 133-year-old Princeton tradition]

Universities find themselves in a surprising position. The only reliable way to evaluate what students have learned may be to bring back pen and paper. Faculty are reverting to in-person, handwritten assignments and timed essays—anything that keeps assessments offline. The unlikely hero of the day is the blue book, sales of which are up by as much as 80 percent for some universities since 2023.

Yet the blue book is more than a last redoubt against cheating. Despite its antiquated appearance, the blue book encourages experimentation, even virtuosity. It deserves to live on not because of what it rejects but because of what it makes possible: thinking on the page, a hallmark of the humanities that is indispensable to their value—and essential to the kinds of human beings that a liberal-arts institution hopes to send out into the world.

The blue book hasn’t changed much for a hundred years or more, with its sky-blue tint and pale-red margin lines, its two neat staples and wide-open spacing, and its austere list of requirements on the cover (NAME, SUBJECT, CLASS, SECTION). The precise history of the blue book is lost to time. One origin story pinpoints its emergence in the 1920s at Butler University; the pamphlet is said to have borrowed its distinctive hue from the university’s colors. Harvard lore suggests that the blue book is older still: By one account, a classics instructor, Evangelinus Apostolides Sophocles, burned a stack of blue-book exams to protest the university’s move from oral to written examinations in 1857.

I realize that by advocating for the blue book in 2026, I might be engaging in the same opposition to progress as old Professor Sophocles. But to me, the blue book represents a timeless human activity—namely, trusting your mind to discover unknown capabilities.

[Walt Hunter: Stop meeting students where they are]

I think of my college-age self, looking up at the clock as I turned the page, crossed out a sentence, broke the tip of my pencil. I recall the satisfaction of filling one book and getting up from my desk to take another, the adrenaline of using my knowledge to improvise something and then having more to say. What I learned by writing this way was distinct from what I learned by composing a five-paragraph essay, with its thesis statement, staid structure, and rote deployment of argument and evidence. Any AI agent can mimic that template.

Taking a blue-book exam is an almost athletic endeavor, and not just because of the stamina it requires of both mind and hand. The test-taker is forced to compose an essay that will demonstrate their command of a semester’s or year’s worth of material. They have to summon the verve to tackle a prompt about the place of freedom in the American novel, or the value of a human life in Hamlet, or what Whitman meant when he said that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.” Staring down the empty pages of a blue book, I learned to throw myself into my writing. In the process, I discovered what I was capable of as a writer and a thinker. When you’ve done the reading and reviewed your lecture notes, you can feel like a basketball player whose hours in the gym made possible a transcendent playoff performance, or like a musician whose endless runs of arpeggios in a soundproof practice room allowed for a spectacular solo in the concert hall.

Not every student can put pencil to paper for 90 minutes without looking up. Even the strongest students can struggle, at first, to answer the question, or to organize their thoughts. But this, too, is a reason to love the blue book. When students write, they write into uncertainty. They court risk. No surrogate exists for feeling an idea form in your mind and trying to express that idea on the page. And wonderfully, for the instructor, the blue book documents how students strain their way to an answer or an argument. The marks on the page are indelible, and efforts to amend them leave marks of their own: furious erasing or hasty strike-throughs. The blue book is a record of first thoughts, instincts, intuitions.

These fits and starts and failed experiments are a good thing—for the education of the individual and for the health of a society. The humanities are distinguished by the habits of mind that they inculcate, not for their success in forcing students to memorize facts. Among the most significant of these habits are a nimbleness of thought and a flexibility of argument, the ability to draw connections between diverse sets of facts. Those habits are honed by writing under pressure. Challenged by the blue book, students learn to identify and stand behind their individual commitments. As their professor, I hope they carry that lesson beyond the classroom, beyond the university, and into the fractious world they enter as citizens.

[From the July/August 2023 issue: A defense of humanity in the age of AI]

Often the key insight arrives just as time is expiring, and I love how no part of the book is out of bounds for a final thought at the buzzer. “Education is the single greatest thing Thoreau believes in,” one student sneaks into the margins of the final for my American-literature course. For the teacher, this is the pleasure of the blue book—despite its uniform presentation and its rigid lineation, any part of it might reveal a sudden moonshot of an idea. Many of the best sentences appear on the back inside cover, such as this ending to an essay on Toni Morrison: “A good life is what we make it to be—now all we have to do is live it.”

Students, of course, know what they’ve been taught: the timeline of the English Civil War, the structure of a sonnet by Gwendolyn Brooks, the development of a motif in a Mahler symphony. But the blue book demands more than a recitation of facts. It asks students to demonstrate not just that they know when or where something happened, but why it did. It asks them not just who wrote a poem, or when, but what the poem conveys about the world in which it was written. The best-prepared students, the ones who inhabit the history and poetry and music that have made up the semester’s syllabus, find that they understand the material in ways they didn’t appreciate before they opened the blue book and the clock started ticking.

Proponents of artificial intelligence have promised that, by removing certain elements of the craft of writing, students can concentrate on making their work more polished and their ideas more clearly defined. That’s a dangerous ruse. To see what a student has learned, look at the moment when they struggle to begin—and then transcend that struggle to create something genuinely surprising. That’s the moment the full force of the writer’s mind takes possession of the process.

When we eliminate the possibility of writing badly or incoherently, we eliminate writing’s greatest satisfaction: the feeling that we have stepped outside ourselves and are watching our own words fall together in the right order. What I describe sounds like a state of grace, but it’s also a furious act of intellection and expression undertaken with only one’s study and wits to guide them. I’ve come to love handing out blue books on exam day and seeing the look of ready intelligence on my students’ faces. The essay they are about to write will be better than they think it can be. All they have to do is write it.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “The Blue Book Is Back.”

On October 9, 2020, Taylor Parker, a 27-year-old mother of two, visited her friend Reagan Simmons-Hancock at her home in northeastern Texas. Simmons-Hancock, who was 35 weeks pregnant with her second child, had something Parker felt she desperately needed: a baby.

What transpired next is the subject of Maternal Instinct, a hit Netflix true-crime documentary directed by Jessica Dimmock and released in June. If you watched the film, you might conclude that you know everything you need to know about Parker and her crimes. But you would be mistaken. What is remarkable—albeit in line with the demands of the true-crime genre—is just how much Maternal Instinct leaves out.

True-crime documentaries are entertainment. They tend to follow a formula with common elements: villains and victims, mystery and suspense, capture and catharsis. These stories typically adopt the tropes of horror films—eerie music, ominous foreshadowing—and offer the prosecution’s version of events, which favor a tidy and dramatic view of a killer’s means and motives. The defense’s job is to poke holes in these assumptions. By omitting vital details from defense teams—in Parker’s case and others—true-crime films portray the grisliest offenses as essentially incomprehensible expressions of wickedness, when the reality is invariably more complicated.

The documentary opens with an acquaintance of Parker’s observing that “there’s evil in our land” and that “evil people do evil things.” This is more of a spiritual explanation than a legal or clinical one. No one can know the fundamental character of another person’s soul, but Maternal Instinct hardly tries to understand Parker’s. Parker is clearly guilty of committing two horrifying murders. Her evident mental illness does, however, challenge the claim that her actions could be explained only by inveterate evil.

[McKay Coppins: The gross spectacle of murder fandom]

As Maternal Instinct recounts, in the months prior to that October morning in Simmons-Hancock’s home, Parker, a divorced mother of two, had staged a fake pregnancy. She had gone to great lengths to convince the people around her—including her fairly new boyfriend—that she was expecting. She’d padded her belly, fabricated medical documents and ultrasounds, and claimed that coronavirus-pandemic restrictions mandated that she see her doctors solo. But unbeknownst to her boyfriend and others, Parker was infertile, having undergone a hysterectomy years earlier.

To keep her lies from being exposed, Parker sought a newborn child to make her own. According to police, she arrived at the house of her very pregnant friend with a scalpel and bludgeoned the 21-year-old Simmons-Hancock with what was likely a hammer, then wrestled her to the floor, sliced her uterus open, and extracted her unborn child. Parker then fled the scene with the infant, leaving Simmons-Hancock to die; the infant died later that day. In 2022, after two years in prison and a weekslong trial, Parker was found guilty of capital murder by a Texas jury and sentenced to death.

Maternal Instinct is meant to paint a portrait of a criminal and her crime, but Parker, who remains on death row, was neither interviewed nor consulted for the documentary—nor were her defense attorneys or their expert witnesses, though Dimmock and her team offered them a chance to comment before releasing the film. Dimmock explained to me that she’d declined to interview Parker out of respect for Simmons-Hancock’s family and friends, and because she doubted that Parker would be truthful or remorseful.

True-crime stories about female killers tend to be especially titillating. Men are about nine times more likely to commit murder than women—who are assumed to be, as the Cornell Law School professor Sandra Babcock put it, “peaceful, nurturing, mothering, caring, obedient.” Murder “seems so out of step with how we view women, how we perceive the stereotypical woman as being,” Babcock, who specializes in gender rights and the death penalty, told me.

Parker’s trial gave rise to a profusion of lurid headlines: “Texas Woman Allegedly Stabbed Mom-to-Be 100 Times, Then Tried to Steal Baby From Womb,” reported People magazine; “Neurologist: Taylor Parker’s Brain Is ‘Broken;’ Defense Rests,” offered the local NBC affiliate KTAL News. Body-cam clips of Parker’s interactions with police spread on YouTube and TikTok. The coverage inspired Maternal Instinct and sets its tone; Dimmock told me that much of her team’s preliminary research into Parker’s case came from the news articles and video clips disseminated online.

Maternal Instinct includes interviews with Parker’s former friends and acquaintances, who describe the broad scope of Parker’s lies over the years, including her many allegedly fictitious ailments and her claims that she was due to receive a multimillion-dollar inheritance from her oil-baron grandparents, who were, in reality, of no particular means. To maintain her deceptions about the pregnancy and other matters, Parker owned multiple cellphones for sending fraudulent messages, fabricated official letters, and used voice-altering software to place anonymous calls.

Randi Chavez, an investigator brought on by Parker’s attorneys, met with Parker for hundreds of hours over the course of a year. Chavez retained experts to assess Parker’s mental and neurological health, and she interviewed people who knew her, including relatives and fellow prisoners. What she discovered was that Parker had displayed symptoms of profound mental illness for many years.

To stipulate that Parker’s mental illness played a significant role in her ghastly crimes is not to suggest that she should have been found either incompetent to stand trial or not guilty by reason of insanity, both of which are exceedingly rare outcomes. Her defense instead presented evidence of her mental illness as a factor that ought to have spared her from the death penalty, but not from punishment altogether. (The American Psychiatric Association, the American Bar Association, and other professional groups have called for a ban on the death penal­ty for those with severe mental illness.) Yet like Parker’s jury, Maternal Instinct does not take Parker to be seriously mentally ill.

At Parker’s trial, the prosecution called upon the forensic psychiatrist Michael Arambula to testify that Parker showed signs of borderline personality disorder, a condition marked by intense mood swings, unstable relationships, impulsivity, fear of abandonment, and feelings of emptiness. But Arambula’s testimony undermined the seriousness of the illness by likening it to intentionally malicious behavior. Borderline personality disorder, he told the jury, is “probably the most manipulative of the personality types.” Parker, he said, had a “pleasant and engaging demeanor atop a core of rage.” He denied that mental illness had contributed to Parker’s murders, insisting to the jury that the uncommon brutality of her crimes did not mean that she was delusional. Members of Simmons-Hancock’s family have likewise adamantly maintained that Parker is “evil” rather than “crazy.”

[Megan Garber: America’s constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality]

But Arambula delivered his testimony without ever meeting or interviewing Parker. He drew his conclusions from a review of Parker’s medical records. The defense’s mental-health experts, who’d actually met Parker, came to very different conclusions.

At trial, the defense called a psychiatrist, a neurologist, and a social worker, all of whom confirmed that Parker suffered from a personality disorder that was exacerbated by a personal history of trauma and abuse. They found that Parker’s teenage mother had been negligent, disengaged, and hostile to her daughter before abandoning the family when Parker was a teenager. Her father, meanwhile, had abused methamphetamines, and when Parker was 12, he’d taken her to a house frequented by drug users, where, she said, a man raped her. Maternal Instinct neither reported nor probed those allegations.

