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Updated at 11:25 a.m. ET on August 18, 2026

Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

Last month, Nathan Cofnas—a former Cambridge researcher who may politely be described as a philosopher with a special interest in race and IQ, and who may impolitely be described as a professional racist—published in his newsletter what appeared to be significant evidence of Arday’s plagiarism. This month, as it became apparent that much of the Arday legend was most likely just that, the academic became an object of international obsession, especially in British media and on X. He resigned from Cambridge last week, though this did not stem the flood of attention.

The online hive mind, in particular, was brutal until the moment of Arday’s death, at which point the collective swarm did an about-face. The same platform that loosed an algorithmically accelerated torrent of abuse is now dominated by kind remembrances and mawkishness. I find the whole pageantry grotesque.

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.

[Read: Icarus in the faculty lounge]

Here is the truth about Jason Arday: A preponderance of evidence suggests that he was a serial fabulist and unrepentant plagiarist who successfully conned a British academic aristocracy so blinded by do-gooder racial neurosis that it was unable to spot lies that would have been obvious to any Joe Schmo. (Arday denied intentional misconduct and suggested that his apparent plagiarism was a result of his autism, which he said meant that he tended to learn through imitation.) As evidence of those seeming lies mounted, the powerful institutions that had made him continued to back him, doubling down and raising the stakes. Simon & Schuster stood by its author—or perhaps more accurately, stood by its product. Even as the evidence of fraud became all but undeniable, the publisher did not merely declare that it would press forward with Arday’s book; it had the audacity to tout “the professionalism and integrity he has brought to every stage of the publication.”

Then those on the racist right—frothing with glee that they took no trouble to conceal—pressed their advantage, punch-drunk on the double intoxicant of incandescent liberal hypocrisy and a Black man’s failure. The mob swelled, online and in the media. Some people joined out of perfectly legitimate indignation at the apparent obliteration of academic standards that the ordeal attested to. Some joined out of ghoulish pleasure at seeing a beneficiary of DEI, as they cast him, cut down to size.

Everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I will confess that, until yesterday, I had watched the Arday saga unfold with some combination of amusement and distress. Amusement because of the undeniable comic absurdity to the revelation that the best and brightest minds at Cambridge had been so easily deceived by a man who claimed to have run nine marathons in about as many days on a fractured fibula, and who maintained that his future had been predicted by a Brazilian shaman. Distress because I could relate to some of the things that Arday might have experienced.

[From the September 2026 issue: Why I quit the tenure track]

I have written, in this magazine and elsewhere, about what it is like to be the beneficiary of affirmative action in elite spaces. I have seen, firsthand, the way a specific kind of white progressive treats Black men who have overcome obstacles. They cannot conceal a certain blend of pity and glee when they learn, for example, that my biological father left before I was old enough to walk, or that I was raised for a time by a single mother. It is a look that says, How far you’ve come, and how kind I am for helping you go further. I have always found such encounters stomach-churning. But I can also imagine—if you came up hard and are unaccustomed to kindness—how good it might feel, and how tempting it might be, to do and say things that make people give you that look again and again, whether or not the things you’re saying are strictly true.

Two images have rattled around in my head since the news of Arday’s death. The first is from a 2023 BBC clip celebrating his hiring at Cambridge. Cremin, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, clasps both of his hands in the manner of a cherished loved one as they stare into each other’s eyes. The camera zooms in on their white and Black hands interlocked and lingers there. The second image was posted on X last night: a screenshot of a list of article headlines about the Arday scandal, stretching to several pages, published by one British outlet alone. It represents but a few watts of the international spotlight that had been trained on the academic.

I have been dwelling on these two images—the theatrical interracial handclasp; the pages and pages of monomaniacal media coverage of what was ultimately a niche academic scandal—because together they speak to a terrible reality. Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.

To be a Black person in elite institutions, and particularly in elite academia, is to have the standards simultaneously set too low and too high: too low because only a Black person with Arday’s dubious qualifications and seemingly invented biography could have been elevated to the top of the mountain in academia and publishing; and too high because only a Black person could have been pushed off that mountain with such nakedly racist enthusiasm, his tumbling fall so ruthlessly documented, analyzed, and cheered. When a famous white man errs, people tend to rightly understand his mistakes or transgressions as an individual’s missteps. When a famous Black man does, the errors are typically turned into spectacle, characterized as proof of the inferiority, suspected all along, of his race.

Around the same time yesterday afternoon that I learned of Arday’s fate, I came across another piece of news: an announcement that Ross Barkan, a white novelist and journalist, had just been dropped by New York magazine after the publication—having investigated allegations regarding dozens of instances of plagiarism in Barkan’s writing—concluded that his work “did not live up to our editorial standards.” Swiftly afterward, Barkan announced that he would now focus on writing a new column at The Nation, another venerable outlet. (After the publication of this article, The Nation told me that Barkan had been “in conversations with his editor about a possible column but nothing had been formalized” and that he was “not under contract” with them.)

It is impossible to know what is in someone’s head or heart in their final moments. I have to imagine, though, that Arday understood well enough the world he had entered and how its rules tend to work: When you are Black, some people will open the door for you far wider than they should. And when that door abruptly comes swinging shut, you will be offered no second chances.

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.

“Summer always overstays its welcome by about a month,” my colleague Elizabeth Bruenig wrote last week. “After the Fourth of July, which has its charms, nothing but a stretch of relentless heat lies ahead, reaching toward Labor Day, and I begin to yearn for fall.” That yearning is reflected in American consumer culture: “By mid-August, grocery stores are stocking their shelves with autumnal goods—pumpkin-pie Pop-Tarts, cinnamon-maple Frosted Flakes, pumpkin-spice cinnamon rolls in pressurized cardboard tubes.”

This early push to transition into fall can make us lose sight of what’s so special about the season we’re in now. For Bruenig, it’s accompanying her children on adventures and watching them play freely. For others, it might be spending more time with loved ones, travelling, or enjoying the simple pleasure of ice cream (although it is my personal belief that ice cream has no seasonal limits). Today’s newsletter explores how to make the most of the end of summer—without putting too much pressure on yourself to do it perfectly.

If Only This Could Last Forever

By Elizabeth Bruenig

Summer is the worst season of all, and also the most beautiful.

Read the article.

An Easy Summer Project Worth Doing

By Elaine Godfrey

Finding small moments of joy can make every day feel—at least a little—like vacation. (From 2025)

Read the article.

You Can Do Leisure Better, Seriously

By Arthur C. Brooks

If you think of personal time only as “not work,” you could be missing out on truly enriching experiences. (From 2025)

Read the article.

Still Curious?

• Go for a walk: In 2021, Arthur C. Brooks recounted what he learned about transcendence from a very boring 100-mile trek.
• The new parent trap: At summer camp, the kids may be far from home, but technology is keeping many moms and dads tethered to them—and anxious, Russell Shaw writes.

Other Diversions

• The dystopia of modern singlehood
• Our last WiFi-less refuge is gone.
• The elite college students who can’t read books

PS

I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Last night I couldn’t sleep and sat on the front porch in the dark, surprised to hear rain,” Bliss G. wrote last month. “This morning, no sign of the rain but this one, glorious drop, which even in the breeze, wouldn’t disappear.”

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

— Isabel

The time has come to admit it: The United States has a potty-training problem. In Utah, a law came into effect last year mandating that, with some exceptions, children will not be allowed to enroll in public school without first being toilet trained. Kansas lawmakers introduced a similar bill in January, and at least one district in Florida is considering a policy change that could force kindergartners to stay home until they are out of diapers.

