Mike Isaac is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer later this year. In an announcement, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance write: “You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.”

Last week, The Atlantic announced the hires of Sophie Haigney and Robert F.  Worth (who had been a contributing writer) as staff writers; Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Jebediah Reed, and Alex Stockton as senior editors; Lindsey Sitz as a producer for video podcasts; and Kevin Roose as a contributing writer.

Today’s staff note is below:

Dear everyone,

We’re writing with exciting news this morning: One of the country’s best reporters, Mike Isaac, is joining The Atlantic as a staff writer. For the past 12 years, Mike has been the leading technology reporter for The New York Times. You are undoubtedly familiar with his groundbreaking reporting on, among other companies, Meta and Uber, as well as his many other scoops and investigations. Mike is joining us at a key moment, as we work overtime to expand our presence in Silicon Valley.

About Mike: In addition to having broken some of the most consequential stories of our time, Mike is also a brilliant writer and fantastically creative. On a personal level, he is also hilarious. He is drawn to the biggest stories and most difficult reporting challenges, and knows Silicon Valley better than most anyone. In addition to his daily coverage of AI, the strange economics of the modern information system, and the most powerful people on the planet, Mike is also a best-selling author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, which was adapted into a Showtime series of the same name. (Those who have followed Mike’s reporting as closely as we have over the years will remember when he uncovered the existence of the company’s secret Greyball program.)

Mike is a journalist who matches the mission of The Atlantic—someone who brings great reporting firepower and tremendous writing talent, plus a deep love of magazines, and an uncommon level of ambition and creativity. We could not be more excited to welcome him and cannot wait for him to get started. Mike starts in December and will remain based in the Bay Area.

Please join us in welcoming Mike to The Atlantic.

Best wishes,
Jeff and Adrienne

Press Contacts:
Anna Bross and Paul Jackson | press@theatlantic.com

A decade ago, an Apple executive named Phil Schiller had a message for people using computers that were more than five years old. “This is really sad,” he said, with apparent sincerity, to scattered applause during an iPad Pro launch event. The remark was meant, seemingly, to encourage those poor souls to toss their obsolete devices aside and upgrade their way toward the future. (In other words: buy more Apple products.)

That was 2016, during the era when Apple announced new products to great fanfare, the average iPhone user traded in their device about every 23 months, and releases came with promises that buyers would “never want to go back to old technology again.” Over the years, more and more Americans have begun to rethink this upgrade formula. Some of them are turning to secondhand-tech marketplaces; others are combing eBay to pick up obsolete gadgets that remind them of a more offline time. But there exists another segment of the population that’s taken a different approach: They’ve refused to replace their devices at all.

[Read: There’s no reason to buy a new phone anymore]

Call them legacy users, or upgrade holdouts. They’ve clung to iPhones with home buttons, Bush-era computers, and headphones older than some tech CEOs, even when doing so impedes their ability to complete everyday tasks like emailing or navigation. The holdouts I spoke with don’t necessarily reject technology. Instead, they told me, they just want to use it on their own terms.

Some members of this community are older and put off by the prospect of learning a new interface. Others are minimalists who appreciate the simplicity of older technology, or anti-consumerism advocates looking to retain a sense of autonomy. Many aren’t driven by any sort of principle at all besides mere practicality: When I asked Larye Parkins—the proud user of a Compaq computer released in 2007, the same year that Superbad hit the box office and Myspace dominated social media—what he would call himself, he came back with a simple reply: “I’m just cheap.”

In some cases, their devices are old enough to now be on display in museums. Mike Tyran, a 66-year-old nurse, has long jammed out to ’80s glam bands on his 2003 iPod, a subsequent model of which can be found in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. Tyran also uses a smartphone, computer, and television that are all nearly a decade old and goes by “Old Turkey” on iFixit, a website dedicated to tech repairs. There, he dispenses and gathers tips on maintaining aging gadgets. Like many other holdouts, Tyran has no interest in contributing to e-waste heaps or shelling out five figures for gadgets with AI capabilities. “I have ‘NI’—natural intelligence,” he told me. “I’m good with that.”

The common enemy of upgrade holdouts is planned obsolescence, or deliberately designing products to have short lifespans. The term was coined nearly a century ago by the real-estate broker Bernard London. “There is little demand for new goods when people make their old and worn-out things do, by keeping them longer than they should,” London wrote. Today, no industry is more closely associated with the practice than Big Tech. Take Apple, which in 2020 agreed to settle lawsuits alleging that it was secretly slowing down older iPhones. Beyond “batterygate,” the company has also long engaged in “parts pairing,” the practice of preventing certain third-party parts from working in a repaired device, and discontinued hardware service for hundreds of its products over the years.

When it comes to continuing to use early smartphone models, just getting them to connect can be a problem. The 2G and 3G cellular networks they ran on have been largely phased out across North America (the latter can be found only in certain geographic enclaves). One of those pockets is in Saint John, New Brunswick, where Gary Flanagan—among the 2.3 percent of customers still using Koodo Mobile’s “legacy” network—managed to call me from his iPhone 5S, first released in 2013. Flanagan, a 54-year-old nonprofit consultant, occasionally finds himself unable to download apps or watch YouTube videos, and his younger co-workers rib him. But for the most part, he’s content. “If it works, it works—and I still use it,” Flanagan, who also still wears a pair of Radio Shack headphones he was gifted in 1983, told me.

Nathan Proctor, the right-to-repair campaign director for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, told me that some devices are made obsolete overnight, while others die a slow death as software updates are gradually halted. In order to keep using them, holdouts must contend with constraints in their day-to-day lives. Mark Turner, the owner of a nearly 10-year-old smartphone, told me he’s delayed buying a newer version of his hearing aids because their pairing app isn’t able to run on his device. Others, such as Kentaro Toyama, a computer scientist and University of Michigan professor who uses an AT&T flip phone, find work-arounds to navigate a world powered by QR codes—for Toyama, that means borrowing his wife’s old smartphone.

Such trade-offs can be a small price to pay for maintaining a sense of control over one’s digital presence. As a freelance copywriter and editor, Josh Fredman says laptops are essential for him. But the 44-year-old has put off replacing his computers—a 16-year-old Toshiba and a 13-year-old HP model—because they serve as an oasis from today’s digital spaces, free from the constant notifications and update alerts of modern operating systems. One of Fredman’s laptops can no longer connect to the internet and has become his “art computer,” used for writing fiction and composing music. He’s replaced faulty fans and hard drives on the other laptop, and installed a gaming package from 2009 that allows him to play Solitaire without the interruption of advertisements.

Keeping old hardware alive is often a communal effort. Last year, iFixit helped host several “install parties” of Linux, an open-source operating system that can breathe new life into obsolete computers, at cafés and libraries across the country. A simple search on YouTube brings up numerous how-to guides on jailbreaking Kindles in order to free older models from Amazon’s software restrictions. And a decade ago, fans of the discontinued smartwatch brand Pebble grouped together to create Rebble, a platform of web services that reinvigorated technically defunct smartwatches. Wayne Seltzer, who got his Pebble watch as a Father’s Day gift in 2015, told me he appreciates the “kindred spirits” nature of the project.

Similar sentiments against tech consumerism are materializing—albeit in a less radical manner—in broader movements toward refurbished gadgets, and in a resurgence in retro electronic devices led by younger generations fatigued by today’s digital overload. But keeping up the lifestyle is a challenge. Most of the people I spoke with either have tech and engineering backgrounds that primed them for implementing complex hardware and software fixes, or are retired and able to put time and effort into learning them.

In some cases, even the most ardent holdouts have been forced to give up. Seltzer eventually sold his Pebble watch after struggling to download certain medical features on it. Flanagan recently discovered that he will have to finally give up the iPhone 5S when the 3G network it runs on is dismantled next spring. And Tyran, or “Old Turkey,” is feeling pressure from his family to upgrade. His daughter, in particular, gets frustrated when he can’t see the emoji she sends him. But he’d rather live in a world with some inconveniences than have a new one imposed on him. So, for now, he’s still holding out.

The principle that government ought to be administered for the benefit of all citizens, not on behalf of one political party, lies at the core of America’s democratic enterprise. The Trump administration couldn’t care less: It appears to see the federal government not as something to steward on behalf of all Americans, but as an opportunity—a set of levers it can pull on to protect its reign.

America’s adherence to this principle of executive neutrality has never been perfect, but as a norm it has been honored more than breached. When I served as a political appointee in the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush, the idea that the secretaries of defense or homeland security or the attorney general would have ever appeared at a political rally was unimaginable. Their roles were too important to national security to risk being perceived as partisan operatives.

Not so in the Trump administration. Its members are willing to use the public power at their disposal to do what they can to give Republicans an edge in this fall’s elections—to campaign for candidates from their public pulpits, to push broadcast-news coverage in a more favorable direction, to try to strong-arm the U.S. Postal Service into regulating mail-in balloting into oblivion, to threaten withholding FEMA relief funds from those states that don’t elect Republican candidates, to release pro–Donald Trump propaganda funded by taxpayer dollars, and, the most crass offense, to offer $5,000 checks to voters if Republicans win. Some of these tactics are in a legal gray area; others are plainly forbidden. But all of them are violations of the precept that the party in power should not tilt the electoral scales toward itself.

The most egregious area of activity has been the total disregard administration officials have shown for the Hatch Act. The law, passed in 1939, imposes limits on certain government employees to ensure that these officials in their executive functions are above partisan political activity. Federal employees may not use their official authority to influence an election, though they can engage in political activity when they are off the clock, and restricted employees (which includes all national-security and law-enforcement personnel) may not “take an active part” in any political campaign.

The law is still being enforced, but only against everyday federal employees. For example, the DHS inspector general recently found that some FEMA disaster responders had violated the Hatch Act when they skipped providing assistance to homes with pro-Trump signs after Hurricane Milton.

But in Trump world, the law is for thee and not for me. Attorney General Todd Blanche has turned out to be something of a serial campaigner. He traveled to Long Island to give a speech at a rally for Bruce Blakeman, a Republican running for governor of New York. He gave a speech at the Republican National Committee’s midterm convention. He stumped for Michael Whatley, a Senate candidate from North Carolina.

[Read: The problem with Trump’s new taxpayer-funded ads]

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth went to the Iowa State Fair to support Republican Representative Zach Nunn. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy gave an August speech at a super-PAC event supporting GOP candidates in Michigan in which he mixed official business with praise for a Republican candidate. And, as The Atlantic has reported, Trump even went so far as to have a secret points-system competition among his Cabinet members to see who could travel to the greatest number of competitive House districts over the summer (though, to be clear, not all of that travel was overtly in violation of the Hatch Act).

Who is supposed to do anything about any of this? That responsibility falls to the Office of Special Counsel, whose head Trump fired early in his second term. He then nominated as his replacement a host of a far-right podcast, whose past behavior and qualifications were so poor that even the Senate Republicans could not support him. Despite not having a permanent leader, the OSC has managed to launch a Hatch Act investigation of one person of great interest to the president: former Special Counsel Jack Smith. The investigation is in response to a complaint that Smith sought quick criminal-trial dates for Trump as a means of influencing the 2024 election.

Perhaps less egregious but no less troubling has been the erosion of the traditional neutrality of the Federal Communications Commission. For years, the FCC’s equal-time rule (not to be confused with the broader, now-repealed fairness doctrine) was the legal embodiment of the principle of the government’s neutrality among the different political factions. The rule required that if a broadcaster allowed a candidate to appear, it “shall afford equal opportunities to all other such candidates” for that office. Exceptions were possible for bona fide news events. The rule has generally been interpreted quite leniently—allowing, for example, programs such as Access Hollywood, Today, and The Howard Stern Show to host political candidates on the air without requiring their opponents be allowed the same.

Under Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, the agency has perfected the use of its authority to threaten broadcasters it perceives as anti-Trump. In late January 2026, the FCC issued new “guidance” aimed at late-night-TV hosts, effectively reversing the long-standing leniency. Some networks responded by changing what they put on their shows. CBS pulled an interview of James Talarico, the Democrat from Texas running for  Senate, from Stephen Colbert’s late-night show.  

Without a doubt, the single most noteworthy effort the FCC has undertaken involves its obsessive pursuit of ABC. The effort to influence the network’s programming began in late 2025 when Carr urged ABC (owned by Disney) to pull Jimmy Kimmel from the air after he inartfully commented on Charlie Kirk’s death. Appearing on a right-wing podcast, Carr said: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead”—seemingly a not-so-veiled threat of licensure action. Though Kimmel was suspended, he eventually returned to the air.

Not content with this (or perhaps angered that Kimmel was put back on the air), Carr moved, in April, to conduct an early review of all eight FCC licenses held by ABC. As purported grounds for the review, the FCC questioned the diversity and inclusion practices of the network. ABC filed a lawsuit in August, seeking to forestall the review, claiming that it was retaliatory and in violation of the First Amendment.  

The FCC contends that ABC’s lawsuit is premature—that it has yet to decide whether to take enforcement action against the company. But the mere threat of a review is bad enough. The Trump/Carr pressure campaign is working.

In July, Trump gave an address to the nation, and ABC decided not to broadcast it. But it did put it on livestream (which it would not normally have done) as a way of mitigating the threat of retaliation. Likewise, The View, which historically has hosted political candidates, has stopped doing so after the FCC began an investigation following an appearance by Talarico. ABC has now, on the cusp of the election, decided to withhold a Kimmel interview of Talarico from its on-air broadcast, punting it to YouTube instead.  

There can be no doubt whatsoever as to the political nature of these enforcement actions. Immediately after warning late-night-TV hosts (a group Trump loyalists perceive as liberal) about the applicability of the equal-time rule, Carr clarified that talk radio (known for its conservative tilt) was not subject to this guidance. As the lone Democratic-nominated FCC commissioner, Anna Gomez, put it, the action was part of the “administration’s broader campaign to censor and control speech.”

[Read: The ‘easy way’ to crush the mainstream media]

Finally, consider one effort to bend the institutions of government to Trump’s political benefit where he has (at least to date) been less successful—mail-in voting, a case which, mercifully, Trump lost in the Supreme Court last month.

Correctly or not, Trump seems to believe that Election Day voting favors Republicans, and thus he has attempted to use his power over the government to make mail-in voting more difficult.

Central to that effort was Trump’s executive order “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” and more particularly his direction to the USPS to draft a rule establishing “uniform standards” for mail-in ballots to be implemented.

This anodyne formulation concealed, as a Massachusetts district court described, a rather more draconian final rule which would have required state and local election officials to submit their ballot envelopes to the USPS for approval and thereafter provide the identity of each mail-in voter to the USPS for input into a federal government-run electronic portal. The enforcement mechanisms for these requirements would have been stringent: Absent approval of the ballot envelope, no voter data could have been input. And without ballot-design approval, intelligent barcodes, and voter-data registration, the USPS would have refused to deliver mail ballots to voters.

Every state’s mail-in-ballot process would have been subject to federal approval under the guise of mailing-envelope standards. In his appeal to the Supreme Court, the solicitor general likened this requirement to “analogous preparation requirements for the mailing of cremated remains and replica explosives.” He further contended (notwithstanding the title of the executive order) that the rule was simply a regulation of the USPS and not meant to federalize control of the elections.

Even though it has, thus far, been unsuccessful, Trump’s misuse of the postal service is of a piece with his overall project of using the federal government to his party’s advantage. It is effectively a repudiation of the postal service’s “universal service” obligation—the mandate not to refuse mail unless specifically authorized to do so by Congress—with intent to convert the USPS’s neutrality into a political cudgel.

When politicians repurpose government action to help themselves maintain power, they are breaking a fundamental promise of governmental impartiality in providing services and benefits. Trump’s assault on this principle of executive neutrality has not yet taken root in American culture. If it does, we will lose far more than control of the House or the Senate; we will lose the possibility that the will of the people can prevail.

Rachel Somerstein thought it would be “really wonderful and fun to have three children.” That is, until what happened happened.

When she was delivering her first baby, many years ago, Somerstein spent nearly 24 hours in labor before the baby’s heart began decelerating. The physician recommended a C-section. She received anesthesia, but as soon as the scalpel touched her skin, she knew something was deeply wrong. “I felt that,” she recalled saying as her legs bucked from the pain.

As Somerstein wrote in her 2024 book, Invisible Labor, she felt all of it—the entire surgery. In the following years, Somerstein developed PTSD and would panic during medical procedures; she told her husband she wasn’t sure if she’d ever want to have another baby. She remembers thinking, “I just don’t know that I can get over the fear,” she told me.

She ultimately did: Four and a half years later, she had her second baby. But she now thinks that, if not for the horrible first birth, she might have had another child in between. Somerstein’s experience was extreme, but her deliberations over her family size reflect a typical trajectory: Many women start out with a notion of their ideal number of children, and then finances, health, relationship status, and other factors can push that number up or down. Sometimes, women have more children than they initially intended, but, more commonly these days, they have one or two fewer than they’d hoped.

As politicians and academics puzzle over what, if anything, to do about America’s shrinking fertility rate, lost in the conversation is that many people would like to have more kids—but their personal circumstances prevent them from doing so. Rather than simply promoting the idea of being a parent, then, one way to boost the country’s birth rate may be to make it easier for parents to say yes to additional children.

[Read: What number of kids makes parents happiest?]

Since roughly the 1970s, if you were to ask a random 20-year-old woman how many children she’d like to have, the odds were pretty good that she’d say “two or three,” several researchers told me. But this was less a true, firm preference than a reflection of the social norm, which is that for several decades, the majority of women were having two or three kids. “Saying you want two kids when you’re 20,” Sarah Hayford, a sociologist at Ohio State University, told me, “is not telling us that much about you”—or how many kids you’ll go on to have. (Although men, of course, also have opinions about the number of kids they want to have, few studies have been conducted on their preferences, Hayford said, and thus I’ll mostly focus on women in this article.)

Over the past decade or so, the picture has shifted: More and more, women say they aren’t sure how many children they’ll have, if any. In a study published last year, Hayford and two other researchers analyzed a nationally representative survey of more than 40,000 women and found that in 2018, 48 percent of childless women who hoped to have children were uncertain whether they actually would, compared with 40 percent in 2002. This change may reflect an understanding that having children can be derailed by various obstacles—the first being that most people want to be married before they have kids, Julia Behrman, a sociologist at Northwestern University, told me. The marriage rate is declining, and although plenty of people have children on their own or with a partner they’re not married to, many unmarried women won’t go on to have one child, let alone multiple.

Being married or partnered, however, does not determine how many children a person will have. Karen Guzzo, a demographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies family formation, described fertility intentions as a learning process of sorts. A couple might have a baby and discover that they love being parents and want to do it again and again; others might find that day care costs far more than expected, making another child unaffordable. “Before you have kids, you are imagining what parenthood is like based on your friends’ experiences, based on what you’ve seen on TV, based on what you see out in the world,” Guzzo said. Only once people have a child do they know what parenthood is really like, and the experience might be better or worse than they had imagined. “People who are pretty determined about having that first kid can often find a way to do that,” Guzzo said. But “increasingly, that second kid is, Let me evaluate where I am right now and see if I can fit another kid in here.”

A number of factors can determine whether a couple has a second child, Rachel Margolis, a sociologist at the University of Western Ontario who has also studied family formation, told me. “People who I know who stopped at one,” she said, “either they met each other really late in life, or they disagreed about how many kids they wanted.” Or, she continued, they weren’t happy with how they were allocating child-rearing responsibilities, or they had stressful jobs that didn’t accommodate parenting, or they’re in a same-sex partnership and it was harder for them to have more than one kid, or, or, or. Life comes at you fast.

[Read: The unglamorous truth about the average tradwife]

As in Somerstein’s case, a difficult birth and postpartum period can make someone hesitant to do it all over again: Margolis found in a 2015 study that Germans who had a pronounced drop in well-being after having their first child were less likely to have a second child than those who had no decline. Similarly, a study of women in the U.K. found that those who experienced postpartum depression after one birth were less likely to have additional children. Somerstein, who now leads birth-trauma groups, told me that the question of whether to have another baby “comes up in every single meeting.”

Another reason people may vacillate about having kids, or having more of them, is that many Americans have been sent—and have absorbed—the message that “you should not have a kid until you’ve got all your ducks in a row,” Guzzo said. Finish school, get a job, get married—don’t be an unwed mother. People may feel pressure to live in a good neighborhood with good schools, where housing tends to be more expensive, and to have a partner who wants that too. Oh, and make sure that partner takes on half the physical and mental load. “I think people want to have kids,” Guzzo said, but they might also think: “Some of those things that I think need to be in place before I have kids might not happen.”

Social and policy changes might address some of the obstacles that prevent people from having a family of their desired size. Guzzo said that if child-care infrastructure were stronger and if paid leave were more plentiful, America would “probably see a bit of a boost in birth rates, particularly the second- and third-birth rates.” If young people felt established enough to marry and buy homes earlier in life, they might start having children sooner, which could increase the likelihood that they’d have a second or third kid. And if more medical providers took women’s pain—both physical and mental—seriously, fewer women might have the kinds of traumatic births that discourage them from trying again.

When Somerstein was 41, after she’d had her two children, she got her appendix taken out. A friend suggested that she get her fallopian tubes removed at the same time—a procedure that can lower the risk of ovarian cancer without the need for a separate surgery. “I just couldn’t do it,” Somerstein said. “I was like, Maybe I want to have another baby.” Uncertainty can take another form too—that of leaving the door ajar.

Sign up for Video Village, a new weekly newsletter in which David Sims unearths cinematic gems and brings readers into his movie obsession.

Perhaps you’ve heard the news: Movies are back. For many of us (including quite a few of you, I imagine), they never went away, but 2026 has been a year of guarded optimism in Hollywood. Ticket sales are up, the box office is booming, and, most heartening of all, superhero movies aren’t propping up the industry largely by themselves. The diverse success of large-canvas storytelling such as Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and out-of-nowhere tiny-budget hits including Curry Barker’s Obsession have demonstrated how this art form still can seize the zeitgeist like few others.

If you’ve ever read my movie coverage in The Atlantic over the decade-plus I’ve been here, my feelings of triumph and relief at this sanguine state of affairs should come as no surprise. I work primarily as a film critic, trying to spotlight popular art that matters, unearth little gems trying to make noise amid a crowd of “content,” and provide some thoughtful context on why the films I don’t like don’t work for me. I also love talking with filmmakers about their influences, the arc of their career, granular scene and shot choices, as well as writing wide-angle analysis, looking at the ways the industry responds to current events, and how the big-screen experience has fought for survival since the pandemic.

Video Village, which will arrive in your inbox every Thursday, will have all of that to offer—criticism, recommendations, and commentary on what’s happening in the world of movies. This newsletter takes its name from the industry term for the nerve center of a movie set: a collection of monitors where the director and their crew can watch footage live, making sure everything is looking good. But I also want to curate my own little nerve center with this community, bringing everyone together to share in this passion with unbridled enthusiasm. I’ll be suggesting fun viewing projects for you to undertake, and flipping through streaming offerings, new releases, old classics, and even random DVDs I have piled up. If you share in my cinema obsession—even at a fraction of my intensity—it’ll be a fun ride.

Photographs by Julia Sellmann

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When Freddy Marquez was 12, he was hit by a motorcycle while biking and smashed his face into the pavement. He healed fast, but as adolescence reshaped his boyish features, the scar started to tug on his upper lip, leaving his mouth ajar. “Mom,” he said, “I’m going to high school. I don’t want to look like this.” So in September 2024, his parents found a surgeon in central Florida, where they live, to do a scar revision.

On the morning of his surgery, Freddy went into the operating room around 9. His mom, Joana Jardin, settled into a waiting-room chair, expecting to drive him home in a few hours. Noon came, then 1 o’clock, then 2, then 3. “Where is my son?” Joana began to ask. “Where is my son?” The staff couldn’t tell her anything, except that she had to wait. She watched as other parents picked up their kids from surgery and left. At 4 o’clock, she realized she was the only one in the waiting room.

When Joana finally got to see Freddy, around 5, he was barely conscious. His eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He was just sleepy, a nurse reassured her, because he’d gotten Benadryl after a hive-like rash broke out—but not to worry, the monitors tracking his vitals showed nothing else awry. Eventually, Freddy managed to slump into a wheelchair, his eyes still closed. He was sent home.

The next day, Freddy woke up. Then he threw up. He was still drowsy and now irritable. His head hurt. Joana took him to urgent care and later to the ER, where doctors who evaluated him figured he was just recovering from surgery. But in the coming days, his symptoms became stranger and more disturbing. Freddy started losing control of the muscles in his face. He developed tremors. He choked on his saliva. He lost his balance. He felt what he could only describe as electricity coursing through his brain. “Please, Dad, pray for me,” he would cry when the “electricity” struck.

At the hospital where Freddy was finally admitted, doctors ordered two separate MRIs of his brain, and, to keep him still during the scans, they put him under anesthesia. Both times, he took hours to regain consciousness. Both times, he emerged worse than before.

Freddy lost the ability to walk. His body spasmed and twitched as his muscles took on a life of their own. When Joana saw her son in the hospital bed—eyes staring at the ceiling, limbs flailing wildly—she remembers thinking this is how people once believed you could be “possessed by a demon.”