After Parker’s conviction, lawyers working on her appeals invited more experts to expand this evidence. Nicole Anders, a clinical psychologist for the defense who met with Parker in January 2025, confirmed that Parker displayed traits associated with borderline personality disorder and argued that this condition—which Anders discussed in the context of Parker’s history of trauma and abuse—significantly altered her ability to reason or function. In a declaration submitted to the court, Anders stated that the trauma and sexual abuse Parker endured as a child had left her hypervigilant, prone to delusion, and desperate for emotional connection. “Although these coping strategies may be maladaptive in the long term,” Anders wrote in her clinical report, “they are rooted in survival instincts. When safe, consistent caregiving is absent or unpredictable early in life, the nervous system adapts to prioritize protection over connection or reason.”

Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, told me that personality disorders form when a patient’s ways of coping with traumatic experiences become deeply ingrained. “We all develop some kind of psychological armor,” Malkin said, which “are just ways of protecting ourselves in vulnerable moments when we’re ashamed, when we fear rejection, when we’re sad and helpless.” For Parker, coping with her mother’s rejection, her father’s destructive irresponsibility, and her own desolate loneliness meant developing delusional fantasies and resorting to extreme people-pleasing behavior. Winning the affection of others sometimes meant lying to them about what she had to offer. Borderline patients, Malkin said, “are people who live on the edge of neurosis and psychosis,” meaning that they alternate between struggling to solve everyday problems and losing touch with reality altogether.

According to experts who spoke with Parker during and after her trial, those delusions centered on her fertility. In 2014, six years before the murders, Parker sought a routine tubal ligation to prevent further pregnancies, but the procedure failed. When a gynecologist confirmed to Parker a year later that she was pregnant, Parker was relieved. She concluded that it was a sign from God that she was meant to have another child. But during a subsequent surgery to remove a cyst on her right ovary, her doctor discovered that the pregnancy was ectopic and developing in her left fallopian tube. While Parker was still under anesthesia, her surgical team procured consent from her then-husband to undertake a total abdominal hysterectomy, removing Parker’s fallopian tubes, uterus, cervix, and right ovary. Although Maternal Instinct notes that Parker’s hysterectomy left her unable to have children, the film neglects to mention how it happened or how she felt about it.

Parker was shattered when she awoke to find that she could no longer bear children. She confided in friends at the time and later told Diana Barnes, a women’s-mental-health expert brought in by her defense team, that she felt robbed of her identity and purpose in life. She became fixated on pregnancy and childbirth, took a job at a women’s health clinic to be near babies, spent her free time watching mothers and children at parks and stores, and desperately researched surrogacy and uterine transplants, even soliciting her mother for her uterus. As Parker’s obsession progressed, her marriage broke down, and her mental health unraveled. She told others that she had again become pregnant and miscarried, though that was not possible. She told Barnes that when she placed a mock pregnancy belly on her body in 2020, she felt as though it were really her flesh.

Parker was clearly unwell in the months and years leading up to the murders, a fact that Maternal Instinct elides. The documentary suggests that Parker’s crimes were carefully calculated out of selfishness and deceit: A malevolent young woman conspired to entrap her boyfriend with a fake pregnancy and needed a newborn to pull off the plot, so she brutally murdered a friend and stole her baby. But that version of events raises questions that can be answered only by Parker’s mental illness: Why was her desire for love and acceptance so overwhelming that it curdled into criminality? What made the prospect of having a baby with her boyfriend seem worth killing for? Suggesting that Parker’s evil nature alone explains her many schemes and lies is both reductive and unsatisfying.

The film does not explain how someone so adept at weaving elaborate falsehoods might fail to anticipate that staff at the hospital where she arrived with Simmons-Hancock’s baby would also inquire into her own condition. People who had doubted her pregnancy were bound to notice that Simmons-Hancock’s murder and Parker’s “birth” had coincided. But Parker was not thinking clearly, and had not been for some time.

[Atlantic documentaries: America is obsessed with serial killers]

Murder is, after all, not a good idea. Some people commit murder without having thought it through at all, but that sort of crime does not make one eligible for the death penalty. Murders that are eligible for the death penalty involve some degree of premeditation and intent. The presence of planning is usually taken to be proof that a murderer had a sober appreciation for what they meant to do, but it also suggests that something was seriously wrong with their capacity to reason; otherwise, they would have come to the conclusion that, whatever their predicament, murder could only compound it. This does not seem to have occurred to Taylor Parker.

The origins of many murders eligible for the death penalty seem to lie less in deeply rooted inherent wickedness than in particularly compromised minds. Such nuance is usually absent from true-crime yarns, however, because acknowledging mental illness and other impairments complicates simplistic narratives. The genre captivates audiences by dramatizing the worst human behavior, but these stories almost always neglect to illuminate the whole truth, which is stranger and more tragic than what passes for good TV.

In late July, Iran struck a U.S. military base in Jordan, killing three American service members. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps followed up with an unusual series of messages to the Jordanian people: “You know well that we have no hostility toward your country,” the IRGC declared in a statement published on Iran’s Fars News Agency. “Rather, we love you, noble people who understand the suffering and injustice endured by the Palestinian people more than any other nation.”

Another message cheekily thanked unnamed Jordanians for providing targeting information for the Iranian strikes. A third appeared to address Jordanian critics of the operation, saying that the United States, not Iran, had “violated your territorial integrity and sovereignty.”

The appeals to Jordanians speak to a concerted effort, fueled by Iran’s growing confidence in its regional position since the start of the war with the United States and Israel, to convince the Arab public that an alliance with the United States is not worth the cost. The Islamic Republic has tried to drive such a wedge ever since its founding in 1979. But today’s push reflects Tehran’s perception of what Iranian officials call a “new equation of power” in the Middle East—one that includes Iranian control over the Strait of Hormuz.

[Nancy A. Youssef and Jonathan Lemire: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

Iran has demonstrated its willingness to defend this position through missile strikes on seven different Arab countries that host U.S. bases. At least three were aimed at Jordan, including a surprise attack on July 28. Now the IRGC is reaching out to Jordanians with professions of solidarity and love.

The switch from bombardment to flattery may seem sudden, and Jordan may seem an unlikely place for the IRGC to go looking for friends. Unlike Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan has no significant Shiite minority to form a social base for the spread of Iranian influence. But Tehran has both a military rationale and an ideological one.

Iran’s military purpose is clear: Jordan houses radar and anti-missile systems that help Israel detect and deter incoming Iranian fire, and it lacks the military capacity to retaliate against Iranian strikes. Jordan also lacks the economic clout that seems to have helped the United Arab Emirates—an essential export hub for Iranian goods—cut a tacit nonaggression pact with Tehran, at least for the moment.

Tehran also hopes to exploit a fissure between Jordan’s people and their government, which depends on the protection and patronage of the United States. Some Jordanians have recently called for the expulsion of the U.S. military, a movement fueled in part by deep sympathy for the Palestinian cause. Some 60 percent of Jordan’s population is of Palestinian origin.

Ever since the start of the Gaza war in 2023, street protests have regularly erupted in Jordan. These have been supported by the country’s king and queen and by prominent government officials, whether out of conviction or a belief that the public needs to let off steam. Queen Rania gave an interview to Christiane Amanpour two weeks after the Hamas massacre on October 7 in which she spoke of Israeli actions as a “genocide”—a gesture that was widely seen in Jordan (and Israel) as setting a new tone of fury regarding Israel’s behavior in Gaza.

Jordanian demonstrators did more than let off steam: They pledged support for Hamas. Islamist networks in Jordan began gaining strength, leading the government to ban the local chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood last year. In late 2024, Jordanians, two of whom were members of the Brotherhood, carried out two cross-border terrorist attacks in Israel.

Violence in Gaza has ebbed since a cease-fire took hold late last year, but Israel’s gradual, de facto annexation of the West Bank, which has accelerated in the past few years under Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, is of deep concern to Jordan. The specter of a fuller or even formal annexation—however unlikely at the moment—raises profound fears in Jordan of a flood of Palestinian refugees, which might upset the country’s fragile demographic balance and amplify anger at Israel.

“The Iranians believe they know what’s going on in Jordan,” Amer al-Sabaileh, a Jordanian security expert and columnist, told me. “This could be a multilayered strategy—missiles, then propaganda, then maybe activating cells.”

But Iran’s bets may well prove wrong. For all their sympathy with the Palestinian cause, Jordanians have long been profoundly distrustful of Iran’s revolutionary Shiite project, partly for sectarian reasons, given that Jordan’s people are almost all Sunni Muslims. Tehran’s latest missile blitz aimed at its neighbors is also taking a toll. Recent polling in Arab countries suggests that any sympathy Iran gained during the initial phase of the war this spring, when it was seen as a victim of Israeli aggression, evaporated with Tehran’s recent bout of air strikes on Arab countries, says Michael Robbins, the director of the Arab Barometer, a public-opinion-research organization.

[Tom Nichols: Trump owes Americans a better explanation about Iran]

Jordanian officials, who spoke obliquely of defending Jordanian sovereignty during the first phase of the Israeli-U.S. war earlier this year, have taken a firm line against “Iranian aggression” in recent public statements. So have some of the country’s government-aligned journalists.

“Jordan is subjected to Iranian aggression, full stop,” wrote the columnist Hussein al-Rawasdeh, in an article in the newspaper al-Dustour that criticized those calling for the withdrawal of U.S. troops as disloyal. “Do you stand with your country?” Other columnists went further, suggesting that the Iranian strikes might even stiffen Arab resolve and help form a more united front.

But Arab countries confront limited options. “Ultimately, they all face the same strategic calculation that adopting a harder line against Iran, especially as ultra-hard-liners gain influence in Tehran, will place them more firmly in the crosshairs,” Ahmad Sharawi, a senior analyst at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, told me. Their primary weapon, he said, will remain “diplomatic condemnations.”

Earlier this summer, Ukraine had finally seized the initiative in its punishing four-year war. President Volodymyr Zelensky had plenty of dramatic victories and technological advances to tout to his Western backers as he made the case that Russia can be defeated. His clash with Donald Trump in the Oval Office last year had been eclipsed by more recent encounters in which the U.S. president seemed open to helping Ukraine prevail. After closed-door talks with Zelensky in Turkey last month, Trump offered to meet Kyiv’s desperate need for air defenses and told reporters during a briefing about the two leaders’ promising vibe: “There was a lot of love in that room, a lot of unity.”

In Washington, Zelensky also had a well-connected ambassador in place. Olha Stefanishyna, a former deputy prime minister, was constantly describing Ukraine’s battlefield successes to officials and lawmakers. Her goal was to move beyond those sympathetic to Kyiv’s plight to build “reliable, economic, interest-based relations across America,” she told us in an interview.

That momentum, built up since the start of the year, fizzled in a matter of days. At his meeting with Zelensky last week, Trump did not agree to send more of the Patriot air-defense systems that Ukraine needs to stop Russian ballistic missiles. He also backtracked on his pledge to let Ukrainian companies make these systems themselves. Back in Kyiv, long-festering issues related to wartime corruption weakened Zelensky’s team, leading to the ouster of Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov last month and the resignation of Stefanishyna earlier this week. (She returned to Kyiv to address corruption allegations, which she denies.)

In a rare show of public dissent, protesters have rallied for weeks in Kyiv to demand that Zelensky reinstate the defense minister. His reengagement may be vital to Zelensky’s plan for Ukraine to survive the winter. Zelensky had asked Trump during their meeting to call in a favor from Elon Musk, The Atlantic first reported last week; Musk’s SpaceX operates the Starlink satellite system. Zelensky wants to use the system to guide strikes against the missile batteries that Russia uses to hammer Kyiv and other cities. Trump was noncommittal about that proposal too. Since he was dismissed, Fedorov has been working through back channels to appeal to Musk, who so far has refused to relent, two of Fedorov’s close allies in Kyiv told us.

“As of this moment, there is no positive decision,” one of those allies said on Wednesday. Musk continues to argue with Fedorov over the risk of further Russian escalation in the war. “Elon keeps saying it’s time to make a deal,” the Fedorov ally said. (Musk and SpaceX did not respond to requests for comment.)