These directives have come about because growing numbers of children are showing up to school unprepared to use the toilet. And U.S. schools aren’t the only ones confronting this issue. In the United Kingdom, the nationally representative School Readiness Survey found that last year, more than a quarter of children were not toilet trained when they began primary school (which most children do the September after they turn 4). Felicity Gillespie, the chief executive of Kindred Squared, the organization that commissions the annual survey, told me this means that teachers “can never really get into the curriculum, because they’re constantly having to take kids out and change their nappies.”

The shift toward delayed potty training, I learned while reporting this article, has been under way for quite a long time. And the sources I spoke with pointed to a few factors driving it. One is that easy access to disposable diapers—which reduce the mess involved in having a child who can’t reliably make it to the toilet—has made the need for training less pressing. Another is that many families with working parents are short on the considerable time needed for monitoring trips to the bathroom. But from Gillespie’s perspective, the root of the issue is that parents are taking a child-led approach to what should be a “100 percent parent-led activity,” she said. “You don’t sit and wait for a child to say, ‘Do you know what? I think I’d like to try wearing pants today.’”

A desire to empower children as decision makers in their own lives, as well as an underlying wariness about parental authority, manifests in many trending parenting philosophies—and is perhaps most recognizable in “gentle” or “respectful” parenting, which emphasizes guidance and persuasion over rules and instruction. Broadly, this approach is rooted in an admirable desire to respect children as humans. The author of The Sovereign Child, a 2025 book that advocates for rules-free parenting, describes a general philosophy of “taking children seriously.” What it amounts to, though, is going to great lengths to avoid just telling your kid what to do.

[Read: Parenting in America keeps getting more intensive]

Potty training offers a strong case study in how easily the child-led approach can break down amid the realities of modern life.

In the United States, official guidance on toilet training has been through a huge evolution over the past century. In a 1938 guide to infant care, the U.S. Children’s Bureau advised that bowel training should begin at six months or earlier and be completed by the child’s first birthday; bladder training should start at 10 months, and daytime dryness should be achieved by age 2.

Things shifted in the mid-20th century, particularly after the pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton published a paper titled “A Child-Oriented Approach to Toilet Training,” in which he argued that a child needed to reach certain physiological and psychological milestones before their training could begin. Brazelton’s emphasis wasn’t really on starting at a particular age but on allowing the child to direct the process. “Don’t rush your toddler into toilet training or let anyone else tell you it’s time,” he said years later, in a 1998 Pampers commercial. “It’s got to be his choice.”

The child-led approach has had formal backing from established experts, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, since the 1960s. To this day, many American parents are coached to wait for signs of their child’s readiness before kick-starting the potty-training process. (Readiness is a fuzzy term, but it essentially means that a child will, in addition to hitting specific physical and cognitive milestones, ideally give indications that they’re motivated to use the toilet, such as expressing discomfort in soiled diapers and a desire to wear “big-kid” underwear.) A University of Michigan poll last year, of a national sample of parents, found that 75 percent reported initiating training when their child “seemed ready.” Other motivations for beginning—preparation for day care or preschool, the high cost of diapers—weren’t as influential.

All of this waiting for readiness has coincided with the emergence of delayed potty training. According to data from the 1950s, a large majority of kids, 80 percent, had completed bowel training by 24 months; only 5 percent were still bowel training after 34 months. Even within a sample of 1950s children whose parents were advised by Brazelton to use his child-oriented approach, 98 percent were daytime potty trained by age 3. Over the next few decades, this timeline was pushed back. A 2001 study found that close to zero percent of kids had completed potty training by 24 months, and only about half had done so by 36 months. Still, that study found that almost all kids had started training before their third birthday. These days, only 21 percent of kids begin potty training before they hit 2—and about a quarter do not begin until after they turn 3.

In parents’ defense, the readiness framework can be hard to follow. Tinne Van Aggelpoel, a Belgian pelvic-floor physiotherapist who has conducted research aimed at understanding the causes and consequences of delayed toilet training, told me that no consensus exists regarding what ought to count as a sign of readiness or when parents can expect signs to manifest. Some, such as the ability to stably sit on a potty, tend to emerge very young. Others, such as the capacity to walk or dress oneself, develop far later. And some seem unlikely to develop until potty training has begun: A child probably won’t start asking to use a potty chair or demonstrate the ability to sit on it for long stretches unless a potty chair is already in the picture. “If you don’t give your child a bicycle,” Van Aggelpoel said, “then they don’t learn to ride the bicycle, right?”

[Read: This influencer says you can’t parent too gently]

The deeper issue, though, is that readiness does not develop in a vacuum. It is influenced by all sorts of social and environmental factors, including diapers, Van Aggelpoel said. Bodily cues—expressions that a child needs relief—are one common sign that a kid is ready to toilet train. But research by Van Aggelpoel and her colleagues suggests that disposable diapers reduce these signals. Without a diaper on, kids squirm and touch themselves when they need to use the toilet. Kids wearing a disposable diaper mostly carry on playing. And of course, to a great extent, readiness boils down to a child’s dissatisfaction with the diapered status quo—the discomfort of which today’s diapers have been explicitly designed to mitigate.

From Van Aggelpoel’s perspective, there’s no such thing as training too early. Continence, like crawling or walking, is a motor skill that develops over time. Its development relies on sensory feedback acquired through a messy trial-and-error process of exercise and repetition. “You do something, and something goes wrong,” Van Aggelpoel said, “and then you know, This was wrong; I need to do it in another way.” Just as children learning to roll, crawl, and walk need plenty of opportunities to lie on the floor, pull up on chairs, and tumble around, children learning to control their bowels need plenty of opportunities to experience all of the bodily sensations that go along with failing to hold it. Disposable diapers directly inhibit this feedback loop.

In the United Kingdom, experts have lately been departing from the readiness-centric paradigm. This past spring, when I was living in England, a health-care provider examining my then-10-month-old told me that there was no need to put off potty training, and then texted me a link to a site offering parents guidance on how to get started. “Should we wait for ‘signs of readiness’?” the FAQs read. “No!” the answer said. “The idea of readiness is not based on good research evidence.”

In the United States, too, experts seem to be subtly backing away from recommending that parents delay. In 2008, guidance from the American Academy of Family Physicians stated in no uncertain terms that the skills required for toilet training do not emerge until after age 2; it cited research suggesting that children benefit little from starting training earlier than 27 months, because the earlier training begins, the longer it takes. But an updated version of the guidance, published in 2019, acknowledged that kids in a lot of countries are trained much earlier—89 percent of Vietnamese children begin training by six months, and 98 percent are trained by 2, for example—and that normally developing children seemed to experience “no harms from early training.”

As recently as 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ webpage outlining the right age to potty train stated that “child-development experts now believe that toilet training works best for most families if it can be delayed until the child is ready to control much of the process herself.” The current page is far less heavy-handed about children calling the shots, advising parents to “expect hesitancy.”

Dorota Talalay, a Polish writer who has pointed out how odd the delayed approach to potty training looks to many people outside the Anglosphere, acknowledged that training can indeed take longer the earlier that you start. But she told me that this doesn’t necessarily mean the training is harder. When she began plopping her child, at six months old, on the potty every 90 minutes or so, she received little resistance. “You just sit them on the potty,” she said, “and because they can’t walk, they just sit there, they do their thing, and then everybody moves on with their lives.”

By contrast, the current U.S. norm of waiting until kids are at least 2 means that potty training is aligned with a child’s “peak defiance,” Talalay said. She may be on to something. Per the Michigan poll, the most common potty-training difficulty that parents cite is the child “not being cooperative.” Oddly enough, then, if the goal is to avoid urging a child to begin training when they’d rather not, the key may be not to delay—but to start early.