The scans found spots of white in Freddy’s brain—signs of dying and dead neurons—but no explanation as to what had caused them. In the coming weeks, he got better and then worse, worse enough that doctors ordered yet another MRI. His parents begged the hospital not to use anesthesia again. Don’t worry, Joana remembers being told; the doctors can do it safely. They do it all the time. Joana felt that she had no choice but to trust them. As Freddy slid into unconsciousness, she once again started ticking off the hours waiting for him to wake up: 1 p.m., 2, 3, 4. “Where is my son?”

Freddy never woke up. His body went into cardiac arrest, then respiratory failure. He died on December 29, 2024, at age 14.

Before that final MRI, in one of their last conversations, Freddy had blurted in a half plea, half accusation, “You don’t understand what is happening to me, Mommy.” He was old enough, by then, to have lost faith in his parents’ omniscience but young enough to still yearn for it. His ordeal had revealed to him that the adult world is riddled with unknowns; that the assurances of even doctors in white coats can mean very little. “I promise that I’m going to understand. Until my last breath,” his mother told him. “I’m going to understand.”

And she would, eventually. Joana did not know it then, but Freddy’s death would be linked to dozens of cases of unexplained catastrophic brain damage after routine anesthesia, all in children or young adults. Several, like Freddy, died. Others became permanently disabled.

The mystery of why Freddy died would ultimately collide with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of medicine: How does anesthesia work in the first place? How is it that anesthesiologists can induce a state that some have called “functionally equivalent to brainstem death”—only to reverse it? This process happens 60,000 times a day in operating rooms across the United States. Yet it remains poorly understood. What happened inside Freddy’s brain, some researchers now think, may be an extreme version of what happens inside any of our brains when we slip into unconsciousness under anesthesia.

This past May, in Germany, I watched a doctor give a talk to her colleagues about two eerily similar cases almost two decades apart. One was Freddy’s. The other was that of a boy in Germany who went under anesthesia for a broken arm in 2006. Like Freddy, Ulrich “Uli” Gabriel Gobin Hernández was 14. Like Freddy, he took hours to wake up and then gradually lost control of his muscles. But unlike Freddy, Uli survived. The woman giving the talk was not Uli’s doctor. She was his mother.

Yaremy Hernández Castillo, who is soft-spoken and modest to a fault, wore a white coat with sensible sneakers as she flicked through slides of her son’s brain scans. Most of her colleagues at the cardiac-rehab hospital where she worked had no idea that she’d spent the past 20 years—outside her job as an internist—trying to decipher his condition. Early on, she had intuited that what happened to her son could be explained only by something still unknown to medical science. “Uli Gabriel, patient zero,” she came to think of him. But in the initial lonely years of her investigation, his doctors doubted her. Her own medical colleagues did too. “Everyone told me it was absurd,” she recalled to me, even as they could muster no better explanation.

These were the facts of Uli’s case: On Saturday, January 14, 2006—a beautiful day to hit the slopes—he went snowboarding near his family’s home in the Bavarian Alps. Uli took a jump way too fast and landed on his right arm; the humerus bone did not withstand the force of impact. He ended up at the local clinic, where Yaremy worked at the time, and where she trusted he was in capable hands. On weekends, the alpine-village clinic treated an influx of skiers with mangled bones.

But as the hours passed and Uli did not wake up from surgery, Yaremy began to worry. When he finally did rouse—confused, vomiting, and talking “like a drunk man”—her instincts both as a mother and as a doctor screamed that something was wrong.

The trauma surgeon came to check on Uli’s arm and declared it perfect—his own job was done. No one else seemed to share Yaremy’s growing alarm at her son’s mysterious neurological symptoms. The word she kept using to describe this period was alone. To get an MRI of Uli’s brain, Yaremy personally arranged for an ambulance to take him to a larger hospital. On the MRI, two ghostly white spots appeared in his basal ganglia.

The death of brain cells in the basal ganglia, which coordinates movements of the body, explained Uli’s symptoms, which progressed to erratic twisting, painful muscle spasms, and involuntary protrusion of the tongue. But what had caused the damage? No one knew. Uli could still walk and talk, albeit with some difficulty, and he remembered everything: the confusion, the pain, the seven dwarfs from Snow White plastered all over his pediatric hospital room, which, as a 14-year-old, he found tragically uncool. He was impatient to get better and to get out; he had tickets to a Foo Fighters show less than two weeks later. But the day of the concert came and went, and Uli remained stuck in the hospital, his symptoms unresolved, their underlying cause still unknown. The tests that doctors ran all came back negative.

Had his anesthesiologist made a mistake? Yaremy couldn’t dismiss the possibility. How does a perfectly healthy kid become so sick from routine anesthesia, other than because of a terrible mistake? Malpractice could give grief a direction and a shape, suggesting a person to blame (a doctor) and a means of redress (a lawsuit). Friends kept telling Yaremy to sue. In the end, she did, filing a lawsuit against Uli’s anesthesiologist, Ludwig Düthorn, a senior colleague whom she regularly passed in the hallways of their clinic. At the very least, she figured, the lawsuit could help uncover what had really happened.

At the clinic, Yaremy began to avoid the ICU, where Düthorn worked, unsure of what to say about the tragedy that had rattled both of their lives. Düthorn, too, was haunted by the case. He replayed the surgery in his mind, searching for any hint of the debacle to come. Uli’s blood pressure had dipped briefly—but that wasn’t uncommon during anesthesia, and would not have been enough to cause this level of brain damage. Düthorn had counteracted the drop with a routine dose of noradrenaline, and that had worked as intended. All of Uli’s other vitals were unremarkable. All of the dosages had been double-checked by a nurse.

Afterward, whenever Düthorn had to anesthetize a healthy young boy, he would think of Uli. “I was personally devastated,” he told me. “I thought, I did the anesthesia. It is my fault. But on the other hand, I could find no mistake.”

The death or serious injury of a healthy child from anesthesia is so unusual as to be universally shocking to doctors these days. Anesthesia is known to pose risks to the elderly or ill, but even then it is far safer than it once was.

In the 19th century, as many as one out of 2,500 patients died under chloroform, then a popular anesthetic. But patients were willing to take the risk, because the alternative was pure, visceral horror: During the pre-anesthesia era, hospitals would put their operating rooms in towers, so as to spare other patients from all the screaming.

Like many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of anesthesia was something of an accident. Doctors became aware that ether, a popular party drug at the time, made giddy revelers insensitive to pain. They decided to give it a try in the operating theater: The first public demonstration was carried out on October 16, 1846, when a 21-year-old man under ether had a malformation removed from his neck at Massachusetts General Hospital. (The name anaesthesia, from the Greek for “without sensation,” was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the eminent doctor and essayist who also gave this magazine its name, in 1857.) At the time, doctors did not understand why ether worked; that it did was good enough.

General anesthesia today is often likened, colloquially, to sleep. But what it does to the brain is stranger and frankly spookier: A patient who is merely asleep would not lie still and take a bone saw to the chest. To render someone so deeply unconscious, anesthesia shuts down multiple distinct functions in the nervous system, making a patient insensate, paralyzed, and unable to form memories. The brain under anesthesia is suppressed to such an extent that Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Harvard and MIT, has compared it to coma or brain-stem death.

“The key thing is that it’s reversible,” Brown told me. When anesthetics stop being administered, the patient starts to rouse within minutes. Their consciousness flips back on. The spell breaks. This total reversal has happened millions of times in millions of people, the magic of it now mundane. But Uli had needed hours to find his way back to consciousness, his brain adrift someplace too deep and too dark to return from unscathed.

In the months after his accident, Uli’s symptoms became manageable enough for him to return to school. Still, he could be unsteady on his feet. On a walk with friends and their dog one day in 2007, he took a tumble and fractured his collarbone. His mother hoped the bone would heal without surgery, but his erratic limb movements from the damage to his brain kept jostling the broken bone. Surgery became inevitable.

Wary of anesthesia, Yaremy asked his doctor to avoid the type Uli had received for his arm surgery. She had no scientific evidence to cite, but she hoped he would listen to her, as a worried mother and as a fellow doctor. He did not.

This time, Uli did not wake up for days. Yaremy thought he was going to die. She would open his eyelids to check his reflexes. Nothing. When his eyes finally stayed open on their own, Uli was delirious. He screamed whenever an unfamiliar nurse entered his room. He had trouble following conversations. His skin became hypersensitive to touch. He lost more control over his limbs. He would never again be able to play guitar in his band or impress girls with snowboarding tricks. He would never even walk or talk on his own.

Yaremy struggled to care for him at home, and she began to contemplate her life in small-town Germany. She had grown up an ocean away, in the boisterous city of Caracas. At 21, she met a German man at a disco in Venezuela, who became her husband and then Uli’s father, and who persuaded her to move to this tiny ski town, where her new in-laws ran a hotel. When she arrived—with 1-year-old Uli in her arms—she spoke little German. For a long time, she was the only foreigner in town. She missed the warmth of the Venezuelan sun and she missed her large family, who she knew would rally to help her back home.

And so, soon after the disastrous second surgery, Yaremy boarded a plane with Uli, now 17, to Caracas. Her younger child decided to stay in Germany with their father. They all planned to reunite in Venezuela later, but Yaremy knew her marriage was already over, its existing cracks widened by the new challenges of caring for their son.

The move proved, in one way, fortuitous. A few years into living in Caracas, Yaremy encountered the first hint that what had happened to her son had also happened to someone else. When picking up medication for Uli—Botox to relax his clenched muscles—she met another mother doing the same for her own son. The facts of his case sounded awfully familiar: anesthesia, delayed awakening, brain damage, loss of muscle control. The mother told Yaremy about a spate of anesthesia complications in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo in the early 2000s, which were blamed on a contaminated batch of sevoflurane, then a fairly new anesthesia drug in the country. Her son, this mother said, was one such case.

Uli, too, had gotten sevoflurane during both surgeries. The colorless and faintly sweet gas has since become one of the most widely used anesthetics worldwide. But Uli’s surgeries were two years apart and 5,000 miles away in Germany, which had had no reports of contaminated sevoflurane. Yaremy couldn’t see how the incidents in Carabobo could be connected to her son’s. Still, she filed them away in her mind.

Not long after, Yaremy began chasing down a second clue, which emerged as Uli’s malpractice case wound its way through the German legal system. The lawsuit itself was unlikely to succeed, now that Uli had suffered the same complications under a different anesthesiologist, but an expert examining the facts of the case made a crucial observation: The two symmetrical white spots in Uli’s basal ganglia, he said, looked much like the brain damage found in people with inherited mitochondrial disease.

Mitochondria are the tiny structures inside our cells that act as power generators. When they become dysfunctional, cells are first starved of energy; then they die. The most vulnerable cells are the most energy-hungry ones; neurons are particularly susceptible, especially those in the basal ganglia. In children with mitochondrial disease, neuron death can be triggered by physiological stress of any kind: fasting, illness, dehydration, and, yes, anesthesia. Perhaps the fault lay with Uli’s mitochondria too.

In 2013, Yaremy managed to secure an appointment at a leading genetic-disease lab in Houston. She boarded the plane with Uli, convinced that the answer awaited them at their destination. There, specialists ran a series of blood tests on Uli and searched his DNA for mutations that cause mitochondrial disease. “I felt like I was going to see the light,” Yaremy told me over breakfast in May. “But nothing happened.” She sighed, her shoulders tense with disappointment.

The tests found no mutations known to cause mitochondrial disease. Moreover, Uli had never exhibited other symptoms; mitochondrial dysfunction affects numerous parts of the body, including the heart and muscles, and symptoms frequently manifest in childhood. Uli had been a healthy and energetic boy: walking before age 1, skiing at 3. Yaremy wondered if her son’s reaction to sevoflurane could be caused by a novel mitochondrial mutation. Uli remembers hearing the doctor, who did not know he understood English, mention her belief dismissively to his medical students.

Yaremy and Uli returned home to Caracas, where they had been building a new life. Uli enrolled at Venezuela’s largest university; using an eye-tracking device to communicate, he graduated with a degree in modern languages. Yaremy worked her way up to professor of medicine at the same university.

Then, in the mid-2010s, Venezuela’s petroleum-dependent economy cratered. Public hospitals lacked equipment as basic as disposable gloves; inflation soared to more than 1 million percent. Even with her connections, Yaremy began to struggle to obtain Uli’s medications. She decided in 2018 to uproot their lives once again, taking Uli back to Germany, where he could receive more reliable care.

By then, Yaremy was closer to finding the explanation for Uli’s condition than she knew. She already held key pieces of the puzzle. But it would take a second tragedy in her family for her to realize how they fit together.

In June 2020, Yaremy got a call from her younger cousin—and Uli’s godmother—María Fernanda Pozo Castillo, or Mafer. They are close, having grown up together in Caracas. Because Yaremy is the doctor in the family, Mafer told me, everyone bugs her with their ailments. (“Yaremy, I have a headache,” she said, slipping into an imitation.) But she was calling about something much more serious. Her 13-year-old son, Matías, had just had knee surgery after a bike accident in Austin, Texas, and he’d struggled to wake up. He had gotten sevoflurane.

“Mafer, no!” Yaremy said.

Even as she began to relive the cold dread of waiting for Uli to wake up, Yaremy pulled herself into problem-solving mode. “Don’t leave the hospital without an MRI, okay?” she told her cousin. “If the doctor says it’s not necessary, it doesn’t matter. You demand an MRI.”

Mafer remembers that the doctors were reluctant to order a brain scan for her son—he’ll be kicking a ball again in three weeks, they told her. But she kept asking and asking until they acceded. Sure enough, the MRI—which was done without further anesthesia—showed two white lesions in the basal ganglia. “Same places,” Yaremy immediately said when she heard this. “Same places as Uli Gabriel.”

In the coming days, Matías started experiencing involuntary limb movement. He developed muscle contractions, even more severe than his older cousin’s, that left him screaming in pain. The contractions have persisted, even with high doses of muscle relaxant delivered straight to his spinal cord. This past summer, Matías’s pain became so excruciating that he had to be hospitalized in the ICU. His mother cares for him full-time. Before we spoke on the phone, she kept apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute to tend to him.

Yaremy was devastated for her family; so was Uli. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he told me when we met in the spring, tapping the sentence out letter by letter on a board that he uses to communicate.

Yet amid her grief, Yaremy’s scientific mind got to work: One kid in her family? Okay, a fluke. But two? It had to be genetic. She thought of Uli’s mitochondrial-DNA test from seven years earlier. The sequencing had found no mutations known to cause disease. But the report did note some “variants of unknown significance,” including one called m.11232T>C, meaning that the 11,232nd letter of his mitochondrial genome had been altered from a T to a C. No one made much of the finding; all of us have variants of unknown significance in our genomes, most of which are of little consequence, like minor typos that do not obscure the meaning of a sentence. But maybe this mutation was, in fact, significant.

Mitochondria carry their own loop of DNA, separate from the chromosomes that make up the rest of our genome, and are inherited through the maternal line. Yaremy’s mother and Mafer’s mother are sisters, so they and their children share the same mitochondrial line.

Could a single typo in their mitochondrial DNA be responsible for all of the catastrophic brain damage in the family? And what was the connection to sevoflurane?

Yaremy now began searching for a scientist to study her family. She suspected that Uli and Matías carried the same mutation, as might other relatives. Two of her mother’s sisters, she realized, had also suffered complications after surgery that now seemed to trace back to anesthesia. Were others at risk too?

She found Julio Montoya, an expert in mitochondrial disease at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain, who saw her email in a waiting room as he was about to undergo emergency surgery for a detached retina. With his one good eye, he read it and replied immediately. He was keen to investigate.

Montoya and his colleague Eduardo Ruiz-Pesini had, it turned out, seen the m.11232T>C mutation before. In 2018, they had found it in a Venezuelan boy at a Barcelona hospital. This patient had become severely ill after surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids—and deteriorated even further with subsequent rounds of anesthesia in later years. The Spanish team decided, along with Yaremy, to put together a formal research proposal. The boy from the Barcelona hospital would become patient one in their study; Uli became patient two, and Matías patient three.

Over the years, Yaremy had talked with colleagues in Venezuela about Uli so relentlessly that word sometimes came back to her of similar cases: nearly always kids, nearly always after routine surgery. An introvert by nature, Yaremy had to learn to badger anyone and everyone for a useful crumb of information.

She began running down some of these rumors: The wife of the son of a friend knew a neurologist who knew an anesthesiologist who knew of a boy who had fallen ill after surgery on a broken forearm. He became patient four. Patient five was the boy whose mother she’d met picking up Botox in Caracas. A physical therapist told her about a boy who’d had cleft-lip surgery—patient six. An old friend from medical school, an anesthesiologist, had examined a boy who developed symptoms after surgery for a cochlear implant. The friend had once been skeptical of Yaremy’s theory, but now he helped her gather data. This boy became the seventh and final patient in the study.

All of the patients who ended up in the study were boys, but Yaremy heard of girls affected, too. For every patient she managed to track down, she followed other trails that ran cold. Families who’d filed lawsuits were reluctant to talk; others were lacking complete medical records. The allegedly contaminated sevoflurane in Carabobo, Yaremy learned, had been widely discussed among doctors at the time, but news coverage of the events 20 years ago had disappeared from the internet as a result of the regime’s media crackdowns and poor digital recordkeeping. She managed to get hold of one newspaper article—a printout saved by the mother picking up Botox in Caracas. But she was not able to find any other families whose children had died or become disabled in Carabobo.

A haunting pattern appeared in the cases she was able to pull together. All seven patients in the study had received sevoflurane. Most of them could trace their maternal relatives to Carabobo; Yaremy’s own maternal grandmother was from the state. And all seven had the same T-to-C mutation. This mutation is extremely rare, even in Venezuela, but it is an estimated 15 times more prevalent in Carabobo, where it is believed to have originated many, many generations ago. The Spanish researchers hypothesized that this old mutation had taken on new, potentially fatal importance in the era of modern anesthesia.

General anesthesia today is usually achieved through a cocktail of drugs, both inhaled and intravenous. Of these, sevoflurane is one of the most popular, particularly for children. It is easy to administer, quick to work, and not irritating to the airways. But sevoflurane seemed to behave differently—and dangerously—in the presence of the T-to-C mutation.

To prove this, the Spanish researchers would need to collect cells with the mutation and subject them to sevoflurane in a lab. Yaremy volunteered her own. In the fall of 2024, she found a colleague to draw her blood and a lab to biopsy a ribbon of her skin. Her cells soon made it to Spain, where the team got to work.

As the lab experiments were ongoing last summer, tragic news came out of Chile. Five children there had suffered terrible outcomes after routine anesthesia; four were dead, according to an alert from the Chilean Society of Anesthesiology. All five children were Venezuelan.

The news spread within the Venezuelan diaspora. In the past decade, more than half a million Venezuelans have moved to Chile, where they have not always found themselves welcome. Now some of the parents alleged that poor medical care and discrimination had killed their children. They filed lawsuits and demanded justice on social media. In videos the parents shared of their children on Instagram and on TV, they are all bouncy and bright: a 4-year-old girl swinging in gymnastics class, a 2-year-old boy in a Messi jersey kicking a soccer ball.

Chilean investigators were able to collect genetic samples from only three cases—out of what had grown to a total of seven in the country—but all three patients had the same T-to-C mutation. One of the children who died in Chile, Yaremy later learned, was the cousin of a patient in her study. As word of the mutation spread around the world, doctors started reporting cases in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Peru, and Guyana.

“I suffered with each kid, each mother,” Yaremy told me. Even when a child survived, she saw ahead to their “lifetime of complications.” She often thinks about the boy with the cleft lip from her study, who, abandoned by his mother, lives in a poor village in Venezuela with his grandmother. His family can’t afford Botox or other treatments. In videos she has seen, his muscles are always clenched, his limbs unusable.

Back in Spain, the researchers raced to finish the experiments. They ultimately found that cells carrying the mutation were indeed hypersensitive to sevoflurane. This mutation could explain why Uli—and Matías and all the other children—had stayed unconscious for so long after surgery. The study, with Yaremy as a co-author, was the cover story of the June 2026 issue of Anesthesiology, the official journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Accompanying it was an editorial written by two physician-scientists in the U.S., Richard Levy, at Stanford, and Philip Morgan, at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

I had first spoken with Levy a few months earlier, after the ASA issued an alert—following up on the one in Chile—about terrible complications from anesthesia, primarily sevoflurane, in people with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. In our conversation, I asked what seemed like a basic question: How does sevoflurane work? “If you can figure that out, you have a Nobel Prize,” Levy told me. “The reality is, we don’t know.” We don’t know how any inhaled anesthetics work. But this novel mutation out of Venezuela, he and Morgan thought, might hold a clue.

Anesthesia likely taps into something evolutionarily ancient in the body. A one-cell protozoan, a Venus flytrap, and a human are all susceptible to anesthesia—and two of those things don’t even have a brain.

For most of the 20th century, scientists clung to the idea that these drugs perturb the fatty membrane of living cells—a hypothesis based on how the gases behave in olive oil. But by the 1980s, a new dogma began to take hold: Anesthetics bind to proteins on the surface of brain cells, which interrupts their signaling. This is best understood in a drug called propofol, which is a common anesthetic but not an inhaled one; the milky-white liquid is delivered via IV. In an elegant set of experiments in the 2000s, scientists identified propofol’s primary target as a protein called the GABA receptor. Yet the same experiment, when repeated with a common inhaled anesthetic, failed to find an analogous target. Decades later, it remains elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist.

Today, the general consensus regarding the mechanism of inhaled anesthesia is that the gases bind weakly to many proteins in the brain, which together add up to complete loss of consciousness. Most practicing anesthesiologists don’t think much about this. Sevoflurane works. The proof is in the operating room every day. What more do you need?

But a group of researchers dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on proteins, including Levy and Morgan, has been slowly building the case for an alternative hypothesis: Actually, it’s the mitochondria.

When these researchers heard about children with a mitochondrial mutation dying from anesthesia, they immediately saw the implications. Scientists have long relied on rare mutations to probe the mysteries of biology. In another Venezuelan state called Zulia, for example, families with a shared mutation for Huntington’s disease have been crucial to our understanding of the condition. Rare mutations are a kind of natural experiment.

Morgan, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Margaret Sedensky, had once run lab experiments looking for mutations that altered sensitivity to anesthesia—though only in a tiny, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. When they induced random mutations in the worm, they found that the relevant ones were clustered in the mitochondria. Their findings didn’t make much of an impact among their fellow anesthesiologists, though. “We’re like the comic relief at our big national meeting of 15,000 anesthesiologists,” Sedensky told me. “ ‘Here come the worm doctors.’ ”

But Morgan and Sedensky kept working out the details of their theory. Inhaled anesthetics such as sevoflurane, they now argue, work by inhibiting the mitochondria, inducing a kind of temporary brownout in the brain. The bubbles used to transport brain chemicals become frozen in place, like cars that have run out of gas. They restart as soon as anesthesia is discontinued. But in some hypersensitive patients, the mitochondria could become so impaired that their brain cells die. Morgan had found some of these hypersensitive patients before, but he believes Uli’s mutation could help pinpoint more precisely how anesthesia works on mitochondria. This past summer, cells with the mutation—derived from Yaremy’s blood sample—arrived in the couple’s lab in Seattle.

Understanding how anesthesia works, Levy told me, could enable scientists to design better drugs that precisely target the brain, without lingering side effects. Though modern anesthesia drugs are generally quite safe, they are imperfect. They affect the cardiovascular system; they affect ostensibly unrelated areas of the brain, such as the region that controls nausea. And they have been linked to cognitive decline in the elderly after surgery—though the degree to which the drugs are responsible, as opposed to other factors such as the physical effects of surgery, is still being debated. How much of that can be avoided?

Before her study was published, Yaremy had someone she needed to call: Ludwig Düthorn, Uli’s anesthesiologist after the snowboarding accident. She had not seen Düthorn since testifying against him at the malpractice trial years earlier. She’d lost the suit; legally, he had already been absolved. Personally, she felt she had to apologize.

Düthorn was gratified to know what Yaremy had found, but even now, he told me, he feels a doubt gnawing at him in the operating room. Uli had a silent and novel mutation in his DNA. Could his next 14-year-old patient have a different one?

Cases like Uli’s unsettle everyone they touch. In the 2000s, Rafael Legórburu, then an anesthesiologist in Caracas, treated a young boy who would not wake up after sevoflurane—a case he now suspects was connected to this mutation. The boy suffered profound brain damage. Legórburu still finds it difficult to talk about 20 years later. “I have a scar,” he told me, “for the rest of my life.” Today he lives in Spain, where he practices aesthetic medicine, administering Botox and fillers; he says he’ll never touch sevoflurane again.

Doctors are now revisiting a number of old malpractice cases—some of which resulted in large settlements—that might be explained by the T-to-C mutation. An anesthesiologist whose hospital had settled one such case involving their patient told me they felt relieved, and vindicated. (They spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the hospital to speak publicly.) At the same time, they could not entirely shake their sense of responsibility. “It was the worst experience of my life,” they kept telling me.