After the Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, Trump said that his trusted envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner would make their first visit to wartime Kyiv in the coming days. But there are no other signs indicating that the pair will make the trip, despite Witkoff’s eight visits to Moscow as Trump’s envoy. Ukrainian officials are skeptical that the real-estate tycoons, who would have to make the long train ride to Kyiv from Poland, will show up anytime soon.

[Read: Zelensky asked Trump for a favor from Elon Musk]

All of these developments have been as unwelcome as they are painfully familiar for Ukraine’s leadership: Throughout the war, they have seen the resolve of their most important ally falter in the moments when it has mattered most—and when a real breakthrough seemed within reach. The White House, fearful of Kremlin retaliation and worried about a shortage of munitions during its war with Iran, has left Kyiv to face another winter of Russian bombardment, just weeks after things finally appeared to be looking up.

A senior administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity to address internal deliberations, told us that the United States was exploring options for defense-industry cooperation with Ukraine but suggested, as Trump has publicly in recent weeks, that following through with his promise to grant Ukraine the ability to manufacture Patriot systems could endanger America’s military edge. “We must prioritize protecting these exquisite systems and expanding overall production of critical weapons systems for the U.S. warfighter and for our partners and allies,” the official said in a statement.

At a meeting of his war council on Wednesday, Zelensky mused that his foreign partners might have darker motives for withholding the air defenses that his country needs. “Maybe these are political steps aimed at making Ukraine more, let’s call it, compliant,” he said in televised remarks. “In my view, that’s also part of it.”

Perhaps the Ukrainians should have seen this coming. After Trump won the election in 2024, many of Zelensky’s allies in Kyiv clung to naive expectations for his second term. They had grown deeply frustrated with what they viewed as the Biden administration’s lack of urgency in providing Ukraine with high-powered weapons. A common refrain in Kyiv held that Joe Biden, due to his fear of escalation, gave them enough to survive the war but not enough to win.

Officials in Kyiv had hoped that Trump might jump-start negotiations with the Kremlin after he repeatedly promised to end the war quickly. “We needed to show that we were not the obstacle to peace,” a senior Ukrainian official told us about that period. “The obstacle is Russia, and we need to overcome it together.”

[Anne Applebaum: Putin’s human safari is the dystopian future of war]

This became the central message of Ukrainian diplomacy during the U.S. presidential transition, and Zelensky delivered it to Trump at every opportunity. But Trump wanted to see some tangible benefit for the United States in supporting Ukraine. Senator Lindsey Graham, a confidant of both Trump and Zelensky, came up with a plan for the U.S. to profit from its role in the war through the extraction of Ukraine’s natural resources, especially rare earth minerals. Zelensky balked at the plan’s most onerous provisions, which seemed to turn Ukraine from an American ally into an economic vassal. He rejected drafts presented to him by J. D. Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, among others.

Stefanishyna, then serving as both the deputy prime minister and the justice minister, helped design a compromise that both sides could accept. She hoped the signing ceremony at the White House, which she attended, would be a brief, cordial affair. The now-famous encounter last February instead devolved into a televised fracas, in which Trump and Vance accused Zelensky of ingratitude and disrespect. Trump’s aides asked the Ukrainian delegation to leave the White House. “Complete and utter disaster,” Graham fumed to reporters gathered outside the West Wing.

Looking back, Stefanishyna told us, Zelensky and his aides hadn’t come prepared to make Ukraine’s case in a way that would resonate with Trump. They didn’t realize the extent to which Trump and his aides viewed Ukraine’s suffering—at least 16,000 civilian deaths have been documented, in addition to nearly half a million soldiers killed or wounded—as a Democratic cause. Biden had spearheaded the Western coalition in support of Ukraine and sought to make his defense of Ukraine’s sovereignty a defining issue of his presidency. With Trump back in power, this all worked in Russia’s favor. “We came with all this pain to the White House,” she said, “and it became very obvious that this was our pain” and not something shared by the Trump administration. Although Trump may have empathized on some level, she added, “as president of the United States, he has a very different perspective. This was a wake-up.”

The administration official said that Trump and his team remain committed to contributing to the war’s end. “We are the only country in the world that can play that role,” the official said.

[Read: Zelensky makes his pitch to Trump]

In July of last year, Stefanishyna arrived in the U.S. to represent Ukraine in Washington. Soon after, Trump hosted Vladimir Putin in Anchorage, Alaska. Stefanishyna was horrified to see the Russian president get a much warmer reception than Zelensky had in February. The summit ended Putin’s long global isolation without Trump demanding a single concession. The moment generated a “very physical fear,” Stefanishyna said. “To wake up in the morning in a reality where the United States is coming back to friendly relations with Russia,” she said, was “like Ukraine never existed.” The rapprochement “was much more terrifying than living in Ukraine under bombs.”

Through the bitterly cold winter that followed, in which temperatures fell below zero Fahrenheit, Russian missiles hammered Ukraine’s power grid and heating infrastructure, leaving millions of civilians to freeze in darkened homes or bomb shelters. Many saw this as the low point for Kyiv in the war.

Ukraine survived. But by the middle of winter, Russia had figured out a potent new way to attack. Russian troops were guiding their drones in Ukraine with the help of Starlink. “This could have been a real catastrophe,” Fedorov told us. The technology allowed the Russians to circumvent Ukraine’s air defenses and bombard any target they wanted, including the government district in Kyiv. To stop them, Fedorov reached out to Musk with an urgent appeal for help.

The billionaire called him back at the end of January, when Fedorov happened to be at his daughter’s birthday party, and the minister stepped out to chat with Musk, whose face appeared on the screen of his phone. That conversation led to a plan to cut off Russian access to Starlink terminals. Ukrainian forces continued to fly their drones with Starlink inside Ukrainian territory, including in Crimea and other Russian-occupied regions.

The technological imbalance allowed Ukraine to shift the momentum at the front, where its troops reclaimed a few hundred square kilometers of occupied territory by the middle of February. Around the same time, Ukraine began a campaign of long-range strikes targeting Russian oil refineries. It also used drones early this summer to cut off Russian supply lines to Crimea. Moscow and other cities soon faced fuel shortages, and Kremlin-backed authorities in Crimea declared a state of emergency. For the first time in years, Ukraine appeared to have Russia on the back foot.

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

The White House noticed. “The real factor that has changed the U.S. attitude, including President Trump, is success on the battlefield by the Ukrainians,” William Taylor, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, told us regarding its recent battlefield gains. He noted Russia’s staggering casualty rate, far higher than Ukraine’s. After all, Taylor added: “Trump likes to back a winner.”

The start of the war in Iran at the end of February—as it happens, one year to the day after Zelensky’s clash with Trump in the Oval Office—gave Stefanishyna another chance to make Ukraine’s case around Washington. Ukraine had invented a way to shoot down the cheap drones that Iran was using to target Persian Gulf nations and U.S. bases in the Middle East. The Ukrainian interceptor drones cost as little as $1,000 to produce, compared with millions for sophisticated U.S. interceptor missiles. “We discovered that we are the only country on the whole planet who’s able to provide effective means of defense in that regard,” Stefanishyna told us. The innovation gave Ukraine the opportunity to engage with the United States not as a supplicant asking for aid but as a partner.

Zelensky offered to share the technology with the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East. Trump did not seem interested. “We don’t need their help in drone defense,” he told Fox News in March, days after a deadly drone attack on the U.S. base in Kuwait. “We know more about drones than anybody.”

Others in his administration saw it differently. In congressional testimony in May, U.S. Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said that he had learned a lot from the Ukrainians. Their military operating system, known as Delta, “is absolutely incredible,” Driscoll said. “It fully integrates every single drone, every sensor, and every shooting platform into just one single network. Ours does not.”

Ukrainian strikes against Russian oil refineries and other infrastructure also bolstered the impression of momentum shifting in Ukraine’s favor. “Now everybody in Washington thinks Ukraine is going to win,” one Republican strategist told us last week. “They have all these drones, and we want all these drones.”

Following what Trump called a “very good meeting” with Zelensky on the sidelines of a G7 summit in June, the U.S. president piled pressure on Putin, saying that “Russia should make a deal.” Then came Trump and Zelensky’s talks at the NATO conference in Ankara, Turkey, last month, where Trump dangled the Patriot-production license as an answer to Kyiv’s long-term air-defense needs.

[Read: What’s eating ‘Putin’s brain’?]

When Zelensky and Stefanishyna met again with Trump last week, ahead of Graham’s funeral in Washington, the tensions of the previous year’s encounter were absent. Rather than arguing for support on moral and legal grounds, Zelensky touted Ukraine’s battlefield advantage and the expertise that Kyiv could offer in waging war in the 21st century. The message was that “Ukraine is no longer a charity case” but rather a valuable partner holding its own on the battlefield, a former Zelensky adviser told us after the meeting. “It was a much more realistic approach, given the administration’s ‘America First’ policy. And if you look at the results, it’s night and day.” Now it was Putin, not Zelensky, whom U.S. officials viewed as the obstacle to peace. Even Laura Loomer, an informal Trump adviser and erstwhile supporter of the Kremlin, returned from Kyiv gushing about how Ukraine deserved American backing to figure out how to win.

That was last week, shortly before we visited the Ukrainian embassy, which occupies a historic brick structure in Georgetown, north of the Potomac River. In 1791, President George Washington met with a group of local landholders in the building to discuss acquiring terrain for the American capital. Today, a hallway in the building holds a Ukrainian bomber drone called a Vampire, which Stefanishyna used to showcase her country’s wartime innovations.

On the day of our interview, however, Stefanishyna was preparing to leave after less than a year on the job. Investigative journalists in Kyiv had scrutinized her property deals and her record in government going back to 2013, when she served as a junior official in the justice ministry. The price her family had paid for an apartment in Kyiv nearly a decade later also raised suspicion in the press. Anti-corruption investigators began looking into her financial records, questioning her friends and relatives. She denied all of the claims of wrongdoing but decided that the allegations were too distracting for her to remain the ambassador to the U.S. “I cannot really pretend like I’m doing a great job here, having fun, while my family is under threat,” she said, tears welling in her eyes.

A week after we spoke with Stefanishyna, anti-corruption authorities in Kyiv charged her with “illicit enrichment,” and a court set her bail at 6 million hryvnia, worth roughly $130,000. “The mission has been successfully completed, and I am in Ukraine to answer here,” she wrote in response on social media. “The burden of proof lies with the one making the accusation. As for me, I will do all I can: calmly defend my position in accordance with the law.”

Her departure was part of a government reshuffle that also cost Fedorov, the defense minister, his job. Speaking last week to Ukrainian journalists, he said that his firing was also related to problems with corruption. In his role as the defense minister, he had pushed for reforms that angered a long list of arms manufacturers and their allies in the military high command, and they had teamed up to undermine Fedorov’s position. His allies told us that he has continued to try to persuade Musk to relent on Starlink, but to no avail.

In a matter of days, the optimism that for months had been building around Ukraine’s prospects seemed to fade. At one point earlier this summer, Zelensky could look ahead to an influx of new U.S. missiles to defend Kyiv, the right to make even more in Ukraine, and the potential ability to strike inside Russia thanks to Fedorov’s overtures to Musk. He enjoyed greater respect from Trump for Ukraine’s innovations and battlefield momentum, and better relations across Washington thanks to a well-regarded young ambassador.

[Read: Putin is slipping into delusion]

Instead, Trump appears to have turned lukewarm and is stalling on previous commitments on Patriot missiles. Entreaties to Musk have so far failed. Zelensky’s firing of his popular defense minister has prompted protests at home. And Ukraine has no ambassador to make the case for continued U.S. support, because the previous one returned home to face charges of corruption.

As if to emphasize the turnaround, Russia has intensified its missile strikes on Kyiv, taking advantage of Ukraine’s depleted air defenses. Earlier this week, the city and its suburbs faced a barrage of at least two dozen ballistic missiles in a single night. Ukraine was unable to shoot any of them down. Seventeen civilians died, and at least 44 others were wounded.

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At this year’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, Donald Trump told a room full of the world’s most prominent CEOs about a routine that he performs when he meets a successful businessperson:

I say, “Congratulations!”

They say, “On what?”

I said, “You’ve doubled your net worth since I’ve been president, right?”