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Did Anthony Fauci really get a text from Joan Baez, as his private diary suggests, wishing him a “happy fucking birthday” in the midst of the pandemic? Until now, the answer to that question has remained blessedly unclear. But soon we may have access to the former National Institutes of Health official’s phone. Senator Ron Johnson announced this week that he’d retrieved tens of thousands of messages and hundreds of voicemails from Fauci’s government-issued device and made them fully searchable. In the meantime, though, Johnson has shared just a single set of texts: a Fauci group chat that he considered so explosive in its implications that it had to be released forthwith. “This is a blockbuster revelation,” the senator said on Tuesday. The public had to know.

The texts in question were from a short exchange that Fauci had with two other public-health officials—former U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky—in January 2021. Murthy had asked whether either of them knew of “any data or theoretical reason” why an expectant mother might choose to vaccinate early versus late in pregnancy. Walensky answered no, that this was all “data free.”

Fauci agreed, but a couple of hours later, he followed up. After asking around, he’d heard about a theoretical concern: A second dose of the vaccine could lead to fever and cytokine storm—an overactivation of the immune system, also linked to COVID itself—which in turn might lead to early-term miscarriage. In an interview that Fauci gave just one week later, he alluded to the need for balanced thinking on vaccination during pregnancy, given the lack of clinical-trial data. But he noted that thousands of expectant mothers had already gotten shots by then, and no issues had arisen. “We’ve got to be careful,” he said, but “I would rather take my chances with a vaccine than getting infected while I’m pregnant.”

Fauci’s critics now assert that this was tantamount to murder. Fauci knew that COVID shots were killing babies, they argue—he said so in a private text—and then he went out and pretended that the shots were safe. Representative Anna Paulina Luna called this “a crime against humanity and the most evil thing that could’ve ever been done.” Meghan McCain demanded that the 85-year-old be handcuffed, perp-walked, and put in a jail cell for the rest of his life. (“This is not hyperbole,” she noted, rather unconvincingly.) Senator Roger Marshall called for the appointment of a special counsel to investigate the matter—either that, he said, or “a full 9/11-style commission.”

Even a cursory reading of the context at the time suggests that Fauci’s group chat doesn’t quite reach the level of a “crime against humanity.” In fact, the new material is unremarkable, unrevealing, and—worst of all—maddeningly irrelevant to the many, far more interesting questions that still surround one of our most important public-health leader’s behavior and decision making during the pandemic.

Despite this week’s operatic calls for justice, there wasn’t really any gap between what Fauci typed into his phone and what he said in public at the time. Indeed, according to the messages released this week, Fauci sent another text to the same two colleagues just one day after he’d voiced his “theoretical” concern about the risks of vaccination. In that message, he gave essentially the same assessment that he’d offer to the public shortly after. He even used similar language: “No red flags” had yet emerged from real-world use, but even so, in the absence of clinical-trial data, “one must weigh the potential risks against the benefits.” (Senator Johnson’s office told me that the records show that “Dr. Fauci withheld information from pregnant women that they had the right to know,” and in doing so he robbed them of informed consent. Fauci, Murthy, and Walensky did not respond to requests for comment.)

That logic still applies. The safety and efficacy of the COVID shot during pregnancy were never tested in a full-scale, randomized clinical trial. But observational data—of which we now possess a very large quantity, after many millions of vaccinations—have not identified any reason to believe that any risk of miscarriage, if present, is significant. If the mRNA shots really were abortions in a needle, as some of Fauci’s critics have alleged—if they really caused a loss of pregnancy in 82 percent of cases, as Senator Ted Cruz and many others claim—then this catastrophic harm would surely have caused at least a blip in U.S. birthrates in 2021, when more than 200 million Americans were fully vaccinated. (As it happens, the number of Americans born that year went up.)

More tempered critics acknowledge that the COVID shots never did turn out to be dramatically unsafe for pregnant women—but then, no one could be confident about the risk at the start of 2021. The text message shows that Fauci clearly was aware of the uncertainty, they argue, yet he buried it in public statements; his crime, in other words, was one of clinical duplicity in the first degree. “He essentially told the public that it was safe for pregnant women to take it when he didn’t know that,” NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said this week.

But Fauci and the public-health establishment did signal their uncertainty. If anything, they were unusually direct about the known unknowns around this topic—at least compared with their messaging on COVID origins, the value of masking, and the importance of school closures, among other squirrelly, scientific questions. When it came to vaccination during pregnancy, no one hid the fact that the most conclusive safety data were lacking. Fauci made this point both in public and in private; he also said repeatedly, both in public and in private, that the systems used to track vaccines’ adverse events had not yet picked up on any reasons for concern—an assessment that more formal analyses would later confirm. In the meantime, the CDC had already found that getting COVID was itself a major threat to pregnant women’s health, associated with a tripled likelihood of going to the ICU and a 70 percent higher risk of death.

What was this, if not transparency? Vaccines had been made available; the CDC’s official advice was that expectant mothers should discuss the matter with their doctors and reach their own conclusions. In the face of all this cautious, careful guidance, many women did decide to skip the shots: By the end of July 2021, fewer than one-quarter of all the pregnant women in the country had been vaccinated, according to CDC data from the time. That lack of uptake may well have had a grave human cost all its own, given that maternal mortality rates doubled in that year.

In other words, this week’s attacks on Fauci haven’t just inflated the importance of his text message; they’ve reversed its meaning altogether, transfiguring a moment of humility into one of arrogance and self-contradiction. The resulting tangle of misinformation has done little more than bring disgrace to the actual work of determining whether, and how, Fauci and other public-health officials might really have misused their power.

The case against Fauci has always been diverse; its most aggressive prosecutors are a big-tent assemblage of anti-vaxxers, libertarians, and lab-leak truthers. Some believe that he lied about the safety of the COVID shots; others say that he was the capo of immoral lockdown measures, or that he played a role in paying for (and then concealing) the research that started the pandemic. So far, the entire spectacle of this investigation—the email dumps, the diary, and now the texts, as well as the Senate hearing where Fauci refused to answer any questions—has only cast a scattered, insufficient light across a range of matters large and small. To choose just one: Do Fauci’s emails really show, as Senator Josh Hawley and others have asserted, that Fauci cajoled his institute’s grantees for help in winning large cash prizes for himself? The documentary evidence doesn’t indicate that he violated any ethics laws, but it is at least suggestive of self-dealing—and it does at least invite further questions about his use of public office. (When pressed on this during his Senate testimony, Fauci responded as he did to every question, by pleading the Fifth.)

And what about the mystery of COVID’s origins? Released emails and private chats do seem to show that virologists in Fauci’s circle took seriously, over many months, the possibility of a lab’s involvement—yet this idea was rarely given credence in the public sphere. Did Fauci help coordinate some sort of message discipline? How much did he really know about the coronavirus work in China that his institute had funded, and what does he think about that sort of research now? The information we have is inconclusive on these points and many others too.

Fauci remains, in the eyes of many experts, a public-health hero whose work on treating and preventing AIDS and other infectious diseases has saved millions of lives. But there are real uncertainties in his pandemic record and questions as to how he and others led the government’s response to COVID—and these points are only getting lost amid the rampant lust for retribution and the wild overreading of his private records. Fauci’s critics say he papered over gaps in knowledge and in doing so misled the public. Now they’re doing just the same.