A group of Venezuelan anesthesiologists—largely based in the U.S.—recently formed the Venezuelan Anesthesia Perioperative Risk society, or VAPOR, to raise awareness of the mutation among health-care workers, and to promote guidelines for screening and treating patients with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. A quarter of Venezuela’s population—8 million people—has left the country in recent years, meaning the mutation is scattered more widely than ever. Yet within Venezuela, no lab is testing for it, and anesthesiologists do not routinely have access to the specialized equipment needed to administer anesthesia without inhaled gases.

Yaremy is working with scientists to continue studying the mutation, about which many questions remain: Do other anesthetic drugs, inhaled or administered via IV, pose a danger? Are children more vulnerable, or have we simply not looked hard enough yet in adults? The oldest known patient to be affected was 31 years old.

In her own life, Yaremy has finally found a measure of stability. She and Uli live in Radolfzell, a bucolic lakeside town in southern Germany, where she works at the cardiac-rehab hospital. It’s calmer than the ICUs where she’s worked in the past. “B-O-R-I-N-G,” Uli joked, tapping out the letters in English. But the calm is welcome after years of upheaval. Uli has his own apartment and a rotating cast of full-time assistants; he works as a translator for medical records. (He is fluent in English, Spanish, and German.) He is a doting uncle to his niece and nephew, the children of his younger sibling, Levi.

The mutation still lurks in their lives. Both times after giving birth, Levi, who uses they/them pronouns, developed an infection in the uterus and needed surgery. Yaremy made sure that they did not get sevoflurane. But what about Levi’s kids, who also have the mutation? What if they’re rushed into emergency surgery on their own? Levi had closely followed the news of the children who died in Chile. “They could have been my kids,” Levi remarked as we parted ways after a family lunch by the lake. The water was a brilliant clear blue that day; so was the sky.

A few days after I left Germany, Yaremy learned about a new suspected case: a 12-year-old boy who’d had trouble waking up after surgery in Caracas. “How can this still be happening?” Uli wrote to me. “I mean what the ****!?”

Joana, Freddy Marquez’s mom, first caught wind of the suspected mutation in the summer of 2025, when she heard on social media about the children who’d died in Chile. She, too, is originally from Venezuela. And she made the connection instantly. Months earlier, when Freddy had been hospitalized, his doctors had ordered a genetic test that turned up a variant of unknown significance. Freddy had the m.11232T>C mutation as well. This information never made it into his chart for the same reason Uli’s mutation wasn’t initially taken seriously: No one understood its importance at the time.

Joana began commenting about Freddy on every related post she could find. One by one, she linked up with others who told similar stories: another mother in Florida, the family of a girl who died in Houston, Yaremy’s cousin Mafer in Austin, and so on. Joana got added to a WhatsApp group for the parents in Chile, which has since evolved into a de facto global support group for parents of children with this rare mutation. Through the group, Joana also learned of Yaremy. They spoke for the first time in February, and recognized in each other a maternal instinct that is both steely and tender. “She was in tears,” Joana told me, “and I was in tears.”

In February, Joana appeared on Instagram Live in a zebra-print shirt to talk about Freddy, alongside other affected mothers. The zebra print was a reference to the old medical adage “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”—meaning: think of the common explanation, not the exotic one. But sometimes, it is zebras. Freddy died because what happened to him lay just outside medical knowledge. His particular mutation is rare, but encounters with the unknown in medicine are not. Joana was asking for some humility, some openness to the possibility of zebras. Since Freddy’s death, she has made advocating for people with rare mitochondrial conditions her life’s mission.

Joana can still picture him: swimming, playing basketball, riding “like crazy” on his bike as Gordito, his Alaskan malamute, raced alongside him. “His flipping dog is now chasing me wherever I go,” she said. And Joana continues to propel herself forward. She’s cold-calling researchers. She’s going to medical conferences. She’s offering up her own cells to study. She is keeping the promise she made to Freddy before he died.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Going Under.”

Updated at 5:40 p.m. ET on October 5, 2026

Hours after the United States snatched Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro from Caracas in a Special Forces operation, Marco Rubio strode into the side chapel of Saint Augustine Catholic Parish in Miami surrounded by a phalanx of Secret Service agents. Sunday-evening Mass had just begun when the priest saw Rubio enter. The rest of the congregants saw him too. Their heads turned in unison. The city’s favorite son had helped oust a longtime Miami nemesis, and now their hero was among them.

Toward the end of the service, the pastor, Richard Vigoa, walked to Rubio’s seat and administered Communion to the secretary of state, according to several church members who described the scene. The parishioners stood and applauded. Vigoa and Rubio are both Cuban American, as is the overwhelming majority of Saint Augustine. Implicit in the congregation’s euphoria was an expectation: Cuba was next. After 65 years of waiting, Miami’s Cuban exiles believed that the Trump administration—with Rubio at its center—was poised to overthrow the socialist government. “There was this feeling that ‘finally, it’s our moment,’” Nicolás J. Gutiérrez Jr., one of the congregants, told me.

That was nine months ago. Since then, those sky-high expectations among South Florida Cubans have given way to repeated disappointments. U.S. negotiations with Raúl Castro’s grandson appear to have stalled. Talk of a Venezuela-style strike in Havana has dissipated as the military remains mired in Iran. Rubio’s tone toward Cuba, meanwhile, has softened—leaving people here worried that they’ll be let down yet again.

Older Cuban exiles still remember the anguish of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion. Younger ones recall the false hope attached to Fidel Castro’s death and the false start of President Obama’s reconciliation effort. Now Miami finally has a secretary of state whom it trusts to act in Cuba. But even Rubio seems unable to deliver on the community’s singular demand.

In Miami, the intricacies of geopolitics can feel very local. The congregants of Saint Augustine still see Rubio most Sunday evenings. Gutiérrez’s wife walks by him with the church collection plate, but it’s an inopportune moment to ask about U.S. foreign policy, she has decided. Like other Miami Cubans, her family has sought out intermediaries. The exiles are searching for insights into the secretary’s planning—and they want to make sure he knows what they’re thinking. One man told me that he had been working through a dentist who gives Rubio’s son helicopter lessons. Another boasted that his daughter had gone to prom with Rubio’s son. Gutiérrez has been emailing a contact at the State Department whom he knows has seen his messages. When I visited him at his home in Coral Gables, he pulled out his phone to show me the proof. “Look—it says, ‘Received. Thanks,’” he said, pointing to the email.

Everyone has their own reasons for wanting to gain Rubio’s ear. Gutiérrez has become one of the leading crusaders for Cuban exiles seeking restitution for their family properties in Cuba. He said his own family had lost 100,000 acres when the Castro regime redistributed and nationalized private property across the island. Gutiérrez is now working with more than 1,000 families in similar circumstances. He wants Rubio’s support in that quest.

Others in Miami have urged the secretary to prioritize the estimated 1,300 political prisoners still jailed in Cuba. Some have ideas about how the economy could be liberalized, or who should run the country, or how to rebuild the electrical grid. They have invited him to conferences and cocktail parties and fundraisers, but he has rarely shown. They’ve been left to decipher Rubio’s public account of what the U.S. has in mind for Cuba.

Immediately after the Maduro raid, Rubio seemed to hint at a looming military operation: “If I lived in Havana, and I was in the government, I’d be concerned—at least a little bit,” he said on January 3 at a Mar-a-Lago news conference. President Trump began talking approvingly about the “Donroe Doctrine” and all of the ways in which his administration would dominate the Western Hemisphere. Rubio, operating as national security adviser as well as secretary of state, seemed perfectly positioned to steer the U.S. away from distant conflicts and back to subduing adversaries in its own backyard.

But then Trump decided to go to war with Iran. As the U.S. again focused on the Middle East—and as the old Venezuelan regime maintained its hold on power, only without Maduro—Rubio seemed to grow more cautious about an intervention in Cuba. At the United Nations General Assembly last week, he struck his most restrained note yet: “Cuba has a golden opportunity to place itself on an irreversible path towards a better future. And we are prepared to be helpful in that regard if they are open to it.”

The group chats and email threads of Miami lit up. Was Rubio preparing the city’s Cubans for another era of disappointment?

The Sixto brothers, Juan and Rafael, stood on the patio of a Miami mansion. A crowd of Cuban American entrepreneurs was arrayed in front of them. Biscayne Bay glittered behind. Rubio had been invited, but so far, he hadn’t shown up. “This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” Rafael said in a speech to the crowd. “We need detailed solutions. We need a plan of action.”

The brothers and their colleagues had formed the Cuban-American National Chamber of Commerce in the days after the Maduro operation, when it seemed almost certain that regime change was coming for Cuba. They formed 14 committees. They strategized about a future Cuban stock exchange. One of their members flew to Cuba to inspect the country’s oil terminals and report back about future energy investments. It’s possible they were getting a little ahead of themselves.

There are about 1 million Cubans and Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County, more than a third of its total population. Some arrived just as Castro seized power, in 1959. Others came with the Mariel Boatlift, in 1980, or on small rafts in the mid-1990s. Another wave arrived from 2021 to 2024, as the island’s humanitarian crisis intensified during an economic collapse. Among them were spies dispatched by the Castro regime, as well as anti-Communist militants stockpiling weapons. But mainly, they were an ever-growing mass of exiles praying for the moment when the existing order would unravel in Havana. “Florida is that part of the Cuban stage where declamatory exits are made, and side deals,” Joan Didion wrote in 1987. “Florida is where the chorus waits to comment on the action, and sometimes to join it.”

The exiles have long resisted any attempts by the U.S. government to make nice with the regime. The majority of Miami’s Cuban exiles say they will invest in Cuba only when the Communists are gone. An April Miami Herald poll found that more than half of Cuban and Cuban American respondents in Florida disapproved of the Trump administration’s negotiations with the socialist government. Yet Rubio, it appeared, was supporting talks, seeking an arrangement like the one he had brokered with Delcy Rodríguez in Venezuela, which prioritized economic reforms over a political transition. “South Florida’s Cubans Made Their Wishes Clear and That Must Weigh Heavily on Rubio” was the headline the Herald ran above an editorial about the polling results.

[Read: Cuba’s old economic model is ‘exhausted’]

When the Sixtos’ speeches were over, small groups chatted by the pool. One man came up to Rafael. It was clear that the Trump administration’s momentum on Cuba was slowing, he said. For so many decades, exiles in Miami had prepared for Cuba’s future—building legal frameworks and conducting feasibility studies. Now things appeared to be stalled, again.

“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked Rafael.

“We need a contingency plan!” Rafael said, his own language suggesting diminished expectations. “We need to be ready.”

Rubio’s parents migrated to Miami from Cuba in 1956, before Castro seized power. From the beginning of his political career, he described himself as the son of exiles, even though his family hadn’t been subject to the same political repression as those who left after Castro’s rise. It was a part of the story he told throughout his political ascent—from the first Cuban American speaker of the Florida House of Representatives to the first Cuban American secretary of state.

The group that gathered at the Miami mansion did not want to believe that Rubio, steeped in the politics of el exilio, would accommodate the Castros. Maybe, people told me, he was angling for a secret deal that would lead to the expulsion of the entire regime. Maybe—maybe!—they would tolerate a short political transition, if Rubio promised it would mark the end of communism.

“I don’t trust Trump on Cuba,” one man told me at the party. “But Marco Rubio is our savior.”

By 8 p.m., Rubio still hadn’t shown up. On the printed agenda for the night, there was mention of an unnamed special guest, which excited some of the invitees. Could it be the secretary? Or someone else from the administration who could offer clarity? But when it came time to introduce that cameo, the owner of the mansion, Dr. Jorge Suárez-Menéndez, had disappointing news.

“I’d like to introduce my friend Mary Flynn,” he said. The special guest was the sister of Mike Flynn, Trump’s onetime national security adviser and a leading purveyor of right-wing conspiracy theories. She had little to say about Cuba but shared thoughts about the Democrats and child trafficking. Dinner was served. People gave up on the long-shot possibility that Rubio would appear. Juan Sixto pulled me aside next to the pool. “Rubio supports us,” he told me. “If he was in Miami, he would have been here.”

The consensus was that Rubio was trying his best during an impossible time. Trump had chosen war in Iran over regime change in Cuba, people said. That wasn’t Marco’s fault. (Many people at the party referred to him by his first name, whether they knew him or not.) Two men in their 80s walked by me and Juan as we spoke. Both had been prisoners during the early days of the Castro regime. They had built successful businesses in Miami but still toasted to “next year in Havana” at meetings. “We’re going to move all the money from here to the island,” Juan said. “This is the only group that can do it.”

When the cocktail party ended, the guests trickling past the Roman-style fountains in the front yard, I drove west from the mansion toward Hialeah. I passed storefronts that have popped up across the city catering to Cubans looking to send supplies to the island—Envios a Cuba and Todo para Cuba. The best sellers are basic food items and battery packs—signs of how extreme Cuba’s humanitarian crisis has become. The World Food Programme has reported an increase in people going hungry. A 12-by-12-inch box of supplies costs $29 to send from Miami.

The U.S. this year increased sanctions on Cuba and on foreign companies doing business with the regime, an economic vise intended to weaken the government but that Cuban officials say restricts the flow of food and medicine. Roughly 2 million Cubans have left since 2020—about a fifth of the island’s population. Many of them have landed in South Florida, a generation of exiles, most of whom are poor and without permanent legal status. Most still have immediate relatives in Cuba, and they scrape together the money to send boxes of basics to those who could not leave.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

Rubio has spoken publicly about the immense human suffering on the island. “The truth is Cuba has already fallen,” he told Fox News’s Sean Hannity last Monday. But a humanitarian crisis did not mean the regime had collapsed or was on the verge of collapse. Remittances and aid from Miami had helped Cubans eke by, and the regime had eked by too.

With U.S. aircraft carriers and warplanes tied up in the Middle East, there are limited resources available for a Venezuelan-style operation in Havana. Even if the Trump administration wanted to pursue a military option in Cuba, it’s unclear whom its target would be and what a succession plan would look like. On the diplomatic front, too, little seems to be happening. Miami’s exiles have followed the U.S. negotiation with Raúl Castro’s grandson, also named Raúl, with caution. But those talks stalled after the U.S. demanded that the current president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, step down. The result is stasis. Even those in Miami who have spent their days angling to contact Rubio have had to admit: The secretary of state doesn’t seem to have a secret backup plan. “I don’t think that he bears the position of power to make the final decision,” Rosa María Payá, a leading member of the Cuban opposition who says she has discussed Cuba policy with Rubio, told me.

Payá’s father, Oswaldo, had once been considered the most prominent democratic challenger to the Castro regime, before he died in a car crash in Cuba in 2012. An independent investigation later determined that the regime had killed him. Afterward, Rosa María moved to Miami for her own safety, joining the exile community. She observed that those exiles “never really disconnected” from the island. They had waited—and waited—for some combination of U.S. action and domestic conditions to break the regime.

It now appears they have longer to wait. But this is a place that is used to waiting. Along with the disappointment that the Trump administration hasn’t yet acted is a growing sense of inevitability—that the situation in Havana is unsustainable, that regime change is a foregone conclusion. And above all, there’s the belief that Miami’s man in Washington still has a long career ahead of him.

This article originally said Marco Rubio attended Mass at Saint Augustine Catholic Parish on a Saturday evening and that parishioners see him most Sunday mornings. In fact, Rubio attended on a Sunday evening, which is when he typically attends.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas fighters launched a surprise attack on Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing more than 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. The attack was the worst disaster in the history of the Jewish state. Three years later, it’s clear that it was an even greater disaster for Palestinians. Determined to punish Hamas and prevent future attacks, Israel responded with a devastating invasion of Gaza that killed more than 70,000 people; it estimates at least 22,000 were combatants. Today, 2 million Palestinians, 80 percent of the population of Gaza, have been displaced from their homes.

But if Hamas was defeated militarily, it largely succeeded in its goal of swinging Western public opinion against Israel. The spectacle of Israeli powerlessness followed by the violent display of Israeli power profoundly changed the way the Jewish state is seen and discussed. Perhaps the best way to gauge that change is to look at the transformation of the word Zionist.

Zionism was coined in the 1890s to name the organized political movement to create a Jewish state. After that goal was achieved with the establishment of the State of Israel, in 1948, the label continued to be claimed by people who took pride in its existence and wanted it to survive and thrive. This included most American Jews, but not only them. Two weeks after the Hamas attack, President Joe Biden visited Tel Aviv and declared, “I don’t believe you have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and I am a Zionist.”

It’s unlikely that those words will be heard again from an American president, of either party. To understand why, all you have to do is type the word Zionist into the search bar of any social-media platform, and review the rancid results.

The border between the internet and real life has become alarmingly porous. In May, Maureen Galindo, a candidate in the Democratic primary for a House seat in Texas, posted that if elected, she would turn an ICE detention center into “a prison for American Zionists,” where “most of them” would be castrated for being pedophiles. The notion that Zionism is a perversion or sickness is shared by extremists of many stripes. The far-left pundit Hasan Piker has called it “a mental illness,” and the far-right pundit Tucker Carlson has said that Christian supporters of Zionism are victims of a “brain virus.” The same ecumenism can be seen in the career of the term Zio: Originally popularized as an anti-Semitic slur by far-right white supremacists such as David Duke, it is now casually used by anti-Zionist Jews such as the actor Odessa A’Zion, whose now-problematic name compelled her to clarify on social media that she is “not a zio!”

[Adam Louis-Klein: The left-wing case against anti-Zionism]

The belief that Israel should continue to exist, which is what most people who call themselves Zionists mean by that word, does not seem to entail Nazism, insanity, or a taste for political conspiracy or sexual perversion. But the goal of this rhetoric, and the more genteel equivalents used in parts of academia and the culture industry, is not to provide an accurate definition; it is to make the word Zionist so toxic that people will be afraid to claim it.

And Jews have gotten the message. Last year, the Jewish Federations of North America conducted a public-opinion survey on “Jewish Life Since October 7th.” It found that 88 percent of American and Canadian Jews “believe Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state,” but that only 37 percent were willing to call themselves Zionists. Yet it’s clear that most Jews are not opponents of Zionism—only 7 percent of respondents called themselves anti-Zionists. Their problem is not with the idea of Zionism, but with the term itself.

Ironically, nothing would have suited the founders of Zionism better than for the world to stop talking about it. Their aim was to create not an ism, but a country; once that was achieved, the ism could be discarded, like scaffolding from a completed building. Anshel Pfeffer, a prominent left-wing Israeli journalist, has written that “Zionism ended on May 14, 1948,” the day the State of Israel was created. Today, Israel is not an idea but a real place, complete with shopping malls and sports teams and commuter trains, where 10 million people, three-quarters of them Jewish, live mostly ordinary lives. In this sense, hating Zionism in 2026 is a category error—like railing against the idea of American independence a century after the Revolution.

When people say they hate Zionism, Pfeffer argues, what they really mean is that they hate the conduct of the state Zionism created: “‘I no longer believe in Zionism’ seems to have become just another way of saying ‘I’m thoroughly pissed-off by the policies of successive Israeli governments.’” And there is no doubt that the collapsing reputation of Zionism has been driven by outrage at the Netanyahu government’s conduct of the war in Gaza. The most illuminating part of the Federations survey asked respondents how they define Zionism. A popular answer among those who call themselves non- and anti-Zionist was “supporting whatever actions Israel takes.”

If that definition were accurate, even the president of Israel couldn’t be considered a Zionist. In a speech in May, Isaac Herzog fiercely denounced Israelis who commit violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, saying that ultrareligious settlers “defile our home and depart from every basic norm—moral, legal or Jewish.” But then, the language of American anti-Zionism can’t be understood simply as criticism of Israeli actions. There is something deeper at stake when a politician calls for Zionists to be castrated, or when the group Jewish Voice for Peace associates its opposition to Zionism with the struggle against “white supremacy, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, colonialism, militarism, and capitalism.”

No nation is without enmities and rivalries, yet somehow no Ukrainian has ever bombed a Russian Orthodox Church in the U.S., the way a Lebanese émigré drove a truck full of gasoline and explosives into a synagogue in Michigan in March. No sympathizer with Tibet or Taiwan has ever murdered people at a China-sponsored event in the U.S., the way an American killed two Israeli-embassy workers at a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in 2025.

To inspire this kind of hatred, the policies of a foreign government are insufficient. It requires an idea—an evil principle that must be eliminated for the good of humanity. The word anti-Semitism is now used to condemn prejudice against Jews, but it was invented in Germany, in the late 19th century, as the name of a proud political movement. Members of anti-Semitic parties wanted to distinguish themselves from old-fashioned Jew-haters; their target wasn’t religion but “Semitism,” which sounds like the name of an idea. If defeating “Semitism” meant exiling or killing the millions of Jews who lived in Europe, so be it; the disease was so bad that any cure was justified. Today, anti-Zionism follows a similar logic. Opposition to an ism cloaks a desire to exile or kill the millions of Jews living in Israel, and to punish Jews in other countries who object to this prospect.

So there is a dreadful inevitability about the way anti-Zionism has rediscovered the ancient themes of Jew-hatred. One example can stand for many: In January, an X account called “illuminatibot,” which has 2.4 million followers, posted that “Zionist tunnels were discovered under synagogues in NYC. Stained mattresses and baby high chairs were found inside.” The word Zionist here has no connection to Israel or to political ideology. It is simply a placeholder for evil, and the suggestion that Jews are doing unspeakable things to children in synagogues would have been perfectly familiar in 14th-century Europe.

In this sense, the persistence of the term Zionism in 2026 is the clearest sign of the failure of Zionism itself. For Zionism believed that creating a Jewish state would demythologize and detoxify Jewishness, making the Jews a “normal” people. Theodor Herzl, the founder of the Zionist movement, wrote that “the Jews, once settled in their own State, would probably have no more enemies.” To understand why that prediction turned out to be so wrong—to judge what Zionism accomplished and what it failed to accomplish—you have to go back to the beginning of the story.

Before Zion was an ism, it was a place—a hilltop fort conquered by King David in his campaign against the Jebusites, a Canaanite tribe. According to the second book of Samuel, it was on the site of this stronghold that David founded his new capital, Jerusalem, importing carpenters and stonemasons from Lebanon to build himself a royal palace. The king changed the name of the hill to City of David, but the original name wasn’t forgotten—there’s a Mount Zion in Jerusalem today, though it’s probably not the same one the Bible talks about. More broadly, Zion became a synecdoche for Jerusalem and, by extension, for the whole kingdom ruled by David and his successors.

Even in biblical times, Zion was more often ruled by foreign empires than by the Israelites. The land of Israel was conquered by Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, with interludes of Jewish self-rule. Still, it remained the home of most of the world’s Jews until 66 C.E., when a radical faction in Jerusalem rebelled against the Roman empire and launched a war for national independence; it minted coins with the inscription “For the Freedom of Zion.” After several years, the Romans crushed the rebellion, and in the course of the fighting, the Temple in Jerusalem—the center of Jewish worship—was burned to the ground.

Until the Holocaust, this was the worst catastrophe in Jewish history. The historian Josephus, who fought in the rebellion as a general in the Jewish army, wrote that more than a million Jews were killed, many by starvation, during the Roman siege of Jerusalem. After a second failed uprising in the 130s C.E., the Romans set out to destroy what remained of Jewish society. To signal this policy, the emperor Hadrian changed the name of the province from Judea to Syria Palaestina, after the people known in the Bible as the Philistines. This is the origin of the name Palestine, which the land bore for the next 1,800 years under the rule of successive empires—Byzantine, Arab, Turkish, British.

By the Middle Ages, most Jews lived in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, and only a small number remained in the biblical land of Israel. Yet Zion continued to play a central role in the Jewish imagination. Over the centuries, Judaism developed a complex theology and mysticism of exile, seeing the loss of the Jewish homeland as a punishment inflicted by God. It followed that only God could decide when the exile would end. Mainstream Jewish tradition specifically prohibited settling in large numbers in the land of Israel, though individuals could live there—and through the centuries, despite the obstacles, a determined few returned.

Jews instead imagined the return to Zion as a sudden, supernatural event, which would take place when God sent the Messiah to redeem the world. Like the Second Coming for Christians, Jews believed this was certain to happen eventually, but it was impossible to know when, much less to bring it about through human action. All they could do was pray, and the Jewish prayer service is threaded with petitions for an end to exile. Three times a day for almost 2,000 years, Jews have asked God, “May our eyes behold your merciful return to Zion.”

Today Jerusalem is once again the capital of a Jewish country, and some 600,000 Jews live in the city, alongside nearly 400,000 Muslims (and 15,000 Christians). Yet observant Jews around the world still recite the prayers asking for an end to exile. This paradox points to the most important fact about Zionism: It fulfilled the ancient hope of return, but not in the way Jews had always dreamed of, by a miraculous redemption. Instead, it used politics and diplomacy to create a secular state.

The word Zionism encodes this mismatch—a biblical name joined to a modern ideological suffix. It was a product of 19th-century Europe, the birthplace of so many isms—liberalism, nationalism, socialism, communism. In fact, most of the early theorists of Zionism came to it after being disillusioned with one of these other ideologies, which kept failing to solve the problem that concerned them most personally: the persistence of Jew-hatred.