This is how Trump has long pitched himself—as the savior of American commerce. One of his central promises to voters in 2024 was that he would encourage private investment in the United States, boosting the stock market and ushering in a “golden age” of economic activity. Everyone, he vowed, would be making money.

But the president now seems less pro-business than he once did. On Monday, in response to a question about the gargantuan profits being posted by U.S. oil companies, Trump told reporters that ExxonMobil and Chevron are “making too much money based on a shortage.” Energy companies adjust their prices as global markets move; when Trump took the country to war against Iran, in February, the world’s oil supply was abruptly pinched, and prices shot up. Chevron and ExxonMobil announced that they’d earned $12.1 billion and $14.5 billion, respectively, last quarter—many billions more than they’d made during the same period last year. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price, the consumer price,” Trump said.

This statement echoes the president’s previous accusation of price gouging in the industry. Back in June, after the U.S. and Iran signed a memorandum of understanding, Trump claimed that companies were keeping gas prices from falling as quickly as oil prices were. There are legitimate economic reasons that gas prices and oil prices aren’t always perfectly synced, and Big Oil doesn’t unilaterally set retail gas prices at American pumps (fewer than 5 percent of U.S. gas stations are owned directly by major oil companies, according to the American Petroleum Institute). The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission subsequently called for states to investigate possible retail-price manipulation. To shift some of the responsibility for high gas prices, the president is now scolding an industry he once championed—but it won’t change the reality that most Americans are unhappy with the economy, and that Trump is largely to blame.

Oil interests reportedly spent more than $75 million to get Trump reelected, and the administration has consistently supported the industry over the past two years. “Drill, baby, drill” has been a mantra for his administration since day one. The White House recently revoked protections for endangered species, clearing the way for companies to drill in critical wildlife habitats. The secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, has pushed to increase offshore drilling and drilling on public lands. Trump’s suggestion that Big Oil return some of its money “to the public” represents, by his own admission, a hard pivot. “I should be the last one to say it, because I’m a big free-enterprise guy—nobody bigger,” he said on Monday. (ExxonMobil declined to comment for this story, Chevron didn’t respond to my request, and the White House told me that “President Trump’s priority has always been and continues to be lowering gas prices for American families.”)

The Trump administration has made a point of celebrating businesses that have cut costs for consumers in recent months. In July, Trump applauded a new chain of gas stations called the Freedom Fuel Network for selling gas at a discount across the mid-Atlantic. On Truth Social, the president wrote that this “VERY smart Retailer” was “stepping up” on account of its patriotism, and that others should follow its example. Brooke Rollins, the agriculture secretary, wrote on X yesterday that a co-owner of 14 Piggly Wiggly supermarkets (who has been invited to the Oval Office in the past) was “answering Trump’s call” by “boldly stepping up to lower costs for families.” She praised Walmart for implementing similar price-cutting measures, and wrote a few days ago that another grocer, Meijer, was also “answering the call” by lowering prices on more than 1,000 items. But it’s unclear whether these companies’ discounts were actually responses to the president, as Rollins has suggested.

Trump and his party have every reason to be worried about high prices. All kinds of consumer goods have become more expensive since the start of the Iran war, and Americans are now broadly worried about the cost of living, just as they were before Trump took office. People’s dissatisfaction with the president’s handling of the economy is reflected in his abysmal approval ratings, which pose a problem for Republicans in the midterms. Trump’s strategy has so far been to avoid taking responsibility for any Iran-driven inflation and to insist that, actually, the U.S. is experiencing an economic boom. He’s right that some indicators have lately been positive: The stock market continues to set record highs, and inflation did cool in June after three straight months of acceleration—although it’s still higher than it was before the start of the war.

With his comments on Big Oil, the president seems to be acknowledging that high prices are indeed a problem for many Americans. He also seems to expect that private companies will bail him out during a moment of political weakness. This administration has created the conditions—both domestically and abroad—for consumer goods to become more expensive, and for the cost of oil to jump. No piecemeal discount can undo what Trump himself has already done.

Related:

• Get used to high gas prices.
• The great Chinese oil mystery

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• The new parent trap
• How the U.S. squandered its strategic advantage
• What El-Sayed does next matters.

Today’s News

1. The Senate Homeland Security Committee voted along party lines to hold Anthony Fauci in contempt of Congress after he refused to answer questions by invoking the Fifth Amendment at last week’s hearing. The resolution sends a referral to the Justice Department for possible prosecution over his alleged refusal to comply with a congressional subpoena.
2. Iranian media said that Iran and Oman are close to an agreement on new arrangements for the Strait of Hormuz; President Trump said that “a lot of progress has been made” and suggested that an announcement could come soon.
3. A Government Accountability Office report found that many of the Department of Government Efficiency’s claims of savings of $110 billion from contracts, grants, and leases may have been inaccurate or overstated, or could not be verified because of insufficient documentation.

Dispatches

• The Weekly Planet: Running from a fire should not be this routine, Joshua Partlow writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

How Theory Took Over the World

By Lynn Steger Strong

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

• Icarus in the faculty lounge
• Do not paint granite!
• Radio Atlantic: Fed up with romance
• An unfortunate surprise for BMW owners
• Someone is mysteriously snapping up used books around the world.

Culture Break

Explore. One surprising thing about The Odyssey: its R rating. Sophia Nguyen examines how the U.S. is a relative outlier in keeping the film away from younger audiences.

Watch. Tony (out now in select theaters) follows the summertime hijinks of a pretentious bad boy—who just so happens to be Anthony Bourdain. But the film skews more coming-of-age tale than biopic, David Sims writes.

Play our daily crossword.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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Even before the push alert about his resignation from the University of Cambridge this week, Jason Arday might well have been the world’s most famous living sociologist. In early 2023, Arday received a professorship at Cambridge; at 37, he was the youngest Black scholar ever to have done so, and his appointment made international headlines. A year later, he set out to sell his memoir. According to a cover letter that his agent sent to publishers at the time, Arday’s book, to be titled Great and Unfortunate Things, would be “an awe-inspiring tale of near mythic proportions.”

That now appears to be an understatement. Arday’s story was indeed astonishing: As a toddler, he was diagnosed with autism and developmental delays; he didn’t fully speak until the age of 11; he learned to read and write only as an adult. Arday’s parents are Ghanaian immigrants; he grew up wearing homemade clothes and hustling for cash by playing snooker. Yet in spite of all these obstacles and many, many others he has recounted over the years, Arday found a way to go to university and then to graduate school. Eventually, he got his Ph.D., and then he became a star. “We are so lucky to have you,” Cambridge’s head of faculty for education, Hilary Cremin, told him in a clip shown on BBC shortly after his hiring was announced. “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”

But in the past two weeks, Arday’s near-mythic (or perhaps purely mythic) tale has disintegrated. In July, a philosopher named Nathan Cofnas published a long Substack post reviewing apparent evidence of plagiarism in Arday’s academic work. Cofnas posted 36 passages from Arday’s 2015 dissertation, about student teaching, which reproduce or closely track text found in a 2009 dissertation from another scholar in the field, Paula Zwozdiak-Myers. Arday looks to have even copied from and rearranged Zwozdiak-Myers’s title, and in doing so to have misused an apostrophe.

Arday’s grad-school alma mater, Liverpool John Moores University, which first received direct complaints about the dissertation last fall, did its own investigation and cleared Arday of wrongdoing. “A confidential procedure was conducted,” the university told me in a statement. “Professor Arday’s PhD still stands.” But some of Arday’s other academic papers had potential problems too—and they seemed much worse than the mere borrowing of language. Quotes from structured interviews that Arday claimed to have performed closely resembled those used by other researchers; parts of some interview responses also reappeared across different studies under Arday’s name, attributed to different people. This duplication, if deliberate, would be something other than plagiarism—it would be academic fraud. (The website Retraction Watch reports that two of Arday’s papers were quietly corrected.)

Yesterday, Cambridge announced that it had “begun an investigation following new information about Professor Arday’s academic qualifications and honorary appointments.” By the end of the day, Arday had resigned. “I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life,” he said in a statement. “I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

[Read: The multibillion-dollar foundation that controls the humanities]

Arday did not respond to questions from The Atlantic, but he told The Times last week that he is not a “liar” or a “fantasist” and that he’d been given insufficient supervision as a graduate student, especially in light of his learning disabilities: “It’s more likely that I’ve made a mistake, there’s a clerical error. It’s not that I’ve fabricated.” He also seemed to address such allegations at a conference in April for the British Sociological Association, where he gave a talk about pervasive efforts to discredit Black scholars including himself. “These people are brilliant, perversely brilliant,” he told his colleagues. “There are times when you look at what they’re doing and you say to yourself, Well done, well played, very good. You’ve caught me [in] a thousand knots—how do I get myself out of this situation?”

This much is true: Some of the people who were going after Arday had a political agenda. Cofnas, the philosopher who put Arday’s dissertation through a plagiarism checker last month, argues for a “hereditarian revolution” based on the idea that innate differences in intelligence and other traits exist across racial groups. (He also claims that “the humanities and much of the social sciences have been slain on the altar of DEI.”) But the challenges to Arday’s credibility quickly went beyond the realm of Cofnas and his fellow white reactionaries, and beyond familiar arguments about diversity hiring. Taken all together, they exposed a broader, self-destructive tendency that has long been present in our universities, and also in the media and publishing: Any failing can be forgiven, as long as it’s packaged in a story that people want to hear.

Great and Unfortunate Things, which Arday co-wrote with Eve Claxton, is still scheduled to come out next week from Simon & Schuster. The story that it tells should not be taken at face value; it differs notably from other versions of his life that Arday has shared in public and in private, including in the original proposal he sent out with his agent. But the book is also, in a way, very honest and quite telling: It provides a vivid portrait of a man who was always manifestly ill-equipped for academia yet found a way to reach its upper levels. This is not someone else’s cruel assessment of Arday’s tragic and improbable career. It’s his own.

The memoir begins with a prophecy. It’s 2006, and Jason Arday, then 21 years old, is installing water pumps in the favelas of Brazil and showing children how to use them. A local aid worker—“a woman in her thirties with dark hair and eyes and a gentle, steady way about her”—touches his arm and softly tells him that he is destined to suffer in his life but also to do great things. “After the trip was over, I never saw the woman again, but her words stayed with me,” Arday writes, “and, you might say, her prediction came true.”

The rest of the book is an elaboration on this moment: Arday suffers; Arday overcomes. The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) As a boy, Arday rocked and hummed and banged his head until he bled; he slammed cupboard doors and smeared his feces on the walls. Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school.

[Read: Higher ed is very sorry]

Tribulations piled up throughout his life. Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic. To make his way through secondary school while—by his own account—illiterate, he needed ample help: support assistants who sat beside him in class and took notes on his behalf.

When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter. Still, he pressed onward. Still, somehow, he got a teaching job.

His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style.

As his dissertation deadline approached, Arday started having blurry vision; medical scans revealed a brain tumor. After it was removed, he had a ministroke and lost his short-term memory. “I’d worked on my thesis for over thirty months, and now I was reading it as if for the first time,” he writes. As one might expect, his thesis defense did not go smoothly. One examiner was suspicious of his work: “I am struggling to see that there is any original contribution here,” she said, according to the book. But Arday, who often likens himself to Rocky Balboa, managed to fight back, and in the end, he passed. (The memoir brings up the fictional boxer in about a dozen different contexts.)

More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”

[Read: The publishing mystery that no one wants to talk about]

The book sticks mostly to this frantic register, and coincidence abounds. Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.

Is that really true? I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond. Even asking that question places me on the wrong side of Arday’s moral ledger. Again and again, the book acknowledges his “impossible” success, yet his indignation at anyone who ever doubted him remains a running theme throughout the book. These are Arday’s villains—the Ivan Dragos and the Clubber Langs of academia, who dared to wonder whether his work was really so original, or questioned whether he did it on his own. He swallowed his “feelings of offense,” he says in reference to one lecturer who insisted on drilling him about subject material in person, “but I have never forgotten them.”

When you succeed against pretty much insurmountable odds,” Arday writes in the book, “it weirdly makes people question your credibility.” Is it weird? I don’t think it’s weird. When you keep succeeding against insurmountable odds, the facts of your surmounting will be bound to get a second look.