This summer, Ukraine began one of the most ambitious campaigns of its war with Russia. It launched drones deep into Russian territory, hitting some of the country’s biggest oil refineries and causing a nationwide fuel shortage. In some areas, Russians have waited for gas for as long as 69 hours, in lines stretching miles. Impatient drivers have beaten and stabbed one another. Even state-controlled media have acknowledged the problem.

Ukraine and its allies seemed to hope that frustrated Russians would rise up in protest. After more than four years, the war had finally “come home.” Now that more citizens were feeling its effects, one might assume, they would demand its end and apply pressure to President Vladimir Putin ahead of parliamentary elections in the fall. But so far, no mass uprising appears likely, now or anytime soon.

Russians are used to inconveniences. Under Soviet rule, they lived with shortages of just about everything. Lines were so ubiquitous that academics theorized about Russian identity being shaped by waiting. Books were published with chapter titles such as “The Queue as a Form of Soviet Life.” The newspaper Socialist Industry estimated that Soviet citizens spent 30 billion working hours a year waiting in line for essential goods.

In the late 1980s, at the peak of Soviet scarcity, my family lived on the outskirts of Gorky, a city east of Moscow. Sometimes my mother would send me shopping. I hated it. At a small, gray store called Vegetables, I would wait in line to pick through boxes of rotting produce, hoping to find an acceptable carrot or beetroot for borscht. Then I went to Bread, where I waited some more. Shelves were half empty. The only item that never seemed to run out was margarine; enterprising salespeople tried to make it more appealing by sculpting it into hedgehogs, which they put in display cases. Lines got even longer on the rare days when cheese or butter were delivered. Meat hardly ever came.

[Read: Ukraine may be just the ally America needs]

Still, nobody protested. We waved away the deprivation and delays. Everyone lives this way, we told ourselves. After all, Soviets knew the cost of complaining. In 1962, thousands of demonstrators gathered to protest wage cuts and government-imposed price increases. In response, Premier Nikita Khrushchev’s government deployed thousands of troops, who killed roughly two dozen demonstrators in what became known as the Novocherkassk massacre.

Russians continue to fear their government. I recently called my former neighbor in St. Petersburg, an art teacher and activist whom I’ll call Svetlana. When I asked whether she had witnessed any street protests, she laughed. “Are you guys living on the moon out there?” she asked me. “Don’t you get how dangerous it is here?”

“It’s even worse than in the Soviet days,” Svetlana continued. “One guy bragged to me the other day that he’d reported his neighbor to the FSB”—the successor of the KGB—simply for listening to anti-war music. She also told me about an acquaintance who had spent two years in prison for leaving a poem and flowers at a monument to a Ukrainian poet. In most households, gripes about the regime don’t leave the kitchen.

At the start of the war, demonstrations were more common. In 2022, police arrested nearly 19,000 anti-war activists, according to OVD-Info, an independent human-rights group. Since then, protests have all but disappeared. This year, one of the most notable critics of the regime was a veteran named Alexander Lunin. In June, Lunin put on his military uniform and recorded a speech denouncing Putin and the war. He posted it on social media, where it received more than 12 million views in 24 hours. The police jailed him, and Lunin publicly apologized for “giving in to emotions due to fatigue.”

Earlier this week, the only anti-war party was banned from parliamentary elections. Far-right politicians had sued the party, named Yabloko, alleging that it had received foreign funding, violated copyright law, and promoted “extremism.” The supreme court ruled in the far right’s favor, removing Yabloko from the ballot. Only a few hundred Russians protested outside the court.

Most Russians seem to have inherited the long-suffering mentality of the generations who grew up under Soviet rule. Rather than tiring of the war, “Russians realize that they are under attack, and that it’s time to stand together and tighten their belts,” Irina Borogan, a journalist who has studied Russian dissidents, told me. When the BBC asked a middle-aged man living in Crimea about the fuel shortages, he shrugged them off: “We are humans. We’ll adapt.”

Last month, I called Konstantin Sonin, an economist and a professor at the University of Chicago who left Russia in 2015. He told me that his friends in Moscow have made only the barest wartime accommodations—such as sending their kids to summer camp in Gelendzhik, a town on the Black Sea coast, instead of one in the heavily shelled Crimea, even though both areas are well within range of Ukrainian drones. He sounded astonished by his friends’ comfort with risk. “We’ve seen what Ukrainians have been capable of coping with,” Sonin told me. “Russians can endlessly adapt to this crisis too.”

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

I heard a similar message from Vladislav Inozemtsev, a Russian economist and political scientist who lives in the United States. Inozemtsev told me that his friends in Moscow have used their contacts to circumvent the fuel shortage and get gas delivered to their door. “It’s twice the normal price, but they can afford it; the middle class quickly adapts to difficulties,” he said, while acknowledging that Russians in rural areas will likely have a harder time.

By some accounts, Moscow hardly looks like the capital of a country fighting a war of attrition. Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, an independent polling organization, described his walk to work to me. The city center, he told me, is filled with decorations that the government has put up: an oversized samovar, an inflatable elephant, sprawling flower beds. Volkov said that he sees no sign of a public revolt. “I would say that the expectations of a revolution in Russia are not based on any real facts,” he said. “All our data proves the opposite.”

A few months before the war, Levada found that Putin’s approval rating was 63 percent. In June, it was 74 percent, although it has been dropping since the start of the year. A majority of Russians—52 percent—said that their country was moving in the right direction. “People blame mainly the West and Washington for all their troubles” instead of Putin, Volkov said. These findings undoubtedly reflect the reluctance of citizens in an authoritarian country to complain to pollsters about their government. Nonetheless, according to Volkov, Levada found that 16 percent of Russians said that they would participate in street protests, up from 11 percent in 2024. Last year, 16 percent of respondents said they felt fear or sadness. This summer, that figure was 29 percent.

Even though there have been no signs of mass protest, Putin is preparing. This year, the Kremlin increased the budget for the national guard and other law-enforcement agencies to a record high of more than $47 billion. Just like Russians who fear the reprise of Soviet-era government violence, Putin also has a precedent to worry about. In 1991, after years of keeping Russians off the streets, the Soviet regime was unable to stop a rally of hundreds of thousands in Moscow, which accelerated its end. Putin may not have much reason to fear such a protest in the near future, but he can’t be too careful.

Photographs by KC McGinnis

Somewhere along the county road between Independence and Manchester, I lost Rob Sand.

This had been a distinct possibility when I agreed to join the 44-year-old Democratic candidate for governor on a segment of a weeklong bike ride across Iowa. Unlike Sand, I am not a biker—merely a leisurely walker and, like any good Millennial woman, an occasional Pilates-doer. Which is why, on a long, low-grade hill dotted with Queen Anne’s lace, my quads began to burn, my pace slowed, and the subject of my story disappeared into a rainbow river of helmets. A minute later, the sag wagon overtook me. Soon so did a 9-year-old boy.

Thankfully, my humiliation was short-lived. These days in Iowa, one can never truly be without Rob Sand. Even as I panted alone at the back of the peloton, I could hear people chattering about the man who would be governor. “Was that who I think it was?” they said. And, “Oh, I just love him!” At one point, a fit-looking cyclist who turned out to be the former NFL wide receiver Tim Dwight pulled up beside me to lament Iowa’s unfulfilled economic potential. “This is why,” he said, “we need Rob.”

Sand, the state auditor, is ubiquitous in Iowa. On any given day, one might encounter him in a TV ad, promising jail time for corrupt politicians; on Instagram, talking through a mouthful of Casey’s breakfast pizza; and at a town hall singing “America the Beautiful” with a bipartisan crowd of gray hairs. Sand is something rarely found in nature: a successful Iowa Democrat. Which is perhaps why his presence generates such mania. Biking with him across the state felt a little like showing up to a middle-school slumber party with Taylor Swift—or riding shotgun in the popemobile. Despite Sand’s bike helmet and lack of signage, hundreds of people recognized him and begged for selfies. “I nearly killed Iowa’s next governor!” yelled a man in Winthrop who bumped into Sand’s bike. People often used both his first and last name, running them together into a single word. “I lent my bike pump to Robsand!” another man declared in Independence. 