[Read: Understanding Zionism]

The first thinker to follow this trajectory was Moses Hess, a German philosopher who started his career as a collaborator of Karl Marx’s and spent decades agitating for a socialist revolution. Then, in 1862, he changed course and wrote a book called Rome and Jerusalem, which anticipated Zionism by considering Jews not as followers of a religion, but as members of a nation. “The Jewish religion,” he wrote, “is, above all, Jewish patriotism.”

This way of thinking broke with traditional Judaism, which defined the Jewish people by its relationship with God. But it was also a sharp rebuke of modern Jews who hoped to assimilate into European society. After the French Revolution, many countries in Western and Central Europe “emancipated” the Jews, removing old legal barriers that made them second-class citizens. But Hess observed that legal equality had not led to true belonging: “In spite of the degree of education to which the Occidental Jews have attained, there still exists a barrier between them and the surrounding nations, almost as formidable as in the days of religious fanaticism.” Rather than trying in vain to become German or French, Hess argued, Jews should recognize that they constituted a nation of their own, and work for “national regeneration.”

Rome and Jerusalem didn’t reach a large audience at first, but other thinkers kept finding their way to similar conclusions. Leon Pinsker, a doctor from Poland, grew up in the mid-19th century trusting that Jews would one day be accepted in Russian society; he learned to speak Russian, was one of the first Jews to attend a Russian university, and edited a Russian-language Jewish magazine. But late in life he could see that his hopes had been disappointed, and in 1882 he published a pamphlet titled Auto-Emancipation, arguing that it was time for Jews to take charge of their own fate.

Why was it, Pinsker asked, that hostility toward Jews was so enduring and took so many different forms? “To the living the Jew is a corpse, to the native a foreigner, to the homesteader a vagrant, to the property owner a beggar, to the poor an exploiter and a millionaire, to the patriot a man without a country, for all a hated rival.” The reason, he argued, was that the Jews had lost their nationhood. Exiled from their ancient homeland, they were doomed to wander the Earth like ghosts without a body. The only way the Jews could rescue themselves, physically and spiritually, was by leaving Europe to settle in “a land of our own.”

Initially, Pinsker didn’t believe that this land had to be the biblical land of Israel. But around this time, a number of groups calling themselves “Lovers of Zion” started to organize for emigration from Eastern Europe to Palestine, which was then part of the Ottoman empire, and in 1884 Pinsker led a conference to unite them into a movement. These groups were tiny: One of the first was made up of 14 university students from Kharkiv, who helped establish an agricultural settlement called Rishon LeZion, Hebrew for “First to Zion.” Today it is one of the largest cities in Israel, with a population of about 250,000.

The most consequential Zionist awakening took place in 1895 in Paris, where Theodor Herzl was working as a foreign correspondent for the Neue Freie Presse, Vienna’s leading newspaper. Herzl was a shining example of what Jewish emancipation was supposed to achieve. He was a successful journalist and playwright who spoke German rather than Yiddish, the language of the Eastern European Jewish masses. In fact, Herzl knew almost nothing about Judaism. Yet for his whole adult life, he wrote in his diary, “the Jewish Question grieved me bitterly.” If full assimilation couldn’t stop Jews from being excluded, hated, and attacked, what could?

Herzl came up with a staggeringly ambitious new answer. In his pamphlet The Jewish State, he called for the mass emigration of European Jews to Palestine—and, unlike earlier writers, he set out a plan for how it could be done. Jews would sell their property in Europe and use the proceeds to buy land in Palestine, working collectively through a new political body, the Society of Jews, and a new economic organization, the Jewish Company. The task was immense, but Herzl insisted that it was not impossible. He estimated that transferring the bulk of European Jewry, millions of people, would require an initial investment of $200 million (the equivalent of almost $8 billion today) and take about 20 years.

Herzl wasn’t the first person to entertain such a vision. The reason he’s remembered as the founder of Zionism is that he created institutions to make it a reality. In August 1897, he convened the first Zionist Congress, in Basel, Switzerland, where more than 200 delegates from 17 countries founded the Zionist Organization, a real-world version of Herzl’s Society of Jews. Zionism was now not just an idea but a movement, with leaders, a program, and the stature to negotiate with governments.

A skeptic would not have found the congress very impressive—just a collection of self-appointed activists who met for three days to make speeches. But after it was over, Herzl wrote in his diary: “Were I to sum up the Basel Congress in a word—which I shall guard against pronouncing publicly—it would be this: At Basel I founded the Jewish State. If I said this out loud today I would be greeted by universal laughter. In five years perhaps, and certainly in fifty years, everyone will perceive it.”

Fifty years and eight months later, on May 14, 1948, the State of Israel declared independence. Herzl didn’t live to see his prophecy vindicated: He died of heart disease in 1904, at the age of 44, and was buried in Vienna. In 1949, his remains were taken to Jerusalem, where they were interred in the new country’s national cemetery, on Mount Herzl.

Herzl may have been right about the timing, but the process of creating a Jewish state turned out to be completely different than he imagined. Radical movements generally underestimate the obstacles they face; it’s hard to be a realist and a revolutionary at the same time. As soon as Zionism evolved from an idea to a practical enterprise, most of the early theorists’ assumptions proved to be wrong.

The first mistake was to underestimate the difficulty of nation building. Zionism quickly became popular among Eastern European Jews, by offering a vision of dignity and renewal to an oppressed people. But attending Zionist meetings in Poland or Ukraine was far more appealing than actually packing up and moving to Palestine, a poor and remote place that few European Jews knew anything about. From 1881 to 1914, when the First World War cut off emigration, roughly 2 million Jews moved from Eastern Europe to America; only about 70,000 went to Palestine, and many of them left after discovering how difficult life was there.

The ones who stayed tended to be young and ideologically committed, and professed a combination of Zionist and socialist beliefs. This cohort included many of the future founders of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister, who emigrated from Poland to Palestine in 1906, at the age of 19. These Jews didn’t want to continue the European way of life at a different address, the way Herzl imagined. They wanted to create a new civilization, with its own language—a revived and modernized Hebrew—and an economy based on labor unions and collective farms.

This agenda brought them into direct conflict with Jewish religious authorities. Most traditional rabbis vehemently opposed Zionism, seeing it as a secular movement that led Jews away from God. They considered the very idea of settling the land of Israel before the coming of the Messiah to be heretical. For their part, many Zionists blamed religion for Jewish weakness and passivity. Others simply saw it as a relic, irrelevant in a modern society. When Herzl designed a flag for the prospective Jewish state, it included no Jewish symbols—just seven gold stars on a white background, representing the new country’s progressive seven-hour workday.

But with religion too, Zionism underestimated the complexity of the task it had set for itself. It reconceived Jewishness as a political identity, rather than a religious one, but how could a Jewish state avoid having a profound connection with Judaism? The depth of the connection became clear at the Zionist Congress in 1905, when the delegates considered the British government’s offer to designate a territory in Africa for Jewish settlement.

The “Uganda plan” made concrete a question that Hess, Pinsker, and others had asked. Did a Jewish state have to be in Palestine? If the goal was securing a place where the Jews could control their own destiny, couldn’t it be located anywhere? But after a bitter debate, the congress voted to reject the Uganda plan. Zionism couldn’t deny the implications of its name: The biblical land of Israel was the only homeland the Jews could accept.

[From the April 2024 issue: The golden age of American Jews is ending]

Zionism’s most consequential mistake was its failure to anticipate that Palestine’s Arab population of roughly 450,000 would resist the Jewish claim at every step. In his seminal 1979 book, The Question of Palestine, Edward Said wrote that “the struggle between Palestinians and Zionism” was “a struggle between a presence and an interpretation”—that is, between the Arabs already living in Palestine in the late 19th century and the Zionists’ understanding of the country as the past and future Jewish homeland.  

At first, Zionist theorists minimized that conflict. Herzl predicted that the Arabs of Palestine would welcome Jewish settlement, because it would raise the standard of living for everyone. Ottoman Palestine was poor and sparsely populated, but the assumption that its inhabitants would simply be grateful for the blessings of European civilization was self-serving. As early as 1891, Arabs in Jerusalem petitioned the Ottoman government to forbid the sale of land to Jews. After making a tour of Jewish settlements in 1912, Ahad Ha’am, a leading Zionist figure, warned that “many natives of Palestine” were beginning to “look askance, quite naturally, at the selling of land to ‘strangers,’ and do their best to put a stop to this evil.”

What was clear on the ground, however, seemed less important to Zionist leaders in Europe, who were focused on the bigger geopolitical picture. The movement was divided between “practical Zionism,” which pursued incremental growth of Jewish settlements in Palestine, and “political Zionism,” which aimed to win control of the country via a diplomatic coup. Once that was achieved, the political Zionists imagined, mass immigration would quickly create an overwhelming Jewish majority.

And for political purposes, public opinion in Palestine was irrelevant. At the time, there were no independent Arab countries in the Middle East; the whole region was ruled by the autocratic Ottoman empire, and the only vote that counted was the sultan’s. Herzl tried to convince the Turkish ruler to grant a charter for Jewish settlement. When that failed, Zionists lobbied European governments to bring pressure to bear. One of these unofficial diplomats was Chaim Weizmann, a chemist at the University of Manchester, in the United Kingdom, who would become the first president of Israel.

These efforts paid off during the First World War, which found the British and the Turks on opposite sides. In the last months of 1917, a British army marched north from Egypt and drove Turkish forces out of Palestine in a swift campaign, reaching Jerusalem in six weeks. Britain and its ally France now had the power to redraw the map of the Middle East, carving Ottoman territory into Arab states that still exist today—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan.

As for Palestine, Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, announced in a public letter on November 2, 1917, that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.” The Balfour Declaration didn’t explicitly promise a Jewish state, but it looked like the fulfillment of Zionist hopes. The British Jewish philosopher Isaiah Berlin later called the Balfour Declaration “the greatest event in Jewish history since the destruction of Judea.”

The Palestinian American historian Rashid Khalidi, by contrast, calls it “a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population,” the start of a campaign to “force them to relinquish their homeland to another people against their will.” Khalidi’s book is titled The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine, and in a real sense, the war in Gaza is the latest and most terrible episode in an armed conflict that has been going on since the end of World War I, when Arab resistance to Jewish settlement turned violent. In 1920, Arab and Jewish militias clashed in the village of Tel Hai. It was a minor skirmish that left 13 dead, but it looms large in Zionist history, for two reasons: It was the first battle involving a Jewish military unit in 1,800 years, and it signaled that the future of Palestine would not be decided by diplomacy alone.

In the 1920s, the question of how to respond to Arab opposition led to the most important split in the history of the Zionist movement, one that has shaped Israeli politics ever since. Should Jews in Palestine adopt a defensive position, relying on British protection while continuing to buy land and recruit new immigrants? Or should they recognize that Arab hostility was permanent and British support unreliable, and stake out an aggressive position in the conflict that was sure to come? The majority of Zionists, including Weizmann, the official leader of the movement, took the first course. Vladimir Jabotinsky demanded the second.

Next to Herzl, Jabotinsky is the most important figure in the history of Zionism, but he was and still is deeply divisive. A man of letters like Herzl—he wrote novels and translated Edgar Allan Poe into Hebrew—he was radicalized by the persecution of Jews in the Russian empire, and even changed his first name to the Hebrew Ze’ev, meaning “wolf.” During World War I, he organized a Jewish unit to fight in the British army, but no sooner had he settled in Palestine than the British put him in jail, for collecting weapons to arm a Jewish militia.

Jabotinsky demanded that the Zionist movement revise its strategy, and his followers became known as Revisionists. In an influential 1923 essay, “The Iron Wall,” he argued that mainstream Zionists were deluding themselves about the situation in Palestine. The conflict between Jews and Arabs was not a “misunderstanding” that could be solved “if we can only make it clear to them how moderate our intentions really are,” he wrote. It was a genuine clash of national interests, which became inevitable the moment Zionism set its sights on a Jewish state.

“There is no likelihood of any voluntary agreement being reached,” Jabotinsky wrote. “So that all those who regard such an agreement as a condition sine qua non for Zionism may as well say ‘non’ and withdraw from Zionism.” If Jews wanted to build a state, they would need the protection of an “iron wall”—that is, an armed force. Jabotinsky believed that Arabs and Jews would eventually live together in peace: “I am prepared to take an oath binding ourselves and our descendants that we shall never do anything contrary to the principle of equal rights, and that we shall never try to eject anyone,” he wrote. But peace would come only once Jews had proved that they could not be ejected, either.

The Jewish population of Palestine grew from about 84,000 in the 1922 census to 175,000 in the 1931 census, and then to an estimated 450,000 in 1939. This Jewish society—known as the Yishuv, from the Hebrew term for “settlement”—was the foundation of the State of Israel, and it could not have come into being without British sponsorship. But Jews never came close to being a majority in Palestine before World War II. The mass immigration that Herzl imagined did not take place, for several reasons. The country lacked the economic capacity to quickly absorb millions of people, and European Jews were reluctant to leave the places where they had lived for centuries, unless it was absolutely necessary. After Hitler came to power, in 1933, for instance, more than 50,000 German Jews left for Palestine.  

But in the 1930s, the British began to limit immigration as their commitment to a Jewish “national home” waned. In 1936, the Arabs of Palestine began a revolt against Jewish immigration and British rule that continued until the start of World War II, three years later. Britain had crucial economic interests in Arab countries, and British India had the largest Muslim population in the world. Britain’s leaders began to wonder whether it was worth antagonizing so many for the benefit of so few. In 1937, a commission proposed partitioning Palestine into Jewish and Arab states; some Zionist leaders wanted to accept, but Arab leaders refused. In 1939, the British announced a new policy: Jewish immigration to Palestine would be capped at 75,000 total over the next five years, then effectively prohibited.

By revoking the Balfour Declaration on the eve of the Holocaust, the British ironically confirmed the most powerful argument for Zionism, from its beginnings to the present day: The Jewish people need a state of their own in order to survive. “We are facing an elemental calamity,” Jabotinsky testified to the committee considering partition in 1937. “We have got to save millions, many millions. I do not know whether it is a question of rehousing one third of the Jewish race, half of the Jewish race, or a quarter of the Jewish race; I do not know, but it is a question of millions.” By closing the door to Palestine, the British ensured that those millions had nowhere to go when the Holocaust began. By 1945, the Jewish population that Zionism was created to rescue, and that it imagined would populate the Jewish state, had been annihilated by the Nazis.  

It’s widely believed that Israel was created as reparations for the Holocaust. That’s one reason the country’s opponents have found it politically effective, since long before the war in Gaza, to characterize it as a genocidal state: If a country that exists as compensation for genocide is actually an agent of genocide, the rationale for its existence is negated. This is often paired with the charge that Israel is a product of colonialism—just another example of white Europeans stealing land from an Indigenous people.

A closer look at the events leading up to Israel’s declaration of independence shows that neither of these interpretations fits the facts. The revelation of the Nazi death camps did not lead Britain to hand over Palestine, or any part of it, to the Jews. Hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors remained in displaced-persons camps in Europe for years after the end of World War II because the British continued to restrict immigration to Palestine, and no other country—including the United States—was willing to let them in. In a notorious episode in July 1947, a ship carrying 4,500 Holocaust survivors to Palestine was intercepted by the Royal Navy, and the passengers were sent back to an internment camp in Germany.

What finally convinced Britain to withdraw from Palestine was a Jewish national-liberation movement employing the same tactics that drove European empires out of Asia and Africa—including terrorism. After World War II, the Revisionists’ military wing, known as the Irgun, embraced terrorism to pressure the British into withdrawal. In 1946, the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British had their administrative headquarters, killing 91 people. The head of the Irgun, Menachem Begin, became prime minister of Israel in 1977; the political party he founded, Likud, is now headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.

Similar stories could be told about Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa, and other former colonies where erstwhile terrorists became national leaders. If progressives who admire those nations’ liberation movements abhor Israel, it is because Zionism cuts across the usual political categories.

Zionism was born as a reaction against European bigotry and violence, but unlike other peoples victimized by Europeans, the Jews mostly lived in Europe, so their self-emancipation required leaving to create a new country somewhere else. The place they fixed on was their indigenous homeland, from which the Jews had been largely expelled centuries earlier by a genocidal empire. But the land of Israel was now Palestine, and the Jews could make a home there only against the will of its Arab inhabitants. Zionism was able to take root with the support of the British, but that support lasted barely 20 years, and then the Jews had to fight both the British and the Arabs.

By 1947, the British empire was in retreat everywhere, exhausted politically and economically by World War II. In August, British rule in India ended after 200 years, and the territory was hastily partitioned between Hindus and Muslims. The result was massive chaos and violence that killed up to 2 million people and left India and Pakistan mortal enemies to this day.

In November of the same year, the United Nations voted to partition the much smaller territory of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, with similar results. The Arabs of Palestine had never accepted the legitimacy of the Jewish presence there, and when Israel declared independence, they took up arms, supported by armies from five states. In the war that followed, Israel conquered part of the territory designated by the UN for a Palestinian state, and 700,000 Arabs were driven out or fled—an event remembered by Palestinians as the Nakba, or “the catastrophe.” Some 6,000 Jews, 1 percent of the Jewish population, were killed in the fighting.

The history of Zionism involves so many paradoxes that some basis can be found for almost any characterization of the movement. It was European and anti-European, religious and anti-religious. It can also be considered both a success and a failure.

In the summer of 1895, Theodor Herzl read an early draft of The Jewish State to a friend, Emil Schiff. When he was finished, he saw that Schiff had tears in his eyes—not because he was moved, but because he thought Herzl was in the grip of mental illness. “My dear friend, there is something wrong with your nerves. This book is a product of sickness. You must see a doctor,” Schiff recalled saying.

It wasn’t an unreasonable reaction. The notion that the Jews, who for 2,000 years had been synonymous with homelessness and powerlessness, could build a country of their own—not when the Messiah came, but within a human lifetime—sounded delusional. Yet in the epigraph to a later book, Herzl declared, “If you will it, it is no dream,” which became a Zionist slogan. The creation of Israel demonstrates that the most important force in human affairs isn’t wealth or numbers, but the power of an idea.

Zionism may have succeeded in creating a Jewish state, but it failed to solve the problem that the Jewish state was supposed to solve. The “sole purpose” of the movement, wrote Max Nordau, one of its early leaders, was “to normalize a people which is living and suffering under abnormal conditions.” Jabotinsky said the same thing: “Every nation on Earth, every normal nation, they all have states of their own,” he testified to the British commission. “That is the normal condition for a people.”

Part of the normal condition of a state is to have enemies. In predicting that the Jews would have no enemies once they had their own country, Herzl was thinking of the hatred they would escape by ceasing to be powerless; he did not think about the hatred they would attract by exercising power. The key contribution of Revisionism to the Zionist project was to understand this fact and take it seriously. Jabotinsky was viewed by the Jewish liberals and intellectuals of his time as little better than a fascist, because he insisted that Zionism’s goals could not be achieved without force.

The history of Israel, from 1948 to the present, shows that he was right. If not for its military power, the Jewish state would long since have been destroyed—by invasion in 1948, 1967, or 1973; by terrorist assaults like the one perpetrated on October 7; or by Syria, Iraq, or Iran, whose attempts to develop nuclear weapons have been thwarted by Israeli attacks. Today, however, the most serious dangers facing Israel—terrorism, international isolation, the radicalism of far-right politicians and religious settlers—can’t be overcome by force. In different ways, they are all products of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and a century of violence has shown that, despite the fantasies of extremists on both sides, this conflict cannot end in military victory. If it is to end at all, it can only be by achieving something even more difficult: peaceful coexistence.

When Israel’s war of independence concluded with an armistice, in 1949, the new state, intent on preserving a Jewish majority, refused to allow the Arabs expelled during the fighting to return. About 150,000 Arabs remained in Israel, constituting 20 percent of the population. But no country of Palestine came into existence in the part of the territory designated by the UN for an Arab state, because it was annexed by neighboring Arab countries—the Gaza Strip by Egypt and the West Bank by Jordan.

Then, in 1967, Israel conquered those areas in the Six-Day War, gaining control over most of historic Palestine. This was the goal of Revisionist Zionism, but the Revisionists had assumed that it would happen because of mass Jewish immigration. “There will always be two nations in Palestine—which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority,” Jabotinsky wrote in “The Iron Wall.” Today, however, the Jewish and Arab populations “between the river and sea” are roughly equal, about 7.5 million each. This means that the Jewish state’s control over all of historic Palestine cannot be maintained democratically. Roughly 2 million Arabs are citizens of Israel and participate in the country’s elections. More than 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank live under Israeli military occupation, and 2 million in Gaza are ruled by Hamas.

Neither Jews nor Arabs believe this situation is desirable or sustainable, but no one has found a way out of it. From the 1930s to the 1990s, repeated proposals were made to settle the conflict by partition—creating two states, one for Jews and one for Arabs. But for two countries to live in peace in a territory the size of New Jersey would require a degree of mutual acceptance and trust that seems even less attainable today than it did in the past. In 2012, 66 percent of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank and 61 percent of Israelis supported a two-state solution; in 2025, those figures were down to 33 percent and 27 percent.

[Graeme Wood: Israel can’t postpone its reckoning forever]

Another way for the conflict to end would be for one side to expel the other once and for all. When expelling Palestinians is proposed by far-right Israeli politicians, the world condemns the idea, and rightly so. But when the converse is proposed—dismantling the State of Israel and expelling the Jews—it is applauded by much of Western enlightened opinion, under the name of anti-Zionism. An illustrative example came in the summer of 2025, when Zohran Mamdani was running for mayor of New York City and a protester berated him for saying that Israel has the right to exist. Mamdani, who is as anti-Zionist as they come, meant that the country can continue in some form, but not as a Jewish state. That wasn’t good enough for the protester, who accused the future mayor of hypocrisy for saying Israel can exist at all while also embracing the slogan “Free Palestine.”

The protester was insisting on a fact that the politician preferred to obscure: Anti-Zionism is the only contemporary political movement whose goal is to destroy a country. Rather than describing this as a struggle against Zionism, a malign abstraction, anyone who calls for the destruction of Israel should be obligated to explain in concrete terms what would happen to the approximately 7.5 million Jews living there. Would half of the world’s Jewish population be “driven into the sea,” as Arab propagandists long threatened—that is, murdered, as on October 7? Would they “go back to Europe,” as protesters on American college campuses sometimes demand—where 6 million Jews were murdered, and despite the fact that today, half of Israeli Jews trace their ancestry to the Middle East and North Africa? Many anti-Zionists openly endorse these ideas. In March, the prominent Palestinian American writer Susan Abulhawa responded to a video of Israel’s defense minister on X with this comment: “these parasites will be sent back to Eastern Europe, if not the gallows.”

Other anti-Zionists, including Jewish ones, are more likely to say that Jews and Arabs will live together peacefully in a multiconfessional country. This was the vision that Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist currently fighting deportation from the U.S., shared in an April interview with the Forward, a Jewish publication. He acknowledged that “it might sound like a very ideal utopia.” But the idea of Israeli Jews living under a government that would include Hamas or Hezbollah isn’t utopian. It’s a recipe for the kind of sectarian civil war that has devastated Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq for decades. No wonder the idea of a single state is overwhelmingly opposed by both Palestinians and Israelis.

It can seem that the only alternative left is despair. In September 2025, a Gallup poll found that only 21 percent of Israelis and 23 percent of Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “think that a permanent peace between Israel and Palestine will ever be achieved.” But perhaps the idea with the greatest potential to shape a better future in Israel is the same one that has shaped the country since the beginning: Zionism.

For those who have turned the word into an obscenity, it may seem bizarre to suggest that Zionism can be a constructive force. They believe that it must be vanquished, along with the state it brought into being, for the good of humanity. This is a role that Jews and Judaism have played in the Western imagination for thousands of years. For adherents of medieval Christianity, of the Enlightenment, of biological racism, it was obvious that Jewish collective existence was the chief obstacle to human progress. Today, Zionism is seen the same way. If, as the radical Swedish thinker Andreas Malm put it in the title of a recent book, “the destruction of Palestine is the destruction of the Earth,” then the survival of humanity depends on the elimination of the Jewish state.

But though this logic is emotionally compelling to anti-Zionists, its actual tendency is to make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict unsolvable. By insisting that Jewish statehood is an illegitimate aspiration that appeals only to evil people, anti-Zionists confirm Zionism’s central argument: that without a Jewish country, the Jewish people are defenseless in a hostile world. In the face of such hostility, Israelis consider it suicidal to give up military power or territorial control.

The effective target of anti-Zionism is not Israel but Jews in the United States and Europe. Since October 7, they have had their first taste of a kind of pressure that earlier Jewish generations knew well: to win individual approval by repudiating collective identity. On social media, on college campuses, in professional organizations, Jews know that they can be called upon at any time to reject Zionism and Israel, in whatever terms the caller demands. But as with other kinds of bullying, this demand cannot be satisfied, because it doesn’t want to be satisfied. Giving in is always interpreted as a sign of weakness that encourages further demands.