Arday’s record of public statements includes plenty that would seem to be exaggerated, if not completely false. He said repeatedly, for instance, that he’d once run 300 miles in three days for a charity event, and that on another occasion he’d run 600 miles in six days. As many people have now pointed out, doing either would be a near-world-record-level feat of endurance athletics. (Neither run is mentioned in his book; he recently told The Guardian that his 600-mile run had actually taken 12 days, including rest periods.) He boasted of having raised millions of pounds for charity—though under questioning from The Times, he conceded that he’d done this as part of a fundraising “syndicate.” In an interview, he claimed that he’d originally been part of the BBC series Up, which began filming before he was born—though this was later said to have been an analogy, not a literal description.

But the most disturbing inconsistencies arise from Arday’s book proposal, a copy of which was obtained by The Atlantic. That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.

[Read: Is this what comes after AI slop?]

Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome. “As I will describe to readers in the book,” Arday wrote in the proposal, “these months afforded me another profoundly different way of perceiving the world.”

The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.

Then there is the prophecy—the revelation Arday was given in Brazil, that he would suffer greatly and also do great things. According to the proposal, this occurred in 2005, not 2006, and the message came not from a local aid worker in her 30s but from “an elder in the small town where I had been assigned, who was well-known in the area for predicting people’s futures.” (Later in the proposal, he calls this person a “shaman woman.”) “Do you know the story of Spartacus, the escaped slave who led a rebellion against the Romans?” this town elder asks, before telling him his fate in minute detail. “Every event she described,” Arday writes in the proposal, “has since come to pass.”

I reached out to Arday’s editors—Dawn Davis in the United States, and Kris Doyle, who is publishing the book with Simon & Schuster UK—to ask them why the three-month coma and the shaman woman hadn’t made the cut in the published version of the book, and to find out what they thought of other inconsistencies in Arday’s story and the allegations of misconduct in his academic work. Neither of them chose to answer any questions.

I also tried to reach Eve Claxton, who co-wrote the book with Arday and whom he describes in the acknowledgments as “one of the most important people I have ever met in my life,” by phone and text. She did not respond.

Arday’s book agent, Jennifer Gates, the one who described his life story as “near mythic,” did not respond to multiple emails. A spokesperson for Simon & Schuster would say only that the company “is proceeding with publication” next week.

[Read: This literary AI scandal changes everything]

Perhaps it’s fitting that the book’s release is still on track and that it has even been designated as an “Editors’ Pick” on Amazon: Once again, Arday is succeeding in the face of many obstacles, uplifted by the many angels in his life and given the opportunity to do great things. This was the true miracle of his career—that the system could be bent to meet his needs, and then it could be bent a little further, and bent and bent until it fit the wild arc of a fairy tale. By his own account, Arday rose to fame as a scholar and a writer despite staggering limitations; he became an academic who can read only a single page of academic text an hour and cannot comprehend what is happening at work 90 percent of the time.

His mission as a scholar had always been to help ensure that other disadvantaged academics could have access to the same allowances that he’d had, and that they’d be empowered to make use of them. He wanted others to succeed the way he had. “Today, in academic circles, that’s what I’m known for,” he writes in his proposal. “Everybody says, ‘Jason is the guy that teaches everyone the tricks.’”

There’s a moment near the end of Great and Unfortunate Things when Arday’s confidence begins to waver. He’s filling out his application for the professorship at Cambridge, and just then, as he draws to the brink of destiny, doubts begin to fill his mind. “What if I have completely overestimated my capabilities?” he writes. “What if my story ends up being a cautionary tale like Icarus about flying too close to the sun?”

What if.

Christopher Nolan has directed two movies in which a soldier washes up on a foreign shore and, battle-weary and sodden, fights to return home. The first, 2017’s Dunkirk, dramatized the World War II evacuation in which thousands of Allied soldiers were killed. It received a PG-13 rating from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) for “intense war experience and some language.” The other, this summer’s The Odyssey, is a seafaring adventure that laments the atrocities of the Trojan War—and is rated R for “violence and some language.”

That R is surprising. As the translator Emily Wilson wrote in her site-crashing review for the London Review of Books, Nolan’s film is “a family-friendly audiovisual spectacle.” She meant it pejoratively. But that quality is what has prompted beleaguered English teachers across the nation to receive the film as almost a personal gift. The Odyssey is decidedly chaste, and even stars Zendaya; what better way to get students to engage with an ancient Greek text? And yet, at least while The Odyssey remains in theaters, the R restriction—which means anyone younger than 17 isn’t allowed to attend unless accompanied by an adult—cuts off the audience members who might particularly benefit from being exposed to Homer’s epic.

The United States is a relative outlier in keeping The Odyssey away from younger audiences. Among its Anglophone peers, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland deemed the movie suitable for anyone older than 15; Canada gave it a PG. Much of Latin America rated it equivalent to PG-13, as did Spain, Portugal, and France. Denmark approved the film for ages 11 and up.

So what happened here? As a rule, the MPA never discusses specific titles in public. Ratings are voted on by a board composed of parents from outside the film industry, who have children from the ages of 5 to 15; they must leave the board after a term maximum of seven years, or when all of their children reach legal drinking age. “One of the huge problems with the rating system is that there’s no transparency,” Kirby Dick, a filmmaker, told me. For his 2006 documentary, This Film Is Not Yet Rated, Dick hired private detectives to suss out who sat on the board at the time. “We don’t know what their backgrounds are, what the diversity is,” said Dick. “They’re making judgments for all of the country, the entire public, and we have no idea who these people are.”

The identities of today’s raters remain secret, as do their deliberations. Their reasoning is so mysterious that, in 2018, the MPA made headlines just by posting a 46-page document outlining the basics of its history and process. Nearly a century ago, Hollywood operated under the Motion Picture Production Code, a series of self-imposed guidelines that were enforced by “a very stern and efficient Irish Catholic named Joseph I. Breen,” Thomas Doherty, a professor of American studies at Brandeis University, told me. Anyone could read its rules: “It kind of operated like case law.” The code grew defunct in the post–World War II era; in 1968, it was replaced by the film-ratings system. Today’s arrangement, styled as a consumer guide that helps families make informed choices, is more permissive than the code, but also more opaque—and more subjective.

A spokesperson for the MPA declined to make the chair of its ratings branch available for an interview, citing scheduling issues. Instead, I called up Ethan Noble, a former Miramax Films executive, and Scott Young, a former MPA senior rater, who, via their firm Motion Pictures Consulting, guide filmmakers through the ratings process. Their job is to anticipate the ratings board’s reaction to matters such as language and content. By my count, The Odyssey featured three uses of the word fuck and its variants, one of which was used to denigrate a beach. But while the movie’s ratings descriptor did highlight language, there’s no hard line governing how many times the word can be uttered before raters impose an R. In recent years, the rating board has demonstrated more flexibility, Noble told me: Today’s PG-13 movies can sometimes get away with more F-bombs, as long as the expletive isn’t “sexually derived.”

Expletives aside, though, what makes a movie “adult” can rarely be quantified. “It’s really about how these certain movies make you feel,” said Noble. Young recalled instances in which a violent scene was deemed less graphic after simple edits to the sound mix: Dial back the sounds of bones crunching or punches landing “and bring up some music, and it completely changes.” Injury and death are considered more intense when affecting a central character—someone the audience has formed an emotional attachment to. But you can mow down an army of zombies, or decapitate an orc, and get a PG-13. “Blood is a factor,” Noble added. “If the blood is red, that’s something that will easily start pushing it more towards R.”

[Read: A Trojan horse is supposed to have humans inside it]

The MPA’s squeamishness can have ironic effects: A movie that keeps the aftermath of violence off-screen, avoiding realistic depictions of what weapons do to bodies, might be open to all ages, but a movie that dwells on those consequences will likely be restricted. Take another example from the Nolan filmography: In The Dark Knight, the Joker “makes a pencil disappear” by driving it into the eye of a mob henchman. The Odyssey, too, features a memorable ocular injury, when Odysseus and company blind the cyclops Polyphemus. The former avoided the more mature rating, apparently shocking the cinematographer who shot it. Casual sadism and glib brutality can squeak by with a PG-13; the wounds of war (and, okay, one overlong scene of husbandly vengeance) can earn an R.

The PG-13 designation has always been an awkward middle child, caught between Hollywood’s clashing commercial incentives: its desire to reach a wide audience and its eagerness to avoid parental ire. Steven Spielberg first proposed the creation of a PG rating “with a little hot sauce on top” in 1984, after widespread indignation at the gory imagery in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. But over time, as superhero franchises saturated pop culture, violence once confined to R-rated movies has arguably become a staple of family entertainment. Gun violence in PG-13 movies exceeded that of R movies by 2012, according to a study from the Annenberg Public Policy Center, and it continued to rise in subsequent years. As less and less distinguished a PG-13 from an R, “the rating issue kind of dissolved,” Dan Romer, one of the study’s co-authors, told me.

Doherty, the American-studies professor, took a harsher view: The distinction between PG-13 and R “in the motion-picture industry and among exhibitors is a total joke and everybody knows it,” he said. “There are a lot of R-rated movies that are aimed at the 15-year-old kid, and everybody, everybody, knows.”

Given the substantial overlap between the two ratings, the casual viewer is left to wonder what earned The Odyssey its R. During lulls in the 172-minute run time, I’d think of the MPA’s rating descriptors, a vocabulary rich with persnickety euphemism: Would I call this flashback “mature thematic”? Was the hero, while steering past the churning waters of Charybdis, experiencing mere “action” or the more threatening “peril”? How much bare human-male backside was visible before Odysseus’s crew was transformed into pigs? In fact, was the entire scene on Circe’s island sort of sexual? (It didn’t seem unsexual.)

Scant visible blood was spilled—surprisingly little, actually, especially considering that, at one point, a man gets bitten in half. Perhaps the script’s emphasis on the hero’s psychological scars from war left the MPA board with the impression that the film contained more vivid carnage than was actually on-screen. Watching a movie like a rater, I found, can be perversely rewarding. The exercise sharpens the senses; it heightens attention to the placement of a cut, to what’s depicted or merely implied. Who, after all, has more faith in the power of cinema than someone gauging how it might affect young minds?

Restricted movies, The Odyssey included, appeal to more people than in the past. “It used to be that the movie industry didn’t want to get an R, because it would limit the audience,” Romer told me. “I think that may be changing.” Box-office data indicate that only 4 percent of the audience was younger than 17—but as anyone who has ever been alive knows, teens always find a way. An R can make a movie feel edgier and more exciting. Perhaps it can also save a movie from feeling, suspiciously, like homework.

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The first time I went to sleepaway camp, I was 10 years old. When I returned home, a month later, my mom opened my footlocker to help me unpack. On top was a tray of my belongings—flashlight, lanyard, marksmanship badge, a few items of clothing, and a stack of letters my parents had mailed to me, many unopened. Beneath the tray were the rest of my clothes, neatly folded, undisturbed since the bag had been packed. I had been too busy having fun to change clothes or read letters.

When my now-adult kids went to camp, I sent them daily emails. The camp printed these out for them, along with its own partially written return messages—templates for how to reply. Each day, a photographer posted to the camp website hundreds of images of children swimming, singing, and playing Frisbee. I scrolled and scrolled, “favoriting” the ones with my kids. When they knew their picture was being taken, they flashed a thumbs-up, our family’s agreed-upon code to signify that all was well. By the time they arrived home, I had put together a photo book with highlights of their summer.

This summer, my young nephew went to sleepaway camp. At the start, parents were asked to complete forms about meal preferences and desired bedtime routines. Throughout, his parents received daily emails with photos exclusively of him. Camp photographers used facial-recognition software to ensure that parents would receive every image of their child.

I tell this story across three generations because it captures a profound shift in camp life. Of course, some camps explicitly declare themselves tech-free zones, and some families seek out those experiences. But in many instances, summer camps—previously some of the last places a child could exist beyond the reach of their parents—have adopted a kind of surveillance apparatus in the name of information sharing and safety check-ins, turning camp into yet another environment where moms and dads can hover, ever present.

For most of the 20th century, camps operated on a simple premise: Send your child and they will come back changed. The magical ingredient effecting that change was parental absence. Camp meant independence from home and school—and this was a feature, not a bug. Children without their parents were forced to navigate the world on their own. They learned to make friends without mediation (no play dates!), resolve conflicts without referees, and experience homesickness without rescue. But at many camps, all of that is being renegotiated.