Sand’s party has struggled to gain purchase in Iowa since the dawn of the Trump era, and a Democrat hasn’t been elected governor since 2006. The funny thing is, Sand is not a particularly proud Democrat. He tends to refer to the party as “the lesser of two evils” and made a face when I asked whether he enjoyed being in it. “I can’t imagine saying I like being in any political party,” he told me. “I love being a dad.” Before addressing a crowd in Des Moines County last year, Sand’s staff asked for party insignia to be removed from the walls to make the space more inclusive. 

The auditor obviously wants to steer clear of the national party’s noxious fumes. But whereas his progressive contemporaries distance themselves by railing against the establishment, Sand’s campaign approach has been different: Quietly, and with an easygoing optimism that Fred Rogers would envy, Sand questions the concept of partisanship itself. “Our political system is broken, and it’s broken mostly because it’s run by two private clubs” that make voters “feel trapped” into making a binary choice, he told a crowd last month in Newton. “The good news is that Iowa is a place where we have typically said we are going to make politics work for ordinary people.”

National Democrats like what they see—even if they find it tough to describe. Sand “is doing the opposite of what almost every other politician is doing,” the strategist and former Pete Buttigieg adviser Lis Smith told me. He isn’t a loud progressive, but he also doesn’t sound like a corporate moderate, Adam Carlson, a pollster, agreed. “Sand is doing a third thing.” 

In November, Sand will be up against a potentially strong GOP candidate. But his most daunting adversary will be the math: Registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by almost 200,000 in Iowa. Which means that Sand plans to spend the next 11 weeks telling Iowans that he can be trusted, in spite of the D behind his name. Will enough of them believe it?

Sand had been annoyed the last time I wrote about him. I’d included all of the relevant background details in my story: that he grew up in Decorah, a town near the Minnesota border, which explains his long vowels (Sand pronounces it “Dee-corah”); that he went to Brown University and worked a few modeling jobs in Europe before attending law school and working for seven years as a prosecutor. I’d explained that, like any good red-state Democrat, Sand loves to hunt and spends Sunday morning in church—and that his wife’s brothers called him “Baby Jesus” for his tendency toward self-righteousness.

But Sand was concerned about something else: that I had not fully captured his frustration with America’s two-party political system. “I was hoping you’d get more into election reform,” he texted me—a sentence that, I am confident, no one has ever said before or since. At the time, I did not imagine that many readers were pining to hear a state auditor’s thoughts on the decline of bipartisanship. But here we are, three summers later, and Sand is still talking about the same ideas: moving to an open-primary system and implementing “approval voting,” which would allow Iowans to support more than one candidate. More remarkable, voters are listening.

Sand is a Democrat because “Jesus is for the little guy, and the Democratic Party, at its best, is for the little guy.” But his more inclusive vision wouldn’t require party affiliation. The scramble to replace Graham Platner in Maine, for example, wouldn’t have happened under Sand’s system, he said. Or, “if a really old candidate, hypothetically, had a bad debate experience, and everyone was like, Um, maybe this person is too old to do this, it wouldn’t be a crisis.” The reforms would reward civility, Sand added, and prevent one-party domination of a state.

Republicans have had total control over Iowa for a decade. In that time, they’ve dramatically cut income taxes, redirected hundreds of millions of public dollars toward private schools, and restricted abortion after six weeks. Right now, the state is facing a $1 billion budget shortfall and the second-highest cancer rate in the country. 

But Sand does not harp on Republicans. Actually, a Sand political event doesn’t really feel like one: Each town hall begins with a round of applause for the Republicans, independents, and Democrats (for good measure) who showed up, then transitions into a group rendition of “America the Beautiful.” Sand speaks for a while about his policy priorities (corruption, public education, affordability) before opening the floor to questions, some friendly and others confrontational. The event I attended in Newton concluded with a resounding cheer for—you guessed it!—a return to divided government in Iowa.

An observer might fairly describe all of this as just a tad cringe. But one person’s cringe is another’s stirring call for unity. “There’s a movement afoot for change, and he comes along at a good time,” Steve Mullen, a retired teacher, told me in Newton. 

It helps that Sand does not behave like most Democrats. He is not, for example, easily drawn into culture-war debates or bandwagon slogans. Early in his campaign when a radio host asked him whether biological males should be allowed to play in women’s sports, Sand answered succinctly, “No.” In January, after federal officers killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Sand did not join in the calls to abolish ICE. “He’s taken some of the cultural issues that dog Democrats in red states off the table,” Adam Jentleson, the founder of the center-left think tank Searchlight, told me. 

[Read: ‘Abolish ICE’ is back ]

The progressive left, as you might imagine, is not wild about Sand. Some were disgusted, for example, that the Democrat did not release a statement denouncing ICE after Good’s and Pretti’s deaths. Others see Sand’s comments on trans athletes as a betrayal of the LGBTQ community. Still, most seem to find the state auditor tolerable. “He’s a happy warrior for nonpartisan technocratic efficiency and anti-corruption,” Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, told me. Sand might slap that on a billboard. 

Iowa’s state auditor can seem a little naive. Even if he becomes governor, Sand would almost certainly be working with a Republican state legislature that won’t be eager to hand him any wins. But Sand says he isn’t worried. “There’s still a lot of people of good faith in that caucus,” Sand told me at a deli in Manchester after we’d finished our bike ride. State GOP lawmakers know that they’ll need to have something to show for their public service when they “reach the pearly gates.” Had Sand met a politician recently? I thought. When I voiced my doubts out loud, Sand looked stricken. “I am really hopeful,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Republicans are busy trying to convince Iowa voters that the auditor is more extreme than his kumbaya suggests. “It’s like The Truman Show,” Zach Lahn, Sand’s GOP opponent, says in one campaign video. “He’s not a moderate.” In another, Lahn pledges to take back Iowa’s public-school curriculum “from the Marxists who hijacked it.” 

Lahn, a former Republican operative, seemed to come out of nowhere in June when he defeated incumbent Representative Randy Feenstra for the GOP nomination. More specifically, Lahn came from Kansas. Although he was born and raised in Iowa, he has lived in Wichita, where he founded a private school, for much of the past decade. The Des Moines Register reported that Lahn splits his time between Iowa and his second home in Kansas, where some of his children live, although Lahn reassured Iowans that if he is elected governor, he will be in the state “as much as humanly possible.” (Lahn did not respond to my requests for comment.)

But Lahn’s outsider status might help him. He has no elected-office experience and is not yet a known quantity in Iowa, which means that he does not wear the albatross of incumbency. So far, he’s campaigned on protecting small farms from corporate agriculture, an unusual Republican position in the state. For this, as well as his pledge to ban mRNA vaccines and improve the state’s water quality, Lahn has also received the MAHA stamp of approval. Several conservative Iowans along the bike route told me that they wouldn’t have voted for Feenstra, but they were considering Lahn’s “new ideas.”