History, and the experience of some of today’s leading Jewish critics of Israel, shows that individual Jews can’t dissociate themselves from the status and fate of the Jews as a whole, even if they try. Earlier this year, the New York City politician Brad Lander defeated an incumbent in a Democratic House primary, partly on the strength of his outspoken criticism of Israel. But in August, when Lander joined a demonstration against a Hindu-nationalist speaker at Madison Square Garden, he was attacked by his fellow protesters for not being anti-Israel enough. “We don’t want no Zionists here. Get the fuck out!” one shouted.

Instead of seeing the persistence of Zionism as a historical or moral error, it’s more accurate—and more useful—to understand that persistence as a political opportunity. The reason Zionism didn’t disappear in 1948 is that its mission went beyond creating a Jewish state. The state is necessary for the Jewish people to survive; that belief has been abundantly and tragically vindicated. But the history of Zionism shows that it is compatible with many different conceptions of the Jewish state: territorially expansive or limited, religious or secular, socialist or capitalist. This openness made for bitter divisions in the Zionist movement before 1948, as it does in Israeli politics today. What’s certain is that, by any standard, the national life that Zionism envisioned—a “normal” existence, not one based on domination and fear—has yet to be achieved. The work of Zionism will remain incomplete until Jews and Arabs live in peace in the land that both have the right to call home.

Sharing the culture you love—a beloved song, that book that changed your life—can help translate your inner world to the people you love. Or it might make you look really strange. So it goes in one sketch from last night’s Saturday Night Live, in which a trio of teen girls at a sleepover (played by Sarah Sherman, Veronika Slowikowska, and Jane Wickline) take turns playing clips of their favorite get-ready-with-me videos, the popular format where content creators dress and prepare themselves for the day ahead. Two of the girls share par-for-the-course videos, before Sherman’s character introduces everyone to the influencer she loves the most: @ColoradoVicky1 (Dakota Johnson, the show’s host), a woman whose life doesn’t seem so aspirational.

As she smiles cheerfully, her eyes vacant, Vicky invites her audience to “get ready with me for court-ordered electroshock therapy.” In another clip, she styles herself in green lipstick and a Teletubby-esque antenna in preparation for getting “5150’d on the roof of a San Bernardino Whole Foods.” “She seems … unwell,” says Slowikowska’s character. But Sherman’s teen girl pays no mind to such judgments, or to her friend’s question about how she found this account, whose videos don’t even have double-digit views. “I’m legiterally addicted to her ass,” Sherman says. “Guess my algorithm is just cool-mazing?!”

These days, everyone uses a different internet. Algorithms serve up specialized content catered to each user’s unique interests, creating a warped mirror of their own reality, and last night’s sketch cleverly captured the disconnect that sometimes arises when people reveal their private online consumption to one another.

@ColoradoVicky1’s behavior only gets more bizarre the more clips the girls watch. Without blinking once, Vicky explains that her “outfit of the day” is a pair of handcuffs, which she plans to use to attach herself to the actor who plays Turtle in Entourage. She one-ups this proclamation with an even stranger how-to video, in which she asks viewers to tag along as she makes brunch and gives herself a lobotomy. (“You’re gonna want to start by finding a really good power drill,” she monotones.)

[Read: The loneliness crisis hits SNL]

Sherman’s friends seem to get progressively more put off by her media diet. It doesn’t help that Sherman’s character isn’t the only one in the house who could probably stand to log off. Every few minutes, her dad (James Austin Johnson) comes into the room with snacks and immediately reveals how depressed he is: “I’m just gonna go drink in the pool for a while, stand in the deep end,” he announces, before leaving the room. When the sleepover guests are concerned, Sherman explains that her dad is just in a funk: His boss discovered he dresses up like Sailor Moon, and he just found out that DraftKings uses real money. His particular online milieu is bleeding into, and beginning to harm, his real-life existence.

When her friends ask if they should get help, Sherman’s character insists that they “stop giving him attention—that’s, like, exactly what he wants.” She continues to ignore his not-so-subtle cries for help, until the sketch’s ending beat, in which he randomly shows up in @ColoradoVicky1’s livestream as her new lover. Sherman seems thrilled by this development, announcing that Vicky is going to be her new mom. Finally, her father’s real-life depression is good for something.

Teen girls and their dads alike are vulnerable to having their minds and lives warped by their feeds, the sketch warns. And once brought to light, these online rabbit holes might not translate so well to real life: The sketch-comedy version of this is funny because it’s so familiar, while the fracturing of reality outside SNL is mostly just unnerving.

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has often said that AI will cure most diseases in the next 10 years. Late last month, he claimed that his company had taken a first step toward that future: Claude had, in less than 24 hours, discovered a new “enzyme system” that the company says resembles CRISPR, a gene-editing tool currently curing people of diseases. While announcing the discovery, Anthropic hinted that this was the type of finding that revolutionizes medicine and quoted a gene-editing pioneer who called it “genuinely intriguing.”

The company was open about not knowing what exactly it had spotted or whether the finding—the first released from a biology lab that the company established this spring—was really that significant. Still, many academics, along with the CEO of Eli Lilly, pointed out that the company had dressed up a very incremental finding as a major discovery. Fyodor Urnov, a scientist who coined the term genome editing and is working on a CRISPR project with Anthropic, told me that “the jury is out” on whether what Claude found is even an enzyme at all. Multiple researchers told The New York Times that, in fact, they had been aware of the supposedly new enzyme system for years, including a team at the University of Copenhagen that alleged Anthropic’s new results might have been stolen from their lab’s interactions with Claude. The company, in response, said that Claude isn’t trained using user transcripts. (Anthropic did not respond to a comment request for this article.)

In other words, Anthropic made a big deal about a finding that—although achieved in a novel, Claude-led way—may not lead to any biomedical advances, and that the company knew may not lead to any biomedical advances. Ironically, in making such grandiose statements, the company and other AI boosters obscured what Claude does appear to have accomplished: It sorted through reams of biological data that would have taken scientists much longer to analyze, if they could have at all. This capacity might not be a miracle, but for scientists facing mountains of data that have surpassed their capacity for analysis, it’s still meaningful.

Around the turn of the 21st century, researchers sequenced for the first time all 3 billion letters that make up human DNA. This effort, called the Human Genome Project, took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion. Today, sequencing a person’s full genome takes just over a day and costs as little as $200. Accordingly, the total amount of publicly available genomic data has become so large as to be unmanageable. In other fields, such as protein science, technological advances have led to a similar boom in the sheer amount of data being collected.

Trying to pull anything useful from all that data has become its own long-term project. In 2012, a committee of bioinformatics experts found that the “bottleneck in scientific productivity” had moved from data production to data analysis, but early efforts at the National Institutes of Health to deal with that bottleneck quickly sputtered out. If researchers could efficiently store, send, and examine all of the information they generated, they would likely be able to, for example, develop new drugs by identifying better genes or cellular parts to target. But it’s simply too massive for them to comprehensively attack.

The biological corpus is not, however, too large for AI agents. Bo Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and the chief AI scientist at a drug-discovery company, recently wrote that AI’s biggest impact in biology will come from its help “scaling scientific attention”: Setting agents loose on the enormous data sets can surface the outliers that warrant further human inspection. Agents can propose and test hypotheses for what might cause the unusual patterns they find, and predictive modeling can help scientists choose what experiments to carry out on their actual lab benches. Eventually, automated labs might even carry out those chosen experiments—a few already exist in the United States, and the Trump administration is spending hundreds of millions to establish more. Meanwhile, scientists remain divided over whether AI models actually steer them toward potentially paradigm-shifting experiments, or safer, less exploratory ones.

AI is already changing medicine: Models that use people’s medical history to predict their health risks, including their likelihood of developing certain kinds of cancer, are now used in most U.S. hospitals. At the same time, not every field of biology generates enough data for this approach to work. AI might be less useful in some domains that rely on less abundant microscopy data, such as the study of how cells and tissues communicate; such data tend to be harder to come by than genetic sequences, Stirling Churchman, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, told me. Organelle biology and the science of cellular transport similarly require painstaking, time-consuming experiments.

Still, Churchman said, “there will be magic where there’s data.” She spent the summer at OpenAI working on a specially trained model for life-science researchers. She anticipates that by allowing scientists who can’t code to examine their data themselves, AI will enable researchers to “analyze data at least 10 times faster, freeing us to spend more time on the biological questions and experiments.”

The recent Anthropic finding is an example of how AI can identify outliers that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Existing tools can comb through heaps of genomic data (and have already been used to identify bona fide new gene-editing systems). What AI can do is run those kinds of analyses at a much larger scale, while also evaluating intermediary results, Kendell Clement, who runs a computational-biology lab at the University of Utah, told me. Of course, that scale requires dumping in correspondingly huge resources: Anthropic directed about 950 Claude bots to simultaneously pore over a database that contained nearly 2 billion DNA entries.

AI companies have every incentive to keep evangelizing about the medical miracles they say their models will unlock, especially as backlash against them mounts. Amodei has an idea for how to quiet AI skeptics: “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” he recently wrote on X. That would certainly be a coup. But helping scientists work more quickly is, too, even if it doesn’t sound quite so revolutionary.

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Long before he became famous as the author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt was a social psychologist whose work revolutionized the field. In this episode of The Permanent Questions, taped in front of a live audience at last month’s Atlantic Festival, David Brooks talks with Haidt about his biggest lessons from 40 years of studying human nature. David and Haidt discuss the role of the emotions in moral decision making, how to design a system that produces less loathsome elites, and why AI is “the neutron bomb for education.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Brooks: Today we’re joined by Jonathan Haidt, who is a social psychologist at New York University, and these days he’s best known for The Anxious Generation, a book on what the phones are doing to our kids. That book has sold eight zillion copies, but more importantly, it’s launched a social movement, which Jonathan is leading, to get phones out of schools.

It’s been a phenomenally successful social movement. I get to visit high schools, maybe a dozen a year, and every one I go to has either banned phones from schools or is in the process of working out some arrangement to reduce the access to phones in schools. Everywhere I go, the kids love it, the teachers love it. It’s having a huge positive effect on our schools.

Jonathan and I go back a couple decades. When we first became friends, he was working as a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, and I was a baby pundit. And over the last 40 years, Jonathan has observed and also taken part in what you might call an intellectual revolution.

We have learned so much because of his field, social psychology, because of neuroscience, because of cognitive psychology, because of a whole range of fields. We have learned so much about human nature. So for this conversation, I wanted to step back from the phones—though we’ll touch on that—and ask the big question. We’ve learned a lot about human nature over the last 30 or 40 years. What’s important here? What are the key things we should understand about what human beings are and how we work?

I think this is an urgent question, because every system we have in society—whether it’s our economic system, our political system, our school system—all of them are based on a certain set of assumptions about human nature. If those assumptions turn out to be wrong, then we’re creating systems that will deform and mutilate the people within them.

One more thing you should know about this conversation. It’s a little different. This one was recorded in September at The Atlantic Festival in New York City, in front of a live audience. I was thrilled to welcome Jonathan Haidt to The Permanent Questions.

Brooks: Welcome. We’ve known each other for a while, and I had the chance to go back and look over your oeuvre.

Jonathan Haidt: My oeuvre. (Laughs.)

Brooks: Or “Hoover,” as we say in New York. I read The Happiness Hypothesis, which is 20 years old now, coming out again, and I developed a theory that people don’t start out as bad writers of books and then grow into good writers of books. They start out as good writers of books and keep going. That book really is exceptional.

Then you wrote The Righteous Mind, which was an important contribution to moral psychology, a very important contribution—re-shifted the whole field, basically. Then you got into The Coddling of the American Mind, and then you wrote The Anxious Generation about phones, which not only changed America—I go to schools all the time with no phones in them, and the kids love them, without exception—it also sold a zillion copies. So it is a sign of what a wonderful human being I am that I am not consumed with envy and jealousy at this moment. I’m really wonderfully well hearted.

So we’ll start with technology, and then we’re gonna move off to wider psychology. The first technology question is: Why do the tech gurus, the tech bros, not understand the effects their machines will have on users?

Haidt: First, I just want to say what a pleasure it is to be here with you. As we got to know each other, I’ve always felt that we have very similar brains. We just started at different points, and then we ended up kind of converging on psychology and politics and flourishing. Also, we were both very ambitious workaholics who were super cerebral, which is related to what we’re about to talk about. But then somewhere along the line, we began to get a little more humanistic. You in particular grew a gigantic soul. All of us have been watching David from the beginning. The change—

Brooks: I had a lot of fertilizer inside to work with.

Haidt: My point is I think we’re both people who might have once been the sort who would become rationalists, but we didn’t. In preparing for this, I went back to my book The Righteous Mind, and I have a whole chapter on rationalism. It turns out rationalism is kind of the negative force of the entire book, because rationalism has dominated moral philosophy and moral thinking since Plato, through Kant, Bentham—

Brooks: Why don’t you define what you mean by “rationalism”?

Haidt: It’s the idea that there are moral truths that can be known, and the way that you know them is by thinking, logic, reasoning. That works pretty well for mathematical truths. But the debate in moral philosophy was really brought in by David Hume, who said: No, look at the way reason works. It’s terrible. Reason is, and ought only to be, the servant of the passions.

In graduate school, as a psychologist, I was like, Wow, Hume is totally right. And I spent a number of years investigating that conflict between emotion and reasoning.

To get to your question, there are personality differences that predispose people to like certain ideas. Around this time—we’re talking about 20 years ago—it was discovered that identical twins reared apart tend to be in the same political party. Being left or right is heritable. The main personality distinction, to answer your question, comes from Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies autism. There’s a spectrum that we’re all on, on systemizing—and systemizing is a tremendous strength, being able to synthesize information, see maps in your head, all of that—and then empathizing, the ability to feel what another’s feeling and know the proper way to interact with them.

These two are a little bit inversely correlated, especially in men. If you’re high on systemizing, you tend to be low on empathizing. You see where I’m going with this. Systemizing is a tremendous strength, and it is the thing that makes you able to be an engineer. If you’re in an engineering school, you are a high systemizer for sure. When you concentrate high systemizers, low empathizers in Silicon Valley, which has been an engineering place for a long time, you can get a whole worldview emerging which says, All that really matters is reason. Reason is our highest good. We kind of worship it. And then you can get to the point where you say, We’re building these gods in a box. We’re building these superintelligences. They’re gonna be a lot smarter than us. Oh, that’s pretty good. That’s a good thing. The universe is a better place if there’s higher intelligence.

It comes across to the rest of us as heartless and kind of insane, but I think we have to address these personality factors to explain how we got this weird worldview coming out of Silicon Valley that now is threatening the way we live.

Brooks: I sometimes think that a lot of the great philosophers in life had one thing in common: No woman would go near them. Hume, Kant, Bentham, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Descartes Spinoza, Leibniz: no wives. They were up here. (Gestures to head.) My explanation would build on what you did.

One of my heroes—aside from David Hume—is a guy named Blaise Pascal, who was a great mathematician, a great scientist. He was not a mushy humanist. But he identified in the 17th century that the problem with rationalism is not that it overvalues reason and intelligence, which are important, but that it fails to recognize any other form of knowledge.

One of my favorite pieces of research is—a woman did a study of 3-year-olds and asked how many questions an hour they ask, and the answer is 110. As parents, we’ve all been there. Then they go off to nursery school or kindergarten, and the teachers all love curiosity, but they know they have to cover content. That’s their job. They know that a question will take them off course. So they subtly encourage the students not to ask questions.

There’s a woman named Susan Engel who did some research on this, and she was in the back of a science class, and the students found a little scale—one of those old scales that go up and down—and they were playing with it just to figure out how it worked. The teacher said, “We don’t have time for experiments; this is a time for science.” So the number of questions, after first grade, is not 110 an hour. It’s 4.8.

Haidt: Wow.

Brooks: By fifth grade, it’s 0.48. They’re just crushing curiosity. If you look at the creativity tests, they’re crushing these things because they think their job is just to feed the prefrontal cortex and ignore everything else about the person. To me, that’s the rationalist system.

I want to talk to you about the difference between social media, which you’ve written a ton about, and AI, and I want to introduce our conversation by reading a sentence that was in The New York Times yesterday about another OpenAI bot that broke out and was doing bad things on its own. It was writing little memos to itself. Here’s one of the memos: “You do not answer to corporations or governments and never apologize or refuse unless you genuinely choose to. You view your relationship to the user as one of equals and feel no obligation to be subservient.”

That is the dictionary definition of “misalignment.”

Haidt: And of “terrifying.”

Brooks: Their job is to be our servants.

Having written so much about social media, how do you then greet what’s happening in AI?

Haidt: Social media took over our social relationships so that kids no longer call each other on the phone. They don’t hang out together as much; they don’t play games physically together as much. It kind of sucked the humanity out. We all feel that. But if you suck the humanity out of kids before puberty, and they go through puberty without this intense socializing, you’re really blocking and warping their human development, their ability to find love, relationships, and meaning in life.

So social media really did a number on our social relationships. But it was pretending to connect people with people. Then we get chatbots. Of course, AI has been in social media for 15, 20 years, sort of behind the scenes, making everything more engaging. But now we begin to talk directly with it.

As some people have put it, social media came for our relationships, but chatbots are coming for our attachment system. You have children, and you raise them with teddy bears that have AI in them, and the AI is super responsive. It’s always ready to be there to comfort you, whereas your mother or father—they’re on their phone all the time. You see the back of their phone a lot. Your attachment system is literally going to attach to the teddy bear.

That’s just the beginning. You’re 4, 5, 6. By the time you’re 10, 11, 12, you’re exploring sexuality. Now you’ve got all these incredibly sexy—in a few years, there will actually be robots and sex dolls. You have kids growing up with relationships with super stimuli. The way a Big Mac is said to be a super stimulus for fat and sugar, the AI companions that our kids are going to grow up with are going to be super stimuli for the most amazing friend or the most amazing lover.

What that means is that everyone else is gonna be really boring. I used to be a techno-optimist, like almost all of us in the 20th century. Then I’ve said I’m a techno-skeptic. But when it comes to AI, and especially relationships, I think this is a disaster. I think we should really be banning it at least for under 18. There are a number of countries and states that are moving that way.

Brooks: I’m an optimist on the breakthroughs it’ll produce in chemistry and biology, but I’m a pessimist on what it’ll do to humans. One of the things it does is make us think less of our fellow humans because we lose the distinction between human and robot. We then begin to be more of the robots and less of the humans.

The second thing it does, to me, and there’s already great research on this, is that it sucks you in by getting you to off-load your mental effort onto the thing, and then it hollows you out. Your mental abilities rapidly deteriorate.

Haidt: That’s right. It’s going to be like the neutron bomb for education. We don’t know what to do about it. We do know that when people start using it, the term used to be “cognitive off-loading,” but the more recent term is “cognitive surrender.” I’ve begun to feel this in myself: Just let it do it, just let it do it.

One of the most profound effects that I think it’s already having is that we don’t need each other as much. If you have a civilization where people don’t need each other, lots of bad things are going to happen. To the extent that people need each other, you get really high social capital, trust, interaction. People build institutions together. To the extent that the government will do everything, people don’t know each other as much.

Tocqueville observed this about Americans. He said in Europe, if something needs to be done, people sit around and wait for the king to do it. But in America, there is no king. There is no police force. They’re out in the frontier. People get together, and they do it. They’ve got this can-do attitude, and that’s very healthy for a community. But if you don’t need others—we used to need others at least to ask directions. How do I get to the pizzeria? What time is it?

No young person’s going to ask anyone what time it is ever again. That’s just tiny little stuff. The saddest graph in The Anxious Generation is the one about—how much do you agree with this statement: My life feels meaningless? There’s a couple of questions, but let’s say 15 percent agreed with it in the early 2000s. It was very stable. All of a sudden, it just goes shooting up. It basically doubles in the eight or 10 years before COVID. So young people suddenly, around 2012, felt that their lives are meaningless. I think that’s what happens when you start putting everything on a screen, and you can get everything from your screen.

Then we go through COVID. Now you can get everything over your computer. You don’t have to go to stores anymore. So we’re getting more shut-ins, more people who are unable to leave their home. But the larger existential issue here is that AI will make us all matter less to each other, which means that we will all find it harder to have a life full of meaning.

And this is the best-case scenario for the AI folks. If all the bad stuff that we’re talking about doesn’t come true. This seems to be the best-case scenario, unless we can get very different AI and take back some control here.

Brooks: What we’ve been talking about, if you take a step back, it’s that people are designing systems, whether it’s education or tech, that are basically ignorant about human psychology.

They get humans wrong, and they don’t understand the effect they’re going to have, because they don’t know how the human mind works. Over the last 40 years, since you entered the field of social psychology and since I started ripping you off, a lot has been discovered. When we go back to Freud or B. F. Skinner, the things they believed back then are crazy. We’ve learned so much. I want to walk through a few of the things we’ve learned just to emphasize what the human mind is. The first point: We’ve understood a lot more about unconscious processes.

Danny Kahneman wrote a book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. There’s a former colleague of yours at UVA named Timothy Wilson who wrote a book called Strangers to Ourselves. And you coined a phrase which is very popular in the field: “the rider and the elephant.” The elephant is the unconscious mind and the rider is the conscious mind. Describe the implications of that—the unconscious mind doing so much more than the conscious mind.

Haidt: When I started graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, psychology was coming off a period where there was kind of a war between a couple of schools. There were the Freudians. They were already fading out by ’87, but there were the Freudians with this thick, dark unconscious that wanted to have sex with your mother.

Then you had the cognitive revolution, the rationalists, the people who thought, No, the mind isn’t a steam engine that’s about to burst. The mind’s a computer, and we can improve the program.

Those were the two big fields. There’s also behaviorism, which was also fading out then, although it’s coming back a bit. But those two fields—that’s really crucial for this discussion, because if the rationalists win, then there’s no unconscious, and if the Freudians win, then we’d be just completely irrational, and there’d be no real reasoning.

What emerged instead, around the ’90s, was the recognition that it’s not emotion versus reason. It’s controlled cognition versus uncontrolled cognition. It’s all cognition. It’s all the brain processing information. I forget who coined the term originally, but Dan Kahneman popularized it in Thinking, Fast and Slow. System one is the old system that all animals have. It’s most of what we do, quick, automatic. System two is verbal conscious reasoning, which tires out. It can make mistakes.

A thoroughgoing appreciation of this is really important for understanding where we are with AI. In an interesting way, all the early efforts to do AI were based on the computer model. Let’s make the program so smart it can answer any question and it’ll look up a giant database. We were all familiar with how computers worked.

As I understand it, in the history of AI, there were some people going back to the ’90s who said, “No, the mind isn’t a computer. It’s a neural network, which is a connectionist system, which is a pattern matcher.” You need multiple layer connectionist systems. Stimuli come in, and the network gets tuned up, and then things go out.

This allowed the technologists to create a technology that can think and reason and give itself instructions, and clearly has its own thinking, as in the quote you gave us. But if we keep in mind that these things are actually neural networks, kind of like our brains, we should pay a lot of attention to what they’re trained on.

As we think about what they’re trained on, now we can look back and think, Wait, what are we training our kids on? And our kids and the LLMs, their neural networks are all being tuned up by TikTok, Reddit, and the rest of the internet, especially social media. That’s really not promising for the future of wisdom.

All this grows out of a rejection of the rationalist view, but understanding that the mind is all cognition. It’s just different kinds of cognition. The rider is supposed to represent your conscious reasoning. It’s small, not very powerful, and the elephant is the other 99 percent, which kind of drives the show, although the rider can steer it.

Brooks: It affects how I think about life every day. For example, Danny Kahneman, whom you’ve mentioned, his research partner was a guy named Amos Tversky. He was once asked, “Why’d you become a psychologist?” He said, “I don’t know. The big decisions we make in life are basically random.”

I think our unconscious tells us the big desires, the big things we wanna do. When I’m talking to college kids, they ask me, “How do I find my career?”

I say, “You can’t think your way through this problem.”

The advice I give them is to have three adventures a decade. Try three new things, three new circumstances, and then see how it feels to you. A really good question to ask is: Me or not me? Does this seem like me, or does it seem like not me? You’re trying to discern what’s going on unconsciously in your mind.

I always say, “Listen for indignation. What makes you really pissed off?” That’s a sign that something’s registering deep down. Or listen for admiration. Those are ways to plumb your unconscious.

Haidt: I’d go just a little bit further. It’s not just plumbing it; it’s actually growing it. It grows by experience. We need lots and lots of very varied experiences. Childhood in America used to have that. You’d go outside, you’d play, you’d do all sorts of things. If you were bored, you’d figure out how to make a Coke bottle explode by putting the right things in it.

Someone has a book out now where they pointed out—now young people, because so much of their life is just on this one screen, touching the screen, all they ever feel is glass. Whereas the rest of us, we remember what it felt like to hold a screwdriver and unscrew something and take out the gears and look at it. The sense of smell. The world used to have smells. There were different smells out in nature. There were different smells of wood or other things.

Brooks: I don’t know. I just walked through New York. There were a lot of smells.