Photos taken using facial-recognition technology are but one indicator of this shift. Some camps now employ teams of full-time photographers who roam the grounds all day, documenting daily life. Parents form WhatsApp groups for their children’s bunks within hours of drop-off. Some send their children to camp with two phones: one to surrender at check-in, the other hidden, for calling home. Technology alone didn’t create this new relationship between parents and camp. But it has made it harder to preserve an essential ingredient of the old experience: distance.

None of the changes to camp culture has happened because parents are suddenly worse parents. If anything, many moms and dads today are more emotionally invested in their children than ever. But some have also come to believe that good parenting means vigilance and continuous connection—which can have noticeable effects on kids’ sense of independence.

Jolly Corley, a co-director of Camp Robindel, in New Hampshire, who has worked there since 1992, remembers when she first perceived the transformation. She didn’t observe it in the parents directly; she saw it in her camp counselors. Sometime between 2008 and 2010, she told me, kids started running to her office. “They were like, Counselors are being so mean. They won’t let us leave the cabin! And they were all upset,” she said. “I was like, Oh, here it is.” Young counselors who themselves had been raised by hypervigilant parents—with stranger-danger drills and supervised play dates—had never experienced the sort of freedom that they were now supposed to be giving their campers. They had to be taught what autonomy looked like.

The more I spoke with camp directors, the more I came to understand how the rise of daily camp photography plays into these dynamics—and has reshaped parents’ perception of camp’s very purpose. Michael Marcus has been a co-owner of the boys-only Camp Greylock, in Massachusetts, since 1994. For years, he resisted posting photos. “When you have a photographer come around and the kids know that this picture is being taken, it takes them out of their moments,” he told me. And camp is supposed to be a “pure time for them”—something he was trying to preserve. At a certain point, however, all the camps around Greylock began posting photos. Marcus found himself, “like an idiot, standing on a soapbox explaining to the world why everybody else was wrong but me. That is not a particularly good position to be in.”

So Marcus hired a photographer, and now Greylock posts 50 to 100 photos each day. Some camps, he said, post 500 to 1,000. A few influencer-run operations, with teams of videographers producing content, make summer camp look like a reality-TV show.

Once posted, camp photos can take on a life of their own. They get scrutinized by parents who go looking for reassurance and instead find reasons to fret. “When you see a kid looking focused, they can also look concerned, or they could look worried or unsure of themselves,” Marcus said. And if that’s “the only photo you’ve seen of your son in three days, you might be worried.” Parents will call to ask if their child is sunburned, or if their kid wore the same shirt two days in a row. If four boys are photographed together and a fifth is shown standing two feet to the right, a parent might wonder, Is he being ostracized? “They can read into absolutely everything that’s natural,” Marcus said. “And unfortunately, ‘natural’ doesn’t seem to sell to parents, because everything in life is scripted and produced.”

Diane Goldberg Marcus—Michael’s wife—co-directs Belvoir Terrace, a girls’ camp also in Massachusetts. She recently received an email from a parent alarmed by a photo of her daughter leaning over a painting in art class. The parent asked that the camp tell the girl to drop the class; she was worried about the child’s posture, afraid that she would hurt her neck. When Diane found the girl and asked her about the class, the camper was confused. “What are you talking about?” she said. “I love this class.”

Parent chat groups have further blurred the boundary between home and camp. When a child appears in a photo, or doesn’t, word travels fast. “It’s not even the individual parent,” Michael Marcus told me. For people “trying not to pay attention, even those parents are bombarded by their friends. Every single age group has their own parent chat, and every bunk has a parent chat, and everybody talks about everything.”

Many camp directors now spend a meaningful part of their summer tending not just to their campers but also to the separation anxiety of the adults who sent them—a phenomenon that the psychologist Michael Thompson calls “childsickness.”

Parents once understood their own occasional absence from their kids’ lives as normal. Many now consider their presence normal and expected. If parents habitually track their children’s locations, attend every game and recital, and are always available by text, the experience of not knowing what’s happening with their kid can feel like a problem to be solved. “When you know what your child is doing every second of the day,” Michael Marcus said, “when they disappear, I truly believe that there’s a void that goes on in parents that is very hard for them to deal with.”

Anxious interventions by parents don’t simply alter camp. They can alter children’s belief in their own capabilities. Corley told me that kids arriving at her camp are sometimes overwhelmed by simple challenges. “If you’ve never had to solve the problem,” she said, “you don’t even know the question you’re supposed to be asking.” Many also seem ill-equipped to manage their feelings, because they haven’t practiced this skill without parental oversight. “Parents are helping to do that,” she said. “I would say maybe they are doing it rather than helping. They’re regulating the emotions of the kids.”

For more than 30 years, Derek Edwards has worked at Incarnation Camp, in Connecticut. He uses a phrase for what he witnesses on visiting day, when parents get to drop in and observe the goings-on: fishing for pain. Some parents arrive primed to interview their child about what might have gone wrong: Was someone unkind? Did someone exclude them? Edwards is careful to say that these moms and dads love their children fiercely and want what’s best for them. Still, he has watched parents arrive and, fueled by the emotions of seeing their child, begin looking for reasons to take them home. The kids, meanwhile, tend not to be bothered by whatever their parent has fixated on. “A lot of times,” he said, the child’s not “fussed.”

My 19-year old daughter went to sleepaway camp for the first time when she was 8. She remembers crying at dinner during her first week and desperately wanting to go home. Her counselor sat with her, listened, and steadied her. My daughter stayed—and went back to camp every summer thereafter and loved it. Recently, I told her that I was working on this article and had heard that some camps now allow children to call home regularly. “That’s terrible!” she said. “If I’d been allowed to call home, I would have begged to leave.”

In his book Homesick and Happy, Thompson argues that missing home is not a problem but a vital developmental milestone. Working through their homesickness, children develop a sense of self-assurance by realizing that they can be away from home, make friends, survive, and, ultimately, thrive. This builds a kind of confidence different from the type derived from academic achievement. It is the confidence of a young person who has discovered something about themselves.

My daughter’s example demonstrates yet another benefit of parents’ backing off: allowing children to learn to rely on a broader community. The person who soothed my daughter’s 8-year-old tears was a counselor, and the experience taught her that when she was in distress, she didn’t necessarily need her parents. She just needed a sympathetic teenager, or an adult, to assure her that she could get through it. This is how children learn that people outside their family have their back, Isaac Saposnik, the executive director of Camp Havaya, in Pennsylvania, where my kids were campers, told me—people who “care about them enough” and who “can be trusted when things aren’t going well.”

For many kids, despite the parental hovering, camp is still doing its job. Once, Corley told me, a tetherball got caught in a bush, and some kids at her camp who’d been there for three summers quickly set about trying to untangle it—going at it from different angles, standing on one another’s shoulders to reach a high branch. (“Had a parent seen that,” she said, “they’d be freaking out.”) Three years before this, the kids would have come running to her for help. Now “they were like, Well, we can do this ourselves.”

An irony worth noting is that camp has become more important precisely because of the culture of hyperconnectivity. In a childhood rife with screens, highly curated schedules, and constant supervision, an extended stretch of relative freedom takes on even greater importance. “Without the screens,” Diane Goldberg Marcus told me, “the kids, every year, they have to relearn how to talk to each other.”

When I think back on my footlocker—the unopened letters, the unworn clothes—I realize that I was too busy to attend to any of it because I was completely absorbed in a world that wasn’t home. I didn’t suffer from the lack of daily photos. And, as far as I know, my parents didn’t either. I was also learning valuable lessons: that I could be somewhere my parents knew very little about and still be fine, that places besides home were full of people worth knowing and experiences worth having, and that I could access these things on my own.

My daughter knows this too. She learned it as an 8-year old, crying in a dining hall. Now she is grateful for that crying, and for the counselor who sat with her instead of handing her a phone. She wouldn’t trade that difficulty for anything, because on the other side of it was the discovery of who she was. That knowledge is no small thing. And for many people, it is the kind of knowledge they can build on only by being, for a while, truly away.

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In the western United States, particularly in fire-prone areas, people have become well versed at preparing to flee. They’re experts at using the tools and technology for monitoring a wildfire’s advance; they consult the Watch Duty app as often as checking the time. They know the three levels of evacuation—Ready, Set, Go—and many perform a running calculation of how much time they might need to get to safety.

On Saturday afternoon, Rita Gregovich was following that script. She wasn’t much concerned about the small wildfire burning across a river from her home in Spokane, Washington, although she’d noticed neighbors running sprinklers on their roofs to make them less immediately flammable and was tracking the fire’s progress on her phone. She was not too worried, either, when she lowered her American flag so that it wouldn’t get too smoky, she told me. Then she stepped around her garage and saw a wall of smoke. “And it was right on top of us,” she said. She and her husband, Dan, would learn, in a moment of rising distress, how much heavier their automatic garage door becomes when the power is out. She would discover what a burning ember feels like when it falls into your shoe.

Nearly 100 large wildfires are burning across the country at the moment, more than half of them in Oregon and Washington, and many of those have prompted evacuations. The three fires converging on Spokane, Washington’s second-largest city, have destroyed 800 to 1,100 homes and other buildings, fire authorities have said, and displaced more than 65,000 people. As more people have moved into forested exurbs and wildfires’ footprints have grown, such evacuations have become a distressingly familiar summer ordeal: a dayslong limbo in relatives’ spare rooms or emergency shelters, pets in hotel lobbies, possessions lugged around in plastic bags. In France and Spain this summer, record-breaking wildfires forced more than 300,000 people from their homes, an exodus that one French minister described as the largest peacetime evacuation in the country’s modern history.

An evacuee, for however long, steps into a kind of parallel existence, in which locations remain familiar but the rhythms of navigating them have changed. The route home is the same, but now a National Guard checkpoint stands in the way. Your boss is still eager to see you at work, but suddenly you’re living in a van at the fairgrounds. Almost as soon as the calculation to flee is complete, you must begin the harder, more uncertain calculation about how to hold together your life until you can return, if you choose to do so. At the Spokane County Fairgrounds, an evacuation site for animals, Jennifer Hynek was trying to ease her anxious horses, which were kicking and pacing, unaccustomed to city water and the confines of a stable after living on an 18-acre ranch, a nonprofit horse-boarding facility. (She also brought five goats, two pigs, two dogs, and four cats, but she “left the chickens all at home,” she told me. “Fend for themselves.”) In one evacuation zone in Spokane that was at the highest level of alert—leaving was mandatory—a sign on the door of the closed Little Garden Cafe read Still level 3, hoping for Weds.

But swaths of devastated land are still smoldering, and more heat and wind are in the forecast. Authorities have not yet been able to say when most evacuees can return home. “I know people want to have certainty about ‘When can I get back to my property? When can I get back to my homes?’ We don’t have it,” Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown told reporters on Monday. “It could be a week. It could be weeks.”

Randall Barkley, a 65-year-old retired Green Beret, spent his first night after leaving home in his Lotus Evora. He loves the two-seat sports car, but he never expected to sleep in it at a park, let alone with another person. He fled on Saturday when he saw flames near a dumpster outside his townhouse and heard the pop of exploding transformers. “The two booms was my cue,” he told me. As he drove away, he watched firefighters hoist patients into vehicles at the Alzheimer’s and dementia-care facility across the street, leaving dozens of tipped-over wheelchairs splayed outside. He and his brother Brian followed the night in the Lotus with one at a “price gouging” motel, as he put it, then a night at Brian’s boss’s house. They never know quite where each day of evacuation will end. “We might sleep in the car downtown,” Barkley told me on Tuesday. “We’re running out of resources.”

The lucky evacuees whose houses still stand may wonder, as they return home to retrieve birth certificates, heart medication, or a pair of pants, whether the gas leak audibly hissing in the wreckage next door will blow them up while they are on their errand. They must consider the inexorably melting side of beef in the now lifeless freezer. The unlucky ones must start thinking about what to buy a teenage daughter who has just lost all of her belongings.