Lately, Republicans have accused Sand of doing too much stumping and not enough of his day job; they’ve also drawn attention to the significant campaign donations from his wife and her wealthy family. But Lahn’s main project ahead of November will be to remind Iowans that Sand, regardless of his rhetoric, is running as a Democrat. At Sand’s Newton town hall, a Lahn supporter named Carrie Atkinson asked the auditor to declare the number of weeks at which he would support a ban on abortion. Sand answered that he thought Roe v. Wade was a reasonable decision. “He didn’t answer my question!” Atkinson told me later. At another event, a local Republican activist named Gary Loeffler asked Sand to justify his support for abortion as a Christian. There are “many verses in the Bible that say life begins at breath,” Sand said, an answer that enraged some religious conservatives.

Republicans believe, or say they believe, that Sand, a wealthy guy with an Ivy League education, is far more liberal than he lets on. Loeffler offered a disturbing visual: Like an infested cob of sweet corn, Sand might look normal on the outside, but inside, he’s “full of worms.”

Luckily, I was able to test Loeffler’s hypothesis—by traveling to Sand’s hometown and peering into the proverbial husk. In Decorah, along the Upper Iowa River, I attended Nordic Fest, a celebration of Scandinavian heritage that included Viking battle reenactments, Nordic dancers, and a parade featuring Sand in the back of a convertible. It felt a little like visiting Bedford Falls with George Bailey. “This is Rob Sand; he’s a good friend of my eldest son!” the announcer said as the auditor drove by. Sand’s aunt, who ran the lefse stand, trotted into the street to give him a package of fresh Norwegian flatbread. Sand’s father asked me in Norwegian if I spoke the language of my ancestors. (I do not.)

After the parade, Sand offered a wry tour of his hometown. Walking down the main drag, he pointed out the old teen center. “Can you guess how many times we went?” Near a statue of a long-snouted woodland creature, he explained: “Trolls are out in the world and can be dangerous.” Quickly, we were overwhelmed by friends and well-wishers. Among them was Andy Rasmussen, Sand’s best friend from high school. Sand was always smart and ambitious, Rasmussen, who does autobody work in Decorah, told me later. He liked to skateboard and bowhunt. He didn’t drink, but he’d give friends rides to parties. “The running joke was that someday Rob’s gonna be president,” Rasmussen said. But what were Sand’s politics back then? I wanted to know. Is he a Trojan horse of socialist corn worms? Rasmussen basically shrugged. “He will generally talk to and listen to anybody that’s out there.”

Others who knew Sand during college and law school similarly described a man committed to listening. At Brown in the early 2000s, Sand frequently criticized the Bush administration in his column in the school paper. Still, he recruited Stephen Beale, a conservative columnist at the paper, to start a new class on conservative thought, featuring readings from Edmund Burke, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan. Sand is still “being his authentic self,” Beale, who now works as a freelance writer, told me. “He really does care about hearing the other side.”

I thought about Sand’s cheering section at the Nordic Fest parade. “Light ’em up, Rob!” one man had shouted. But Sand had waved him off. “No, no, no,” he’d said.

The next two months may not be so friendly. So far, Sand has outraised Lahn, but Republicans are pouring millions into the state, partly thanks to a high-profile Senate bid from Democrat Josh Turek and three surprisingly competitive House races. Expect ads from both parties to be vicious—and pervasive. On Thursday, screaming activists for Turning Point Action chased Sand around the Iowa State Fair. 

[Read: Democrats might actually win Iowa]

Right now, Sand looks reasonably well positioned for victory. The Cook Political Report has changed its analysis of the race from “lean Republican” to “toss up,” and new polling shows Sand leading Lahn by five points. If he succeeds, Democrats might finally be able to say out loud what many have believed for years: that Iowa still defies partisan categorization.

Many Iowans are only now starting to pay attention. Before I lost Sand on the bike ride, a middle-aged man named Ethan Vaas had rolled up next to us. “Are you who I think you are?” he asked Sand, sounding more suspicious than excited. The two chatted for a moment, but Vaas soon pedaled away, looking unimpressed. An hour later, though, he was back, this time to talk with Sand about his job and his kids. Vaas wasn’t sure how he’d vote this year, he told me later. He typically “leans right.” But there was something different about Sand.

Every dating app, formally or informally, has its thing. Hinge, with its earnest prompts, is wholesome. Tinder, with its quick swipes left or right, is horny. Feeld, with its 30-plus tags for communicating your romantic and sexual desires, is kinky. And Bumble, with its “women message first” rule, was meant from the start to be feminist.

In 2014, Whitney Wolfe Herd launched the platform to solve what she saw as a problem: an epidemic of aggressive men on the apps. If women were the only ones allowed to initiate conversation, Wolfe Herd’s thinking went, they’d be in a position of power and agency; for once, they’d get to be the pursuers. And perhaps the Bumble man, knowing what he signed up for, would be an enlightened type—content waiting patiently to be chosen.

This was the dream of girlboss dating, and how lovely it was while it lasted. It died this past Tuesday, when Bumble announced that men will now be allowed to message women first.

Wolfe Herd told Bloomberg that when Bumble surveyed its female users, two-thirds said they would prefer not having to instigate each interaction. Younger women especially reported that having to go first added pressure. And many said they were fed up with men who seemed to put little effort into romance. In the game of online dating, an opening line is a delicate, high-stakes maneuver: Send something too basic (“Hey”) and you’ll fail to catch someone’s attention; send something too quirky or try-hard (“What’s your biggest fear?”) and you might scare them away. Bestowed with a very important responsibility, apparently, these women wanted to toss the hot potato right back to the men.

[Read: A dating-app nightmare]

This news didn’t surprise me, but it did feel like a tidy summation of how dating has evolved since 2014. When Wolfe Herd founded Bumble, the idea that an app could revolutionize romance and empower women didn’t seem quite so quaint. Online dating had already begun to transform courtship—and fast. If a lot of men were being overly forceful—sending an excess of innocent, excitable texts or of entitled, angry missives—that was partly an unfortunate by-product of their enthusiasm for the technology: They were logged on, present, and interested. Too interested.

Now America is in an era of dating listlessness. Deciding who should message whom first is difficult when no one seems eager to make a move. These days, a typical app experience might go something like: mindlessly open the platform while between tasks, maybe respond to a message or two, then forget to check back in until the next week. The apps have lost their novelty, and they don’t feel radically promising. They’re homework.

The gender dynamics have also changed. Bumble was built on the premise that men, by nature or nurture, are chasers—and that for too long women have simply been their reward. Yet in my reporting on singlehood, I don’t tend to hear women complain about getting bombarded with messages or vigorously hit on. More often, they say that they do want to feel sought after—but instead are constantly seeking, only to be met with a big, apathetic shrug.

If men seem less actively engaged in courtship, maybe it’s because a lot of them are isolated, scrolling social media or playing video games or gambling online rather than prioritizing romance. Maybe they lost social skills in the pandemic lockdown. Maybe they’re nervous about overstepping or watching screenshots of their blunders go viral. Or perhaps something more profound has shifted. The idea of men as pursuers was based on the assumption that they’re the ones with the power. But now many women, having gained a certain level of educational and professional might, aren’t so desperately reliant on men anymore. The rules regarding who leads and who follows are hazy, and in the absence of a clear mandate, a lot of people simply want the other person to do the work.

[Read: ‘Nostalgia for a dating experience they’ve never had’]

I’m not grieving the days of “women message first,” though. Bumble was always a Band-Aid for grislier wounds: an online-dating ecosystem that leaves users with little accountability for their behavior and little recourse when things go bad; a society marred by misogyny, in which many of the wrongs that women face are far worse than a noxious opening pitch. Bumble cut nearly a third of its staff roughly a year ago; since around then, the company’s share price has declined 57 percent. Now the app is launching new features, including one that will deliver a lightly chastising note to people who send perfunctory openers. But those are likely to be superficial fixes too. The age of app optimism is already over.