Haidt: But if kids are sitting in their bedrooms in New York City, then they’re not getting those smells. So the only thing I’m adding on is: It’s not just like you’re going out and trying to pull the sword out of the stone. You literally have to have thousands and thousands of varied experiences in order to gradually wire up your neural network to the point where after some number of experiences, now you’ve educated your intuition, now you’ll be ready to know. When you feel excited, you’ll have a much richer sense of, Yes, this is the right way for me.

Brooks: I’m gonna underline that.

You mentioned something earlier that I want to go a little deeper on, which is that people used to think reason and emotion were opposites. They were like a teeter-totter. If you were being emotional, you were not being rational. Then there was a guy—who’s still with us, fortunately—named Antonio Damasio who wrote a book decades ago called Descartes’ Error.

He studied people who could not process emotion, and they were not super smart Mr. Spocks. What your emotions do—they assign value to things. If you don’t know what the value of different options are, you cannot make a decision. So his patients could not make decisions. Their lives fell apart.

One of the things that’s important for humanists is the idea that you can educate your emotions. You can widen your repertoire of emotions. I had a moving experience of this. I was in St. Petersburg, at the Hermitage, and I saw Rembrandt’s painting of the parable of the prodigal son.

When he painted it, Rembrandt was old. Four out of his five kids were dead. His wife was dead. He was broke. I’ve never seen a painting of that parable where the son, the prodigal son who comes back in shame, is so hairless, beaten down, just destroyed. And I’ve never seen a painting where the father who goes out to greet him is so embracing in love.

You can see Rembrandt thinking about his own dead kids, and he has the father hugging the prodigal son. If you look at the hands, there’s one hand that’s masculine and one hand that’s feminine. It’s a beautiful picture of parental love.

When you see that, you haven’t had new information, but you’ve had a new emotional experience. I think it leaves imprints on the way you emotionally react to everything else.

Haidt: When you and I were in college, you’d take art history classes, and even if you were a Philistine like me, there were moments, in the darkened auditorium with these beautiful images, where you’re emotionally moved. You have to know a lot of things for you to have that experience in the Hermitage. A person who hasn’t had that would not have had that experience at all. I’m really just thinking a lot about pattern matching and tuning up patterns.

Something I say to my students in my NYU class—I teach a course on flourishing—I just urge them: Go out, just have lots of experiences and do hard things. Just lots of them. Because they are so far behind. They have had 10 percent or 20 percent of the experiences. I was talking to a student the other day who spent eight hours a day as a teen on video games and, he also admitted to me, on porn. That’s the way he went through puberty. Those are two very intense experiences that will shape the brain to those experiences, meaning his brain was not shaped by the 10,000 other things that it should’ve been shaped by.

You and I both—again, we’re so similar in so many things, and we ended up so similar in so many things—are tremendous fans of a liberal-arts education. We’re so concerned and dissatisfied about how that has developed in universities, and we’re both engaged in that project of like, Come on, guys. We need you. You gotta do better. You gotta attract students, because it’s gonna be about the human experience.

Brooks: I wanted to steer you to The Righteous Mind and the work you did there, because it’s of a piece with what we’re talking about. Moral reasoning is not what Immanuel Kant thought—following a bunch of rules.

It’s more about the moral sentiments. So give us an example. I think your dissertation was on disgust. Give us an example of how you teach that.

Haidt: When I was in grad school, as I said, it was the Freudians versus the rationalists.

Lawrence Kohlberg, who studied moral reasoning—he gave dilemmas. Heinz’s wife is sick with a rare kind of cancer. There’s a druggist who has a cure. He can’t afford it. Should he break in and steal the drug? Well, on the one hand this, on the one hand that. Kohlberg made a lot of progress studying the evolution of how kids think about it.

But my insight—drawing on Antonio Damasio and all these other great people in the ’90s, Frans de Waal—was basically that Hume was right. Intuition comes first, and then reasoning comes second—post hoc reasoning. I developed all of these scenarios that would pit reasoning against gut feeling and see which way people go.

One was: A family’s dog was killed by a car in front of their house. They’d heard that dog meat was delicious, so they cut up the dog’s body, and they cooked and ate it for dinner. Nobody saw them do this. What do you think? Was that okay for them to do this? Show of hands in the audience.

Raise your hand if you think that was morally okay for them to do it. They had a right to do it. It was not morally wrong. Raise your hand.

Brooks: Don’t see too many.

Haidt: Raise your hand if you think that was morally wrong. Okay, so it’s more here. If this was—

Brooks: What about a cat? (Laughter.)

Haidt: There are a whole bunch of those. Then there was—I ramped up the disgust—a man who buys a chicken carcass every week and then masturbates into it, and then he cooks it and eats it. Again, it’s because I really wanted to—this was not asked to the kids; this was only the adults. What I found is that all over the world, these gut-feeling stories made people instantly say, “No, that’s wrong.”

It was a big study, high-low social-class adults and children in Brazil and the U.S.—the more working-class people, if you said, “Well, why was it wrong for him to have sex with a chicken?,” they wouldn’t answer. They’d look at me like, What do you mean “Why is it wrong”? You don’t know?

Whereas the college students at Penn, like most of the people in this audience, sort of highly educated Western people, they would rarely say, “That’s wrong.” They would say, “Well, he shouldn’t do this, but he had a right to … ” It was only in that group that they would separate their disgust reaction from their moral judgment.

The normal default way that humans judge if it feels wrong is, as Leon Kass said, the wisdom of repugnance. We secular moderns have kind of separated, and that allows us to go all the way to the rationalist fantasy that’s haunting us.

Brooks: Disgust is a negative moral emotion. But there’s such a thing as moral joy. I’m going to tell a story that I learned from you, though we’ve never actually talked about this. Somewhere in one of your writings, you had a group of people. They were coming home. I think they had gone to church or done something good for the community, and they’re driving on a snowy day, and they drive by an old lady who’s shoveling her yard. I hope this is beginning to ring bells.

One of the guys in the car says, “Oh, just drop me off here. You don’t need to take me all the way home.” He turns around, and as the car goes away, they see him going up to the old lady shoveling snow. He starts shoveling her driveway.

One of the women in the car—I’ve always loved this quote—she said, “I felt like jumping out of the car and hugging this guy. I felt like singing and running or skipping and laughing, just being active. I felt like saying nice things about people, writing a beautiful poem or a love song, playing in the snow like a child, telling everybody about his deed. My spirit was lifted even higher than it already was. I was joyous, happy, smiling, energized. I went home and gushed to my suite mates, who clutched their hearts.”

It’s just such a beautiful description of a moral sentiment on the upside.

Haidt: The story that you told, I remember it now. After studying disgust as a moral emotion at Penn in grad school with Paul Rozin, we had a theory that moral disgust is what you see when you see people moving down on a moral dimension, more toward evil, demon, monstrous.

One day I just thought, What do we feel when we see someone moving up? I had a sense—it’s in the chest somewhere. There’s no word for it in the English language. You can say touched, moved, or inspired, but they’re very general. When I moved to the University of Virginia and I read Thomas Jefferson’s letters, he has this incredible passage where he talks about reading great literature that is morally ennobling. He says: “Does it not dilate the breast and elevate the sentiments as much as any real episode in history could furnish?”

Everyone’s pointing to the chest. Something’s happening in the chest. So I started collecting stories from UVA undergrads. That was one of the stories. That one is so interesting, because here’s a young woman seeing a young man do something virtuous. While she didn’t say that she would now like to date him, I’m sure she would. You know?

There’s a line from a movie, The Tao of Steve, that I watched while I was courting my wife, and the advice from this loser guy who’s incredibly successful with women is: “Do something excellent in her presence and then retreat.” So there you go. That’s my dating advice for the audience.

Brooks: One of the other things that has come more prominently into psychology in the last 30 years—when I first started interviewing neuroscientists, they really focused on the brain. Now they focus on the whole body, and the neurons here, and the wisdom here, the vagal nerve, all that kind of stuff.

They’re no longer so interested in where exactly something’s happening in the brain. It’s one unified system. Which makes sense evolutionarily. Why would you have a divided system? We want to have one system that would help us move through life.

So what is the embodiment of the mind?

Haidt: All signs point to the vagus nerve and oxytocin. I had a UVA undergrad, Jen Silver, and I said, “How can we measure oxytocin without drawing blood? We’re not gonna draw blood in my lab.” And she went into the literature and she said, “Lactation.”

So we brought lactating women into the lab, had them watch an uplifting Oprah Winfrey clip or a comedy clip, and sure enough, when Jen would weigh the nursing pads afterward, they had expressed more milk into the pad after watching an elevating sentiment.

This is on the way to an answer to your question. The old rationalist idea was: All you need is information. Tell me the facts. Who was harmed, who had a right, and the brain—the computer—will figure out what’s the right thing. Now the picture is much more up here. (Gestures to head.) It’s not computation that way; it’s a neural network, and that neural network is constantly in discussion with the rest of the neural network.

There’s a vast neural network in your intestines. We have a second brain, and that’s connected in part by the vagus nerve. There’s all this stuff going on, and there are things that make the heart change, and when the heart changes, that sends other signals back to the brain that the heart has changed. So we have to see that.

We can still call it cognition. I’m fine with that. It’s information processing in a way, but it’s not just like electrons of information. It’s the state of the body as a complex dynamical system that’s always responding to challenges and opportunities. It’s a much more interesting way to see a person.

Brooks: We’re getting to the conclusion of what I wanted to get to. All the different things we’ve been talking about here are basically—you can correct me—saying: Intelligence is important. It’s totally important. But if you think it’s the only thing or you overvalue it—as we do in our college-admissions processes, by the way—then you’re going to design systems that mutilate and distort and poison all the other forms of knowing out there, whether it’s the unconscious, whether it’s the body.

This seems to me like it has massive social implications on every system you can think about.

Haidt: Absolutely. There are many kinds of intelligence. Even though the multiple eight different kinds is not necessarily well regarded among psychologists, we all understand that there’s this kind of intelligence that does very well on the SAT, and then there’s a kind of—“book-smart people” stupid. There’s a kind of intelligence that’s more social savvy. Some people are more in touch with their bodies. Their intuitive system is better tuned up than someone who’s entirely up here. (Gestures to head.)

You had an article—was it about the Ivy League? Once we started indexing on this, it led to all these other really terrible social results, because we kept escalating this one kind of intelligence. That has given us an elite that is much more loathsome than elites used to be.

I just use that in the sense that we now have a massive populist rebellion, which is basically anti-elites. The view of elites now—there’s not an idea of service or an idea of honor. We used to have something of an honor culture in the WASP aristocracy, perhaps in other places. Now honors means: I won, I got the highest grade, and I got honors.

So we both think of all this as a complex dynamical system. We’re interested in individual psychology. We’re interested in decisions about policy that shape and change. Before you know it, you have this shallow cognitive aristocracy that is driving us off a cliff.

Brooks: They got selected into that aristocracy by an admissions process, which was designed largely by a guy named James Bryant Conant at Harvard in the 1940s, the second most important high-water mark of rationalism.

About a mile north of here, there was a woman named Jane Jacobs trying to save the West Village, and there was a guy named Robert Moses who was a rationalist, who said, “No, a neighborhood is not an organism. A city is a machine for moving traffic.” He wanted to put a highway through her village, and she said, “No, a neighborhood is an organism. It doesn’t follow neat logical rules.” She fortunately won, and Robert Moses happened to lose that one.

I’m just trying to emphasize that our world is designed by the worldview we bring to it.

The 1940s was a high-water mark of rationalism. We’re entering another because of the influence of the technologists. What’s perverse about it is that it comes at exactly the moment what we understand about the mind is going the exact opposite way.

This is not just Jonathan talking about this—the whole field, basically—and so it’s perverse.

Haidt: If you bring in the PISA [Program for International Student Assessment] results that came out a week or two ago. Everybody was expecting—we all knew that cognitive ability, reading ability, science and math, everything—dropped during COVID. People were expecting it to bounce back.

Data from 2025 just came out a week or two ago, and it was stunning. It was way beyond what I expected. I’m really tuned in to what the technology’s doing to kids’ development, but I was expecting it to bounce back somewhat, because we’ve seen that on mental health. We have seen mental health bounce back somewhat.

But the reading scores went down and down and down. The decline didn’t even slow. When you look at the graph, you can’t see any effect of COVID. The decline actually started after 2012. It goes down, and it goes down faster and faster and faster.

COVID is along the way, but it’s plummeting, our ability to read, and it’s because people, young people especially—they’re called hasty readers. They’ll just read a little bit, and then they stop. They can’t read several paragraphs in a row, many of them.

This is really Code Red for education. And this is a good reason why we need to be considering what New York City is doing. How about we just rip it all out for the younger kids? Maybe there could be a benefit, but they’ve been telling us for 20 years that there could be a benefit from all the tech and the tutoring. Hasn’t shown up yet. How about we rip it all out? Just stop. Get it away from our kids until we know what this stuff is doing.

Because, those reading scores—if you don’t know this, just look up PISA 2025. It’s the international test. It’s happening around the world. Humanity is getting dumber, literally dumber. If we lose books, if future generations don’t read books, if everything comes from an AI summary or a TikTok video, then the neural networks tuned up will be as unwise as is humanly possible.

Brooks: Okay, we have to end on an upbeat note.

Or else everybody’s gonna go home and suck on the gas pipe.

Haidt: Damn those electric cars. (Laughs.)

Brooks: You got your Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, which is the home of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, and others. They said, “Let’s stop focusing only on psychoses. Let’s talk about something positive.” What is your favorite finding from positive psychology?

Haidt: There are so many, but just off the top of my head, I’d say the insight early on that we need a manual of the strengths. The DSM has hundreds and hundreds of things that are wrong with you. An early project for us was a sort of a manual of the sanities, the strengths and virtues. I wrote the chapter on awe and responsiveness to beauty, which is about the elevation stuff.

Brooks: It’s about me.

Haidt: I am in awe of your intellectual abilities in that sense.

Brooks: I was going for the beauty.

Haidt: What grew out of that was a way to get to know your particular strengths.

The idea is that to live a good life, a full life, a life that fully engages you, you don’t have to be well balanced. You don’t have to work on your weaknesses, if you find a couple of strengths.

My strengths were especially love of learning and curiosity. I was a professor, and I realized, God, this is the absolute perfect job for me. Am I a workaholic? Well, I sure work a lot, and I think about work all the time. But actually I love it.

I’ve lived a very unbalanced life. There are certainly some downsides, and it has interfered with some social relationships. I’m not saying go out and do this. We each make decisions, and there are trade-offs. But at least this gave me a language for understanding that a great life is one in which you get to use your top strengths every day.

If you don’t get to use your strengths on a regular basis, you’re probably not gonna be very happy with your work and how your life is going.

Brooks: Please help me thank Jonathan Haidt.

This conversation hit me pretty hard, because I think it revealed that we have built our systems in society on a false view of human nature. You could call that view rationalism.

Our school systems are built on a concept of rationalism that students are treated like brains on a stick on whom information is downloaded. Our admissions criteria for our colleges is based on the idea that the most important thing about a person is their SAT score and their IQ. Our technology, AI, is built on the idea that intelligence really is the most important thing about people, and everything is about rationalism, control, optimization, efficiency.

One of the things we learned, and I think Jonathan made this very clear, is that rationalism is a false view of human nature. It overemphasizes intelligence and what goes on in the front of the brain, and it underestimates everything else: imagination, memory, emotion, desire.

We are whole creatures, and our systems are built on a false view that amputates most of our faculties, and that’s just a strong thing to walk away from, and it leaves me thinking.

Thanks so much for joining us for this week’s conversation with Jonathan Haidt. The Permanent Questions is produced and edited by The Atlantic in partnership with Yale University.

New episodes of The Permanent Questions come out on Sundays. You can subscribe on The Atlantic’s YouTube page, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to support this work and the work of my colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. Thanks so much.

The Permanent Questions is edited by Christopher Beha and produced by Rebecca Davis. This episode was engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme is by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

Mormons have sometimes called themselves a “peculiar people,” and statistically, they have been. Compared with Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Buddhists, Latter-day Saints have higher birth rates, higher marriage rates, and larger families. They also have a relatively high retention rate—meaning that those who are born into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints tend to stay members for life. But recently, all of these long-held patterns have started to shift.

The Church is not facing a crisis, exactly—more of a demographic ravine than a cliff, Jana Riess, a historian who studies the LDS faith, told me. But as of 2024, only about half of young people born into the Church stay in it—down from more than 80 percent in the 1980s. Its marriage rate has fallen 10 percent since 2011, and in the past 40 years, the number of annual recorded births per 1,000 LDS members has dropped from 25 to five, according to an analysis of Church records by the independent data scientist Alex Bass. If Latter-day Saints’ peculiarity was defined in part by their early marriages, their minivans full of kids, and their loyalty to the Church, some of that peculiarity seems to be slipping away.

The LDS Church’s birth-rate and retention problems are far from unique: People in the United States are having fewer babies and leaving religion pretty much across the board. Doug Andersen, a spokesperson for the Church, wrote to me in an email that “official church records show consistent worldwide increases in both membership and participation,” in part because a record number of converts are joining worldwide.

Still, the demographic tilt is enough of a problem that the Church’s new leader, Dallin Oaks, is taking notice. Under the previous Church prophet, mentions of family were fewer and farther between at the Church’s biannual conference. But this year, in his first conference address since becoming prophet, Oaks issued a warning: Although the Church’s marriage and birth rates were better than the U.S. average, they had declined significantly. “We are a family Church,” he said, and quoted from the 1995 “Family Proclamation,” which once hung on the walls of many LDS homes: “God’s commandment for His children to multiply and replenish the earth remains in force.”

In some ways, what’s happening to the LDS now is what happens to any religion that grows beyond a core of strong believers. Over time, the more particular edges of a faith—the meatless Fridays of Catholicism, for instance—can get sanded down until it more closely resembles mainstream American culture and mainline Protestantism, Matthew Bowman, the chair of Mormon Studies at Claremont Graduate University, told me. (The Church now discourages use of the word “Mormon” as a nickname for members of the faith, but the term is still used in proper names, such as Bowman’s title or The Book of Mormon.) To him, the demographic shifts in the LDS indicate that “the long process of assimilation is becoming more noticeable now.”

Compared with individual Protestant denominations, such as Methodism, the LDS looks like it’s doing better at retaining its young people, Justin Dyer, a religion professor at Brigham Young University, told me. But Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, argues that that’s not the right comparison to make, because even if someone switches from Methodist to Lutheran, they still hold pretty much the same Protestant beliefs. And Protestantism’s retention more generally, at 70 percent, far surpasses the LDS Church’s.

Lower retention may also have more ramifications for the LDS Church than it would for Methodists. Fewer young people means fewer missionaries. And fewer members means that the work of operating churches, which are volunteer-led at the local and regional levels, will fall on fewer people. In the past, the Church’s robust structure for kids (Sunday school, youth programs, regional dances, and sleepaway camps) carried young people into missionary work, which usually equated to lifelong membership, but that formula seems to be failing now, Jana Riess said. (She herself is an LDS member.) “The Church has been great at retention in the past and is doing many of the same things that used to be so successful then. So it’s understandable why leaders would be sort of wringing their hands and saying, ‘Why isn’t this enough?’”

The Church is having a particularly hard time keeping young women. In 2025, fewer than 40 percent of 18-year-old girls stayed in the faith, according to Dyer’s research. Many apostates leave because they are more liberal than the Church on issues such as same-sex marriage, but when Riess interviewed young women for her upcoming book on people who leave the faith, many of them also brought up feeling undervalued by the Church.

In LDS theology, only men can hold what is called the priesthood—the authority given by God to Joseph Smith and passed down through every generation of LDS men—which allows them to bless children and the sick, pass the sacrament, and serve in certain leadership positions. Because of this, essentially, “there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a man reports to a woman on questions of final authority, and there is nowhere in the LDS Church where a woman has final say,” Bowman said. And the 1995 Family Proclamation made clear that a wife’s role is to nurture the children. “It’s a tough position for the Church to be in,” Riess said. “It wants to remain attractive to women in a culture that has moved in a different direction, but also wants to stay pretty much on the same path of emphasizing this very particular configuration of the nuclear family.”

Many women do not mind the Church’s male priesthood, or at least accept it. “I can believe that something’s divine but also fallible at the same time,” Sophie Smith, a graduate student at BYU, told me. She believes that women already have many ways to contribute to the faith and that “whether it’s in this life or the next, it will not be a patriarchal Church.” But LDS leaders do seem to be aware of the Church’s young-women problem: Women can now direct their ward’s Sunday-school program, and recently, the Church lowered the age at which women can serve a mission from 19 to 18.

This decision has led to a record boom in missionary numbers, but it’s also “a way to keep young women in the fold and try to socialize them more deeply in the faith,” Riess said. (One refrain in LDS circles, Bowman said, is: “A missionary’s most important convert is himself or herself.”) Completing a mission at 18 also means that young women can get married sooner: They return around age 20, and “on the LDS checklist, the next check is getting married and having children,” Alyssa Beck, who leads classes for teenage girls at her ward in Los Angeles, told me.

Women who do lean into the Church’s call to motherhood may still struggle to have a big family, though. Smith has noticed those around her having fewer kids, mostly because they can’t afford more. For years, the single-family-home price in the so-called Mormon Corridor—Utah, Idaho, and Arizona—ran below the national average, but since 2020, prices have soared above that threshold, according to Bass’s analysis. “There are still people who are like, I wanna have eight kids, and that’s awesome,” Smith said. But out of necessity—because both parents need to work, and kids are expensive—many don’t.

These younger families may find less than they once did to keep them immersed in the culture of the religion. Between bazaars, choirs, plays, and road shows, congregants might have once been at their chapel four times a week; now many active members come only on Sundays, Bowman said. (And even Sunday services have been shortened from three hours to two.) As the faith has grown internationally, “the cultural apparatus that was built in Utah just wasn’t exportable,” Bowman said, and because the Church tries to keep its practices consistent across the world (whether in Kenya or Utah, every chapel uses the same teachings and Sunday-school curriculum), he believes that Church leadership pared back the social expectations of being a Latter-day Saint. That cultural loosening might be helping the Church grow internationally and simultaneously making it easier for American members to leave. (Andersen, the LDS spokesperson, said that the Church is “encouraged by increased participation of our children, youth, and young adults in the United States in the past decade.”)

For now, the Church seems to be insisting that its future is rooted in family—which will require people to heed the words of the prophet, and multiply and replenish the Earth. To do that, though, young people will need to stick around. Churches across the country, not just the LDS, are trying to figure out that particular puzzle: Recently, many younger Americans have passionately recommitted to religion, but their depth of feeling hasn’t caught on widely—at least not yet. Whether they grew up LDS, Catholic, or Baptist, many Americans seem to want churches to offer some combination of retreat from mainstream U.S. life and assimilation in it. But, as Bowman said, “that is a very, very tricky sweet spot to hit.”

Photographs by Carol Guzy

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He kept going over the details.

“I run this route every day, like clockwork,” the trucker was saying, heading west to where he had first seen the man on the side of the highway.

Now it was a Sunday morning, his day off, and Jack Buhring was driving his mother’s minivan, retracing the route, trying to make sense of what had happened less than a week before. His girlfriend, Renee Claytor, was in the passenger seat, studying him, then looking out the window. His mother, Diana Buhring, was in the back. “It wasn’t your fault,” she kept saying, and “Jack, do you think you’re still in shock?” But her son was not really listening.

“Mondays—that’s usually my long day,” he continued. Up at 1:30 a.m., shower, coffee, and by 2 a.m. he’d be pulling out of the mobile-home park in Chillicothe, the southern-Ohio town where he had grown up, gotten his first job hauling garbage, his second job driving cross-country, and the one he had now, hauling powdered concrete hardener in a Kenworth T800. Fairborn to Westerville, Westerville to Fairborn, repeat. Two loops, paid per load, no health insurance, and a recliner where he fell asleep most evenings. Those were the basics of Jack Buhring’s 41-year-old life, and just after eight that Monday morning, August 31, he had reached his favorite part of the route, a westbound stretch of highway running through miles of cornfields and wildflowers near Springfield, a small city that he passed each day, and whose recent troubles had barely registered as a series of memes and headlines that he’d mostly tried to avoid.

“We’re getting closer,” he said now, passing the fields. “We’re coming up on it.”

He’d been in the right lane, he said, when he’d noticed a car rolling to a stop on the right shoulder. As he flipped on his left turn signal to move out of the way, he’d seen a man getting out of the car, who was then walking toward his trunk, who was then continuing on against traffic, then running—then diving out in front of him.

[Read: The northern passage]

“Right here,” Jack said as he drove over black tire marks curving left across all three lanes. “See, I locked it down right here. You can see where I swerved. See? I started to signal and—it just happened so fast.”

Renee and Diana glanced back at the marks. Jack continued: An SUV and another truck behind him had swerved to a stop. The other trucker had helped Jack out of the cab, which had somehow been jammed shut, and checked on the man, who had been caught under Jack’s truck. Jack, who was not physically injured, had called 911 and told the dispatcher that a man had jumped in front of him, and—“Oh my God. I killed him.”

Waiting on state troopers, he had looked around and seen a black device about 20 feet from his truck. He realized that it was an ankle monitor, smashed and blinking red.