Donna Light learned that her apartment, in a 12-unit building, was gone before she could get there. A friend sent her a photo the day after the fire. She discovered on Facebook that her parents’ home, not far away, had also burned down. On Tuesday afternoon, Light, a 48-year-old who works in hospital administration, poked through the ruins of her apartment, looking for her jewelry and her collection of Polish pottery. Her Honda CR-V was still in its parking spot, charred down to its metal frame. Light had recently given up her rental insurance on her apartment because “nothing ever happens here,” she told me. Her 14-year-old daughter, who kept belongings at both houses, lost everything except for her electronics and a spare pair of pajamas. “We just start from scratch,” Light said.

This is what a successful evacuation looks like, by the most basic measure, at least: So far, in the face of multiple fast-moving wildfires, nobody has been found dead, and first responders have reported no major injuries. The familiarity of evacuation math—when to go, how long to stay away—can be its own kind of protection. Disasters tend to be less disastrous, in certain ways, when the people who face them know what to expect and what’s expected of them.

Police and National Guard soldiers have tended to let people walk or take bikes and scooters back to their properties, but not drive to them. For some people, the walk home covers multiple miles, in the heat of summer, through a bitter pall of smoke. On her way into the disaster zone, Nikki Martin, a 33-year-old caregiver whose home survived, has felt the pang of passing others who had little to retrieve. “One guy held up a brick and a metal Welcome door sign,” she told me. “He said, ‘This is my house, right here.’”

The United States is running out of missiles. After five months of war with Iran, stockpiles of long-range weapons are so low, current and former U.S. defense officials told us, that they don’t believe the U.S. has enough to combat a threat in Asia. The remaining supplies, depending on the munition, are as low as 20 percent of what the Pentagon would like to have in hand. And stores of sophisticated interceptor missiles, such as Patriots and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missiles, are too depleted to give or sell the weapons to Ukraine or effectively defend against Iran’s launch of ballistic missiles. Even when troops see Iranian missiles approaching, they are forced to decide in a matter of seconds whether to expend a limited number of interceptors or hope for the best, the defense officials told us.  

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth this week pleaded with Republicans on Capitol Hill for billions of dollars to replenish America’s dangerously depleted stockpiles of missiles and other crucial munitions. Hegseth’s appeal was nakedly partisan—he ignored Democratic lawmakers entirely—but also long overdue.

The Pentagon this year has awarded tens of billions of dollars in contracts to replenish those arsenals. But signing contracts is not the same as delivering missiles. Those contracts will produce munitions over the coming years, not the coming months. The Trump administration has invested in the defense industrial base to accelerate production, as did the Biden administration, but for crucial systems such as the Patriot, supply is not projected to meet demand until about 2030. Meanwhile, Iran has ramped up production of its offensive drones and ballistic missiles, and enhanced their capabilities. The war is now being shaped as much by industrial supply and logistics as by economic considerations and the politics of the midterms.

President Trump raged at the assessment his national-security team gave him at Camp David on Friday, which showed that the U.S. military was running low on the munitions that would be necessary for Trump to order an escalation against Iran, a senior administration official familiar with the meeting told us. If the U.S. were to strike, Tehran would likely launch a barrage of missiles and drones against its neighbors in the region and the American bases they host.

The president barked at aides and had some pointed words for the Department of Defense’s leadership. (He is not presently considering staff changes, a White House official told us.) Trump has grown frustrated at his inability to escape the stalemate of the war; he’s seething at its toll on the economy and is desperate to move on. In a post on Truth Social earlier today, Trump said that reports of munitions shortages were false and that such “leaks” were treasonous. Manufacturers are shipping “large amounts” of munitions “as needed,” he wrote.

[Read: This may be Trump’s biggest error in the Iran war]

White House aides are concerned that Trump is losing his leverage in the conflict. He has threatened Iran many times but has rarely followed through; Tehran knows that. Tehran also knows that the U.S. is running low on munitions despite what Hegseth and the president say in public. Military leverage depends not simply on the U.S. ability to strike but also on its capacity to defend against Iran’s retaliation. Iran has displayed the confidence to further test the U.S., attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz. The White House has maintained that Iran would soon face an economic situation so dire that the regime would be forced to negotiate, and U.S. intelligence reports suggest that Iran is struggling. But the Trump administration has been surprised at Tehran’s resilience, and is no longer certain that the regime will reach the point where negotiation is its only option.

In the five months since the war started, the president has never faced such a weak position. The shortage of interceptors makes escalation dangerous. Nor would expanded strikes guarantee that Tehran will come back to the table.

That may leave diplomacy and concessions as the administration’s least risky option. Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have repeatedly said that Iran will never be allowed to control any part of the Strait of Hormuz. But Trump is now considering a deal that gives Iran some control over maritime traffic. The proposed agreement between Oman and Iran, pending U.S. and Gulf approval, would reopen the strait by establishing a jointly managed framework for commercial shipping. Such a deal would give Iran the oversight of the crucial waterway it feels it has earned from the war, while also honoring Oman’s insistence on preserving freedom of navigation.

America’s stockpiles have been under strain for years, but became painfully clear after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. The U.S. military fired hundreds of missiles, some costing millions each, during the Trump administration’s 53-day campaign last year against the Houthis in Yemen. That was followed by nearly two weeks of U.S. and Israeli attacks on Iran and the interception of Iranian missiles and drones aimed at Israel. During the first 38 days of the Iran war, the U.S. launched thousands of munitions.  

Hegseth has repeatedly denied any shortage, including to Trump as recently as last week, one U.S. official told us. On Capitol Hill, the defense secretary did not make a compelling case for the funding he wants, particularly to legislators who face tough reelections partly because of the war’s unpopularity. Between American voters’ frustrations with rising gas prices and Hegseth’s mixed messages and past combative relationship with Congress, “there is no goodwill for the department here,” one congressional aide told us.

[Read: A tragedy in Iran might persuade Hegseth to change course]

Still, Congress is ultimately expected to provide much of the funds the Pentagon says it needs to replenish its stores. But what the U.S. really needs is time. Depending on the weapon, replenishment to prewar levels could take as long as five years, Mark Cancian, who tracks munitions stockpiles for the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., told us.

Another three years would get stockpiles “to a level where the joint staff and U.S. commanders in charge of the Asia Pacific would be comfortable,” Cancian said. In theory, that gives Beijing plenty of time to take advantage of American shortages with, say, an invasion of Taiwan.

“Claims of U.S. munition shortages are false,” and the amplification of them is irresponsible, Sean Parnell, Pentagon spokesperson, told us in a statement. “We have everything required to strike at the time and place of the President’s choosing.”

The problem predates the Trump administration. After the Cold War, the U.S. reduced the number, and slowed the pace of production, of vital munitions, figuring that long bouts of peace between short, conclusive wars would provide plenty of capacity. But the military has been almost constantly engaged somewhere in conflicts led by missile strikes: Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Nigeria. And Russia’s war with Ukraine has been defined by rapid advances in munitions. The Biden administration signed contracts to replenish Kyiv’s weapons but could not keep up with demand, Cancian told us.  

The U.S. raced to develop cheaper ways to tackle the Iranian-supplied drones that Russia deployed, and has made some progress. But the stores of interceptors such as Patriots and THAADs were rapidly expended. “There are no good alternatives for stopping ballistic missiles,” Cancian told us. “Without these defensive missiles, attacking missiles will land unopposed. That is what is happening in Ukraine.”

Before Russia’s invasion, the U.S. produced roughly 300 Patriot missiles a year, half of which went to allies. Production has since doubled, but badly trails wartime demand.

Had the Iran war been over in a matter of several weeks, as the administration initially predicted, the U.S. munitions problem would not be so dire. And the problem would be mitigated “if we knew when the war will end,” one defense official told us. “The real problem is that there is no long-term strategy—and we can’t plan around that.”

Before the shortages, the U.S. used its technological advantages to shape its strategy. Now the technological advances of its foes—and the strain they have put on U.S. stockpiles—are forcing Washington to reconsider its strategy again, this time without the long-held assumption that U.S. forces would enjoy an advantage in munitions.

Since November, President Trump has been pushing a plan to paint the granite office building next to the White House, because he thinks it should be white too.

Trump’s proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building is inane, which is why historic preservationists have sued over the project. With its dramatic mansard roof and facade of polished gray granite, the imposing Gilded Age structure has been called a “palace of state.” But painting granite damages the stone and requires expensive upkeep. Moreover, the facade is intrinsic to the design of this century-and-a-half-old building that is revered—and protected as a National Historic Landmark—for its exceptional architecture and prominent role in American history.

In the latest development, preservationists sought emergency relief last week to block the White House from applying test patches of paint to the building. A federal judge then directed the Trump administration to refrain from this and related actions until the court has ruled on the underlying issues; a hearing is tentatively set for August 18.

The EEOB proposal has been overshadowed by Trump’s larger legacy projects, including the White House ballroom and the 250-foot triumphal arch. Like those, the EEOB plan disregards legal and institutional rules in ways that will create dangerous precedents if it is not reversed by the courts. However, the project is notable in that it has no constituency, is of no redeeming value, and would cause irreversible physical damage. Simply put, someone needs to tell the president, Stop.

The EEOB was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the rapidly growing State, War, and Navy Departments. The architect, Alfred Mullett, selected granite for the exterior for aesthetic as well as functional reasons. He sourced the granite from two quarries, in Virginia and Maine. By using the darker, gray Virginia granite for the flat surfaces and the pinker Maine granite for the rusticated base and columns, he highlighted the architectural features of the massive and ornate building.

Mullett’s exuberant French Second Empire design, which reflected the optimism of post–Civil War America, soon fell out of favor, and there were repeated efforts to demolish the building, including by a commission established by President Eisenhower. Fortunately, the cost of demolition impeded such action, and, beginning in the 1960s, architects and historians embraced the EEOB as a Victorian masterpiece.

The Eisenhower building has witnessed at least as much history as all but three others in Washington, D.C.: the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court. As home to the National Security Council, the National Economic Council, and the Council of Economic Advisers, among other White House offices, the EEOB remains the setting of executive-branch policy making at the highest levels.

Trump apparently doesn’t like the color of the building. “Gray is for funerals,” he said in a November Fox News interview, and he has argued that white would be more congruent with the White House. However, the EEOB dwarfs the White House in size. If it were painted white, the EEOB would appear even larger, visually overwhelming its neighbor.

[Read: Donald Trump’s paint jobs]

History and aesthetics aside, Trump’s plan violates a key rule of building maintenance: Do not paint granite. Granite is a superior building facade that has been used for other distinctive structures in Washington, D.C., such as the Library of Congress and the Old Post Office. Left unpainted, granite requires little maintenance. Once granite is painted, however (and examples are rare), it requires extensive maintenance in perpetuity. Greg Werkheiser, a co-founder of Cultural Heritage Partners, a law firm representing the DC Preservation League (which is suing over the project), has warned that the EEOB could become the Golden Gate Bridge of federal buildings: As soon as painting is finished on one end, it will be time to begin again on the other.

The president and his aides claim to have identified a “magic paint,” made with mineral silicate, that avoids the problems of traditional paint. However, 25 technical experts who were surveyed by Cultural Heritage Partners strongly refute that claim, arguing that mineral-silicate paint is no more suited than traditional paint for use on granite. Although the testing that the White House wanted to begin could help settle such disagreements, the process is unlikely to be transparent or impartial.

Despite its flaws, the president’s proposal to paint the EEOB is still alive because key institutions, including ones with a history of nonpartisanship, have fallen under the sway of the White House. One such institution is the Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member independent federal agency that reviews the designs of major construction projects within Washington, D.C. The president appoints CFA members (no Senate confirmation is required), and the members select the chair and vice chair. Past chairs of the commission, which Congress created in 1910, include such luminaries as Daniel H. Burnham and Daniel Chester French.

Although the CFA criticized the building earlier in its life, the commission later became an advocate, fending off post-Eisenhower proposals to “modernize” its exterior. Members even told the General Services Administration to “launder, but don’t scour” the exterior so as to preserve the natural patina of the granite. In 2018, the CFA published a richly illustrated history of the EEOB.

Since last year, Trump has replaced the entire CFA with loyalists who have largely rubber-stamped the president’s pet projects. The commission’s April deliberation on the EEOB proposal was typical of its Trump-era approach. Vice Chair James C. McCrery II, an architecture professor at Catholic University and the original architect of Trump’s ballroom, conceded that painting the office building would increase its maintenance needs, but compared it to the laundry costs he gladly incurs so he can wear dressy white shirts. McCrery also argued that the EEOB’s shadowy gray color may have suited the 19th-century War Department but was unnecessary now that the building had no military tenant (National Security Council staff might disagree). Another commissioner predicted that painting the EEOB white would improve morale among its occupants by highlighting their connection to the White House.