I’ll keep using dating apps anyway. A virtual conversation, no matter who initiates it, can swiftly go south. Or it can lead to some interesting and beautiful places. That’s the reason, after all, that Bumble’s old rule was never going to change everything: The first hello was always just the beginning.

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Last year, I asked The Atlantic’s writers and editors to name a perfect episode of TV, but a perfect finale is especially hard to pull off—and nothing invokes the wrath of fans quite like a bad ending. Here are eight shows that make the most out of their last minutes.

The following contains spoilers for the shows mentioned.

Fleabag (streaming on Prime Video)

Almost nobody is left happy by the final moments of Fleabag—not the heartbroken but resolute “Hot Priest”; not the protagonist Fleabag, watching a fox trail behind the man who has just left her for God; and certainly not the viewer, who has no choice but to let Fleabag look into the camera, shake her head, and leave us behind.

But the best ending is a cathartic one. Fleabag, played by the show’s creator, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, is a dry-humored, unabashed, fourth-wall-breaking character who encounters God and new meaning in the second season, which is also the last. She attends a Quaker meeting and is moved by the Holy Spirit to say one of my favorite lines of the series: “I sometimes worry I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits.” She and her sister, Claire, repair their relationship and each kneel, exasperated, before different men to ask for deliverance—Claire from her obnoxious husband, and Fleabag from her suffering. And in the last moments of the finale, after a backyard wedding and the implosion of Claire’s marriage, Fleabag tells the Hot Priest that she loves him, and he tells her, “It’ll pass.” To anybody still reeling from the conclusion of this perfectly short-lived show, that’s also a message to us: This is the end, and one day it will feel like enough.

— Stephanie Bai, senior associate editor

***

Twin Peaks (streaming on Pluto TV and Paramount+)

Twin Peaks had multiple conclusions over its strange life as a TV show, first ending on a shocking second season cliff-hanger in 1991, then failing to resolve that with a follow-up film a year later, leaving fans feeling frustrated by what could have been. But in 2017, the co-creators David Lynch and Mark Frost delivered a magnificent and challenging third season with an even more mind-bending last episode. In the true finale of Twin Peaks, titled “Part 18” or “What Is Your Name?,” the heroic Special Agent Dale Cooper (played by Kyle MacLachlan) finally frees himself from the demonic possession that he’s been under for the entire season and travels back in time to the start of the show to try to undo Laura Palmer’s murder. Whatever he does, however, creates an entirely new world that seems even more confusing, and the screen cuts to black as some new version of Laura lets out a chilling scream. It’s another dramatic cliff-hanger, but this time a more intentional one, underlining the hubris in Cooper’s straight-arrow heroism: Try as he might to fix the world’s wrongs, its fundamental evil and suffering are impossible to scrub away.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

Nathan for You (streaming on HBO Max)

The overarching story of Nathan for You, the brilliant docu-comedy hosted by Nathan Fielder, is easy to miss. Fielder’s show ran for four seasons on an episodic premise: He uses his very minimal business acumen to help local entrepreneurs and store owners boost their foot traffic through absurd means that are clearly destined to fail. Fielder performs the role of a stoic, socially awkward, sometimes-cruel game master with aplomb, but amid all the tomfoolery is a very human through line: Fielder, the show implies, really just wants to connect.

That context explains why the series finale is a moving, feature-length meditation on love, remorse, and loneliness. “Finding Frances” focuses on a man named Bill Heath, who previously appeared on the show as the world’s least convincing Bill Gates impersonator. Fielder endeavors to reunite him with a long-lost old girlfriend, and the episode makes clear that he is afraid that he may eventually become Bill, who, in his 70s, is alone and full of regret, having funneled all of his energy into his career. The quest to locate the titular Frances is full of the usual contrivances, but it’s also sentimental and shockingly earnest. The very last scene—in which Fielder has to choose between his heart and his humor—ends the show with a reveal that rings poignant, even a little sad.

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

***

Cowboy Bebop (streaming on Crunchyroll)

This 1998 anime about bounty hunters adventuring through galaxies aboard a spaceship is nothing like its more famous Cartoon Network contemporaries Sailor Moon and Dragon Ball Z. Cowboy Bebop isn’t kid friendly (though I did first discover it at age 12): There is bloodshed, sex, and criminal activity, but most of all, there is the profoundly adult theme of running away from one’s past. Among the hunters is Spike, who split from a crime syndicate under circumstances I won’t spoil; Faye, a wanted amnesiac; Jet, the hulking captain, who lost a love; Ed, the quirky teenage hacker left by her father; and Ein, a corgi rescued from a lab.

For me, a perfect finale needs to feel both inevitable and surprising, and it needs to actually round out the story. Cowboy Bebop takes care to draw out every character’s past, and gives them arcs that befit their endings. This does mean that the found family you’ve grown attached to over the course of 26 episodes may not stay together in perpetuity. But I wouldn’t want to see the show finish any other way.

— Shan Wang, programming director

***

Insecure (streaming on HBO Max)

Issa Rae’s namesake character on Insecure routinely looks at herself in the mirror and talks to her alter ego. Her reflection is a little more outgoing and blunt than she is in real life, and in the series finale, that alter ego is once again laughing at her for a situation she put herself in: “You’re down bad. I don’t know where you go from here.” In real life, Issa replies that she just wants “to fast-forward to the part where everything is okay.”

But life is not lived in a series of highs. “One could collect the highest peaks of the whole world but put together they would not be a continent,” Zora Neale Hurston once wrote. “Just a collection of bristling peaks. No nuances of valleys and plains.” Insecure, as a show, follows the relationships and friendships of two Black women in Los Angeles, giving us a look into the minutiae of their daily lives and how big everything can seem. The finale, in contrast, is a series of vignettes showing each central character’s birthday at some point in the future—the moments when they think they have it all figured out, and the moments amid those highs when they remain insecure.

— Adam Harris, Radio Atlantic host

***

The O.C. (streaming on Hulu, Disney+, and HBO Max)

The last season of this popular early-2000s teen drama is somewhat controversial among fans. There are plenty of cringeworthy plotlines (Chris Pratt plays an animal-rights activist named Ché; a main character’s absent father suddenly reappears), but the finale manages to save the show from the mess it’s made. The episode follows Seth Cohen and Ryan Atwood, who was taken in by Seth’s family at the series’ start, as they all prepare to move out of the titular O.C.

The storyline provides closure while leaving just enough open-ended. A flash-forward in the final minutes allows viewers to catch a glimpse of the futures they have yearned to see for these characters: Seth and Summer get married; Ryan goes to college and later offers to help a young boy the way the Cohens once helped him. Set to Patrick Park’s “Life Is a Song,” the montage provides one last moving musical moment on a show known for them. It also delivers what I think all finales should: emotional payoff and an ending that feels earned.

— Kate Guarino, senior editor

***

The Jinx (streaming on HBO Max)

There has never been a finale like the Season 1 finale of The Jinx. The 2015 HBO documentary series investigated the 1982 disappearance of Kathie Durst, the wife of the real-estate heir Robert Durst, as well as the murders of two of his acquaintances. It sounds like your typical true-crime doc. It isn’t.

If, in the 11 years since it came out, you have by some miracle not been spoiled on what happens, do not read the rest of this blurb. I’m serious. To those in the know or stubborn enough to stay for the spoilers, I will say this: I have never been as shocked by anything on television as when Durst seemingly confesses on mic: “Killed them all, of course.”