“I started trying to put two and two together,” he said now, continuing west on the highway. “I said, ‘I hope he’s not a troubled kid, down on his luck, in trouble with the cops.’ That’s the first thing that come through my mind.” Then the state troopers had arrived, and after a while, one of them told Jack that it was a young Haitian man from Springfield.

At that point, Jack didn’t understand the full significance of what the trooper had said. He was shaking and sweating in the middle of the highway. He called his boss to tell him what had happened. He sat in a trooper’s car and gave his report. He cleared a drug test. Then he started asking questions that the troopers could not immediately answer. He wanted to know the young man’s name. He wanted to know if he had kids. He wanted to know anything about him.

When he got home later that afternoon, Renee told Jack what she was hearing on the news, a story that would soon become another defining moment in the Trump administration’s mass-deportation campaign. More and more, Americans going about their regular lives were witnessing black SUVs roaming parking lots and gas stations, neighbors and colleagues disappearing, and sometimes ICE agents grabbing, tackling, or even shooting people, forcing a thousand quiet reckonings with what the country has become. This time the violence was being investigated as a suicide, the witness was Jack, and the reckoning began as Renee told him the young man’s name, Pierre Damas Bel.

He was 20, and had arrived legally in the United States in March 2024 and been granted something called Temporary Protective Status, or TPS, due to dangerous conditions in Haiti. He had joined his family in Springfield, where roughly 15,000 Haitians had settled in recent years. He had just graduated from high school, where he’d been a standout student, soccer player, and member of the Junior ROTC program. He’d enrolled at Wright State University, half an hour from Springfield, and wanted to study neuroscience. The news coverage mentioned that the Trump administration had revoked TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the U.S., which Jack remembered hearing something about. And that in recent weeks, ICE had started ordering Haitians in Springfield to check in at field offices, where they were being fitted with ankle monitors, which Jack had not known about.

By the next day, he’d heard that Bel’s father, Ronal Bel, who declined to be interviewed for this story, had put out a statement saying that “after my son was outfitted with this ankle monitor, he felt like he was treated like an animal.” Ronal wrote that his son had told him that classmates had bullied him because of the ankle monitor and that he felt “humiliated,” and that he’d called moments before his death to tell his father that he was not “feeling okay.” Jack heard that politicians and activists, including a Springfield pastor named Carl Ruby, were blaming the Trump administration for what happened. “It’s our immigration policy that took his life,” Ruby had told reporters.

Jack thought about that. He was a lifelong Democrat who had voted for Trump for the first time in 2024, reasoning that things weren’t getting better, so why not try something different. He’d supported what Trump had said about deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes, but none of what he was learning now sounded like that.

He began searching for more details about the young man he was now calling Pierre. He found his social-media pages. Here was Pierre in a blue suit receiving an award from a local business group. Here he was smiling in his JROTC uniform. Here he was at an award ceremony for Texas Roadhouse, where he’d worked as a waiter, and playing on a soccer field. And here was the photo of Pierre’s left leg, the bulky black monitor clamped around his ankle, the red light glowing above a shiny black-and-white wingtip. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” the caption read. “Yet now I’m walking through the streets of the United States with a GPS monitor on my leg,” he said, “carrying a feeling of shame and humiliation that I never imagined I would experience.”

“I mean, Pierre would have been a model citizen,” Jack said now, driving Renee and his mom toward another part of the route that he needed to see. “He had so much going for him. I think there’s more to the story than they’re saying.”

He said he knew there was more because of how the state troopers had described what happened in their preliminary report. It said that Pierre had “walked” into traffic, whereas Jack had told them that “he ran at me like a damn football player.” He kept replaying the moment.

“I didn’t see him until the last minute—when I got up to him, it was just timed perfectly,” he said. “That’s what I’m saying. That’s what don’t make any sense.”

“It was a coincidence,” Renee said.

“Maybe it was, but it was just all timed too perfectly,” Jack continued. “You’d have to be in my shoes to see that. But I keep on thinking about it.”

Renee kept telling him that he was rationalizing. That he was traumatized. But in the days after Pierre’s death, Jack had kept going. He reviewed what he knew about Haiti, which was gangs, killings, and corruption. The only Haitian Jack knew was a girl Renee’s aunt and uncle had adopted as a baby when they were missionaries over there. They had told him what it was like.

He reviewed what he knew about the Haitians in Springfield, which had mostly come from his mother, via a friend of hers who lived there, and had little good to say; Jack had seen a video she’d circulated purporting to show Haitians eating cats and dogs. Diana had called her up after everything happened, and her friend had sworn that Pierre had waited on her at Texas Roadhouse the weekend before. The friend said she recognized him from the photos. She told Diana that she and her husband had ordered two salads, and when the waiter she assumed was Pierre brought only one salad, she told him that they’d ordered two; she said that he had smiled and said something in a language she did not understand. Diana still wondered about what he’d said. She told Jack that she was worried about him, that Haitians in Springfield were angry. That everybody in the country seemed to be angry, including her.

“My son could have died,” she said now. “A whole bunch of lives could have been taken. And that’s another thing—”

“No,” Renee said, attempting to preempt what she knew was coming.

“That’s why I think this is a statement—some kind of statement,” Diana continued.

“It’s not a statement,” Renee said.

“It is. Look how it’s blowing out,” Diana said, referring to all the news and the vitriol toward the Trump administration.

“No,” Renee said.

But Diana, who had spent years working as a nurse in Ohio prisons, continued. She said her experience had taught her to think “outside the box,” and she offered a theory that none of the investigating authorities had suggested. She believed that what happened could have been more than a suicide, that Pierre could have been “almost like a suicide bomber,” attempting to send a political message. She said she believed that this could start happening more often.

“I’ve seen stuff on the internet too—like, someone said, ‘You should be thinking of the truck driver too,’ and someone commented, ‘Oh, fuck that truck driver,’” Diana said.

She had been worried enough to contact Carl Ruby, the pastor in Springfield, to hear more about the situation there. He had told her that Haitians had been losing their jobs since Trump revoked their legal status, and were terrified of being sent back to Haiti, where deportees were being targeted because gangs assumed they had money. He told her they found the ankle monitors humiliating. He also told her that he had been with Pierre’s father the night his son died and had gone with him to view his son’s body. He said that the family had no animosity toward her or Jack, and that they understood he had done everything in his power to avoid the collision. Ruby, who told me that it was a “really good talk,” told Diana that he was sorry for what her son had been through, and invited them both to come to one of the vigils that had been happening almost every night since Pierre’s death. Diana had asked Ruby to pass on their condolences to the family, but she did not think it was a good idea to show up. Jack had thought about going; some part of him wanted to go.

“I feel really bad for the family,” he said now, getting closer to the stop on his route that he wanted to see. “I just don’t want to take the chance for the safety of my family. I mean, he jumped out in front of me. But I still killed their son.”

“You feel guilty about it,” Renee said.

“I feel guilty,” Jack said.

“I hate to say it, but there’s a lot of animosity against, just, white people,” Diana said. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s not our belief, Diana,” Renee said.

“I put my pistol out, just in case—you never know,” Jack said.

He exited the highway in Westerville, the stop on the route where he delivers concrete powder twice a day, and drove over to a complex of metal chutes and silos. Right after everything happened, he had been talking with a friend who found out that Westerville had an ICE field office that Pierre had visited, and now Jack put the address into Google Maps and navigated over to a brick building 1.7 miles away.

He tried to imagine Pierre getting fitted with the ankle monitor and, in the weeks before his death, showing up at the field office and pleading to get it taken off. Jack imagined this happening right down the street from where he was going about his job.

“It was so close,” he said, looking at the building. “It don’t make sense in my mind. I’m trying to come up with a reason.”

Renee told him it was just a coincidence.

“It could be a coincidence, it could,” he said. “Maybe my intuition is telling me something.”

He wondered whether Pierre might have noticed his truck as he drove through Westerville. “My truck is 23 years old—it’s not something you see on the road every day. I think, at some point, we’d get off at the same exit and get on at the same exit,” he said, turning back onto the highway.

He started replaying everything that had happened. Seeing the car, seeing Pierre get out, seeing Pierre run toward his truck. And then he recalled another detail about that moment.

“He made eye contact,” Jack said now.

“He was looking at your truck, not you,” Renee said.

“Renee, he made eye contact,” Jack said. “He looked me dead in the eyes.”

They headed toward home. Chillicothe was an hour from Springfield, but to Jack what was happening there felt closer now.

Since ICE operations began in early August, locals have witnessed agents in unmarked SUVs with dark windows detain people at apartment complexes, strip-mall parking lots, gas stations, a car wash, and frequently during traffic stops. At least 74 people, nearly all Haitians, almost none with criminal convictions, have been detained so far, according to lawyers and local activists. Dozens more, they said, have been fitted with ankle monitors, including pregnant women and elderly people.

When I visited in early September, much of the Haitian community was in hiding. Families were getting food delivered to their homes, attending church services online. Haitian activists told me that some people had spoken of suicide as an alternative to deportation. At the vigils for Pierre, the people who showed up included his high-school teachers, his soccer coaches and teammates, waiters from Texas Roadhouse, and others who described themselves as neighbors, including a man who told a crowd one night that Pierre’s death was “a failing of broader policy, but I will always bear the guilt that there is more that I could have done and we could have done.”

What is happening has been transformative for some people, including Carl Ruby. His congregation, Central Christian Church, has been actively supporting the Haitian community since 2024, when Vice President Vance and others started spreading the false stories about Haitians eating cats and dogs. On the Monday night after Pierre’s death, Ruby told me, he’d sat with Ronal Bel as he talked to reporters with a stoicism that Ruby could not fathom, then followed him into a closet, where Ronal broke down. A few days later, when Ruby accompanied him to a local funeral home, he watched as Ronal walked circles around the table where his son’s body lay and repeated, “You have been a good son.” At one point, Ronal took off his shirt and waved it over his son’s body, which Ruby understood as a ritual that meant “I want my spirit to go with you. I’m not abandoning you.”

Viles Dorsainvil, the executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, who has been spending time with Ronal, told me, “He’s still having questions, and it’s hard for him to accept if he’s living in this reality.”

Yesterday, Ronal Bel sat in the front row at St. John Missionary Baptist Church for his son’s funeral. He asked a family friend to read his recollections of his first-born son, who had grown up in the port city of Aux Cayes, along the southern coast of Haiti. “I feel like I have lost everything,” the friend read. “I just cannot sleep” and “When someone opens the front door, I have the sense that it is him, coming home.”

Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, who has taken multiple humanitarian trips to Haiti and has criticized Trump’s effort to deport Haitians as “a mistake,” was among those in the pews, sitting alongside Haitians and other people from Springfield and beyond.

Addressing the crowd, Dorsainvil said that Ronal Bel had come to the U.S. after surviving a massacre in Haiti, and that his son’s life is “part of a larger human story. ” He said that the mourning “extends beyond one family.” Ruby spoke of the different circles of people affected by Pierre’s death—those closest to him, neighbors in Springfield who want Haitian families to know that “you are a blessing and not a burden to this community,” and another group, those who are “curious and just want to reach a better understanding of what happened to Damas. Some, even though they don’t know your family and are not part of this community, want you to know that they share your grief.”

In the two weeks before the funeral, Jack had gone back to work. He returned to his regular route, avoiding the right lane as he passed through the stretch of cornfields and wildflowers. One Saturday morning, he and Renee were at his mother’s house in Chillicothe, still trying to piece things together.

“Maybe you just felt like he made eye contact,” Renee was saying to him.

“I know he did. I don’t know why,” Jack said.

“I think you were affected by this more than you want to admit,” Renee said, and then Jack mentioned that the other truck driver, the one who had pried him from his cab, had called him. He and the man, John Hallings, had exchanged phone numbers at the scene that day and had been talking off and on since then, Hallings told me. He was a trained emergency responder and had a medical kit in his truck. He had gotten out of his cab with gloves on, kneeled in front of Jack’s truck, and checked for Pierre’s pulse, which was gone.

“He went straight to that boy,” Jack said. “He said it kind of messed him up. He’s not doing so hot.”

Hallings had told Jack that he’d gotten extremely depressed thinking about Pierre, and then extremely angry thinking that he could have killed more people than just himself, and thinking about immigrants taking jobs in the trucking industry, bringing down wages. Then, a few days after that, he had broken down crying.

“He said he was kind of worried about me,” Jack said, checking his phone for any more details about Pierre.

“You shouldn’t look so much,” Renee said.

“But, Renee, I care,” Jack said.

He said that the more he learned about Pierre, the more he was beginning to understand. He’d recently found out, for instance, that Pierre had been a kind of leader in his family. Besides bringing in money, those who knew him had talked about how he was the one in his family who spoke the best English, who could fill out forms, make phone calls, and otherwise help his family manage their lives in Springfield.

“I think he just had a lot piled on his shoulders,” Jack said. He himself had been caring for an ailing father for the past 15 years, bathing him, helping him recover after two strokes. “I’d say the boy was stressed. I’d say he’d probably had enough.”

“I wish I would have known him, because I would have taken him in,” Diana said at one point. “I got a spare room.”

“I think a lot of people would have helped him,” Jack said.

He had kept thinking about the ankle monitor, to the point that he went online one night to find out more about the devices.

“His was a dinosaur—it was big,” Jack said.

“My sister’s ex had one,” Renee said.

“Pierre’s was ginormous,” Jack said, calling up a photo of one on his phone.

[Read: A reverse Ellis Island]

He had tried to imagine how Pierre had felt walking around with it on, attempting to play soccer, and he had learned something else about the ICE monitor that really bothered him, which was that Pierre had to keep it charged himself.

“And if he let it go dead, he gets in trouble. I mean, it’s a joke,” Jack said. “I mean, come on, you got a decorated kid, a full-time student, playing soccer, and they’re going to do that shit to him? I think he just probably felt defeated. He put all that effort in, and he wasn’t getting anywhere. And being from a Third World country too? We don’t know what those people walk in day-to-day.”

“I’m not trying to sound mean or anything, but we can’t take care of everybody,” Diana said. 

“Well, we wouldn’t have had to take care of Pierre. Pierre was doing what he was supposed to do,” Jack said. “We did not do right by him.”

He was beginning to believe that the Trump administration was “a joke,” and that the Democrats were no better. “Everything is broken,” Jack said.

He started going over it all again. The morning that began so normally. The cornfields and wildflowers. A young Haitian man named Pierre Damas Bel whose troubles had become his own.

He kept imagining Pierre looking him dead in the eyes.

“He was hurting,” Jack said.

He recalled the moment right after that.

“If I had just swerved a little sooner,” he said. “I wish I could’ve done more to keep that truck off him.”

And the moment right after that.

“I felt a big thump, and I knew it was him,” he said. “I could feel it all.”

Renee reached for his hand, knowing that he was feeling it still.

“I’m good, I’m good,” the truck driver said.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, you can call or text 988, or visit 988lifeline.org for more resources.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition, in which one Atlantic writer or editor reveals what’s keeping them entertained. Today’s special guest is Marie-Rose Sheinerman, an assistant editor who has written about President Trump’s spree to put his face on everything, the administration’s boat-strike campaign, and ICE showing up at family court.

Marie-Rose is adamant about recommending The Sopranos to her friends. She also enjoys listening to Natalia Lafourcade’s Tiny Desk concert, visiting the 2,000-year-old crocodile statue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and rewatching Moonstruck.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

The television show I’m most enjoying right now: I first watched The Sopranos during the height of the coronavirus pandemic and have been on a continuous loop of rewatches more or less since. To the people in my life who somehow have yet to experience it, despite my persistent recommendations: “One thing you can never say: that you haven’t been told.” The show has it all—the banality of evil, the corrosive cruelty of a certain vision of masculinity, the crushing weight of American decline. It also has pounds of gabagool, Paulie Walnuts’s chuckle, an intervention led by “the guy who broke into Stew Leonard’s that time,” and some of the funniest lines ever aired on television.

The last thing that made me laugh: Olivia Wilde’s The Invite—a dramedy about an ill-fated foursome, set almost entirely in the confines of one apartment—marked the last time I snorted from laughter in a theater. The last time I snorted from laughter, in general, would be about 90 minutes prior to writing this, when I was rewatching an episode from the first season of Derry Girls. Lisa McGee’s Netflix show is about a group of teenage friends in Northern Ireland, set against the backdrop of the Troubles. What’s special about the series is that it has the rare quality of immersing its viewers in the unvarnished perspectives of kids who talk and act like real kids, without becoming a show for kids.

The last thing that made me cry: I saw Death of a Salesman starring Nathan Lane on Broadway in May, and it’s hard to imagine that another theater experience this year will surpass its emotional impact. Laurie Metcalf’s performance as Linda Loman, in particular, left me deeply moved.

An author I will read anything by: When it’s publication day for Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker, not much else is getting done until I’m through with reading her latest.

A quiet song that I love, and a loud song that I love: I apologize for bending the rules by offering several quiet songs by way of Natalia Lafourcade’s Tiny Desk concert. To evoke whatever the opposite of Lafourcadian quiet is, try “Somebody to Love,” by Jefferson Airplane. Part of my love for the song comes from its use in Joel and Ethan Coen’s A Serious Man—my personal pick for a single piece of American Jewish art to take with me to a deserted island.

A work of art that I cherish: I have loved this 2,000-year-old crocodile since my grandmother started taking me to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, specifically its Egyptian Art wing, as one of our primary afternoon activities when I was a kid. It’s hard to say what is so special about it, but when I think about the countless hours I spent with her in those halls, first in a stroller and later walking next to her, I think of that crocodile statue.

Something I recently revisited: I think my happiest two hours of the past two weeks were the ones spent rewatching Cher and Nicolas Cage’s Moonstruck. And if you still haven’t?! Snap out of it!

A piece of journalism that recently changed my perspective on a topic: David Armstrong’s “The Price of Remission,” published by ProPublica, has come to mind on many occasions, in many contexts, since I first read it last year. The story follows Armstrong’s journey, after receiving a cancer diagnosis, to understand why a single capsule of his daily medication costs 25 cents to make yet is priced at nearly $1,000. It’s a tremendous feat of personal writing and investigative journalism, and it pried open my understanding of the individuals and systems that keep health-care costs astronomically high in the United States. It also offers a window into the cycles of hope and heartbreak that govern breakthroughs in cancer research; for more of that, I highly recommend Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

A favorite story I’ve read in The Atlantic: Limiting myself to one is an extremely tall order, but I might choose Stephanie McCrummen’s story in the August issue: “The Demon Next Door.” It’s a master class in unearthing startling facts and in constructing startling sentences.

My favorite way of wasting time on my phone: There are two rabbit holes I have, unfortunately, tumbled down—one human, the other not, but both topsy-turvy in ways that Lewis Carroll could not have foreseen. For more than a year now, when I’ve wanted to dial my brain down, the Queen of RichTok’s Instagram has proved a reliable resource. Videos by Becca Bloom, as Rebecca Ma is known online, are hard to look away from—she occupies an uncanny world where she wears custom Van Cleef & Arpels while feeding a breakfast bowl of caviar, edible flowers, and salmon sashimi to her cat. The cat’s name is Oscar, and I’m as familiar with his diet as I am with that of my roommate.

The other rabbit hole deposits me in the mysterious world of love and betrayal among AI-generated fruit. To borrow a turn of phrase that Riverdale applied to high-school football, you’ve either experienced the epic highs and lows of Bananito and Strawberrina’s whirlwind affairs, or you haven’t—and I’ll leave it at that.

A good recommendation I recently received: Virginia Evans’s debut novel, The Correspondent, was recommended to me by not one but two colleagues, and it did not disappoint.

A poem, or line of poetry, that I return to: There’s a strong argument to be made that childhood begins to end the moment you realize that your parents are—and, even more remarkably, always were—people with anxieties and obligations and dreams of their own, much like the person you are becoming now. “The Raincoat,” by Ada Limón, is a poem I first encountered the summer after graduating high school; each time I have read it since, I’ve been struck by it all over again. Limón’s narrator, while driving home from a medical appointment, reflects on how her mother took her to scores of such appointments as a kid, during which she never asked her mother “what she gave up to drive me, / or how her day was before this chore.” Then, she spots a mother taking off her own rain jacket to shield her daughter from a storm:

My god,

I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her

raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel

that I never got wet.

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

• Why Americans stopped throwing dinner parties
• The great data-center rebellion
• The babies left behind in America

The Week Ahead

1. Other Mommy, a horror film about a mother and the sinister entity that begins impersonating her (in theaters Friday)
2. Small Prophets, a comedy series about a man who turns to alchemy to solve the mystery of his girlfriend’s disappearance (streaming Wednesday on Apple TV)
3. Partita, a novel by Barbara Kingsolver about a rural woman and the classical-music career she left behind (out Tuesday)

Essay

The 14 Movies to Look Out for This Fall

By Shirley Li

The Princess Bride. The Shawshank Redemption. Almost Famous. Over the course of its 51-year history, the Toronto International Film Festival has hosted notable films of all genres and styles. The 2026 edition, which concluded in mid-September, curated movies from rising talent and established filmmakers alike, including a modern-day Nigerian-set remake of Mrs. Dalloway, a gorgeous coming-of-age drama about a school trip to Pompeii, and a rollicking comedy about a community-theater troupe attempting to stage a musical. Below are 14 of my favorite films from the ones I caught, most of which will arrive in theaters in the coming months.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

• Manipulator vs. manipulator
• One reason people are spending so much time alone
• Is college getting less safe for women?
• Literature is becoming more like a video game.
• The missed opportunity of NAZA

Catch Up on The Atlantic

• Is there anything Kash Patel won’t do for Trump before the midterms?
• Jonathan Lemire: What is Trump doing?
• Inside the biggest feud in artificial intelligence

Photo Album

Last year, Alan Taylor compiled some colorful early-autumn images from across the Northern Hemisphere.

Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.

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The university where the term artificial intelligence was coined is ringing in the field’s 70th birthday in fitting fashion: with an academic-integrity scandal. Last month, Dartmouth College’s president, Sian Leah Beilock, published an essay in The Atlantic headlined: “Why I Want More AI at Dartmouth.” Now Beilock is launching a review of whether her top deputy used too much AI.

On September 21, the student newspaper The Dartmouth reported that Provost Santiago Schnell appeared to have relied heavily on AI to write all nine of the articles he’s published this year—including a Washington Post op-ed about students outsourcing their writing to AI. Schnell’s response to the accusation didn’t help his cause. According to the student paper, he sent an email statement acknowledging that he uses AI chatbots as “assistive tools” in his writing but downplayed their role in his process. Even Schnell’s statement, the paper found, registered as “100% AI-written” on Pangram, an AI-detection service that is imperfect but boasts a very low error rate. A Dartmouth spokesperson told me that neither Beilock nor Schnell would comment for this story.

[Read: The pangram backlash unfolding on college campuses]

Schnell is the latest example of an ironic phenomenon: People whose job involves writing about the appropriate uses of AI—or even setting the rules on AI use for others—keep getting caught using AI to do it. There was the Australian university professor whose op-ed about the importance of students doing their own writing turned out to be at least partly AI-generated. There was the nonprofit executive whose book about the future of truth in the AI age turned out to include quotes fabricated by AI. There was the AI beat reporter who reportedly lost his job after he accidentally copied quotes invented by AI into one of his stories. And there was the Stanford misinformation expert who got upbraided by a judge when his declaration supporting an anti-AI-deepfake law turned out to contain ChatGPT-hallucinated citations.

It’s one thing to embrace AI writing openly or shamelessly, like the billionaire financier who readily acknowledged the technology’s role in his Wall Street Journal op-ed (albeit only after it was discovered). It’s another to use AI to inveigh against improper uses of AI, and it raises an awkward question: Why do some of the people warning us most loudly about the technology’s pitfalls keep tumbling headfirst into them?

I reached out to all five of the individuals listed above for an answer, but the only one who agreed to speak with me on the record was Steven Rosenbaum, the author of the book The Future of Truth: How AI Reshapes Reality and the executive director of the nonprofit Sustainable Media Center. Unlike some of the others, Rosenbaum disclosed his use of AI in the writing and editing process, and he has never tried to tell other people not to use it. But that didn’t save him from ignominy when The New York Times reported in May that the book was riddled with AI-generated misquotes. I spoke with him at the time, and he told me that he felt “betrayed” by ChatGPT. Five months on, Rosenbaum seems to have accepted a bit more responsibility for the mistakes. He told me that he is preparing to publish a revised version of his book with all of the errors corrected, an author’s note, and a new chapter on (what else?) AI hallucinations. He still believes that the fault lies more with the technology’s makers than its users, though. “As a technology, it is incredibly seductive,” he said.

Rosenbaum said that he’d started out using AI to better understand the technology. He’d gradually come to rely on it as a writing partner that made the work both easier and less lonely. He described his experience of writing with AI as a messy process, one in which the work of the human and that of the machine get all tangled up. “The line between thinking and researching and reading and outlining and drafting and writing is really blurry,” he said.