Another crucial institution bowing to political pressure is the GSA, which manages federal real estate. The EEOB is the crown jewel in the agency’s portfolio. Under normal circumstances, career staff would have dismissed as laughable a proposal to paint the Eisenhower building, because of the risk to it and the prospect of steep maintenance costs that the GSA can ill-afford. (I am a former public-buildings commissioner at the GSA. I testified in May against the plan before the U.S. National Capital Planning Commission, another body tasked with reviewing it.)

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Circumstances being abnormal, the GSA signed a memorandum purporting to delegate its legal authority over the EEOB project to the White House Office of Administration. The White House is exempt from requirements to review construction projects under the National Historic Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act—requirements that apply to the GSA and other federal agencies. If the GSA’s delegation is found to be lawful, the White House will have effectively eliminated the need for the project to undergo a crucial but time-consuming review that elicits the views of experts, affected groups, and the public. Although the White House says it will carry out the review voluntarily, critics of the proposal are skeptical, and Cultural Heritage Partners and the DC Preservation League have challenged the GSA’s action in federal court.

Critics of the Trump administration’s GSA gambit fear that it could become a template for exempting other controversial projects from review under NHPA and NEPA. Werkheiser told The Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott that “the precedent is potentially devastating,” and that “anytime the president takes a personal interest in a project he can simply pluck it out of an agency that is subject to review, and put it in his own shop.”

The president’s GSA plan faces a tough legal test (the key issue is whether the White House Office of Administration, which was created by executive order, is a federal agency). However, even if the president loses, the challengers’ victory could be short-lived. The NHPA and NEPA review processes rely on the goodwill of the federal agencies that conduct the reviews. The National Park Service is making a mockery of its review of the president’s proposed arch. The GSA is likely to do a similarly token job on its review of the EEOB proposal. The Trump administration also plans to gut federal historic-preservation rules more broadly, potentially allowing federal agencies and developers to pursue projects such as the arch’s construction and the EEOB’s paint job without soliciting expert or public input.

The president’s destructive approach to the EEOB is ironic given the positive role he played, before his first term, in restoring another granite landmark with a Pennsylvania Avenue address. Like the EEOB, the Old Post Office was a Victorian ugly baby whose critics tried repeatedly to demolish it before the public eventually warmed to it. The Trump Organization invested $200 million to restore the Old Post Office and convert it into a luxury hotel, working closely with historic preservationists at the GSA, which owned the building. The results are impressive. Sadly, the aesthetic taste and respect for history evident in the Old Post Office’s restoration are absent from the president’s plan for the EEOB.

Had the Trump Organization sought to paint the granite exterior of the Old Post Office, the GSA’s answer would have been not just no, but Hell no. The president’s EEOB proposal deserves the same response.

This article was adapted from the author’s written testimony at a May 7 meeting of the National Capital Planning Commission.

Separating facts from lies, and real thoughts from fabrications, can seem more difficult than ever: Words and images are easily faked, and some writers at every stage—students, academics, novelists—are letting machines do the work for them. The author may as well be dead. Ubiquitous cameras are eroding human privacy, creating the sense that we live in a panopticon. And across many popular platforms, information is often shorn of context, if not outright false.

The fact that I feed my kids and pay my rent as a novelist and teacher likely intensifies the queasiness I feel at these developments. Yet my profession also helps me understand that the idea of society coming apart might be the oldest story in the world. In the second half of the previous century, a group of mostly French theorists made this kind of instability their main subject. Systems built by humans were overpowering our ability to make choices, they explained. Society and language, the scaffolding on which our reality was built, were made up and farcical.

I read these guys—mostly guys, often grouped together as structuralists and post-structuralists—in college, and they baffled and entranced me. After a mediocre high-school education spent checking boxes, the thrill of thinking, of elbowing my way through something hard and complicated, felt like coming to life. Trudging doggedly through these difficult, abstruse ideas—roughly 67 percent of which I felt sure I didn’t understand—made the world feel sharper, different. Twenty years later, looking back on their (not inaccurate) cultural diagnoses generates a complicated feeling: I’m reminded of that seductive sensation of stretching one’s brain, even as I hear speculation that artificial intelligence might one day make thinking obsolete.

No book better captures this paradox than The Frenchmen, Emily Eakin’s new book about her encounters with post-structuralist ideas. Eakin entered college as an aspiring academic, but went on to spend her adult life in journalism (she is an editor at The New York Times). Yet despite her experience in two unstable fields, and her focus on thinkers who proclaimed, among other things, “the death of the author,” her book is filled with life. Every page contains evidence of deep research, an eye for telling details, and the pleasure that can comes from sprawling, sometimes consternating thought.

The Frenchmen opens as a sort of intellectual bildungsroman: At Harvard in the late 1980s—and especially in the classrooms to which Eakin gravitated as an undergraduate—French theory was the rage. It seemed both exclusive and rebellious. The protests of the ’60s seemed to be a distant memory, Ronald Reagan was president, and large portions of the population were quietly ignoring the thousands of deaths caused by AIDS. “In an era of complacency and self-satisfaction,” she writes, “theory was a symbol, however small, of intellectual nonconformism, a badge, like a pink mohawk, that marked you as a member of the counterculture, different from—and critical of—the docile horde.” Like so many college kids before her, Eakin, the child of two English-Ph.D. holders from Indiana, came to campus feeling ineffectual and small. The spirit of the times only amplified that impression, but the sheer force and seeming certainty of these fashionable thinkers gave her a sense of power.

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Before long, Eakin comes to the titular French writers: Jacques Lacan (1901–81), Roland Barthes (1915–80), Louis Althusser (1918–90), Paul de Man (1919–83), Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), Michel Foucault (1926–84), Félix Guattari (1930–92), and Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). I gave you the dates of their lives because, in Eakin’s telling, they really matter. Having led the reader into their ideas through her own experience, she illustrates how impossible it is to separate any individual thinker’s theories or discoveries from the time in which they lived. This seems obvious, maybe, but in fact it contradicts these philosophers’ core belief in the irrelevance of biography. And to the extent that our lives often feel disembodied today—so much time spent staring at screens—Eakin’s approach is not just a refreshing way of explaining ideas, but also a reminder to readers that we are physical beings first.

One of the primary tenets of most of the Frenchmen was that facts and meaning were difficult to pin down. There was only the text, over which the writer had little control. Even the self was ultimately an unstable text. “Within the structuralist framework,” Eakin explains, “an author was held to be of little account, a ‘fiction’ perpetrated by the ‘linguistic system,’ so it was easy to ignore the philosopher” and instead “focus exclusively on his words.” Eakin’s goal is the opposite: “to re-embody these men—to recover the hidden human element beneath their often stringent antihumanism.”

In carefully parsing not only these men’s arguments but also their lives, Eakin is able to seduce us with their ideas. And by whipping back and forth between theory and life, documenting spats among the players, and jumbling timelines, she lets readers glimpse the twisty paths these ideas followed, the historical currents that accelerated their spread, and the way they still thrum through our lives.

We spend the early chapters with the adolescent Eakin, for whom theory’s appeal was as much aesthetic—scarves and cigarettes, jeans with neckties—as it was intellectual. Eakin spent weeks imagining herself performing as Nadja, the wanton and elusive love interest from André Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. “I didn’t know what I wanted to be,” she writes. “I was hung up on something more basic: what it meant to be. I lacked confidence and, more to the point, skepticism. I didn’t know how to take theory in small doses.” This infatuation seemed to acquire the quality of an addiction. “Theory made thinking feel like doing. There was a rigor and beauty to it, an athletic strenuousness.”

A combination of theoretical gloss, intellectual memoir, and group biography, The Frenchmen is never wholly any of the three, and this is both its great strength and the reason that it sometimes loses hold of itself. From Eakin’s early college days, readers move through various philosophies without the confusion and doubling back that reading the actual works frequently entails. We start with Sartre, Marx, and Freud, who give way to Althusser and Lacan. Nearly all of the structuralists thought Sartre’s emphasis on individual agency was absurd in the face of Vietnam, inequality, and the Cold War. People had no power after all; their unconscious, shaped by systems and structures, was actually in charge.

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Such a smooth summary inevitably sacrifices complexity. My own descriptions have already shortchanged everyone I’ve mentioned. But Eakin doesn’t mean to untangle every theory, only to find “the hidden human element” that unites and explains the movement. Over and over, she knocks these philosophers’ experiences up against their thinking, lets us see these men move (sometimes awkwardly, sometimes dashingly) through time and space, and helps us understand how their theories reflected their lives.

How, for instance, does your understanding of Foucault’s theory of power—that society is a trap constructed to discipline and punish—change when you know that he was told by his headmaster that he had to fix his homosexuality if he wanted to stay at school? What might Derrida’s famous notion of différance—that words and signs mean something only in relation to other words and signs—have to do with the fact that he was a French Algerian Jew, expelled from primary school because of his ethnicity? Sartre and Althusser, each fixated on the limits of freedom, had both been prisoners of war and struggled to reintegrate into civilian life. Both Deleuze and Barthes were not admitted to L’École Normale, which was considered one of the best schools in Paris, for different reasons; each went on to defy academic orthodoxy.

Foucault was hospitalized after a suicide attempt; then he dropped acid in Death Valley. Althusser was diagnosed as bipolar, endured shock treatment, and eventually strangled his wife. Derrida was arrested (erroneously) for drug trafficking in Prague; Barthes was struck and killed by a laundry van. Nearly all the Frenchmen were fast drivers and sharp dressers. None of this made them structuralists or post-structuralists, but all of it is fairly extraordinary.

Watching these details accrue leads to conclusions that undermine the doctrines of the Frenchmen: How could biography not be important? And also, how much more fascinating does it make these ideas? Unstable or not, the author is most certainly a text worth talking about. Instead of ideas bestowed by gods, these iconoclastic theories come to look like intellectual insurrections with both global and highly proximate causes. The eruptions of the 20th century, refracted through idiosyncratic, brilliant, sometimes troubled men, engendered new ways of thinking about freedom, collectivity, social control, and artistic creation. In Eakin’s account, you begin to see the alchemy through which these notions caught fire and spread.   

By the time Derrida died, in 2004, the fever of post-structuralism had long broken in the universities—and in Eakin’s mind. In the end, close reading didn’t lead to revolution. The students supposedly radicalized by Marxist theory and its descendants did not slow down the global march toward free markets and political triangulation. In the late ’80s, De Man was revealed to have been a Nazi apologist with a secret family stashed in Europe. Eakin, for her part, dropped out of her Ph.D. program and went on to work at the academic magazine Lingua Franca; she was there when the outlet published an article by the NYU professor Alan Sokal, who revealed that he had duped a journal into publishing a hoax that mocked literary theory. The death knell of the Frenchmen had been rung before the end of the 20th century.

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When Eakin, by 2004 already at the Times, was asked to read the paper’s prepared obituary for Derrida, she realized how thoroughly these once-vaunted men had been struck down. She laments the article’s “tone of condescension,” its emphasis on how “unintelligible” theory is: “The Times’s Derrida was a caricature I recognized, and it seemed pointless, maybe even pretentious, to object.” Eakin now seems to regret her failure to ask for changes to the obituary, but she mentions extenuating circumstances that most anyone could understand. She was on maternity leave, and she was unsure what difference she could make. I also got the sense that she was deep inside a bureaucratic system whose rules she had learned to accept. But she wonders, years later, if she wrote off theory too easily—or too early. Maybe it seemed dead only because its influence was so diffuse. Its ideas were nowhere—and in evidence everywhere.

Today, when the slipperiness of truth, the ubiquity of surveillance, and the pervasive politics of identity are all self-evident, an intellectual history of deconstruction seems less like a dip into the past than a sharper lens through which to view our present. Eakin’s skill in distilling and then weaving these ideas together within a biographical context not only gives them new life; it also supports her argument that these lives are essential to the work. The Frenchmen immerses the reader in the thinking and feeling of the world that came before it, and it explains, through one particular writer’s experience, the world we live in now.