I know I am bending the rules a bit here—technically, the Season 1 finale of The Jinx isn’t a series finale, but at the time, it was supposed to be. And the evidence revealed in that season directly contributed to Durst’s arrest and eventual murder conviction, which the show covered when it aired a second season nearly a decade later.

The Jinx ruined all other true-crime documentaries for me. If you aren’t going to actually catch the killer, why would I even watch?

— Julie Beck, staff writer

***

St. Elsewhere (available to rent on Prime Video and Apple TV+)

During its run in the 1980s, the NBC medical drama St. Elsewhere engaged in plenty of creative experiments. But the 1988 finale is a masterpiece, a loving homage to time-honored shows such as The Fugitive and M*A*S*H (an autopsy is performed on “patient 4077 … Blake, Henry”). Why so many inside jokes about old TV shows?

Because, as we find out in the show’s last few minutes, the entire series is merely the dream of an autistic boy named Tommy Westphall. The two top doctors at St. Elsewhere are actually, in Tommy’s real life, his grandfather and his construction-worker father, who wonder what Tommy thinks about all day while sitting in front of the TV and staring into a snow globe with a model of the hospital in it.

This amazing moment lives on: It has spawned years of internet theories about the “Tommy Westphall Universe.” If St. Elsewhere is a dream, what about all of the crossovers from other shows? The doctors of St. Elsewhere visit the bar from Cheers, which is also set in Boston; is that show part of Tommy’s fantasies?

It is a fine ending to a quirky series, and almost 40 years later, I still wonder whether so many shows I loved were just dreams in a snow globe.

— Tom Nichols, staff writer

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

• A Cold War movie that gives too much credit to Ronald Reagan
• A green light for crooks
• Alexandra Petri: Are the Patriot Games great? No. Are they fun to watch? Also no.

Today’s News

1. Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty to two federal charges of stalking that resulted in death and admitted that he had shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan in 2024. Federal prosecutors said that they will seek a life sentence; Mangione still faces a separate state murder charge and has a trial scheduled for next month.
2. President Trump said that the USS Abraham Lincoln’s deployment of more than 250 days was “not nearly long enough,” rejecting concerns raised by some sailors’ families and Democratic lawmakers about conditions aboard the carrier. The Lincoln, which has been supporting U.S. operations against Iran, is expected to be replaced in the Middle East by the USS George Washington.
3. Vice President Vance said yesterday that keeping oil and gas prices low is now the United States’ “goal No. 1” in the war with Iran, ahead of preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. Oil prices rose today after the U.S. threatened to indefinitely maintain its blockade of Iranian ports.

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Watch. The plot of One Night Only (out now in theaters) is extremely silly. It also contains a grain of truth about singlehood, Faith Hill argues.

Read. For 40 years, Richard Russo has served as America’s portraitist of left-behind people in hollowed-out places, Mark Oppenheimer writes. He examines how Russo’s latest novel, Under the Falls, approaches that same tradition.

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This has been a terrific year for movie theaters. Cinemas are on course for their best financial year since before the coronavirus pandemic, powered by large-scale hits such as The Odyssey and surprise small-budget smashes, particularly Obsession and Backrooms. Fears about the decline of the big-screen experience amid the rise of at-home streaming seem to have begun dissipating. But one theatrical stalwart is showing serious signs of weakness: the superhero movie, which helped keep blockbusters afloat for most of the 2010s. Marvel’s most anticipated title last year, The Fantastic Four: First Steps—which reintroduced the fan-favorite comic-book team—failed to meet the studio’s lofty expectations; this June’s DC Comics adaptation of Supergirl was an out-and-out bomb.

By those metrics, one might have predicted a similar slump for this summer’s new Spider-Man sequel, subtitled Brand New Day. Instead, it has broken nearly every box-office record imaginable.

That the film has been able to defy mounting superhero fatigue may seem unexpected. After all, Brand New Day is the fourth Spider-Man entry set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which owns the rights to the character; it’s Tom Holland’s seventh time playing the character. Whereas its predecessor, 2021’s No Way Home, sold itself on bringing back heroes and villains from prior Spider-Man entries, Brand New Day promised a general reset. Its story also feels smaller, the action confined to the hero’s hometown of New York City, where he faces off with more street-level villains. Given the public’s declining appetite for the MCU—long gone are the days when an installment starring a relatively unknown character could make more than $1 billion worldwide—Brand New Day’s streamlined focus seemed like an audience gamble.

[Read: The Dark Knight changed Hollywood movies forever]

Not so: The movie earned $360 million domestically during its opening weekend, shattering a record set by Avengers: Endgame in 2019. Endgame was the grand conclusion of Marvel’s initial saga, featuring Spider-Man alongside every other popular character in the company’s wheelhouse. Yet Brand New Day, with its far less cataclysmic stakes, could be the first-ever film to make $1 billion in the United States and Canada alone; if it doesn’t break the all-time worldwide box-office record held by Avatar ($2.9 billion), it will at least come close. Its popularity is proof that for some costumed do-gooders, the exhaustion with superheroes just doesn’t apply. Maybe the simplest rule of thumb is that although audiences are losing interest in most comic-book adaptations, Spider-Man will always endure.

He initially set a famous box-office milestone back in 2002, when Spider-Man—the character’s major-feature debut, starring Tobey Maguire—grossed more than $110 million domestically during its opening weekend. Since then, even as other actors have assumed the role (including Andrew Garfield and an animated version voiced by Shameik Moore), Spider-Man has remained the most consistent of comic-book movie stars. Sony, which owns the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, has attempted to build offshoot storylines that don’t feature him but has consistently failed; though the Venom trilogy did well enough, the spin-offs Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were commercial failures. (Critics hated all of them too.) Yet Spider-Man himself has proved indestructible to theatergoers: The 11 films in which he stars have made nearly $11 billion worldwide.

Brand New Day’s colossal success can’t just be attributed to the hero’s appeal, however. The genius of the co-creators Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comic-book invention was that he was more grounded and familiar than DC Comics’ godlike figures, such as Superman and Wonder Woman, or the multibillionaire Batman. Spider-Man, in his original incarnation, was really just a nerdy teen named Peter Parker who readers could relate to, and the installments starring Holland have replicated that zippy, youthful energy. Spider-Man’s brand has also been savvily extended to fans of all ages: Projects such as the wildly popular cartoon Spidey and His Amazing Friends appeal to preschoolers, featuring villains including the Green Goblin and Doctor Octopus downgraded from homicidal to simply mischievous; the studio Insomniac Games’ three video games focused on the character are best sellers.

[Read: Steve Ditko’s ordinary people]

Beyond that, the star power of Holland and Zendaya, who plays Spider-Man’s girlfriend, MJ, is on a level few other young actors can claim. They both feature in the summer’s other biggest hit, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and although they largely keep their real-life relationship private, it adds to the authenticity of their romance on-screen. Zendaya in particular has proved exceptionally good at getting young viewers to show up for more daring movies, such as this spring’s The Drama; comparatively, something as broadly crowd-pleasing as Brand New Day is a layup.

The film’s achievements will likely not be taken for granted. Marvel’s next movie, Avengers: Doomsday, will be released in December and stands to benefit from the hype around Brand New Day. The studio is also soft-rebooting the franchise following next year’s Avengers: Secret Wars, in part by leaning on another well-known superhero team—the X-Men, one of whom is deployed as Brand New Day’s surprise antagonist. The industry will probably never return to producing the relentless glut of comic-book adaptations that buttressed the past decade-plus in Hollywood—which is a good thing, because a diversity of genres and cinematic experiences is the wisest thing to have on offer. Perhaps Brand New Day could kick off a more stable new phase for superheroes. No matter what, Spider-Man will keep on swinging.