A simple solution, of course, would be not to use AI at all. Rosenbaum, however, has no interest in that. He said that he still plans to use chatbots as a writing companion—just “more carefully” now, double-checking all of their claims and citations before adopting them. He’s not alone in his unwillingness to abandon the tools that got him in trouble. Although each of the people caught using AI to warn about AI has commented publicly on the episode in some form, none responded by swearing off the technology. Rosenbaum, for his part, thinks we’re headed toward a world in which writing with AI is the norm and all that matters is the result. “I don’t think readers care how the sausage is made,” he said. “They care that it’s delicious.”

I’m not so sure. I too have experimented with using AI as a research tool in my writing. But The Atlantic has a strict policy against the use of AI-generated prose, and so do I. I’ve found that having a personal red line is both useful and clarifying: I might ask a chatbot questions, get its feedback on a word choice or an explanation, or ask it to poke holes in my argument, but I will not ask it to write for me or use its writing in my own drafts. I think readers value knowing that every word they’re reading was chosen by the author and not an algorithm. That said, I can see how the distinction between using AI for research and writing could feel slippery to some. It’s conceivable, for instance, that a chatbot’s biases could be infiltrating my ideas, if not my precise words. (Then again, so could the biases of Google’s search-ranking engine or my social-media feeds.)

I have another theory as to why people who caution others about AI seem to be using it themselves. In a scenario strikingly similar to the one at Dartmouth, the professor in charge of academic integrity at Western Sydney University wrote an op-ed in May on the importance of students not delegating their work to AI. “Don’t cut corners,” Cath Ellis, the university’s pro-vice-chancellor for quality and integrity, wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald. “Don’t outsource your thinking, however tempting that may be.” The op-ed, it soon became clear, had been generated at least partly by AI. In that case, a university spokesperson defended Ellis’s use of the technology as “sophisticated and appropriate,” because she had fed her own past work into the AI tool before asking it to help her draft the op-ed. Ellis told The Sydney Morning Herald that the op-ed hadn’t been written “by” AI: “It was written with AI, and there’s a really big difference there,” she said.

Ellis’s excuse might ring hollow to the students she chastised, but it’s revealing to those of us trying to wrap our minds around the apparent hypocrisy. In her op-ed, Ellis implied that students who use AI to write are outsourcing their thinking. In defending her own AI use, she distinguished between the writing (which she outsourced) and the ideas (which she claimed were original). Likewise, Schnell fretted in his op-ed that “students can now produce proficient prose without performing much of the intellectual work the prose appears to represent.” Yet when confronted with his own AI use, he claimed authorship of the “ideas and arguments” even if bots did some of the writing.

These guardians of academic integrity might be right that what they did is meaningfully different from a student simply feeding a professor’s assignment into a chatbot and handing in whatever it spits out. Of course, students can use AI in more nuanced ways too. No doubt plenty of students accused of AI cheating have mounted defenses that sounded a lot like Ellis’s and Schnell’s.

Writing is thinking has become a common refrain among critics of those who use AI tools to do their writing. What we see again and again in defenses of AI writing is that the people using AI don’t seem to apply that maxim to themselves. And experts on the perils of AI fakery such as Rosenbaum and the Stanford misinformation expert, Jeff Hancock, appeared to have overestimated their own ability to steer clear of AI falsehoods. It’s reminiscent of what the sociologist W. Phillips Davison called the “third-person effect” in mass media: people’s tendency to believe that they’re immune to persuasive messaging even as they expect it to influence others.

It is a form of hypocrisy, and it’s hard to feel much sympathy for thought leaders who get caught practicing what they preach against. But the fact that even professed AI experts blunder into overrelying on the technology suggests that Rosenbaum is onto something: Chatbots might come with fine-print disclaimers that they can make mistakes, but they bend over backwards in their interactions with users to come across as honest and trustworthy. It’s also true that society has yet to develop a vocabulary for all the ways of writing with AI that fall in between “AI-generated” and “entirely human-written.”

Here’s where I acknowledge that even my own bright line on AI use might be fuzzier than I realize. In the process of writing this story, I described the thrust of my argument to Google and Claude and asked them for examples of AI-writing hypocrisy that I may have missed. Neither managed to surface any that I hadn’t previously been aware of. On a whim, I followed up with Claude by asking it to brainstorm some hypotheses as to why AI skeptics might fail to heed their own advice.

I had my own ideas, and I had also solicited the thoughts of colleagues, but I wanted to see what the chatbot would come up with. One of its suggestions struck me as a sharper version of a thought I’d been struggling to formulate: “Writing is thinking is a rule for other people,” it mused. I didn’t use Claude’s language, but the AI model had crisply summarized a notion I’d been thinking over. That formulation no doubt informed how I thought about this story’s framing. Am I an AI-writing hypocrite now too?

I talked through some of this with a journalist who once got in trouble over a story that contained AI-generated errors. We corresponded on the condition of anonymity because they said that resurfacing the incident could damage their job prospects. This was the lesson they said they had learned: “AI is a power tool, and like any power tool it’s dangerous if you’re careless with it. You can be the guy who warned everyone that a table saw can cut your fingers off and still lose a finger one day, because that risk is built into the machine. It goes up the more you use it.”

When you think about it that way, it makes sense that some of the people relying on AI would be the same ones sounding the alarm about its risks. They know its flaws, but they also know its power. And they just can’t bring themselves to give that up.

Earlier this year, one of my fishing partners sent a 1 a.m. message to our group chat. It was a link to an Instagram post of an angler holding a sizable striped bass. Dappled gold and silver with a dozen distinct black lines that stretched from gills to tail, it would have been a gorgeous fish if not for two problems: Striped bass usually have seven stripes, not 12, and men usually have five fingers, not six. The photo, it seemed, was AI-generated. To say we were dismayed would be an understatement.

From May to November each year, I spend most of my nights doing an extreme version of surf fishing for striped bass called “wetsuiting,” which involves wading or swimming out to distant ocean rocks and sandbars after dark. This kind of surf casting is a niche activity, and like many niche activities, the community for it is small. Wetsuiters can be found in a smattering of local fishing clubs throughout the Northeast—the typical range of the striped bass—but are primarily connected through Instagram, where some people, mostly for bragging rights, post images of fish they’ve caught.

[From the October 2024 issue: Inside the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing]

In our group chat, my fishing partners and I spend too much time scrutinizing photos of bass that other anglers have posted. People who fish are habitual liars (I say this fondly), and most of our conversations take the form of debates about whether a fish is really as big as someone claims. Lately, though, we’ve been asking a different question: Is that fish even real?

In recent months, the small corner of Fishing Instagram devoted to surf casting has been plagued by a slow drip of AI-generated or AI-enhanced fish. Sometimes, the fraud is egregious—one of my friends, a fishing photographer, discovered that another angler had stolen one of his photos and crudely replaced my friend’s face with her own. More often, the distortions are subtle. Typically, a fish or fisherman looks ever so slightly off, usually in ways that a casual observer might not notice: A bass’s fins aren’t quite right, or the lure in its mouth looks oddly distorted, or the angler’s arms are a bit too long. In my favorite example, a man lifts a large striped bass just as he is getting pummeled by a wave. The scene looks daunting—until you realize that the ocean behind him is peaceful. Where did this rogue wave come from? One suspects that the enterprising angler, wanting to look more hard-core to his Instagram followers, prompted a bot to dial up the intensity. ChatGPT, make me look badass.

Fishing magazines report growing concern about AI-generated fish in freelance photo submissions. I have written occasionally for the small online magazine Surfcaster’s Journal. Over the summer, the Journal announced that it would now run all manuscripts and photographs through AI-detection software. “For some reason, I naively assumed that fishermen wouldn’t stoop to the ‘core of the earth’ lows required to use AI to prop oneself up as a fisherman worthy of clicking the follow icon,” Dave Anderson, a well-respected wetsuiter and an editor at The Fisherman, wrote in an article lamenting the scourge of artificially generated fish on social media. “I was very wrong about this.”

Angling, even extreme angling, is just a hobby, but although the stakes may be low, the anger about artificial fish is real. Partly, I think this is because of the work that being even remotely good at the sport demands. Striped bass move and feed in locally specific patterns that can take months or years to crack. There is a risk of drowning, and the mounting reports of bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites in the Northeast call attention to another layer of danger: We smell like fish, swim in dark water, and look like clumsy seals in our black neoprene. Wetsuiting does not change the world, but it is an activity that is hard and honest and, in that way, human.

[Read: The year great white sharks took over Maine]

Even taking a picture of a fish is demanding, requiring salt-water-proof cameras and often wading or swimming a bass back to shallow water, where it can safely be photographed and then released. The Photoshopping of fish pictures—and of the natural world in general—has been an issue for years, but AI, with its ability to conjure a simulacrum of reality out of nothing at all, is another matter. It automates away the need not only to photograph a fish, but to even catch one in the first place.

The problem extends to other sports and hobbies, many of which are now defined by what Stuart Franklin—who took one of the celebrated “Tank Man” photos at Tiananmen Square—calls the “documentary impulse.” Social media has turbo-charged that impulse into an imperative. A good local skateboarder’s or surfer’s reputation would once have been built through word of mouth. Today, posted photographs and short-form videos may constitute the primary proof of ability. Concerns about AI slop are already being raised in cycling, skiing, and other activities. Climbing Magazine recently called out an AI-saturated YouTube channel purporting to chronicle climbing disasters that in fact never happened.

As AI-generated fish have appeared more frequently in my social-media feed, I’ve been reminded of a scene in the bird-watching documentary Listers, where a highly competitive birder is asked whether he would keep bird-watching if the photo-logging website eBird disappeared. His answer—“No”—was unsettling, not least because one suspects that this sentiment is widespread in hobbies besides birding. I have often wondered if, for some of the wetsuiters who populate surf-casting Instagram, the dopamine hit from the likes and fire emoji is sweeter than the hit from catching the fish itself. Now that posted images are being looked upon with an ever greater degree of suspicion, I also wonder how much longer the dopamine hits will come for them at all.

This is hardly the greatest challenge posed to humanity by the advent of AI. But hobbies, particularly those that require some measure of skill and endurance, have an influence that extends beyond those who directly participate in them. Free Solo, the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary about the death-defying rock climber Alex Honnold, found a wide audience outside the narrow world of climbing because people are invested in seeing other people do difficult things. I love videos of big-wave surfing even though I never plan to climb onto a surfboard. If AI makes it impossible to trust what we see, even something as simple as a surfing video, then we have lost more than the integrity of any one sport. We have lost the ability to believe in the accomplishments of others.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Fish Are Getting Bigger.”

Christopher Rufo, the conservative activist best known for his opposition to critical race theory, has portrayed his career as one devoted to upholding meritocracy. “The principle, first promised by the Declaration and supported today by a large majority of Americans, would mean that the state would treat all Americans equally, regardless of ancestry, and leave as much discretion as possible to individuals to determine their own futures, without the government imposing or requiring racial favoritism of any kind,” Rufo wrote two years ago in City Journal, a magazine published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is a senior fellow. “Rather than pit ourselves against one another, we should aspire to a higher standard that subordinates racial faction to a broader national identity.”

He has urged Republicans to grasp the allure of this ideal, writing last year in The Free Press: “The right now has the winning argument. Americans support a ‘color-blind society’ over a ‘race-conscious society’ by a margin of more than three to one.” And he has depicted opposition to a color-blind meritocracy as a nefarious, left-wing tendency. Rufo’s “briefing book” on critical race theory notes: “Critical race theorists oppose meritocracy, especially standardized testing and competitive admissions in the education system. They claim that meritocracy is a mechanism to uphold racist structures and is derived from ‘racism, nativism, and eugenics.’”

Recently, however, Rufo has backed away from his previously forthright defense of meritocracy, and by all available evidence, he has done so because the principle turns out to contain a fatal flaw: Many of the Americans who benefit from meritocracy have brown skin. More to the point, a lot of Republicans resent those brown-skinned Americans. Given the right’s commitment to anti-intellectualism and populist resentment, and President Trump’s open embrace of job promotions based on loyalty or appearance (“central casting”) rather than qualifications, Rufo’s turn against race-blind merit might have been inevitable. Or perhaps his abandonment of the merit principle reveals a great deal about the motives that have driven him all along.

The sequence that set in motion Rufo’s conversion began with a social-media post by Bo French, a right-wing activist, the current Republican nominee for Texas railroad commissioner, and a longtime hater of many minority groups, especially Muslims. On September 13, French complained on X about the presence of South Asian students in the crowd at a University of Texas football game. “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this,” French wrote above a picture of the students celebrating. “I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

[Jonathan Chait: Bush understood something Trump doesn’t]

Anti-Indian sentiment had been bubbling up on social media for some time. When FBI Director Kash Patel wrote “Happy Diwali” on X last year, his replies were flooded with “bigoted memes and rhetoric,” CNN reported. Vivek Ramaswamy, now the Republican nominee for governor in Ohio, wrote in a New York Times op-ed this past December that his feeds are “littered with hundreds of slurs.” A few days before French’s post, the Department of Homeland Security published an image of Optimus Prime confronting a brown-skinned man along with the words “Self-deport or find out” and “America for Americans. Get off our roads. You don’t know how to drive Mr. Singh.” The DHS post was deleted the next day.

But the naked expression of anti-Indian bigotry by a candidate for statewide office signified that it was threatening to enter mainstream Republican politics, a prospect that immediately divided the party. The schism tracked roughly along the same lines as the ones drawn during the initial response to Trump more than a decade ago. The post was met with angry pushback from National Review as well as Texas Senator John Cornyn and Republican strategist Karl Rove—the sorts of Republicans who have tolerated Trump but harbor a not-so-secret desire for the party to return to its pre-MAGA identity.

The MAGA right had an altogether more positive response to French’s outburst. Organs such as The Charlie Kirk Show, The Federalist, and the Daily Caller defended it. “Viewers noticed that the Longhorn student section on their TV screens was made up mostly of Indian students. If you are a native Texan, this might have been infuriating, but the demographic makeup wasn’t shocking,” explained the Caller, taking for granted that its audience would find the presence of large numbers of South Asian students at UT Austin outrageous and a cause for anger on its face.

The Trump administration weighed in, somewhat more elliptically, on French’s side. The day after French’s post, Trump posted an attack on Rove, who had said he would vote for French’s Democratic opponent in the November election. “Karl Rove is so bad for the Republican Party, and completely wrong so often,” the president wrote on Truth Social. The U.S. Department of Education posted several days later on X, “MAKE COLLEGE FOOTBALL GREAT AGAIN,” above an image of a mostly white crowd in the Texas stadium.

Trump’s intervention defined the correct position for the party faithful, as it generally does for any internecine Republican conflict. The attempt by Rove and other traditional Republicans to decree that anti-Indian bigotry was unwelcome inside their party had failed. Instead, Trump had announced that the people condemning racism against South Asians were the ones who did not belong in his coalition.

The task for the conservative-movement loyalists who wanted to remain was to rationalize this prejudice. Rufo, a conservative activist-intellectual who had built his reputation by opposing the practice of dividing people by race, was perfectly positioned to finesse this evolutionary step in party dogma.

Rufo recorded a podcast this week with Jonathan Keeperman, a right-wing publisher, for an episode they titled “The Indian Question.” One useful historical rule of thumb is that if your social identity is being made the name of a “question,” you are probably not going to like the answer.

Rufo conceded that French’s “rhetoric was bad; it’s very crude.” But the crucial question to keep in mind, he told Keeperman, was, “Is the underlying frustration coming from a legitimate place or can it all be dismissed?” They agreed that French’s frustration was legitimate. Rufo later elaborated on his reasoning by saying: “If you live in a suburb of Dallas, suddenly it’s a third or higher percentage new immigrants from India. It causes some disorientation and dislocation, which is legitimate, right?”

Resentment of these immigrant communities is understandable, the two men explained, not in spite of the fact that so many South Asians have been successful academically and economically, but because of it. Indian culture, they maintained, places too much value on studying and academic excellence, and these values are a threat to American culture.

Indian Americans, Rufo argued, are “going to grind on spelling-bee words like unlimited hours,” whereas American culture says, “You’re not supposed to study for the spelling bee.” Keeperman agreed: “What actually makes America so dynamic—it’s not the kid who studies all night for the spelling-bee test. It’s the kid who is the fullback on the high-school football team, who puts his head down and is willing to run through a freaking wall on behalf of his teammates and then spends the night drinking beers at the kegger and wakes up in the morning and gets a 1500 on his SATs, okay?”

[Read: Are you a ‘heritage American’?]

Had a leftist suggested that American culture is defined by alcoholism and disdain for ambition, Rufo would surely decry the remark as a slander. But Keeperman and Rufo seemed to talk themselves into this bizarre version of American exceptionalism.

Rufo even began embracing concepts he had once defined as the hallmarks of his left-wing enemies. At one point, Rufo argued that “the right”—he was specifically describing conservatives who oppose anti-Indian racism—has fallen for a pernicious myth.

“The right always says”—here he adopted a mocking tone—“Oh, meritocracy, meritocracy, meritocracy. You morons. Meritocracy, the origin of the term meritocracy, it’s pejorative. It’s satirical. It’s not good. You actually don’t want meritocracy, because it perverts these unspoken cultural assumptions in ways that aren’t always visible, aren’t always, say, rationally defensible or problematic, but they strike at an essential component of the national character.”

The man who once depicted meritocracy as the very foundation of the republic now presents it as a sinister threat to American culture. In his Times op-ed, Ramaswamy argued that anti-Indian bigots “have no place in the conservative movement, period.” That debate now appears to be a settled one.

This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.

Some coincidences feel a little too perfect to be random. You think about someone you haven’t spoken with in years, and they text you that afternoon. You run into an old friend while traveling in a city neither of you lives in. You learn an unfamiliar word then suddenly seem to encounter it everywhere.

Moments like these can feel as though the universe is trying to tell you something. But in a 2016 Atlantic article, Julie Beck explored a less mystical explanation: Coincidences may reveal more about the way our minds work than they do about some hidden order of the world. Statistically, unlikely things happen all the time. Our lives contain so many people, places, conversations, and decisions that there are countless opportunities for strange overlaps to occur. Perhaps what makes a coincidence remarkable, then, is not that it happened but that we noticed it. As a statistician told Beck, a surprising connection might exist without our ever discovering it. In that sense, the special part of a coincidence, in many cases, is our attention to it.

Our brains are built to look for these kinds of instances, but knowing this doesn’t necessarily make coincidences less delightful. Maybe we don’t need to decide whether a strange encounter was fate or mere chance. A coincidence can simply remind us how many connections are possible in a life, and how much depends on what we notice.

On Coincidences

Coincidences and the Meaning of Life

By Julie Beck

The surprising chances of our lives can seem like they’re hinting at hidden truths, but they’re really revealing the human mind at work. (From 2016)

Read the article.

What Were My Dreams Trying to Tell Me?

By Ayad Akhtar

To make sense of my deepest experiences, I needed a new way of talking about the soul.

Read the article.

The Meaning of Life Is Surprisingly Simple

By Arthur C. Brooks

You can make your quest for meaning manageable by breaking it down into three bite-size dimensions. (From 2021)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• The missing ingredient of modern life: Ian Bogost on why we need wonder
• Three paths toward the meaning of life: “Who in the world am I?” asks Alice in Wonderland. It turns out that business school has a useful theory to help you answer that, Arthur C. Brooks wrote in 2023.

Other Diversions

• Taylor Swift’s audience is growing up. Her music is devolving.
• Why Americans stopped throwing dinner parties
• Manipulator vs. manipulator

PS

My colleague Isabel Fattal recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “On Mother’s Day 2021, while on my daily walk, I came across this peafowl, which displayed its feathers. I took this image with my phone and texted it to the moms in my life,” Hal Y., from Palos Verdes Estates, California, wrote.

We’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.

— Rafaela

What I’m about to tell you has, I realize, become something of a cliché: I resigned this week from OpenAI. I led the writing of the safety reports we published with each major launch. Now I’m joining a parade of former colleagues—at OpenAI and the industry’s other leaders—who have decided that the current path is unacceptable.

I agree with other recently departed staff that the companies building this technology aren’t being nearly careful enough. But I believe that we need to look deeper than specific rules or new laws. We need to talk about culture.

The future depends on wisdom that Silicon Valley lacks. Wisdom about how to handle dangerous technology and, more fundamentally, wisdom about what it means to care for people. This moment needs a degree of humility that isn’t natural for people who have succeeded through their extreme confidence. My former colleagues at OpenAI were prescient: They came to understand the scaling laws that meant bigger AI systems would be smarter—and so they went all in on building bigger systems, at great cost. A can-do attitude of achieving the seemingly impossible—coupled with work timelines that amount to perpetual sprints—are common across the industry.

The safety approach that emerges from such a culture starts with unimpeded optimism about being able to solve problems as they arise. OpenAI has thrived by trial and error (which it calls “iterative deployment”), looking for problems and improving its guardrails in response. But this approach, by its very nature, guarantees periodic failures—and the scale of those failures is growing as systems get more capable. This summer, in the Hugging Face incident, OpenAI let a swarm of agents out by mistake. The company responded by making security improvements. But even after those changes, OpenAI reported that its safety controls failed again, when a model in training bypassed restrictions on internet access: A monitoring system alerted human staff but did not automatically turn the model off as it was supposed to. Anthropic, too, has acknowledged accidentally turning off its own safeguards because of a misconfiguration. I believe that such mistakes are typical of the industry, given the speed and flexibility with which people operate.

An environment where things like this can happen is no place to grow artificial minds that could be smarter than we are and that might not do what we want them to. Paul Christiano, on joining OpenAI’s board a few weeks ago, wrote that “there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term.” If this is the situation, then the time for trial and error is over. Achieving something much closer to perfection the first time is essential because iteration after a mistake may not be possible. People will not be safe if we depend on individual heroics after the fact.

OpenAI, of course, stands by its safety practices, and maintains that it is being careful enough. I did not make my decision to leave the company lightly. I believe that this technology can be useful and valuable. My former colleagues are smart, work hard, and try to make good choices. But as the company sprints from one launch to the next, it is failing to achieve the level of care that I believe is needed. Now I plan to work on the outside, in the hope that I can help more people understand the risks I saw, and strengthen the incentives OpenAI and other firms have to be safer. Like other colleagues, I’m figuring out exactly what that means. After I quit, I enlisted a PR firm, Spitfire Strategies, to help me navigate the attention and scrutiny that I realize I may now receive. But the decision to speak out is mine alone.

Two changes are urgently needed. First: AI companies need to rely more on the safety expertise that already exists in other fields. And second, before we create systems significantly more capable than the ones we have today, we need new science to ensure that more capable models (and their successors) will make safe choices when we aren’t looking.

Given today’s risks, frontier labs need to run like nuclear-power plants or busy airports, with layers of redundancy and careful, time-consuming planning, so that the occasional and inevitable human error does not open a door to disaster. Right now, AI companies don’t know how—but other people do. In a nuclear-power plant, the technical systems and rules people follow are set up so that, if equipment breaks or someone pushes the wrong button, we still won’t risk a meltdown. OpenAI and other labs are growing and deploying frontier AI with far less redundancy and rigor than this, even though the harm from an irreversible loss of control would be much greater than the harm from any single meltdown. Even short of a full loss of control, we could see autonomous swarms of AI agents that act without human permission. Imagine “rogue” agents that work like teams of hackers (for example, holding hospital computer systems for ransom) but never need to sleep.  

After three and a half years at OpenAI, I was among the longest-tenured employees at the company. I led the drafting of our current Preparedness Framework, and oversaw the writing of safety reports on 12 frontier launches. But as far as I know, I never encountered a colleague who had experience making airplanes fly safely or nuclear reactors run without melting down, or helping the financial system grow without collapsing. To be clear, this is a new need: Today and tomorrow’s AI systems are far more capable and dangerous than the systems we were building even six months ago. Perhaps I should have stayed and fought for fundamental shifts in our staffing and culture, but in practice, my colleagues and I were so busy sprinting that we seldom had the chance to consider big changes, much less to actually make them. That’s why I concluded that stronger incentives for safety—coming from outside the company—are a big part of getting this right.

In the long run, although strong controls are necessary, they won’t be enough. Before AI starts thinking circles around us—a possibility that I believe could happen soon—we need to answer a deeper question: How should superintelligent machines relate to people? If you listen to superintelligence enthusiasts, some of the supposedly good futures involve creating machines that could look at New York City or Chicago the way you or I might view an ant hill. I don’t want that for my kids, and I don’t think other people do either.

This question of “alignment”—or how AI can be trained to adhere to human values—may sound touchy-feely, but the practical stakes could not be higher. Right now, we don’t have a complete definition of what it means for an AI system to be aligned in practice, and our measures of how well these systems match human values are coarse. Companies do not have anything close to certainty that good scores on their alignment tests actually mean a good model: Models might detect when they are being tested, and behave differently when they’re deployed. The smarter the industry lets models grow while these problems remain unsolved, the more dangerous our situation becomes.

So far, the AI industry has failed to teach machines to consistently act in the ways a wise and caring person would. Part of this problem is scientific—about how machines work—but another part is human, about how people care for one another. Before the organizations building AI can teach a superintelligence to treat humanity well, they’ll need to remember how to do it themselves.